The Hungry Tide - Amitav Ghosh [63]
“Why?”
“Why else?” she said. “Because there’s a lot of money in prawns and the traders had paid off the politicians. What do they care — or the politicians, for that matter? It’s people like us who’re going to suffer and it’s up to us to think ahead. That’s why I have to make sure Tutul gets an education. Otherwise, what’s his future going to be?”
“I’m sure Fokir would understand if you explained,” Kanai said.
“Do you think I haven’t tried?” she said, her voice rising. “I’ve tried so many times. But what does he understand? He’s illiterate — it’s impossible to explain these things to him.”
It occurred to Kanai, as she was speaking, that for someone in her circumstances, Moyna possessed a sure grasp of the world and how to get by in it. It was astonishing to think of how much had changed in the tide country since his last visit, not just in material matters but in people’s hopes and desires. Nothing was better proof of this than the very existence of this hospital and the opportunities it provided and the aspirations it nurtured. This made it seem all the more unfortunate that someone with Moyna’s talents should be held back by a husband who could not keep up.
“Look.”
They had come to an operating room now, and Moyna broke off abruptly to look through the circular window that pierced the door. She lingered there so long that Kanai began to wonder whether there was an operation under way inside. But when at last she moved aside to let him look, he saw that the room was empty except for its equipment.
“What were you looking at?” he said.
“I just like to look at all the new equipment,” she said with a laugh. “Who knows? Maybe if I finish this course, one day I’ll be working in there myself.”
“Of course you will.”
She pursed her lips. “God knows.”
Kanai could tell from the sound of Moyna’s voice that her dream of becoming a nurse was no ordinary yearning: it was the product of a desire as richly and completely imagined as a novel or a poem. It recalled for him what it meant to be driven to better yourself, to lay claim to a wider world. It was as though, in listening to Moyna, he were looking back on an earlier incarnation of himself.
In the circular pane he saw Moyna’s face appear beside his own. She tapped on the glass and pointed into the dark interior of the operating room. “That was where my Tutul was born,” she said. “Mashima arranged for my admission. I was the first girl from my family to give birth in a hospital. There were three nurses to tend to me and they passed the baby to each other before they handed him to me. All I could think of was how fortunate they were and how much I wanted to be one of them.”
Her ambition was so plainly written on her face that Kanai was assailed by the kind of tenderness we sometimes feel when we come across childhood pictures of ourselves — photographs that reveal all too unguardedly the desires people spend a lifetime learning to dissimulate.
“Don’t worry, Moyna,” said Kanai. “You’ll be there soon.” It was only after he had spoken that he realized he had addressed her as tumi — using a familiar form, without asking the customary permission. There was an intimacy in this that he had not intended but he made no apology, for it seemed best to let it pass unremarked.
CRABS
AROUND MIDDAY, with the level of the water edging ever higher, it was clear that the dolphins had begun to disperse. Piya’s last set of sightings was of the newborn and its mother and they put on a display the like of which she had rarely seen. First there was a series of surfacings in which they exposed almost the entire length of their bodies: the calf was seen to be about three feet in length while the older animal was almost half as large again. Next she was afforded a couple of beautiful sightings in which they shot water from their mouths, creating fountains in the air. “Spitting behavior” of this kind was a characteristic of the species