E-Paper
Tides and eddies of humans
All night long, I have been asking myself, what is it I am afraid of? Now, with the rising of the sun, I have understood it.
The Hungry Tide
Amitav Ghosh
Ravi Dayal
2004
Fiction
Pages:
Price: Rs 350
ISBN 0007141777
Paperback
All night long, I have been asking myself, what is it I am afraid of? Now, with the rising of the sun, I have understood what it is: I am afraid because I know that after the storm passes, the events that have preceded its coming will be forgotten. No one knows better than I how skilful the tide country is in silting over its past.
‘Nature’ is a funny word. At least in fiction, it conjures up pastoral pleasures, the beauty of landscapes and the hidden mysteries of the physical world. But strangely enough, once you qualify the word with ‘human’, the picture changes. We suddenly find ourselves dealing with souls, hearts and minds — all entrenched in the physical world, but not quite in the way that, say, the English Romantics had it.
The basic story of Amitav Ghosh’s new novel is about a people (only gradually do we find them turning into persons) who either inhabit ‘The Tide Country’, the mangrove forest region marked by countless riverbanks and ‘floating’ islands of the Sunderbans in southern Bengal, and those who find themselves transported to it, sucked into it, and finally spewed out. For both types of characters —– locals and ‘aliens’ — the natural surroundings mould their relationships with other humans. So in a way, The Hungry Tide is really about how intrinsically Nature and Human Nature hungrily feed off each other.
At the start we are introduced to the Bengali city-slicker businessman, Kanai Dutt. He once had an interest in Things Literature, but now uses his gift for languages for more practical purposes: to head a professional translating company and make money. This ‘sophisticated’ man finds himself reluctantly returning to a place he last visited as a boy, Lusibari, “the farthest of the inhabited islands” in the Sunderbans, after his aunt, Nilima, calls him to investigate a mysterious packet that her husband, Nirmal, left behind for him after his death.
The other protagonist is the American-Bengali cetologist from Seattle, Piyali Roy, who is travelling to the Sunderbans to conduct a survey on the local population of the Irrawady dolphin. We are introduced to her as a self-sufficient woman whose ignorance of the Bengali language doesn’t stop her from her intellectual quest.
Both Kanai and Piyali separate after their brief encounter on the train but find themselves first, playing out the unsuspecting roles of sympathetic outsiders, and then, even more unknowingly, as malevolent intruders.
But it is in the characters of Nilima and Nirmal that the reader finds Ghosh creating two of his finest characters. Nilima, who runs a trust in Lusibari and is known as ‘Mashima’ (an honorific ‘aunt’) strikes us as a latter-day Bengali Prospero in a tempestuous island, surrounded by Ariels and Calibans. Her life is dedicated to working for the Tide People, something that her failed writer, Left-intellectual-husband found particularly ‘boojwa’. Nirmal comes alive only through the writings he has left behind for Kanai. In him, we find an idealist howling against the forces of human nature and Nature, trying to latch on to a revolution he has always craved for but in which he has no real role to play.
It is through Nirmal that we find Ghosh reaching a level of seeing Nature and human nature unparalelled since Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhaya’s Aranyak, that classic story of guilt and longing for the forestlands of Lobtulia-bahair. Through Nirmal, Ghosh writes: “This is a land half-submerged at high tide: it is only in falling that the water gives birth to the forest. To look upon this strange parturition, midwived by the moon, is to know why the name ‘tide country’ is not just right but necessary. For as with Rilke’s catkins hanging from the hazel and the spring rain upon the dark earth, when we behold the lowering tide
‘we, who have always thought of joy
as rising... feel the emotion
that almost amazes us
when a happy thing falls.’
In Nirmal, we find a tragic figure who wishes to engage with a world but cannot.
There are the shadowy figures of the boatman Fokir (for whom Piya has emotions Kanai cannot fathom), Moyna (his knowledge-worshipping wife) and the girl-grown-up-mother of Fokir, Kusum, for whom a young Kanai harboured feelings that remain as confused as his feelings towards the world of tigers, crocodiles, rivers and fishermen.
Ghosh is least effective when he delves in the cultural conundrum of Piya. Narrating the ‘alienness’ of an American-Bengali in rural Bengal never descends to the level of ABCD literature that is so much in fashion these days. But a certain degree of banality does creep in as we are made witness to Piya’s fumbling with communication and culture that doesn’t really click with the depth of the rest of the book.
This book is about confusion, misunderstandings, understandings and changes — all of which are played out in a world that’s always-changing, ever-silting, and in which the prey and the pursuer constantly switch positions. It is perhaps apt that the name of this rich book bears a resemblance to that other tale of confusion, The Hungry Stone (which incidentally Ghosh has translated). While the past is cast in stone in Tagore’s short story, in Ghosh’s novel the past drowns the present in which the future furiously swims to stay afloat.
