The Hungry Tide - Amitav Ghosh [84]
“And do you know how you can tell that the Sindhu and the Ganga were once conjoined?”
“How, Saar?”
“Because of the shushuk, the river dolphin. This creature of the sea was the legacy left to the twins by their mother, Tethys. The rivers nurtured it and made it their own. Nowhere else in the world is the shushuk to be found but in the twin rivers, the Ganga and the Sindhu.”
And if their interest wandered, I would tell them, in the end, a love story, about a king called Shantanu and how, on the banks of the great river, he spotted a woman of dazzling beauty. This was, of course, none other than the Ganga herself, but the king had no knowledge of this. On the banks of rivers even the most temperate men lose their heads. King Shantanu fell in love wholly, madly; he promised the river goddess that he would grant her whatever she wanted; if she chose even to drown her own children, he would not stand in her way.
A single besotted moment beside a river, and thus was launched a parva of the Mahabharata.
Why should a schoolmaster deny that which even the old mythmakers acknowledge? Love flows deep in rivers.
“Children, this is the lesson; hear it in the words of the Poet:
“To sing about someone you love is one thing; but, oh, the blood’s hidden guilty river-god is something else.”
LANDFALL
AT THE START, with the currents flowing in the wrong direction and Fokir laboring alone at the oars, the going was painfully slow. Piya was not surprised when after an hour of rowing she checked the boat’s position on the GPS and found that they had traveled only two miles. It struck her then, belatedly, that Fokir might have yet another pair of oars. On signaling the question, she was glad to discover he did: they were stowed underfoot in the boat’s bilges.
The oars were no less crudely crafted than the boat itself — they consisted of two oblong pieces of wood nailed awkwardly to a couple of shorn mangrove branches. There were no oarlocks on the gunwales and the handles had to be engaged in little protrusions of wood. When Piya dipped the oars in the water the current twisted them around and nearly tore them from her grip. It took her a while to grow used to the feel of them, but with two of them rowing the pace quickened.
As the hours wore on, Piya found it increasingly difficult to keep going: a crop of blisters appeared on her hands, and her face and neck seemed marbled with salt. Toward sunset she pulled in her oars and yielded to the temptation to ask how much longer it would be before they arrived at their destination. “Lusibari?”
Fokir had been rowing almost without a break since morning, but she was still unable to see any signs of tiredness in him. Now, pausing briefly to glance over his shoulder, he pointed to a tongue of land just visible in the distance: its deforested shoreline marked it out from the other islands in the vicinity. It was heartening to have the place finally within sight, but Piya knew it would be a while yet before they made landfall, and she was right.
By the time they had moored the boat and collected their things, the sun had set and darkness was closing in. Fokir picked up one of her backpacks while she carried the other, and they set off in single file with Tutul in the lead. Piya’s attention was focused on keeping the two of them in sight, and she took nothing in of the surroundings until Fokir came to an abrupt halt and pointed ahead. “Mashima,” he said, and