-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Beyond the Book | Readalikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
A Novel
by Amitav Ghosh
Book Reviewed by:
While climbing in, he noticed that the foreign girl was not without
some experience in travel: she hefted her two huge backpacks herself,
brushing aside the half-dozen porters who were hovering around her. There
was a strength in her limbs that belied her diminutive size and wispy build;
she swung the backpacks into the compartment with practiced ease and
pushed her way through a crowd of milling passengers. Briefly he wondered
whether he ought to tell her that there was a special compartment for women.
But she was swept inside and he lost sight of her.
Then the whistle blew and Kanai breasted the crowd himself. On
stepping in he glimpsed a seat and quickly lowered himself into it. He had
been planning to do some reading on this trip and in trying to get his papers
out of his suitcase it struck him that the seat he had found was not
altogether satisfactory. There was not enough light to read by and to his right
there was a woman with a wailing baby: he knew it would be hard to
concentrate if he had to fend off a pair of tiny flying fists. It occurred to
him,
on reflection, that the seat on his left was preferable to his own, being right
beside the window — the only problem was that it was occupied by a man
immersed in a Bengali newspaper. Kanai took a moment to size up the
newspaper reader and saw that he was an elderly and somewhat subdued-
looking person, someone who might well be open to a bit of persuasion.
“Aré moshai, can I just say a word?” Kanai smiled as he bore
down on his neighbor with the full force of his persuasiveness. “If it isn’t all
that important to you, would you mind changing places with me? I have a lot
of work to do and the light is better by the window.”
The newspaper reader goggled in astonishment and for a moment
it seemed he might even protest or resist. But on taking in Kanai’s clothes
and all the other details of his appearance, he underwent a change of mind:
this was clearly someone with a long reach, someone who might be on
familiar terms with policemen, politicians and others of importance. Why
court trouble? He gave in gracefully and made way for Kanai to sit beside the
window.
Kanai was pleased to have achieved his end without a fuss.
Nodding his thanks to the newspaper reader, he resolved to buy him a cup of
tea when a cha’ala next appeared at the window. Then he reached into the
outer flap of his suitcase and pulled out a few sheets of paper covered in
closely written Bengali script. He smoothed the pages over his knees and
began to read.
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. To hear this story is to see the river
in
a certain way: as a heavenly braid, for instance, an immense rope of water,
unfurling through a wide and thirsty plain. That there is a further twist to the
tale becomes apparent only in the final stages of the river’s journey — and
this part of the story always comes as a surprise, because it is never told
and thus never imagined. It is this: there is a point at which the braid comes
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
iinto hundreds, maybe thousands, of tangled strands.
Until you behold it for yourself, it is almost impossible to believe
that here, interposed between the sea and the plains of Bengal, lies an
immense archipelago of islands. But that is what it is: an archipelago,
stretching for almost two hundred miles, from the Hooghly River in West
Bengal to the shores of the Meghna in Bangladesh.
The islands are the trailing threads of India’s fabric, the ragged
fringe of her sari, the ãchol that follows her, half wetted by the sea. They
number in the thousands, these islands. Some are immense and some no
larger than sandbars; some have lasted through recorded history while others
were washed into being just a year or two ago. These islands are the rivers’
restitution, the offerings through which they return to the earth what they have
taken from it, but in such a form as to assert their permanent dominion over
their gift. The rivers’ channels are spread across the land like a fine-mesh
net, creating a terrain where the boundaries between land and water are
always mutating, always unpredictable. Some of these channels are mighty
waterways, so wide across that one shore is invisible from the other; others
are no more than two or three miles long and only a thousand feet across.
Yet each of these channels is a river in its own right, each possessed of its
own strangely evocative name. When these channels meet, it is often in
clusters of four, five or even six: at these confluences, the water stretches to
the far edges of the landscape and the forest dwindles into a distant rumor of
land, echoing back from the horizon. In the language of the place, such a
confluence is spoken of as a mohona — an oddly seductive word, wrapped in
many layers of beguilement.
From The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh pages 3-7. Copyright © 2005 by Amitav Ghosh. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.
 (1).gif)
If we did all the things we are capable of, we would literally astound ourselves
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Can you name the title?
Test your book knowledge with our daily trivia challenge!
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
