• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 938 0

saw nothing there, he gestured to her to look more closely. Again his finger described an arc, circling around and over the moon. Now, as her eyes grew accustomed to the silvery light, she saw a faint spectrum of colored light: it seemed to hang in the air for an instant and then it was gone. She glanced at Fokir to ask if he had seen it too, and he gave her an affirmative nod. Then his finger traced another arc in the sky, a vast one this time, spanning the horizon, and it dawned on her that he was thinking of a rainbow of some kind. Was that what he had shown her, a rainbow made by the moon? He gave her an earnest nod and she nodded too — she had seen it after all, or at least glimpsed it, so what did it matter that she had never heard of such a phenomenon before?

Piya’s eyes strayed from the moon and the shadows of the forest and then fell to the currents playing on the river’s surface: it was as if a hand hidden in the water’s depths were writing a message to her in the cursive script of ripples, eddies and turbulence. She remembered a snatch of something Kanai had said about Moyna — something about the unseen flow of the water and the visible play of the wind. Did he, Fokir, understand what it meant to be the kind of person who could inspire and hold such constancy, especially when it was overlaid with so much pain and so many difficulties? What could she, Piya, offer him that would amount to even a small part of what he already had?

They sat unmoving, like animals who had been paralyzed by the intensity of their awareness of each other. When their eyes met again it was as if he knew at a glance what she was thinking. He reached for her hand and held it between his, and then, without looking in her direction again, he moved off to the stern and began to kindle a fire in his portable stove.

When the meal was ready, he offered her a plate of rice and spiced potatoes. She could not bring herself to decline it, for the plate seemed like an offering, a valedictory gesture. It was as if their shared glimpse of the lunar rainbow had somehow broken something that had existed between them, as if something had ended, leaving behind a pain of a kind that could not be understood because it had never had a name. Afterward, when the stove and the utensils had been put away, Piya took one of Fokir’s blankets and went to her usual place in the bow, while he retreated to the shelter of the hood.

She remembered the letter Kanai had given her and took it out of her backpack. It would be good to have the distraction — she needed to think of something else. Fokir saw her peering at the envelope in the moonlight, and he passed her a matchbox and a candle. She lit the wick and placed the candle on the boat’s prow, using its own drippings to fasten it in its place. The night was so still and airless that the flame held perfectly steady.

Tearing open the envelope, she began to read.

Dearest Piya:

What does it mean when a man wants to give a woman something that is beyond price — a gift that she, and perhaps only she, will ever truly value?

This is not a purely rhetorical question. It is inspired by a genuine perplexity, for I have never known this impulse before. For someone like me, a man whose chief concerns have always been with the here and now — and, let us admit it, with myself for the most part — this is new ground, uncharted terrain. The emotions that have generated this impulse are of a shocking novelty. Would it be true then to say that I have never been in love before? I had always prided myself on the breadth and comprehensiveness of my experience of the world: I had loved, I once liked to say, in six languages. That seems now like the boast of a time very long past. At Garjontola I learned how little I know of myself and of the world.

Suffice it to say then that I have never before known what it was to want to ensure someone’s happiness, even if it should come at the cost of my own.

Yesterday it dawned on me that I have it in my power to give you something that no one else can. You asked me what Fokir was singing and