I come from a middle-class family based in Assam, a beautiful state endowed with natural resources, biodiversity and assimilation of different cultures, in the north-eastern part of India. Yet, with respect to the rest of the country, the region is very underdeveloped and there are challenging issues of governance, infrastructure, road connectivity and lack of quality education, that need to be addressed and that seldom find a mention in the news of national importance.
As fate would have it, I was on my way to the airport on the first day of the onset of monsoon in Assam, with my bags in the trunk of the taxi, as I rolled down the windows and breathed in the heaviness of moisture in the air mixed with the earthy scent of the cooling asphalt, and it smelled like home for the very last time. As the plane took off, I left behind me, a reverberating thunder that announced the arrival of the resplendent showers that would go on to become the worst disaster that Assam faces every year.
Caused by the overflowing of the menacing waters of the Brahmaputra river (Dihang), which descends into the plains of Assam from Arunachal Pradesh where it is known as Siang, floods in Assam has become an annual calamity. This year, at least eight hundred thousand people have been affected so far, with over ninety reported deaths and close to one hundred thousand displaced in thirty of the state’s thirty-three districts. Home to two-thirds of the endangered one-horned rhino population, the Kaziranga National Park in Golaghat and Jorhat districts bore the brunt of the incessant rain as ninety-five per cent of it was submerged for weeks.
As a first-year PGP student at IIM Rohtak, watching the floods from afar wreak havoc sent a chill down my spine and I was gripped with crippling anxiety, knowing that while I was safe, my family and friends back home were not and there was only so much I could do. Fear became my constant companion and I remember the taste it left in the parched corners of my mouth as the news of an impending disaster started settling in.
College had just begun, and I was starting to get used to the MBA way of life only to end every day with a routine and extensive research on the updates on the flood situation in Assam. Two weeks later when I spoke to her again, my mother’s voice didn’t sound excruciatingly exhausted over the phone for the first time in a long time as she told me that she woke up to a glorious sunrise, the brightest kind, a blazing yellow. Life must go on, tells my mother, as she describes to me how people back home are picking their lives back up, bit by bit. She also tells me I was lucky that I made it out of there and it was both liberating and frustrating being made aware of it.
As the flood-waters recede, the Mahabahu rebrands itself for it to come back again the following year, leaving people with a perennial sense of overwhelm in the wake of the devastation, a loss that stays with you forever.