The Hungry Tide - Amitav Ghosh [172]
In a few minutes, the line became a densely spun web, anchoring the boat to the forest. Yet despite the care he had taken, Fokir had not been able to keep the line’s attachments out of his way. By the time he was done, his face and chest were crosshatched with nicks and cuts.
Now he took hold of Piya’s arm and led her deeper into the island, crouching low against the wind. They came to a tree that was, for a mangrove, unusually tall and thick-trunked. Fokir gestured to her to climb up, and he followed at her heels as she pulled herself into the branches. When they were about eight feet off the ground, he chose a sturdy branch and motioned to her to sit astride it, facing the trunk. Then he seated himself behind her, like a pillion rider on a motorcycle, and made a sign to ask her for the rolled-up sari tied around her waist. She saw now what it was for — he was going to use it to tie them both to the tree trunk. She gave him one end of the fabric and helped him pass it around the trunk. After another turn, the sari was all paid out and Fokir tied its ends in a tight knot.
Powerful as it already was, the gale had been picking up strength all along. At a certain point its noise had reached such a volume that its very quality had undergone a change. It sounded no longer like the wind but like some other element — the usual blowing, sighing and rustling had turned into a deep, earsplitting rumble, as if the earth itself had begun to move. The air was now filled with what seemed to be a fog of flying debris — leaves, twigs, branches, dust and water. This dense concentration of flying objects further reduced the visibility in what was already a gathering darkness. The light was as dim as it might be at the approach of night, but Piya’s watch told her it was just one in the afternoon. It was difficult to imagine that the wind could grow any stronger or more violent, yet Piya knew it would.
IN HIS BARE FEET, with his body and clothes caked in mud, Kanai scrambled over the embankment and crouched low beneath it, to shelter himself from the wind. Drenched as he was, he became aware that the wind had grown colder as it picked up strength; he wrapped his arms around his chest and looked up, shivering, at the sky.
Although it had lost all trace of blue, the sky was not uniformly dark: the clouds above were a multiplicity of shades, ranging from an ashen gray to a leaden blue-black. There seemed to be many distinct layers of clouds, each distinguished by a minute difference of shading, each traveling on its own trajectory. It was as though the sky had become a dark-tinted mirror for the waters of the tide country, with their myriad cross-cutting currents, eddies and whirlpools, all with their slight but still discernible distinctions of coloring.
The casuarina trees that lined the embankment were now bent almost double in the wind and the fronds of the surrounding coconut palms had been twisted into flame-shaped knots. As a result, Kanai was able to look much farther into the interior of the island than he might have in other circumstances. The hospital, being one of Lusibari’s tallest structures, was easy to spot.
He started toward the hospital at a run but after a few steps was forced to slow down because the path was slippery and his bare feet kept sliding on the mud. For much of the distance he saw no one about — many of the islanders seemed to have abandoned their dwellings, while others had fortified themselves behind closed doors. But once the compound’s gate came into view, Kanai saw that streams of people were heading there, in order to take shelter inside the hospital — it was easy to see why, for there was something immensely reassuring about the building’s squat solidity. Mostly these people were on foot, but a number were seated on cycle-vans, principally the elderly and the very young. Kanai joined the throng, and on stepping onto the building’s portico, he saw that a full-scale evacuation