The Hungry Tide - Amitav Ghosh [145]
“And your mother? Do you remember her?”
“How could I forget her? Her face is everywhere.”
He said this in such a plain, matter-of-fact way that Kanai was puzzled. “What are you saying, Fokir? Where do you see her face?”
He smiled and began to point in every direction, to the ends of the compass as well as to his head and feet. “Here, here, here, here. Everywhere.”
The phrasing of this was simple to the point of being childlike, and it seemed to Kanai that he had finally understood why Moyna felt so deeply tied to her husband, despite everything. There was something about him that was utterly unformed, and it was this very quality that drew her to him: she craved it in the same way that a potter’s hands might crave the resistance of unshaped clay.
“So tell me, then, Fokir, do you ever feel like visiting a city?”
It was only after he had spoken that he realized he had inadvertently addressed Fokir as tui, as though he were indeed a child. But Fokir seemed not to notice. “This is enough for me,” he said. “What’ll I do in a city?” He picked up his oars as if to mark the end of the conversation. “Now it’s time to go back to the bhotbhoti.”
The boat began to rock as Fokir dipped his oars and Kanai retreated quickly to his place in the bow. After sitting down, he looked up to see that Fokir had moved to the boat’s midsection, seating himself so that he would be facing Kanai as he rowed.
In the steaming midday heat a haze was rising from the river, giving the impression of mirages dancing on the water. The heat and haze induced a kind of torpor in Kanai, and as if in a dream he had a vision of Fokir traveling to Seattle with Piya. He saw the two of them walking onto the plane, she in her jeans and he in his lungi and worn T-shirt; he saw Fokir squirming in a seat that was unlike any he had ever seen before; he pictured him looking up and down the aisle with his mouth agape. And then he thought of him in some icy western city, wandering the streets in search of work, lost and unable to ask for directions.
He shook his head to rid himself of this discomfiting vision.
It seemed to Kanai that the boat was passing much closer to Garjontola than it had on the way out. But with the water at its lowest level, it was hard to know whether this was due to a deliberate change of course or to an optical illusion caused by the usual shrinkage of the river’s surface at ebb tide. As they were passing the island Fokir raised a flattened palm to his eyes and peered at the sloping sandbank to their left. Suddenly he stiffened, rising slightly in his seat. As if by instinct, his right hand gathered in the hem of his unfurled lungi, tucking it between his legs, transforming the anklelength garment into a loincloth. With his hand on the gunwale, he rose to a half-crouch, setting the boat gently asway, his torso inclining forward in the stance of a runner taking his mark. He raised a hand to point. “Look over there.”
“What’s the matter?” said Kanai. “What do you see?”
“Look.”
Kanai narrowed his eyes as he followed Fokir’s finger. He could see nothing of interest, so he said, “What should I look for?”
“Signs, marks — like we saw yesterday. A whole trail of them, running from the trees to the water and back.”
Kanai looked again and caught sight of a few depressions in the ground. But the bank at this point was colonized mainly by stands of garjon, a species of mangrove that breathed through spear-like “ventilators” connected by subterranean root systems. The surface of the bank was pierced by so many of these upthrust organs that it was impossible to distinguish between one mark and another. The depressions that had caught Fokir’s eye looked nothing like the sharply defined marks of the night before. They seemed to Kanai to be too shapeless to signify anything in particular; they could just as well have been crabs’ burrows or runnels formed by the retreating water.
“See how they form a track?” Fokir said. “They go right to the edge of the water. That means they were made after the tide had ebbed — probably