The Hungry Tide

Kanai is one the novel’s protagonists, an upper-class, city-bred translator who travels to Lusibari to visit his aunt. Kanai finds himself comfortable in a society that rewards his class status and gender, and though he feels twinges of guilt at using these to his advantage, he pushes through. Piya regards him as “self-satisfied” and full of “casual self-importance” (8), but with a crucial “glimmer of irony” (12).

Kanai frequently views others as little more than extensions of his own life and choices. He speaks to Piya overconfidently when he first meets her, certain that her foreignness allows him to be condescending and smug. When he meets Moyna, a poor striver who shares only her nationality with Kanai, he regards her as similar to himself, though he is an upper-class, educated male from the city and has no real idea what her life is like. Piya sees this trait in Kanai: “It was important for him to believe that his values were, at the bottom, egalitarian, liberal, meritocratic” (182). Kanai is, on the positive side, extremely intelligent and observant, able to notice small details that others might miss. Over the course of the novel, he undergoes a transformation in which he begins to see himself not as the center of the universe, but as simply one planet in orbit.