The Hungry Tide - Amitav Ghosh [158]
AFTER THREE HOURS of unrewarded wandering, Horen said, in a tone of gruff vindication, “We’ve looked enough. We have to turn back now.”
Kanai’s eyes were weary from the effort of peering into creeks and gullies. Now that the sun was dipping toward the horizon, the light would be directly in their eyes and it would be even harder to maintain an effective watch. But the anxiety gnawing at his stomach would not go away and he could not bring himself to accept that there was nothing more to be done. “Do we have to turn back already?” he said.
Horen nodded. “We’ve wasted a lot of fuel. Any more and we won’t be able to get back to Lusibari tomorrow. Besides, the boat is probably back at Garjontola now.”
“And what if it’s not?” said Kanai sharply. “Are we just going to abandon them?”
Horen turned to squint at him through narrowed eyes. “Look,” he said, “Fokir is like a son to me. If there was anything more to be done, I would do it.”
Kanai was quick to acknowledge the justice of this reproof. “Yes,” he said with a nod. “I know that, of course.” He felt a twinge of shame for having doubted Horen’s diligence during the search. As the Megha changed course, he said, in a more conciliatory voice, “Horen-da, you have experience of these things. Tell me — what’ll happen here when the cyclone strikes?”
Horen looked pensively around him. “It’ll be as different as night from day.”
“You were caught in a cyclone once, weren’t you?”
“Yes,” said Horen in his slow, laconic way. “That was the year when you visited, 1970.”
It was well after the end of the monsoons, and Horen had gone out to sea in his uncle Bolai’s boat. The crew consisted of three men: Horen, his uncle and a man he didn’t know. They were on the edge of the Bay of Bengal, a couple of miles from the mouth of the Raimangal River, within sight of land. There was no formal warning system in those days and the storm had taken them completely by surprise. One minute there was sunshine and a stiff breeze; half an hour later a gale had hit them from the southwest. Visibility had become very poor and they had lost sight of all their usual landmarks. They had had no compass on board: their eyes were the only instruments they used in navigating and in any case it was rare for them to venture out of sight of the coast. Nor would any instrument have been of much help, for the gale did not leave them the option of steering in a direction of their choice. The wind was so fierce that there was no resisting its thrust. It had swept them before it in a northeasterly direction. For a couple of hours they could do nothing other than cling to the timbers of their boat. Then, all of a sudden, they had found themselves heading toward a stretch of flooded land: they could see the crowns of some trees and the roofs of a few dwellings — huts and shacks for the most part. The storm’s surge had drowned most of the shoreline; the flood was so deep that they didn’t know they had made landfall until their boat slammed into a tree trunk. The boat’s planks came apart instantly, but Horen and his uncle managed to save themselves by clinging to the tree. The third member of their crew also took hold of a branch, but it broke under his weight. He was never seen again.
Horen, then just twenty years old, had great strength in his arms. He was able to pull both himself and his uncle out of the raging water, into the tree’s higher branches. The two men used their gamchhas and lungis to tie themselves to the tree. They joined hands and held on as the gale howled around them. At times the wind was so fierce that it shook the tree as though it were a giant jhata, a reed broom — but somehow Horen and Bolai had managed to cling on.
When the wind abated a little, they discovered that the water had deposited a great deal of debris in the