The Hungry Tide

by Amitav Ghosh

When this Scotsman looked upon the crab-covered shores of the tide country, he saw not mud but something that shone brighter than gold.

“S’Daniel’s schooling,” Nirmal said, “was in Scotland, which was a harsh and rocky place, cold and unforgiving. In school his teachers taught him that life’s most important lesson is ‘labor conquers everything,’ even rocks and stones if need be—even mud. As with many of his countrymen, a time came when Daniel Hamilton had to leave his native land to seek his fortune, and what better place to do that than India? He came to Calcutta and joined MacKinnon and McKenzie, a company with which he had a family connection. This company sold tickets for the P and O shipping line, which was then one of the largest in the world. Young Daniel worked hard and sold many, many tickets: first class, second class, third class, steerage. For every ship that sailed from Calcutta there were hundreds of tickets to be sold and only one ticket agent. Soon S’Daniel was the head of the company and master of an immense fortune, one of the richest men in India. He was, in other words, what we call a monopolikapitalist. Another man might have taken his money and left—or spent it all on palaces and luxury. But not S’Daniel.”

He learned that of all the hazards of the Sundarbans none is more dangerous than the Forest Department, which treats the area as its own kingdom.

In 1903 he bought ten thousand acres of the tide country from the British sarkar

“See!” he said. “The words could have been written by Marx himself: it is just the labor theory of value.

“It was a dream, Kanai,” said Nirmal. “What he wanted was no different from what dreamers have always wanted. He wanted to build a place where no one would exploit anyone and people would live together without petty social distinctions and differences. He dreamed of a place where men and women could be farmers in the morning, poets in the afternoon and carpenters in the evening.”

Nirmal was at first horrified at the thought of being associated with an enterprise founded by a leading capitalist, but after much pleading from Nilima he eventually agreed to go to Gosaba for an exploratory visit. They traveled down to the estate together and their stay happened to coincide with the annual celebration of the founder’s birthday. They discovered, to their astonishment, that this occasion was observed with many of the ceremonial trappings of a puja. Statues of Sir Daniel, of which there were many scattered around the estate, were garlanded, smeared with vermilion and accorded many other marks of reverence. It was clear that in the eyes of the local people the visionary Scotsman was, if not quite a deity, then certainly a venerated ancestral spirit. In listening to the settlers’ remembrances of the estate’s idealistic founder, Nirmal and Nilima were forced to revise their initial skepticism. It shamed them to think that this man—a foreigner, a burra sahib, a rich capitalist—had taken it upon himself to address the issue

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

“that as a young man Nirmal was in love with the idea of revolution. Men like that, even when they turn their backs on their party and their comrades, can never let go of the idea: it’s the secret god that rules their hearts. It is what makes them come alive; they revel in the danger, the exquisite pain. It is to them what childbirth is to a woman, or war to a mercenary.”

who would have thought that it would be so intensely satisfying to have your future resolved, to know what you were going to be doing next year and the year after that until who knew when?

It would be enough; as an alibi for a life, it would do; she would not need to apologize for how she had spent her time on this earth.

the kind of tenderness we sometimes feel when we come across childhood pictures of ourselves—photographs that reveal all too unguardedly the desires people spend a lifetime learning to dissimulate.

Each slow turn of the world carries such disinherited ones to whom neither the past nor the future belongs.

“She was like an orchid in a way, frail and beautiful and dependent on the love and labor of many, many people. She was the kind of person who should never have strayed too far from home.

“Amra kara? Bastuhara.” Who are we? We are the dispossessed. How strange it was to hear this plaintive cry wafting across the water. It seemed at that moment not to be a shout of defiance but rather a question being addressed to the very heavens, not just for themselves but on behalf of a bewildered humankind. Who, indeed, are we?

Rilke said ‘life is lived in transformation,’

“That words are like the winds that blow ripples on the water’s surface. The river itself flows beneath, unseen and unheard.”

“Kanai, the dreamers have everyone to speak for them,” she said. “But those who’re patient, those who try to be strong, who try to build things—no one ever sees any poetry in that, do they?”