FIRST PUBLISHED IN 2005, Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide is a novel that explores the meeting of different cultural attitudes in the Sundarbans, a mangrove and tidal region at the border of India and Bangladesh, where the freshwater of the river Ganges encounters the seawaters of the Gulf of Bengal. The confluence of sea and river currents in the countless channels composing the delta creates a profuse mangrove ecosystem where biological diversity thrives. In this essay, I argue that in Ghosh's novel the ecosystem works as both a matrix for transculturation and as a chronotope that underlies the narrative structure. In this matrix, rivers flow into the tide to create the ecosystem; foreign cultures flow into the local culture to create the cultural system; and, in their experiencing of the Sundarbans, foreign focalizers – those through which the data of the novel are narrationally filtered – create the narrative system.