That morning in October, 1997, we got out of bed before dawn and staggered into the 22-seater Toyota Coaster which took us to the last point before Chilmari Ghat. It was still dark, with the gloaming of early morning barely able to penetrate the thick fog. We walked down the embankment and started putting up the cameras; the sound recordist got busy capturing the morning sounds: water drops falling off the side of a boat, plip! plop! Fishermen yawned as they stretched and stepped down from the boats to wash, hawk and spit; small waves lapping against the shore and the boats; the cries of river birds, and the chugging of the first motors as their owners set out to fish, with music issuing from radios on board and on shore.

Jahnu and Sudheer decided that the spot chosen for the first shots weren’t right; So the camera was shifted again. The boats stood in silent silhouette against the mist. The light of dawn was warming the mist and the water, the land and people. Slowly, both boat people and land settlers came out as part of their daily ritual and then stopped to watch our small group of characters with numerous cameras, tripods, instructions and dialects.

I was standing not far from the camera when a deep male voice rasped in my ear, ‘Sir, you should go about 100 yards further away, from there you will get a perfect shot.’

Of course, the voice did not speak in English. That is a literal translation of what it said. Nor did it speak in Bangla or Bengali, the national language of Bangladesh and West Bengal. It spoke in Assamese, the language of the Brahmaputra Valley, my language.

I jumped in surprise and saw a dark, lean man in a blue and green checked lungi and a long shirt. He was standing by Joseph, the tough, all-seasons and all-purpose man from Assam with a gigantic appetite for rice and an equally prodigious capacity for hard work and physical labour. It was Joseph’s first visit outside the country and he was enjoying every moment of it. However, he thought and said so, in his characteristically simple way, that there were too many Bangladeshis in Bangladesh, that the place was too crowded and abysmally poor. ‘We do not have this kind of poverty in Assam, such wretchedness, such misery,’ he would exclaim as we passed a village market or a town, where the principal food on sale appeared to be mounds of ripe, golden-yellow jack fruit with its loamy, rich smell and taste.