The Hungry Tide - Amitav Ghosh [55]
“You’re not looking well,” said Kanai. “Has a doctor been sent for?” Nilima blew her nose into a handkerchief. “It’s just a cold,” she said. “Why do I need a doctor to tell me that?” “You shouldn’t have come to Canning yesterday,” said Kanai. “It was too much for you. You should take better care of your health.”
Nilima brushed this off with a flick of her hand. “Enough about me,” she said. “Sit down over here and tell me how you’ve been faring. Did you sleep well last night?”
“Well enough.”
“And the packet?” she cried eagerly. “Did you find it?”
“Yes. It was exactly where you said it would be.”
“So then, bal to ré, tell me,” said Nilima, “were they poems or stories?”
Kanai could tell from the expectant tone of her voice that she had already begun to believe that her husband’s literary reputation would be posthumously restored by the contents of the packet she had found. It pained him to disappoint her and he tried to let her down as gently as he could. “Actually, it’s not what I’d expected,” he said. “I thought I’d find poems, essays, stories. But what I found instead was some kind of journal or diary. It was written in an exercise book — just a common khata, like schoolchildren use.”
“Oh?” Nilima’s eyes dimmed and she breathed a sigh of dejection. “And when was it written? Does it say?”
“Yes,” said Kanai. “It was written in 1979.”
“In 1979?” Nilima was quiet for a moment as she thought this over. “But that was the year of his death. He died in July. Are you sure it was written in that year?”
“Yes,” said Kanai. “Why should that surprise you?”
“I’ll tell you why,” she said. “Because that was the one year of his life when he did no writing at all. He had retired as headmaster of the Lusibari school the year before and it was a difficult time for him. The school had been his whole life for almost three decades — ever since we came to Lusibari. His behavior became erratic at this time. As you know, he had a history of mental instability, so it was very worrying for me. He used to disappear for days, and afterward he wouldn’t be able to recall where he had been. He was all in an uproar that year. He was in no state to do any writing.”
“Maybe he had a brief period of lucidity,” Kanai said. “I have the impression the entire notebook was written over one or two days.”
“And do you know the dates?” said Nilima, watching him closely.
“Yes,” said Kanai. “He started writing it on the morning of May 15, 1979. In a place called Morichjhãpi.”
“Morichjhãpi!” There was a sudden intake of breath as Nilima said the word.
“Yes,” said Kanai. “Tell me what happened there.”
Morichjhãpi, said Nilima, was a tide country island a couple of hours from Lusibari by boat. It fell within a part of the Sundarbans reserved for tiger conservation, but unlike many such islands it was relatively easily accessible from the mainland. In 1978 a great number of people suddenly appeared on Morichjhãpi. In this place where there had been no inhabitants before there were now thousands, almost overnight. Within a matter of weeks they had cleared the mangroves, built bãdhs and put up huts. It happened so quickly that in the beginning no one even knew who these people were. But in time it came to be learned that they were refugees, originally from Bangladesh. Some had come to India after Partition, while others had trickled over later. In Bangladesh they had been among the poorest of rural people, oppressed and exploited both by Muslim communalists and by Hindus of the upper castes.
“Most of them were Dalits, as we say now,” said Nilima. “Harijans, as we used to say then.”
But it was not from Bangladesh that these refugees were fleeing when they came to Morichjhãpi; it was from a government resettlement camp in central India. In the years after Partition the authorities had removed the refugees to a place called Dandakaranya, deep in the forests of Madhya Pradesh, hundreds of miles from Bengal.
“They called it resettlement,” said Nilima, “but people say it was more like a concentration camp or a prison. The refugees