Tides of Salt and Iron: "the water knew him"

The Bay of Bengal, 1884. Arjun Muthurajan has spent forty-two years learning to read the water - its moods, its warnings, its silences. He knows the Coromandel Coast's trading routes, the Palk Strait's narrows, the particular patience required of a man who lives by the sea. He has built a life from this knowledge: a ship, a business, a family, a crew he trusts with his life.When an unmarked vessel appears on the horizon and armed men board the Maragatham under a flag no one recognises, Arjun loses all of it in an afternoon. The Suvarnadvipa Trading Authority - a private colonial power operating in the grey zones of maritime law - seizes his ship, his cargo, and his crew, and locks them in a sea fort far from any coast he can name.What they cannot seize is the quality of his attention.Tides of Salt and Iron is a novel about what it means to navigate without a chart - through confinement, through uncertainty, through the long work of finding a way home.The water knew him. He intended to use that.