Amitav writes closer to his origins in this one, and the writing has a subtle flavour of Bengali (or Bangalie or Bangla) literature - quite appropriately too, since it is about coastal region of the land where the great river - after Ganga meets Brahmaputra forming a humongous river flowing through the north-south axis of the land - goes to meet the ocean in several branches, hundreds of them, with estuaries forming and swallowing up coastal islands all the time, where mangrove forests emerge in short time and are submerged at high tide.
How people live in this region is a mystery for those that have never experienced living in low lands, and for that matter it is not that different in any low region of a great river. Netherlands has her dikes protecting the country from the ocean at north; and the Mississippi delta has the unique city of New Orleans with its unique style of cemeteries - graves have to be not under but above ground, for one thing - and other characteristics peculiar to features common to all low lying regions of great river delta around the earth.
When storms hit, these people are affected by not dozens or hundreds but just as often by thousands or mind boggling hundreds of thousands. One wonders why they live there when they know this will happen for sure in another few years yet again, and in this book one finds why.
For the love of the land, this land, is why - it is this simple. If they are resettled elsewhere, another land just as loved by others who belong there, these people are not happy to be safer, they want to return, they dream of their own river delta country and they steal a march to walk back hundreds of miles at nights to return to resettle on another island.
The region is a biopreserve for many many species that are unique to this region often, some too that exist elsewhere but just as precious for all that. Royal Bengal Tiger among the former, and species of riverine or general dolphins for examples of latter. Some dolphin species are common to river and ocean but choose an environment and stick to it, while some belong to rivers.
The author describes the history and geography of the land along with the species and the people that belong here and know their land, the ins and outs of the islands and what one might encounter, having lived here for generations, albeit illiterate. We see it through prism of a young cetologist who is here for research and is amazed at the knowledge of the local fisherman, illiterate, who saves her life more than once - giving his own in the final such event, though it is of necessity and not a choice. There are townspeople who are visitors or settlers discovering the land, choosing to live here and helping the locals one way or another, in another strand of the story that weaves with the main. It all forms a delta of a story like a river reaching its finalé, mirroring the region the story is set in.
The author neatly avoids mentioning the cataclysmic events that were set in motion by the storms of 1970, when hundreds of thousands of people lost their lives in the eastern part of this region, after having actually described the storm and the fact of losses of life. That was when finally Bangladesh separated (from the two part fractured nation that had separated from India as Pakistan in '47), having had enough of being dominated and exploited by the western part for most of their history as a joint nation, after a prolonged two year struggle involving much massacre and worse before arriving at freedom. But of course, he stays off most of the struggles of this nature except the leftist thought stream of the region in this one, and even that is fleetingly given here only to refer to the history of the region and the struggles of the people who settled and live here.
The portrait of this land is lovingly sketched and goes straight to heart. At the end, the characters one forgets mostly except perhaps the mostly mute fisherman, the child of his and the mother who returned to live here, and they are sort of off in corners while the main characters through whom one one sees the story are, while not unimportant, recede with the storm. One approves of the women who tenaciously decide to stay here although of affluent and more city backgrounds - one from Calcutta, another from US where she has grown up and returned to her birth land only for research as a professional cetologist to begin with - but it is the local people personified in the fisherman and his mother and his child one remembers. They, after all, are one with the region, the islands, the river and its hundred fingers holding the islands as sand grains while it reaches out to the ocean in south of the land.
These are some of the books I read during last half a century or so, and some of the thoughts, questions, reactions and insights, emotions - and so forth -, evoked on reading them, either then or later sometime during the interim years and decades, or even thinking over now, that are summed up here while trying to record my impressions about what I read.
Serene, Reflecting
Life Recedes