Amérique du Nord, mai 2006, séries ES et S, LV1: Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide, Harper Collins, 2004.

« Sujet 10 ♦ Amérique du Nord, mai 2006, séries ES et S, LVI The train was at a standscill, some twenty minutes outside Kolkata 1, when an unexpected stroke of luck presented Piya with an opportunity to avail herself of a seat beside a window.

She had been sitting in the stuffiest part of the compartrnent, on the edge of a bench, with her backpacks arrayed around her: now, moving to the window, she saw that the train had stopped at a station 5 called Champahati.

A platform sloped clown into a huddle ofhutrnents before sinking into a pond filled with foaming grey sludge.

She could tell, from the density of the crowds on the train, that this was how it would be all the way to Canning: strange to think that this was the threshold of the Sundarbans, this jungle of shacks and shanties, spanned by the tracks of a commuter train.

Looking over her shoulder, Piya spotted a tea-seller patrolling the platform.

Reaching through the 10 bars, she summoned him with a wave.

She had never cared for the kind of chai 2 sold in Seattle, her hometown, but somehow, in the ten days she had spent in India she had developed an unexpected affinity for milky, overboiled tea served in earthware cups.

There were no spices in it for one thing, and this was more to her taste than the chai at home.

She paid for her tea and was trying to manoeuvre the cup through the bars of the window when 15 the man in the seat opposite her own suddenly flipped over a page, jolting her hand.

She turned her wrist quickly enough to make sure that most of the tea spilled out of the window, but she could not prevent a small trickle from shooting over his papers.

"Oh, l'm so sorry!" Piya was mortified: of everyone in the compartrnent, this was the last person she would have chosen to scald with her tea.

She had noticed him while waiting on the platform 20 in Kolkata and she had been struck by the self-satisfied tilt of his head and the unabashed way in which he stared at everyone around him, taking them in, sizing them up, sorting them all into their places.

She had noticed the casual self-importance with which he had evicted the man who'd been sitting next to the window.

She had been put in mind of some ofher relatives in Kolkata: they too seemed to share the assumption that they had been granted some kind of entitlement (was it 25 because of their class or their education?) that allowed them to expect that life's little obstacles and annoyances would always be swept away to suit their convenience.

"Here," said Piya, producing a handful of tissues.

"Let me help you clean up." "There's nothing to be clone," he said testily.

"These pages are ruined anyway." She flinched as he crumpled up the papers he had been reading and tossed them out of the window.

30 "I hope they weren't important," she said in a small voice.

"Nothing irreplaceable -just Xeroxes." 1.

Kolkata: The other name of Calcutta, a city in eastern India, the capital of the West Bengal State, near the Bay of Bengal.

2.

Chai : Indian spiced tea.. »