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The Hungry Tide
The story revolves around three characters: Piyali, a cetologist (one who studies marine mammals), who has come from America to study dolphins in the Sunderbans; Kanai, an urbane translator-interpreter from New Delhi, who has come to the Sunderbans to meet an aunt and peruse some papers left for him by her dead husband; and Fokir, a local fisherman, who knows "the tide country" like the back of his hand. As Piya, with the help of Fokir, tries to track river dolphins and study their habits and habitat, Kanai is busy at Lusibari, trying to figure out what his uncle was going through in his last days. Kanai and Piya find themselves on a boat with Fokir, with whom Piya has built an excellent rapport due to his extraordinary skills in finding dolphins. Kanai develops a soft corner for Piya and though he is on the boat as a translator, Fokir and Piya can communicate well enough without him. The ensuing tension between Fokir and Kanai is the heart of the story. However, The Hungry Tide is not merely a story about people. It’s also about a place—the lovely and treacherous Sunderbans, where if you are not careful, you will be gobbled up by man-eating tigers or crocodiles. It’s a place no other in the world, where islands, big and small, appear and disappear every day with the rise and fall of the tides, where mangroves are abuzz with life, where gods have to be propitiated and human beings are intruders in nature’s cradle. It is against this scenic backdrop that the human drama is played out. Amitav Ghosh paints extraordinary word pictures with a thick brush, firm strokes and vibrant colours, as you ride in a boat with Piya and Fokir and then Kanai or when he takes you to the island of Morichjhapi where refugees have set up their home. Throughout, you can sense the precarious nature of human existence in the Sunderbans and the fact that any attempt to colonise these parts can at best only be temporary. But this is particularly so in the last scene when a storm breaks, the tides rise, the winds blow and nature unleashes its fury. The sheer helplessness of man in the face of a brutal and overwhelming nature is pitiful. Meticulously researched (the author himself spent 40 days in the Sunderbans), this is an enchanting picture of the "tide country". There are close encounters with tigers, crocodiles and dolphins, with the mystique and the myths of the Sunderbans and with the human heart. Ghosh’s greatest achievement is that he gets you out of your armchair, drops you right in the middle of the Sunderbans on a rickety boat and pulls you out before you get sucked in. His mastery over the subject seems to deepen with each
work (this is his ninth book). One feels after reading this book that
the Sunderbans are close to his heart. You feel sorry when it the book
is over. The next book by Ghosh is going to be longer. Ghosh’s writing
is clear-eyed and unsentimental, a cue other Indian writers should take.
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The Hungry Tide consumes
the reader as it eats its characters. For the characters, nothing is
going to be the same after their close encounter with the Sunderbans and
you begin to wonder if it’s going to remain the same for you as well
after reading this book—particularly your idea of a good book.