Haunting Tides

Is this a romantic evening? Maybe not. Nestled in a boat in the river’s heart with my girlfriend, Suzy. Moon’s light minions weaving a silvery path on the water. Massive salt-tolerant tangles of Sundarbans’ mangroves as grey as the storm clouds on either side, each bank a few feet away. Before us, the illimitable sea at a distance of five kilometers. Leaves rustling, beasties cheeping, animals howling, afar. An eerie smell occasionally coming along with the autumn’s breeze--partly aromatic, partly musty. Its after-odor is very stomach-turning.

In the middle of nowhere, I gather the courage to speak my mind. My broken family always comes in the way of shaping my resolve--its formation-dissipation like the deposition-erosion of the fluvial shoreline.

My pocket is heavy with the gold ring. The ideal moment is here to propose to my girlfriend for 10 years since college.

A trespasser’s footsteps, tip-tapping on the wooden deck. And the devil appears.

“It’s crying. I mean the boat.” Gorang, our boatman and guide, yelps, barging into our space.

“What? What do you mean?” Suzy and I ask, unanimously.

“Could be anything, sir. A storm…”

“A storm in this clear weather?” I espy the breathing, spike-like matted pneumatophores jutting out of the muddy soil and stilt-like prop roots swinging from branches of the mangrove trees on the shore. They appear like a witch’s knotted hair, emitting noises like loud cackles and squeals of rats on encountering the intermittent waves.

“Perhaps the tides. Our existence and livelihoods depend on them.”

I imagine the lives of the locals who live along the ebb and flow of the water, shaped by its plenteousness and infirmity.

“Maybe bade miya is on the prowl.” Gorang returns, exposing his buck-toothed jaws.

“Bade miya? You mean the Royal Bengal Tiger?”

“Don’t take its name at this hour.” His brambly brows rise to his forehead.

Rushing toward the bow, wrapped with marigold garlands and tinted with vermilion paste, we press our ears against it. A squeaking of something being dragged is heard, perhaps the anchor lowered in mid-stream to keep us safe from the land inhabited by the tigers and getting stuck in low tides.

Confused, I lift my head on hearing an ear-splitting human cry from the nearby land.  

“Someone is in danger. We have to save him.” I say.

“That’s baghmuri, not real. A human killed by a lamba fakir, waiting to lure you away from your life.”

“Lamba fakir, the tiger?”

“Again, you’re taking its name. Not safe to remain out here. Let’s go inside, have our dinner, and go to sleep.”

After dinner, I am alone on the deck. A multitude of tiny lights sparkle all over the chittering swampy land--dancing and mingling with one another--just like a fairy-tale movie scene. Waving my hand in the cold water, I watch blue-green, luminescent specks flick over my palm, wriggling and disappearing in the slosh. Overhead, whether of clouds or something else, descend cold turrets, shifting swiftly toward me.

Abruptly, a movement on the land catches my attention. A group of five men, probably fishermen or honey collectors, moor their small boat and tread into the jungle. For a while, they vanish. A few minutes later, four of them reappear, rushing toward their boat. They tie a ribbon on one of the tree branches and leave in their boat.

Breathing loudly through his mouth, the fifth man returns a couple of minutes after they have left. A shadow moves stealthily--in halting steps--among the thicket, before I see the leonine eyes--glowing like two burning blocks of coal--closing in on its prey. A momentary pause. It jumps. A jump that jolts me off my calm. Bleeding, the man runs like forever, his right hand missing.

Before I can call Gorang, I see a crowd thronging the muddy grove. Icy-white of taurine eyes dancing, gravelly voices rejoicing. A nine-foot long, striped, unconscious body--presumably of a man-eating tiger--held captive, upside down. Its four limbs are securely fastened with jute ropes onto two wooden sticks. Every beating with staves foams up blood, tainting its whiteness. A faint gurgling sound somewhere gradually develops into a roar of falling water. Tidal waves surge, draw closer, with a huge one right over them. The water level keeps rising, covering up the aerial roots and lower portions of the tree trunks. Helplessly moving helter-skelter and flailing their arms, the inhabitants soon drown.

A sound like distant thunder rolls over toward our boat, increasing steadily in volume. My heartbeat comes to a standstill, while a thousand ants crawl underneath my skin. Voiceless, I’m unable to call Gorang or Suzy. I bend over the boat’s railing to check the swell of rising water, thumping on the boat’s outer surface. Hissing crocodiles, lining the boat’s lower edge, attempt to aggressively crawl onto our boat. Something falls into the river. I feel my pocket lighter now.

Our anchorless boat drifts and clings onto an adjoining land, still to go under water. I hear a loud growl at a distance, and the entire world swings like a Ferris wheel, before I fall into a swoon.

When I wake up, the pale white of the morning sky tumbles down upon me. I find myself lying on the deck like a log. Our boat is in the middle of the river, with no land in sight. Suzy’s face is lowered onto mine. At a distance, Gorang utters a sigh of relief noisily. My hands feel heavy with a stinging sensation. I vex at the red sores and deep parallel cuts that indicate fierce nail scratches of some animal.

“Where am I?” I stare blankly at the retreated view from the previous night, eyes burdened by the cold weight of the atmosphere.

“We are heading toward the mainland.” Suzy says.

“I know I have to go back.” My heart stitches a blue ache of tidal waves, while my mind is pregnant with thoughts of a premonition I lived last night.

***

Sreelekha Chatterjee is an award-winning writer, poet, and editor. Her flash fiction was longlisted in Wigleaf’s Top 50. Her stories have appeared in Kitaab, Flash Fiction North, Ink Pantry, York Literary Review, Friday Flash Fiction, The Piker Press, Borderless, Underbelly Press, Five Minutes, 101 Words, Mad Swirl, and elsewhere. She lives in New Delhi, India.

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