The Hungry Tide (44 page)

This was Piya's first glimpse of
Orcaella brevirostris:
it was about five feet in length, with a steel-gray body and a short dorsal fin. It lacked the usual dolphin snout and its rounded head and large eyes gave it an oddly ruminative, bovine appearance. She named it Mr. Sloane, after a high school teacher to whom it bore a distinct resemblance.

Mr. Sloane, the dolphin, was clearly in trouble: the water was drying up fast and there were no fish left in the reservoir. Piya went with her motorcycle driver to the next kampong and brought back some fish from the market: she spent the rest of the day sitting beside the reservoir, feeding the dolphin. Next day, she went back again with a cooler filled with fish. Although there were many farmers and children present, Mr. Sloane ignored the others and went straight over to Piya's side of the reservoir.

“I swear to you it recognized me.”

Back in Phnom Penh there was much concern in the small wildlife community. The Orcaella population of the Mekong was known to be declining rapidly and was expected soon to fall below sustainable levels. The Mekong Orcaella had shared Cambodia's misfortunes: in the 1970s they had suffered the ravages of indiscriminate American carpet bombing. Later they too had been massacred by Khmer Rouge cadres, who had hit upon the idea of using dolphin oil to supplement their dwindling supplies of petroleum. The once abundant population of Orcaella in the Tonle Sap, Cambodia's great fresh-water lake, had been reduced almost to extinction. These dolphins were hunted with rifles and explosives and their carcasses were hung up in the sun so their fat would drip into buckets. This oil was then used to run boats and motorcycles.

“Do you mean to tell me,” Kanai said, “that they were melted down and used as diesel fuel?”

“Yes, in effect.”

In recent years the threat to Orcaella had grown even more serious. There was a plan afoot to blow up the rapids of the upper Mekong in order to make the river navigable as far as China: this would mean the certain destruction of the dolphin's preferred habitats. Thus the stranding of Mr. Sloane was not just an individual misfortune; it was a harbinger of catastrophe for an entire population.

Piya was given the job of caring for the stranded dolphin while arrangements were made for transporting the animal back to the river. Every day for six days, Piya traveled up to the reservoir bearing cooler-loads of fresh fish. On the morning of the seventh day she arrived to find that Mr. Sloane had disappeared. She was told that the animal had died during the night, but she could find no evidence to support this. There was no explanation of how the remains had been removed from the pool. What she did find were the tread marks of a heavy vehicle of some kind, probably a truck, that led down to the water's edge. What had happened was all too obvious: Mr. Sloane had fallen victim to the flourishing clandestine trade in wildlife. New aquariums were opening throughout eastern Asia and the demand for river dolphins was growing. Mr. Sloane was a valuable commodity — Irrawaddy dolphins had been known to fetch as much as one hundred thousand dollars on the black market.

“One hundred thousand dollars?” said Kanai in disbelief. “For these?”

“Yes.”

Piya was not inclined to be sentimental about animals. But the idea that Mr. Sloane would soon be sold off to an aquarium, as a curiosity, made her stomach churn. For days afterward she was haunted by a nightmare in which Mr. Sloane was driven into a corner of his tank by a line of hunters armed with fishnets.

Trying to put the incident behind her, she decided to go back to the States to register for a Ph.D. program at the Scripps Institute in La Jolla. But then an unforeseen opportunity came her way: a wildlife conservation group in Phnom Penh offered her a contract to do a survey of Mekong Orcaella. The offer was perfect in every way: the money was enough to last a couple of years, and the material would count toward her Ph.D. She took the job and moved upriver to a sleepy town. In the three years since she had become one of a tiny handful of Orcaella specialists, she had worked everywhere Irrawaddy dolphins were to be found: Burma, northern Australia, the Philippines, coastal Thailand — everywhere, in fact, except the place where they first entered the record book of zoological reckoning, India.

It was only when she reached the end of her story that Piya realized, with a guilty start, that she had not said a single word to Fokir since she stepped onto the boat.

“Listen, Kanai,” she said, “there's something I've been kind of puzzled about. Fokir seems to know this place so well — this island, Garjontola. He seems to know all about the dolphins and where they go. I wish I knew what first brought him here, how he learned about these things. Could you ask him?”

“Of course.” Kanai turned away to explain the question and then, as Fokir began to speak, he swiveled around to face Piya. “This is what he says:

“‘I cannot remember a time when I didn't know about this place. Back when I was very little, long before I had seen these islands and these rivers, I had heard about Garjontola from my mother. She would sing to me and tell me tales about this island. This was a place, my mother said, where no one who was good at heart would ever have cause for fear.

“‘As for the big
shush,
the dolphins who live in these waters, I knew about them too, even before I came here. These animals were also in my mother's stories: they were Bon Bibi's messengers, she used to say, and they brought her news of the rivers and khals. They came here during the bhata, my mother said, so they could tell Bon Bibi about everything they had seen. During the jowar they scattered to the ends of the forest and became Bon Bibi's eyes and ears. This secret her own father had told her, and he had told her also that if you could learn to follow the shush, then you would always be able to find fish.

“‘I had heard these stories long before I came to the tide country, and ever since I was little I had always wanted to come and see this place. When we came to live in Morichjhãpi I would say to my mother, “When will we go? When will we go to Garjontola?” There was never time — there was too much to do. The first time she brought me was just a few weeks before her death. Maybe this was why, after her death, whenever I thought of her I thought also of Garjontola. I came here time and again, and it happened that the shush became like my friends. I followed them where they went.

“‘That day when you came in that launch with the forest guard, and stopped my boat: this was where I was coming, with my son. The night before, my mother had come to me in a dream and she had said, “I want to see your son; why do you never bring him to Garjontola? It will soon be time for you and me to be reunited — after that, who knows when I will see him again? Bring him to me as soon as you can.”

“‘I could not tell my wife this, because I knew she would be upset and she would not believe me. So the next day, instead of taking Tutul to school, I took him to my boat and we set off to come here: on the way we stopped to catch some fish and that was when you came upon us in your launch.'”

“And what came of it?” Piya said. “Do you think she saw him, your mother?”

“‘Yes. The last night we were here, in my boat, I dreamed of my mother again. She was smiling and happy and she said, “I'm glad I've seen your son. Now take him home and come back, so that you and I can be together again.”'”

Up to this point Piya had been listening as if she were under a spell: Kanai seemed almost to have vanished, creating the illusion that she was speaking directly with Fokir. But now the spell broke and she stirred as if she had been jolted awake from her sleep.

“What does he mean by that, Kanai?” she said. “Ask him: what does he mean?”

“He says it was just a dream.”

Kanai turned away from her to say a few words to Fokir, and suddenly, to Piya's surprise, Fokir began to sing, or rather to chant, in a quick rhythm.

“What's he saying?” Piya said to Kanai. “Can you translate?”

“I'm sorry, Piya,” Kanai said. “But this is beyond my power. He's chanting a part of the Bon Bibi legend and the meter is too complicated. I can't do it.”

KRATIE

T
HE TIDE TURNED
with the waning of the day and as the level of the water crept up, the dolphins began to drift away from the pool. When the last animal had left, Fokir turned the boat toward the
Megha
and began to row.

On board, in the meantime, Horen and his grandson had strung up a couple of tarpaulin sheets to create an enclosed bathing area in the bhotbhoti's stern. After a long day under the sun, the prospect of cleaning up was all too welcome, and Piya lost no time fetching her towel and toiletries. She found two buckets in the enclosure, of which only one was full. The other had a rope attached to its handle to draw water from the river. Piya threw it overboard, hauled it in and emptied it over herself, reveling in the bracing chill. The other bucket was filled with fresh water and she dipped into it sparingly with an enamel mug to wash off the soap. When she was done, it was still half full.

On the way back to her cabin, she passed Kanai. He was waiting in the gangway with a towel slung over his shoulder.

“I've left plenty of fresh water for you.”

“I'll make good use of it.”

In the distance, she heard someone else splashing and knew it was probably Fokir, bathing in the stern of his own boat.

Later, after she had changed into fresh clothes, she went out on deck. The tide was now nearing full flood and the currents were drawing patterns on the river's surface as they whirled around the anchored vessel. Some of the distant islands had shrunk to narrow spars of land, and where there had been forest before, there were now only branches visible, bending like reeds to the sway of the tide.

Piya was pulling a chair up to the rails when Kanai appeared beside her with a cup of steaming tea in each hand. “Horen asked me to bring these up,” he said, handing one to Piya.

He pulled up a chair too, and for a while they were both absorbed in watching the slow submersion of the landscape. Piya braced herself, expecting a joke or a satirical remark, but somewhat to her surprise he seemed content to sit quietly. There was something companionable about the silence, and in the end it was she who spoke first.

“I could watch it forever,” she said. “This play of tides.”

“That's interesting,” he said. “I once knew a woman who used to say that — about the sea.”

“A girlfriend?” said Piya.

“Yes.”

“Have you had many?”

He nodded, and then, as if to change the subject, said, “And what about you? Do cetologists have private lives?”

“Now that you ask,” said Piya, “I have to say that there aren't many who do, especially not among us women. Relationships aren't easy, you know, given the kinds of lives we lead.”

“Why not?”

“We travel so much,” Piya said. “We never stay long in one place. It doesn't make things easy.”

Kanai raised his eyebrows. “But you don't mean to say, do you, that you've never had a relationship — not even a college romance?”

“Oh, I've had my share of those,” Piya allowed. “But none of them ever led anywhere.”

“Never?”

“Well, once,” Piya said. “There was this one time when I thought it was leading somewhere.”

“And?”

Piya laughed. “It ended in disaster. What could you expect? It was in Kratie.”

“Kratie?” he said. “Where's that?”

“In eastern Cambodia,” she said, “about a hundred miles from Phnom Penh. I lived there once.”

Kratie stood on a bluff above the Mekong, and a few miles north of the town was a riverbed pool that served as a dry-season home for a pod of some six Orcaella. This was where Piya had begun her research. As the town was both convenient and pleasant, she had rented the top floor of a wooden house with the intention of making it her base for the next two or three years. One of the advantages of Kratie was that it housed an office of the Fisheries Department, a branch of government with which she had to have many dealings.

One of the local representatives of the department was a young official who was reasonably proficient in English. His name was Rath and he was from Phnom Penh. Without friends or family in Kratie, he was often at loose ends, especially in the evenings. Kratie was very small, no larger than a couple of city blocks, and inevitably Piya found her path crossing Rath's quite frequently. It turned out that he often ate in the same waterfront café where she usually went for her evening meal of noodles and Ovaltine. They took to sitting at the same table and their everyday small talk evolved slowly into real conversations.

One day, in passing, Rath revealed he had spent a part of his childhood in a death camp of the Pol Pot era: his parents had been transported there after the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh. Although Rath had offered this as a throwaway scrap of information, his revelation had made such an impression on Piya that she had responded by telling him about her own childhood. In the weeks that followed she found herself talking to him as she never had to any man she had known before: she had told him about her parents and their marriage, about her mother's depression and her last days in the hospital.

How much did Rath understand of what she was saying? The truth was she had no idea. Was it a delusion to think he too had made some kind of revelation about himself when all he had done was talk about an experience more common than not among his contemporaries? She would never know.

A day came when she found she was thinking of Rath all the time, even when her attention was meant to be focused on the dolphins and their pool. Although she realized she was falling in love, she was not alarmed. This was mainly because of the kind of man Rath was — like her, he was shy and a little solitary by nature. She took comfort in his hesitancies, taking them as proof that he was as inexperienced with women as she was with men. But she was still very cautious, and it was not until some four months had passed that their intimacy progressed beyond the sharing of meals and memories. It was the lightheadedness of the aftermath that caused her to dispense with her habitual caution. This was it, she decided; she was going to become one of those rare exceptions among female field biologists — one who'd had the good fortune to fall in love with the right man in the right place.