The Hungry Tide - Amitav Ghosh [44]
There was never any question that she, two-year-old Piya, would be allotted that room. Piya was the altarpiece around which their lives were arranged; the apartment was a temple to her, and her room was its shrine. Her parents took the other bedroom, so small that they had to get into bed by climbing over the foot of the bedstead. This enclosed space became the echo chamber for the airing of their mutual grievances. They would while away hours bickering over trivia, only occasionally generating enough energy to launch into full-throated quarrels.
Piya had the larger room to herself for some five years before her mother abruptly ousted her from it. She could no longer bear the circumstances of her confinement with Piya’s father and wanted nothing more than to shut out the entire family.
Shortly afterward she would be diagnosed with cervical cancer. But in between was a period when she would allow Piya to sit beside her on her bed. Piya was the only person allowed into her presence, permitted to touch and see her. Everyone else was excluded — her father most of all. Her mother’s voice would greet her as soon as she let herself into the flat, on coming home from school: “Come, Piya, come and sit.” It was strange that she could not remember the sound of those words (were they in English or Bengali?) but she could perfectly recall the meaning, the intent, the voice. She would go in and find her mother curled up in bed, dressed in an old sari: she would have spent the whole morning in the bath, trying to cleanse herself of some imaginary defilement, and her skin would be dimpled from its long immersion.
It was only then, sitting beside her, looking toward Puget Sound, that she learned that her mother had spent a part of her girlhood staring at a view of a river — the Brahmaputra, which had bordered the Assam tea estate where her father had been manager. Resting her eyes on the sound, she would tell stories of another, happier life, of playing in sunlit gardens, of cruises on the river.
Later, when Piya was in graduate school, people had sometimes asked if her interest in river dolphins had anything to do with her family history. The suggestion never failed to annoy her, not just because she resented the implication that her interests had been determined by her parentage, but also because it bore no relation to the truth. And this was that neither her father nor her mother had ever thought to tell her about any aspect of her Indian “heritage” that would have held her interest — all they ever spoke of was history, family, duty, language.
They had said much about Calcutta, for instance, yet had never thought to mention that the first known specimen of Orcaella brevirostris was found there, that strange cousin of the majestic killer whales of Puget Sound.
SOON IT BECAME clear that Fokir was making preparations for a meal. From the bilges below deck, he pulled out a couple of large and lively crabs. These he imprisoned in a soot-blackened pot before reaching into the hold again for a knife and a few utensils — including a large cylindrical object that appeared to be an earthenware vessel. But there was a hole in the side of this vessel, and when he began to stuff bits of firewood into it, she realized it was a portable stove made of clay. He took the stove to the stern, and when it was well out of the way of the shelter’s inflammable roof, he lit a match and blew the firewood into flame. Then he washed some rice, drained it into a battered tin utensil, poured in some water and put it on the stove. While the rice was coming to the boil, he dismembered the crabs, cracking their claws with his knife. When the rice was done, he took the pot off the fire and replaced it with yet another blackened aluminium pot. Next he opened a battered tin container and took out some half-dozen twists of paper, which he unrolled and