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Chapter SevenThe shifting contours of home: The Hungry Tide

“A novel” says Amitav Ghosh, “… must always be set somewhere: it must have its

setting, and within the evolution of the narrative this setting must, classically, play a

part almost as important as those of the characters themselves” (Ghosh 2002: 361).

Most of his novels have had South Asia as one of the major axis of the setting

whereas the other axes have been located in some other part of the globe. Ghosh’s

exploration of different landscapes in his fiction prompts Anita Desai to describe him

at par with Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gunter Grass and Milan

Kundera as “belonging to this international school of writing which successfully deals

with the post-colonial ethos of the modern world without sacrificing the ancient

histories of their separate lands” (Desai 1986). From The Circle of Reason (1986) to

River of Smoke (2011), Ghosh has projected the yearning for a home of one’s own but

in The Hungry Tide, the scope of the setting is so limited to the Sundarbans or “tide

country” – the “archipelago of islands...stretching for almost three hundred

kilometres, from the Hoogly River in West Bengal to the shores of the Meghna in

Bangladesh” (6) that “it is its sense of place that dominates the novel” (Rollason

2005: web). In the “Author’s Note” appended at the end of the novel, Ghosh clarifies

that like the characters, the two principal settings of the novel, Lusibari and

Garjontola are fictitious. “However,” he continues, “the secondary locations such as

Canning, Gosaba, Satleja, Morichjhapi and Emilybari do indeed exist and were

founded or settled in the manner alluded to” in the novel. (401)

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Sundarbans, which literally means “the beautiful forest” (8) derives its name from the

Sundari tree (Heriteria minor), a species of mangrove that populates the archipelago

and determines the peculiarity of its topography and ecology. This region is also

known as bhatir desh or the “tide country” because the geography of the islands is in

a continuous state of flux due to the diurnal processes of the tide and ebb of the sea.

There are no borders here to divide fresh water from salt, river from sea. The

tides reach as far as three hundred kilometres inland and every day thousands

of acres of forest disappear underwater only to re-emerge hours later. The

currents are so powerful as to reshape the islands daily almost daily—some

days the water tears away entire promontories and peninsulas; at other times it

throws up new shelves and sandbanks where there were none before. (7)

The narrative of The Hungry Tide begins when two people, Kanai Dutt and Piyali

Roy (Piya), en route to Canning, the railway terminus to the Sudarban community,

travel together and mutually exchange the reasons for their respective visits to the

“tide country”. The sequence of events develops through the interaction of these

visitors with that community and with each other. Kanai is a forty two year old

professional interpreter and translator whose ability to use “the currency of

language…to build a business” (199) in New Delhi, “one of the world’s leading

conference cities and media centres” (199) made him a rare visitor to the Sundarban.

On his way to visit his aunt Nilima Bose, an NGO activist who runs a hospital on

Lusibari, one of the islands, Kanai meets Piya, a Bengali-American cetologist from

Seattle in her twenties, whose “neatly composed androgyny of ... appearance” (3)

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makes him doubt her as an Indian, “except by descent.” (3) Kanai had earlier visited

his uncle and aunt in the Sundarbans in 1970 as a punishment for a childish prank.

His second visit is occasioned by his aunt’s invitation to him to read a journal left him

by his late uncle Nirmal that has resurfaced years after his uncle’s death, whereas

Piya’s journey to the tide country is part of her ongoing research on dolphins.

Parting ways with his co-passenger Piya after disembarking from the train at

Canning, Kanai goes with his “Mashima” (Nilima) to Lusibari. Piya, on the other

hand, makes her way to the Forest Department’s offices at Canning to make

arrangements to study the Gangetic dolphin. Accompanied by a forest guard, Piya

finds herself manipulated to hire the launch of man named Mej-da but this

arrangement falls through when Piya accidentally falls into the water. As long as she

stayed on the launch, however, Piya feels discomfort at being perceived by the two

men as a helpless foreign woman trapped in an unfamiliar locale. This perception is

demonstrated by Mej-da who enacts a pantomime to objectify her similarities and

differences with them (33). Whereas the two men accept Piya’s clothes, her

complexion, the colour of her eyes and her short hair (34) as points of similarity, Mej-

da’s gesticulation, in an obscene manner, towards his tongue and crotch, “organs of

language and sex”, function as a “commentary on the twin mysteries of their

difference.” (34) Thus, Piya’s identity, at this point in the narrative, is perceived by

others as simultaneously based on her sameness and difference with them.

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Piya’s accidental fall from the launch enables her to meet Fokir Mondol, an illiterate

fisherman and a protégé of Kanai's aunt who serves as her guide in her research in the

tide country. In the company of Fokir and his son Tutul, Piya overcomes the remnants

of her unpleasant experience with the guard and launch owner that “had bruised her

confidence and she felt as though she were recovering from an assault.” (64)

Piya decides to continue the rest of her survey with Fokir’s help. During their journey

together, Fokir creates a provisional enclosure on his five-metre-long boat to enable

Piya to bathe and change her clothes (70-71, 85). This gesture, in contrast to her

previous experience with the guard and Mej-da and the years she had spent “sharing

showers in co-ed dorms and living with men in cramped seaboard quarters” (71),

makes Piya grateful to Fokir for treating her as a person rather than “a representative

of a species, a faceless, tongueless foreigner.” (71)

After spending a few days on the boat with Fokir who helps her to study the

behaviour of a pod of Irrawady dolphin or the Orcaella brevirostris in ecosystem of

the tide country, an encounter with crocodiles compels Piya to accompany Fokir and

Tutul to Lusibari where she meets Kanai and accepts his aunt’s offer to stay in the

Guest House located on the second floor of Nilima’s two-storey house. Piya also

meets Moyna, a trainee nurse at the hospital who along with her husband Fokir and

son Tutul, lived in the Lusibari hospital’s staff quarters.

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Once again, after a few days of rest, Piya, makes arrangements to resume her study of

the dolphins. This time Fokir helps her to hire the “bhotbhoti” (221) of Horen Naskor

who was a father figure to Fokir. Kanai offers to join Piya’s expedition as a translator

and she accepts rather reluctantly mainly to reciprocate his gesture of arranging her

stay at the Guest House (232). The journey begins with Horen, his grandson, Piya and

Kanai travelling on the ‘bhotbhoti’ and Fokir accompanies them on his boat. Kanai

brings on board his uncle’s note-book with the intention of completing reading it

during the journey. Eventually, however, Kanai realises that he is not indispensable

for Piya and decides to return to New Delhi. The group splits in two as Piya and Fakir

continue their onward journey in Fokir’s boat and Horen changes direction to take

Kanai back to Lusibari.

The narrative reaches its climax when a storm ravages the tide country. Piya loses her

equipments and findings and Kanai is unable to save his uncle’s journal. However,

the biggest casualty of the storm is Fokir who dies braving the elements. Even after

his death, Fokir’s lifeless body shields Piya and helps her to survive the storm until

she is eventually rescued by Kanai and Horen.

The plot of The Hungry Tide is made up of interwoven strands. The present of Kanai

and Piya’s narrative that is being lived by the characters is interspersed with the past

of Nirmal's journal - that variously alternate, converge, diverge and reconverge. The

sixty six chapters and the epilogue of the novel that form a crisscross fabric of

alternating narrative frames are divided into two parts to emulate the movement of a

tide, the first part is titled The Ebb: Bhata that contrasts with the second part The

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Flood: Jowar. Only Horen and Nilima are function as bridges between the narrative

time frames of the past and the present and occasionally fill up the gaps in Nirmal’s

story.

Nirmal and Nilima had migrated from Calcutta to Lusibari in 1950, one year after

their marriage. Nirmal’s career as a teacher of English literature at Ashutosh college

had been interrupted by his detainment in Calcutta police’s custody for a few days as

a result of his marginal involvement in “a conference, convened by the Socialist

International, in Calcutta.” (77) Despite being estranged from her parents due to her

marriage, Nilima, with the help of her father, secured a job for Nirmal as

schoolteacher in Lusibari and the couple left Calcutta.

Within a short time after their relocation to Lusibari, Nilima, prompted by the plight

of the increasing number of widows left destitute after their husbands’ death, set up

“the island’s Mohila Songothan—the Women’s Union” (81) that ultimately morphed

into the Badabon Development Trust. On the other hand, Nirmal, who “had made a

name for himself as a leftist intellectual and a writer of promise” (76) did not

completely approve of wife’s project, but nevertheless “it was he who gave the Trust

its name, which came from the Bengali word for ‘mangrove’.” (82)

When Kanai was forced to pay his first visit to Lusibari, he learned from his uncle the

history of the human settlement, founded in the Sundarbans at the beginning of the

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twentieth century by the visionary Scot Sir Daniel MacKinnon Hamilton, which was

essentially utopian in character:

Here there would be no Brahmins or Untouchables, no Bengalis and no

Oriyas. Everybody would have to live and work together. (51)

During this visit, Kanai met Kusum (Fokir’s mother) as a teenager and Horen, a

boatman and Kusum’s friend who eventually became her lover.

Nirmal’s hour of glory came when he became involved with the Morichjhapi

incident. Kanai reconstructs, though his uncle's journal, the revolt of a group of

resettled refugees from the erstwhile East Pakistan, their creation of a short-lived

community in the Sundarbans with visible utopian-rationalist features. Nirmal

detected a strong utopian strand in this attempt by the dispossessed to possess

something of their own. In the entry in his diary on May 15, 1979, 5.30 a.m.

addressing his future reader Kanai, Nirmal writes:

I am writing these words in a place that you will probably never have heard

of: an island on the southern edge of the tide country, a place called

Morichjhapi…(67)

Nilima fills in the gaps of her husband’s narrative for the benefit of her nephew:

Morichjhapi...was a tide-country island...In 1978, it happened that a great

number of people suddenly appeared in Morichjhapi...Within a matter of

weeks they had cleared the mangroves, built bundhs and put up huts. It

happened so quickly that in the beginning no one even knew who these people

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were. But in time it came to be learnt that they were refugees from

Bangladesh...But it was not from Bangladesh that these refugees were fleeing

when they came to Morichjhapi; it was from a government resettlement camp

in central India. In the years after Partition the authorities had removed the

refuges to a palce called Dandakaranya, deep in the forests of Madhya

Pradesh, hundreds of kilometres from Bengal. (118)

Therefore, the refugees’ plight was basically the product of the Partition of

subcontinent that came about as a result of the British colonialism and its divide-and-

rule strategies. The refugee community was forcibly resettled by the Indian

government in Madhya Pradesh, but in 1978 many of these dislocated people made

the collective decision to return “home” - if not to East Pakistan/Bangladesh, at least

to West Bengal and the Sundarbans. These migrants re-locate themselves, this time,

voluntarily, on the island of Morichjhapi and begin to create the bases of an organised

microsociety:

… there had been many additions, many improvements. Saltpans had been

created, tubewells had been planned, water had been dammed for the rearing

of fish … It was an astonishing spectacle - as though an entire civilisation had

sprouted suddenly in the mind. [191]

Nirmal’s process of identifying the “tide country” as his home in a way Calcutta

failed to be reaches completion when he eventually internalises the refugees’

resistance as his own. Alerted by Nilima that the government was planning to take

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strong measures against the refugees, Nirmal quietly makes his way to the scene of

the confrontation between the refugees and the policemen who had come to evict

them:

...the people in the boat joined together their voices and began to shout, in

unison, ‘Amra kara? Bastuhara. Who are we? We are the dispossessed.’

How strange it was to hear this plaintive cry wafting across the water... And

as I listened to the sound of those syllables, it was as if I were hearing the

deepest uncertainties of my heart being spoken to the rivers and the tides.

Who was I? Where did I belong? In Kolkata or in the tide country? In India or

across the border? In prose or in poetry?

Then we heard the settlers shouting a refrain, answering the question they had

themselves posed: ‘Morichjhapi charbona. We’ll not leave Morichjhapi, do

what you may.’

Standing on the deck of the bhotbhoti, I was struck by the beauty of this.

Where else could you belong, except in the place you refused to leave.

I joined my feeble voice to theirs: ‘Morichjhapi charbona!’ (254)

Nirmal’s conscious choice to belong to the ‘place he refuses to leave’, together with

his love for Kusum eventually, draws him into the refugees’ struggle.

However, this utopia cannot and does not last: it is brutally repressed by the

government forces, and in its aftermath Kusum, who actively participates in that

revolt, dies in the course of its repression, while Nirmal, whose journal ends at the

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moment of the repression, having got mixed up in the events loses his sanity and dies

soon after in July, 1979.

Along with his version of the Morichjhapi incident, Nirmal also records the customs

and folklore of the tide country in his journal. He narrates one of his experiences

where he accompanies Kusum and Horen to the shrine of Bon Bibi:

We came to a clearing and Kusum led the way to the shrine which was

nothing more than a raised platform with bamboo sides and a thatched

covering. Here we placed the images of Bon Bibi and Shah Jongoli, and then

Kusum lit a few incense sticks of fragrant dhoop and Fokir fetched some

leaves and flowers and laid them at their feet.

So far there was nothing unusual about the ritual, except its setting—

otherwise it was very much like the small household pujas I remembered my

mother performing in my childhood. But then Horen began to recite a mantra,

and to my great surprise I heard him say:

Bismillah boliya mukhey dhorinu kalam/ poida korilo jinni

tamam alam* baro meherban tini bandar upore/ taar

chhani keba ache duniyar upore*

(In Allah’s name, I begin to pronounce the Word/ Of the whole

universe, He is the Begetter the Lord* To all his disciples, He is

full of mercy/ Above the created world, who is there but He*) (245-

246)

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Nirmal is amazed and astonished to hear Arabic invocations accompanying puja-like

rituals:

I listened enthralled as Horen continued his recitation: the language was not

easy to follow—it was a strange variety of Bangla, deeply penetrated by

Arabic and Persian. The narrative, however, was familiar to me: it was the

story of how how Dukhey was left on the shore of an island to be devoured by

the tiger-demon Dokkhin Rai, and of his recue by Bon Bibi and Shah Jongoli.

(246)

When Nirmal enquires of Horen how he learnt the long recitation, it is Horen’s turn to

be surprised:

He looked startled. ‘Why Saar,’ he said, ‘I’ve known it as long as I can

remember. I heard my father reciting it, and I learnt from him.’

‘So this legend passed on from mouth to mouth and held only in memory?’

‘Why no, Saar,’ he said. ‘There’s a book in which it was printed. I even have a

copy.’ He reached down into that part of his boat where he stored his things,

and pulled out a tattered old pamphlet. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘have a look.’ (246-

247)

The document that Nirmal sees increases his bewilderment:

I opened the first page and saw it bore the title ‘Bon Bibir Karamoti orthat

Bon Bibi Johuranama’ (The Miracles of Bon Bibi or the Narrative of her

Glory). When I tried to open the book, I had another surprise: the pages

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opened to the right, as in Arabic, not to the left, as in Bangla. Yet the prosody

was that of much of Bangla folklore; the legend was recounted in the verse

form called dwipodi poyar — with rhymed couplets in which each line is of

roughly twelve syllables, each with break, or caesura, towards the middle.

The booklet was written by a Muslim, whose name was given simply as Abdur-

Rahim. By the usual literary standards the work did not have great literary

merit. Although the lines rhymed, in a kind of doggerel fashion, they did not

appear to be verse; they flowed into each other, being broken only by slashes

and asterisks. In other words they looked like prose and read like verse, a

strange hybrid, I thought at first, and then it occurred to me that no, this was

something remarkable and wonderful—prose that had mounted the ladder of

metre in order to ascend above the prosaic.

‘When was this book written?’ I asked Horen. ‘Do you know?’

‘Oh it’s old,’ said Horen. ‘Very, very old.’ (247)

Despite the ambiguous nature of the document’s antiquity, Nirmal speculates about

the approximate time of its origin:

It struck me that this legend had perhaps taken shape in the late nineteenth or

early twentieth century, just as new waves of settlers were moving into the tide

country. And was it possible that this accounted for the way it was formed,

from elements of legend and scripture, from the near and the far, Bangla and

Arabic?

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How could it be otherwise? For this I have seen confirmed many times, that

the mudbanks of the tide country are shaped not only by rivers of silt, but also

by rivers of language: Bengali, English, Arabic, Hindi, Arkanese and who

knows what else? Flowing into o0ne another they create a proliferation of

small worlds that hang suspended in the flow. And so it dawned on me: the

tide country’s faith is something like one of its great mohanas, a meeting not

just of many rivers, but a roundabout people can use to pass in many

directions—from country to country and even between faiths and religions.

(247)

The metaphor of the river within the novel encapsulates the interspersing of lives of

individuals driven by various waves of experience to shores different from their

ancestral terrains. Just as Nirmal’s belief in the disintegration of class barriers brings

him close to Kusum, a generation later Piya repeats this pattern with Kusum’s son

Fokir. Piya naively believes she can do away Bengali/English interpretation in her

interaction with Fokir.

At a very early stage of their meeting, Kanai’s ears “tuned to the nuances of the

spoken language” (12) detect Piya’s ignorance of the local language. When

questioned how she will establish alternate linguistic means of communication with

the local Bengali speakers whose knowledge and lore are vital for her research, Piya

responds:

“I’ll do what I usually do...I’ll try to wing it. Anyway, in my line of work

there’s not much need to talk.” (11)

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When Kanai further points out the incongruity of her unfamiliarity with Bangla

despite bearing a Bangla name, Piya draws on her American upbringing to excuse

herself: “I grew up in Seattle. I was so little when I left India that I never had a chance

to learn.” (12)

Later in the novel, Kanai’s aunt Nilima also questions Piya’s inability to converse in

Bangla:

Just as a matter of interest: why is it your parents never taught you any

Bangla?

‘My mother tried a little,’ said Piya. ‘But I was not an eager student. And as

for my father, I think he had some doubts.’

‘Doubts? About teaching you his language?’

‘Yes,’ said Piya. ‘...my father has all these theories about immigrants and

refuges. He believes that Indians—Bengalis in particular—don’t travel well

because their eyes are always turned backwards, towards home. When we

moved to America, he decided he wasn’t going to make that mistake: he was

going to try to fit in.’ (249-250)

As a result of this ‘desire to fit in’, Piya’s father consciously refrained from teaching

Piya to speak in Bangla. Her parents’ attempts to blend in their chosen home as

naturalised Americans significantly impacts Piya’s development during her

childhood. Reminiscing about the efforts of her parents to adapt to their new

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surroundings, Piya describes her mother as “frail and beautiful” as an orchid who

“should never have strayed too far from home” to Seattle where she had “no friends,

no servants, no job, no life.” (219) In contrast, Piya remembers her father as “the

perfect immigrant—driven, hard-working, successful” and “busy getting on with his

career” (219).

Up to a certain extent, Piya successfully negotiates her linguistic disability to

communicate with Fokir. During her initial mapping of the dolphins’ habitat with

Fokir’s help, Piya is pleasantly surprised to see the fisherman using that opportunity

to fish for crabs.

...it had proved possible for two such different people to pursue their own ends

simultaneously—people who could not exchange a word with each other and

had no idea what was going on in one another’s head—was far more than

surprising: it seemed almost miraculous. And nor was she the only one to

remark on this:....he too was amazed by the seamless intertwining of their

pleasures and their purposes. (141)

However, language definitely becomes a hindrance when Piya finds it necessary to

communicate complex instructions to Fokir. When trying to explain to Fokir where to

position his boat, she resorts to pictorial diagrams to put across her ideas. However,

the difference in their cultural background hinders Piya’s effort to communicate her

ideas to the illiterate fisherman:

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In the past, she had always used a triangular skirt to distinguish her stick

women from her men—but this didn’t quite make sense in a situation where

the man was in a lungi and the woman in pants. (139)

The realisation of this handicap eventually makes Piya take Kanai on board with her

as interpreter between her and Fokir during her second trip. Kanai interprets for Piya

only for a limited period of her expedition, because at a certain point he concludes she

no longer requires his services: “I think you'll be able to manage perfectly well

without a translator” (333). Kanai withdraws from his role as a translator for Piya

after he witnesses how Piya and Fokir communicate with each other intuitively across

the language and cultural divide that separates them:

And all that while, you couldn't understand a word he was saying, could you?

No (…) but you know what? There was so much in common between us it

didn't matter. (268)

In contrast to the intuitive communication between Piya and Fokir, linguistic

communication between Piya and Kanai is also challenged when upon Piya’s request

for an explication of the meaning of a traditional song that Fokir is chanting, Kanai

replies:

‘… this is beyond my power … the metre is too complicated. I can't do it.’

(309)

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Later, in what he intends as a farewell letter to Piya, Kanai elaborates the

complications of the inadequacy of language as a medium of translation: “You asked

me what Fokir was singing and I said I couldn't translate it: it was too difficult. And

that was no more than the truth, for in those words there was a history that is not just

his own but also of this place, the tide country” (354). Although Kanai knows both

Bangla and English and is a professional translator, he fails to help Piya understand

the meaning of the song because of Piya’s ignorance of not only the language but also

the history of the tide country. Kanai feels that a mere translation of the literal

meaning of the Bangla words into English is insufficient to enable Piya comprehend

the significance of the song.

On the other hand, Piya’s communication with Fokir is not absolutely devoid of the

necessity of language. Notwithstanding their inability to communicate with each

other using linguistic structures, Piya ventures out into the unfamiliar terrain of the

tide country with Fokir on his boat. Soon however, the need to establish a minimal

communication with her guide compels Piya to try to learn the Bangla words for

certain objects by gesturing and pointing to them:

After Piya had dressed and changed, she crawled back to the front of the boat

with the chequered towel in her hands. She tried to ask Fokir the name of the

fabric, but her gestures of inquiry elicited only a raised eyebrow and a puzzled

frown. This was so expected, for he had so far shown little interest in pointing

to things and telling her their Bengali names. She had been somewhat

intrigued by this for, in her experience, people almost automatically went

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through a ritual of naming when they were with a stranger of another

language. Fokir was an exception in that he had made no such attempts—so it

was scarcely surprising that he should be puzzled by interest in the word for

the towel.

But she persisted, making signs and gestures until finally he understood.

‘Gamchha,’ he said laconically, and of course, that was it; she had known it

all along: Gamchha, gamchha. (93)

The word “gamcha” that Piya had ‘known all along’ but forgotten acts as a bridge

that reminds her of her past:

How do you lose a word? Does it vanish into your memory, like an old toy in

a cupboard, and lie hidden in the cobwebs and dust, waiting to be cleaned out

or rediscovered? (93)

This incident demonstrates that despite Kanai’s doubts about Piya’s familiarity with

the language, Bangla is not as strange for her as it appears initially. This language is

intimately intertwined with some of the unpleasant memories of her childhood as

Bangla is the language that Piya’s parents used.

There was a time once when the Bengali language was an angry flood trying

to break down her door. She would crawl into a wardrobe and lock herself in,

stuffing her ears to shut out those sounds. But a door was no defence against

her parents’ voices: it was in that language that they fought, and the sounds of

their quarrels would always find ways of trickling in, under the door and

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through the cracks, the level rising until she thought she would drown in the

flood. Their voices had a way of finding her, no matter how well she hid. The

accumulated resentments of their life were always phrased in that language, so

that for her, its sound had come to represent the music of unhappiness. As she

lay curled in the cupboard, she would dream of washing her head of those

sounds; she wanted words with the heft of stainless steel, sounds that had been

boiled clean, like a surgeon’s instruments, tools with nothing attached except

meanings that could be looked up in a dictionary—empty of pain and memory

and inwardness. (93-94)

Piya’s association of the language with her parents’ quarrels, their “accumulated

resentments” and “the music of unhappiness” explain her gradual estrangement from

Bangla in favour of English. By ‘sterilising’ her mind of the sound of the Bangla

words and concentrating strictly on their lexical meaning, she learns to cope with the

painful associations those words evoked in her.

Looking back through the lens of memory, however, Piya is no longer sure of the

language her mother, shortly after being diagnosed with cervical cancer, used in her

daily interactions with her daughter:

Her mother’s voice would greet her as soon as she let herself into the flat, on

coming home from school: ‘Come Piya, come and sit.’ It was strange that she

could not remember the sound of those words (were they in English or

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Bengali?) but she could perfectly recall the meaning, the intent, the voice. She

would go in and find her mother curled up in bed, dressed in an old sari... (94)

The mother’s nostalgia for the landscapes where she had spent her own childhood is

passed onto the daughter through stories of the “happier life”:

It was only then, sitting beside her [Piya’s mother], looking towards Puget

Sound, that she [Piya] learnt that her mother had spent a part of her girlhood

staring at a view of the river—the Brahmaputra, which had bordered on the

Assam tea estate where her father had been manager. Resting her eyes on the

sound, she would tell stories of another, happier life, of playing in sunlit

gardens, of cruises on the river. (95)

The linguistic and cultural estrangements that Piya went through in her early life

continue to disturb her and confuse her about her “heritage”.

Later, when Piya was in graduate school, people had sometimes asked her if

her interest in river dolphins had anything to do with her family history. The

suggestion never failed to annoy her, not just because she resented the

implication that her interest had been determined by her parentage, but also

because it bore no relation to the truth. And this was that neither her father nor

her mother had ever thought to tell her about any aspect of her Indian

‘heritage’ that would have held her interest—all they ever spoke of was

history, family, duty, language.

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They had said much about Calcutta, for instance, yet had never thought to

mention that the first known specimen of Oracella brevirostris was found

there, that strange cousin of the majestic killer whales of Puget Sound. (95)

Piya’s annoyance and resentment at the equation drawn between her choice of a

profession and her ethnicity highlight the dislocation of her identity. Even during her

graduate programme at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California, Piya’s

small build that led to her being nicknamed ‘the little East Indian Girl’ and ‘a minnow

among the whale-watchers’ set her apart from her contemporaries (74).. Unlike her

parents’ who draw sustenance from their memories of Calcutta and Assam as distinct

landscapes they grew up in, Piya is unable to ‘locate’ herself vis-a-vis those

unfamiliar sites. Though unwilling to admit it, the only way that Piya is able to relate

to Calcutta, the city of her birth (12), is through her chosen subject of study, but when

other people point out this fact, Piya’s discomfort becomes evident. In reality, Piya’s

interest in choosing to be a field biologist developed not only for its intellectual

content but due to the life it offered “because it allowed her to be on her own, to have

no fixed address, to be far from the familiar, while still being a part of a loyal bur

loose-knit community” (126).

Paradoxically, this profession which makes her a “habitual peripatetic” (314) also

forces her to reconcile with solitude. When Kanai gently prods her: “Do cetologists

have private lives?” (311), Piya alludes to her necessity for constant travel as one of

the major hindrances that professional women like her face to sustain and nurture

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relationships. She tells Kanai of her brief affair with a Cambodian man Rath who for

a short time led Piya to believe that “she was going to become one of those rare

exceptions among female field biologists—one who’d had the good fortune to fall in

love with the right man in the right place.” (313) Her disillusionment when Rath

deserts her and marries someone else behind her back increases when she realizes that

he had laid bare the intimate details of her life to his acquaintances all over the town.

However, this disillusionment becomes complete only when she eventually compares

notes with her friends and colleagues:

All women, all doing research in field biology. They just laughed when they

heard my story. They’d all been through something similar. It was as if what

I’d been through wasn’t even my own story—just a script we were all doomed

to live out. That’s just how it is, they said: this is what your life’s going to be

like. (314)

In another incident when Piya questions Kanai’s passive compliance with the

villagers to burn a tiger alive, Kanai in his counter argument tries to share the blame

equally with Piya:

‘Because, we are complicit in this, Piya; that’s why.’

Piya dissociated herself with a shake of her head ‘I don’t see how I’m

complicit.’

‘Because it was people like you,’ said Kanai, ‘who made a push to protect the

wildlife here, without regard for the human costs. And I’m complicit because

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people like me –Indians of my class that is—have chosen to hide these costs,

basically in order to curry favour with their Western patrons. (301)

Piya retorts back by highlighting the “human cost” she has endured while dedicating

her life to the study and conservation of wildlife:

‘Kanai, tell me, do you see anything easy about what I do? Look at me: I have

no home, no money and no prospects. My friends are thousands of kilometres

away and I get to see them maybe once a year, if I’m lucky. And that’s the

least of it. On top of that is the knowledge that what I’m doing is more or less

futile.’ (302)

Ironically the same incident also makes Piya temporarily distance herself from Fokir

because she is unable to process Fokir’s approval of the killing of the tiger. However,

except this one instance, Piya depends on Fokir’s extraordinary abilities as an

observer (268) and his intimate knowledge of the terrain to trace the routes and map

the patterns of the movement of the Gangetic dolphins during her research.

The descriptions of the Sundarban in the novel provide a considerable gateway into

the issues of memory, identity and the malleable capacity of the dislocated

individuals’ sensibility. Against the backdrop of a terrain where “the boundaries

between land and water are always mutating, always unpredictable” (7), Ghosh takes

up for exploration a vast field of human relationships, testing both their possibilities

and their limits as the characters seek to cross multiple barriers - the barriers of

language, religion and social class, those between human beings and nature, between

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traditional and cosmopolitan India, between urban and rural, between India and the

larger world. Throughout the novel, the tension between global and local is

articulated through the characters—globalisation is embodied by the Americanised

Piya using hi-tech devices that connect her to the satellites of the Global Positioning

System, local identity is symbolised by Fokir and his knowledge of the landscape and

folklore of the Sundarbans, whereas Kanai, the Delhi-resident, part-globalised

modern entrepreneur, shifts uncertainly in the liminal territory in between.

Both Kanai and Fokir are drawn towards Piya. Kanai is confident of his skill in

handling women. He believes that he possessed “the true conoisseur’s ability to both

praise and appraise women” (3) and on first sighting Piya at the Dhakuria platform,

he is “intrigued by the way she held herself, by the unaccustomed delineation of her

stance” (3). The second time Kanai meets Piya in Lusibari, he tells her very clearly

that for a lasting relationship with a woman, “I’d say someone like you would be

much more to my taste.” (220)

On the eve of Piya’s departure for her second expedition on Horen’s boat, Kanai’s

feelings for Piya resurface:

Piya raised her hand to her earlobe in the gesture that Kanai had noticed

before. That movement made her seem at once as graceful as a dancer and as

vulnerable as a child and it made Kanai’s heart stop. He could not bear to

think that she would be leaving the next day. (231)

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His desire for Piya’s proximity compels him to convince Piya to let him accompany

her as an interpreter. Even Nilima detects his infatuation and gently warns Piya of her

nephew’s intentions:

‘...Fond as I am of my nephew, I feel I should tell you that he’s one of those

men who likes to think of himself as being irresistible to the other sex...I

don’t know how you describe that kind of man nowadays, my dear—but in

my time we used to call them “fast”.’ (251)

Kanai’s growing attachment for Piya makes him resent Fokir’s intrusive presence

near her. Time and again, he tries to intrude upon Piya’s companionship with Fokir

by pointing out their differences:

He’s a fisherman and you are a scientist. What you see as fauna he sees as

food....Piya, there’s nothing in common between you at all. You’re from

different worlds, different planets. (268)

Observing Piya doing her work by gazing at the water through her binoculars, Kanai

is reminded of the passion with which he studied other languages except for the fact

now “that desire was incarnated in the woman who was standing before him, in the

bow, a language made flesh” (269). Growing empathy with Piya and an

understanding of the difficulties of the nature of her work makes Kanai learn to look

deeper than Piya’s external features and see her for the person she really was.

Her containment and her usual economy with words had prevented him from

acknowledging, even to himself, her true extraordinariness: she was not just

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his equal in mind and imagination; her spirit and heart were larger than his

own. (315)

Kanai’s illusion of seeing a tiger while stranded alone on island of Garjontala for a

while effected a significant change in him and acted as a catalyst for his sudden desire

to go back to his familiar world. However, his attachment for Piya does not diminish

and before he parts ways with her, he extends to her an invitation to visit him in New

Delhi. When she enquires for a reason behind the invitation he replies: “...It’s just that

I want to see you again. And I want you to see me—on my own ground, in the place

where I live” (335).

Faced with the earnestness of his appeal, Piya, for the first time, answers Kanai’s

query of a future possibility of sharing their lives together. Firmly but gently, Piya

dissuades Kanai’s romantic involvement with her leaving no room for doubt:

She reached over to touch his arm. ‘Listen, Kanai,’ she said. ‘I hear what

you’re saying. And believe me I appreciate it; I appreciate everything you

have done and I wish you the best. I’m sure one day you’ll meet the woman

who’s right for you. But I don’t think I’m the one.’ (335)

On the other hand, Kanai’s suspicion about Fokir’s feelings for Piya is stoked by

Moyna who requests him to speak to her husband on her behalf. Moyna perceives

Kanai’s command over languages and his intermediary role as a translator between

Piya and Fokir as an instrument of power that she desires to wield to destroy Piya’s

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intimacy with Fokir: “Kanai-babu, there’s no one else who knows how to speak to

both of them—to her and to him. It’s you who stands between them: whatever they

say to each other will go through your ears and your lips. But for you neither of them

will know what is in the mind of the other. Their words will be in your hands and you

can make them mean what you will” (257).

Whereas Moyna perceives the Fokir’s attraction towards Piya as the ‘natural’

desirability of a man for a woman, to Kanai, the possibility of Piya reciprocating

Fokir’s feelings appears ‘unnatural’ because of the difference of language, education,

wealth and social standing between the cetologist and the fisherman. Therefore,

Kanai is perplexed by Moyna’s insecurity and when he questions the basis of her

suspicion, she replies: “She’s a woman...And he’s a man” (258).

Kanai glared at her [Moyna] in the dark. ‘I am a man too, Moyna,’ he said. ‘If

she had to choose between me and Fokir, whom do you think it would be?’

(258)

Kanai’s response to Moyna highlights his inability to transcend social barriers like his

uncle, Nirmal. He is forced out of his complacency only Horen compels him to accept

the truth of Fokir’s love for Piya by drawing the equation between Fokir-Piya-Kanai

relationship with Horen-Kusum-Nirmal a generation ago.

Horen points out to Kanai that the same parameters that separate Kanai and Fokir

were also present in his own relation with Nirmal. However, these differences

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between Horen and Nirmal did not prevent the two men from falling in love with the

same woman, Kusum: “...he, like me, could not stop thinking of her: she had entered

his blood just as she had mine. At her name he would come alive, his step would

change, words would come pouring out of him. He was a man of many words, your

uncle—and I had very few. I knew he was wooing her with his stories and tales—I

had nothing to give her but my presence, but in the end it was me she chose” (363).

Unlike Kusum, who, amongst her two suitors, chose the one who was her social

equal, Piya decisively declined the interest expressed in her by the one who was

apparently more compatible with her. Despite Kanai’s repeated and persistent efforts

to highlight the differences between Piya and Fokir, Piya’s refusal to encourage

Kanai’s attention remains constant.

Only once, Piya concurs with Kanai’s opinion of Fokir when she is shocked at

Fokir’s endorsement of the burning of the tiger. Except for this one isolated instance,

Piya’s relationship with Fokir evolves on the basis of trust and camaraderie despite

the apparent barrier of language between them. Piya feels comfortable and ‘at home’

on the non-place of Fokir’s boat. Similarly, Fokir takes care of her needs by creating

private space on his boat for Piya to bathe in. His ultimate sacrifice during the storm

to keep her alive is reciprocated by Piya when she decides to name her project after

Fokir to honour his memory at the end of the narrative.

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In a large measure, it is due to Fokir’s direct or indirect assistance that Piya learns to

negotiate two things, namely food and clothes, which initially prevented her from

blending in with the locale of the Sundarbans. The sight and smell of the food that

Fokir cooks on the boat reminds Piya of her home and her mother:

Now, as she sat watching Fokir at the stove, she knew he would offer her

some of his food and she also knew she would refuse. And yet, even as she

recoiled from the smell, she could not tear her eyes from his flying fingers: it

was as though she were a child again...it was her mother’s hands she was

watching, as they flew between those colours and the flames. They were

almost lost to her, those images of the past, and nowhere had she less expected

to see them than on this boat.

There was a time when those were the smells of home; she would sniff them

on her mother... (96)

Later, Fokir instructs Moyna about Piya’s food preferences and thus helps Piya come

to terms with her surroundings in Lusibari.

Like Piya, food also operates as a metaphor of identity and home for both Kanai and

Nilima. The Bengali meals that Moyna cooks for Kanai contrasts sharply with the

Mughlai cuisine that Kanai has become accustomed to due to his stay in New Delhi.

Even cold, the food was delicious. Kanai’s cook was from Lucknow and his

table at home, in New Delhi, tended to be set with elaborately Mughlai dishes.

It was a long time since he had eaten simple Bengali food and the tastes

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seemed to explode in his head. At the end of the meal he was giddily replete.

(143)

Kanai’s aunt Nilima goes a step further as she correlates food with home: “For me

home is wherever I can brew a pot of good tea” (400).

Other than the local food that Piya finds unpalatable, her clothes too set her apart

from the rest of the inhabitants of the tide country. Till she loses her clothes in the

storm, Piya continues to wear pants. However, after the storm, she is forced by

necessity to wear sarees borrowed from the newly widowed Moyna: sarees of

“...colourful reds, yellows and greens—for Moyna had given her those of her own

clothes that she herself would no longer wear” (394). In addition, Moyna’s trimmed

hair, symbolising her widowhood, increased her resemblance to Piya so much so that

Nilima occasionally mistook one for the other till she saw their faces. Thus, Piya’s

adoption, though somewhat involuntarily, of the saree, the garment distinctly

associated with women in the tide country, helps her to blend in with the locale.

Fokir, thus, becomes a medium who helps Piya to construct her home in the tide

country. Unable to relate to any specific locale as her abode, home for Piya, “is where

the Oracella are” (400). By mediating between the dolphins of the Sunderbans and

Piya, Fokir not only stirs in her the memories of her early life and her parents, but

also guides her so that she is able learn the seasonal rhythms of her subject of study.

Thus, together with her consciously chosen vocation, the retention of the ancestral

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heritage in Piya’s memory helps her gain a sense of a self rootedness in her new

surroundings.

Unlike her parents, who, though unhappy, had shared a home and a daughter between

them, Piya is left with nothing but the isolation the nature of her work makes

mandatory for her. Apart from Piya’s parents, the trope of unfulfilled relationships

also surfaces in the childless marriage of Nirmal and Nilima as well as the Moyna-

Fokir marriage that gave birth to their son Tutul. When Piya talks about her role as a

messenger between her occasionally estranged parents, Nilima accepts the lack of the

mediating role of a child in her marriage with Nirmal: “’…It’s a terrible thing, my

dear, when a husband and wife can’t speak to each other. But your parents were

lucky: at least they had you to run between them.” (250) Nilima continues that Kanai

had provisionally played that role for her during his first visit to Lusibari but his

desire for material success prevented him from making any further effort in this

direction.

Tutul also plays the role of the mediator for his father Fokir vis-à-vis Moyna and

Piya. Tutul is the binding force in Fokir’s relationship with Moyna. Even their last

argument centers on the child when Moyna throws away Fokir’s last gift to his son, a

sting-ray’s tail, as she drags away the unwilling child to school (). Though unaware of

it at that moment, that was the last time Moyna and Tutul saw Fokir alive.

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Similarly, Tutul’s presence on Fokir’s boat encourages Piya to trust Fokir when she

meets them both for the first time:

This made her all the grateful for the child’s presence: she knew that if it

weren’t for him it would have been much harder for her to put her trust in a

complete stranger as she had done. It was true, then, that in a way the boy was

her protector. The recognition of this made her do something that did not

come easily. She was not given to displays of affection but now, in a brief

gesture of gratitude, she opened her arms and gave the boy a hug. (64)

As the novel reaches its culmination despite its open-ended conclusion, the narrative

and conceptual fibres of the novel’s plot intermingle to provide the text with a

provisional closure. Paralleling the image of the river goddess Ganga’s entanglement

in the heavenly braid of Lord Shiva resulting in “an immense rope of water, unfurling

through a wide and thirsty plain” (6) Nirmal’s narrative of the past and the present

narrative timeframe of Piya and Kanai, the urban and the rural backgrounds of the

characters, the global and the local identities, and the linguistic and the scientific

structures described in text all blend together like the “mohona,” the local word for

the confluence of two or more rivers/channels (7) in the tide country.

The ‘mohona-like’ structure of the The Hungry Tide resembles the flow of the rivers

across the tide country exemplifying Mark Twain’s definition of a narrative in his

autobiography:

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With the pen in one's hand, narrative is a difficult art; narrative should flow as

flows the brook down through the hills and the leafy woodlands, its course

changed by every boulder it comes across and by every grass-clad gravelly

spur that projects into its path; its surface broken, but its course not stayed by

rocks and gravel on the bottom in the shoal places; a brook that never goes

straight for a minute, but goes, and goes briskly, sometimes ungrammatically,

and sometimes fetching a horseshoe three quarters of a mile around, and at the

end of the circuit flowing within a yard of the path it traversed an hour before;

but always going, and always following at least one law, always loyal to that

law, the law of the narrative, which has no law.

With a pen in hand the narrative stream is a canal; it moves slowly, smoothly,

decorously, sleepily, it has no blemish except that it is all blemish. It is too

literary, too prim, too nice; the gait and style and movement are not suited to

narrative. That canal stream is always reflecting; it is its nature, it can't help it.

Its slick shiny surface is interested in everything it passes along the banks--

cows, foliage, flowers, everything. And so it wastes a lot of time in

reflections. (Twain 2010: 224).

The narrative winds up at the moment when both Piya and Kanai are situated at the

threshold of their respective search for identity vis-a vis the tide country. Initially, the

visits of these characters to the tide country had been induced by their desire to lay

claim to their respective texts, Kanai, to read Nirmal’s journal and Piya, to ‘map’ the

patterns of the Oracella’s behavior, with no intention to engage themselves in any

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permanent relationship with the landscape. For some time, both succeeded in

accessing their respective texts till the storm claimed Nirmal’s journal and Piya’s

equipments and datasheets. It is in the aftermath of this loss, both Kanai and Piya

learn to salvage the remnants of their respective texts. Kanai intends to take recourse

to his memory to reconstruct Nirmal’s journal (387) and Piya decides to base her

future research on the route maps of her expedition with Fokir that have survived in

the records of GPS satellites (398).

Therefore, home, for both Kanai and Piya, becomes a reconstruction and a

reinterpretation of their experiences in the Sundarbans. In order to facilitate their

respective endeavours, both Kanai and Piya decide to move their bases away from

New Delhi and Seattle respectively. As Nilima tells Piya, Kanai restructures his

company to shift his residence indefinitely from New Delhi to Kolkata to be near the

tide country and visit often (399). For Piya, however, the change is more drastic

because she begins to refer to Lusibari as her ‘home’ (399) and makes arrangements

to base herself indefinitely in the Sundarbans to further her research. Piya’s eventual

acceptance of her Indian roots over her American nationality is unmistakably

perceptible in the contrast between her inevitable annoyance at any reference to her

ethnicity earlier to her reaffirmation of her origins to legalize her stay in Sundarbans

at the end of the novel: “…I’m eligible for a card that would allow me to stay on

indefinitely—it’s something to do with being a person of Indian origin” (398).

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In a review in The New York Times, Pankaj Mishra describes Ghosh as one of few

postcolonial writers “to have expressed in his work a developing awareness of the

aspirations, defeats and disappointments of colonized peoples as they figure out their

place in the world.” (Mishra 2001 web). The morphing of both Piya and Kanai into

changed individuals who inevitably get drawn into a long lasting relationship with

Sundarban landscape despite their initial intentions to the contrary. This problematic

assertion of identity that results from the shifting figurations of landscape which in

turn destabilises the very idea of homeland makes Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide

a postcolonial text, a product and reflection of a globalised world where migrations,

whether anchored in individual choice or not, does not diminish the desire to locate

the ‘self’ in a ‘home’.

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Things exist rooted in the flesh,

Stone, tree and flower….Space and time

Are not the mathematics that your will

Imposes, but a green calendar

Your heart observes; how else could you

Find your way home or know when to die….

—R. S. Thomas, “Green Categories”