What the River Took

He made three trips.

That was what people said afterwards, at the ghat, in the market, for years. Haren Majhi made three trips across the Rupnala in the worst flood in living memory and brought back fourteen people, and the river let him do it three times before it asked for its fare.

Meghla wrote every name. She stood under the banyan tree at the top of the ghat with a hurricane lantern hung on a nail and the ledger open on a stone, sheltering the page with her body, and as each soaked, shaking person was hauled up the steps she asked their name and wrote it down. Her hand did not shake. She would wonder at that later. Kamala Das and her two sons. Abdul the boatbuilder. Phuli, the widow's granddaughter, age six. The second trip brought the priest of the Kali temple, weeping, and behind him, carried up the steps by two men because she could not walk, a small old woman in a white sari plastered to her body, her silver hair loose and streaming.

Sarojini Lahiri. Meghla had never seen her hair unbound. Without the keys and the motor car and the thirty-one steps between them, she was only an old woman, shorter than Meghla, with thin wrists.

They looked at each other in the lantern light. Neither spoke. Meghla wrote: Sarojini Lahiri. And then, because it was the ledger and the ledger was always right, she wrote beside it what was written beside every name: Fare: one anna.

An anna was the smallest coin there was. A sixteenth of a rupee. The price of a crossing.

Haren went back a third time, for the last family. Meghla saw his lantern reach the char and swing as people climbed aboard. She saw it start back. She saw it reach the middle of the river, where the current ran fastest.

What came down the river then was a tree. A whole one, a great silk-cotton tree torn out by the roots somewhere upstream, riding the flood with its branches spread like arms. People on the bank screamed. In the lantern light she saw her father see it. She saw him throw his weight on the pole and turn the boat, so that the tree struck the stern and not the side where the family crouched. The boat spun and grounded in the shallows of the near bank, and the men on the ghat waded out with ropes and pulled the family to safety: a mother, a father, and a baby wrapped in a shawl.

And the lantern at the stern was gone.

They found him three days later, eight miles downstream, caught in the roots of a mangrove. Meghla would not let them bring her the news. She walked the eight miles herself and sat with him until the men came with a bamboo stretcher. They cremated him on the riverbank, as Hindus do, and she gave his ashes to the Rupnala, because there was nowhere else he would have wanted to be.

The rains stopped the day after. The river drew back to its banks, brown and satisfied.

There was no word from Ishan. That August, Calcutta had turned on itself in days of rioting so terrible that the trains stopped and the roads closed, and nobody in Shonapur could say whether the Lahiri boy was safe. Meghla did not let herself think about it. She found she could not think about anything at all.

On the fifth day, Sarojini Lahiri came down the ghat steps.

She came on foot, with no servant, leaning on a cane. She wore a fresh white sari and her keys were back at her waist, but something had gone out of her, and she took the thirty-one steps one at a time. She stopped at the door of the ferryman's hut and waited to be invited in. Meghla did not invite her. After a while the old woman lowered herself onto the step where Haren used to sit, and spoke to the river instead.

"I have come to offer you a place," she said. "In my house. Or money, if you prefer. Enough for a dowry. You will not need to work the ferry."

"No."

"You have not heard the sum."

"My father carried you across the river for one anna," Meghla said. "Did you pay it?"

The old woman was silent a long time. "No," she said at last. "I did not."

"Then that's what you owe him. One anna. I won't take anything else."

Sarojini turned and looked at her then, and her eyes were the same grey-brown as her grandson's, which was a cruelty Meghla had not prepared for.

"Then I will ask you for something instead," the old woman said. "My grandson will come home. When he comes, he will find you here, grieving and alone, and he will give up everything for you. His father, his name, this house. He will do it gladly, because he is young. And in ten years, when he is poor and his family will not speak his name, he will look at you across a table and not understand why he is unhappy." She paused. "I do not say this because you are not good enough for him. I watched the two of you in that boathouse for seven years. I know exactly what you are. I say it because I know what he is. If you love him, do not let him make that choice."

Meghla said nothing. But she did not tell the old woman she was wrong.

Ishan reached Shonapur nine days after the flood, on the first train out of the city, grey with exhaustion, in clothes he had slept in for three nights.

The ferry was running. A boy named Bhola, who had been Haren's helper since he was ten, was poling it, badly. The hut by the ghat stood empty, its door propped open, its single room swept bare. The tin trunk was gone. Nibaran-master, when Ishan ran to his house, would say only that he had written a letter of recommendation for a teacher-training course, and that he had promised not to say where.

Bhola handed Ishan the ledger without a word.

He opened it on the ghat steps. He turned to the last page, and there it was, in Meghla's steady hand: the fourteen names, every one, his grandmother's among them. Fare: one anna. Unpaid. And at the very bottom, one more line.

Haren Majhi. Crossing: one way.

Beneath it, in the green ink of the pen he had given her, was a note, and his eyes reached it before his mind could stop them.

Ishan. The return crossing is cancelled. Do not look for me. M.