Free The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh Page B

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 labor 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.”
    â€œIt 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. Someday, who knows? It may yet come to be.”

SNELL’S WINDOW

    I N THE CLEAR WATERS of the open sea the light of the sun wells downward 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 inches 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 on 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 savor, 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 pummeling, 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