Sunderbans in West Bengal is unique in many ways. To begin with Sunderaban means a beautiful forest filled with Sundari trees. The place is a UNESCO Heritage sight and also forms the largest Tiger Reserve and National Park in India. It has a unique terrain of mangrove forests across 56 islands. Its history, and culture are equally unique.

Nestled in the North East corner of Bay of Bengal it is hardly noticed by anyone “until you behold it for yourself, it is almost impossible to believe that here, interposed between the sea and plains of Bengal, lies an immense archipelago of islands, an archipelago stretching for almost three hundred kilometres from the Hooghly river to the shores of Bangladesh. While some of these islands are just sand bars some are immense. 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. There are no borders here to divide fresh water from salt, river from sea. The tides reach as far as three hundred kilometres inland and   everyday thousands of acres of forest disappear underwater only to re-emerge four hours later. The currents are so powerful as to reshape the islands almost daily.

At no moment can human beings have any doubt of the terrain’s hostility to their presence, of its cunningness and resourcefulness, of its determination to   destroy or expel them. Every year dozens of people perish in the embrace of that dense foliage, killed by snakes, tigers and crocodiles.”

It is also called in local parlance the tide country as the semi- diurnal tides which   vary as much as three to four metres play an important role in the quotidian lives of people in the area. This area is also prone to frequent disturbances of weather and storms. Most of the depressions and storms that start in the Bay of Bengal finally head towards this area and hit the coast of Bangladesh wreaking havoc.

This area had also seen a major upheaval between the displaced persons of East Bengal originally settled by the Government in Dandakaranya forests returning to find a home and hearth in Bengal and the Government bowing to the pressure of environmentalists trying to chase them away. This clash later came to be known as “the Morichjhaipi” incident.

The various rivers and tributaries of Hooghly are home to a particular species of Dolphins called Irrawaddy Dolphins, which are of great interest to the Cetologists and Marine Zoologists.

The novel “HUNGRY TIDE” by Amitav Ghosh is set in the Sunderbans and is about the study of the dolphins by an American girl of Bengal origin without any knowledge of the language.

The author, a product of Doon School, St Stephen’s college Delhi, Delhi and Oxford Universities earned his doctorate at Oxford and is now a visiting Professor in the Department of English at Harvard. He had received valuable assistance from Professor Marsh an eminent Cetoligist (specialist in Dolphins), several specialists in Marine Biology, the Tagore Society of Rural Development and a horde of organisations involved with the development of the district and the confrontation between the settlers and the authorities. When the natural story telling abilities of gifted writer and one of the leading novelists of India are added to this plethora of information the end product cannot be anything but a heady mix of brilliant and magical.

The novel with various aspects of science, myth, politics, history, wild life, the vagaries of sea and weather, life and dangers at sea and in the mangroves and finally a fine and delicate interplay of human relationships including muted love all woven together forms a fine tapestry. No wonder the novel turns out to be superb and very engrossing.

It is therefore no wonder that the author received an advance of Rs 44 Lakhs for his novel after this book. I am sure that many aspiring writers must have salivated after hearing of this figure.

After reading the bio data of the author and all those who helped him in writing the novel I thought it would be audacious on my part to review the novel.

I therefore thought that it would be best to quote a few snippets to show the author’s magical prose and his mastery over the language.

“In the language of the place, such a confluence is spoken of as a mohana- an oddly seductive word, wrapped in many layers of beguilement.”

“How do you lose a word? Does it vanish into your memory, like an old toy in a cupboard, and lie hidden in the cobwebs and dust, waiting to be cleaned out or rediscovered?”

“Now it was the darkened islands that looked like lakes of liquid, while the water lay spread across the earth like a vast slick of solid material.”

“Even though her achol was drawn carefully over her head, there was a  restlessness in the tilt of her face that was at odds with the demure draping of her sari.”

“The true tragedy of a routinely spent life is that its wastefulness does not become apparent till it is too late.”

“The two of them Fokir and herself, they could have been boulders or trees for all they knew of each other; and wasn’t it better in a way, more honest that they could not speak? For if you compared it to the ways in which Dolphins’ echoes mirrored the world, speech was only a bag of tricks that fooled you into believing that you could see through the eyes of another being.”

In short the book is a masterpiece which not only interests but also enlightens and educates the reader. I have no hesitation in recommending the book to all aspiring writers and authors to learn the art of storytelling with twists and turns that look almost cinematic and to chamfer up their English prose.

However I find it irresistible to say that the author stretched the details of the scientist’s study of Dolphins a bit too much and at times wrote like an English Professor. I also wonder why he had to use Rahul Bose a cine actor for promotion of his latest book recently when he himself is a superstar.