The Hungry Tide. Amitav Ghosh

that wooden house. But that had changed now. It was clear at a glance that the area was among the most heavily trafficked in the whole island. Clusters of huts, houses, stalls, sweetshops and the like had grown up around the compound. The lanes that snaked around its perimeter echoed to the sound of filmi music and the air was heavy with the smell of freshly fried jilipis.

      Kanai glanced over his shoulder and saw that Nilima was busy discussing Trust business with a couple of office-holders of the Women’s Union. Slipping away, he pushed open the compound’s gate and went hurrying up the mossy pathway that led up to the house. To his surprise, none of the noise and bustle of the village seemed to filter into the compound and for a moment he felt as though he were stepping through a warp in time. The house seemed at once very old and very new. The wood, discoloured by the sun and rain, had acquired a silvery patina, like certain kinds of bark; it reflected the light in such a way as to appear almost translucent, like a skin of mirrored metal. It seemed now to be almost blue in colour, reflecting the tint of the sky.

      On reaching the stilts, Kanai stopped to peer at the dappled underside of the house – the geometric pattern of shadows was exactly as he remembered. He went up the steps and was starting towards the front door when he heard his uncle’s voice, echoing back from the past.

      ‘You can’t go in that way,’ Nirmal was saying. ‘Don’t you remember? The key to the front door was lost years ago. We’ll have to go all the way around.’

      Retracing the steps of that earlier visit, Kanai went down the veranda, around the corner of the balcony and along the next wing until he came to a small door at the rear of the house. The door opened at a touch and, on stepping in, the first object to meet his eyes was an old-fashioned porcelain toilet with a wooden seat. Next to it was an enormous cast-iron bathtub with clawed feet and a curling rim. A showerhead curled over it, like a flower drooping on a wilted stem.

      The fittings seemed somewhat more rusty since he had first seen them, but they were otherwise unchanged. Kanai remembered how eagerly, as a boy, he’d taken them in. Since coming to Lusibari he’d had to bathe in a pond, just as Nirmal and Nilima did – he’d longed to step under that shower.

      ‘This is a shahebi choubachcha, a white man’s tank,’ Nirmal had said, pointing to the bathtub. ‘Shahebs use them to bathe in.’

      Kanai remembered that he had been struck by the aptness of the description while also being offended at being spoken to as if he were a yokel who’d never seen such things. ‘I know what that is,’ he had said. ‘It’s a bathtub.’

      A door led out from the bathroom, into the interior of the house. Pushing it open, Kanai found himself in a cavernous, wood-panelled room. Clouds of dust hung, as if frozen, in the angled shafts of light admitted by the louvred shutters. A huge iron bedstead stood marooned in the middle of the floor, like the remains of a drowned atoll. On the walls there were fading portraits in heavy frames; the pictures were of memsahibs in long dresses and men in knee-length breeches.

      Kanai came to a stop in front of a portrait of a young woman in a lacy dress, sitting on a grassy moor dotted with yellow wildflowers. In the background were steep slopes covered with purple gorse and mountains flecked with snow. A grimy copper plate beneath the picture said, ‘Lucy McKay Hamilton, Isle of Arran.’

      ‘Who was she?’ Kanai could hear his voice echoing back from the past. ‘Who was this Lucy Hamilton?’

      ‘She’s the woman from whom this island takes its name.’

      ‘Did she live here? In this house?’

      ‘No. She was on her way here, from the far end of Europe, when her ship capsized. She never got to see the house but because it had been built for her, people used to call it Lusi’rbari. Then this was shortened to Lusibari and that was how the island took this name. But even though this house was the original Lusibari, people stopped calling it that. Now everyone speaks of it as the “Hamilton House”.’

      ‘Why?’

      ‘Because it was built by Sir Daniel MacKinnon Hamilton, Lucy’s uncle. Haven’t you seen his name on the school?’

      ‘And who was he?’

      ‘You really want to know?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘All right, then. Listen.’ The knob-knuckled finger rose to point to the heavens. ‘Now that you’ve asked you’ll have to listen. And pay attention, for all of this is true.’

       The Fall

      The day was drawing to an end when a distant fishing boat drew a scratch across Piya’s line of vision, interrupting the rhythm of her vigil. At first it was no more than a pinpoint on the lens of her binoculars, a stationary speck, anchored on the far side of a confluence of many rivers. After a while, when the dot had grown a little, Piya saw that it represented a small canoe-like craft with a hooped covering at the rear. There seemed to be only one fisherman on board. He was going through the motions of casting a net, standing upright to make his throw and stooping to pull his catch in.

      Piya had now spent three hours in her ‘on effort’ position, in the bow of the launch. With her binoculars fitted to her eyes, she had scanned the water, waiting for a flash of black or grey to break through the dun surface. But so far her vigil had gone unrewarded: she had had no sightings all afternoon, not one. There had been one hopeful moment but it had ended with a glimpse of a gliding stingray, shooting into the air, with its tail trailing behind it like the string of a kite. Soon afterwards there was another false alarm. Mej-da had come running up in great excitement, pointing and gesticulating, giving her the impression that he had seen a dolphin. But it turned out that his attention had been caught by a group of crocodiles that were sunning themselves on a mudbank. Mej-da’s motives for bringing them to her notice were made evident when he rubbed his fingers together to let her know that he deserved a tip. This had annoyed her and she had brushed him off with a peremptory gesture.

      She had spotted the crocodiles long before him of course – she had seen them when they were a couple of kilometres away. There were four of them, and they were huge: from tip to tail, the largest of them was probably about the same length as the launch. She had wondered what it would be like to encounter one of these monsters up close and the thought had prompted an involuntary shudder.

      But this was all. She had seen nothing else of note. Even though she hadn’t known what to expect, she had not foreseen as complete a blank as this. That these waters had once contained large numbers of dolphins was known beyond a doubt. Several nineteenth-century zoologists had testified to it. The ‘discoverer’ of the Gangetic dolphin, William Roxburgh, had said explicitly that the freshwater dolphins of the Ganges delighted in the ‘labyrinth of rivers, and creeks to the South and South-East of Calcutta’. This was exactly where she was and yet, after hours of careful surveillance she had still to spot her first dolphin. Nor had she seen many fishermen: Piya had been hoping that the trip would yield a few encounters with knowledgeable boat people but such opportunities had been scarce today. She had seen many overcrowded ferries and steamers but very few fishing boats – so few as to suggest that the area was off-limits for fishing. The canoe-like craft in the distance was the first boat she had seen in a long time and it was clear the launch would pass within a couple of hundred metres of it. She began to wonder if it was worth a detour.

      Reaching for her belt, Piya unhooked her rangefinder. The instrument had the look of a pair of truncated binoculars, with two eyepieces at one end but only a single Cyclopean lens at the other. She focused this lens on the fishing boat and pressed a button to get a reading of the distance between them. A moment later, to the accompaniment of an exclamatory beep, the instrument posted the answer: 1.1 kilometres.

      Piya could not see the fisherman clearly but it seemed to her that he had the grizzled look of an experienced hand: around his chin and mouth was a dusting of white that suggested stubble or a beard. There was some kind of turban wrapped around his head but his body was bare except