The Hungry Tide - Amitav Ghosh [141]
On the way back to her cabin, she passed Kanai. He was waiting in the gangway with a towel slung over his shoulder.
“I’ve left plenty of fresh water for you.”
“I’ll make good use of it.”
In the distance, she heard someone else splashing and knew it was probably Fokir, bathing in the stern of his own boat.
Later, after she had changed into fresh clothes, she went out on deck. The tide was now nearing full flood and the currents were drawing patterns on the river’s surface as they whirled around the anchored vessel. Some of the distant islands had shrunk to narrow spars of land, and where there had been forest before, there were now only branches visible, bending like reeds to the sway of the tide.
Piya was pulling a chair up to the rails when Kanai appeared beside her with a cup of steaming tea in each hand. “Horen asked me to bring these up,” he said, handing one to Piya.
He pulled up a chair too, and for a while they were both absorbed in watching the slow submersion of the landscape. Piya braced herself, expecting a joke or a satirical remark, but somewhat to her surprise he seemed content to sit quietly. There was something companionable about the silence, and in the end it was she who spoke first.
“I could watch it forever,” she said. “This play of tides.”
“That’s interesting,” he said. “I once knew a woman who used to say that — about the sea.”
“A girlfriend?” said Piya.
“Yes.”
“Have you had many?”
He nodded, and then, as if to change the subject, said, “And what about you? Do cetologists have private lives?”
“Now that you ask,” said Piya, “I have to say that there aren’t many who do, especially not among us women. Relationships aren’t easy, you know, given the kinds of lives we lead.”
“Why not?”
“We travel so much,” Piya said. “We never stay long in one place. It doesn’t make things easy.”
Kanai raised his eyebrows. “But you don’t mean to say, do you, that you’ve never had a relationship — not even a college romance?”
“Oh, I’ve had my share of those,” Piya allowed. “But none of them ever led anywhere.”
“Never?”
“Well, once,” Piya said. “There was this one time when I thought it was leading somewhere.”
“And?”
Piya laughed. “It ended in disaster. What could you expect? It was in Kratie.”
“Kratie?” he said. “Where’s that?”
“In eastern Cambodia,” she said, “about a hundred miles from Phnom Penh. I lived there once.”
Kratie stood on a bluff above the Mekong, and a few miles north of the town was a riverbed pool that served as a dry-season home for a pod of some six Orcaella. This was where Piya had begun her research. As the town was both convenient and pleasant, she had rented the top floor of a wooden house with the intention of making it her base for the next two or three years. One of the advantages of Kratie was that it housed an office of the Fisheries Department, a branch of government with which she had to have many dealings.
One of the local representatives of the department was a young official who was reasonably proficient in English. His name was Rath and he was from Phnom Penh. Without friends or family in Kratie, he was often at loose ends, especially in the evenings. Kratie was very small, no larger than a couple of city blocks, and inevitably Piya found her path crossing Rath’s quite frequently. It turned out that he often ate in the same waterfront café where she usually went for her evening meal of noodles and Ovaltine. They took to sitting at the same table and their everyday small talk evolved slowly into real conversations.
One day, in passing, Rath revealed he had spent a part of his childhood in a death camp of the Pol Pot era: his parents had been transported there after the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh. Although Rath had offered this as a throwaway scrap of information, his revelation had made such an impression on Piya that she had responded by telling him about her own childhood. In the