The Hungry Tide - Amitav Ghosh [45]
The smells were harsh on Piya’s nose. It was a long time now since she had eaten food of this kind: while in the field she rarely ate anything not from a can, a jar or a package. Three years before, when working on Malampaya Sound in the Philippines, she had been incautious in her eating and had suffered to the point where she had had to be medevaced by helicopter to Manila. On every survey since, she had equipped herself with a cache of mineral water and portable food — principally high-protein nutrition bars. On occasion, she also carried a jar or two of Ovaltine, or some other kind of powder for making malted milk. When there was milk to be had, fresh or condensed, she treated herself to a glass of Ovaltine; otherwise, she managed to get by on very little — a couple of protein bars a day was all she needed. This diet had the added advantage of limiting the use of unfamiliar, and sometimes unspeakable, toilets.
Now, as she sat watching Fokir at the stove, she knew he would offer her some of his food and she knew also she would refuse it. And yet, even as she recoiled from the smell, she could not tear her eyes from his flying fingers: it was as though she were a child again, standing on tiptoe to look at a clutch of stainless-steel containers lying arrayed on the counter beside the stove; it was her mother’s hands she was watching as they flew between those colors and the flames. They were almost lost to her, those images of the past, and nowhere had she less expected to see them than on this boat.
There was a time when those were the smells of home; she would sniff them on her mother, on the way back from school; they would fill the elevator on its journey up to their floor. When she stepped inside they had greeted her like domesticated animals, creatures with lives of their own, sustaining themselves on the close, hot air of the apartment. She had imagined the kitchen as a cage from which they never ventured out, which was why it came doubly as a shock when she discovered, from pointed jokes and chance playground comments, that the odors followed her everywhere, like unseen pets. Her response was to fight back, with a quietly ferocious tenacity, against them and against her mother, shutting them away with closed doors, sealing them into the kitchen.
But here, the ghosts of these creatures seemed to be quieted by their surroundings. The spell of Fokir’s fingers was broken only when a breeze carried the acrid odor of burning chilies directly into her face. And then suddenly the phantoms came alive again, clawing at her throat and her eyes, attacking her as though she were an enemy who had crossed over undetected. She retreated to the bow and when he followed her there, with a plateful of rice and cooked crab, she fended him off with her protein bars and her bottled water, smiling and bobbing her head in apology, to show she meant no offense.
He accepted her refusal with a readiness that surprised her; she had expected protests, exclamations, a show of being wounded or hurt. But there was none of that; instead, he gave her a nod and a long, cool look of appraisal, as though he were mentally going through a list of reasons why she might decline to accept food from his hands. It alarmed her that he might imagine that it was for some mysterious reason of caste or religion that she had refused to eat his food, so she placed a hand on her belly and acted out a little charade of her intestinal sufferings. This seemed to serve the purpose, for he laughed, throwing his head back, and gave the plate to Tutul, who devoured it greedily.
After the meal, the utensils and the stove were put back in the hold and an armload of mats and blankets was taken out. Tutul, already drowsy, unrolled one of the mats