The Hungry Tide (17 page)

“Yes,” said Kanai. “It was written in 1979.”

“In 1979?” Nilima was quiet for a moment as she thought this over. “But that was the year of his death. He died in July. Are you sure it was written in that year?”

“Yes,” said Kanai. “Why should that surprise you?”

“I'll tell you why,” she said. “Because that was the one year of his life when he did no writing at all. He had retired as headmaster of the Lusibari school the year before and it was a difficult time for him. The school had been his whole life for almost three decades — ever since we came to Lusibari. His behavior became erratic at this time. As you know, he had a history of mental instability, so it was very worrying for me. He used to disappear for days, and afterward he wouldn't be able to recall where he had been. He was all in an uproar that year. He was in no state to do any writing.”

“Maybe he had a brief period of lucidity,” Kanai said. “I have the impression the entire notebook was written over one or two days.”

“And do you know the dates?” said Nilima, watching him closely.

“Yes,” said Kanai. “He started writing it on the morning of May 15, 1979. In a place called Morichjhãpi.”

“Morichjhãpi!” There was a sudden intake of breath as Nilima said the word.

“Yes,” said Kanai. “Tell me what happened there.”

Morichjhãpi, said Nilima, was a tide country island a couple of hours from Lusibari by boat. It fell within a part of the Sundarbans reserved for tiger conservation, but unlike many such islands it was relatively easily accessible from the mainland. In 1978 a great number of people suddenly appeared on Morichjhãpi. In this place where there had been no inhabitants before there were now thousands, almost overnight. Within a matter of weeks they had cleared the mangroves, built bãdhs and put up huts. It happened so quickly that in the beginning no one even knew who these people were. But in time it came to be learned that they were refugees, originally from Bangladesh. Some had come to India after Partition, while others had trickled over later. In Bangladesh they had been among the poorest of rural people, oppressed and exploited both by Muslim communalists and by Hindus of the upper castes.

“Most of them were Dalits, as we say now,” said Nilima. “Harijans, as we used to say then.”

But it was not from Bangladesh that these refugees were fleeing when they came to Morichjhãpi; it was from a government resettlement camp in central India. In the years after Partition the authorities had removed the refugees to a place called Dandakaranya, deep in the forests of Madhya Pradesh, hundreds of miles from Bengal.

“They called it resettlement,” said Nilima, “but people say it was more like a concentration camp or a prison. The refugees were surrounded by security forces and forbidden to leave. Those who tried to get away were hunted down.”

The soil was rocky and the environment was nothing like they had ever known. They could not speak the languages of that area and the local people treated them as intruders, attacking them with bows, arrows and other weapons. For many years they put up with these conditions. Then in 1978 some of them organized themselves and broke out of the camp. By train and on foot they moved eastward in the hope of settling in the Sundarbans. Morichjhãpi was the place they decided on.

Earlier that year a Left Front ministry had taken power in West Bengal and the refugees may have assumed that they would not face much opposition from the state government. But this was a miscalculation: the authorities had declared that Morichjhãpi was a protected forest reserve and they had proved unbending in their determination to evict the settlers. Over a period of about a year there had been a series of confrontations between the settlers and government forces.

“And the final clash,” Nilima said, “if I recall correctly, was in mid-May of that year, 1979.”

“So do you think Nirmal was there at the time?” Kanai stopped to consider another possibility. “Or was it perhaps just a fantasy?”

“I don't know, Kanai,” Nilima said, looking down at her hands. “I really don't know. He became a stranger to me that year. He wouldn't talk to me. He would hide things. It was as if I had become his enemy.”

Kanai could see that Nilima was close to tears and his heart went out to her. “It must have been very hard for you.”

“It was,” she said. “I could see that he had developed some kind of obsession with Morichjhãpi and I was very uneasy about it. I knew there was going to be trouble and I just wanted to keep him from harm.”

Kanai scratched his head. “I still don't understand. Why did this cause have so much appeal for him?”

Nilima's answer was slow in coming. “You have to remember, Kanai,” she said at length, “that as a young man Nirmal was in love with the idea of revolution. Men like that, even when they turn their backs on their party and their comrades, can never let go of the idea: it's the secret god that rules their hearts. It is what makes them come alive; they revel in the danger, the exquisite pain. It is to them what childbirth is to a woman, or war to a mercenary.”

“But these settlers weren't revolutionaries, were they?”

“No,” said Nilima. “Not at all. Their aims were quite straightforward. They just wanted a little land to settle on. But for that they were willing to pit themselves against the government. They were prepared to resist until the end. That was enough. This was the closest Nirmal would ever come to a revolutionary moment. He desperately wanted to be a part of it. Perhaps it was his way of delaying the recognition of his age.”

Kanai was hard put to reconcile the gentle, dhoti-clad man of his memories with this image of a revolutionary. “Did you try to reason with him?”

“Yes, of course,” Nilima said. “But he would say, ‘You've joined the rulers; you've begun to think like them. That's what comes of doing the sort of social work you've been doing all these years. You've lost sight of the important things.' She shut her eyes as she recalled the contempt with which her own husband had dismissed her life's work. She turned her head to brush away tears. “We were like two ghosts living in the same house. At the end he seemed to want only to hurt me. Just think about it, Kanai — why else would he have insisted on leaving this notebook to you and not to me?”

“I don't know what to say.” Kanai had assumed that Nirmal had wanted him to have the notebook because he, Kanai, represented a slender connection to the ears of an unheeding world. He had not for a moment considered the possibility that Nirmal had intended to wound Nilima. The idea shocked him. He had always known Nirmal to be eccentric, but he had never thought him to be capable of malice or cruelty, especially to his own wife. Like everyone who knew them, he had always assumed that Nilima and Nirmal were content in their marriage, that theirs was a happy, if unlikely, pairing. He realized now that it was only because Nirmal never left Lusibari that they had been able to sustain this illusion.

Thinking of what Nilima had been through all these years, an unfamiliar lump arose in Kanai's throat. “Look,” he said, rising to his feet. “I'll give you that notebook right now. You can keep it or throw it away — do whatever you like. I don't want to have anything more to do with it.”

“No, Kanai!” cried Nilima. “Sit down.” Reaching for his hand, she pulled him back into his chair. “Kanai, listen to me: I always did my best to do my duty by Nirmal. It's very important to me that his last wishes are not dishonored. I don't know why he wanted you to have the book; I don't know what's in it — but that's how it must be.”

Kanai went to sit beside her on the bed. He had been uneasy about broaching the subject of Kusum, but he could see no way around it. “Tell me,” he said gently, “do you think Kusum might have had something to do with it?”

She flinched at the sound of the name. “There were rumors, Kanai. Yes, I won't deny it.”

“But how did Kusum end up at Morichjhãpi?”

“I don't know how it happened. But somehow she did.”

“And did you ever see her while she was there?” Kanai said.

Nilima nodded. “Yes. Just once. She came to see me, in this very room.”

She was working at her desk, said Nilima, one morning in 1978, when a nurse came to tell her she had a visitor, someone who claimed to know her. Nilima asked what her name was, but the nurse didn't know. “All right,” said Nilima. “Bring her here.” A few minutes later the door opened to admit a young woman and a child, a boy of four or five. The woman looked to be in her early twenties but she was dressed in a white sari and there were no bangles on her wrists and no vermilion in her hair: elsewhere, Nilima would have known immediately she was a widow, but in Lusibari she could not be sure.

There was something familiar about the woman — not so much her face as the look in her eye — but Nilima could not remember her name. When the visitor bowed to touch her feet, she said, “Tell me now, who are you?”

“Mashima,” came the answer, “my name is Kusum. Don't you remember me?”

“Kusum!” Almost at once Nilima began to scold her. “Why didn't you send news, Kusum? Where have you been? Didn't you know we were looking for you?”

Kusum's answer was to laugh. “Mashima, there was too much to tell. More than I could put into a letter.”

When she stood up Nilima saw that Kusum had grown into a sturdy, bright-eyed young woman. “And who is this boy, Kusum?”

“That's my son,” she answered. “His name is Fokir — Fokirchand Mandol.”

“And his father?”

“His father died, Mashima. I'm all he has now.”

Nilima was glad to see that premature widowhood had not robbed Kusum of her ready laugh. “Tell me, Kusum. What brings you here?”

It was then that Kusum revealed that she was living in Morichjhãpi: she had come to Lusibari in the hope of persuading Nilima to send medical help for the settlers.

Nilima was immediately on her guard. She told her that she would like to help, but it was impossible. The government had made it known that it would stop at nothing to evict the settlers: anyone suspected of helping them was sure to get into trouble. Nilima had the hospital and the Women's Union to think of: she could not afford to alienate the government. She had to consider the greater good.

After half an hour Kusum left and Nilima never saw her again.

“So what happened after that?” Kanai said. “Where did she go?”

“She didn't go anywhere, Kanai. She was killed.”

“Killed?” said Kanai. “How? What happened?”

“She died in the massacre, Kanai,” Nilima said. “The massacre at Morichjhãpi.”

She covered her face with her hands. “I'm tired now. I think I'd better rest for a while.”

AN EPIPHANY

I
N THE AFTERNOON,
as the waters began to rise, Piya noticed that she was seeing less and less of the dolphins. This was confirmed by a glance at her data sheets: it seemed the animals had begun to disperse with the turning of the tide.

Through the early hours of the day the pace of Piya's work had been dictated by the belief that this was a school of migrating dolphins that might depart at any minute. But now she began to wonder: these animals hadn't given her the impression of being headed anywhere in particular. On the contrary, she had gotten the feeling that they had gathered here to wait out the ebb tide until the water rose again. But that made no sense either, she told herself; it just didn't fit with what she knew about these animals.

Orcaella were of two kinds: one tribe liked the salt water of the coast while the other preferred rivers and fresh water. The difference between these communities was not anatomical — it had only to do with their choice of habitat. Of the two populations, the coastal was by far the more numerous. The waters of southern Asia and northern Australia were reliably believed to contain several thousand of them. Fresh-water Orcaella, on the other hand, were a rare and dwindling breed. Only a few hundred now remained in Asia's rivers. Coastal Orcaella were not known to linger for hours in one place and were more likely to range freely along the shore. Their fresh-water cousins were more territorial and not nearly so gregarious. In times of heavy rainfall, when the rivers rose, they would roam far afield, chasing their prey into minor tributaries and even into flooded rice fields. But in dry periods, when the rivers began to drop, they would make their way back to certain spots. These were usually deep-water pools, created by quirks of geology in the riverbed or by the water's patterns of flow. In Cambodia Piya had tracked populations of Orcaella in several pools along the Mekong, from Phnom Penh to the Laos border. She had found the same individuals returning to the same pools year after year. But when the seasons changed these dolphins traveled hundreds of miles downriver; in one unfortunate instance an animal had swum all the way down from the Laos border only to drown in a gill net near Phnom Penh.

Piya had come to the Sundarbans believing that any Orcaella she found there would be of the coastal variety: this seemed only logical, considering how salty the waters were in this region. But what she had seen today made her wonder if she hadn't made a mistake. If these were coastal Orcaella what were they doing congregating in a pool? That was out of character for them — only their river-dwelling kin did that. But these could not be river dolphins either. The water was too salty. And anyway, riverine Orcaella didn't leave their pools in the middle of the day; they spent a whole season in them. So what kind of animal was this and what did this odd behavior mean?

As she mulled over these questions a thought came into Piya's mind. Was it possible that these Sundarbans Orcaella did twice each day what their Mekong cousins did once every year? Had they found a novel way of adapting their behavior to this tidal ecology? Could it be that they had compressed the annual seasonal rhythms of their Mekong relatives so as to fit them into the daily cycle of tides?