“I would produce my secret treasure, a present sent to me by a former student – a map of the sea-floor, made by geologists. In the reversed relief of this map [the students] would see with their own eyes that the Ganga does not come to an end after it flows into the Bay of Bengal. It joins with the Brahmaputra in scouring a long, clearly marked channel along the floor of the bay. The map would reveal to them what is otherwise hidden under water: and this is that the course of this underwater river exceeds by far the length of the river’s overland channel.
‘Look, comrades, look,’ I would say. ‘This map shows that in geology, as in myth, there is a visible Ganga and a hidden Ganga: one flows on land and one beneath the water. Put them together and you have what is by hard the greatest of the earth’s rivers’ (181).
The Hungry Tide, by Amitav Ghosh