— 13 —
In a dialogue in Hinduism’s philosophical scriptures, the Upanishads, a young yogi asks his father to explain God. If the Almighty is everywhere and all-powerful, why can’t he be seen?
The father peels a fig and removes one of the tiny seeds. Where, he asks his son, does a fig tree come from?
“From the fig seed,” the boy answers.
The father splits the fig seed open. “What do you see inside?” he asks.
The son blinks. “Nothing.”
“Yes,” agrees the father. “And from that nothing, which is all you can see, a mighty fig tree will grow.”
Next the father fills a pitcher with water and adds a handful of salt, which dissolves in the water. The father tells his son to drink.
“What does your drink taste like?” he asks the boy.
“It tastes salty,” the young yogi replies.
“Oh? But how can that be,” asks the father, “when I cannot see the salt?”
The tiger’s power permeates Sundarbans just as salt flavors its rivers. Most often the tiger does not choose to be seen, just as you cannot see the wind. But you can see what the wind and the tiger have touched.
The wind began only minutes after we finished the rice and dahl and curried crab that Namita and Mabisaka had cooked for us. At first it blew the rice that the family had winnowed, which lay in a neat pile in the front yard; then the rain began. We all ran outside the hut to scoop up the rice in our hands and pour it into the round-bellied aluminum pot and move it inside. This was in February, on my second trip to India, when Eleanor was with me; she joked that the rain, the first we’d seen in Sundarbans, was the cleanest water to have touched our bodies since we had left the Tollygunge Club in Calcutta. In Sundarbans even the drinking water is muddy and salty.
We’d been warned that a storm was coming. At dusk, as we returned from a stroll around the village with Girindra, a boy came running to tell us that Monorama was here and that Rathin wanted to speak with me on board.
While Girindra and Eleanor waited on the mud embankment, I boarded Monorama.
“There is a very severe storm warning,” Rathin said to me, “very severe. It is already causing very high waves in Bangladesh. It could become a cyclone! That mud village could be simply washed away. So you must take shelter on Monorama. I will make sure that you are safe.”
I was doubtful of Rathin’s forecast. Unintelligible Bangla crackled on the launch’s radio. I couldn’t tell what it was saying, but it didn’t sound all that urgent to me.
The usual season for cyclones is from August to November, not February—although it is true they can come at any time. If a cyclone had been brewing, Kanchan Muhkerjee would have heard the warning on his radio in Pakhiralaya, just across the river, and dispatched staff to warn the people of Jamespur and the other villages. There would have been other signs too. Girindra, who is named for the rain god, Indra, would surely have known them: a red moon, a purple dawn—the red and purple horses that draw the noisy chariot of Vata, the god of winds. We would have noticed a halo around the sun. And then a final warning: the sea would go flat as glass. “There is an awesome calm before a storm,” as John Seidensticker, tiger expert and Smithsonian wildlife ecologist, wrote about Sundarbans’ cyclones. “The light changes, and the water and forest, backed by the mottled, steel-grey wall of clouds, take on a vivid texture and contrast which intensifies as the storm closes.”
No such storm was closing in, I was sure. The swashbuckling Rathin, I thought, having already fought with pirates and walked among tigers, was merely eager to augment his chivalrous résumé by rescuing memsahibs in distress—even if we were in no distress at all.
It was clear from the gathering gray clouds, though, that we were in for some weather. Even if he was exaggerating the threat of a cyclone, Rathin’s concern about our safety was genuine. He had reason to fear high winds. He had lost a good friend, a research officer, who had been aboard the Rangabilia in the cyclone of 1988.
Rathin had told me the story earlier aboard Monorama. “November 28: two days to D-day,” he had narrated theatrically into my tape recorder. November 30 was the scheduled start of the tiger census that year, so the department’s boats had begun to converge upon Sundarbans days in advance.
The radio warnings had started at two P.M. on the twenty-ninth. All census vessels were ordered away from the Bay of Bengal as the storm approached. The Rangabilia took refuge in a creek about 230 feet wide near Sajnekhali Tourist Lodge, well inland from the sea. The sareng had chosen the location carefully.
At six P.M. it was cold and raining hard, and the cyclone’s wind speed had gathered to about 60 miles per hour. Rangabilia swayed from side to side. But the staff were calm. The crew were playing cards behind the wheelhouse; the two officers on board had gone to bed. Even in choppy waters Rangabilia, a large launch, gave the impression of stability. It had an unusual design: its freshwater tank was on the foredeck, and its stern rode very low in the water. The last radio transmission before the antenna snapped off reported that all the tiger census boats were safely anchored.
Later that night, slammed by the cyclone-churned waves, Rangabilia bucked sickeningly. By eight P.M. the wind speed had reached more than 110 miles per hour. Suddenly the craft lurched, and the water tank slipped to starboard. Weighted down, the Rangabilia could not right herself. Water poured into the engine room through the shuttered windows and instantly shorted the batteries powering the lights. Within seconds the darkened launch began to sink.
The boat’s sareng and the crew behind the wheelhouse jumped into the swirling water and swam for their lives. The two officers were trapped in their cabins.
At this point in the story, Rathin’s words tumbled, rushing upon each other like the water pouring in through the windows:
“And the two officers in the cabin probably couldn’t find the latch to the door, and the windows were shut, and the Rangabilia is going down, so they had no way to get out of their own cabin. But one staff had the courage to throw a torchlight beam inside the passage between the two cabins, and he started shouting, ‘Sir, please come out! The launch is sinking!’ But of course they couldn’t come because they couldn’t find the door in the darkness. . .”
Tarapada, who is now Rathin’s orderly, was in the engine room that night, and he had tried to break down the door to the cabin from that side to rescue his officers. “But by that time,” Rathin narrated, “the things were happening so fast that he had only seconds from being completely drowned, and Tarapada was already underwater, floating on the water, inside the launch. And at the last second, while the launch was going down, he grabbed some object with his hands and pushed himself out the window against the current, and no sooner had he slipped out, the launch had gone down to the bottom, and with the persons—the boatman—oh!”
Rathin’s strong face crumpled at the memory.
The brave boatman who had tried to save the officers drowned with them. He tried to dive overboard, but when his body was recovered, his arms and legs were impossibly tangled in Rangabilia’s anchor ropes.
Days later Rathin was asked to identify the body of his friend, the research officer. None of the bloated corpses fished out of the rivers after the cyclone were recognizable, he told me. His friend’s body was probably forever trapped inside Rangabilia, swallowed by Sundarbans’ silken creek-bottom silt. The sunken craft was never found. But the government needed a positive ID of each dead man before it would release insurance money to the widow. Rathin dutifully visited the morgue and identified the faceless, purple corpse of a stranger as that of his friend.
After telling me this story, Rathin leaned over the rail of Monorama and vomited.
Now Rathin stood before me, asking that I let him rescue us from the storm. But even if Rathin was not overstating the danger, Eleanor and I could not abandon Girindra and his family to the wind.
“We are grateful for your warning,” I told Rathin, “but we must stay with our friends in Jamespur. If a cyclone will wash away this village, it will wash us away with it.” And even though Rathin and I are both Christian, before I rejoined Eleanor and Girindra I took Rathin’s hand between my palms, brought it to my forehead, and for a long moment held it there.
Girindra was glad we had decided to stay with his family. This night was to be our last in Sundarbans before we returned to the States, and everyone at the house was excited to have two Americans as overnight guests. Namita was preparing a special dinner. Girindra had promised to hold a puja. That night we would worship the god Naryan, who he said is the same as Laxmi, the goddess whose image Eleanor kept in her purse.
By lantern light Girindra and his daughters had prepared the puja, painting Shiva’s trident in vermilion on the pots, smoothing out banana leaves carefully, as if laying a tablecloth, arranging the sweets and flowers, the offerings of betel nut and rice. Girindra draped his body in the clean white cloth that Mabisaka had earned for healing a sick woman. He sprinkled oil three times in a clockwise direction and shook Ganges water from mango leaves. One of the children blew the holy conch shell, and the women called their shivering welcome to the gods.
Girindra was careful about the proceedings: everything was in perfect order, arranged with the care of a thoughtful host who has plenty of time to prepare for his guests. But what struck me most deeply was how comfortable, how relaxed, he felt, welcoming the gods into his home. As Girindra sang the chants to Naryan—all twenty-seven pages of them, handwritten in his worn cardboard notebook—he sometimes stopped to slap at mosquitoes or yawn or jump when a centipede wriggled out from under the prayer mat, as one would do while entertaining a beloved but familiar elder relative.
The puja continued for an hour. Outside in the dark, men and women were still threshing rice. We could hear fish sizzling in a nearby kitchen. Even as Girindra chanted, some of his older children chatted and some slept. We felt like family gathered around the dinner table—two Anglo American women, eleven Sundarbans Bengalis, and the gods.
When the ceremony concluded, we all bowed our heads to the floor. But I felt less conscious of the god above us than of the feel of the smooth, cool floor against my forehead, as if we were bowing to the earth itself—to the mud from which the floor was made, to the spiders who crawled over it, to the pneumatophores and stilt roots that had stood here before the house, to the forest whose bounty nourished the village, even to the tiger who guarded the forest—to everything for which this family was so endlessly grateful.
The meal we enjoyed afterward was a sort of communion. And shortly thereafter the wind came.
To the poetic authors of the Vedas, the clouds that the winds brought from the ocean were heavy with treasures. These riches were so valuable that the clouds were loathe to give them up; Indra, the god of rain and storm, who rides upon an elephant, must pry open the clouds’ fast embrace in order that their riches may shower the earth.
The Vedas say that when Indra was born, the sky and the earth trembled at his appearance. And so it was when Indra came that night: the wind howled and gasped and shrieked. Trees writhed and slapped like a person possessed. The night was as black as a hole, and out of that hole poured rain, lightning, thunder.
Sound and light cracked and rolled through the heavens, through our bodies. We felt the thunder like pain: it seemed to arise both without and within—out of our bones and our organs and our souls—as if the whole world were made of thunder.
We were all shuttering windows, Girindra and the girls and I, when we realized we didn’t know where Eleanor was. Girindra and I ran out into the rain, into the blackness, shouting her name: Eleanor! But the storm ate our call, as the tiger in the forest eats the echo of the human voice. We slipped in the mud. Guided by explosions of lightning, we raced in separate directions: Girindra twice to the latrine, in horror that he would find her at the bottom of the filthy ditch, and I to the kitchen, hugging the mud perimeter of the house.
Girindra found Eleanor. She had gone to another portion of the family’s complex with Namita and Mabisaka and the two little boys. The women had refused to let her go back outside, even though she could hear us calling. When he brought her back to me, she was visibly shaken—less by the storm than by Girindra. He had been so worried that when he found her safe, he’d flown into a rage and screamed at her furiously, his anger all the more upsetting since he expressed it in a language she didn’t understand.
The wind gathered fury, and Girindra was gripped with a new fear: the Mabisaka! He had pinned her to the mud in four places at high tide, but still she might be coming loose. With his brother, he rushed to save his hand-hewn boat, his livelihood, from the wind-whipped waves. I tried to follow him, but when he realized what I was doing he yelled at me with such force I was afraid he would hit me; helplessly I returned to the house. Water gushed through the shuttered windows; much of the freshly threshed rice had blown away; lives, it seemed, were literally on the verge of flying apart.
Eleanor later told me that as she huddled in the room with the women, Namita’s face had been a sheet of terror. The children were crying. And everyone kept saying, “Cyclone.” They were remembering the cyclone of 1988.
It was not until my third trip, with Shankar and Debasish, that Girindra and Mabisaka told me how the family had survived that cyclone.
The wind that night was like a giant who ate everything in its path. The wind ate up sound: when Girindra cried out to members of his family who were staying in another hut a few feet away, they could not hear him; the wind took their voices away. The wind ate up light: even with his flashlight on, Girindra said, he could see nothing in the blackness. The wind ate up matter: to their astonishment, in one of the huts Girindra and Mabisaka watched as an enormous pot of rice—containing enough to feed the family for a month—just flew apart. No one could stand against this wind; it knocked you down and blew you away. This was a wind that brought you to your knees, as if before a god.
Girindra, of course, had known the storm was coming. There had been bulletins on the radio that afternoon. The Forest Department staff had issued warnings. At high tide, Girindra had secured Mabisaka firmly to trees. He had fortified the huts—two separate huts had stood where Girindra has now built one big compound—bracing them with bamboo poles. He had planned for the storm. He would stay in the larger of the two huts with Namita and most of the children; his younger brother and Mabisaka would oversee the others in the smaller, newer hut next door.
When night fell, the family huddled in the huts. Outside the wind gathered force. The huts shook. Girindra thought he heard the voice of his brother calling from next door. He managed to push open the door against the wind and crawl out—and found that the other hut had collapsed!
No one was seriously hurt, and quickly Girindra escorted everyone into the larger hut. But by now the rain, as well as the wind, was chewing through the hut. The roof leaked so badly that the smooth, neat floors had become rivers of mud. Soon even the walls began to melt, and the wind swayed the whole structure as if it were a coconut palm. Girindra realized it would not hold for long, so the family fled to his uncle’s house. The moment the last one left, their home collapsed behind them.
Five families had already gathered at the uncle’s home. There was nowhere dry to sit. Girindra and his uncle dug a ditch to try to channel water away from the house. Then Girindra fetched and laid down wood planks on the hut’s veranda and told people to sit there. What he knew but did not tell them was that if they stayed inside the house, the walls would collapse on them.
So, leaving Namita and Mabisaka and his daughters and an infant son shivering under a single sheet of plastic, Girindra went out again into the howling downpour to look for a new place to move.
Outside he could see nothing. His flashlight was useless. He waited for the lightning. In the flickering flash, he saw that all the surrounding huts had already collapsed.
After that he crawled about endlessly in rivers of mud. But at last he came upon a small hut still standing. Two families had already crammed inside. They said they would make room for the Mridhas, but they were all too weak to help Girindra escort the women to safety.
So again Girindra crawled to a crumbling hut to rescue his family. There he found his two youngest daughters unconscious. Wet, cold, and mesmerized with terror, the other members of the family had forgotten about the two girls and were actually sitting on them—they had nearly suffocated. “You cannot know how terrifying it is,” he told me, “unless you have experienced it.”
One by one, Girindra escorted each member of his family to safety. But even now his job was not done. Next he crawled out again into the storm to see to the cows and the other animals. For hours, in the driving rain, Girindra and four others worked to rescue cows and lambs and sheep from collapsed stables.
When the cyclone was over, the damage was terrible. At sunrise Girindra saw that his brother’s motorboat had been smashed to bits. All ten of his uncle’s cows were dead. Almost everyone had lost their house. So many villagers had died that for days the rivers were clogged with the corpses. But everyone in Girindra’s family had survived without injury. And his beloved boat, Mabisaka, although full of water, was still whole.
Girindra told me this story through Shankar, but when he had finished, he spoke directly to me.
“Goddess,” he said, touching his right hand to his forehead. “Goddess always, I luke.”
Bengali syntax is almost the opposite of English syntax; the position of subject and object are often reversed. At first when Girindra would say this to me, I wondered whether he meant that the goddess was always watching over him or that he always looked to the goddess for her help. Now I realized he meant both at once: even in the storm Girindra could see the goddess clearly.
Across Sundarbans in Bangladesh, Hasna Moudud, too, has faced cyclones. As the wife of the former vice president, as a member of Parliament herself, as a patriot of her country, as a disciple of Mohammed, she has felt it her duty to help the victims of her country’s deadly floods and cyclones, and again and again has found herself in the midst of the worst devastation.
In 1974 she worked distributing emergency supplies to flood-stricken villages. “The women were hiding from us,“ she said, “and I wondered why. Then I saw: everything had been destroyed, and they’d had to divide one sari among three women. Their houses had been washed away. The children had scabies and disease. It was as if they had forgotten about the human body.”
The aftermath of a cyclone took her to Nijumbe, a beautiful, peaceful village in central Bangladesh. The wind had blown people out of their houses, off the ground. “Now there were bodies of women and children caught in the trees—like a garden of corpses, like a forest of bodies.”
In the nine years between 1960 and 1969, eleven major storms killed more than 54,000 people in Bangladesh alone—an area the size of Wisconsin. And then, in November 1970, a cyclonic storm coupled with a high tide killed more than 200,000 people in two days. The cyclone of 1988 topped that figure by no one knows how much. “The situation of the Gangetic Delta, at the head of the funnel-shaped Bay of Bengal,” wrote the Smithsonian ecologist F. R. Fosberg, “poses perhaps the most serious threat from surges driven by storm waves to be found anywhere in the world.” The resulting tidal waves along the Bay of Bengal may rise as high as 250 feet. On both sides of Sundarbans, villagers face four to eight “cyclonic depressions” each year.
Fleeing the flood and cyclone of 1988, villagers from coastal Bangladesh surged into Dacca. Thousands took refuge in the stadium. Hasna remembered women—Muslim women, whose modesty normally demands that they keep even their faces discreetly veiled in public—giving birth there, right out in the open. “You wonder, then, who can help this nation?” Hasna said in her mellifluous voice.
“And then,” she said, “you come back, weeks or days later. You will not believe it. It is a mysterious thing: all this tragedy makes it more beautiful than before, as if it was all swept clean and now is greener and more lush. It is a fantastic thing. A mysterious thing. A miracle.”
The Lord Vishnu, it is told, brought the world into being this way:
At first, all was water. Vishnu himself was water. He slept on the water, yet the water was also him. The god-water was a fathomless ocean, and within it lay all the fluid powers of the universe: blood, milk, sap, rain. Calm lay over the water as Vishnu slept. But then he awoke and with a finger gently stirred the cosmic ocean.
This subtle action created a subtle change: small ripples formed. The ripples spread. Between the spreading arcs of the ripples ether—the upper region of the heavens, that which we now call space—came into being.
Ether, like the ripples, began to spread and grow larger, resounding like a joyous hymn. From the sound arising from its growth came another element, wind.
Wind grew, gathered energy, rushing, sweeping, bounding, swirling, full of power and joy. It stroked against the waters of the cosmic ocean. It drove the currents. It aroused the waves. From the powerful friction of the wind on the waves arose the third element, fire.
When a great wind gathers in Sundarbans, it is easy to see that this story is true. When Eleanor and I, with Girindra’s family, felt the wind that February night at Jamespur, I recalled the words the man from Chittagong had used in describing the cyclone of 1991: “The wind,” he said, “it was as if it had fire in it.”
It is said that the burning of wind-created fire created heaven itself. And only then did Vishnu put forth the thousand-petaled lotus from which arose the radiant Brahma, the four-faced creator of the earth.
In wind we face the invisible power that created the world. This is surely the case in Sundarbans. Its mangroved shores are born of wind as well as water. “It is during these periods of high-energy influx that much geological work is done,” John Seidensticker wrote, “and the storms guide the long-term development of mangroves and forests.” As he was researching the management plan for Bangladesh’s tiger reserve in Sundarbans, he was amazed to see that even mild storms sometimes ripped every leaf from the mangroves. But the mangroves recover. All the creatures here depend on change. The bounty of the trees plunges into the waters, which the tides then offer back to the land. The rapid cycling of Sundarbans’ nutrients, the great wheel of rebirth, is driven, in large part, by the force of the cyclones.
Through it all the tigers seem unperturbed. Even after the violent cyclone of 1988, forest officers reported seeing surprisingly few tiger corpses among the rivers of storm dead that clogged the channels for weeks. Forest officials believe the tigers survive cyclones by climbing into trees as the water rises. The deer, too, are said to cope well with storms. Rathin told me the deer wedge their heads into tangles of stilt roots so they will not be carried away by the wind and the water; when the tides rise to the tops of the mangroves, the deer anchor themselves among the uppermost branches of the trees. After such storms, he said, you will sometimes find a deer and a tiger clinging to the same tree.
The workings of Sundarbans’ cyclones are still poorly understood. Some storms, Seidensticker reported, “appear to be literally sucked up the estuaries”—the power of the wind absorbed, swallowed, dissolved by the mangrove forest. Under certain circumstances “the stable cool air over the water, hemmed [in] by the warm air rising from the land, forms a trough along the axis of the storm path which acts as a funnel.” In these cases Sundarbans’ forests protect the millions of people inland from the cyclone’s fury.
But this does not always happen. In fact, Seidensticker writes, as the forests have shrunk, the devastating storms have grown more frequent. In the sixty-nine years between 1891 and 1960, sixteen severe tropical storms raked Bangladesh; in the sixteen years between 1961 and 1977 there were nineteen. With global climate change, climatologists expect more and more.
As Vishnu marshals the wind to create fire, and fire created heaven itself, so too does Vishnu use wind to take back the universe.
It happens at the end of each world cycle, Hindu mythology tells us. Vishnu becomes the sun, and with its devouring rays consumes the moisture of the world. Then he becomes the wind and withdraws the life-breath from all living creatures. The friction of the sucking cyclone then ignites the universe. Everything is consumed in fire.
Finally, when all of creation lies in smoldering ash, Vishnu, clothed in cloud formed by the fire’s smoke, again pours forth his delight in the form of rain. The flood creates an ocean so profound that it dissolves the moon, the stars, the sun. And here, upon the fathomless, pure waters, Vishnu slumbers, dreamy and serene, until he is stirred to evoke the universe again.