Since it was late, we decided to return to Bepari Para the next morning. It would be easier to talk in the privacy of his home, Keramat said. As we got ready to return, he stopped us and insisted on tea with biscuits at the chai dokan or tea shop on the edge of the main path, before a dusty diversion going into the village. The road could not have been more than 10 to 12 feet wide.

The next day, I returned, this time without Mamon Bhai who had to leave for some reporting, and asked to be excused. Accompanying me was Firdouz, a young and tall scholar from Dhaka University, who was taking the place of Raquib, who could not come because he was preparing for examinations. Firdouz wanted to take the civil service examinations and become a district magistrate and serve in the secretariat in Dhaka. ‘I want to be an officer, then only can we do something for our people,’ he declared, when I asked him why he wanted to join the administration. ‘But, Firdouz,’ I said, ‘all across the subcontinent, people go into the civil service with such dreams only to see them dashed within a few years of entering the system. They become as venal, corrupt and inefficient as the earlier batches.’ He only smiled, especially when I told him that, at least in India, many people from ‘service’ backgrounds were moving to management jobs in multinationals or large domestic corporates which paid far better. Or else, they were setting up their own, extremely profitable organizations.

Firdouz smiled again: ‘Ah, sir, in India you have many opportunities, people can manage and do well in other fields. Here, opportunities are less, jobs are few, we have limited choices.’ He was as fascinated by our interactions and the information that we were generating.

Before talking to Keramat, we had spoken with a number of householders at the Chilmari Ghat, both Hindus and Muslims, bonded by language and a history of shared suffering, for the river too had taken away their homes, time after time, year after year.

Thus, Nitya Kumar Ghosh, a high-school teacher, who said he was fifty-five, and lived on the river front at Chilmari, spoke of how his family had shifted six times because of the flooding. ‘Four times in my lifetime and twice during my father’s. The Old Chilmari lies in the river, some five miles from here.’ His son teaches at a nearby school and Ghosh, wearing a singlet, lungi and with a few days stubble on his face, said that the river perceived people as an enemy. ‘We are not its enemy but it pursues us—we go far away to escape it but it does not allow us to go, it follows us.’

Once, steamers from the Brahmaputra moved down to connect with the Ganga and into Bengal. ‘At that time, the river depth was twenty-five feet,’ Ghosh said.