Gun Island

by Amitav Ghosh

Such figures are not quite gods and nor are they merely saintly mortals: like the shifting mudflats of the Bengal delta, they arise at the conjuncture of many currents. Sometimes shrines are built to preserve their memory; and almost always their names are associated with a legend. And since Bengal is a maritime land, seafaring is often a prominent feature of such tales.

But some stories, like certain life forms, possess a special streak of vitality that allow them to outlive others of their kind

‘Because his legend is tied,’ said Kanai, ‘to a shrine – a dhaam – in the Sundarbans.’

through the Sundarbans – there’s no other way to reach the sea. The Sundarbans are the frontier where commerce and the wilderness look each other directly in the eye; that’s exactly where the war

The Sundarbans are the frontier where commerce and the wilderness look each other directly in the eye; that’s exactly where the war between profit and Nature is fought.

The boatman had answered that the dhaam was revered by all, irrespective of religion: Hindus believed that it was Manasa Devi who guarded the shrine, while Muslims believed that it was a place of jinns, protected by a Muslim pir, or saint, by the name of Ilyas.

‘Yes, you’re right. But the whole world is made up of semantics and yours are those of the seventeenth century. Even though you think you are so modern.’

People think that knowing the future can help you prepare for what is to come – but often it only makes you powerless.’

Indian men have no inner lives. The only thing they

really care about is their digestion.’

It’s always a mistake, she said, to do the easy thing, just out of habit.

Sometimes, said Moyna, it seemed as though both land and water were turning against those who lived in the Sundarbans.

Even fishermen could barely get by; where once their boats would come back loaded with catch, now they counted themselves lucky if they netted a handful of fry.

enclosing them both in a bubble of affluence within the increasingly impoverished terrain that they actually inhabited.

Horen spoke of the Bhola cyclone, and of Aila, as events that bookended extended spans of time.

the calamities that figure in it loomed much larger in his memory than they did in hers.

Her account of the story had presented the Merchant in the light of a victim. As Horen told it, on the other hand, the Gun Merchant’s misfortunes were due to his own arrogance, and his conviction that he was rich enough, and clever enough, to avoid paying deference to the forces represented by the goddess of snakes.

There was scarcely a creature to be seen but every element of the landscape – forest, water, earth – seemed to be seething with life.

‘Sure! I’ve been there a coupla times. All you gotta do is cross this river – it’s easy if you know how. Wanna go?’

did indeed believe in passports, visas, permits, green cards and the like. For me these weren’t just pieces of paper or plastic; they possessed a certain kind of sacredness that attached also to the institutions that issued them.

‘No. It goes much deeper than that. Where d’you think they learn that they need a better life? Shit, where do you think they even get an idea of what a better life is? From their phones of course. That’s where they see pictures of other countries; that’s where they view ads where everything looks fabulous; they see stuff on social media, posted by neighbours who’ve already made the journey – and after that what d’you think they gonna do? Go back to planting rice? You ever tried planting rice, Pops? You’re bent over double all day long, in the hot sun, with snakes and insects swarming around you. Do you think anyone would want to go

back to that after they’ve seen pictures of their friends sitting in a café in Berlin sipping caramel lattes? And the same phone that shows them those images can also put them in touch with connection men.’

To my unaccustomed eyes the matt browns and greens of the landscape looked almost featureless, unreadable. 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.

‘How can that be? It can’t have moved, surely?’ ‘It’s the river that’s moved,’ came the answer. ‘When I last saw the place it was still a good way inland. Now it’s at the water’s edge.’

But then the tracks had begun to vary, becoming increasingly erratic; this was due, Piya believed, to changes in the composition of the waters of the Sundarbans. As sea levels rose, and the flow of fresh water diminished, salt water had begun to intrude deeper upstream, making certain stretches too saline for the dolphins. They had started to avoid some of the waterways they had frequented before; they had also, slowly, begun to venture further and further upriver, into populated, heavily fished areas.

These were signs, said Piya, of the innumerable streams that were contained within the course of this one river.

The result was an astonishing proliferation of life, in myriad forms.

oceanic dead zones?

Well, they’re these vast stretches of water that have a very low oxygen content – too low for fish to survive. Those zones have been growing at a phenomenal pace, mostly because of residues from chemical fertilizers. When they’re washed into the sea they set off a chain reaction that leads to all the oxygen being sucked out of the water. Only a few highly specialized organisms can survive in those conditions – everything else dies, which is why those patches of water are known as “dead zones”.

‘I have a feeling that the culprit here is a refinery that started up a couple of years ago – it’s not far from here as the crow flies. We’d been fighting it for years – I mean the trust and an alliance of environmental groups – but we were up against some very powerful people, a giant conglomerate

that’s got politicians in its pocket on both sides of the border. They organized a campaign against us, called us “foreign agents”, tried to cut off our funding, had protesters arrested, attacked our demonstrations, not just with the police but also with paid goons – every kind of dirty trick you can think of and then some. And the online stuff! You wouldn’t believe what comes at me through social media: death threats, hate mail, constant trolling.’

fish kill?’ ‘It’s when you find thousands of dead fish floating on the surface or washed up ashore. It’s happening all round the world with more and more chemicals flowing into rivers.

I’m certain that it’s been a huge source of stress for them – I mean, wouldn’t you be stressed, if you had to abandon all the places that you know and were forced to start all over again?’

‘And it must be hardest on Rani, knowing that the young ones depend on her. There she is, perfectly adapted to her environment, perfectly at home in it – and then things begin to change, so that all those years of learning become useless, the places you know best can’t sustain you any more and you’ve got to find new hunting grounds. 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.’

Moyna said something similar when she was talking about the people who’re leaving the Sundarbans.’

‘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 was them all right,’ she said grimly. ‘Rani and her pod. They seem to have beached themselves, all at the same time. I’ve never seen anything like it.’

‘Some of the old stories about beachings are so weird that they sound almost like witchcraft.’

The sight made me shudder: that I had ventured voluntarily into that wild tangle of mud and mangrove seemed incomprehensible now.

It was as if some living thing had entered my body, something ancient that had long lain dormant in the mud. I could only think of it in analogy to germs or viruses or bacteria, yet I knew it was none of those things: it was memory itself, except that it was not my own; it was much older than me, some submerged aspect of time that had been brought suddenly to life when I entered that shrine – something fearsome, venomous and overwhelmingly powerful, something that would not allow me to be rid of it.

‘Rafi’s grandad was a bauley.

‘A bauley is a man who leads people into the jungle,

They get to do that coz they have this special thing with some animals.

‘Can you believe it? It’s like we’re back in the Dark Ages – women being attacked as witches!’

‘It would seem that the intellectual titans of the Enlightenment had no inkling of what was getting under way. Yet, strangely, all around the earth, ordinary people appear to have sensed the stirring of something momentous. They seemed to have understood that a process had been launched that could lead ultimately

to catastrophe: what they didn’t allow for was that the story might take a few hundred years to play out.

‘We’ve got to show Mother Nature that we’re not quitters!’

At that time people recognized that 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.’

You mustn’t underestimate the power of stories. There is something in them that is elemental and inexplicable.