The Sea Is Bound

At twenty minutes to one, Anthonimuthu walks barefoot down a four-mile beach of eleven hundred boats and binds the Gulf of Mannar for the pearl season. He does not believe a word of it. The government pays him to shut the mouth of the sea until the second gun.

The Sea Is Bound is an original novel about a Catholic binder on the Ceylon pearl fishery in the Gulf of Mannar. Anthonimuthu, son of Sebastianpillai, of Vaipar, has spoken the same twenty-eight seconds of words for thirty-five years while Muthukaruppan, the Hindu binder, sings a longer binding beside him. He knows the sea has no mouth. The fleet goes out anyway. The novel stays with the camp of twenty thousand people on a spit of sand, the estimate and the auction, the divers who go down nine fathoms, and the daughter who will one day stand at the water and say the list herself. It is a book about work, belief, and what a voice can do on a beach that only exists for a season.