The Hungry Tide

In our legends it is said that the goddess Ganga's descent from the heavens would have split the earth had Lord Shiva not tamed her torrent by tying it into his ash-smeared locks....there is a point where the braid becomes undone; where Lord Shiva's matted hair is washed apart into a vast, knotted tangle. Once past that point the river throws off its bindings and separates into hundreds, maybe thousands, of tangled strands...N this created an immense archipelago of islands, interposed between the sea and plains of Bengal, called the Sunderbans. An unheard legend for me. And the point that hooked me on to this book by Amitav Ghosh.

There are so many unsaid stories, forgotten people, parts of our country to which we ourselves have become alien. India for us, does not go into the deltas of the Sunderbans where there is no separation of fresh and saline, where numerous islands emerge and sink in a matter of hours, the abode of the Royal Bengal tigers. Nobody knows to whom, the uninhabitable islands belong to, whether to the Govt of India or to the Govt of Bangladesh. Not a soul ever cared about the people who lived there in one of the many islands where human habitation existed, no party raised their problems and they lived their small uneventful lives in this land of interwoven shore and tide in the Republic of India.

And suddenly when a group of homeless and helpless refugees, victims who fled from Bangladesh at the time of communal riots, inhabit one such island and try to make a living in uninhabitable conditions, there comes the Government with allegation of unlawful subjugation of land, social groups who feel that the abode of the Royal Bengal Tigers have been encroached, the big men of the world who felt that the wonderful ecosystem of the Sunderbans were at risk from this group of hapless men, women and children.

A wonderful story, seen through the eyes of Kanai Dutt, a man of the modern world and a translator by profession and Piya Roy, a young NRI cetologist (one who studies of whales, dolphins and related mammals). I have just captured some insight given by the book and unsettling thoughts that beat me when 50 odd pages of the book still remain to be read.