Real fictions

I felt like I was increasingly more engrossed in this story of stories as it took more and more convoluted paths of narrating "truth" as we know it. The "truth" as we know it can exist in tension with itself, as the narratives of the story conflicts and emerges, and I think Ghosh loves to play into this. There's also the meta-textual aspect of the book. It’s a fiction written in a very real place facing very real problems, many of which are described in the text itself. These are problems told by fictitious people recounting fictitious experiences, yet they are experiences that stand in for a collective whole. I am drawn to the idea that the book can speak so well to something “true” by Ghosh writing a fictional character (Kanai) who reads his fictional uncle’s documentation (Nirmal’s) of the uncle’s retelling of nonfictional histories (of the tide country)—which the uncle locates in a nonfictional place (a British museum)—and “fictional” local myths, all recounted to a fictional child (Fokir). Or, reverse it: a fictional boy learns “fictional” myth and nonfictional history from a fictional character who learned those myths/histories in a nonfictional place, all recounted from a fictional account read by a fictional person in a fiction about a semi-fictional place. We’re being played with here: what’s “real” if the fiction can speak so truly to reality?

“What happened” or what’s “real” is never just that. A narrative of “what happened” emerges from stories, accounts, rumors, whispers, fears, archived documents, and fictional retellings. These switching perspectives that Ghosh gives us, I think, make us unable to say definitively “This is what happened.” We can’t hold onto one truth for too long—Kanai puts down the book, Piya takes her gaze elsewhere. At the same time, we can only see “what happened” through each pair of eyes. There is no unadulterated “Here is what it looks like” narration. It is all sensory input, already interpreted, already situated in the frames of mind. The closest thing to “Here is what it looks like” that we get are through the instances of storytelling—namely Nirmal—where poetry and prose, history and myth, mix together in a way that seems to sound less like “This is what happened” and more like “This is how I have heard it had happened.”