I talked to a small group of them as we shared a boat ride from a Noonkhowa char on the Brahmaputra to the mainland. It was a two-hour drive to Kurigram and the road journey had been bad—sandy and dusty, barely metalled in many parts and extremely bumpy and hard on the back. It didn’t help either that I suffer from cervical spondolysis.

As we talked, I became aware of the helplessness and hopelessness in which the Mohfiz were steeped. If ever there was fatalism, it was here. Man after man cited stories of how their families had been pauperized by the river. ‘This is our enemy,’ one of them said, staring at the water around us. ‘We have lost everything here: my father was a big zamindar (landlord), we had much land and a good amount of money. Now we have no land, it is all in the middle of the water, we have moved five times in the past years and I have to travel elsewhere to earn and work.’

He fell silent for a short while after this outburst and spoke again. ‘They call us Mohfiz, this is a word without honour—and we were not always like this, we had honour, we had property, we had money and now we must go like common labourers to work on someone else’s lands.’

They were going to Comilla, he said. They would be gone for four months, during the harvest season and the sowing season. They would earn enough, he said, for the family to manage for the rest of the year. While they were away, their wives would work in the homes or fields of others, for keeping the family together.

When the water came, he said, conditions turn turned very difficult. ‘We first put the food and clothes on the bed, when the water rise is not too much; then when it goes above the level of the bed, we put tables and planks together and live on top of that, or finally we go to the roof of the hut—with our families, goats and chickens.’ How did they cook? ‘Every day, we make one meal of bhaat on a chulah in the kitchen and eat it with salt and chillis and a little mustard oil.’ The chulahs or mud baked stoves are set high above the ground—as much as two to four feet—to protect the homestead from suffering too much during times of flood. For those with boats—and most Bangladeshis in the countryside appeared to possess at least a dugout—life on land could move to life on the boat and then to higher ground such as roads or nearby towns. Unless the flood was of cataclysmic proportions, as that of 1988 and 1999, those affected managed to see out the worst days on one meal and bunched together in their homes.