The Hungry Tide - Amitav Ghosh [65]
But how could she explain this to Fokir?
She made her way to the shelter and found Fokir and the boy fast asleep. They were lying on their sides, with Tutul’s small form nested inside the larger curve of his father’s body. The boy, she noticed, had a slight pudginess that contrasted sharply with his father’s near-skeletal leanness: Fokir was all muscle and bone, a male anatomy reduced to its essentials. Was the boy better fed than his father? There was a story here that she wished she understood: Who looked after the boy? Did someone have to deprive himself to make sure Tutul was properly fed?
Their chests were moving in unison as they slept and the rhythm of their breathing reminded her of the pair of dolphins she had been watching earlier. It calmed her to see them sleeping so peacefully — the contrast with her own state of mind could not have been more marked. She hesitated in extending her arm to wake Fokir: Would he be annoyed at being woken from his siesta? Was this when he would demand to leave for home? She noticed a bead of sweat traveling down his temple toward the corner of his eye, and without thinking she put out a finger to flick it away.
He awoke instantly and sat up, rubbing the spot where her fingertip had touched his skin. She backed away in embarrassment. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean —” He shrugged indifferently and dug his fists into his eyes, as though he were trying to rub away the remnants of sleep.
“Look.” She thrust her positioning monitor in front of him and pointed to the screen. “Over here.” To her surprise, his attention was caught immediately. He looked closely as she tried to show him the meaning of the dots and the lines.
The hardest part was to explain the correspondence between their own position and their place on the screen. She tried pointing, in various combinations, to the screen, to herself, to him and the boy. But the purpose was not served: she saw he had grown flustered and realized that her gestures had given him the impression that she wanted him to move closer to her. The misunderstanding disconcerted her and she fetched a sheet of paper, deciding on a change in strategy. Surely it would be easier if she reduced the problem to two dimensions, by drawing a simple diagram with stick figures, like those familiar to every child. The trouble was, she had never been much good at drawing, and now, halfway into the sketch she was brought up short by an unanticipated misgiving. In the past, she had always used a triangular skirt to distinguish her stick women from her men — but this didn’t quite make sense in a situation where the man was in a lungi and the woman in pants. She crumpled up the sheet and would have tossed it away if Fokir hadn’t taken it from her hands, to save for kindling.
With her next drawing she started with the outlines of the landscape, sketching in the curve of the shore before indicating their own position. Just as she had thought, the reduction to two dimensions made all the difference: once she had shown him how the diagram corresponded with the lines on the monitor’s screen, the rest was easy. It took only a few strokes of her pencil to convey that she needed him to row the boat in parallel lines over a quadrant shaped roughly like a triangle, with its apex almost touching the far shore.
She had expected some reluctance, and possibly even resistance.
But there was none. On the contrary, he seemed quite pleased and went so far as to rouse Tutul with a cheerful shout. It was the prospect of traversing the water in straight lines that seemed to enthuse him most — and she discovered why when he pulled a roll of line out of the hold. Evidently he wanted to use this opportunity to do some fishing.
But the line puzzled her; in all the time she had spent