On the banks of the Padma in a fishing village once part of East Bengal, the boatman Kuber and his family live at the river's mercy—good days bring hilsa and a full meal, bad days bring hunger. Within this close-knit, struggling community, friendship, betrayal, and desire quietly take hold.
When daily life offers no way up, a powerful outsider promising a better place far away gains easy hold over the poor and unwary. The pull of such offers comes from hopelessness at home, not from what is actually known about the destination. They move through ordinary lives like hidden currents, quiet and sudden.
A poor man can know a wild river or forest better than anyone and still be unable to protect his own home from it. Skill at surviving the wilderness does not add up to security, because the dangers that strike the poor are small, constant and close at hand. The book drives this home with irony, naming a penniless fisherman after the god of wealth.
Fishermen hand over their catch to be shipped to the city, but payment does not reliably come back when it is owed. People living hand to mouth cannot afford to protest, because a quarrel with the buyer could cost them the next season's work. Each new child arrives as one more mouth to feed rather than as simple joy.
People living on a great river build their lives on ground the river itself laid down, and it can swallow that ground again without warning. Floods and erosion make every settlement provisional, so fear and flight are always one wet season away. Human passions and quarrels play out right alongside these natural forces, never separate from them.
A man worn down by a grinding everyday life keeps a hidden inner life of longing, built around someone livelier than the people he must provide for. These private dreams are a refuge from poverty as much as a desire. Greed, betrayal and helplessness sit side by side with real hope, joy and love in the same lives.