The Hungry Tide (45 page)

At the end of the dry season she was scheduled to go to Hong Kong for six weeks — partly to attend a conference and partly to earn some money by working on a survey team. When she left, everything seemed settled. Rath came to Pochentong Airport to see her off and for the first couple of weeks they exchanged e-mails every day. Then the messages began to tail off, until she could not get a response out of him. She didn't call his office because she was trying to save money — and anyway, she assumed, what could happen in a couple of weeks?

On stepping off the boat at Kratie, she knew immediately something was wrong: she could almost hear the whispers running up and down the street as she walked back to her flat. It was her landlady who told her, conveying the news with a ghoulish glee: Rath had married and taken a transfer to Phnom Penh.

At first, trying to think the whole thing through, she had decided that he had been forced into a marriage of convenience by his family — this was a predicament she could have understood and it would have sweetened the pill. The rejection would have seemed a little less direct, a little less brutal. But even that consolation was denied her, for she soon found out that he had married a woman from his office, an accountant. Apparently he had started seeing her after she had left to go to Hong Kong: it had taken him just six weeks to decide.

Despite everything, she might still have found it in her to forgive Rath: she could see that in her absence it might have occurred to him to ask himself what it would mean, in the long run, to be married to a foreigner, a habitual peripatetic at that. Could he really be blamed for deciding that he could not deal with it?

She found some solace in this until she met Rath's replacement. He was a married man in his thirties, and he too spoke some English. Within a short while of meeting her, he shepherded her down to the same waterfront café that she and Rath had once frequented. With the sun setting across the Mekong, he had gazed into her eyes and begun to ask sympathetic questions about her mother. It was then that she realized that Rath had told him everything: that the most intimate details of her life were common knowledge among the men of the town; that this awful oily man was actually trying to use those confidences in some sort of clumsy attempt at seduction.

That was it. The next week she packed her things and moved sixty-some miles upriver, to Stung Treng. In the end it was not the pain of what she had lived through with Rath that drove her out, but the sheer humiliation of having had her life laid bare before the whole town.

“But that wasn't the worst part,” Piya said.

“What was the worst part, then?”

“That came when I went back to the States. I met up with some friends. All women, all doing research in field biology. They just laughed when they heard my story. They'd all been through something similar. It was as if what I'd been through wasn't even my own story — only a script we were all doomed to live out. That's just how it is, they said: this is what your life's going to be like. You're always going to find yourself in some small town where there's never anyone to talk to but this one guy who knows some English. And everything you tell him will be all over the town before you've said it. So just keep your mouth shut and get used to being on your own.”

Piya shrugged. “So that's what I've been trying to do ever since.”

“What?”

“Get used to the idea of being on my own.”

Kanai fell silent as he thought about the story she had just told. It seemed to him that he had not till this moment been able to see her for the person she was. Her containment and her usual economy with words had prevented him from acknowledging, even to himself, her true extraordinariness. She was not just his equal in mind and imagination; her spirit and heart were far larger than his own.

Kanai had been leaning back with his feet up on the gunwale. Now, allowing his chair to right itself, he sat forward and looked into her face. “It doesn't have to be like that, you know, Piya. You don't have to be on your own.”

“You have a better idea?”

“I do.”

Before he could say any more, they heard Horen's voice echoing up from the lower deck, summoning them to dinner.

SIGNS

P
IYA WENT TO BED
early again. Not having slept much the night before, Kanai tried to do the same. But despite his best efforts, sleep proved elusive for him that night: there was a strong wind blowing outside and, as if in response to the bhotbhoti's rocking, a recurrent childhood nightmare came back to visit him — a dream in which he was taking the same examination over and over again. The difference now was in the faces of the examiners, which were not those of his teachers but of Kusum and Piya, Nilima and Moyna, Horen and Nirmal. In the small hours he sat up suddenly, in a sweat of anxiety: he could not remember what language he had been dreaming in, but the word
pariksha,
“examination,” was ringing in his head and he was trying to explain why he had translated the word in the archaic sense of “trial by ordeal.” Eventually these dreams yielded to a deep, heavy sleep, which kept him in his bunk until the dawn fog had lifted and the tide was about to reverse itself.

Kanai stepped out of his cabin to find that the wind had died down, leaving the river's becalmed surface as still as a sheet of polished metal. Having reached full flood, the tide was now at that point of perfect balance when the water appears motionless. From the deck the island of Garjontola looked like a jeweled inlay on the rim of a gigantic silver shield. The spectacle was at once elemental and intimate, immense in its scale and yet, in this moment of tranquillity, oddly gentle.

He heard footsteps on the deck and turned to see Piya coming toward him. She was armed with a clipboard and data sheets and her voice was all business: “Kanai, can I ask you a favor? For this morning?”

“Certainly. Tell me: what can I do for you?”

“I need you to do some spotting for me,” Piya replied.

The timing of the tides had created a small problem for her, Piya said. Her original plan had been to follow the dolphins when they left the pool at high tide. But right now the flood seemed to be setting in early in the morning and late in the evening; this meant the animals would be migrating in the dark. Tracking them would be hard enough during the day; without good light it would be impossible. What she had decided to do instead was to make a log of the routes they followed when they came back to the pool. Her plan was to post watches at the two approaches to the pool, one upstream and one downstream. She would take the upstream watch on the
Megha:
the river was wide there and it would be difficult to cover it without binoculars. Fokir could take the other watch, in his boat: if Kanai could join him, so much the better — to have two pairs of eyes on the boat would compensate for the lack of binoculars.

“It means you'll have to spend a few hours in the boat with Fokir,” said Piya. “But that's not a problem, is it?”

Kanai was affronted to think she had the impression that he was somehow in competition with Fokir. “No,” he said quickly. “Not at all. I'll be glad to have a chance to talk to him.”

“Good. That's settled, then. We'll get started after you've had something to eat. I'll knock on your door in an hour.”

By the time Piya came to get him, he had breakfasted and was ready to go. In preparation for a day under the sun, he had changed into light-colored trousers, a white shirt and sandals. He had also decided to take along a cap and sunglasses. These preparations met with Piya's approval. “Better bring these as well,” she said, handing him two bottles of water. “It's going to get very hot out there.”

They went together to the
Megha
's stern and found Fokir ready to leave, with his oars placed crosswise across the gunwales. After Kanai had gone over to the smaller boat, Piya showed Fokir exactly where he was to position himself. The spot was about a mile downstream of the
Megha,
at a point where Garjontola curved outward, jutting into the river so that the channel narrowed.

“The river's only half a mile wide over there,” said Piya. “I figure that if you anchor at midstream, you'll have all the approaches covered between the two of you.”

Then she turned to point upstream, where the river's mouth opened into a vast mohona. “I'll be over there,” said Piya. “As you can see, it's very wide, but being on the
Megha
I'll have some elevation. With my binoculars I'll be able to keep it covered. We'll be about two and a half miles apart. I'll be able to see you, but you probably won't be able to see me.”

She waved as Fokir cast off the boat's moorings. Cupping her hands around her mouth, she shouted, “If it gets to be too much for you, Kanai, just tell Fokir to bring you back.”

“I'll be fine,” said Kanai, waving back. “Don't worry about me.”

The boat had not gone very far when puffs of black smoke began to spurt from the
Megha
's funnel. Slowly the bhotbhoti began to move and for several minutes Fokir and Kanai were shaken by the turbulence of its bow wave. Only when it had disappeared from view was the water calm again.

Now, with the landscape emptied of other human beings, it was as if the distance between Kanai and Fokir had been reduced a hundredfold — yet if the boat had been a mile long they could not have been farther apart. Kanai was in the bow and Fokir was in the stern, behind the hood. Separated by the thatch, neither of them could see the other and for the first couple of hours on the water very little was said. Kanai made a couple of attempts to break the silence and was answered on each occasion with nothing more than a perfunctory grunt.

Around noon, when the level of the water had begun to ebb, Fokir jumped to his feet in great excitement and pointed downriver: “
Oi-jé!
Over there!”

Shading his eyes, Kanai spotted a sharply raked dorsal fin arcing through the water.

“You'll see better if you hold on to the hood and stand up.”

“All right.” Kanai made his way to the boat's midsection, pulled himself to his feet and steadied his balance by leaning on the hood.

“Another one. Over there.”

Guided by Fokir's finger, Kanai spotted another fin slicing through the water. This was followed in quick succession by two more dolphins — all of them spotted by Fokir.

This flurry of activity seemed to have created a small opening in the barrier of Fokir's silence, so Kanai made another attempt to draw him into conversation. “Tell me something, Fokir,” he said, glancing down the length of the hood. “Do you remember Saar at all?”

Fokir shot him a glance and looked away again. “No,” he said. “There was a time when he used to visit us, but I was very small then. After my mother died I hardly ever saw him. I hardly remember him at all.”

“And your mother? Do you remember her?”

“How could I forget her? Her face is everywhere.”

He said this in such a plain, matter-of-fact way that Kanai was puzzled. “What are you saying, Fokir? Where do you see her face?”

He smiled and began to point in every direction, to the ends of the compass as well as to his head and feet. “Here, here, here, here. Everywhere.”

The phrasing of this was simple to the point of being childlike, and it seemed to Kanai that he had finally understood why Moyna felt so deeply tied to her husband, despite everything. There was something about him that was utterly unformed, and it was this very quality that drew her to him: she craved it in the same way that a potter's hands might crave the resistance of unshaped clay.

“So tell me, then, Fokir, do you ever feel like visiting a city?”

It was only after he had spoken that he realized he had inadvertently addressed Fokir as
tui,
as though he were indeed a child. But Fokir seemed not to notice. “This is enough for me,” he said. “What'll I do in a city?” He picked up his oars as if to mark the end of the conversation. “Now it's time to go back to the bhotbhoti.”

The boat began to rock as Fokir dipped his oars and Kanai retreated quickly to his place in the bow. After sitting down, he looked up to see that Fokir had moved to the boat's midsection, seating himself so that he would be facing Kanai as he rowed.

In the steaming midday heat a haze was rising from the river, giving the impression of mirages dancing on the water. The heat and haze induced a kind of torpor in Kanai, and as if in a dream he had a vision of Fokir traveling to Seattle with Piya. He saw the two of them walking onto the plane, she in her jeans and he in his lungi and worn T-shirt; he saw Fokir squirming in a seat that was unlike any he had ever seen before; he pictured him looking up and down the aisle with his mouth agape. And then he thought of him in some icy western city, wandering the streets in search of work, lost and unable to ask for directions.

He shook his head to rid himself of this discomfiting vision.

It seemed to Kanai that the boat was passing much closer to Garjontola than it had on the way out. But with the water at its lowest level, it was hard to know whether this was due to a deliberate change of course or to an optical illusion caused by the usual shrinkage of the river's surface at ebb tide. As they were passing the island Fokir raised a flattened palm to his eyes and peered at the sloping sandbank to their left. Suddenly he stiffened, rising slightly in his seat. As if by instinct, his right hand gathered in the hem of his unfurled lungi, tucking it between his legs, transforming the anklelength garment into a loincloth. With his hand on the gunwale, he rose to a half-crouch, setting the boat gently asway, his torso inclining forward in the stance of a runner taking his mark. He raised a hand to point. “Look over there.”

“What's the matter?” said Kanai. “What do you see?”

“Look.”

Kanai narrowed his eyes as he followed Fokir's finger. He could see nothing of interest, so he said, “What should I look for?”