I just finished reading 'The Hungry Tide' by Amitav Ghosh. Among the Indian authors who have become very famous in international English literature, Ghosh is a noted one.
The present novel is about two people who hold their ancestry to Bengali families but are brought up in different societies. The male protagonist 'Kanai' is born and brought up in Calcutta and relocated to Delhi for professional reasons. His female counterpart 'Piya' is brought up in Seattle by the parents whose only reason to stay together was their daughter. The story unfolds from these two strangers, who are both to some extent 'self-centered', making their headway to Canning and then to further south in the tide country of 'Sunderban'. While Kanai was visiting his aunt Nilima, Piya was on her research on river dolphins and their habitat in the tide country. Ghosh spells his mastery in story-telling by going back and forth between the events happening to Piya and Kanai as they proceeded through different routes but to meet at the end at Lusibari, one of the two hypothetical islands in the story which resembles slightly to Gosaba in reality.
The story takes its turn through different human emotions and the uncanny similarity in behavior of two pair of individuals Kanai-Moyna and Piya-Fokir, even though they are really from different worlds which never leads to one another. In fact, in the story Moyna is married to Fokir, who again happens to be the son of Kusum, a childhood friend of Kanai. The backbone of the story is Piya's expedition for the riverine dolphins, inter twinned with Kanai's search for Nirmal's (Nilima's husband) involvements with the settlers in one of the islands in Sunderban, against whom the Government had taken brutal action in the name of wild-life preservation. While Kanai found that most that involvement of Nirmal was related to his soft corner for Kusum, Piya discovered that her findings about dolphins matches with the colloquial god 'bon-bibi' and her legendary messengers.
The novel proceeds through the turns of human emotions and rationalism, often putting both in dramatic confrontations. Finally, a devastating cyclone and a near death experience for both Piya and Kanai yields them in changing their way of life and accommodating others emotion in their life. The story leaves us in a open end situation, where the reader might keep extrapolating and interpreting the next moves in their own way.
Having never read Ghosh before, this was a refreshing experience for me. Not only he details the plots in his writings but also enriches them by using real incidences and references. After reading this, I became to some extent familiar with the tide country which is just a couple of hours away from Calcutta.
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