The Hungry Tide - Amitav Ghosh [33]
The deck beneath the shelter concealed yet another hold, and when Fokir moved the slats, Piya saw that this was the boat’s equivalent of a storage cupboard. It was separated from the fore hold by an internal bulwark, and was crudely but effectively waterproofed with a sheet of blue tarpaulin. It held a small, neatly packed cargo of dry clothes, cooking utensils, food and drinking water. Reaching into this space now, Fokir pulled out a length of folded fabric. When he shook it out Piya saw it was a cheap printed sari.
The maneuvers that followed caused Piya some initial puzzlement. After sending Tutul to the bow, Fokir reached for her backpacks and stowed them under the shelter. Then he slipped out himself and motioned to her to go in. Once she had squirmed inside, he draped the sari over the mouth of the shelter, hiding her from view.
It took her a while to understand that he had created an enclosure to give her the privacy to change out of her wet clothes. In absorbing this, she was at first a little embarrassed to think that it was he rather than she herself who had been the first to pay heed to the matter of her modesty. But the very thought of this — even the word itself, “modesty,” with its evocation of fluttering veils and old comic strips — made her want to smile: after years of sharing showers in coed dorms and living with men in cramped seaboard quarters, the idea seemed quaint, but also somehow touching. It was not just that he had thought to create a space for her; it was as if he had chosen to include her in some simple, practiced family ritual, found a way to let her know that despite the inescapable muteness of their exchanges, she was a person to him and not, as it were, a representative of a species, a faceless, tongueless foreigner. But where had this recognition come from? He had probably never met anyone like her before, any more than she had ever met anyone like him.
After she had finished changing, she reached out to touch the sari. Running the cloth between her fingers, she could tell that it had gone through many rigorous washings. She remembered the feel of the cloth. This was exactly the texture of the saris her mother had worn at home in Seattle — soft, crumpled, worn thin. They had been a great grievance for her once, those faded graying saris: it was impossible to bring friends to a home where the mother was dressed in something that looked like an old bedsheet.
Whom did the sari belong to? His wife? The boy’s mother? Were the two the same? Although she would have liked to know, it caused her no great regret that she lacked the means of finding out. In a way it was a relief to be spared the responsibilities that came with a knowledge of the details of another life.
Crawling out of the boat’s shelter, Piya saw that Fokir had already drawn in the anchor and was lowering his oars. He too had changed, she noticed, and had even taken the time to comb his hair. It lay flat on his head, parted down the middle. With the salt gone from his face, he looked unexpectedly youthful, almost impish. He was dressed in a faded, buff-colored T-shirt and a fresh lungi. The old one — the one he had been wearing when she first spotted him with her binoculars — had been laid out to dry on the boat’s hood.
Meanwhile, the sun had begun to set, and a comet of color had come shooting over the horizon and plunged, flaming, into the heart of the mohona. With darkness fast approaching, Piya knew they would soon have to find a place to wait out the night. Only in the light of day could a boat of this size hope to find its way through this watery labyrinth. She guessed that Fokir had probably already decided on an anchorage and was trying