The Hungry Tide. Amitav Ghosh
the land, Kanai. What else? This was at a time when people were so desperate for land that they were willing to sell themselves in exchange for a bigha or two. And this land here was in their own country, not far from Calcutta: they didn’t need to take a boat to Burma or Malaya or Fiji or Trinidad. And what was more, it was free.’
‘So they came?’
‘By the thousand. Everyone who was willing to work was welcome, S’Daniel said, but on one condition. They could not bring all their petty little divisions and differences. Here there would be no Brahmins or Untouchables, no Bengalis and no Oriyas. Everyone would have to live and work together. When the news of this spread, people came pouring in, from northern Orissa, from eastern Bengal, from the Santhal Parganas. They came in boats and dinghies and whatever else they could lay their hands on. When the waters fell the settlers hacked at the forest with their daas, and when the tides rose they waited out the flood on stilt-mounted platforms. At night they slept in hammocks that were hung so as to keep them safe from the high tide.
‘Think of what it was like: think of the tigers, crocodiles and snakes that lived in the creeks and nalas that covered the islands. This was a feast for them. They killed hundreds of people. So many were killed that S’Daniel began to give out rewards to anyone who killed a tiger or crocodile.’
‘But what did they kill them with?’
‘With their hands. With knives. With bamboo spears. Whatever they could find at hand. Do you remember Horen, the boatman, who brought us here from Canning?’
‘Yes.’ Kanai nodded.
‘His uncle Bolai killed a tiger once, while he was out fishing. S’Daniel gave him two bighas of land, right here in Lusibari. For years afterwards, Bolai was the hero of the island.’
‘But what was the purpose of all this?’ said Kanai. ‘Was it money?’
‘No,’ said Nirmal. ‘Money S’Daniel already had. What he wanted was to build a new society, a new kind of country. It would be a country run by co-operatives, he said. Here people wouldn’t exploit each other and everyone would have a share in the land. S’Daniel spoke with Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Thakur and many other bujuwa nationalists. The bourgeoisie all agreed with S’Daniel that this place could be a model for all of India; it could be a new kind of country.’
‘But how could this be a country?’ said Kanai in disbelief. ‘There’s nothing here – no electricity, no roads, nothing.’
Nirmal smiled. ‘All that was to come,’ he said. ‘Look.’ He pointed to a discoloured wire that ran along the wall. ‘See. S’Daniel had made arrangements for electricity. In the beginning there was a huge generator, right next to the school. But after his death it broke down and no one ever replaced it.’
Kneeling beside a table, Nirmal pointed to another set of wires. ‘Look: there were even telephone lines here. Long before phones had come to Calcutta, S’Daniel had put in phones in Gosaba. Everything was provided for; nothing was left to chance. There was a Central Bank of Gosaba and there was even a Gosaba currency.’
Nirmal reached into one of the bookshelves that lined the wall and took out a torn and dusty piece of paper. ‘Look, here is one of his banknotes. See what it says: “The Note is based on the living man, not on the dead coin. It costs practically nothing, and yields a dividend of One Hundred Per Cent in land reclaimed, tanks excavated, houses built, &c. and in a more healthy and abundant LIFE.”’
Nirmal held the paper out to Kanai. ‘See!’ he said. ‘The words could have been written by Marx himself: it is just the Labour Theory of Value. But look at the signature. What does it say? Sir Daniel MacKinnon Hamilton.’
Kanai turned the piece of paper over in his hands. ‘But what was it all for? If it wasn’t to make money, then why did he go to all the trouble? I don’t understand.’
‘It was a dream, Kanai,’ said Nirmal. ‘What he wanted was no different from what dreamers have always wanted. He wanted to build a place where no one would exploit anyone and people would live together without petty social distinctions and differences. He dreamed of a place where men and women could be farmers in the morning, poets in the afternoon and carpenters in the evening.’
Kanai burst into laughter. ‘And look what he ended up with,’ he said. ‘These rat-eaten islands.’
That a child could be so self-assuredly cynical came as a shock to Nirmal. After opening and shutting his mouth several times, he said weakly, ‘Don’t laugh, Kanai – it was just that the tide country wasn’t ready yet. Some day, who knows? It may yet come to be.’
In the clear waters of the open sea the light of the sun wells downwards from the surface in an inverted cone that ends in the beholder’s eye. The base of this cone is a transparent disk that hangs above the observer’s head like a floating halo. It is through this prism, known as Snell’s window, that the oceanic dolphin perceives the world beyond the water; in submersion, this circular portal follows it everywhere, creating a single clear opening in the unbroken expanse of shimmering silver that forms the water’s surface as seen from below.
Rivers like the Ganga and the Brahmaputra shroud this window with a curtain of silt: in their occluded waters light loses its directionality within a few centimetres of the surface. Beneath this lies a flowing stream of suspended matter in which visibility does not extend beyond an arm’s length. With no lighted portal to point the way, top and bottom and up and down become very quickly confused. As if to address this, the Gangetic dolphin habitually swims on its side, parallel to the surface, with one of its lateral fins trailing the bottom, as though to anchor itself in its darkened world by keeping a hold upon its floor.
In the open sea Piya would have had no difficulty dealing with a fall such as the one she had just sustained. She was a competent swimmer and would have been able to hold her own against the current. It was the disorientation caused by the peculiar conditions of light in the silted water that made her panic. With her breath running out, she felt herself to be enveloped inside a cocoon of eerily glowing murk and could not tell whether she was looking up or down. In her head there was a smell, or rather, a metallic savour she knew to be, not blood, but inhaled mud. It had entered her mouth, her nose, her throat, her eyes – it had become a shroud closing in on her, folding her in its cloudy wrappings. She threw her hands at it, scratching, lunging and pummelling, but its edges seemed always to recede, like the slippery walls of a placental sac. Then she felt something brush against her back and at that moment there was no touch that would not have made her respond as if to the probing of a reptilian snout. Her body began to twitch convulsively, and she tried to look over her shoulder, but could see nothing except that impenetrable sepia glow. Although her limbs were growing rigid and her strength was ebbing, she tried to defend herself by hitting out and flailing her arms. But then something came shooting through the water and struck her in the face: she felt herself being propelled forward and was unable to resist. Suddenly her head broke free and there was a lightness on her skin that she knew to be the touch of air. But still she could not breathe: her nose and her mouth were swamped with mud and water.
Thrashing her arms, she tried to lift herself from the water, only to be struck on the face again, by another powerful blow. Then, to her amazement, a pair of arms appeared around her chest. A hand caught hold of her neck, jerking back her head, and another set of teeth were clamped against her own. There was a sucking sensation in her mouth and something seemed to shoot out of her gullet. A moment later she felt a whiff of air in her throat and began to gasp for more. A clasped arm was holding her upright in the water and on her left shoulder was a sharp, prickling sensation. Even as she was struggling to swallow mouthfuls of air, it filtered through to her consciousness that it was the fisherman who was holding her and that his stubble was abrading her skin. The stinging seemed to clear her mind and she forced herself to loosen her panicked muscles, calming her body to the point where he could begin to swim.