Gun Island Read online

  Opening a door Piya ushered me into a tidy, sunlit room. Nilima was lying on a comfortable-looking bed, propped up by a few pillows and half covered by a bed-sheet. Always tiny, she seemed to have shrunk in size since I had last seen her. But her face, round and dimpled, with steel-rimmed eyeglasses, was just as I remembered, down to the sparkle in her eye.

  Piya found me a chair and pushed it close to the bed. ‘I’ll leave you two alone now,’ she said, giving Nilima’s hand an affectionate squeeze. ‘Don’t tire yourself out, Nilima-di.’

  ‘I won’t, dear,’ Nilima said, in English. ‘I promise.’

  A fond smile appeared on her face as she watched Piya leave the room. ‘Such a sweet girl,’ she said, switching to Bangla. ‘And strong too. I don’t know what I would do without Piya.’

  Nilima’s Bangla, I noticed, had acquired the earthy tones of a rural dialect, presumably that of the Sundarbans. Her English, by contrast, still retained the rounded syllables of her patrician upbringing.

  ‘It’s Piya who keeps the trust going nowadays,’ Nilima continued. ‘It was a lucky day for us when she came to the Sundarbans.’

  ‘Does she spend a lot of time out there?’ I said.

  ‘Oh yes, when she’s in India she’s mostly in the Sundarbans.’

  Nilima explained that it was Piya’s research, in marine biology, that had first brought her to the Sundarbans. Nilima had given her a place to stay and supported her work, and over the following years Piya’s involvement with the trust had deepened steadily.

  ‘She spends every vacation with us,’ said Nilima. ‘Summer and winter, she comes whenever she can.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ I said, trying not to sound unduly inquisitive. ‘Doesn’t she have a family, then?’

  Shooting me a shrewd glance, Nilima said: ‘She’s not married, if that’s what you mean –’ at which I dropped my eyes and tried to look disinterested.

  ‘But Piya does have a family of sorts,’ Nilima continued. ‘She’s adopted the wife and son of a Sundarbans villager who died while assisting with her research. Piya’s done everything possible to help the wife, Moyna, in bringing up the boy.’ She checked herself: ‘Or at least she’s tried…’

  Then she sighed and shook her head, as if to recall why she had asked me to come. ‘I mustn’t ramble on,’ she said. ‘I know you’re pressed for time.’

  Truth to tell I was so eager to know more about Piya that I wouldn’t at all have minded if she had rambled on in this vein. But since I couldn’t very well say so, I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out the small voice recorder that I usually take with me when I’m scouting for antiquities.

  ‘Are you planning to record this?’ said Nilima in surprise.

  ‘It’s just a habit,’ I said. ‘I’m a compulsive note-taker and record-keeper. Please forget about the gadget – it’s not important.’

  * * *

  Nilima knew the exact date on which she had first heard of the Gun Merchant. She had entered it that very day in an account book that bore the label ‘Cyclone Relief Accounts, 1970’. The book had recently been retrieved for her from the archives of the Badabon Trust. Flipping it open, she showed me the entry: at the top of a page, in Bangla script, were the words ‘Bonduki Sadagarer dhaam’ – ‘the Gun Merchant’s shrine’. Below was the date ‘November 20, 1970’.

  Eight days earlier – on November 12, 1970, to be precise – a Category 4 cyclone had torn through the Bengal delta, hitting both the Indian province of West Bengal and the state that was then called East Pakistan (a year later it would become a new nation, Bangladesh). Storms had no names in this region back then but the 1970 cyclone would later come to be known as the Bhola cyclone.

  In terms of casualties the Bhola cyclone was the greatest natural disaster of the twentieth century; its toll is conservatively estimated at three hundred thousand lives lost but the actual number may have been as high as half a million. Most of those casualties were in East Pakistan where political tensions had long been simmering. West Pakistan’s laggardly response to the disaster played a critical part in triggering the war of independence that resulted in the creation of Bangladesh.

  In West Bengal it was the Sundarbans that absorbed the impact of the cyclone. Lusibari, the island where Nilima and her husband lived, suffered a great deal of damage: a large chunk of the island was ripped away by the storm surge, houses and all.

  The damage to Lusibari was, however, a pale shadow of what was visited on the islands and settlements to its south. But Nilima did not learn of this till several days later. She was told about it by a young fisherman of her acquaintance, Horen Naskar: he had been out at sea, fishing, and had witnessed the devastation with his own eyes.

  Horen’s account prompted Nilima to assemble a team of volunteers to collect and distribute emergency supplies. With Horen at the helm of a hired boat, Nilima and her team had ferried supplies to some of the villages near the coast.

  On each outing they saw horrific sights: hamlets obliterated by the storm surge; islands where every tree had been stripped of its leaves; corpses floating in the water, half eaten by animals; villages that had lost most of their inhabitants. The situation was aggravated by a steady flow of refugees from East Pakistan. For several months people had been coming across the border, into India, in order to escape the political turmoil on the other side; now the flow turned into a flood, bringing many more hungry mouths into a region that was already desperately short of food.

  One morning, Horen steered the boat to a part of the Sundarbans where the mighty Raimangal River ran along the border, with different countries on its two shores. Nilima usually avoided this stretch of river: it was notoriously frequented by smugglers and its currents were so powerful that boats were often inadvertently swept across the border.

  Not without some difficulty Horen managed to keep the boat close to the Indian side, and in a while they came to a sandbank where a village had once stood: nothing was left of the settlement but a few bent poles; every last dwelling had been swept away by the wave that followed the cyclone.

  Spotting a few people on the riverbank, Nilima asked Horen to pull in. From the look of the place, she assumed that many of the hamlet’s inhabitants had been killed or wounded – but on enquiring, she received an unexpected answer. She learnt that no one from that hamlet had suffered any bodily harm; they had even managed to salvage their belongings and stocks of food.

  To what did the village owe its good fortune?

  The answer startled Nilima: her informants told her that the miracle was due to Manasa Devi, the goddess of snakes, who, they said, was the protector of a nearby shrine.

  Shortly before the storm’s arrival, as the skies were turning dark, the shrine’s bell had begun to ring. The villagers had rushed there, taking whatever food and belongings they could carry. Not only had the shrine’s walls and roof kept them safe from the storm, it had continued to shelter them afterwards, even providing them with clean, fresh water from its well – a rare amenity in the Sundarbans.

  Nilima had asked to see the shrine and was led to it by the villagers. It was a good distance from the sandbank, situated on a slight elevation, in the middle of a sandy clearing that was surrounded by dense stands of mangrove.

  Of the structure itself Nilima retained only a vague memory – there were hundreds of people milling around and their belongings were stacked everywhere. All she could recall was a set of high walls and a curved roof with the profile of an upturned boat: its shape had reminded her of the famous temples of Bishnupur.

  Nilima had asked whether there was a custodian or caretaker that she could speak to. In a while, a middle-aged Muslim man, with a greying beard and white skull cap, had emerged from the interior. Nilima learnt that he was a majhi, a boatman, and that he was originally from the other side of the Raimangal River. As a boy he had occasionally worked for the people who then tended the shrine: they were a family of Hindu gayans (or ballad singers) who had kept alive the epic poem (or panchali) t
hat narrated the legend of the shrine, passing it down orally through many generations. But over the years the family had dwindled to one last remaining member, and it was he who had asked him, the boatman, to take care of the shrine after his passing. That was a long time ago, a decade before the partitioning of the Indian subcontinent in 1947; the boatman had been looking after the dhaam ever since; it had become his home and he now lived there with his wife and son.

  Nilima had asked if it was strange for him, as a Muslim, to be looking after a shrine that was associated with a Hindu goddess. 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.

  But who had built the shrine, and when?

  The boatman had been reluctant to answer. He did not know the legend well, he said, and could only remember a few snatches of the poem.

  Wasn’t there a written version of the poem? Nilima asked. No, said the boatman; it was the Gun Merchant’s express desire that the poem never be written down but only passed on from mouth to mouth. Unfortunately the boatman had never memorized the poem and remembered only a few verses.

  At Nilima’s insistence the boatman had recited a couple of lines and the words had lodged themselves in Nilima’s memory, perhaps because they sounded like nonsense verse (a genre of which she was very fond).

  Kolkataey tokhon na chhilo lok na makan

  Banglar patani tokhon nagar-e-jahan

  Calcutta had neither people nor houses then

  Bengal’s great port was a city-of-the-world.

  Nilima cast me a glance and laughed, a little awkwardly, as though she were embarrassed to bring such a piece of silliness to my notice.

  ‘It doesn’t make any sense, does it?’ she said.

  ‘Not immediately,’ I said. ‘But go on.’

  Nilima had continued to question the boatman and he had responded by becoming increasingly reticent, pleading ignorance on the one hand, yet insisting on the other that it was impossible for most people to make sense of the legend. But Nilima had persisted and had succeeded in getting him to divulge the general outline of the story. It proved to be quite similar to the legend of the merchant Chand.

  Like Chand, the Gun Merchant was said to have been a rich trader who had angered Manasa Devi by refusing to become her devotee. Plagued by snakes and pursued by droughts, famines, storms, and other calamities, he had fled overseas to escape the goddess’s wrath, finally taking refuge in a land where there were no serpents, a place called ‘Gun Island’ – Bonduk-dwip.

  Here Nilima stopped to ask me whether I had ever heard of a place of that name.

  I shook my head: ‘No, never,’ I said. ‘It must be one of those fairy-tale countries that crop up in folk tales.’

  Nilima nodded. There were some other such places in the story, she said, but she couldn’t recall their names.

  But not even on Gun Island had the Merchant been able to conceal himself from Manasa Devi. One day she had appeared to him out of the pages of a book and had warned him that she had eyes everywhere. That night he had tried to hide himself in an iron-walled room, but even there she had hunted him down: a tiny, poisonous creature had crept through a crack and bitten him. Having barely survived the bite, the Merchant had escaped from Gun Island, on a ship, but while at sea he was once again captured by pirates. They threw him into a dungeon and were taking him to be sold, at a place called ‘The Island of Chains’ (Shikol-dwip) when Manasa Devi appeared before him once again. She promised that if he became her devotee and built a shrine for her in Bengal, she would set him free and make him rich.

  Now at last the Merchant gave in and swore that he would build a temple for the goddess if only she would help him find his way back to his native land. So she set him free and wrought a miracle: the ship was besieged by all manner of creatures, of the sea and sky, and while the pirates were fighting them off, the captives managed to take over the ship and seize their captors’ riches. The Merchant’s share of the spoils allowed him to turn homewards and on the way he was able to make many profitable trades. On his return to Bengal he brought with him a fortune so vast, and a tale so amazing, that it earned him the title Bonduki Sadagar – the Gun Merchant. This was how the shrine had got its name.

  * * *

  ‘And that was all there was to it,’ said Nilima with a shrug. ‘I told the boatman that it really made no sense at all. He didn’t seem at all surprised. He said: “I told you, didn’t I? The legend is filled with secrets and if you don’t know their meaning it’s impossible to understand.” And then he added: “But some day, when the time is right, someone will understand it and who knows? For them it may open up a world that we cannot see.”’

  Nilima gave me a self-deprecating smile. ‘I don’t know what it was but there was something about the story that got into my head: it haunted me and I wanted to know more about it. But there was always so much else to do that it dropped out of my mind – until just the other day, when I was reading something about the great cyclone of 1970. Then suddenly it all came back to me.’

  ‘But you only visited the temple that one time?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It was the only time I actually went there. I did see it again once, from a distance, but I didn’t have time to stop. That was about ten years ago. I believe the dhaam’s still there, but who knows how much longer it’ll remain? The islands of the Sundarbans are constantly being swallowed up by the sea; they’re disappearing before our eyes. That’s why I feel that some record should be made of it; for all I know that temple might be an important historical monument.’

  Trying to be helpful I said: ‘Have you tried to contact the Archaeological Survey of India?’

  ‘I wrote to them once but they showed no interest at all.’

  Then she glanced at me and her face broke into a dimpled smile. ‘So then I thought of you.’

  Taken aback, I said: ‘Me? Why me?’

  ‘Well you have a passion for antiquities, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, but not of this kind,’ I said. ‘I mainly deal with old books and manuscripts. I often visit libraries, museums, old palaces and so on – but I’ve never done anything remotely like this.’

  ‘Still, wouldn’t you at least like to see the place?’

  The only reason I didn’t say no straight away was that it would have seemed rude. At that moment a visit seemed impossible to me – because I was due to leave for New York at the end of the week; because I already had a packed schedule of appointments for the days ahead; and (most of all) because I didn’t much care for swamps and mangroves.

  I tried to get out of it by mumbling an excuse: ‘I don’t know that I’ll have the time; I have to catch a flight home…’

  But Nilima was not a woman to give up easily.

  ‘It wouldn’t take long,’ she persisted. ‘You could go there and be back in a day. I’d be glad to arrange it.’

  I was trying to think of a polite way to decline when who should walk in but Piya.

  Nilima lost no time in roping her in: ‘Tell him, Piya – a visit to the shrine won’t take long. He’s afraid of missing his flight to America.’

  Piya turned to me and asked when I was scheduled to fly. I told her and she reassured me: ‘Don’t worry – you’ll be back in good time for your flight.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘As sure as it’s possible to be.’ She added apologetically: ‘I’d have liked to accompany you myself. Unfortunately I can’t because I’m on my way to a conference in Bhubaneswar and won’t be back till next week. But if you do decide to go I’ll see to it that you’re well looked after.’

  Her smile made me reconsider the matter. ‘I’ll think it over,’ I said.

  Gathering my things together I said goodbye to Nilima. Then Piya led me to an adjoining room, where she introduced me to a matronly, heavy-browed woman in a n
urse’s uniform – a blue and white sari.

  ‘This is Moyna Mondal,’ said Piya, ‘Nilima’s favourite nurse.’ She threw an arm around the nurse’s shoulder and gave her a hug. ‘Moyna and I are like family; we’ve become sisters over the years. If you decide to go she’ll arrange everything. You don’t need to worry about anything: it’ll be quick and easy.’

  Piya’s tone was so encouraging that I was tempted to say yes. But something held me back.

  ‘I just need to check a few things,’ I said. ‘Will it be okay if I get back to you tomorrow morning?’

  ‘Sure. Take your time.’

  Cinta

  My mind was in a muddle when I left Nilima’s flat. The reasonable, practical, cautious parts of me were dead set against going. I have always been a nervous traveller and the thought of missing my flight filled me with dread. Nor could I imagine that I would find anything of special interest, from a professional point of view: if ever there had been anything of value at the shrine it was sure to be long gone.

  But then there was Piya: there was something about her that reminded me of Durga, my first, long-ago love. It wasn’t so much her appearance as something about her manner, her gaze; I sensed in her a single-mindedness, an idealism that was rem- iniscent of Durga.

  I knew that if it had been possible for Piya to accompany me I would have been glad to go. This frightened me, and added to my confusion. Some months before, my therapist, back in Brooklyn, had told me that I was in a peculiarly vulnerable state and was likely to delude myself about relationships that had not the slightest chance of working out. She had warned me especially about situations in which I found myself fixating on women who were unattainable or ill-matched for someone in my circumstances: ‘Don’t set yourself up to fail, yet again.’

  Those words echoed in my ears all the way back to my apartment.

  By dinner-time I had more or less made up my mind that I would not go. But that evening I was invited to dinner by one of my sisters and when I went up to her apartment I found her, and her whole multi-generational household, sitting rapt around a television set. And what should they be watching but a (bizarrely modernized) version of the legend of Manasa Devi and the Merchant? I was told that this was now the most popular show on regional television: evidently the legend of the Merchant was undergoing one of its periodic revivals, not just in my own mind, but in the culture at large.