much by her candour as her canniness. ‘So you have relatives in Calcutta then?’
‘Yes. In fact I was born there myself, although my parents left when I was just a year old.’ She turned a sharp glance on him, raising an eyebrow. ‘I see you still say “Calcutta”. My father does that too.’
Kanai acknowledged the correction with a nod. ‘You’re right – I should be more careful, but the re-naming was so recent that I do get confused sometimes. I try to reserve “Calcutta” for the past and “Kolkata” for the present but occasionally I slip. Especially when I’m speaking English.’ He smiled and put out a hand. ‘I should introduce myself; I’m Kanai Dutt.’
‘And I’m Piyali Roy – but everyone calls me Piya.’
She could tell he was surprised by the unmistakably Bengali sound of her name: evidently her ignorance of the language had given him the impression that her family’s origins lay in some other part of India.
‘You have a Bengali name,’ he said, raising an eyebrow. ‘And yet you know no Bangla?’
‘It’s not my fault really,’ she said quickly, her voice growing defensive. ‘I grew up in Seattle. I was so little when I left India that I never had a chance to learn.’
‘By that token, having grown up in Calcutta, I should speak no English.’
‘Except that I just happen to be terrible at languages …’ She let the sentence trail away, unfinished, and then changed the subject. ‘And what brings you to Canning, Mr Dutt?’
‘Kanai – call me Kanai.’
‘Kan-ay.’
He was quick to correct her when she stumbled over the pronunciation: ‘Say it to rhyme with Hawaii.’
‘Kanaii?’
‘Yes, that’s right. And to answer your question – I’m on my way to visit an aunt of mine.’
‘She lives in Canning?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘She lives in a place called Lusibari. It’s quite a long way from Canning.’
‘Where exactly?’ Piya unzipped a pocket in one of her backpacks and pulled out a map. ‘Show me. On this.’
Kanai spread the map out and used a fingertip to trace a winding line through the tidal channels and waterways. ‘Canning is the railhead for the Sundarbans,’ he said, ‘and Lusibari is the farthest of the inhabited islands. It’s a long way upriver – you have to go past Annpur, Jamespur and Emilybari. And there it is: Lusibari.’
Piya knitted her eyebrows as she looked at the map. ‘Strange names.’
‘You’d be surprised how many places in the Sundarbans have names that come from English,’ Kanai said. ‘Lusibari just means “Lucy’s House”.’
‘Lucy’s House?’ Piya looked up in surprise. ‘As in the name “Lucy”?’
‘Yes.’ A gleam came into his eyes and he said, ‘You should come and visit the place. I’ll tell you the story of how it got its name.’
‘Is that an invitation?’ Piya said, smiling.
‘Absolutely,’ Kanai responded. ‘Come. I’m inviting you. Your company will lighten the burden of my exile.’
Piya laughed. She had thought at first that Kanai was much too full of himself, but now she was inclined to be slightly more generous in her assessment: she had caught sight of a glimmer of irony somewhere that made his self-centredness appear a little more interesting than she had first imagined.
‘But how would I find you?’ she said. ‘Where would I look?’
‘Just make your way to the hospital in Lusibari,’ said Kanai, ‘and ask for “Mashima”. They’ll take you to my aunt and she’ll know where I am.’
‘Mashima?’ said Piya. ‘But I have a “Mashima” too – doesn’t it just mean “aunt”? There must be more than one aunt there: yours can’t be the only one?’
‘If you go to the hospital and ask for “Mashima”,’ said Kanai, ‘everyone will know who you mean. My aunt founded it, you see, and she heads the organization that runs it – the Badabon Trust. She’s a real personage on the island – everyone calls her “Mashima”, even though her real name is Nilima Bose. They were quite a pair, she and her husband. People always called him “Saar” just as they call her “Mashima”.’
‘Saar? And what does that mean?’
Kanai laughed. ‘It’s just a Bangla way of saying “Sir”. He was the headmaster of the local school, you see, so all his pupils called him “Sir”. In time people forgot he had a real name – Nirmal Bose.’
‘I notice you’re speaking of him in the past tense.’
‘Yes. He’s been dead a long time.’ No sooner had he spoken than Kanai pulled a face, as if to disclaim what he had just said. ‘But to tell you the truth, right now it doesn’t feel like he’s been gone a long time.’
‘How come?’
‘Because he’s risen from his ashes to summon me,’ Kanai said with a smile. ‘You see, he’d left some papers for me at the time of his death. They’d been lost all these years, but now they’ve turned up again. That’s why I’m on my way there: my aunt wanted me to come and look at them.’
Hearing a note of muted complaint in his voice, Piya said, ‘It sounds as if you weren’t too eager to go.’
‘No, I wasn’t, to be honest,’ he said. ‘I have a lot to attend to and this was a particularly busy time. It wasn’t easy to take a week off.’
‘Is this the first time you’ve come, then?’ said Piya.
‘No, it’s not,’ said Kanai. ‘I was sent down here once, years ago.’
‘Sent down? Why?’
‘It’s a story that involves the word “rusticate”,’ said Kanai with a smile. ‘Are you familiar with it?’
‘No. Can’t say I am.’
‘It was a punishment, dealt out to schoolboys who misbehaved,’ said Kanai. ‘They were sent off to suffer the company of rustics. As a boy I was of the opinion that I knew more about most things than my teachers did. There was an occasion once when I publicly humiliated a teacher who had the unfortunate habit of pronouncing the word “lion” as if it overlapped, in meaning as in rhyme, with the word “groin”. I was about ten at the time. One thing led to another and my tutors persuaded my parents I had to be rusticated. I was sent off to stay with my aunt and uncle, in Lusibari.’ He laughed at the memory. ‘That was a long time ago, in 1970.’
The train had begun to slow down now and Kanai was interrupted by a sudden blast from the engine’s horn. Glancing through the window, he spotted a yellow signboard that said, ‘Canning’.
‘We’re there,’
