Since the Flood II

Then one day, the water receded and everything was dry again. The grass grew back to its normal quantity in the courtyard, as the mud stains on the leaves of the lemon tree were washed away by the occasional rains. The roads were repaired privately by the people living near the damaged parts; some people went so far as to remove the invasive water hyacinths that had proliferated the most during the flood in their ponds. The houses were clean once again. The beds were brought down to the floor from their precarious positions, mounted on several bricks. The mud was cleared off the furniture; the tables and chairs were cleaned and polished; the wooden planks under beds dried in the sun and oiled. Everything seemed to come back to normal. And out of the soothing complacency, removed from the immediate significance as a societal problem, the flood assumed significance as a content of immense potential for my blog. The inconvenience and practical losses faded among the countless previous experiences of similar degree; and a light first person narrative was published here on my blog, with pictures, that may have made it look like a picnic.

Brahmaputra one fine evening.

                 

Roughly a month after the events narrated in the previous blog post, the water was at our doorstep again. The embankment had been penetrated by the end of the previous flood itself, and no barrier stood between the river and people. On a Saturday, we were woken up at 3 am by frantic villagers preparing to face the flood

The algae try to encroach on the walls, but their attempts are ruthlessly thwarted every single time. 

And sure enough, it came. We endured. And it left.

The Aftermath

Some People and a Few Things

Old photo albums lie on the veranda floor. Beside them a pile of damaged photographs, growing by the minute. The wetness has crept into the album slots, cooking up the ink, settling in white spots. A batch of photographs from the late eighties is among the most severely affected. My mother’s wedding. In cold sepia hues, the vestiges of her wedding day peer through the infernal white spots spread over the photographs like ringworms.

It is grandmother who is plucking the damaged photographs from the albums. Sorting them into 'to be disposed' and 'fixable' piles. She sits with the courage and the grace of a warrior heading into a lost battle. Exclaims at the recognition of familiar faces, “Ah, poor so and so. So beautiful. Shame he’s dead”. Remarks to me, “Look, you were so beautiful when you were a baby”, pointing to what used to be a photograph of me as a baby, sitting on a stringed chair, holding an inflatable plastic ball as big as myself. I agree. It’s a piece of sticky damp plastic, with a riverside chromatic noise on it.

She doesn’t romanticise it. This cruel transience. She doesn’t grieve more than necessary. The pathos of an oppressed people, as discussed in my city friend circles, doesn’t manifest itself through her actions in quite the same way. Perhaps that is why she says that the damaged photographs need to be burnt off.

The photos took to the dumping ground memories of a generation.

     

Relief

People crowd at different spots near the main road every day to get their portion of the flood relief items. (The area has become a shelter to all the people in this region who lost their homes and lands to the river in the last decade. The people from my village were among the first to settle in these grounds which were governmentally reserved lands. It still belongs to the government and some people still live in fear of being evicted with the turn of power in the coming elections.)

In any case, floods are always accompanied by relief items, distributed by various institutions. Apart from the governmental compensation/relief, a plethora of organisations such as political parties, NGOs, private clubs, and miscellaneous “trusts” extend their helping hands. The relief packages vary from a few kg of rice and daal to a full-fledged grocery loot. 

"Relief"

The people are divided here about the usefulness of this tradition. For the small number of privileged people, who are rich enough to afford makeshift platforms, labourers, and batches of packaged drinking water, distribution of free food is the cause of the ongoing dumbing down of the working class. The shift of political power does not initiate any process that can permanently solve the flood problem. The working class, according to them, have been habituated into suffering due to which they are happy with the minimal material comfort that they are provided with. Deprive a people so much that they accept whatever you throw at them.

But the poor people cannot afford ideals when they become unemployed, and whatever savings they had accumulated during the dry days have to be spent on food, medicine, shelter, and all sorts of articles necessary during prolonged disasters. The relief events play an important role in temporarily redressing the distressed, and prevents a total impoverishment of the poor.

That is not to negate the fact that the political class, and everyone subsumed under that rough category, from a low ranking clerk at the circle office to the Home Minister, has been cashing in on natural disasters since Independence. And it is true for every governmental initiative today in India. It is also not to negate the fact that the various NGOs and upper class black money holders find a golden opportunity in these relief events where they arrive in their marecedes-benz’s and get clicked with tanned fishermen in torn towels, smiling all the while, knowing that back home black money is turning into white.

In any case, any convoy bringing “relief” is followed by a frenzied mob of mostly women, and its news spreads through the region like wildfire, which results in the crowds by the main road. It can be the cause of severe disappointment sometimes, sometimes of lasting bitterness. People celebrate, people complain, and people display a vicious tribalism.

Anecdote: the rich distributors left after having a sumptuous lunch without distributing anything, for fear of getting mobbed by the many hundred people (here outside the frame) who had gathered at the local Naamghar grounds to receive what was rightfully theirs.

The clash between ethnic groups materialise the most during these relief distribution programs. The Assamese population, armed with a nostalgic sense of dignity, accumulated through the bygone decades of social security and relative prosperity, see the desperation of the Bihari women running in crowds to distribution sites, then bickering over unfair distribution, as lowly. Even the labourer working in grandma’s garden doesn’t see the irony of him terming them as shameless. Centuries of exploitation still hasn’t taught the people to see themselves as one class rather than a distribution of castes.

Food Grains

The concretized part of the courtyard sees busy days after the most recent flood. The water had risen above the elevated granary floor and drenched a few hundred kilograms of food grain. The moment the concrete ground in the courtyard emerges, it is washed by Kumar and another worker, and the next day with God's grace the several hundred kg of rice is dried in the blazing sun. The rest of the food grains, a much smaller quantity of corn and mustard, is transported to Kumar's place to be dried, for lack of space.

The rest of the grounds that have not been concretized are still muddy to the ankle. The dogs have come down from their sanctuary above the storage bins now, joyous of the emancipation from that dark cramped corner in the granary. They play in the mud like it's a chocolate river, smearing one another with black humus, as sticky as freshly prepared cream. And then occasionally, they run over the mustard drying on the concrete ground, their careless paws obliterating the little dunes of tiny, dark red spheres, the mustard sticking to their limbs like dark chocolate crumbs embedded on ice cream bars that resemble dog limbs.

The dark yellow dunes of damp bau rice, spread on the floor like sea waves, smell of the Earth. To stand near it and breath in its presence, (to get intimate with the stench of rotting carbon, really) is to bathe in the afterglow of the flood itself.

Part I(2017) here

Part III (2020) here

As a bonus, here's a smartphone visual travelogue I shot on my Android phone while traveling to the district headquarters.