The Hungry Tide (53 page)

When he stepped off the last rung and entered the cavernous galley, his foot sank immediately into ankle-deep water. He spotted Nogen deep in the deck's unlit interior, standing beside the casing that housed the diesel engine, grimly baling water with a plastic bucket.

Kanai waded through the ankle-deep water. “Is there another bucket?”

Nogen answered by pointing to a tin container afloat in a slick of oily water. Kanai took hold of its handle, but when he reached for the water he was all but knocked off his feet by a sudden lurch of the bhotbhoti's hull. Righting himself, he found that to fill the bucket was far more difficult than it might seem, for the
Megha
's pitching kept the water moving in such a way that it seemed almost to be toying with them, making them lunge ineffectually from side to side. In a while Nogen broke off to point to the shore. “We're close to Lusibari now,” he said. “Is that where you're going?”

“Yes. Aren't you?”

“Not us,” said Nogen. “We have to go to the next island: it's the only sheltered place in this area. You'd better go and ask my grandfather how we're going to drop you off. It won't be easy in this wind.”

“All right.” Kanai clawed his way back up the ladder and went step by step along the slippery gangway to the wheelhouse.

“How is it down there?” Horen said.

“It was bad when we were in the middle of the mohona,” said Kanai. “But it's better now.”

Horen flicked a thumb at the windshield. “Look, there's Lusibari. Do you want to get off there, or do you want to come with us?”

Kanai had thought this over already. “I'll get off at Lusibari,” he said. “Mashima is alone. I should be with her.”

“I'll take the bhotbhoti as close to the bank as I can,” Horen said. “But after that you'll have to wade across.”

“What about my suitcase?”

“You'd better leave it behind. I'll bring it to you later.”

Kanai cared about only one thing in the suitcase. “I'll leave everything but the notebook,” he said. “I'll wrap it in plastic so it won't get wet. I want to take it with me.”

“Here, take this.” Horen reached under the wheel and handed him a plastic bag. “But be quick now. We're almost there.”

Kanai let himself out of the wheelhouse and stepped into the gangway. A couple of steps brought him to the cabin, and he opened the door just wide enough to slip inside. In the half-light he unlocked his suitcase, took out Nirmal's notebook and wrapped it carefully in plastic. The engine went dead just as he was stepping out again.

Horen was waiting for him in the gangway. “You don't have far to go,” he said, pointing to Lusibari's embankment, some hundred feet away. Along the base of the earthworks, where the waves of the mohona crashed against the island, there was a fringe of foaming white surf. “The water isn't deep,” Horen said. “But be careful.” As an afterthought he added, “And if you see Moyna, tell her that I'll go back to get Fokir as soon as the storm lets up.”

“I want to go too,” Kanai said. “Be sure to stop at Lusibari.”

“I'll pick you up when the time's right.” Horen held up a hand to wave him off. “But be sure to let Moyna know.”

“I will.”

Kanai went aft to the stern, where Nogen had already pushed out the gangplank. “Step onto it backward,” Nogen said. “Use your hands to hold on, as if it were a ladder. Or else the wind will knock you off.”

“All right.” Kanai tucked the plastic-wrapped notebook into the waist of his lungi in preparation for the descent. Then he turned around and stooped to take hold of the edges of the gangplank with his hands. Immediately he knew he would have been blown into the water had he not taken heed of the boy's advice: without using his hands he would not have been able to withstand the pressure of the wind. He crawled backward on all fours and straightened up as he stepped off the plank. He held on to the plank for a moment, steadying himself as his feet sank slowly through the water and into the mud. The water was about hip deep and he could feel the currents surging around him. He moved the notebook up so that it was pressed against his chest. Then, keeping his eyes fixed on the shore, he began to wade toward the embankment, stepping carefully with his bare feet, making sure of his footing. When the water fell to the level of his knees he breathed more easily — he was almost there now and knew he would make it. He heard the bhotbhoti's engine start up somewhere behind him and turned to look.

And then it was as if the wind had been waiting for this one unguarded moment: it spun him around and knocked him sideways into the water. He thrust his hands into the mud and came up spluttering. He scrambled to his feet just in time to see the notebook bobbing in the current some thirty feet away. It stayed on the surface for a couple of minutes before sinking out of sight.

GOING ASHORE

T
HE TIDE SHOULD
have been at a low ebb when the boat reached Garjontola, but because of the wind the level of the water was higher than Piya had ever seen it before. The gale was blowing so hard that it seemed to be holding the surface of the river at an incline: it was as if the water had been mounded into a sloping ramp that reached well past the island's banks. Fokir was able to take the boat over the barrier of mangrove roots, right into a thicket of tree trunks. Piya noticed that he had not steered the boat to his usual Garjontola landing place; rather, he had taken it toward the most elevated point on the island, a headland that jutted into the river.

When the bow was just short of the tree trunks, Fokir vaulted over the gunwale to pull the boat deeper into the island. He put himself at the front end, where it was easier to maneuver. Piya went to the rear, so she could put her whole weight behind the stern. Between the two of them they were able to push the boat into a position where it was lodged between the trunks of several trees. Then Fokir jumped in again and removed the cover from the boat's rear hold. Piya climbed in too, to look over his shoulder, and saw that the hold and its contents had survived the battering of the wind. Along with Fokir's stove and utensils, there were some nutrition bars and a couple of bottles of water rolling around inside. She stuffed the bars into the pockets of her jeans and handed Fokir one of the bottles of water. Although her throat was parched, she was careful to sip very sparingly from her bottle: there was no telling how long it might have to last.

Then Fokir took out the old sari he had once given Piya to use as a pillow. Sheltering the fabric with his body, he twisted it into a rope and gestured to Piya to tie it around her waist. She could not see the point of this but did it anyway. While she was doing this, Fokir reached into the hold again and took out the coiled line that he used for catching crabs. He handed Piya the nylon roll and motioned to her to handle it carefully, because of the sharp edges of the bits of tile and bait that were attached to it. After they had stepped off the boat, he showed her how to pay out the line while keeping the coils sheltered from the wind with her chest. He upturned the boat and ran the line through its timbers and around the trunks of the surrounding trees. Piya's job, she quickly realized, was only to see that the line stayed taut as it was paid out: any slack was instantly picked up by the wind, which threatened to turn the weights and the bait into vibrating projectiles.

In a few minutes, the line became a densely spun web, anchoring the boat to the forest. Yet despite the care he had taken, Fokir had not been able to keep the line's attachments out of his way. By the time he was done, his face and chest were crosshatched with nicks and cuts.

Now he took hold of Piya's arm and led her deeper into the island, crouching low against the wind. They came to a tree that was, for a mangrove, unusually tall and thick-trunked. Fokir gestured to her to climb up, and he followed at her heels as she pulled herself into the branches. When they were about eight feet off the ground, he chose a sturdy branch and motioned to her to sit astride it, facing the trunk. Then he seated himself behind her, like a pillion rider on a motorcycle, and made a sign to ask her for the rolled-up sari tied around her waist. She saw now what it was for — he was going to use it to tie them both to the tree trunk. She gave him one end of the fabric and helped him pass it around the trunk. After another turn, the sari was all paid out and Fokir tied its ends in a tight knot.

Powerful as it already was, the gale had been picking up strength all along. At a certain point its noise had reached such a volume that its very quality had undergone a change. It sounded no longer like the wind but like some other element — the usual blowing, sighing and rustling had turned into a deep, earsplitting rumble, as if the earth itself had begun to move. The air was now filled with what seemed to be a fog of flying debris — leaves, twigs, branches, dust and water. This dense concentration of flying objects further reduced the visibility in what was already a gathering darkness. The light was as dim as it might be at the approach of night, but Piya's watch told her it was just one in the afternoon. It was difficult to imagine that the wind could grow any stronger or more violent, yet Piya knew it would.

IN HIS BARE FEET,
with his body and clothes caked in mud, Kanai scrambled over the embankment and crouched low beneath it, to shelter himself from the wind. Drenched as he was, he became aware that the wind had grown colder as it picked up strength; he wrapped his arms around his chest and looked up, shivering, at the sky.

Although it had lost all trace of blue, the sky was not uniformly dark: the clouds above were a multiplicity of shades, ranging from an ashen gray to a leaden blue-black. There seemed to be many distinct layers of clouds, each distinguished by a minute difference of shading, each traveling on its own trajectory. It was as though the sky had become a dark-tinted mirror for the waters of the tide country, with their myriad cross-cutting currents, eddies and whirlpools, all with their slight but still discernible distinctions of coloring.

The casuarina trees that lined the embankment were now bent almost double in the wind and the fronds of the surrounding coconut palms had been twisted into flame-shaped knots. As a result, Kanai was able to look much farther into the interior of the island than he might have in other circumstances. The hospital, being one of Lusibari's tallest structures, was easy to spot.

He started toward the hospital at a run but after a few steps was forced to slow down because the path was slippery and his bare feet kept sliding on the mud. For much of the distance he saw no one about — many of the islanders seemed to have abandoned their dwellings, while others had fortified themselves behind closed doors. But once the compound's gate came into view, Kanai saw that streams of people were heading there, in order to take shelter inside the hospital — it was easy to see why, for there was something immensely reassuring about the building's squat solidity. Mostly these people were on foot, but a number were seated on cycle-vans, principally the elderly and the very young. Kanai joined the throng, and on stepping onto the building's portico, he saw that a full-scale evacuation was under way. Teams of nurses and other volunteers were at work, guiding patients down corridors and helping them climb the stairs that led to the fortified cyclone shelter on the upper floor.

At the far end of the ground-floor veranda stood the diminutive figure of a small boy. Winding his way through the crowd, Kanai went up to him. “Tutul?”

The boy didn't recognize him and made no answer, so Kanai squatted on his heels and said, “Tutul, where's your mother?”

Tutul nodded at one of the wards, and just as Kanai was rising to go toward it Moyna came hurrying out, dressed in her white nurse's uniform. She stared at his wet lungi and mud-caked shirt: it was clear she hadn't recognized him.

“Moyna,” said Kanai. “It's me, Kanai.”

She clapped a hand over her mouth as she took this in. “But what happened to you, Kanai-babu?”

“Never mind that, Moyna,” he said. “Listen. I have to tell you something —”

She cut him short. “And where are
they
— my husband and the American?”

“That's what I was about to tell you, Moyna,” he said. “They're at Garjontola — we had to leave them there.”

“You left them behind?” Her eyes flared in angry indignation. “With the cyclone coming — you left them in the jungle?”

“It wasn't my decision, Moyna,” Kanai said. “It was Horen who decided. He said there was nothing else to be done.”

“Oh?” The mention of Horen seemed to calm her a little. “But what will they do out there, with no shelter, nothing?”

“They'll be all right, Moyna,” Kanai said. “Fokir will know what to do, don't worry. Others have survived storms on that island, his grandfather included.”

Moyna nodded in resignation. “There's nothing to be done now. All we can do is pray.”

“Horen wanted me to tell you he's going to go back for them as soon as the storm blows over. I'll be going too — he's going to come here to pick me up.”

“Tell him I want to come too,” said Moyna, taking hold of Tutul's hand. “Be sure to tell him.”

“I will,” said Kanai with a glance in the direction of the Guest House. “And now I'd better go and see how Mashima is.”

“Take her upstairs to the Guest House,” Moyna said. “I've closed the shutters. You'll be fine up there.”

THE WAVE

T
HE MINUTES CREPT BY
and the objects flying through the air grew steadily larger. Where first there had been only twigs, leaves and branches, there were now whirling coconut palms and spinning tree trunks. Piya knew that the gale had reached full force when she saw something that looked like a whole island hanging suspended above their heads: it was a large clump of mangroves, held together by the trees' intertwined roots. Then Fokir's hand tightened on her shoulder and she caught a glimpse of a shack spinning above them. She recognized it immediately: it was the shrine he had taken her to in the interior of Garjontola. All at once the bamboo casing splintered and the images inside went hurtling off with the wind.