Summary

Fresh Water and Salt: Kanai and Horen anchor the Megha by Garjontola. At 4 a.m. Kanai goes out on the deck and Horen suggests to him that maybe Fokir does not want to return as he wants to be alone with Piya. When Kanai looks shocked, Horen asks if it is so hard to believe an uneducated man can fall in love. He tells him that, the night before the massacre, while Nirmal was writing in his notebook, he and Kusum had made love on his boat and “…it was as if the barriers of our bodies had melted and we had flowed into each other as the river does with the sea” (364).

Horizons: Piya awakes at daybreak and sees a group of Gangetic dolphins. They are behaving unusually and, as she...