The Hungry Tide - Amitav Ghosh [42]
At the back of the bungalow was an open courtyard where the meetings of the Lusibari Women’s Union were held. At the time of Kanai’s banishment to Lusibari, in 1970, the Union was a small, improvised affair. Several times a week the Union’s members would gather in the courtyard to work on “income-generating projects” — knitting, sewing, dyeing yarn and so on. But the members also used these occasions to talk and give vent to their anger and grief.
These outbursts were strangely disquieting, and in the beginning Kanai went to great lengths to stay away from the bungalow when the Union was in session there. But that too was not without its pitfalls, for he had no friends in Lusibari and nowhere in particular to go. When he encountered children of his age they seemed simpleminded, silent or inexplicably hostile. Knowing that his suspension from school would be over in a few weeks, he felt no compulsion to unbend toward these rustics. After twice being attacked with stones, thrown by unseen hands, Kanai decided that he might be better off inside the bungalow than outside. And soon enough, from the safety of the study, he was eavesdropping avidly on the exchanges in the courtyard.
It was at one of those meetings that Kanai first saw Kusum. She had a chipped front tooth and her hair was cut short, making her something of an oddity among the girls of the island. Her head had been shaved the year before, after an attack of typhoid. She had only narrowly survived and was still treated as an invalid. It was for this reason that she was allowed to while away her time at the Union’s meetings; it was possibly for this reason also that she was still, in her mid-teens, dressed in the frilly “frock” of a child instead of a woman’s sari — or perhaps it was simply in order to wring a few more months’ wear out of a set of still usable clothes.
During that meeting in the courtyard, a woman began to recount a story in exceptionally vivid detail. One night when her husband was away on a boat, her father-in-law had come home drunk and forced his way into the room where she was sleeping with her children. In front of her children, he had held the sharpened edge of a dá to her throat and tried to pull off her sari. When she attempted to fight him off, he had gashed her arm with the machete, almost severing the thumb of her left hand. She had flung a kerosene lamp at him and his lungi had caught fire, giving him severe burns. For this she had been turned out of her marital home, although her only offense was that she had tried to protect herself and her children.
Here, as if to corroborate her story, her voice rose and she cried out, “And this is where he cut me, here and here.”
At this point Kanai, unable to restrain his curiosity, thrust his head through the doorway to steal a glance. The woman who had told the story was hidden from his view, and since everyone in the courtyard was looking in her direction, no one noticed Kanai — no one, that is, but Kusum, who had averted her eyes from the storyteller. Kanai and Kusum held each other’s gaze, and for the duration of that moment it was as though they were staring across the most primeval divide in creation, each assessing the dangers that lay on the other side; it seemed scarcely imaginable that here, in the gap that separated them, lay the potential for these extremes of emotion, this violence. But the mystery of it was that the result of this assessment was nothing so simple as fear or revulsion — what he saw in her eyes was rather an awakened curiosity he knew to be a reflection of his own.
So far as Kanai could remember, it was Kusum who spoke to him first, not on that day but some other morning. He was sitting on the floor,