The Hungry Tide - Amitav Ghosh [78]
“And there you have it, Saar. I have told you the story. That’s how Fokir and I came to Morichjhãpi.”
And so we fell silent, each of us alone with our thoughts, Kusum and Fokir, Horen and I. In my mind’s eye I saw them walking, these thousands of people who wanted nothing more than to plunge their hands once again in our soft, yielding tide country mud. I saw them coming, young and old, quick and halt, with their lives bundled on their heads, and knew it was of them the Poet had spoken when he said:
Each slow turn of the world carries such disinherited
ones to whom neither the past nor the future belongs.
A HUNT
IN THE MORNING Fokir still showed no great eagerness to be gone, and Piya, for her part, saw no reason to hurry him: she was glad to be able to spend more time with the dolphins.
The animals remained in the pool till midmorning, when the waters began to rise. Then again, over a period of about half an hour, they vanished. It happened exactly as it had the day before, except for the difference in the timing of the tide.
What remained to be seen now was where they went when they left the pool: Fokir might know the answer to this. Through a combination of gestures she managed to convey to him that she wanted to follow the dolphins — would it be possible to track them in the boat? He nodded eagerly and quickly pulled in the anchor.
They left the pool while the tide was still coming in and the current added a little to their pace. Leaving Garjontola behind, they entered a mohona. Keeping watch in the bow, Piya saw that with the tide in flood the surrounding islands were sliding gradually beneath the water.
Looking ahead with her binoculars, she spotted a pair of fins far out in front. By the time they had crossed the mohona, the fins were nowhere in sight. But Fokir seemed sure of the way, for he turned unhesitatingly into a wide channel and then veered off into another that was narrower. Shortly afterward he downed his oars and pointed to the shore. Veering around with her binoculars, Piya spotted three crocodiles — she had missed them because her attention had been focused on the water. She guessed that Fokir had seen them before, in this very stretch of water. They were lying exposed to view but their mud-caked bodies blended so well into the surroundings that it was hard to judge their size. One had its jaws open and it seemed to Piya that the gap was wide enough to take the measure of a human being — certainly one of her own size.
The channel was a relatively narrow one, and if the tide had been low they would have passed very close to the crocodiles, but with the water running high, the reptiles were well up on the shore. They gave no indication of having noticed the boat’s passage, but a while later when Piya turned her binoculars on them again, she saw that there were only two animals left on the bank. The third had slithered into the water and the trough it had carved in the mudbank had begun to fill up again. Within minutes the depression vanished and the bank was restored to its lacquered smoothness.
Then Tutul uttered a wordless shout and pointed ahead. Piya swung her binoculars around just in time to catch a glimpse of a dolphin’s flukes. They disappeared almost at once and she was annoyed with herself for being distracted by the crocodiles. But a minute later the flukes appeared again, rising vertically out of the water, as if the animal were standing on its head. Then another pair of flukes appeared beside the first, similarly upended, and Piya recognized the mother-and-calf couple she had observed before in the pool. The flood tide had created dozens of tiny creeks that reached deep into the interior of the surrounding banks and islands. It was in one of these that the dolphins were foraging, a gully clearly too shallow even for Fokir’s boat.
Piya knew what the dolphins were doing: they had herded a school of fish into shallow