This Makes Up the Sky: Weather. Sreejayaa Rajguru

We Survive the Storm: Floods and the People of Assam

by Sreejayaa Rajguru

“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions… You have to step right into the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step. There’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time.”
— Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

The people of Assam confront stormy weather every year.

Only this isn’t stormy weather. It’s flooding and often cold, brown, heavy flooding that swallows fields, roads, schools, and homes, creeping in quietly and slowly at first. It rises from the Brahmaputra and its many tributaries, bringing in its wake the weight of abandoned policy and broken promise. Every year floods come. And every year we live.

Not because it’s easy. Because it’s not an option.

The Water as Guest
Where I come from (Assam) water isn’t always an enemy. For many parts of the year, water is life. It sustains the rice fields, energizes the ferry, fills the ponds, and children cast-off onto and fishermen rely on. Come June (ish) the very same water refuses to leave. Instead it becomes an unwanted guest, it barges through the door and plops itself down on your couch.

You can’t fight the flood. You can’t negotiate with the flood. You can’t tell the flood to give you a moment.

Instead, we make adjustments. We lift our items, we prep up our boats, we prepare food. People who live in other parts of the country probably look at us and wonder how we survive like this every year, and the answer is pretty simple; we survive it like you survive a long illness, or a bleak marriage or grief. Just a day at a time.

What the Flood Takes
The flood is a slow thief. It robs us in daylight and not in the usual darkness of night. It always starts with the road. Then it takes the back yard. Then it takes the courtyard. Then it takes the house. And sometimes it takes more than land.

It takes the crop that we waited all year to harvest. It takes the top of the hill, and the cattle that couldn’t swim. And sometimes it takes people – an old woman who didn’t move fast enough, a child who didn’t know where the ground ended, a breath away from safety. These stories never make the news anymore, they are too ordinary. They are too cruelly commonplace.

This ordinary cruelty is a different sort of violence. When suffering is predictable, it is mundane. But to us, every loss is new. Every time our bodies feel the pain anew.

We Become Builders, Not Victims
The flood waters recede, leaving a lot more than mud. 

I see how they leave silt–the fine, golden silt that coats our skin and the seeds. They leave behind the skeletons of cows and lost stories. But more than that, they leave behind an invitation: What will you do now? 

And so, we build. Not just homes, but faith. 

We hammer the weight of our sorrow into the roofs over our heads. We stitch resilience into the mosquito nets we hang around our beds. We plant new seedlings in our gardens not because they will survive but because we will. 

Children splash and play in the puddles where graves once rested. The women rebuild the granaries. The men pick up where they left off fishing, not because they want to, but because they must. Life starts not in ceremony but in habit. The world pretends we are victims. We know better. Victims wait. Survivors act. 

We are not waiting for the flood to stop. We are learning to dance in it.


“You’ll come out of the storm…”

Haruki Murakami writes, “And when the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in.”

The message resonates deeply with many people in Assam. 

When the floodwater recedes, the real work begins. Cleaning the mud, repairing the walls, rebuilding the farm, replanting the fields, seeing who returned and who didn’t. The people get quieter, they age in ways that have nothing to do with age. The children grow up quicker. They have seen too much to believe in fairy tales. 

Every year leaves its scars. None of us come out of the storm without carrying some damage. We come out carrying the weight of one more thing. Some of us come out weighing less: less land returned to, less money returned to, less stuff to return to. But always we come out, that is the part we don’t forget.

The storm is never over
In Murakami’s realm, the storm may leave, but it never really leaves. It continues to affect the person, and follows them around for the rest of their life.

In Assam, the flood waters recede. The water doesn’t always leave but it recedes. There are remnants to remember the storm: on the walls, the land, the eyes of those who have watched everything they have built melt away. In some cases, we look at trauma, and it screams at us. In others, it whispers. It becomes your hesitation at planting again. It is the way a little girl flinches at the rumble of thunder. It is the way an old woman cannot sleep when it rains heavily.

We have learned to live beside the flood, not under it. That’s how we survive.

Of course, perhaps that is Murakami’s point.

“When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in.”

We are different. But we are still here.

And we are still walking.

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You can read the entire This Makes up the Sky series by visiting: https://womenwhosubmitlit.org/category/the-sky/