Gun Island

by Amitav Ghosh

It was almost as though she had wanted to tell me, once again, not to do the easy thing, just out of habit.

In the same way that the Chinese speak of the era of the Qianlong or Jiajing emperors, or Americans of the Kennedy or Reagan administrations, Horen spoke of the Bhola cyclone, and of Aila, as events that bookended extended spans of time.

Even the animals are moving

Yet I could tell, from the way that Horen’s eyes kept flickering from detail to detail, that to those who knew what to look for, the forest teemed with signs that could, in fact, be deciphered and read, like some antediluvian script.

a style which is perfectly attuned to the place in which it was born, in the sense that it echoes the shapes and forms of the Bengal countryside.

Each of these streams differed from the others in small ways, and each was freighted with its own mixture of micro-nutrients. In effect, each was a small ecological niche, held in suspension by the flow, like a balloon carried along by a wind. The result was an astonishing proliferation of life, in myriad forms.

‘Each of these rivers,’ said Piya, ‘is like a moving forest, populated by an incredible variety of life forms.’ ‘That’s a beautiful image,’ I said. ‘A forest that’s been moving for millions of years.’ ‘But the fact that a river flows,’ said Piya, ‘means that it carries traces of everything that happens upriver. And that’s the part that really worries me.’

Rani must have felt that everything she knew, everything she was familiar with – the water, the currents, the earth itself – was rising up against her.’

‘You’ll hear those words often here. We’re in a new world now. No one knows where they belong any more, neither humans nor animals.’

It’s as though the Little Ice Age is rising from its grave and reaching out to us.’

stories could tap into dimensions that were beyond the ordinary, beyond the human even. They knew that only through stories was it possible to enter the most inward mysteries of our existence where nothing that is really important can be proven to exist – like love, or loyalty, or even the faculty that makes us turn around when we feel the gaze of a stranger or an animal. Only through stories can invisible or inarticulate or silent beings speak to us; it is they who allow the past to reach out to us.’

what if the truth were even stranger? What if it were the other way around? What if the faculty of storytelling were not specifically human but rather the last remnant of our animal selves? A vestige left over from a time before language, when we communicated as other living beings do? Why else is it that only in stories do animals speak? Not to speak of demons, and gods, and indeed God himself? It is only through stories that the universe can speak to us, and if we don’t learn to listen you may be sure that we will be punished for it.’

specchietti per le allodole, “mirrors for larks”.

both cities are like portals in time; they seem to draw you into lost ways of life. And in both cities, as nowhere else in the world, you become aware of mortality. Everywhere you look there is evidence of the enchantment of decay, of a kind of beauty that can only be revealed by long, slow fading.

a portavoce – as the Italians say, ‘a voice-carrier’ between two species that had no language in common and no shared means of communication.

that mysterious Sanskrit root bhu, which means simultaneously ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ and much else as well.

Rafi and I were both bhutas in the sense of being at once conjunctions and disjunctions in the continuum of time, space and being.

it was the only space I had ever been in that was literally, palpably alive.

not earth or rock but rather the soft mud of the Venetian lagoon, a substance that tended to shift over time, subtly changing the alignments of the buildings above. This meant that the terrazzo floors of Cinta’s apartment had ripples running through them while some of the door frames were so crooked that it was impossible to shut the doors. So alive was the apartment that it even possessed its own language: at all hours creaks, groans and sighs would emanate from its corners as if to express changes of mood.

was as if the very rotation of the planet had accelerated, moving all living things at unstoppable velocities, so that the outward appearance of a place might stay the same while its core was whisked away to some other time and location.

you cannot say that this spider’s presence here is “natural” or “scientific”. It is here because of our history; because of things human beings have done. It is linked to you already – you have a prior connection with that spider, whether you like it or not.’

Merely to survive they needed to assert their presence or they would have been overwhelmed, they would have become shadows of themselves. That is why possession – the loss of presence – was a matter of such anxiety for them.

‘what would happen if those great Venetian travellers – the Polos, Niccolò de’ Conti, Ambrosio Bembo – were to come back to the Venice of today? Who would they have more in common with? Us twenty-first-century Italians, who rely on immigrants to do all our dirty work? The tourists, who come in luxury liners and aeroplanes? Or these ragazzi migranti, who take their lives in their hands to cross the seas, just like all those great Venetian travellers of the past?’

think of them whenever you despair of the future: Unde origo inde salus – “From the origin salvation comes”.’

They think they’ve travelled to the heart of Italy, to a place where they’ll experience Italian history and eat authentic Italian food. Do they know that all of this is made possible by people like me? That it is we who are cooking their food and washing their plates and making their beds? Do they understand that no Italian does that kind of work any more? That it’s we who are fuelling this fantasy even as it consumes us?

sasagara basumati – ‘the ocean’d earth’. At that moment I felt that I was surrounded by all that was best about our world – the wide open sea, the horizon, the bright moonlight, leaping dolphins, and also the outpouring of hope, goodness, love, charity and generosity that I could feel surging around me.

that tiny vessel represented the upending of a centuries-old project that had been essential to the shaping of Europe.

‘Time itself is in ecstasy,’ said Cinta softly. ‘I had never thought I would witness this joy with my own eyes, pouring over the horizon.’

‘Uno stormo,’ said Cinta, gazing upwards, using the Italian word for a flock of birds in flight – and it seemed to me that this was indeed the right word, the only word, for the phenomenon that we were witnessing: a storm of living beings, bhutas.