The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh Page A

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-paneled room. Clouds of dust hung, as if frozen, in the angled shafts of light admitted by the louvered 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.
    â€œWho was she?” Kanai could hear his voice echoing back from the past. “Who was this Lucy Hamilton?”
    â€œShe’s the woman from whom this island takes its name.”
    â€œDid she live here? In this house?”
    â€œNo. 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’r-bari. 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.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œBecause it was built by Sir Daniel MacKinnon Hamilton, Lucy’s uncle. Haven’t you seen his name on the school?”
    â€œAnd who was he?”
    â€œYou really want to know?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œAll 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

    T HE DAY WAS coming 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 gray 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 afterward 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 mile or so 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