The Monsoon Ledger

In Shonapur, the river decided everything. It decided when the rice went in and when the fish came up, which families grew rich on the silt and which watched their fields slide away in a single wet night. It decided, too, who crossed and who stayed, and for that it had a servant: Haren Majhi, the ferryman, and his flat wooden boat with a patched sail the colour of weak tea.

Haren could not read. Nor could his daughter, Meghla, who was nine the summer this story begins, and who had been named for the overcast sky under which she was born. But the ferry lease from the Lahiri estate required a ledger, a record of every crossing, so that the estate's accountant could count the coins and take his share. And so the ledger was kept, by Meghla, in pictures.

A man with an umbrella was a drawn umbrella. The milk-seller was a pot with three wavy lines above it. The priest from the Shiva temple got a little flame, and the widow who crossed every Thursday to visit her son's grave got a single flower, which Meghla always drew with great care, because it seemed the right thing to do. Beside each picture she pressed a thumbprint of turmeric paste for every coin paid. The accountant, a sour man named Gopal-babu, complained that her ledger looked like a temple wall. But the sums were always right, so he took his share and said nothing more.

Then there was the boy.

He crossed twice a day in the school months, to the high school on the far bank and back again, and he was the only passenger she did not know how to draw. He was the grandson of the Lahiri house, the great yellow mansion with green shutters that stood above the river like a disapproving aunt. The Lahiris had owned the land on both banks for six generations. They were the zamindars, the landlords, to whom everyone in Shonapur paid rent in rice or coin or bowed heads. The boy wore pressed white shorts and a shirt that never seemed to wrinkle, and he sat at the very front of the ferry with his back straight, looking at the far bank as if staring hard enough would bring it closer.

He was eleven. His name was Ishan. Meghla knew this because everyone knew it, the way everyone knew the name of the moon.

For a whole month she left his space in the ledger blank, and pressed the turmeric thumbprints beside nothing.

The monsoon came early that year. It arrived the way it always did in Bengal, less like weather than like an event: a wall of dark cloud marching up from the south, a hush in which every bird went quiet, and then the first fat drops striking the dust so hard they raised little puffs of smoke. After that, for weeks, the world was water. The river swelled brown and quick. The paddy fields turned to sheets of mirror. Frogs sang all night as if they had been waiting all year to say something.