The Hungry Tide

Kanai sees Horen and his grandson, a crewman on the ship, watching the village. It is 3 a.m., and something is happening in the village, “people running along the shore with burning torches” (238). Everyone, including Piya and Fokir, go in the little boat to investigate. On the shore, they see tiger prints. In the village, they discover that the tiger entered the village, killed the water buffalo, and then entered a nearby hut. The village people managed to trap the tiger inside the hut and are systematically slaughtering it. Piya is horrified—“‘you can’t take revenge on an animal!” she says (244). Angered, she breaks a villager’s bloody spear. The crowd turns upon her, but Fokir picks her up and drags her back to the boat as the villagers set the tiger on fire.

The next day, Kanai and Piya speak. He urges her to understand that the villagers—and Fokir—are not ecologists. Tigers are a true danger to them, not a precious endangered species. Piya says that Kanai was right all along. She can never truly understand Fokir, and he can never truly understand her. Just then, Horen tells Piya to hide. Police boats have been spotted, and he doesn’t want them seeing a foreigner on the boat. When the police have left, Kanai fills Piya in: the forest authorities—who turn out to be Piya’s former escorts—heard about a foreigner present at the killing of a tiger. They are very close to the border, and wanted to take Piya into custody and arrest Fokir, whom they recognized. Kanai was able to persuade them otherwise, using his high-up connections. They discuss the tiger further, and Kanai tells Piya that they are both complicit in what happened. Scientists like her pushed for the conservation of tigers, despite their danger to humans in poor, isolated places. Upper class Indians like Kanai are complicit because they ignore the suffering of their lower-class countrymen.

The boat drops anchor—the dolphins have been spotted. Fokir, Piya, and Kanai go into the little boat to track their movements. Piya begins to think that the dolphins recognize her. Kanai is unimpressed by the “phlegmatic, beady-eyed creatures” (251). He asks how Piya came to study these dolphins, and she explains that it was a random assignment as part of an internship. She had gone to Phnom Penh with a conservation team. She encountered a stranded, starving dolphin with whom she developed a near relationship, as she fed it fish. One day, the dolphin disappeared, stolen by someone to be housed in a private aquarium. She decided to devote her life to studying and saving dolphins like the one she had lost.

She asks Kanai about the island they are floating next to. He says it is Garjontola, a secret, sacred place. She asks him to ask Fokir about it, and translate. Fokir tells her, through Kanai, that he has always known the place as Bon Bibi’s sanctuary. The dolphins are his messengers. The night before Fokir met Piya, Kusum had come to him in a dream and told him to come to Garjontola with Tutul. That is why he was on the river when he met Piya.

Piya takes a break from watching the dolphins. She bathes, then drinks tea with Kanai on the big boat’s deck. He asks about her love life, and she says that women like her move around too much to keep a boyfriend. She tells him about her last relationship, when she was in Cambodia studying the dolphins. There, she met a young man named Rath, a local government official. Rath had a little English, and so they talked together of their childhoods—hers in Seattle, his in “a death camp of the Pol Pot era” (257). They slept together repeatedly. After a six-week visit to Hong Kong for a work conference, Piya returned to the little village to find that Rath had taken a wife and transferred to a big city. He had told all the villagers about her life’s “most intimate details” (259). Piya was devastated, but a colleague told her this is exactly how it always goes for women like them. She would be better off on her own. Kanai tells her that isn’t true—she doesn’t have to be alone.

The next day, Piya asks Kanai to go in the boat with Fokir and watch for dolphins. Piya will take a watch elsewhere. That way, they can cover the most “ground,” as it were. He reluctantly agrees. He and Fokir set off, and Fokir quickly spots a dolphin. They track the dolphins near Garjontola, and Fokir notes the signs and tracks of a tiger. Kanai dismisses these, saying he isn’t afraid. Fokir practically dares him to go onto the island, and Kanai agrees, refusing to let his bluff be called. “‘Are you a clean man?’” Fokir asks Kanai (266), telling him that on this island, Bon Bibi can search a man’s heart and show him what he deserves. Kanai steps off the boat onto the island and slips in the mud. Fokir laughs unkindly. Kanai loses his temper, and Fokir decides to leave him on the island alone. “Fokir had brought him here not because he wanted him to die,” Kanai realizes, “but because he wanted him to be judged” (269).

Fokir leaves him, and Kanai becomes entangled in the mangrove branches hear the shore. He is soon “covered in cuts and scratches” (271). When he breaks free, he sees a tiger a hundred feet away, watching him. Terrified, he edges toward the water, where he is rescued by Piya, Fokir, and Horen in the boat. He tells them what he saw, but they say it is impossible. They would have seen a tiger if one had been there, and Kanai would not be alive now.

After Kanai rests and recovers from his scare, Piya brings him up to the deck to see the glowworms in the mangroves. Kanai tells her he will head back to Lusibari in the morning. She protests, but he has made up his mind. He asks Piya to come to stay with him in New Delhi, after she has finished the survey. She turns him down gently, saying she is not the right woman for him. He reveals to her that Moyna is concerned about Piya’s relationship with Fokir.

At dawn, Piya awakes and finds Kanai on the deck. He hands her a large manila envelope and tells her to open it once he’s gone. If she’d like to contact him again, his address is on the front. Fokir and Piya spend the day on the water, but do not spot any dolphins. Horen takes Kanai back to Lusibari. On their way, they spot dozens of fishing boats returning, which is odd, given the early hour. Horen learns from the fishermen that a major storm is approaching—“might even be a cyclone” (282). Kanai is worried for Piya, but Horen assures him they can go back to Garjontola, pick them up, and return to Lusibari before the storm hits. They return to the island, but Piya and Fokir are nowhere to be found.

Out on the water, Piya finally spots a dolphin, congregating with others, in a small pool by the island. She spots the carcass of a baby dolphin on the island’s mudbank, with the injuries suggesting “the dolphin had been hit by the propeller of a fast-moving motorboat” (285). Doubtlessly, it was killed by the forest rangers looking for Piya.

Meanwhile, Horen and Kanai search for Piya and Fokir, to no avail. Horen says they must return to Lusibari, or they will be caught in the storm. Piya and Fokir will have to whether the storm on the island. Kanai asks what a cyclone would be like in such a remote jungle. Horen says Piya and Fokir will need to tie themselves a tree’s upper branches and pray for the best.

At sunset, Piya and Fokir are still several miles from the island. They anchor the boat for the night in a small, calm channel. He fixes them dinner and they eat in silence, with a “pain of a kind that could not be understood because it never had a name” (290). Piya retires to her sleep mat and decides to read what Kanai wrote to her. She opens the envelope. Earlier, Piya had asked Kanai to translate one of Fokir’s songs, and he had demurred, saying it was too difficult. Now, he has written out the story that Fokir was singing, a story of Bon Bibi. In the story, Bon Bibi saves an abandoned child from a demon king who takes the shape of a tiger. She asks Fokir to sing it again and he does.