The Hungry Tide - Amitav Ghosh [148]
Kanai looked at the tangled barrier of mangrove ahead and knew that it would be madness to walk into that with Fokir: his dá could slip, anything could happen. It was not worth the risk.
“No,” said Kanai. “I’m not going to play this game with you anymore, Fokir. I want you to take me back to the bhotbhoti.”
“But why?” said Fokir with a laugh. “What are you afraid of ? Didn’t I tell you? A man like yourself should have nothing to fear in this place.”
Stepping into the mud, Kanai shouted over his shoulder, “Stop talking nonsense. You may be a child, but I’m not —”
Then suddenly it was as though the earth had come alive and was reaching for his ankle. Looking down, he discovered that a rope-like tendril had wrapped itself around his ankles. He felt his balance going and when he tried to slide a foot forward to correct it, his legs seemed to move in the wrong direction. Before he could do anything to break the fall, the wetness of the mud slapped him full in the face.
At first he was completely immobile: it was as though his body were being fitted for a mold in a tub of plaster. Trying to look up, he discovered that he could not see: the mud had turned his sunglasses into a blindfold. Scraping his head against his arm, he shook the glasses off and allowed them to sink out of sight. When Fokir’s hand descended on his shoulder, he brushed it off and tried to push himself to his feet on his own. But the consistency of the mud was such as to create a suction effect and he could not break free.
He saw that Fokir was smiling at him. “I told you to be careful.”
The blood rushed to Kanai’s head and obscenities began to pour from his mouth: “Shala, banchod, shuorer bachcha.”
His anger came welling up with an atavistic explosiveness, rising from sources whose very existence he would have denied: the master’s suspicion of the menial; the pride of caste; the townsman’s mistrust of the rustic; the city’s antagonism toward the village. He had thought he had cleansed himself of these sediments of the past, but the violence with which they spewed out of him now suggested that they had only been compacted into an explosive and highly volatile reserve.
There had been occasions in the past — too many of them — when Kanai had seen his clients losing their temper in like fashion: when rage had made them cross the boundaries of selfhood, transporting them to a state in which they were literally beside themselves. The phrase was apt: their emotions were so intense as almost to spill outside the physical boundaries of their skin. And almost always, no matter what the proximate cause, he was the target of their rage: the interpreter, the messenger, the amanuensis. He was the life preserver that held them afloat in a tide of incomprehension; the meaninglessness that surrounded them became, as it were, his fault, because he was its only named feature. He had survived these outbursts by telling himself that such episodes were merely a professional hazard — “nothing personal” — it was just that his job sometimes made him a proxy for the inscrutability of life itself. Yet, despite his knowledge of the phenomenon, he was powerless to stop the torrent of obscenities that were pouring out of his mouth now.
When Fokir offered a hand to help him up, he slapped it aside: “Ja, shuorer bachcha, beriye ja! Get away from me, you son of a pig!”
“All right, then,” said Fokir. “I’ll do as you say.”
Raising his head, Kanai caught a glimpse of Fokir’s eyes and the words withered on his lips. In Kanai’s professional life there had been a few instances in which the act of interpretation had given him the momentary sensation of being transported out of his body and into another. In each instance it was as if the instrument