The Hungry Tide (19 page)

Such was the hospital's reputation, Moyna said, that people now came there from great distances. Many who could have traveled more conveniently to Canning or Kolkata chose to come to Lusibari instead: the hospital was known to provide, at a nominal fee, a standard of care that could not be had elsewhere even at exorbitant rates. This traffic, in turn, had led to the growth of a small service industry around the hospital's perimeter. Over the years, a number of teashops, guest houses and stands for cycle-vans had taken root and flourished. Directly or indirectly the hospital now provided employment for the majority of Lusibari's inhabitants.

On the upper floor Moyna pointed out Nirmal's single contribution to the hospital: a large ward specially equipped to withstand cyclones. The windows had thick wooden shutters and the doors were reinforced with steel. Although he had rarely interfered in anything to do with the Trust, when the hospital was under construction Nirmal had taken the trouble to find out if any anti-cyclone measures had been provided for. He was horrified to learn that they hadn't: did nobody know about the tide country's history of catastrophic cyclones? Did they think that Lusibari was the one place where history would not repeat itself ? It was at his insistence that this ward was built.

From a veranda on the second floor, Moyna pointed to the stalls and clusters of huts that ringed the compound. “Look over there, Kanai-babu,” she said. “Look at the shops and stalls that have come up around the hospital. See how many there are?”

Kanai was touched, moved even, by Moyna's evident pride in the institution. “Have you ever brought Fokir here?” he said.

She answered this with a small shake of her head. “No.”

“Why not?”

She pulled a face. “He doesn't like to come — he feels out of place.”

“In the hospital, you mean? Or in Lusibari?”

“Both,” she said. “He doesn't like it here.”

“And why is that?”

“Things are different here than they were in the village.”

“In what way?” Kanai asked.

She shrugged. “Over there he was always with Tutul — our son,” she said. “Because of my work with the Trust I was out of the house a lot, so Tutul was with him on the river all day. But after we came here I had to put a stop to that.”

“Really? Why?”

“Because Tutul has to go to school, doesn't he?” she said sharply. “I don't want him growing up catching crabs. Where's the future in that?”

“But that's what Fokir does.”

“Yes, but for how long?” she said. “Mashima says that in fifteen years the fish will all be gone, what with the new nets and all.”

“What new nets?”

“These new nylon nets, which they use to catch
chingrir meen —
the spawn of tiger prawns. The nets are so fine that they catch the eggs of all the other fish as well. Mashima wanted to get the nets banned, but it was impossible.”

“Why?”

“Why else?” she said. “Because there's a lot of money in prawns and the traders had paid off the politicians. What do they care — or the politicians, for that matter? It's people like us who're going to suffer and it's up to us to think ahead. That's why I have to make sure Tutul gets an education. Otherwise, what's his future going to be?”

“I'm sure Fokir would understand if you explained,” Kanai said.

“Do you think I haven't tried?” she said, her voice rising. “I've tried so many times. But what does he understand? He's illiterate — it's impossible to explain these things to him.”

It occurred to Kanai, as she was speaking, that for someone in her circumstances, Moyna possessed a sure grasp of the world and how to get by in it. It was astonishing to think of how much had changed in the tide country since his last visit, not just in material matters but in people's hopes and desires. Nothing was better proof of this than the very existence of this hospital and the opportunities it provided and the aspirations it nurtured. This made it seem all the more unfortunate that someone with Moyna's talents should be held back by a husband who could not keep up.

“Look.”

They had come to an operating room now, and Moyna broke off abruptly to look through the circular window that pierced the door. She lingered there so long that Kanai began to wonder whether there was an operation under way inside. But when at last she moved aside to let him look, he saw that the room was empty except for its equipment.

“What were you looking at?” he said.

“I just like to look at all the new equipment,” she said with a laugh. “Who knows? Maybe if I finish this course, one day I'll be working in there myself.”

“Of course you will.”

She pursed her lips. “God knows.”

Kanai could tell from the sound of Moyna's voice that her dream of becoming a nurse was no ordinary yearning: it was the product of a desire as richly and completely imagined as a novel or a poem. It recalled for him what it meant to be driven to better yourself, to lay claim to a wider world. It was as though, in listening to Moyna, he were looking back on an earlier incarnation of himself.

In the circular pane he saw Moyna's face appear beside his own. She tapped on the glass and pointed into the dark interior of the operating room. “That was where my Tutul was born,” she said. “Mashima arranged for my admission. I was the first girl from my family to give birth in a hospital. There were three nurses to tend to me and they passed the baby to each other before they handed him to me. All I could think of was how fortunate they were and how much I wanted to be one of them.”

Her ambition was so plainly written on her face that Kanai was assailed by the kind of tenderness we sometimes feel when we come across childhood pictures of ourselves — photographs that reveal all too unguardedly the desires people spend a lifetime learning to dissimulate.

“Don't worry, Moyna,” said Kanai. “You'll be there soon.” It was only after he had spoken that he realized he had addressed her as
tumi
— using a familiar form, without asking the customary permission. There was an intimacy in this that he had not intended but he made no apology, for it seemed best to let it pass unremarked.

CRABS

A
ROUND MIDDAY
, with the level of the water edging ever higher, it was clear that the dolphins had begun to disperse. Piya's last set of sightings was of the newborn and its mother and they put on a display the like of which she had rarely seen. First there was a series of surfacings in which they exposed almost the entire length of their bodies: the calf was seen to be about three feet in length while the older animal was almost half as large again. Next she was afforded a couple of beautiful sightings in which they shot water from their mouths, creating fountains in the air. “Spitting behavior” of this kind was a characteristic of the species — she believed the dolphins used it as a strategy to confuse their prey. The sightings were so good that she put away her data sheets and picked up her camera. Minutes later she was rewarded with a rare view of a young Orcaella tossing a fish into the air and catching it in its mouth. The propensity to play with prey was a family trait — Orcaella shared it with its relative the killer whale — but Piya had witnessed it just half a dozen times in all her years of tracking Orcaella, and this was the only occasion on which she had gotten a clear shot of it.

Shortly afterward the pair vanished. Now it remained to be seen whether they would come back when the water ebbed again, in the evening.

While Piya was in the bow watching the water, Fokir and Tutul were sitting in the stern, patiently tending a set of fishing lines. The lines had worried Piya at first, for dolphins had been known to get themselves tangled in certain kinds of fishing gear. But a close look had shown that Fokir's tackle was too flimsy to pose a threat to animals of that size and she had let the matter pass, deciding that it was all right to ignore such lightweight lines. The fish evidently had come to the same conclusion for neither father nor son had a single strike all morning. But this didn't seem to worry them — they looked content where they were, at least for the time being.

But when would Fokir and Tutul demand to leave? The night before, she had hoped they would set off at first light. But the dolphins had changed everything: she saw now that it was imperative that she stay till the next day. This was the only way she could discover whether there was any truth to her intuition that these dolphins had adapted their behavior to suit the ebb and flow of the water — by staying here through a whole cycle of tides. It was possible, of course, that this was just a fantasy and in any event it would take years to gather supportive data. For now all she needed was a few more shreds of evidence, a few indications to suggest that she was thinking along the right lines. If only she could remain here till the next sunrise — that would be enough.

As the hours passed, Piya's anxiety shifted focus, moving away from the dolphins and settling on Fokir and the boy. How much longer before they grew impatient and demanded to leave? What would she have to do to persuade them to remain here? She had noticed that their clay stove had not been lit all morning — they had eaten nothing but some dry chapatis. This was not a good sign; it could mean they were running low on supplies. In other circumstances she might have offered Fokir a bonus, as compensation for whatever inconvenience he might have to suffer. But this was not an option here: the child could not be expected to defer his hunger in order to earn money for his father.

Her own supply of water was running low, but she knew she could make it last. It was the two of them she was worried about, and her anxiety prompted her to do something unprecedented: digging into her carefully hoarded stock of nutrition bars, she offered them some. Fokir declined, but Tutul accepted one and ate it with evident relish. This reassured her a little. If need be, she would sacrifice a few more bars — it would be well worth it if she could only persuade them to stay on. But her nerves would not be quieted: even as she was filling in her data sheets, she kept casting glances in their direction. Their every movement made her start: Was this it? Had they decided to leave now?

Unaccountably, nothing happened. Neither of them seemed to have any interest in getting the boat under way. After a meager midday meal of chapatis and honey, they both lay down in the shade of the shelter.

Piya was now in a state of such anxiety and expectation that she knew she would not be able to sit still and wait for the hours to pass. Instead, she decided to spend the rest of the afternoon mapping the riverbed to see whether or not there was an underwater pool where the Orcaella had gathered. She had some experience of this kind of mapping and knew it to be a simple, if painstaking, task: it would require her to take depth soundings that could be linked together to create contour lines. Thanks to the Global Positioning System it was easy to ensure the exact placement of each sounding, so that the readings were taken along regular, geometric quadrants.

But how could she explain this to Fokir?

She made her way to the shelter and found Fokir and the boy fast asleep. They were lying on their sides, with Tutul's small form nested inside the larger curve of his father's body. The boy, she noticed, had a slight pudginess that contrasted sharply with his father's near-skeletal leanness: Fokir was all muscle and bone, a male anatomy reduced to its essentials. Was the boy better fed than his father? There was a story here that she wished she understood: Who looked after the boy? Did someone have to deprive himself to make sure Tutul was properly fed?

Their chests were moving in unison as they slept and the rhythm of their breathing reminded her of the pair of dolphins she had been watching earlier. It calmed her to see them sleeping so peacefully — the contrast with her own state of mind could not have been more marked. She hesitated in extending her arm to wake Fokir: Would he be annoyed at being woken from his siesta? Was this when he would demand to leave for home? She noticed a bead of sweat traveling down his temple toward the corner of his eye, and without thinking she put out a finger to flick it away.

He awoke instantly and sat up, rubbing the spot where her fingertip had touched his skin. She backed away in embarrassment. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I didn't mean —” He shrugged indifferently and dug his fists into his eyes, as though he were trying to rub away the remnants of sleep.

“Look.” She thrust her positioning monitor in front of him and pointed to the screen. “Over here.” To her surprise, his attention was caught immediately. He looked closely as she tried to show him the meaning of the dots and the lines.

The hardest part was to explain the correspondence between their own position and their place on the screen. She tried pointing, in various combinations, to the screen, to herself, to him and the boy. But the purpose was not served: she saw he had grown flustered and realized that her gestures had given him the impression that she wanted him to move closer to her. The misunderstanding disconcerted her and she fetched a sheet of paper, deciding on a change in strategy. Surely it would be easier if she reduced the problem to two dimensions, by drawing a simple diagram with stick figures, like those familiar to every child. The trouble was, she had never been much good at drawing, and now, halfway into the sketch she was brought up short by an unanticipated misgiving. In the past, she had always used a triangular skirt to distinguish her stick women from her men — but this didn't quite make sense in a situation where the man was in a lungi and the woman in pants. She crumpled up the sheet and would have tossed it away if Fokir hadn't taken it from her hands, to save for kindling.

With her next drawing she started with the outlines of the landscape, sketching in the curve of the shore before indicating their own position. Just as she had thought, the reduction to two dimensions made all the difference: once she had shown him how the diagram corresponded with the lines on the monitor's screen, the rest was easy. It took only a few strokes of her pencil to convey that she needed him to row the boat in parallel lines over a quadrant shaped roughly like a triangle, with its apex almost touching the far shore.