The Hungry Tide - Amitav Ghosh [168]
On entering their first mohona, they ran into waves much taller than those they had already faced. When the water curled up ahead of them, they had to strain against the oars to carry the boat over the crests. They seemed to be working twice as hard to cover half the distance: it was as if a once level track had now been stretched over a range of hills and valleys.
Piya took her next GPS reading after they had crossed the mohona — brief as it was, the operation gave her a minute to catch her breath. But there was nothing heartening about the reading itself: it confirmed her impression about the drop in their pace — it had slowed to a crawl.
Piya was reaching for her oars when something brushed against her cheek and fell into her lap. She glanced at it and saw that it was a mangrove leaf. She looked to her left, the direction from which the leaf had come. It so happened that they were in the center of a widebodied river — she estimated that the wind had carried the leaf a good mile and a half, from the shore to the boat.
They made another turn and now Piya found herself rowing with her back to the wind. It was oddly disorienting to be hit by a wave coming from her blind side; after it had lifted her up there would be a dizzying moment when the boat seemed to hang on the crest of the watery ridge. Then suddenly she would find herself tobogganing backward into the wave’s trough, clutching at the gunwales to keep her balance. Water came sluicing over the bow with each wave and it felt as if a bucket were being emptied on her back.
The impact of these descents soon began to shake loose the assorted bits of plywood that covered the boat’s deck. They began to quiver and rattle and the wind caught hold of one of them and tore it off the boat; it vanished in an instant. Minutes later, another slat of plywood went spinning away, and then another, exposing the boat’s bilges. Piya found she could see right into the hold where Fokir stored his crabs.
Another turn brought the wind around so that it was hitting them side-on, tilting the boat steeply to one side. The oar in Piya’s right hand was now almost a foot higher than the other: she had to lean sideways over the gunwale to bring it into contact with the water. As the boat tilted, her backpack began to roll around under the hood.
She had thought it would be dry there, but now it hardly seemed to matter. The spray was coming at them from so many different angles that everything was soaked. The boat lurched again and the pack was tossed into the air; it would have gone over but for the hood. Piya dropped her oars and scrambled forward to throw herself on the backpack. All her equipment was in it — her binoculars, her depth sounder, everything except her GPS monitor, which she had attached to a belt loop on her pants. The backpack also contained all the data she had gathered over the past nine days: she had put the sheets in a plastic bag and fastened it to her clipboard.
Piya was looking for some means of securing this precious piece of luggage when Fokir interrupted his rowing to pass her a length of rope. She took it from him gratefully and after threading it through the pack’s straps, she bound it tightly to one of the bamboo hoops of the hood. Then she opened the flap just wide enough to check her equipment. The backpack was made of a heavy waterproof material and its contents were more or less dry. As she was closing the pack her eyes fell on the pocket where she kept her cell phone: she had not activated it for use in India, so it hadn’t been charged or turned on since her arrival. Now, as the boat was heaving and listing below her, a sudden seizure of curiosity