The Hungry Tide - Amitav Ghosh [22]
Piya could scarcely believe that he was asking her to carry on as if nothing had happened. She drew her hands back, shaking her head. He thrust the card at her again and this time his rifle seemed to move with his arm, as if to prod her in the direction of the fisherman. She shrugged. “All right.” Undoing her equipment belt, she stowed it in her backpack along with her binoculars. Then she picked up the display card and stepped up to the gunwale. The boat was directly below, tethered close to the launch, and the fisherman’s face was now on a level with her knee.
On catching sight of her, the fisherman started. His attention had been focused on the guard and he hadn’t realized there was a woman on the launch. Her presence seemed to make him suddenly self-conscious. He reached for the cloth tied around his head and yanked it down. It sprang apart and fell open around him, unrolling over his body like a curtain. When he had fastened it at the waist, she saw that the twist of cloth that she had taken to be a turban was, in fact, a rolled-up sarong. There was a consideration in this gesture, an acknowledgment of her presence, that touched her: it seemed like the first normal human contact she had had since stepping on the launch. Despite the strangeness of the circumstances, she was eager to see his response to the pictures.
She lowered herself to one knee and when their heads were level she held out the card. She tried to give him a smile of reassurance but he would not meet her eye. He glanced from the card to her face and raised a hand to point upriver. The gesture was so quick and matter-of-fact that for a moment she thought he had misunderstood. Then she looked into his eyes and he nodded, as if to say, yes, that’s where I saw them. But which ones? She thrust the card at him again, expecting that he would point to the picture of the Gangetic dolphin, the more common of the two species. To her astonishment, his finger dropped to the illustration of the Irrawaddy dolphin, Orcaella brevirostris. He said something in Bengali and held up six fingers.
“Six?” she said. She was very excited now. “You’re sure?”
She was interrupted by a child’s cry. Looking up, she saw that the guard had taken advantage of her conversation with the fisherman to board the boat. Now he was rifling through the possessions that lay bundled under the hooped covering. The child was cowering against the side of the boat, clutching his hands to his chest. With a sudden lunge, the guard caught hold of the child and pried his hands open: evidently the boy had been trying to conceal a thin wad of banknotes. The guard tore the money from his grip and slipped it into his own pocket. Then he gave the boy a parting slap and climbed back into the launch.
Piya, looking on from above, recalled her own wad of money, stashed in the money belt she was wearing around her waist. She undid the zipper surreptitiously, slipped her hand in and pulled out a handful of notes. Rolling them tight in her palm, she waited until the launch had started up again. When the guard had turned his back, she leaned over the side and stretched her arm toward the fisherman. “Here! Here!” She kept her voice low and it was drowned out by the hammering of the engine. Now a wedge of water had opened up between the boat and the launch, but she felt sure she would be able to throw the money over if only she could climb a little higher. There was a plastic chair nearby and she pushed it to the side of the deck. Then she climbed up, balancing her weight against the gunwale. “Here!” She threw over the money, and accompanied it with a loud hissing sound. This time she succeeded in catching the fisherman’s attention and he jumped to his feet in surprise. But the guard had heard her too, and he came barreling across the deck. One of his feet crashed into the chair, throwing her forward, tipping her weight over the gunwale. Suddenly she was falling and the muddy brown water was rushing up to meet her face.
S’DANIEL
ONE OF THE MANY WAYS,” said Nirmal, “in which the tide country resembles a desert