The End of the Road for Climate
Where the Ganges meets the sea, the stress of global warming becomes too much.
The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more.
– from The Solitary Reaper by William Wordsworth
I had zig-zagged through the Sundarbans for five days, from the populated western side to the wildlife reserve in the east and then half way back, before I finally reached a pair of islands located where the Ganges River meets the Bay of Bengal.
Here I met Sourav Giri, who had agreed to be my guide to the islands of Ghoramara and Gangasagar. We greeted each other after my car pulled into what’s known by its map coordinates as Lot 8. This is where the ferries depart from.
I had explained to Sourav that my mission was to report on the impacts of climate change. Within minutes of setting off toward the first of these islands, the bright, energetic 32-year-old — a guy who taught himself to speak English by conversing alone in front of a mirror — was exclaiming to me, “Who will save us?”
He was exclaiming, rather than asking, because when it comes to the dwindling population of Ghoramara, it is too late for saving.
Getting this far in my Sundarbans journey had already been an adventure. Five days earlier I had bumped along potholed and buckling roads from the nearest big city, Kolkata (once known as Calcutta). Three days aboard a boat with a team of researchers transported me across the Sundarbans. Another five-hour jostling car ride and I was in the village of Purba Shridharpur, where I saw how everything from housing to education helps build climate resilience.
Along the way were stretches of pristine mangroves as far as one could see, as well as many miles of eroded shoreline lacking almost any vegetation. On one morning, a crocodile longer than I am tall lumbered off a landing as our boat pulled up so we could, very carefully, disembark at the river bank. At another landing a billboard welcomed us with a warning about a rogues gallery of snakes, from king cobras to constrictors.
Just a few days before I arrived in a town called Raidighi, wildlife authorities trapped a Bengal tiger. The tiger was returned to the reserve — a development villagers were still relating with relief when I showed up. Another day we came across this guy below, hand-catching mudskippers deep in the oozy, denuded river bank. They look like a cross between a fish and a salamander.
And on yet another day, wandering with my botanist guides through undisturbed forest, I looked up in wonder to see more bees than I’d ever been around in my life. Their buzzing filled the air as they weaved in and out of a tangle of flowers in a Nim tree (a.k.a. Indian Lilac or, scientifically, Azadirachta indica, as my botanist guides informed me). This is the rich density of life the Sundarbans is known for.
But I also saw plenty of devastation, particularly from May 2020’s Cyclone Amphan — which served up terrific, record-setting wind gusts — and May 2021’s Cyclone Yaas, which delivered an unprecedented storm surge when it arrived during an unusually high tide. Collapsed homes, washed out shoreline embankments, rice paddy fields wasting from salt water inundation — the damage to villages was obvious. Fallen trees littered even the thickest and healthiest mangrove stands.
Yet none of this prepared me for Ghoramara and Gangasagar.
If the Sundarbans are among the increasing number of places on earth facing an existential threat from climate change, Ghoramara Island has reached a point of no return. Nearby Gangasagar doesn’t seem too far behind. These are alarming, happening-right-now reminders that the cascading challenges of global warming can overwhelm — at first slowly, then all at once as they say — even communities well accustomed to these sorts of hazards.
It’s not as if Anil Ghorai, 50, had never been through a cyclone. Born on Ghoramara, he was one of dozens of residents we spoke with during our visit. The island has lost more than half its area to erosion and flooding and three-quarters of its population to migration in the past decade or so. One of a few thousand remaining island residents, Ghorai saw his home destroyed by winds during Amphan. He had just finished rebuilding last year when Cyclone Yaas brought catastrophic flooding.
“Nature didn’t give me time to recover,” he told us.
He extended his arm in a sort of hook-shape, describing how he clutched a tree during Yaas, holding tight with his other hand to a tin box with his all his savings and irreplaceable documents. Water poured over the embankments and swept his newly rebuilt house away. His wife, a baby son in her arms, scrambled to the top of a pile of bricks left over from the construction to stay above the rising water.
“I could never have imagined the entire island going under,” he said, standing next to his once-again destroyed home.
Yet it did, miraculously leaving not a villager dead during the storm itself. Most sheltered on the upper floor of the local school. Here’s Sourav showing how high the floodwaters crested at the center of the island, just inches below the floor where residents were sheltering…
Property, homes, material livelihoods — all wiped out, along with virtually every living thing on the island that couldn’t swim or fly to safety. “Cows, hens, goats, all the animals died,” one resident told us.
So, too, did the possibility of growing rice or cultivating the betel leaf that many on the island grew to supplement their income. School textbooks and student records were ruined. For two days, there was no drinking water beyond what residents had in the shelter. Emergency food supplies took even longer to arrive.
“We lost everything,” said Sheikh Sabir, a 24-year-old we met beside a pond where he repeatedly threw a net into the water hoping to come up with a few fish to help feed his wife, seven-month-old daughter, parents and uncle. Very few fish survive in the once fresh water — what locals call “sweetwater” — that dot the island and are now markedly saline. He’d caught nothing so far that day.
“What will happen next?” he ponders upon being asked. “If the government gives us land, we’ll move away.”
Large swathes of the island are now wastelands of infertile soil or shoreline that routinely breaks off and dissolves into the water flowing past relentlessly. These powerful tidal currents reverse twice each day, rushing in and draining out, undermining shoreline embankments awaiting the next cyclone.
It reminded me of what a program manager at a nonprofit group told me earlier in the week. The group, known as the Tagore Society, does a wide variety of social and environmental work in the Sundarbans.
“You cannot fight against nature. Nature will fight back. That’s what’s happening here.” said Santanu Bhattacharyya, 36, in the settlement of Rangabelia. “Whoever wants to live in the Sunderbans has to consider environmental factors, because to make a sustainable livelihood here is very difficult. Whatever you’ve accomplished in two to three years, or even five years or ten years — all of a sudden a cyclone comes along and it is finished.”
Yet moving is no simple task, either.
The government won’t provide land elsewhere. But it is building housing on Gangasagar for the most vulnerable residents who can no longer scrape out a life on Ghoramara. Thirty families will take up the offer this year, adding to a growing community of Ghoramara residents who have abandoned the island, according to Sudipta Mondal, a local government development official on the bigger island.
Mondal is justifiably proud of the government’s record of preventing deaths during such big storms. Not long ago, less powerful cyclones killed thousands, even tens of thousands. The improvement comes from building shelters for even the poorest communities, convincing villagers to use them and using modern meteorology to accurately predict where and when cyclones will hit.
Yet for the residents of smaller islands like Ghoramara, the only long-term alternative remains leaving, Mondal said.
“They’re accustomed to having their own land,” he said, “but there’s no choice.”
Many, especially the young, move further away than Gangasagar.
We stopped for tea at the shop of Kanai Lal Guchhait. The 64-year-old and his wife earn less than 50 cents a day selling tea and biscuits now, a fraction of what they made before much of the population, especially the working age men, moved away.
Cyclone Ampham wiped out Guchhait’s betel leaf patch. Yaas stopped the plants from growing back. His son moved to north India after Amphan. After Yaas, his daughter and her husband moved there, as well. Both work in food processing factories. A granddaughter remains with Guchhait and his wife to attend school.
The parents need money from their children to make ends meet. Their government-provided monthly food allotment — a little over five pounds each of wheat and lentils — lasts only about ten days. Still, they resist leaving themselves. Even if a home were offered to them on Gangasagar, they would have no space for a tea shop. Guchhait still holds out hope his empty dirt plot nearby will once again grow betel leaf.
And Gangasagar, a far larger island with a population of some 150,000, has many challenges of its own. Not least is a huge Hindu festival held there each January. Over a span of about two weeks, as many as four million pilgrims — yes, you read that right, more than 25 times the population of the island — make their way to Gangasager. They cross the water on fleets of ferries brought in especially for the purpose, operating twenty-four-seven to deliver them to shores purpose-dredged for landings at high tide, low tide and everything in between.
The pilgrims, some annual attendees, others on a once-a-lifetime journey of faith, file down to a beach facing the Bay of Bengal to purify themselves in the waters. Why they do this here is a fiery tale of sin and absolution. Suffice it to say, this is where, in Hindu mythology, the gentle and holy waters of the Ganges find the sea after gushing from the big toe of Vishnu and then are tamed by falling through the matted hair of Shiva — a journey thus involving Hinduism’s top two deities.
Economically, spiritually, even politically, the festival is too important to the island, the state of West Bengal, India’s Hindu-nationalist government and the pilgrims themselves to even contemplate forgoing or moving the essential dip elsewhere. Yet the beach continues to erode away, pounded by some of the fastest-rising sea levels in the world. The Kapil Muni Ashram, closely associated with the festival, has been moved at least four, and maybe as many as seven, times over the past century or so — depending on who you ask — to stay ahead of the rising water. It flooded again during Yaas, less than a decade after the last move.
State and local government and religious foundations have spent millions to build infrastructure in the area to handle the crowds. Now the local development authority is proposing to spend millions more for a barrier made up of thousands of huge concrete “pentapods” dropped offshore it hopes of diminishing the wave force and slowing the erosion. Neither natural mangrove barriers or the usual man-made embankments used to hold back the water can work here, with so many pilgrims needing access to the sea in such a short time.
Here’s a view of Kapil Muni Ashram when I was there. You can see how far it is from the beach, which was at my back when I took this photo…
Here’s what it looked like after Cyclone Yaas…
Throughout my three days on the islands, Sourav provided running commentary, veering from explanation to interpretation to personal observations about everything from geopolitics to linguistics and tea. At turns amusing, animated and sad, frequently frustrated but never defeated, he had come a long way and was determined to go further. And he wanted me to know it.
His father, a farmer, ran a tea stall during the festival. Yet Sourav himself had gotten an education, a masters degree. For years that meant arduous weekly ferry and train journeys to Kolkata and back, leaving at 2 am and returning home well into the evening.
“I am the first in my family to cultivate my mind instead of cultivating crops,” he told me with pride.
He had many motivational aphorisms to live by: “To be born poor, that is not a sin. To die poor, that is a sin,” he announced as we chugged across Ghoramara island in a three-wheeled tuk-tuk. “You have to change your own life. Nobody is here to help you,” he offered later.
Unprompted he began acting out his method for teaching himself English: hours of staccato, self-conversation before a mirror, his best friend growing up, he said.
“What is your name, sir?”
“My name is Sourav.”
“Where are you from, sir?”
“I am from Gangasagar.”
“What is your name?”
“What is your age?”
“Quite difficult,” he told me.
Now an English tutor to the children of many of Gangasagar’s elite, he pulled out his phone to play me instructional Youtube videos he’s recorded. In them, he patiently explains the shades of meanings between words such as “fresh” (as in fruit) and “raw” (as in meat), or when to use “clean,” as opposed to “disinfect” or “sanitize.”
As we sat beside an eroded grotty shoreline waiting for the ferry to take us off Ghoramara Island, he rattled off the names of India Nobel prize laureates, and launched into recitations of English poems he’d memorized, including by his favorite poet, William Wordsworth. The lines seemed wildly incongruous as we sat on the garbage-strewn shore. And yet somehow right on the mark.
He closed his eyes to try to better call up the words…
Behold her, single in the field,
Yon solitary Highland Lass!
Reaping and singing by herself;
Stop here or gently pass!
Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain;
O Listen! For the Vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.
There he stopped, unable to remember more.