The Hungry Tide Read Free Page B

Canning?”
    â€œNo,” he said. “She lives in a place called Lusibari. It’s quite a long way from Canning.”
    â€œWhere exactly?” Piya unzipped a pocket in one of her backpacks and pulled out a map. “Show me. On this.”
    Kanai spread the map out and used a fingertip to trace a winding line through the tidal channels and waterways. “Canning is the railhead for the Sundarbans,” he said, “and Lusibari is the farthest of the inhabited islands. It’s a long way upriver — you have to go past Annpur, Jamespur and Emilybari. And there it is: Lusibari.”
    Piya knitted her eyebrows as she looked at the map. “Strange names.”
    â€œYou’d be surprised how many places in the Sundarbans have names that come from English,” Kanai said. “Lusibari just means ‘Lucy’s House.’”
    â€œLucy’s House?” Piya looked up in surprise. “As in the name Lucy?”
    â€œYes.” A gleam came into his eyes and he said, “You should come and visit the place. I’ll tell you the story of how it got its name.”
    â€œIs that an invitation?” Piya said, smiling.
    â€œAbsolutely,” Kanai responded. “Come. I’m inviting you. Your company will lighten the burden of my exile.”
    Piya laughed. She had thought at first that Kanai was much too full of himself, but now she was inclined to be slightly more generous in her assessment: she had caught sight of a glimmer of irony somewhere that made his self-centeredness appear a little more interesting than she had first imagined.
    â€œBut how would I find you?” she said. “Where would I look?”
    â€œJust make your way to the hospital in Lusibari,” said Kanai, “and ask for Mashima. They’ll take you to my aunt and she’ll know where I am.”
    â€œMashima?” said Piya. “But I have a Mashima too — doesn’t it just mean ‘aunt’? There must be more than one aunt there: yours can’t be the only one?”
    â€œIf you go to the hospital and ask for Mashima,” said Kanai, “everyone will know who you mean. My aunt founded it, you see, and she heads the organization that runs it, the Badabon Trust. She’s a real personage on the island — everyone calls her Mashima, even though her real name is Nilima Bose. They were quite a pair, she and her husband. People always called him Saar, just as they call her Mashima.”
    â€œSaar? And what does that mean?”
    Kanai laughed. “It’s just a Bangla way of saying Sir. He was the headmaster of the local school, you see, so all his pupils called him Sir. In time people forgot he had a real name — Nirmal Bose.”
    â€œI notice you’re speaking of him in the past tense.”
    â€œYes. He’s been dead a long time.” No sooner had he spoken than Kanai pulled a face, as if to disclaim what he had just said. “But to tell you the truth, right now it doesn’t feel like he’s been gone a long time.”
    â€œHow come?”
    â€œBecause he’s risen from his ashes to summon me,” Kanai said with a smile. “You see, he’d left some papers for me at the time of his death. They’d been lost all these years, but now they’ve turned up again. That’s why I’m on my way there: my aunt wanted me to come and look at them.”
    Hearing a note of muted complaint in his voice, Piya said, “It sounds like you weren’t too eager to go.”
    â€œNo, I wasn’t, to be honest,” he said. “I have a lot to attend to and this was a particularly busy time. It wasn’t easy to take a week off.”
    â€œIs this the first time you’ve come, then?” said Piya.
    â€œNo, it’s not,” said Kanai. “I was sent down here once, years ago.”
    â€œSent down? Why?”
    â€œIt’s a story that involves the word