The Hungry Tide - Amitav Ghosh [38]
What to make of these women and their plight? Searching for a collective noun for them, Nilima was tempted to settle on sreni, class. But Nirmal would not hear of it. Workers were a class, he said, but to speak of workers’ widows as a class was to introduce a false and unsustainable division.
But if they were not a class, what were they?
It was thus, when reality ran afoul of her vocabulary, that Nilima had her epiphany. It did not matter what they were; what mattered was that they should not remain what they were. She knew a widow who lived near the school, a young woman of twenty-five. One day she asked her if she would be willing to go to Gosaba to buy soap, matches and provisions. The prices charged by Lusibari’s shopkeepers were exorbitant; even after the fare for the ferry, the woman would save a considerable amount. Half of this she could keep for herself. This tiny seedling of an idea was to lead to the foundation of the island’s Mohila Sangothon — the Women’s Union — and ultimately to the Badabon Trust.
Within a few years of Nirmal and Nilima’s arrival in Lusibari, zamindaris were abolished and large landholdings were broken up by law. What remained of the Hamilton Estate was soon crippled by lawsuits. The Union Nilima had founded, on the other hand, continued to grow, drawing in more and more members and offering an ever-increasing number of services — medical, paralegal, agricultural. At a certain point the movement grew so large that it had to be reorganized, and that was when the Badabon Development Trust was formed.
Nirmal was by no means wholly supportive of Nilima’s efforts — for him they bore the ineradicable stigma of “social service,” shomaj sheba — but it was he who gave the Trust its name, which came from the Bengali word for “mangrove.”
Badabon was a word Nirmal loved. He liked to point out that like the English “Bedouin,” badabon derived from the Arabic badiya, which means “desert.” “But ‘Bedouin’ is merely an anglicizing of Arabic,” he said to Nilima, “while our Bangla word joins Arabic to Sanskrit — bada to bon, or ‘forest.’ It is as though the word itself were an island, born of the meeting of two great rivers of language — just as the tide country is begotten of the Ganga’s union with the Brahmaputra. What better name could there be for your Trust?” And so was the Trust’s name decided upon.
One of the Badabon Trust’s first acts was to acquire a tract of land in the interior of the island. There, in the late 1970s, its hospital, workshops, offices and Guest House were to be built. But in 1970, the year of Kanai’s first visit, these developments were still a decade in the offing. At that time, the meetings of the Women’s Union were still held in the courtyard of Nirmal’s bungalow. It was there that Kanai met Kusum.
AT ANCHOR
IN THE FAILING LIGHT the boat approached a bend that led into a wide channel. The far shore, a few miles away, had already been obscured, but in midstream something lay anchored that seemed to suggest a floating stockade. Fetching her binoculars, Piya saw that this object was actually a cluster of six fishing boats, similar in size and design to the one she was in. The boats were tied tightly together side by side, and they were tethered against the current by a battery of ropes.