Audiobook Review: The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh

A mysterious place of water, mud, tigers, crocodiles and dolphins stars in The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh, read by Firdous Bamji, and reviewed by Star Lawrence.

The Sunderbans, on the border between India and Bangladesh, sounds like a half-mythical fairyland of goddesses, tigers and marvelous creatures of yore, but this story is set in both the present day and a generation before. Ghosh weaves together the two journeys of Nirmal, a Rilke-loving revolutionary wannabee, and Piya, an Indian-born American scientist studying fresh-water dolphins in this watery world.

The real star of the show is this archipelago of islands and rivers fed by the tides, rising and falling each day. The mangrove forests are home to huge tigers, who attack and kill several inhabitants each month. Giant crocs bask on the banks of the heaving rivers. And the Irrawaddy dolphins, friendly as piglets, poke their heads from the stream to regard their chronicler.

Nirmal’s story is one of an idealist married to a social activist. He finally retires from teaching and, half in love with a young widow with a son, gets involved in an illegal takeover of one of the islands by Bangledeshi refugees. The second story comes a generation later, when that single mother’s son, Fokir, also married to a no-nonsense, modern woman, meets Piya, the American cetologist studying dolphins. Common to both stories in Nirmal’s nephew, Kanai, a rich businessman and translator, who is also attracted to Piya.

The love stories tremble beneath the surface, barely rising visibly in the same way the rivers rise with the tides each day.

I am a 21st century woman sitting in the desert in Chandler, AZ, and this story gently tugged me in. I lived for a few days in a world where you can’t sleep untroubled on the deck of a boat anchored in the middle of a river. Tigers can swim for miles.

The reader, Firdous Bamji, is flatout fantastic—keeping the timbre and accents of each character separate, no mean feat.

As the residents of Sunderban learn to walk in calf-deep mud on the tidal beaches of their waterways, I learned to almost smell and taste the fires, the musky tiger fur, and the understated yearning of hearts trying to connect and never quite touching before being borne away on the tides.