The Hungry Tide - Amitav Ghosh [18]
Kanai glanced over his shoulder and saw that Nilima was busy discussing Trust business with a couple of officeholders of the Women’s Union. Slipping away, he pushed open the compound’s gate and went hurrying up the mossy pathway that led to the house. To his surprise, none of the noise and bustle of the village seemed to filter into the compound and for a moment he felt as though he were stepping through a warp in time. The house seemed at once very old and very new. The wood, discolored by the sun and rain, had acquired a silvery patina, like certain kinds of bark; it reflected the light in such a way as to appear almost translucent, like a skin of mirrored metal. It seemed now to be almost blue in color, reflecting the tint of the sky.
On reaching the stilts, Kanai stopped to peer at the dappled underside of the house — the geometric pattern of shadows was exactly as he remembered. He went up the steps and was starting toward the front door when he heard his uncle’s voice, echoing back from the past.
“You can’t go in that way,” Nirmal was saying. “Don’t you remember? The key to the front door was lost years ago. We’ll have to go all the way around.”
Retracing the steps of that earlier visit, Kanai went down the veranda, around the corner of the balcony and along the next wing until he came to a small door at the rear of the house. The door opened at a touch and, on stepping in, the first object to meet his eyes was an old-fashioned porcelain toilet with a wooden seat. Next to it was an enormous cast-iron bathtub with clawed feet and a curling rim. A showerhead bowed over it, like a flower drooping on a wilted stem.
The fittings seemed somewhat more rusty since he had first seen them, but they were otherwise unchanged. Kanai remembered how eagerly, as a boy, he’d taken them in. Since coming to Lusibari he’d had to bathe in a pond, just as Nirmal and Nilima did — he’d longed to step under that shower.
“This is a shahebi choubachcha, a white man’s tank,” Nirmal had said, pointing to the bathtub. “Shahebs use them to bathe in.”
Kanai remembered that he had been struck by the aptness of the description while also being offended at being spoken to as if he were a yokel who’d never seen such things. “I know what that is,” he had said. “It’s a bathtub.”
A door led out from the bathroom into the interior of the house. Pushing it open, Kanai found himself in a cavernous, wood-paneled room. Clouds of dust hung, as if frozen, in the angled shafts of light admitted by the louvered shutters. A huge iron bedstead stood marooned in the middle of the floor, like the remains of a drowned atoll. On the walls there were fading portraits in heavy frames; the pictures were of memsahibs in long dresses and men in knee-length breeches.
Kanai came to a stop in front of a portrait of a young woman in a lacy dress, sitting on a grassy moor dotted with yellow wildflowers. In the background were steep slopes covered with purple gorse and mountains flecked with snow. A grimy copper plate beneath the picture said, LUCY MCKAY HAMILTON, ISLE OF ARRAN.
“Who was she?” Kanai could hear his voice echoing back from the past. “Who was this Lucy Hamilton?”
“She’s the woman from whom this island takes its name.”
“Did she live here? In this house?”
“No. She was on her way here from the far end of Europe when her ship capsized. She never got to see the house but because it had been built for her, people used to call it Lusi’r-bari. Then this was shortened to Lusibari and that was how the island took this name. But even though this house was the original Lusibari, people stopped calling it that. Now everyone speaks of it as the Hamilton House.”
“Why?”
“Because it was built by Sir Daniel MacKinnon Hamilton, Lucy’s uncle. Haven’t you seen his name on the school?”
“And who was he?”
“You really want to know?”
“Yes.”
“All right, then. Listen.” The knob-knuckled finger rose to point to the heavens. “Now that you’ve asked you’ll have to listen. And pay attention, for all of this is