The Hungry Tide

When Piya awakes, the wind is picking up. As the hours pass, Fokir at the oars, aiming for the island, “the dark stain in the sky seemed to spread faster and faster” (304). The waves grow larger, and eventually the boat’s plywood edges begin to break. She ties her equipment to the hood with a rope, feeling the “boat groaning as if it were going to come apart at any minute” (306). They reach the island, but Kanai and Horen are not there. The little boat’s hood is torn away by the wind, and all of Piya’s equipment vanishes in the waves.

Meanwhile, Kanai and Horen’s boat is quickly filling with water. Kanai goes down below to siphon water out with a bucket. They approach Lusibari—Horen is continuing on to his own shelter, but Kanai decides he must stay with his aunt. He will have to wade to shore, leaving all his belongings behind. He wraps the journal in plastic to keep it with him. As he wades to shore, he is knocked over by the wind and loses the notebook in the water.

Fokir beaches the boat on the island. Piya grabs the remaining supplies. They move deeper into the island. Fokir picks out a tree and gestures for Piya to climb. He helps her tie herself to a high-up branch, then does the same for himself. To Piya, the wind is so strong that it is “as if the earth itself had begun to move” (311).

Kanai reaches the Lusibari shore and runs for the hospital. The other Lusibari villagers are all headed there as well. He sees Moyna and Tutul and tells Moyna what has happened to Piya and Fokir. This understandably upsets her. Kanai tries to reassure her, and she takes him up to see his aunt.

As Piya and Fokir sit in the tree, “whirling coconut palms and spinning tree trunks” fly by them. As the wind increases, the Garjontola shrine itself is picked up and flung across the sky. Piya and Fokir hold each other, “their skin joined by a thin membrane of sweat” (314). Then, Piya sees what she thinks is a wall, but turns out to be a gigantic tidal wave coming in from the sea. Her mind goes blank as the wave envelops them—she estimates it is nine feet high. She tries to untie herself from the tree, sure she will drown, but Fokir prevents her. The wave crests above their heads and diminishes. The water falls to just below their feet, and they can breathe again.

Kanai goes to see his aunt. He urges her to go upstairs in the hospital, as she might drown in the guesthouse. They fill her suitcases with her most important belongings and run for the hospital. Once they are safe and dry, he tells her that he lost notebook. She is saddened, and asks why Nirmal didn’t leave the notebook to her. Kanai says Nirmal feared she wouldn’t understand. He says he will put the notebook back together from memory. Nilima asks that if he does, he include her side of the story, too—the practical side. The island fills with water, “like a saucer tipped on its side” (318).

Back on Garjontola, Piya sees a “heaving carpet of leaves” on the water (319). The island itself is completely underwater. In the distance, she sees a tiger drag itself from the water and onto the top branches of a tree. The storm circles back, and Fokir and Piya tie themselves to the tree again. But this time, with the wind coming from a different direction, the tree cannot shelter them. Fokir blocks her from the storm with his body—the storm “had fused them together and made them one” (321).

The next day, Horen, Kanai, and Moyna go in search of Piya and Fokir. After hours, they spot Fokir’s boat in the distance—but there is only one person aboard. It is Piya. Moyna begins to break her marital bangles, signaling her widowhood. She faints. They reach Piya and take her on board. She tells them Fokir was crushed by something heavy and that he’d said Moyna and Tutul’s names before he died. His body was still tied to the tree, to keep it from scavenging animals. They retrieve the body and bring it back to Lusibari, where “a great number attended the cremation” (323). Piya stays with Moyna and Tutul, unable to communicate what passed between her and Fokir in his final moments. “She remembered how she had tried to find the words to remind him of how richly he was loved—and once again, as so often before, he had seemed to understand her, even without words” (323).

A month after the cyclone, Nilima sits in her office. A nurse tells her that Piya has just come off the ferry, and Nilima is shocked. Piya had stayed for a couple weeks after the storm, “a kind of human wraith…uncommunicative” (324). She had not thought Piya would ever return to Lusibari, despite forming an odd, grief-bound friendship with Moyna. Kanai had asked his aunt to let Piya process her trauma in her own way, but the day after he returned to New Delhi, Piya left, as well.

Piya arrives at Nilima’s door. For the past weeks, she explains, she was staying with her aunt in Kolkata. She posted information on the Internet about Fokir’s death and was able to raise money to help support Moyna and Tutul. Moreover, her report on the dolphins gained interest from the scientific community. With Nilima’s permission, she would like to set up her research project out of Lusibari. She would live on the top floor of the guesthouse with Moyna, helping with administrative duties. She has worked out every detail, from funding to visas. She intends to name her project Fokir. Piya reveals that her GPS device survived the storm, hidden in her pocket. It contains all of her routes with Fokir and “represents decades of work and volumes of knowledge”—Fokir’s knowledge (327).

Nilima reveals that Kanai has been busy, too. He has taken time off his job to write the story of Nirmal and his notebook. And in two days, he will be in Lusibari again. Piya says she will be excited to see Kanai come “home.” Nilima brews them a pot of tea.