The Hungry Tide - Amitav Ghosh [19]
THE FALL
THE DAY WAS coming to an end when a distant fishing boat drew a scratch across Piya’s line of vision, interrupting the rhythm of her vigil. At first it was no more than a pinpoint on the lens of her binoculars, a stationary speck, anchored on the far side of a confluence of many rivers. After a while, when the dot had grown a little, Piya saw that it represented a small canoe-like craft with a hooped covering at the rear. There seemed to be only one fisherman on board. He was going through the motions of casting a net, standing upright to make his throw and stooping to pull his catch in.
Piya had now spent three hours in her “on effort” position, in the bow of the launch. With her binoculars fitted to her eyes, she had scanned the water, waiting for a flash of black or gray to break through the dun surface. But so far her vigil had gone unrewarded: she had had no sightings all afternoon, not one. There had been one hopeful moment but it had ended with a glimpse of a gliding stingray, shooting into the air with its tail trailing behind it like the string of a kite. Soon afterward there was another false alarm. Mej-da had come running up in great excitement, pointing and gesticulating, giving her the impression that he had seen a dolphin. But it turned out that his attention had been caught by a group of crocodiles that were sunning themselves on a mudbank. Mej-da’s motives for bringing them to her notice were made evident when he rubbed his fingers together to let her know that he deserved a tip. This had annoyed her and she had brushed him off with a peremptory gesture.
She had spotted the crocodiles long before him of course — she had seen them when they were a mile or so away. There were four of them, and they were huge: from tip to tail, the largest of them was probably about the same length as the launch. She had wondered what it would be like to encounter one of these monsters up close, and the thought had prompted an involuntary shudder.
But this was all. She had seen nothing else of note. Even though she hadn’t known what to expect, she had not foreseen as complete a blank as this. That these waters had once contained large numbers of dolphins was known beyond a doubt. Several nineteenth-century zoologists had testified to it. The “discoverer” of the Gangetic dolphin, William Roxburgh, had said explicitly that the fresh-water dolphins of the Ganges delighted in the “labyrinth of rivers and creeks to the South and South-East of Calcutta.” This was exactly where she was and yet, after hours of careful surveillance she had still to spot her first dolphin. Nor had she seen many fishermen: Piya had been hoping that the trip would yield a few encounters with knowledgeable boat people but such opportunities had been scarce today. She had seen many overcrowded ferries and steamers but very few fishing boats — so few as to suggest that the area was off-limits for fishing. The canoe-like craft in the distance was the first boat she had seen in a long time and it was clear the launch would pass within a couple of hundred yards of it. She began to wonder if it was worth a detour.
Reaching for her belt, Piya unhooked her rangefinder. The instrument had the look of a pair of truncated binoculars, with two eyepieces at one end but only a single Cyclopean lens at the other. She focused this lens on the fishing boat and pressed a button to get a reading of the distance between them. A moment later, to the accompaniment of an exclamatory beep, the instrument posted the answer: 1.1 kilometers.
Piya could not see the fisherman clearly but it seemed to her that he had the grizzled look of an experienced hand: around his chin and mouth was a dusting of white that suggested stubble or a beard. There was some kind of turban wrapped around his head but his body was bare except for a single twist of cloth, wound between his legs and around his waist. His frame was skeletal, almost wasted, in the way of a man who’d grown old on the water, slowly yielding his flesh to the wind and the sun. She had come across many