The Hungry Tide - Amitav Ghosh [143]
“What was the worst part, then?”
“That came when I went back to the States. I met up with some friends. All women, all doing research in field biology. They just laughed when they heard my story. They’d all been through something similar. It was as if what I’d been through wasn’t even my own story — only a script we were all doomed to live out. That’s just how it is, they said: this is what your life’s going to be like. You’re always going to find yourself in some small town where there’s never anyone to talk to but this one guy who knows some English. And everything you tell him will be all over the town before you’ve said it. So just keep your mouth shut and get used to being on your own.”
Piya shrugged. “So that’s what I’ve been trying to do ever since.”
“What?”
“Get used to the idea of being on my own.”
Kanai fell silent as he thought about the story she had just told. It seemed to him that he had not till this moment been able to see her for the person she was. Her containment and her usual economy with words had prevented him from acknowledging, even to himself, her true extraordinariness. She was not just his equal in mind and imagination; her spirit and heart were far larger than his own.
Kanai had been leaning back with his feet up on the gunwale. Now, allowing his chair to right itself, he sat forward and looked into her face. “It doesn’t have to be like that, you know, Piya. You don’t have to be on your own.”
“You have a better idea?”
“I do.”
Before he could say any more, they heard Horen’s voice echoing up from the lower deck, summoning them to dinner.
SIGNS
PIYA WENT TO BED early again. Not having slept much the night before, Kanai tried to do the same. But despite his best efforts, sleep proved elusive for him that night: there was a strong wind blowing outside and, as if in response to the bhotbhoti’s rocking, a recurrent childhood nightmare came back to visit him — a dream in which he was taking the same examination over and over again. The difference now was in the faces of the examiners, which were not those of his teachers but of Kusum and Piya, Nilima and Moyna, Horen and Nirmal. In the small hours he sat up suddenly, in a sweat of anxiety: he could not remember what language he had been dreaming in, but the word pariksha, “examination,” was ringing in his head and he was trying to explain why he had translated the word in the archaic sense of “trial by ordeal.” Eventually these dreams yielded to a deep, heavy sleep, which kept him in his bunk until the dawn fog had lifted and the tide was about to reverse itself.
Kanai stepped out of his cabin to find that the wind had died down, leaving the river’s becalmed surface as still as a sheet of polished metal. Having reached full flood, the tide was now at that point of perfect balance when the water appears motionless. From the deck the island of Garjontola looked like a jeweled inlay on the rim of a gigantic silver shield. The spectacle was at once elemental and intimate, immense in its scale and yet, in this moment of tranquillity, oddly gentle.
He heard footsteps on the deck and turned to see Piya coming toward him. She was armed with a clipboard and data sheets and her voice was all business: “Kanai, can I ask you a favor? For this morning?”
“Certainly. Tell me: what can I do for you?”
“I need you to do some spotting for me,” Piya replied.
The timing of the tides had created a small problem for her, Piya said. Her original plan had been to follow the dolphins when they left the pool at high tide. But right now the flood seemed to be setting in early in the morning and late in the evening; this meant the animals would be migrating in the dark. Tracking them would be hard enough during the day; without good light it would be impossible. What she had decided to do instead was to make a log of the routes they followed when they came back to the pool. Her plan was to post watches at the two approaches to the pool, one upstream and one downstream. She would take the upstream watch on the Megha: the river was wide there and it would be