of the circle and stood listening. A few among the crowd were supplicants who wanted jobs and some were would-be politicians hoping to enlist her support. But for the most part, the people there were just well-wishers who wanted nothing more than to look at Nilima and to be warmed by her gaze.
At the age of seventy-six, Nilima Bose was almost circular in shape and her face had the dimpled roundness of a waxing moon. Her voice was soft and had the splintered quality of a note sounded on a length of cracked bamboo. She was small in height and her wispy hair, which she wore in a knot at the back of her head, was still more dark than grey. It was her practice to dress in saris woven and crafted in the workshops of the Badabon Trust, garments almost always of cotton, with spidery borders executed in batik. It was in one such, a plain white widow’s sari, thinly bordered in black, that she had come to the station to receive Kanai.
Nilima’s customary manner was one of abstracted indulgence. Yet when the occasion demanded she was also capable of commanding prompt and unquestioning obedience – few would willingly cross her, for it was well known that Mashima, like many another figure of maternal nurture, could be just as inventive in visiting retribution as she was in dispensing her benedictions. Now, on catching sight of Kanai, it took her no more than a snap of her fingers to silence the people around her. The crowd parted almost instantly to let Kanai through.
‘Kanai!’ Nilima cried. ‘Where were you?’ She ran a hand over his head as he bent down to touch her feet. ‘I was beginning to think you’d missed the train.’
‘I’m here now.’ She looked much more frail than Kanai remembered and he slipped an arm around her to help her to her feet. While members of her entourage took charge of his luggage, Kanai grasped her elbow and led her towards the station’s exit.
‘You shouldn’t have taken the trouble to come to the station,’ said Kanai. ‘I could have found my way to Lusibari.’ This was a polite lie for Kanai would have been at a loss to know how to proceed to Lusibari on his own. What was more, he would have been extremely annoyed if he had been left to fend for himself in Canning.
But Nilima took his words at face value. ‘I wanted to come,’ she said. ‘It’s nice to get away from Lusibari sometimes. But tell me, how was your ride on the train? I hope you weren’t bored.’
‘No,’ said Kanai. ‘I wasn’t. Actually I met an interesting young woman. An American.’
‘Oh?’ said Nilima. ‘What was she doing here?’
‘She’s doing research on dolphins and suchlike,’ Kanai said. ‘I asked her to visit us in Lusibari.’
‘Good. I hope she comes.’
‘Yes,’ said Kanai. ‘I hope so too.’
Suddenly Nilima came to a halt and snatched at Kanai’s elbow. ‘I sent you some pages that Nirmal had written,’ she said anxiously. ‘Did you get them?’
‘Yes,’ he said, nodding. ‘In fact, I was reading them on the train. Were they from the packet he left for me?’
‘No, no,’ said Nilima. ‘That was just something he wrote long ago. There was a time, you know, when he was so depressed I thought he needed something to keep him going. I asked him to write a little thing about the Sundarbans. I was hoping to be able to use it in one of our brochures, but it wasn’t really appropriate. Still, I thought it might interest you.’
‘O,’ said Kanai. ‘I somehow assumed it was a part of whatever he’d left for me.’
‘No,’ said Nilima. ‘I don’t know what’s in the packet: it’s sealed and I haven’t opened it. I know Nirmal wanted you to see it first. He told me that, just before his death.’
Kanai frowned. ‘Weren’t you curious, though?’
Nilima shook her head. ‘When you get to my age, Kanai,’ she said, ‘you’ll see it’s not easy to deal with reminders of loved ones who’ve moved on and left you behind. That’s why I wanted you to come.’
They stepped out of the station into a dusty street where paan-shops and snack-stands jostled for space with rows of tiny shops.
‘Kanai, I’m very glad you’re here at last,’ said Nilima. ‘But there’s one thing I don’t understand.’
‘What?’
‘Why did you insist on coming through Canning? It would have been so much easier if you had come through Basonti. No one comes this way nowadays.’
‘Really? Why not?’
‘Because of the river,’ she said. ‘It’s changed.’
‘How?’
She glanced up at him. ‘Wait. You’ll see soon enough.’
‘On the banks of every great river you’ll find a monument to excess.’
Kanai recalled the list of examples Nirmal had provided to prove this: the opera house of Manaus, the temple of Karnak, the ten thousand pagodas of Pagan. In the years since he had visited many of those places, and it made him laugh to think his uncle had insisted that Canning too had a place on that list: ‘The mighty Matla’s monument is Port Canning.’
The bazaars of Canning were much as he remembered, a jumble of narrow lanes, cramped shops and mildewed houses. There were a great many stalls selling patent medicines for neuralgia and dyspepsia – concoctions with names like ‘Hajmozyne’ and ‘Dardocytin’. The only buildings of any note were the cinema halls; immense in their ungainly solidity, they sat upon the town like sandbags, as though to prevent it from being washed away.
The bazaars ended in a causeway that led away from the town towards the Matla River. Although the causeway was a long one, it fell well short of the river: on reaching its end Kanai saw what Nilima had meant when she said the river had changed. He remembered the Matla as a vast waterway, one of the most formidable rivers he had ever seen. But it was low tide now and the river in the distance was no wider than a narrow ditch, flowing along the centre of a kilometre-wide bed. The freshly laid silt that bordered the water glistened in the sun like dunes of melted chocolate. From time to time, bubbles of air rose from the depths and burst through to the top, leaving rings on the burnished surface. The sounds they made seemed almost to form articulate patterns, as if to suggest they were giving voice to the depths of the earth itself.
‘Look over there,’ said Nilima, pointing downstream to a boat that had come sputtering down the remains of the river. Although the vessel could not have been more than nine metres in length, it was carrying at least a hundred passengers: it was so heavily loaded that the water was within fifteen centimetres of its gunwales. It came to a halt and the crew proceeded to extrude a long gangplank that led directly into the mudbank.
Kanai froze in disbelief. What would happen now? How would the boat’s passengers make their way across that vast expanse of billowing mud?
On the boat, preparations for the crossing were already in train. The women had hitched up their saris and the men were rolling up their lungis and trousers. On stepping off the plank, there was a long, drawn-out moment when each passenger sank slowly into the mud, like a spoon disappearing into a bowl of very thick daal; only when they were in up to their hips did their descent end and their forward movement begin. With their legs hidden from sight, all that was visible of their struggles was the twisting of their upper bodies.
Nilima frowned as she watched the men and women who were floundering through the mud. ‘Even to look at that hurts my knees,’ she said. ‘I could do it once, but I can’t any more – it’s too much for my legs. That’s the problem, you see: there isn’t as much water in the river nowadays and at low tide it gets very shallow. We brought the Trust’s launch to take you to Lusibari, but it’ll be at least two hours before it can make its way here to pick us up.’ She directed an accusatory glance at Kanai. ‘It really would have been so much easier if you had come through Basonti.’
‘I didn’t know,’ said Kanai ruefully. ‘I wish you’d told