On names, representational fiction and the Ganges Delta
A love letter to habitats // A love letter to namesakes
My name is Piyali, and I often go by Peels (an alias bestowed upon me by my high school classmates in an effort to “make [me] appear less intimidating”). At the time, I hated it. Then, I immigrated and autocorrect happened, which made it a clutch nickname to have. It would take me 5 years to learn that my name rhymed with a Yiddish dessert. Today, I introduce myself with both names, knowing that I will respond to both equally (here’s a helpful guide if you don’t know what to call me).
Piyalis are prolific in two very narrow sections of society: rural Bengal and Bengali women older than 80 (+/- 5 years). Yet, we are all difficult to find. In 2014, when Google Groups was still trying to be a social media platform, I was added to a Circle consisting of 273 other Piyalis and one dude. In 2021, some guy added me to a Twitter list of Piyalis which had a much narrower and targeted focus. There were 23 of us, but each of us had an excess of a thousand Twitter followers. In both instances, I was not the woman they had in mind, a feeling I share often when I consume media. To find my representation in American pop culture will still take a while (unless I somehow become the first), but I hadn’t even encountered Piyalis in the Bollywood mainstream for all 17 years of my life there.
Until I came across The Hungry Tide by Amitava Ghosh. The book is set in the Sundarban Forest, which spans the entire Ganges Delta. The region is the home habitat of the Bengal Tiger, which is the only man-eating tiger species in the world. The mangroves try their best to hold on to the shifting silt, but the waters also create their own forms of illusion there as islands continue to disappear and reappear with the tide. The region is also politically sensitive as it contains the international boundary between Bangladesh and India.
The name Piyali, whose etymology vaguely points to the Sanskrit word for “wood”, is the local name of a tree species and the registered name of one of the tributaries that rush to meet the ocean here. It is even graced by a small train station of its own.
Pi(y)ali station and I have different anglicized spellings of our name, but the Bengali spelling is the same.
The protagonist of The Hungry Tide is a Piyali, and like me, she is based primarily out of the US. She also has a nickname (“Piya”), which I judge to be boring because it does not create the same intrigue as Peels (“Peels of what?”). From here on, I will refer to her as Book-Piyali. Book-Piyali and I became very close over the four days during which we both navigated the complex endangered ecosystem and its social and literal waters.
Unfortunately, there is very little to tether us to each other besides the name and the fact that we were both occupying a geographic location. Book-Piyali is a cetologist from Seattle whose PhD thesis is studying the Gangetic dolphin. She is petite, with close-cropped hair, doesn’t speak a word of Bangla and does not hire a translator. She’s also incredibly disconnected from reality and blindly unaware of her privilege (“typical American”) and develops romantic feelings for a local fisherman called Fokir.
Fokir is a man of the waters. He is illiterate and all he does is help his son skip school so that he can continue to go on perilous fishing and forest adventures with him. He is the character who has the least to say in the book, and he is portrayed as some sort of exotic local savage, which makes any romanticization of him deeply uncomfortable. Book-Piyali is extremely attracted to this man of nature and his natural talent for detecting dolphin pools, and thinks that the silences they share together brew the kind of romance that transcends language.
Girl, please.
And, I’m on this safari-style ferry with nearly 30 other noisy retirees, having photographed enough of the wildlife and nature to feel like all horizons bleed into the same. Our ferry-tour service prepares our meals and they are expert navigators of the tides. The main crew captain, Hajrat, is a man in his late forties. The rest of the crew are all several standard deviations younger than him. Hajrat’s second-in-command is a young, smart and social upstart called Sabeer.
Sabeer seems like a smooth talker, and he probably is, with the way he befriends almost everyone on-board. At 23, he is the oldest unmarried man in his village. His next-in-command is a 16 year old boy who has recently married. Sabeer has seen enough tigers in his life to be bored of them. He likes to style suit vests over a lungi, and apparently uses instagram. He wishes to marry when he has established a tourism/ferry business of his own. He prefers “industrial contracts” rather than these touristy-boat assignments (wildlife photographers or group ferry-trips like ours). By “industrial contracts”, he means assignments where he is paid about USD 100 to ship agricultural machines over the waters to the habitable lands. But he likes chatting with tourists.
It’s apparent to Sabeer and the locals that I am Not From There. My Bangla is sufficient, but not polished enough. I have to use the English “thank you” everywhere because using Bangla instantly makes me sound formal and stand-offish. My Hindi is in shambles. Some of them suspect I might not even be Indian, in the accent with which English words creep up into my speech and requests. Another flattering, although unexpected, angle to my exotic appeal is that everyone struggles to pin my age. The rest of the retirees ask me how years before I graduate, or if corrected, assume that my employment is recent.
When I got annoyed by the book, I bugged my cousin brother, who, at 26, is the closest to me in age. He has sporadic Youtube access, which makes me insanely jealous as he has other ways to occupy his time. I brought a deck of cards and promised to teach him to play bridge, as we had hours to pass in the darkness before we ventured back into the mainlands. That entire paragraph I wrote about Sabeer’s life is excerpted from a conversation that Sabeer had with my cousin and I just sort of hung around.
As soon as I brought out the deck, Sabeer asked if he could play. Sabeer rarely made direct conversation with me, partly because speaking to an unmarried woman unchaperoned is a cultural taboo and partly because of the language barrier. We were short of players and my brother had yet to learn, so I let him. Sabeer was fast, aggressive and his play was exceptional. He had a talent for playing bridge that will perhaps take me many years to master. Soon, some of the other uncles and aunties on this trip wanted to join the game. Sabeer and I are squished into a tiny corner in a room on the boat, playing the same hand, so as to accommodate the new players. He is wiry, so easy to accommodate, but pushed closer to me than he would have found comfortable.
Later, I wanted to acknowledge to Sabeer that he played well and I genuinely appreciated that he spent his time with us. I made the mistake of thanking him aloud in front of the crew. The other boys looked at him as if I had kissed him. Sabeer accepted the compliment with the kind of smile that indicates that he knew he was really good at what he did.
Book-Piyali entertains the romantic fantasy of escaping the real world and stealing Fokir away from his wife. I, on the other hand, am trying to balance the delicate, embarrassing and amusing situation that my appreciation has caused.
Sabeer avoided making eye-contact with me for the next day. I learned that he asked my mother why I “only speak English.” This is hyperbole as I maintain that my Bangla is not that bad. He learns that I am a cockroach of the concrete jungle of New York. He probably knows what my life looks like via instagram (which is very popular among the boys on the crew) and in much the same way I found myself living in a surreal National Geographic series, he has no idea how to conceptualize what my life there is actually like.
The main purpose of our trip was to witness tigers in the wild; an event which was considered an evil omen for the locals. The human-tiger interaction is terrible because, while nobody wants to die in the encounter, tigers have international protections on their lives. Book-Piyali for example, stumbles upon the horrific reality that sometimes tigers who attack the villagers are killed. She argues that the tiger is an endangered species, that we should protect nature.
Whereas the impoverished people who live there are forced to enter the forest-land to harvest honey and put themselves at risk of death. Historically, victims of political skirmishes or state-sanctioned massacres (thanks, Colonialism) are dumped in the rivers. One of the many reasons why the Royal Bengal Tiger is the only tiger with a taste for human meat is because a few generations of baby tigers have practiced hunting on those corpses, and thus have acquired the taste. Book-Piyali’s naivete was annoying.
On the day we were traveling the river bordering Bangladesh, we made a stop at a floating customs office (literally on a ship) to report the headcount of humans entering the forest territory or show appropriate permits if the boat intended to dock in Bangladesh territory. My cousin and I discovered that the ferry had an anchor on-board. We were guessing how much it weighed. I told my brother that it must take at least three or four of them to move the anchor. We watched Sabeer instead drop and haul in the anchor all by himself.
“Well, he must be super fit,” I remarked in surprise.
“Are you looking at Sabeer differently?” my cousin teases.
The concept is preposterous, but the book I’m trying to get through is trying to make the concept feel real. All of which is profoundly hilarious. At 28, I feel far too old for him.
Meanwhile, I survived a saltwater crocodile, which at a juvenile 5 years old, is 10 ft long and terrifyingly fast on the silt beds. It went chasing after this baby egret that I was trying to take a picture for instagram. Anything with legs is slower on silt because the mud is squelchy. The saltwater crocodile slides blazingly fast out of the water, prepared to get its airborne snack. I flee for the boat as I have seen the face of God up close, and I would not have made it if Sabeer and crew didn’t help hoist me. My entire family jokes that I am too skinny to make a reasonable snack for it anyway. Sabeer and the boys find the entire episode comical and he made a gallant effort to change the topic when I was back on board. On the final day of our trip, the most Sabeer does is return my goodbye wave. I am relieved to be back on solid ground again.
Once we are headed back to civilization, on the train journey home, my uncle serves as a physical barrier between me and another gaggle of teenage boys. This assortment of four is anywhere between the ages of 14 to 17 (highly eligible bachelors in their local communities?). They spent most of the shared 40 minute ride playing daredevil and dangled themselves out of the train over the tracks to feel the wind in their hair. They hooted and hollered openly at the village girls working at the rice fields, many of whom ignored them, presumably used to this style of catcalling.
When I ask my uncle why is it that people are looking at me, he says, “because you are a tall, dark and handsome stranger.” When these truants jump off the tracks before the train stops, one of them blows me a flying kiss. I laughed in their faces and along with them, because that’s what you do when you’re a Piyali in the Sundarban, rightfully reminded of your place in the ecosystem.
For a full review of what I thought of The Hungry Tide, here’s my review on Goodreads.