The Hungry Tide - Amitav Ghosh [56]
The soil was rocky and the environment was nothing like they had ever known. They could not speak the languages of that area and the local people treated them as intruders, attacking them with bows, arrows and other weapons. For many years they put up with these conditions. Then in 1978 some of them organized themselves and broke out of the camp. By train and on foot they moved eastward in the hope of settling in the Sundarbans. Morichjhãpi was the place they decided on.
Earlier that year a Left Front ministry had taken power in West Bengal and the refugees may have assumed that they would not face much opposition from the state government. But this was a miscalculation: the authorities had declared that Morichjhãpi was a protected forest reserve and they had proved unbending in their determination to evict the settlers. Over a period of about a year there had been a series of confrontations between the settlers and government forces.
“And the final clash,” Nilima said, “if I recall correctly, was in mid-May of that year, 1979.”
“So do you think Nirmal was there at the time?” Kanai stopped to consider another possibility. “Or was it perhaps just a fantasy?”
“I don’t know, Kanai,” Nilima said, looking down at her hands. “I really don’t know. He became a stranger to me that year. He wouldn’t talk to me. He would hide things. It was as if I had become his enemy.”
Kanai could see that Nilima was close to tears and his heart went out to her. “It must have been very hard for you.”
“It was,” she said. “I could see that he had developed some kind of obsession with Morichjhãpi and I was very uneasy about it. I knew there was going to be trouble and I just wanted to keep him from harm.”
Kanai scratched his head. “I still don’t understand. Why did this cause have so much appeal for him?”
Nilima’s answer was slow in coming. “You have to remember, Kanai,” she said at length, “that as a young man Nirmal was in love with the idea of revolution. Men like that, even when they turn their backs on their party and their comrades, can never let go of the idea: it’s the secret god that rules their hearts. It is what makes them come alive; they revel in the danger, the exquisite pain. It is to them what childbirth is to a woman, or war to a mercenary.”
“But these settlers weren’t revolutionaries, were they?”
“No,” said Nilima. “Not at all. Their aims were quite straightforward. They just wanted a little land to settle on. But for that they were willing to pit themselves against the government. They were prepared to resist until the end. That was enough. This was the closest Nirmal would ever come to a revolutionary moment. He desperately wanted to be a part of it. Perhaps it was his way of delaying the recognition of his age.”
Kanai was hard put to reconcile the gentle, dhoti-clad man of his memories with this image of a revolutionary. “Did you try to reason with him?”
“Yes, of course,” Nilima said. “But he would say, ‘You’ve joined the rulers; you’ve begun to think like them. That’s what comes of doing the sort of social work you’ve been doing all these years. You’ve lost sight of the important things.’ She shut her eyes as she recalled the contempt with which her own husband had dismissed her life’s work. She turned her head to brush away tears. “We were like two ghosts living in the same house. At the end he seemed to want only to hurt me. Just think about it, Kanai — why else would he have insisted on leaving this notebook to you and not to me?”
“I don’t know what to say.” Kanai had assumed that Nirmal had wanted him to have the notebook because he, Kanai, represented a slender connection to the ears of an unheeding world. He had not for a moment considered the possibility that Nirmal had intended to wound Nilima. The idea shocked him. He had always known Nirmal to be eccentric, but he had never thought him to be capable of malice or cruelty, especially to his own wife. Like everyone who knew them, he had always assumed that