The Hungry Tide - Amitav Ghosh [43]
“Reading.”
“I saw — you were listening.”
“So?” He shrugged.
“I’ll tell.”
“So go and tell.” Despite the show of bravado he was rattled by the threat. As if to keep her from carrying it out, he moved up to make room for her to sit. She sank down and sat beside him with her back to the wall and her knees drawn up to her chin. Although he didn’t dare look at her too closely, he became aware that their bodies were grazing each other at the shoulders, the elbows, the hips and the knees. Presently he saw that there was a mole on the swell of her left breast: it was very small, but he could not tear his eyes from it.
“Show me your book,” she said.
Kanai was reading an English mystery story and he dismissed her request with a shrug. “Why do you want to look at this book? It won’t make any sense to you.”
“Why not?”
“Do you know English?” Kanai demanded.
“No.”
“Then? Why are you asking?”
She watched him for a moment, unabashed, and then, sticking her fist under his nose, unfurled her fingers. “Do you know what this is?”
Kanai saw that she had a grasshopper in her hand and his lip curled in contempt. “Those are everywhere. Who’s not seen one of those?”
“Look.” Lifting her hand, Kusum put the insect in her mouth and closed her lips.
This caught Kanai’s attention and he finally deigned to lower his book. “Did you swallow it?”
Suddenly her lips sprang apart and the grasshopper jumped straight into Kanai’s face. He let out a shout and fell over backward while she watched, laughing.
“It’s just an insect,” she said. “Don’t be afraid.”
WORDS
AFTER PIYA HAD DRESSED and changed, she crawled back to the front of the boat with the checkered towel in her hands. She tried to ask Fokir the name of the fabric, but her gestures of inquiry elicited only a raised eyebrow and a puzzled frown. This was to be expected, for he had so far shown little interest in pointing to things and telling her their Bengali names. She had been somewhat in rigued by this, for in her experience people almost automatically went through a ritual of naming when they were with a stranger of another language. Fokir was an exception in that he had made no such attempts — so it was scarcely surprising that he should be puzzled by her interest in the word for this towel.
But she persisted, making signs and gestures until finally he understood. “Gamchha,” he said laconically, and of course that was it, she had known it all along: Gamchha, gamchha.
How do you lose a word? Does it vanish into your memory, like an old toy in a chest, and lie hidden in the cobwebs and dust, waiting to be cleaned out or rediscovered?
There was a time once when the Bengali language was an angry flood trying to break down her door. She would crawl into a closet and lock herself in, stuffing her ears to shut out those sounds. But a door was no defense against her parents’ voices: it was in that language that they fought, and the sounds of their quarrels would always find ways of trickling in under the door and through the cracks, the level rising until she thought she would drown in the flood. Their voices had a way of finding her, no matter how well she hid. The accumulated resentments of their life were always phrased in that language, so that for her its sound had come to represent the music of unhappiness. As she lay curled in the closet, she would dream of washing her head of those sounds; she wanted words with the heft of stainless steel, sounds that had been boiled clean, like a surgeon’s instruments, tools with nothing attached except meanings that could be looked up in a dictionary — empty of pain and memory and inwardness.
In the bedroom of Piya’s early childhood there was one window that afforded