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By Root 817 0

Although they were more than half a mile away, her binoculars provided a clear view of the crewmen as they went about their business. Some were sitting alone, smoking bidis; others were drinking tea or playing cards; a few were washing clothes and utensils, drawing water from the river in steel buckets. A boat in the center of the cluster was sending up puffs of smoke and she guessed that this was where the communal dinner was being cooked. The sight was both familiar and puzzling. She was reminded of riverside hamlets on the Mekong and the Irrawaddy: there too, at the approach of nightfall, time had seemed to both accelerate and stand still, with lazy spirals of smoke rising into the twilight while bathers came hurrying down the banks to wash off the day’s dust. But the difference here was that this village had taken leave of the shore and tethered itself in midstream. Why?

Catching sight of the boats, Tutul gave a shout and launched into an animated conversation with his father. She could tell that they had recognized the boats in the little flotilla. Perhaps they belonged to friends or relatives? She had spent enough time on rivers to know that the people who lived on their shores were rarely strangers to each other. It was almost a certainty that Fokir and his son knew the people in that floating hamlet and that they would be welcome there. It was easy to imagine how, for them, this might well be the best possible conclusion to the day — an opportunity to mull over the day’s events and to show off the stranger who had landed in their midst. Maybe this had been the plan all along — to anchor here with their friends?

As the boat rounded the bend, she became convinced of this and found herself thinking of the hours that lay ahead. She had long experience of such encounters, having been on many river surveys where the days ended in unforeseen meetings of this kind. She knew what would follow, the surprise that would be occasioned by her presence, the questions, the explanations, the words of welcome she didn’t understand but would have to respond to with forced good humor. The prospect dismayed her, not because of any concern for her own safety — she knew she had nothing to fear from these fishermen — but because for the moment all she wanted was to be in this boat, in this small island of silence, afloat on the muteness of the river. It was all she could do to restrain herself from appealing to Fokir to keep on going, to hug the shore and keep their boat well hidden.

Of course, none of this could have been said, not even if she had had the words, and it was precisely because nothing was said that she was taken by surprise when she saw the boat’s bow turning in the direction she had hoped for. Fokir was steering them away from the floating hamlet, slipping by along the shadows of the shore. She did not betray her relief by any outward alteration of her stance and nor did her practiced hands fail to keep her binoculars fixed to her eyes — but inside, it was as though there were a child leaping up to celebrate an unexpected treat.

Shortly after the last flicker of daylight had faded Fokir pulled the boat over and dropped anchor in a channel that the ebb tide had turned into a sheltered creek. It was clear that they could not have gone much farther that night, and yet there was something about his manner that told Piya that he was disappointed — that he had decided on another spot in which to anchor and was annoyed with himself for not having reached it.

But now that they were at anchor, with the surprises of the day behind them, a sense of unhurried lassitude descended on the boat. Fokir put a match to an oil-blackened lamp and lit a biri from the flame. After he had smoked it down to a stub, he went aft and showed Piya, by indication and gesture, how the square platform at the stern end of the boat could be screened off for use as a lavatory and bathroom. By way of example, he drew a bucket of water and proceeded to bathe Tutul, using the brackish water of the river to soap him, and dipping sparsely into a fresh-water