The Hungry Tide

Piya awakes in the middle of the night and finds Kanai rereading the journal. She asks about it, but cannot read it, as it is written in Bengali. He tells her about his uncle and the kind of person he was—equally in love with poetry and Marxism. He recounts one of his uncle’s favorite stories about Canning, the train station town. Canning was named after an English lord who sought to build a magnificent port town to rival any in India. As he had the town built, “the Matla [River] lay still and waited” (235). A shipping inspector named Piddington predicted that the port would not last fifteen years. Everyone thought he was crazy, but it only took five years for the town to be destroyed, not by a large storm, but by a small one—a small one that caused a river surge, just as Piddington had predicted.

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