The Hungry Tide

In the Sundarbans, the vast tide country of mangrove islands where the Ganges meets the sea, an American cetologist, Piya, a Delhi translator, Kanai, and an illiterate fisherman, Fokir, are drawn together among the shifting channels, the tigers and the river dolphins. Ghosh maps the real delta: the railhead at Canning, the island settlement of Lusibari and its trust, the tidal creeks where the dolphins gather, and Morichjhanpi, where refugees were massacred in 1979.

Kanai

Canning (the railhead)

Part 1

At Canning, the last outpost of the railway, the city ends and the water begins. Kanai, a smooth Delhi translator, and Piya, an American scientist come to study the river dolphins, arrive on the same train and part, their paths set to cross again far out among the islands.

Part 1

explicit Canning, the real railhead town at the edge of the tide country, is where travellers from Kolkata leave the train and take to boats; both Kanai and Piya begin their journeys into the Sundarbans here.

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Kanai

Lusibari (the trust)

Part 1

Kanai comes to Lusibari at his aunt's request to read the notebook his dead uncle Nirmal left him. The island, with its embankments, its hospital and its precarious life between tiger and tide, is the human centre of the book, a foothold of settlement in a world the water is always trying to take back.

Part 1

inspired by The island of Lusibari, where Kanai's aunt Nilima runs a hospital and trust, is invented but drawn from the real settled islands of the Sundarbans around Gosaba; sited in that inhabited part of the tide country.

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