The Hungry Tide - Amitav Ghosh [89]
It is afternoon now and Horen and Kusum have gone to see if they can find some fish. Fokir is sitting here with a crab line, what is called a don in the tide country, and as I watch him play with it, my heart spills over. There is so much to say, so much in my head, so much that will remain unsaid. Oh, those wasted years, that wasted time. I think of Rilke going for years without writing a word and then, in a matter of weeks, producing the Duino Elegies in a castle besieged by the sea. Even silence is preparation. As the minutes pass, it seems to me I can see every object in the tide country with a blinding brightness and clarity. I want to say to Fokir, “Do you know that every don has one thousand morsels of bait, tied at gaps of three arms’ lengths each? That each line is thus equal to the length of three thousand arms?”
How better can we praise the world but by doing what the Poet would have us do: by speaking of potters and rope makers, by telling of
some simple thing shaped for generation after generation until it lives in our hands and in our eyes, and it’s ours.
CATCHING UP
AFTER HER SHOWER, Piya sank into the chair by her window and found she could not get up again. After days of squatting and sitting cross-legged it was strange to have a support behind your back and to be able to swing your legs freely without worrying about tipping over. She could still feel the rocking motion of the boat in her limbs, and the sighing of the wind blowing through the mangroves was still in her ears.
The feeling of being back on the boat suddenly brought back the terror she had felt that morning. It had happened so recently that the sensations seemed still to be present, unprocessed, in her mind — they had not yet been absorbed as memory. She saw once again the wrenching, twisting motion of the reptile’s head as its jaws closed over the spot where her wrist had been: it was as if it had been so certain of its aim, so sure of seizing her arm, that it had already launched into the movement that would drag her out of the boat and into the water. She imagined the tug that would have pulled her below the surface and the momentary release before the jaws closed again, around her midsection, pulling her into those swift, eerily glowing depths where the sunlight had no orientation and there was neither up nor down. She remembered her panic in falling from the launch, and it made her think of the numbing horror that would accompany the awareness that you were imprisoned in a grasp from which there was no escape. The overlapping of these images created a montage of such vividness that her hands began to tremble. And now, with Fokir absent, the experience seemed even more frightening than it had been at the time.
She forced herself to sit up and look out the window. The moon was not up yet and it was dark outside. She could not see much except the outlines of a few coconut palms, and beyond that a striated emptiness that suggested a closely shorn field. Then she caught the sound of a conversation in Bengali, drifting in from the front of the house: a woman’s voice in counterpoint to Kanai’s deep baritone.
She made herself get up and go downstairs. Kanai was standing by the door with a lantern in his hands, talking to a woman in a red sari. The woman was facing away from her, but at Piya’s approach she looked over her shoulder so that one side of her face was suddenly brightened by the glow of Kanai’s lantern. Piya saw that she was about her own age, with a full figure, a wide mouth and large, luminous eyes. Between her eyebrows was a big red bindi, and a streak of vermilion shindur ran like a wound through the part in her shiny black hair.
“Ah, there you are, Piya!” cried