Amphan

For as far as I can cast my mind back to, I have always been thrilled by storms. It may have to do with the fact that I was born on a very rainy dawn one late May day, three decades ago. Or just that as someone who exercises considerable restraint in expressing herself (except in writing) I found in the high theatrics of lightning and thunder an outlet for my own repressed emotions. Whatever be the reason, rumbling, electric skies have always made my soul sing, the winds have always made my soul expand, and rains have always brought fresh promise to a dusty, weary self. I remember my father recounting countless times how his mother, my diminutive but fierce grandmother, was terrified of thunder and at the slightest hint of it, would gather all her four ‘chhana-pona’ (brood of children) in her arms and cower in her bed. I never ceased to feel amazed at this, for I remember her a formidable woman of whom I was mortally afraid of as a child, and yet she was fearful of something I was not! On the other hand I, who am quite a physical coward, was fascinated by the violence of rain, to the point of seeking it out.

And then came yesterday.

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We had been hearing of Amphan, the super cyclone, that was coming our way, for the past week or so, but it still seemed remote in my mind. Living as we were through an unrelenting pandemic, every other impending disaster refused to take shape clearly in the mind. Then I heard that it was going to be the worst we had encountered in these parts in the past two centuries. That did made me pause and wonder. But I knew that living as we did in an upper-middle-class neighbourhood in Kolkata, with well-planned infrastructure all around, we would be cushioned from the impact of the blow; it would be the coast and those inside rudimentary dwellings everywhere, who would bear the brunt of it. As always, we would be spared. The day dawned cloudy and remained that way. My parents were tracking the news of the cyclone’s approach and my father, in preparation, sealed us from the world outside (an advanced stage of lockdown for us) as securely as he could, and disconnected all electrical appliances from the sockets. We waited.

The cyclone was to reach the city around 5.30 pm and it was indeed around then that the rains began in earnest. It was then that I thought of our ‘emergency light’. This was the battery-operated lantern that was lying in disuse for the past several years since we rarely see a power cut here these days. However, I recalled that one was due any time now and for unknown duration, so I scrambled to check its batteries, which were expectedly, dead. They had escaped the attention even of my father’s usually well-prepared and well-stocked self. It was when I used the term ‘emergency light’ in my mind, that I realised that an emergency was upon us. And soon we were plunged in darkness.

With this, the wifi had vanished as well, but thankfully the mobile data was still working. The mind has such banal priorities. Even at this juncture of the beginning of a natural disaster, my thoughts were full of my regret at not having downloaded films to watch to keep myself distracted. And with my precious mobile data, not strong enough for streaming videos but good enough for downloading images, I sat down to make a meme. The world was swirling outside my window, and I was making and posting memes. It was when I logged into Facebook, that I discovered how bad things were elsewhere. Slowly, images and videos of water-logged streets and parked cars bumping into each other emerged out of the web. We were well within the eye of the storm now.

Frankly, I wasn’t scared for myself. I heard later that people had weathered the storm by clutching onto their loved ones and praying for dear life, but it wasn’t so for me. My mother asked me a few times to join her and my father in their room in case I was afraid, but I was quite alright spending all that time by myself in the dark. I only wished the windows were open and I could look outside. I tried a few times to open them, just to check on the car parked in the open driveway under the tree, but could see nothing in the dark except the vague outlines of dangerously-swaying trees and then the strong gusts of wind flattened the windows to their two opposite ends almost instantaneously. I had a hard time closing them. Out in the drawing room, I discovered a pool of water in an unlikely place, far away from the door. Even in this well-designed house that my civil engineer grandfather had built, water had found its way in through the inevitable gaps in the door, and trickled all along the floor and taken a turn towards the inside.

Like most of us who lived through it, I will always remember that night through its sounds. The shattering of glass was ominous, but it was the rattling of tin and asbestos roofs not unlike the rattling devices used on a film set to denote artificial thunder, that I found most unsettling. Not only because it managed to consistently rise above the infernal din of the cyclone, but also because it reminded me of all the less fortunate families that lived in garages attached to houses all around the neighbourhood. They would know little respite. Or were they experienced with the fury of nature, exposed to it in their native villages in rural Bengal? And the other persistent sound — the loud thuds of mangoes. My mother is obsessed with the mangoes in the garden. Every summer our mango trees bear a plentiful bounty and every day of it, my mother doesn’t rest till she has rushed out to gather the mangoes as soon as they have dropped, or pushed one of us to go fetch them. All day long she plans her mango recipes. I call it ‘Aamer aatonko’ (the mango terror). But the real mango terror was last night. It was by the rate and force at which the fruit came crashing down, that we could gauge the fury of the winds, which made stones of the raw mangoes. It felt as though the heavens were pelting stones at us.

The internet too was gone out by now and we each did what we could to wait out the evening. Eventually, around 9 pm, we sat down to a reluctant candle-lit dinner. Immediately, the lights were back. The storm had retreated slightly. We finished our meal quickly and then I finally opened the drawing room door to peep outside. Directly in my view was a toppled tree, several inches deep water all across, and leaves and debris floating all over it. The rains resumed and the storm turned its attention upon us again, although with abated vigour, as if most of its wrath had been spent. With the electricity back, I opened my laptop and willed myself to work on an overdue essay, dragging my mind through the drudgery of it. An hour of this and I was suddenly very tired, despite having done little. Things were quieter outside now, and I lay down and slowly drifted into sleep.

I woke up in the morning to the usual chirping of birds and immediately relaxed. I reasoned later that this must have been so because all night in the deafening noise outside, I had not been able to hear the birds. Today their calls signalled the quiet calm after the storm, and also that they had survived it. I got up and joined my parents in the garden, who were already out there, assessing the damage. The waterlogging was gone, but had left behind in its wake fallen trees, leaves, mud, and debris. I went up to the terrace for an aerial survey of the neighbourhood. It looked ravaged. The dogs were quiet, still terrified from last night, and the birds were very loud; I think they were mourning the loss of each fallen companion every time they came across one. I was surprised at seeing people up and about in the lanes outside my home. Most without the now habitual mask on their faces. The streets seemed relatively busy again. We saw our neighbours across the road and enquired about the extent of each other’s damage. A coconut tree that fell on someone’s water tank and broken it, an electric pole had came down and dented someone’s car, an asbestos sheet had flown off someone’s roof and landed up in another’s garden. The spontaneous lack of quarantine protocol made sense, for the cyclone was the immediate disaster we were reeling from, the pandemic pushed back in our mental list of emergencies for now. Today, we needed human contact to share our wordless grief. My father himself slipped out for an impromptu walk and returned with dismal pictures of the neighbourhood’s gateway of fallen trees.

In our own garden, the jackfruit and banana trees were gone and several other trees had lost their branches. But it is what has happened to our mango tree that breaks my heart. We woke up to the sight of a carpet of mangoes on that part of the garden. Hundreds of mangoes had been shed in the night. It took us around two hours to gather them all and bring them inside. Half the tree was gone — the shattering glass we had heard the night before was the sound of the windows of our neighbour’s empty house that had broken under the impact of its branches crashing into them. The rest of it still stands thick and mighty, but dangerously bent. The ground near it looked curiously arisen — we realised that this was because the tree was being slowly uprooted, and may come down anytime. In all probability, we will be forced to get it felled ourselves, before it can fall over the house and cause serious damage. All the smaller plants around it have survived, sheltered by it. How do I explain to you the loss of a tree in the face of overwhelming destruction elsewhere? This is the tree that was planted decades ago when my grandmother, very fond of mangoes, was still alive, but which began to give fruit only after her death. And year after year, unfailingly. My grandfather was very proud of it and looked after it, also ensuring that its mangoes were, without fail, properly distributed to relatives and neighbours and all others in our immediate vicinity. Our home in summer overflows with hastily picked mangoes tucked into surprising nooks and corners. And now it will be gone, along with its shade. So will the sunbirds, sparrows, crows, mynahs, koels, and the lone woodpecker who frequent it. And all we’ll see outside the window is the clear blue sky that caused it all.

We had erratic mobile network most of the day today. I managed to respond to my friend in Kashmir, where fresh hell is brewing in her neighbourhood, and she replied that she well understood what it felt like to live through destruction helplessly, cut off from the world; she added that would not know what to do with a 4G connection were it ever to be restored. My experience was nothing like hers though, and impatient as it made me, I knew it was unavoidable and only a matter of time. So, I sat down to write this essay instead. The limited mobile data that was available to me this morning, I spent completing watching a film that I had left midway through the previous day — Aparna Sen’s 1989 (which happens to be my year of birth) film, Sati. Amongst other things, this excellent film is about the unusual bond between a mute young woman and a tree whom she is married off to. Two stormy nights decide the fate of this hapless girl and at the end of the film, on the morning after such a night, she is found lying dead, under the death embrace of a heavy limb of the tree that had broken off in the storm. How more uncanny could it get.

Earlier this year when I had come to Kolkata from Delhi for a temporary stay, I had immediately felt the difference. There was so much greenery all around, and so many varieties of birds. And somehow that made a world of difference. Today, much of that has gone. And after all the wreckage has been removed over the next several days and weeks, we’ll know just how much has been lost in one night. My family, for instance, still await news of how our virtually unoccupied village home in the suburbs has fared. For those of us who have suffered little material damage — unlike the devastated Sunderbans for instance — we have still lost a lot. Through the trees that have fallen and the markets and libraries destroyed, quite apart from the extensive economic damage, we have lost a large part of our heritage. Many of the places and landmarks that brought us comfort and pride are today gone, except from our memories. We feel unmoored. This must be partly the reason behind the anguish and despair expressed by the state’s chief minister in her public address. How do you explain to someone such loss? I have not experienced this city like many others have, but I share their despair in watching videos of flooded bookshops on College street, or toppled statues outside the Jadavpur University library. The sight of a flooded Kolkata airport runway seeming eerily like a sea port. And the wretched conditions of the hospitals that were our limited hopes of fighting back corona…

In a world that is hopping from one disaster to another with frightening speed, as if skipping between one disaster movie to another, and a world in which lockdown is not deterring the nexus between state and big capital to clear away more land for more ‘development’ that will bring even more devastation upon us, last night’s aftermath is a grim reminder of what lies ahead if we are do not recognise our stakes in protecting our natural heritage, and do not resist. Our quarantined routines that have brought us closer to nature’s wonders precisely by retreating from it, today demands that we assert ourselves to save as much as we can, as soon as we can, however we can. I have felt this each passing year in smoggy Delhi that had compelled us to take to the mask long before the rest of the country and the world, and I feel it all the more after last night. If there is anything I have realised in the past few months of quarantine, it is this — it is not cars and air conditioners and computers and internet or our sanitised luxurious havens that would ensure our survival at the end of the day. It is in learning to not see nature as apart and outside from us, that lies our survival — physical, economic, emotional, and spiritual.

While cleaning some of last night’s debris away, I spotted some granular black dust on the floor — quite a mound of it. Upon looking closer, I discovered them to be anthills that had been forced out by the rain, like the thousands of insects that had emerged out of the earth since yesterday. I followed with my eyes the curious and speedy precision with which they scurried along the walls in neat, wavy files, bumping into each other along the way. They reminded me of Pratishtha Pandya’s poem ‘Red Ants’ that I had read in English translation: “…traumatised colonies of ants overflow/ looking for their homes/ Broken, destroyed, devastated/ searching for their lives/ crushed between someone’s fingers/ suffocating beneath someone’s feet/ hungry colonies/ thirsty colonies/ angry colonies/ colonies of red bites/ gasping for breath/ colonies of red ants.” In the poem, the ants are compared to “a disciplined lot of labourers”. Indeed, what of the ant-like humans: millions of industrious, otherwise invisible workers who had made their presence felt it the past few weeks as they marched homewards in the harsh summer sun defying thoughtless lockdown restrictions? Many of them who return to these parts will find their homes gone. Those who made a living by fishing and agriculture will have lost their livelihoods. Those who toiled all year to build the homes of others in a faraway hostile city for a pittance will find little or no assistance in rebuilding their own homes, caught between helpless and indifferent governments. And we are yet to hear those stories.

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My current Facebook display picture was taken on the Nag Tibba trek, on my last trip with friends, last year. It was an unexpected moment on an exhausting climb, when we suddenly came upon a tree hollowed out by lightning, allowing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to enter a tree. As I went in and took a look around in awe, I wondered what the tree had felt like in that moment and whether it died an instantaneous death or a prolonged one — swift death by lightning is another of my morbid fantasies, you see. Or can a tree still standing be called dead at all? But today, I am marvelling at the trees that are able to resist and survive and stand tall, carrying forward the business of living, and holding up the circle of life.

Every Bengali has a favourite Tagore song. Even those who profess to be bored by the surfeit of Rabindrasangeet in Bengali popular culture. Mine is ‘Je raate mor duaar guli bhanglo jhore..’ The song is addressed to an unnamed presence that batters down the gates of the poet’s soul on one dark and stormy night, and although initially the poet thought this was all a dream, he recognises storm as the victory ensign of this presence and awakens to find his emptiness filled by it in the morning. I always wondered about the identity of this presence. Lover? Beloved? God? Universe? Self? Last night, it stood for a wrathful Nature that had no intention of standing as a poetic trope. Last night was no poem. I looked up the meaning of the name ‘Amphan’, which in my mind sounded ironically like ‘I’m fine’. I discovered it is to be the Thai word simply for ‘sky’. And so, like those who follow calendars dictated by the ravages of nature, we’ll remember 2020 as the year that the sky had happened to us.

Note: This is a personal account from the very cushioned region of Salt Lake, Kolkata in North 24 Paraganas district of West Bengal, where mostly landline and mobile networks have been affected. Elsewhere in the city, considerable personal and heritage property has been damaged and people continue to grapple with disrupted electricity and water connections as well. Several regions of the state are still incommunicado and feared to have been completely decimated; the severity of ecological and economic devastation remains to be fully gauged. Similar horrors must have been visited upon Odisha and Bangladesh. For reliable updates and information about relief and rehabilitation drives to donate to, please read this document.