The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh Read Free Book Online Page A

soot-blackened awning. She would have liked a skiff or a light fiberglass shell, outfitted with an outboard motor. Experience had taught her that this was the kind of boat of greatest use in river surveys. She began to regret the impulse that had led her to agree to this arrangement, but now it was too late to turn back.
    As she walked up the gangplank, the stench of diesel fuel struck her like a slap in the face. There were some half-dozen or so young helpers tinkering with the engine. When they started it up, the volume was deafening, even up on deck. Then, to her surprise, Mej-da ordered all the helpers to leave the launch. Evidently the crew was to consist of no one other than himself and the guard. Why just these two and no one else? There was something about this that was not quite right. She watched in concern as the boys filed off the launch and her misgivings only deepened when Mej-da proceeded to enact a curious little pantomime, as if to welcome her onto his vessel. It so happened that he was dressed exactly as she was, in blue pants and a white shirt. She hadn’t remarked on this herself, but the coincidence had evidently seized his interest. He made a series of gestures, pointing to himself and at her, providing a wordless inventory of the points of similarity in their appearance — their clothes, their skin color, the dark tint of their eyes and the cut of their short, curly hair. But the performance ended with a gesture both puzzling and peculiarly obscene. Bursting into laughter, he gesticulated in the direction of his tongue and his crotch. She looked away quickly, frowning, puzzled as to the meaning of this bizarre coda. It was not till later that she realized that this pairing of the organs of language and sex was intended as a commentary on the twin mysteries of their difference.
    The laughter that followed this performance sharpened her doubts about this pair. It was not that she was unused to the company of watchers and minders. The year before, while surveying on the Irrawaddy she had been forced — “advised” was the government’s euphemism — to take on three extra men. They were identically dressed, the three men, in knit golf shirts and checkered sarongs, and they had all sported steel-rimmed aviator sunglasses. She had heard later that they were from military intelligence, government spies, but she had never felt any unease around them, nor any sense of personal threat. Besides, she had always felt herself to be protected by the sheer matter-of-factness of what she did: the long hours of standing in unsteady boats, under blazing skies, scanning the water’s surface with her binoculars, taking breaks only to fill in half-hourly data sheets. She had not realized then that on the Irrawaddy, as on the Mekong and the Mahakam, she had also been protected by her unmistakable foreignness. It was written all over her face, her black, close-cropped hair, the sun-darkened tint of her skin. It was ironic that here — in a place where she felt even more a stranger than elsewhere — her appearance had robbed her of that protection. Would these men have adopted the same attitude if she had been, say, a white European, or Japanese? She doubted it. Nor for that matter would they have dared to behave similarly with her Kolkata cousins, who wielded the insignia of their upper-middleclass upbringing like laser-guided weaponry. They would have known how to deploy those armaments against men like these and they would have called it “putting them in their place.” But as for herself, she had no more idea of what her own place was in the great scheme of things than she did of theirs — and it was exactly this, she knew, that had occasioned their behavior.

LUSIBARI

    T HE TIDE WAS RUNNING low when the Trust’s launch brought Kanai and Nilima to Lusibari and this seemed to augment the height of the tall embankment that ringed the island: from the water nothing could