Perhaps it’s the tendency of humans to behave in a godly, pure, selfless way in certain situations and this culminates as the goddess BonBibi. Bon Bibi as a mental image can be located as present within various characters of the novel. Fokir disentangles Piya from the toxic, masculine forest guard and this can be connected with the myth of Bon Bibi coming to the rescue of the feeble Duk hey. “Love” here trespasses all social norms and is acknowledged as something that rises above all possible explanations and bondages. What binds them together is faith on destiny and the acceptance of the eternal doom of death that lingers in the air.

Surrounded by water on all sides, the people who lands up in these islands are themselves refugees with no particular identity of their own. Ghosh has treated the tidal country as an altogether different world that perhaps geographically has no connection with the rest of the universe.

However, for Piya who has a little idea about religion and whose presence in the island is like a suckling infant who is mesmerised and grapples with everything that she comes across. Facts as such confuses Kanai as he lives in Delhi amidst a mass of educationally evolved human beings who gnaws at the question of religious superiority. The custom of venerating the idol of Bon Bibi at Garjontola is truly mesmerising as Horen reads out scripts in Arabic with repeated mentions of Allah and challenging it stands the idol of Bon Bibi (we are aware of the fact that Muslims don’t have the consuetude of idol worshipping). It is in this tidal country that religion is challenged in the way that the God worshipped and verses (mantras) read is an amalgamation of Hindu and Muslim principles. It’s nature that controls human lives and takes the form of Bon Bibi a supernatural God deciding when to toss and create human lives.

The novel treats nature as its cardinal theme. The three protagonists of the novel are Piya an American who has arrived to the Sundarbans in all hopes to research about the habituation of the Irrawaddy Dolphins, Kanai the nephew of Nirmal and Nilima whose arrival builds the atmosphere and sets the tone of the gale and Fokir a fisherman who represents nature in every form, his voice is the voice of nature trying to communicate with the mortals.

Author of the hungry tide