The Return Crossing

The monsoon came back in the night.

Meghla heard it from the cot in the ferryman's hut, where Bhola had insisted she sleep while he took a mat on the boat. First the hush, the frogs falling silent one by one. Then the first heavy drops on the thatch, loud as fingers drumming on a table. Then the full roar of it, the whole sky letting go, and the smell of wet earth rising through the floor, the smell she had been born into and had not known, in five years of city rain, that she missed.

She did not sleep after that. She lay listening and thought about her father, who had loved this sound, and about an old woman tying a coin into the corner of her sari every morning for five years, and about a boy of eleven sitting very straight at the front of a ferry, frightened of a river he did not understand.

At first light she rose, washed in the river, and plaited her hair. She put on her blue-bordered sari and packed her cloth bag: the ledger, the lease, the anna in its knot of white cloth, the green pen. She did not let herself look up the bank at the yellow house.

The ghat was empty. The rain had settled into a soft, steady grey, the kind that might last a day or a season. Bhola had the boat ready at the bottom step, the patched sail furled, the pole laid along the side. He would not meet her eyes. She thought it was grief, and then, as she reached the last step, she saw that it was something else entirely. It was a young man trying very hard not to smile.

Ishan was sitting on the floor of the boat.

He was wet through. He had clearly been there some time. He sat where he had sat at eleven, in the middle of the planks, his palms flat against the wood, and he looked up at her with his grandmother's grey-brown eyes and a face that was completely, nakedly unguarded.

"I was told," he said, "that I'd be a fool to let you cross alone."

"She told me to tell you that."

"Bhola told me. He said you never would." He did not get up. "Meghla, sit down. Please. I have three things to say and I'm bad at this. I practised on Bhola half the night and he says I'm hopeless."

"He is hopeless," Bhola agreed, from the stern.

She sat. Not on the bench. On the floor of the boat, beside him, the way she had on the ninth day of the rains in 1938. She laid her palm on the wood next to his. The river hummed up through it.

"The first thing," Ishan said. "The house. Baba and I talked last night. We can't keep it, not with the estate going, and neither of us wants to. So we won't sell it. We'll give it to the district, for a girls' school. With boarding, for the char villages, the ones the river floods every year. Baba wanted to name it after my grandmother. I told him it should be named after your father. We argued. We settled on both. The Haren Majhi and Sarojini Lahiri School for Girls. It's far too long. Nobody will ever say it."

Meghla could not answer. She sat with her hand flat on the floor of the boat and looked at him.

"The second thing. It will need a headmistress. Someone very strict. Not now. After the examinations, after you've found Naya Gram a headmistress nearly as strict as you, because I know you won't leave them otherwise. I wrote to the district board before dawn and told them there was only one candidate worth considering, and that she already holds the lease on the ferry, so she can bring the char girls across herself." He swallowed. "I'll be in Calcutta most of the week. There are a great many people there who are owed things, and I'm not finished. But on Saturdays I would come home. On the ferry. And somebody would have to write me down."

"And the third thing?"

He reached for her bag. She let him. He took out the ledger and turned the pages, past the page of the flood with its shaky word Paid, back to a page from the autumn of 1945, where the green ink had faded to the colour of tea. He laid his finger beneath one line.

Ishan Lahiri. Departing. Return crossing: owed.

"The third thing," he said, "is that the ledger is always right. You told me so. And it says I owe you a crossing. Three thousand four hundred and twelve, if we're counting, but one will do to start."

The rain came down on the river. On the far bank, through the grey, a temple bell was ringing for morning prayers. Meghla thought of the drums on immersion night, and the cry that went up as the goddess slid into the dark water, the promise made to someone who is leaving. It will happen again next year. She had stopped believing it. She had never stopped believing it.

She took the green pen from behind her ear. On the first clean line of a new page, beneath the date, in her schoolmistress's hand, she wrote:

Ishan Lahiri. Return crossing: paid.

She paused. Then, below it, she wrote one more line, and turned the book so that he could read it.

Meghla Majhi. Crossing: together.

He read it twice. Then he laughed, the same surprisingly ordinary laugh she had first heard in the rain thirteen years before, and put his hand over hers on the floor of the boat, and did not let go.

"Bhola," Meghla said, without looking away from him. "Cast off."

They kept the ledgers, every one. Many years later they sat in a glass case in the entrance hall of a yellow house above the Rupnala, where the paint was always fresh and the green shutters always hung straight, and every new girl from the char villages was brought to see them on her first morning.

The headmistress would open the oldest one for them. A drawn umbrella. A pot with three wavy lines. A single flower, drawn with great care. And then, in wobbling letters, the name of a frightened boy, written by a ferryman's daughter who had not known how to draw him.

"Every one of you is going to cross a river," she would tell them. "Some of you already have. The picture is only a boat. It carries you to the word. And then you write your own name, and nobody can ever take it out of the book."

Outside, every year without fail, the monsoon came. Nobody in that house ever complained about it. Who notices a sunny name in the monsoon?