Sunday, December 11, 2011

The Hungry Tide did Gulp

So I finally finished reading 'The Hungry Tide' by Amitav Ghosh a couple of days back and I'm still reliving the memories of the book. Not my memories, but the memories of the characters, because that is what Ghosh did, he made me believe that they were real, that what they felt was something that could truly be procured in real life, that it could have been one of us in the situation and that is how we would have reacted.

I must say, the start of the book is a drag which led me to shove it back in the library for a few days, after which my guilt picked on me to force myself to read it and to my surprise, though the book did not pick up the pace, it did pick up my senses with it's to and fro narration between two totally different lives and circumstances. One one hand you see Piya, the Indian American trying to find out ways for her dolphin research and Kanai, the translator, stuck with a diary written by his uncle about one of his visits to an island and his relation with the people and the place.

Amitav Ghosh transforms your view of Bengal, by giving stunning descriptions of the land and most importantly the emotions that play throughout the whole book. Love, is the reigning emotion/feeling in the book in different forms and different times and between different kinds of people. Though many of them don't work out, it's the expression of the love that kept me bound to the book, wanting to know more. By the end of the book, I actually began to believe it as a real-made-fiction story. 
The weaving of the different years that he talks about has been done with such a classy grasp that at no point did I lose thread of what the story was about, though there are several sub-stories in the story too. (Also I can't help if you have a bad memory because there are quite some details to remember)
Ultimately, it was the bond that Piya shared with Fokir, the crab-catcher rather than the one between Piya and Kanai (which Piya kept dodging) or even the seeming love that Nirmal (Kanai's Uncle) had for Kusum, that had me by my tenterhooks. It showed that you don't need a language to communicate when you make a bond with someone. You just need to feel it the other person shall know. This was what Piya and Fokir shared, an unspeakable (literally!) bond which kept them connected even through the roughest of times and Fokir's sacrifice for Piya. In the end, the book doesn't reveal whether he loved her or vice versa but as a reader it gave me enough to formulate my own opinion. For me it was the kind of unattainable love that they shared that was the winning stroke of the book which Kanai's story, though interesting, didn't mount to the same height.
The book ends on a happy, or rather a revitalizing note having gone through a turbulent time. The play of emotions that Ghosh did was something astonishing as he weaved love, fear, bitterness, pain, agony, sorrow, happiness, relief and passion all in 400 pages, without the slightest hint of boredom or out of the point situation.