III. Ishani
He met her three days later, at the village school, where he had gone to ask about a document — an old land record his grandmother's lawyer needed for the sale — that the schoolteacher was said to keep among a small archive of local papers. Her name was Ishani Sen, and she had returned to Noyapara from Kolkata University two years before to teach, as she told him with a wry twist of her mouth, "because someone in my family had to, and it turned out to be me."
She was perhaps twenty-eight, with the particular brand of restless intelligence that small villages either nurture into something remarkable or slowly grind down into resignation; Anirban could not yet tell which fate had claimed her, and found himself, against his own better judgment, wanting to know. She kept the school's few papers in a battered tin trunk, and among the land records and attendance registers he found — pressed carefully between two boards, tied with red thread — a slim notebook in her own hand, dense with notes.
"You're collecting the stories," he said, turning it over.
"Someone should, before the old people die and take them with them. Rakhal Kaka gave me half of what's in there. The rest I've had from women at the ghat, from the fishermen, from an old woman in the Muslim para who remembers a version her grandmother told that's stranger than any of the others." She took the notebook back from him, not unkindly, but with the protectiveness of a woman guarding something she has built with her own hands. "I take it he's told you about Dighir Bou."
"He has. I confess I found it very — atmospheric." He heard the condescension in his own voice and, watching her face cool by exactly one degree, regretted it immediately.
"Atmospheric," she repeated. "Six people have drowned in that dighi in the last thirty years, Anirban Babu. Not counting the ones from before anyone kept records. Two years ago it was a boy, eleven years old, a good swimmer, the son of the postmaster. He went in at dusk to fetch a ball and by the time his mother went looking for him there was nothing but the ball, floating near the far bank, exactly where they found Rajobala two hundred years ago. You can call that atmosphere if you like. His mother calls it something else."
Anirban had the grace to look chastened. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be dismissive of a child's death. I only meant — I'm an engineer, Ishani. I build bridges. I like things that can be measured."
Something in her softened, marginally, at that — perhaps the honesty of it, or perhaps simply that he had used her name without the honorific and she had let it pass. "Then measure this," she said, and pulled a loose page from the back of the notebook. "This is from Bibhuti Charan, who is past ninety and remembers things from his own childhood, not just what he was told. He says that when he was a boy, his village used to hold an offering at the dighi every year, on the night of Kojagari Lokkhi Puja — the same night Rajobala died. A red saree, sindoor, a little rice and milk, set on a banana-leaf raft and floated out onto the water at moonrise, with prayers asking her forgiveness for what was done to her. He says the offering was kept up faithfully by whichever family had inherited the zamindari — your family, Anirban — right up until sometime in the 1970s. And then it stopped."
"Why did it stop?"
"He doesn't know. Or won't say. But it's worth noting —" she tapped the page — "that Bibhuti dates the stopping of the ritual to a year or two before your grandmother's own husband died. Your grandfather. He drowned in that dighi, didn't he?"
Anirban went very still. It was true, though it was a fact so old and so folded into the quiet furniture of family history that he had not thought of it in years: his grandfather, Bimalendu Roy, had drowned in the family pond when Anirban's father was a boy of nine. It had always been told to him, when it was told at all, as an ordinary tragedy — a man who could not swim, a monsoon night, an accident. No one in his family had ever once mentioned Rajobala, or an offering, or a curse.
"I didn't know that," he said slowly. "About the ritual stopping, I mean. I knew my grandfather died in the pond. I never thought — no one ever said there was a connection."
"Perhaps no one wanted to." Ishani's voice had lost its edge; she was watching him now with something closer to sympathy. "Grief does that. It's easier to call a thing an accident than to say your family owed a debt and let it lapse, and something in the water remembered."
Outside, the light was beginning to slant gold and low across the schoolyard, and somewhere a conch shell sounded, thin and silvery, from a house preparing for the evening's small household puja. Anirban found himself, for the first time since arriving in Noyapara, genuinely afraid — not of the pond itself, which was after all only water, but of the shape of the thing Ishani had just laid out for him, the neat, terrible logic of it: a debt, unpaid; a ritual, abandoned; a grandfather, drowned; and now, eleven years since he had last set foot in this village, the current zamindar's heir sleeping alone in a house three hundred feet from the water, in the very month the debt had first been incurred.
"Ishani," he said. "When is Kojagari Lokkhi Puja this year?"
She did not need to check the notebook. "Nine days from now," she said. "The full moon of Ashwin."
IV. The Fisherman
The first death came six days later, and it was not Anirban.
His name was Haran Majhi, and he had fished the dighi and the river beyond it for fifty-one years, since he was a boy of nine casting his father's old net from the very ghat where Rakhal had sat that first evening. He was, by every account Anirban later gathered, not a superstitious man in the ordinary sense — he did not fear snakes, did not believe in the evil eye, laughed openly at the panicky rituals of younger fishermen who would not go out without touching the shrine of Bonbibi first. But even Haran would not fish the dighi after dark in the month of Ashwin, and had not for thirty years, since — he told anyone who asked — "the pond does not like to be watched when it thinks no one is looking."
That night, however, a merchant from Bongaon had come through the village promising a good price for hilsa and hoped-for prawns, and was leaving before dawn; and Haran, whose wife's health had grown expensive that year, decided that thirty years of caution could survive one exception. He told his son he would fish the dighi's eastern shallows, where the good prawns gathered near the roots of the banyan trees, and be home before the moon was high.
He was not.
His son found the boat first, drifting empty near the middle of the dighi, the net still half-cast and trailing in the black water like a torn veil. It was Rakhal, roused from sleep, who organized the search, and it was Rakhal — Anirban heard this later, secondhand, in a voice the old man could not quite steady — who pulled Haran's body from the shallows near the far bank shortly before dawn.
Anirban went down to the ghat when the whole village had gathered, drawn by the same dreadful magnetism that draws crowds to any tragedy, and stood at the edge of what quickly became a horrified, murmuring circle. He saw the body only for a moment before the women began the work of covering it, calling for cloth, for the men to stand back — but a moment was enough, and it stayed with him for a long time afterward.
Haran Majhi's face was not the face of a man who had struggled and drowned. There was no terror in it, no rictus of a last desperate breath. His eyes were open, fixed upward at a sky he could no longer see, and his mouth was curved — faintly, unmistakably — into the ghost of a smile, the particular soft smile Anirban had seen once before on his own grandmother's face in her coffin, the smile of someone who has been given, at the very last, something they wanted very badly. His grey hair, and the grey stubble of his cheeks, were threaded through with the fine dark weed that grew only in the deepest part of the dighi, weed that no ordinary drowning in the shallows could have gathered — as though something had drawn him down, and held him a long time, in the cold black water at the pond's forgotten centre, before it let the shallows have him back.
Ishani found Anirban standing apart from the crowd afterward, staring at the dighi's flat, indifferent surface, which had already gone still again, betraying nothing.
"He wasn't a young man," Anirban said, before she could speak. "He wasn't a stranger. Rakhal Kaka said the pond usually takes the careless, or the ones who don't believe. Haran believed. He was careful for thirty years."
"He went out anyway," Ishani said quietly. "For money. People do foolish things for money, curse or no curse."
"It's three days to Kojagari Lokkhi Puja." Anirban turned to look at her, and found that some part of him — the part that built bridges, that trusted in load calculations and measurable stress — had, sometime in the last six days, quietly given up its resistance to the other, older part of Noyapara's logic. "Ishani, I want to see the old land records. Not for the lawyer. I want to know exactly what happened to my grandfather, and I want to know what that offering was — the exact words of it, if Bibhuti remembers them. Because I think whatever debt my family owes, it isn't going to wait for me to finish selling the house before it comes to collect."