The Hungry Tide - Amitav Ghosh [80]
I rose in the morning to find, as so often after a storm, that there was not a cloud in the sky. The island and river were bathed in brilliant sunshine. I stepped away from Kusum’s dwelling and saw others nearby. I walked a little farther and saw still more dwellings, scattered over cleared fields. These were huts, shacks and shanties built with the usual materials of the tide country — mud, thatch and bamboo — yet a pattern was evident here: these dwellings had not been laid out at random.
What had I expected? A mere jumble perhaps, untidy heaps of people piled high upon each other? That is, after all, what the word rifugi has come to mean. But what I saw was quite different from the picture in my mind’s eye. Paths had been laid; the bãdh — that guarantor of island life — had been augmented; little plots of land had been enclosed with fences; fishing nets had been hung up to dry. There were men and women sitting outside their huts, repairing their nets and stringing their crab lines with bits of bait and bone.
Such industry! Such diligence! Yet it was only a few weeks since they had come.
Taking in these sights, I felt the onrush of a strange, heady excitement: suddenly it dawned on me that I was watching the birth of something new, something hitherto unseen. This, I thought, is what Daniel Hamilton must have felt when he stood upon the deck of his launch and watched the mangroves being shorn from the islands. But between what was happening at Morichjhãpi and what Hamilton had done there was one vital aspect of difference: this was not one man’s vision. This dream had been dreamt by the very people who were trying to make it real.
I could walk no more. I stood transfixed on the still wet pathway, leaning on my umbrella while the wind snatched at my crumpled dhoti. I felt something changing within me: how astonishing it was that I, an aging, bookish schoolmaster, should live to see this, an experiment, imagined not by those with learning and power, but by those without!
I felt all of existence swelling in my veins. Letting my umbrella drop, I flung back my head to open myself to the wind and the sun. It was as though in the course of one night I had cast away the emptiness I had so long held in my arms.
In great excitement, I went back to Kusum’s door.
“What’s the matter, Saar?” she said in alarm. “Why are your clothes muddy, your face red? Where have you left your umbrella?”
“Never mind all that,” I said impatiently. “Tell me, who is in charge? Is there a committee? Are there leaders?”
“Yes, of course. Why?”
“I want to meet with them.”
“Why, Saar?”
“Because I want to have some part in what is happening here. I want to be of help.”
“Saar, if that’s what you want, who am I to say no?”
The island, she said, had been divided into wards. People in charge of each of these wards made decisions and helped organize every essential activity.
“Take me to the head of your ward,” I said, and she led me to a door a short distance away.
The leader of the ward was a sharp, energetic man, no dreamer, and not someone to put up with trespasses on his time: in his demeanor I glimpsed the euphoric reticence of someone who knows that success is within reach. Of course he was busy, but when he heard I was a headmaster — although soon to be retired — he took the time to show me around. We walked along the newly cleared paths and he pointed out all that had been done in the weeks since they had first arrived. I was amazed, not just by what they had built but the care they had invested in creating organizations, institutions. They had set up their own government and taken a census — there were some thirty thousand people on the island already and there was space for many more. The island had been divided into five zones and each family of settlers had been given five acres of land. Yet they had also recognized, shrewdly enough, that their enterprise could not succeed if they didn’t have the support of their neighbors on the surrounding islands. With this in