Chapter 7: What Stayed With Us
My mesho never fished after dark again, not once, for the rest of his life. It became, in our family, one of those quiet, permanent facts about him that no one questioned or even really discussed anymore, the way you stop questioning why your grandmother always keeps a particular door locked or why your father refuses to drive on a certain road — it simply became part of who he was, and everyone around him adjusted without needing an explanation repeated.
He kept fishing, though, right up until his health made it difficult a few years ago — but always in daylight, always finished and home well before the light started to fail, and always, without fail, carrying a small twist of mustard seeds in his shirt pocket, a habit he never explained to anyone who hadn't been there that summer and never dropped, not even decades later, not even, my aunt tells me, on the day he died, an old man, peacefully, in his own bed, nowhere near any water at all.
I never went back to that particular bend in the canal, not once in all the summers I continued visiting after that, even years later as an adult with my own children in tow, curious the way adults get curious about the frightening places of their childhood. I would walk past it sometimes, at a distance, on the main path, and I can tell you honestly that even now, even grown, even reasonably certain in the daylight part of my mind that there are rational explanations for most of what happened that summer — fever, mass suggestion, the particular power that fear has to make three separate people's memories bend toward agreement — even with all of that reasonable doubt fully intact, I have never once been able to walk past that stretch of water without my pace quickening, without some old, wordless part of me insisting that I not look too closely at the shadows beneath that leaning banyan tree.
My brother, who is less inclined toward this kind of story than I am, generally more practical, more skeptical, still — when pressed, usually after a drink or two at a family wedding — admits that he remembers me coming through that gate the way I came through it, remembers our mother's face, remembers that something in our family changed shape a little that summer and never quite changed back. He doesn't offer theories about what it was. He just says, quietly, that he believes me, which from him, honestly, is more than I ever expected and more than most people are willing to offer about a story like this one.
Rotan Kaka died a few years after I finished college, well into his nineties, and at his funeral, an old man I didn't recognize — a distant relative of his, I think, from another village down the canal — told me, unprompted, in the particular unhurried way village elders share things they think you ought to know, that Rotan Kaka had, over the decades, quietly performed some version of that same ritual — the naming, the offering, the mustard seeds — for at least six or seven other families in the area whose fishermen had come home too heavy, too pale, murmuring about weight they couldn't explain. He never made a business of it, this man told me. He never called himself an ojha or a healer. He simply understood, better than most, what lived in that water and what it would and wouldn't listen to, and he spent a good portion of his long life making sure fewer families than might have otherwise had to learn that the hard way.
I think about that a lot, honestly — about how much quiet, unglamorous knowledge like that must have existed all across rural Bengal, carried by old men and women who never wrote any of it down, who simply passed it from one frightened family to the next, generation after generation, the way you'd pass along the location of a safe well or a dangerous stretch of road. I think about how much of it has probably already been lost, as villages empty out and young people move to cities and old men like Rotan Kaka die without anyone thinking to ask them, while there's still time, exactly what they knew and how they knew it.
I don't fish. I've never wanted to, not since that summer, and my own children, who've heard this story more times than they probably wanted to by now, tease me gently about it whenever we pass a river on a family trip, asking in mock-serious voices whether I can feel anything settling on my shoulders. I laugh along with them, because it's easier that way, and because thirty years of daylight and city living have given me enough distance to laugh, most of the time.
But I keep a small twist of mustard seeds in the glovebox of my car. I've never told my children why. Some habits you inherit without ever fully deciding to, the way you inherit a fear of a particular sound, or a certain way of going very quiet when the frogs stop singing all at once. I don't know if I believe, in the flat, reasonable, daylight way, that something is still waiting at that bend in the canal in Basirhat, patient and hungry and endlessly counting an old, unpaid debt.
But some nights, when I'm driving home late and pass water I don't know well, in the dark, alone, I find myself, without quite deciding to, whistling nothing in particular under my breath — just to make sure, I tell myself, that the only whistling I hear is my own.