The Hungry Tide - Amitav Ghosh [60]
MOYNA
IT WAS WELL PAST NOON when Kanai went down to knock again on Nilima’s door. He was glad to find her dressed and on her feet.
“Aré, Kanai,” she said, smiling. “There you are. Come in.”
On her face there was no sign of the anguish Kanai had seen that morning, and he guessed that the change in her spirits was due to her being at her desk. It was in this way, he realized, that she had coped with Nirmal’s death and the years of loneliness that had followed — by immersing herself in her work.
“Moyna should be here any minute now,” Nilima said. “I’ve asked her to show you around the hospital.”
“What does Moyna do here?” said Kanai.
“She’s one of our trainees,” replied Nilima. “She joined the Trust years ago, when we started our ‘barefoot nurse’ program. It’s an outreach project for providing medical assistance to people in out-of-the-way villages. We give the nurses some basic training in hygiene, nutrition, first aid, midwifery and other things that might be useful — how to cope with drowning, for instance, since that’s a situation they often have to face. Then they go back to their villages and hold training classes of their own.”
“But I take it Moyna has risen in the ranks?”
“Yes,” said Nilima. “She’s not a barefoot nurse anymore. She’s training to be a fully fledged nurse in the hospital. She applied a couple of years ago, and since her record was very good we were happy to take her in. The strange thing was that even though she had worked for us for a long time, we had no idea who she was — in the sense that we didn’t know she was married to Kusum’s son. And when I found out, it was almost by accident.”
“What happened?”
“I was in the market one day,” Nilima said, “and I saw her with a young man and a child. Now you have to remember I hadn’t seen Fokir since he was a boy of five, so of course I didn’t recognize him. I said to her, ‘Moyna, is this chhélé-chhokra your husband, then?’ and she replied, ‘Yes, Mashima, this is him.’ ‘So what’s his name then?’ I asked, and she said, ‘Fokir Mandol.’ It’s a common enough name, but I knew at once. I said, ‘Éki ré? Who are you? Are you our Kusum’s Fokir?’ And he said yes.”
“So at least that part of it turned out well,” said Kanai. “He was here, safe in Lusibari.”
“I wish it were that simple,” said Nilima. “But the truth is, it hasn’t gone well at all.”
“Oh? Why not?”
Moyna was both ambitious and bright, Nilima said. Through her own efforts, with no encouragement from her family, she had managed to give herself an education. There was no school in her village, so she had walked every day to another village miles away. She had done well in her school final exams and had wanted to go on to college in Canning or some other nearby town. She had made all her preparations and had even gotten her Scheduled Caste certificate. But her family had balked at the prospect of her departure and to thwart her plans had insisted she get married. The man chosen to be her husband was Fokir — by all accounts a perfectly fine young fellow except that he could neither read nor write and made his living by catching crabs.
“But the remarkable thing is that Moyna hasn’t abandoned her dreams,” said Nilima. “She’s so determined to qualify as a nurse that she made Fokir move to Lusibari while she was in training.”
“And is Fokir happy about that?”
“I don’t think so,” Nilima said. “I hear they’ve been having trouble — that might be why he disappears sometimes. I don’t know the details; the girls don’t tell me everything. But I do know that Moyna’s been having a difficult time. This morning, for instance, she looked completely distraught.”
“So she came by, did she?”
“Yes,” said Nilima. “In fact, she should be here again any minute. I sent her to the hospital to get me some medicine.”
“But Fokir