The Hungry Tide - Amitav Ghosh [27]
Piya’s eyes widened: could it really be that he knew this woman? To confirm, she said again, “Mashima?” He nodded once more and gave her a smile, as if to say, yes, he knew exactly whom she was referring to. But she still could not tell whether he had understood the full import of what she was asking of him. So, just to be sure, she made a sign, pointing first to herself and then at the horizon, to tell him she wanted him to take her there in his boat. He nodded again, and added, as if in confirmation, “Lusibari.”
“Yes.” Shutting her eyes in relief, she unclenched her stomach and let her breath flow out.
STANDING ON THE LAUNCH, the guard snapped his fingers at Piya as if to wake her from a long sleep. She pulled herself to her feet, leaning against the boat’s bamboo awning for support, and signaled to him to pass over her backpacks. He handed over the first without demur, and it was only when she asked for the second that he understood she was not coming back to the launch. His smirk changed into a scowl, and he began to shout, not at her but at the fisherman, whose response was nothing more than a quiet shrug and a murmur. This seemed to make the guard angrier still, and he began to threaten the fisherman with gestures of his fist.
Piya tried to intervene with a shout of her own. “It’s not his fault. Why’re you yelling at him?” Now, unexpectedly, the pilot added his voice to hers. He too began to remonstrate with the guard, pointing to the horizon to remind him of the fast-approaching sunset. This jolted the guard’s attention back to Piya. He held up her second backpack and rubbed his finger and thumb together, to indicate that it would not be given without a payment.
Her money, she remembered, was inside her waterproof money belt. She reached for the zipper and was relieved to find the belt intact, its contents undamaged. She counted out the equivalent of a day’s hire for the boat and a day’s wages for the guard. Then, as she was handing the money over, just to ensure herself of a quick riddance, she added a few extra notes. Without another word, the guard grabbed the money and tossed over her backpack.
She could scarcely believe she had succeeded in ridding herself of them. She had expected more scenes and more yelling, fresh demands for money. On cue, as if to show her that she had not gotten off lightly, the guard held up her Walkman — he had managed to extricate it from her belongings before handing them over. Then, to celebrate his theft, he began to make lurid gestures, pumping his pelvis and milking his finger with his fist.
Piya was as oblivious to these obscenities as to the loss of her music: she would be grateful just to see the guard and his friend depart. She shut her eyes and waited till the sound of the launch had faded away.
THE TRUST
DESPITE ITS SMALL SIZE, the island of Lusibari supported a population of several thousand. Some of its people were descended from the first settlers, who had arrived in the 1920s. Others had come in successive waves, some after the partition of the subcontinent in 1947 and some after the Bangladesh war of 1971. Many had come even more recently, when other nearby islands were forcibly depopulated in order to make room for wildlife conservation projects. As a result, the pressure of population in Lusibari was such that no patch of land was allowed to lie fallow. The green fields that quilted the island were dotted with clusters of mud huts and crossed by many well-trodden pathways. The broadest of these paths were even paved with bricks and shaded with rows of casuarina trees. But these elements of an ordinary rural existence did not entirely conceal the fact that life in Lusibari was lived at the