The Hungry Tide - Amitav Ghosh [72]
Piya stood by and watched as Fokir and Tutul performed a little ceremony. First they fetched some leaves and flowers and placed them in front of the images. Then, standing before the shrine, Fokir began to recite some kind of chant, with his head bowed and his hands joined in an attitude of prayer. After she had listened for a few minutes, Piya recognized a refrain that was repeated again and again — it contained a word that sounded like “Allah.” She had not thought to speculate about Fokir’s religion, but it occurred to her now that he might be Muslim. But no sooner had she thought this than it struck her that a Muslim was hardly likely to pray to an image like this one. What Fokir was performing looked very much like her mother’s Hindu pujas — and yet the words seemed to suggest otherwise.
But what did it matter either way? She was glad just to be there as a witness to this strange little ritual.
A few minutes later they headed back and on breaking free of the mangrove, Piya saw that the sun had dipped in the sky and the level of the water had begun to fall. She tiptoed carefully across the mud and was about to climb into the boat when Fokir waved to catch her attention. He was some fifty feet away, kneeling with his hand pointing toward the ground. Piya went over to look and saw that he was pointing to a depression in the mud filled with scurrying crabs. She raised her eyebrows, and he held up a hand, as if to tell her that that was what it was — the mark of a hand. She frowned in incomprehension: what hand could have touched that mud other than his? Then it struck her that maybe he meant not “hand” but “foot” or “paw.” “Tiger?” she was about to say, but he raised a finger to prevent her: she understood now that this was indeed some kind of superstition — to say that word or even to make a gestural reference to it was taboo.
She looked at it again and could see nothing to suggest that it was what he had said. The placement of the mark contributed to her skepticism: the animal would have had to be in full view and she would have seen it from the water. And would Fokir himself be quite so unconcerned if there really was a tiger nearby? It just didn’t add up.
Then she heard the sound of an exhalation, and all thought of the tiger was banished from her mind. Picking up her binoculars, she spotted two humps breaking the river’s surface: it was the adult Orcaella swimming in tandem with the calf. With the water ebbing, the dolphins had returned: their movements seemed to follow exactly the pattern she had inferred.
A DISTURBANCE
KANAI WAS STILL in his uncle’s study, reading, when the light above the desk flickered and went out. He lit a candle and sat still as the throbbing of the generator faded and a cloud of stillness crept slowly over the island. As he listened to its advance, it occurred to him to wonder why, in English, silence is commonly said to “fall” or “descend” as though it were a curtain or a knife. There was nothing precipitous about the hush that followed the shutting off of the generator: the quiet was more like a fog or a mist, creeping in slowly, from a distance, wrapping itself around certain sounds while revealing others: the sawing of a cicada, a snatch of music from a distant radio, the cackle of an owl. Each of these made themselves heard briefly, only to vanish again into the creeping fog. It was in just this way that yet another sound, unfamiliar to Kanai, revealed itself, very briefly, and then died away again. The echo had carried across the water from such a distance that it would have been inaudible if the generator had been on; yet it bespoke a nakedness of assertion, a power and menace, that had no relationship to its volume. Small as it was, every other sound seemed to wither for an instant, only to be followed by a loud and furious outbreak of disquiet — marked most prominently by a frenzy of barking from all over the island.