The Banshee shows her Assam-fascination in this story 'Deepor Beel' published in Parcham, an international journal based out of West-Bengal. Shayan A. Bhowmik is the editor and the team has many fantastic people on it including Sumana Roy and Bhaswati Ghosh. Deepor Beel is a lake in Guwahati. The story is mostly about climate change, but Parcham has published it in their childhood issue, so I suppose it has some childhood in it?
You can find it here. I am also putting the text of the 1800 words story below:
“Deepor Beel”: — Shruti Krishna Sareen
Tuni Das bolted and locked the front door of her house and walked down the garden path to the little white gate. Shutting it firmly behind her, she looked up and down the road for her cab. She was a woman of short height, in her mid-40’s. She had bob cut hair which was gradually greying. She wore a long pink skirt with a blue top, and had her sunglasses on her head. Tuni Das was a botany teacher in Guwahati with a passion for birds. Her binoculars hung round her neck with a loose chain, and she had her camera in hand. She had called for a cab to take her to Deepor Beel, one of the largest wetlands and biodiversity hotspots. Unfortunately the once pristine Deepor Beel was now a biologically and environmentally threatened habitat. It was drying up and had now shrunk to two-thirds of its original size. Tuni didn’t really go there as much as she used to earlier. She preferred other places for bird-watching. But it was April, the season of the migratory birds, and she thought of visiting it after almost an entire year. Less than a hundred bird species now visited the lake which used to attract hundreds of bird species earlier.
Deepor Beel was quite a distance away, on the outskirts of Guwahati. It would take a while to get there. As the cab sped past, first through the traffic of city lanes and later through quieter environs, her thoughts turned to the Beel. The southern side of the Beel was bounded by some forested hills. There were loads of huge elephants in these hilly forests and they would come down to the Beel for water, or to eat aquatic plants such as the water hyacinths, the water lily and the rhizomes. Tuni loved these magnificent and gentle creatures. However, a tragedy had befallen them a few years ago when a railway track had been built, running between the Beel and the hills. This obstructed the elephants’ path and they were sometimes killed on the railway track, on one of their several trips between the hills and the Beel. On the eastern side of the Beel was an ever growing waste dump where all the garbage of the capital city was thrown. This trash threatened to swallow up the entire Beel. The Beel was a freshwater body. A couple of small rivers, the Bhoralu and the Basistha fed the lake with the polluted water from Guwahati city. Both the rivers originated in Meghalaya, and flowed through the city of Guwahati before joining the main Brahmaputra river. The Bhoralu was one of the most polluted rivers of Assam. The Basistha flowed through the southern part of the city where the temples were, and this brought all the temple waste to the lake. The rivers also carry all the untreated sewage of the city— the city had no sewage treatment plant.
Tuni tried to think of the birds she would soon see to turn her mind away from these dismal thoughts. Well, she was not disappointed. The biodiversity hotspot still had an amazing variety of birds, far more than you would find in the city. As the taxi turned the corner and Deepor Beel came in full view, Tuni saw the breathtaking sight of thousands of birds swarming across the water body. She could lose herself here and live here forever. She was blissfully happy wandering around the lake by herself, shooting bird photographs, although there was a twinge of sadness and dismay when she thought of what the Beel had been in the past. She literally lost herself as she wandered and did not realise where she was going. She suddenly realised that she was towards the eastern side of the lake, where the garbage dumps were.
She thought she heard something. She looked around. She saw two small children. One of them seemed to be crying. She walked over to them. They seemed to be roaming around the garbage dumps. Rag pickers?, Tuni wondered. The children seemed to be hunting for something. Perhaps food. Dead elephant carcasses lay around the garbage dumps. Greater adjutant storks were feeding on these. The fish in the lake which they used to feed on had disappeared. The waste piles were deserted save for the children, and the greater adjutant storks. And the dead elephant carcasses. “Ki hol?”, she asked in Assamese. “What happened?” “Ekunai. Nothing”, answered the boy. But his voice was sad, as if he was suppressing something. “No, tell me what it is”, insisted Tuni. “Let’s go away from here, there’s such a garbage stench. Let’s walk over to that little clump of trees, and we’ll sit there. Then you tell me.” The children let themselves be guided by Tuni. “What are your names?”, she asked. “Jiri”, said the girl. “Luit”, said the boy. “Oh, how nice!”, she cried. “All of us are named after rivers. My name is Tuni.” “Now tell me what’s the matter”, she continued, as they all sat down. Jiri and Luit looked at each other. “Jiri, you go ahead”, said Luit. “Okay”, said Jiri. “Can I call you Tuni baidew?”, she asked, looking up at Tuni. “So the story is simply this. Our parents used to fish here. They would fish in the Beel and would get some money by selling the fish. The leftover fish we would eat ourselves. We used to go to school, Luit and I. I have studied till class 6th, Luit till 7th. But then, they forbade fishing in the lake. They said it’s bad for the environment. Anyway, the number of fish was reducing because the oil spills flow into the lake. The lake is full of kerosene, the fish are full of kerosene. Then the silt from the hills gets deposited in the lake. The silt from all the mining and quarrying in the hills. So when it settles into the lake, the number of fish decrease. Anyway, so we were not allowed to fish. Then our parents turned rag pickers here on these waste dumps. But it’s so hard to survive like this. Rag picking doesn’t bring money like fishing does. So we had to quit school. And start rag picking too. Plus, there’s such a terrible stench out there. Last month, I got rashes on my legs wandering amidst those garbage dumps. And Luit has picked up an allergy, he keeps sneezing all the time. There’s shortage of food. Sometimes we find some leftover food among those waste heaps. So I was just crying because… Because… Sometimes I feel I can’t take it anymore. Our life was so beautiful earlier. This year, the floods in the city where worse than ever this year. Our house was inundated. The goats perished. We couldn’t even fish as the fish get away in the waters. You want to add something, Luit?”, she asked, again looking at him. “Bihu is about to come. And we can’t find half of the hundred and one herbs leaves and plants we need to make the dishes. Jiri and I have been out, trying to collect some for days. These plants have just vanished. Disappeared. All because of this stupid climate change. And they find it easy to ban us from fishing and evict us. But why don’t they ban the railways from building tracks there and the oil companies releasing all their kerosene in the water, and all the corporates and affluent people responsible for garbage? Why is it only our fault?”, he said. “Jiri and I have this dream, that we’ll get out of this, we’ll have better lives”, he continued wistfully.
Tuni was reminded of her own family, who, two or three generations earlier, had been fishermen. They had managed to improve their lot in life, and look at her today, elite botany teacher carrying cameras and binoculars. The luxury of leisure. She looked at the two woebegone faces beside her and her heart went out to them. “Come with me”, she said, getting up. “We’ll go to a nice little place and eat something.” She took them in the cab to a small cafe near her place in the main city. She ordered them a farm fresh pizza and glasses of cold coffee to drink. Jiri and Luit were delighted. They looked bright-eyed at the food and voraciously wolfed it down. They hardly talked, they were so busy satisfying their tummies and their souls and their senses. “You both must come to work in my garden from tomorrow”, she said. “You must stop going to the Beel to collect garbage. My house has a pretty little garden and I need a gardener. The plants need to be watered, the flower beds need to be dug and new ones have to be planted, the grass is full of weeds. Then I have bird-feeders all over the place. Those must be filled too. And there’s a ton of other work that the garden needs every season. You can help out with the odd jobs and whatever projects I plan.” Jiri and Luit looked up at her with tears of happiness. “Our dream is coming true. Our life is changing for the better”, said Jiri. “You have been so good to us”, said Luit “we can’t thank you enough.” “It’s the least I can do”, said Tuni. “Come tomorrow, okay? House number 43. Uzan Bazar. Come at 5pm. See you then.”
Tuni had left the cab. The cafe was quite near her place. She would walk down. “What a frightful mess”, she thought. “I could help these two, but there are hundreds of others. And then the birds and the fish and the elephants and the plants— all just dying out like that! It’s a humongous tragedy and nobody realises it. The floods are increasing too as the air is warmer because of global warming, so it holds more moisture. They could easily take a few measures. They should just divert the waters of the flash floods into the Beel. That will be an excellent thing all round. That will rejuvenate the Beel and will solve the flood problem as well. But then, in order to do that, they have to first clear the mounds of garbage surrounding the Beel which blocks the inlet. And they must rehabilitate the people living near the Beel if they are to release the flood waters there. This must absolutely be done to kill two birds with one stone. But why would anyone want to kill birds, anyway? Dear me, what awful proverbs we have in this language”. Thus musing, she reached the small white gate and the pretty little garden.
