The Hungry Tide - Amitav Ghosh [91]
She gave the containers a look of dubious appraisal. “I hope you won’t be offended,” she said, “but I don’t think I want any of that. I have to be careful about what I eat.”
“What about some rice, then?” said Kanai. “You could have some of that, couldn’t you?”
She nodded. “Yes. I guess I could — if it’s just plain white rice.”
“There you are,” he said, ladling a few spoonfuls of rice on her plate. Rolling up his sleeves, he gave her a spoon and then dug into the rice on his own plate with his hands.
During dinner, Kanai talked at length about Lusibari. He told Piya about Daniel Hamilton, the settling of the island and the circumstances that had led to Nirmal and Nilima’s arrival. He seemed so knowledgeable that Piya remarked at last, “It sounds like you’ve spent a lot of time here. But you haven’t, have you?”
He was quick to confirm this. “Oh, no. I only came once as a boy. To be honest, I’m surprised by how vividly I still remember the place — especially considering it was a kind of punishment.”
“Why are you surprised?”
He shrugged. “I’m not the kind of person who dwells on the past,” he said. “I like to look ahead.”
“But we’re in the present now, aren’t we?” she said with a smile. “Even here, in Lusibari?”
“Oh, no,” he said emphatically. “For me Lusibari will always be a part of the past.”
Piya had finished her rice, so she rose from the table and started clearing away the plates. This seemed to fluster Kanai.
“Sit down,” he said. “You can leave those for Moyna.”
“I can do them just as well as she can,” said Piya.
Kanai shrugged. “All right, then.”
As she was rinsing her plate, Piya said, “Here you are, putting me up, feeding me and everything. And I feel like I know nothing about you — beyond your name that is.”
“Is that so?” Kanai gave a startled laugh. “I wonder how that could have happened? I’m not known for being unusually reticent.”
“It’s true, though,” she said. “I don’t even know where you live.”
“That’s easily remedied,” he said. “I live in New Delhi. I’m fortytwo and I’m single most of the time.”
“Oh?” Piya was quick to turn the conversation in a less personal direction. “And you’re a translator, right? That’s one thing you did tell me.”
“That’s right,” said Kanai. “I’m an interpreter and translator by profession — although right now I’m more of a businessman than anything else. I started a company some years ago when I discovered a shortage of language professionals in New Delhi. Now I provide translators for all kinds of organizations: businesses, embassies, the media, aid organizations — in short, anyone who can pay.”
“And is there much of a demand?”
“Oh, yes.” He nodded vigorously. “New Delhi’s become one of the world’s leading conference cities and media centers; there’s always something happening. I can barely keep up. The business just seems to keep growing and growing. Recently we started a speechtraining operation, to do accent modification for people who work in call centers. It’s become the fastest-growing part of the business.”
The idea that the currency of language could be used to build a business came as a surprise to Piya. “So I guess you know many languages yourself, right?”
“Six,” he said immediately, with a grin. “Hindi, Urdu and Bengali are my mainstays nowadays. And then there’s English, of course. But I have two others I fall back on from time to time: French and Arabic.”
She was intrigued by the odd combination: “French and Arabic! How did you come by those?”
“Scholarships,” he said with a smile. “I always had a head for languages, and as a student I used to frequent the Alliance Française in Calcutta. One thing led to another and I won a bourse. While I was in Paris an opportunity turned up to learn Arabic in Tunisia. I seized it and