What is the colour of that knowledge? Nobody knows, nobody can ever know, not even in memory, because there are moments in time that are not knowable: nobody can ever know what it was like to be young and intelligent in the summer of 1939 in London or Berlin. But not that other infinitely more important reality: the fact that they knew that even walking down that street, that evening, they knew what was coming-not the details, nor the timing perhaps, but they knew, all four of them, that their world, and in all probability they themselves, would not survive the war. The realities of the bombs and torpedoes and the dying was easy enough to imagine-mere events, after all, recorded in thousands of films and photographs and comic books. Full Title: The Hungry Tide When Written: 2002-2004 Where Written: New York When Published: 2004 Literary Period: Contemporary Genre: Environmental fiction postcolonial Indian literature Setting: The Sundarbans, 1950 to the early 2000s Climax: The cyclone hits Garjontola and Lusibari, killing Fokir in the process. “Which was more real, their dirty bathtubs and shared bedrooms or that other reality, waiting one week away? Most of all he would despair because he could not imagine what it would be like to confront the most real of their realities: that within two years three of the four of them would be dead.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |