Читать книгу The Hungry Tide - Amitav Ghosh - Страница 13

‘One of the many ways,’ said Nirmal, ‘in which the tide country resembles a desert is that it can trick the eye with mirages. This is what it did to Sir Daniel Hamilton. When this Scotsman looked upon the crab-covered shores of the tide country, he saw not mud, but something that shone brighter than gold. “Look how much this mud is worth,” he said. “A single acre of Bengal’s mud yields fifteen maunds of rice. What does a square mile of gold yield? Nothing.”’

Nirmal raised a hand to point to one of the portraits on the wall. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘That’s him, Daniel Hamilton, on the day when he became a knight. After that, his name was forever S’Daniel.’

The picture was of a man in stockings and knee breeches, wearing buckled shoes and a jacket with brass buttons. On his upper lip was a bushy white moustache and at his waist hung something that looked like the hilt of a sword. His eyes stared directly into the viewer’s, at once stern and kindly, austere and somewhat eccentric. There was something about his gaze that discomfited Kanai. As if by instinct, he slipped behind his uncle to elude those penetrating eyes.

‘S’Daniel’s schooling,’ Nirmal said, ‘was in Scotland, which was a harsh and rocky place, cold and unforgiving. In school his teachers taught him that life’s most important lesson is “labour conquers everything”, even rocks and stones if need be – even mud. As with many of his countrymen, a time came when Daniel Hamilton had to leave his native land to seek his fortune, and what better place to do that than India? He came to Calcutta and joined MacKinnon & McKenzie, a company with which he had a family connection. This company sold tickets for the P&O shipping line, which was then one of the largest in the world. Young Daniel worked hard and sold many, many tickets: first class, second class, third class, steerage. For every ship that sailed from Calcutta there were hundreds of tickets to be sold and only one ticket agent. Soon S’Daniel was the head of the company and master of an immense fortune, one of the richest men in India. He was, in other words, what we call a monopolikapitalist. Another man might have taken his money and left – or spent it all on palaces and luxury. But not S’Daniel.’

‘Why not?’

‘I’m getting to it. Wait. Look at the picture on the wall and close your eyes. Think of that man, S’Daniel, standing on the prow of a P&O liner as it sails away from Calcutta and makes its way towards the Bay of Bengal. The other shahebs and mems are laughing and drinking, shouting and dancing, but not S’Daniel. He stands on deck, his eyes drinking in these vast rivers, these mudflats, these mangrove-covered islands, and it occurs to him to ask, “Why does no one live here? Why are these islands empty of people? Why is this valuable soil allowed to lie fallow?” A crewman sees him peering into the forest and points out the ruins of an old temple and a mosque. See, he says, people lived here once, but they were driven away by tempests and tides, tigers and crocodiles. “Tai naki?” says S’Daniel. Is that so? “But if people lived here once, why shouldn’t they again?” This is, after all, no remote and lonely frontier – this is India’s doormat, the threshold of a teeming subcontinent. Everyone who has ever taken the eastern route into the Gangetic heartland has had to pass through it – the Arakanese, the Khmer, the Javanese, the Dutch, the Malays, the Chinese, the Portuguese, the English. It is common knowledge that almost every island in the tide country has been inhabited at some time or another. But to look at them you would never know: the speciality of mangroves is that they do not merely recolonize land; they erase time. Every generation creates its own population of ghosts.

‘On his return to Calcutta S’Daniel sought out knowledgeable people. He learnt that of all the hazards of the Sundarbans none is more dangerous than the Forest Department, which treats the area as its own kingdom. But S’Daniel cared nothing for the Forest Department. In 1903 he bought ten thousand acres of the tide country from the British sarkar.’

‘Ten thousand acres! How much land is that?’

‘Many islands’ worth, Kanai. Many islands. The British sarkar was happy to let him have them. Gosaba, Rangabelia, Satjelia – these were all his. And to these he later added this island you’re standing on: Lusibari. S’Daniel wanted his newly bought lands to be called Andrewpur, after St Andrew of Scotland – a poor man, who, having neither silver nor gold, found the money to create it. But that name never took; people grew used to speaking of these islands as Hamilton-abad. And as the population grew, villages sprouted and S’Daniel gave them names. One village became “Shobnomoskar”, “Welcome to All”, and another became “Rajat Jubilee”, to mark the Silver Jubilee of some king or the other. And to some he gave the names of his relatives – that’s why we have here a Jamespur, an Annpur and an Emilybari. Lusibari was another such.’

‘And who lived in those places?’

‘No one – in the beginning. Remember, at that time there was nothing but forest here. There were no people, no embankments, no fields. Just kada ar bada, mud and mangrove. At high tide most of the land vanished under water. And everywhere you looked there were predators – tigers, crocodiles, sharks, leopards.’

‘So why did people come, then?’

‘For the land, Kanai. What else? This was at a time when people were so desperate for land that they were willing to sell themselves in exchange for a bigha or two. And this land here was in their own country, not far from Calcutta: they didn’t need to take a boat to Burma or Malaya or Fiji or Trinidad. And what was more, it was free.’

‘So they came?’

‘By the thousand. Everyone who was willing to work was welcome, S’Daniel said, but on one condition. They could not bring all their petty little divisions and differences. Here there would be no Brahmins or Untouchables, no Bengalis and no Oriyas. Everyone would have to live and work together. When the news of this spread, people came pouring in, from northern Orissa, from eastern Bengal, from the Santhal Parganas. They came in boats and dinghies and whatever else they could lay their hands on. When the waters fell the settlers hacked at the forest with their daas, and when the tides rose they waited out the flood on stilt-mounted platforms. At night they slept in hammocks that were hung so as to keep them safe from the high tide.

‘Think of what it was like: think of the tigers, crocodiles and snakes that lived in the creeks and nalas that covered the islands. This was a feast for them. They killed hundreds of people. So many were killed that S’Daniel began to give out rewards to anyone who killed a tiger or crocodile.’

‘But what did they kill them with?’

‘With their hands. With knives. With bamboo spears. Whatever they could find at hand. Do you remember Horen, the boatman, who brought us here from Canning?’

‘Yes.’ Kanai nodded.

‘His uncle Bolai killed a tiger once, while he was out fishing. S’Daniel gave him two bighas of land, right here in Lusibari. For years afterwards, Bolai was the hero of the island.’

‘But what was the purpose of all this?’ said Kanai. ‘Was it money?’

‘No,’ said Nirmal. ‘Money S’Daniel already had. What he wanted was to build a new society, a new kind of country. It would be a country run by co-operatives, he said. Here people wouldn’t exploit each other and everyone would have a share in the land. S’Daniel spoke with Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Thakur and many other bujuwa nationalists. The bourgeoisie all agreed with S’Daniel that this place could be a model for all of India; it could be a new kind of country.’

‘But how could this be a country?’ said Kanai in disbelief. ‘There’s nothing here – no electricity, no roads, nothing.’

Nirmal smiled. ‘All that was to come,’ he said. ‘Look.’ He pointed to a discoloured wire that ran along the wall. ‘See. S’Daniel had made arrangements for electricity. In the beginning there was a huge generator, right next to the school. But after his death it broke down and no one ever replaced it.’

Kneeling beside a table, Nirmal pointed to another set of wires. ‘Look: there were even telephone lines here. Long before phones had come to Calcutta, S’Daniel had put in phones in Gosaba. Everything was provided for; nothing was left to chance. There was a Central Bank of Gosaba and there was even a Gosaba currency.’

Nirmal reached into one of the bookshelves that lined the wall and took out a torn and dusty piece of paper. ‘Look, here is one of his banknotes. See what it says: “The Note is based on the living man, not on the dead coin. It costs practically nothing, and yields a 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 Labour 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.’

‘It 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. Some day, who knows? It may yet come to be.’