Floods often prevent primary students from accessing their education.
The minute I stepped outside the airplane, Assam welcomed me with hot, sticky, wet air kissing my cheeks and tightly hugging onto my aching body. Purple clouds huddled together above the state’s largest airport while cool droplets of rain rolled from my hair to my face. Welcome to monsoon season, the tropical state of India hinted. You are far from ready.
I was in the state’s capital, Guwahati, for two days before taking a train ride to Dolohat Tinali, a region prone to floods. Home to about 1.2 million people, every centimeter of Guwahati is occupied with bodies riding brightly colored rickshaws, families sleeping under bridges, or vendors selling fresh fish from the Brahmaputra River. The city is constantly playing a game. How much can happen all at once on a single- or two-lane highway for 365 days?
The game reaches a new level of difficulty when the monsoon season interrupts the city’s momentum. With no integrated drainage or sewage system and increased urbanization that is not flood-adaptive, research shows that Guwahati is vulnerable to annual flash floods.
Everyone is a victim to the restless floods here. Women hold onto the ends of their pastel-colored saris to stop the water from tarnishing the silk. Smaller roads become vacant.
I am from Assam—it’s my favorite statement to say—but I know little about Guwahati. The city falls under India’s Smart City list and “sustainable environment” is one of the essential goals from the initiative’s plans. Yet from the everyday people I pass by and the flood stories I hear, I know there is a gap between a Smart City and this city. So this is not the last time I will come to Assam to report on floods. Dear Guwahati, you’re next on my list.
After spending two days in the city and taking a seven-hour train ride to Dolohat Tinali, it was the first day to visit schools. The task was to learn how floodwaters were disrupting classes from operating in rural and Indigenous communities throughout Assam. That day I wore my beaded pink salwar kameez, a fanny pack with my digital camera, and flip flops. I was warned by Headmaster Basu Biswas that the rain from the day before, which reached his knees, would make this reporting day “slippery.”
Our car’s route to Alichuck Lower Primary School mimicked the outline of a slithering python. The driver curved, turned, and drove around potholes caused by the heavy rain on the single-lane road to the government school. He avoided wearing a seat belt while I held onto my strap like it was my mother’s hand. Don’t worry, I did loosen up. The wind pulled my hair back and cool air hit my eyes. I witnessed two ducks glide and drink up the rainwater from a pothole taking over half the road.
I stepped out of the car to walk the remaining five-minute muddy path to the school. I scrunched up my dress pants, put pressure on my feet, and tried to scout for dried rocks rather than slippery mud to walk on. It didn’t matter how carefully I tried to walk. The mud slapped onto my legs, and my flip flops were now brown. Biswas, who was several feet ahead of me, turned around and stood smiling until I made it. No mud got on him.
“This is normal during the rainy season,” Biswas said in Assamese. He pointed to the silver bucket with water at the entrance of the school. I used it to wash my hands and feet like the rest of the students do every morning.
When I reached the school and started speaking to Biswas and his students, my days of sharpening my Assamese faded away. Instead, I just felt like myself, an Assamese girl, starting up a conversation with a school generous enough to let me in.
Biswas, along with the founder of the school, Muhammed Huessein, and teacher Rinjumoni Bharali Bhuya were very patient when I would ask them to repeat their answers to me. My favorite moments, though, were entering the classrooms. One first-grader, with his gray colored uniform shirt unbuttoned and pants scrunched to his knees, came back from the restroom barefoot because of how wet and slippery the school grounds were.
With the thick air, days reaching over 90 degrees, and no consistent electricity, the students were sweating but constantly giggling.
The kindergarten students all stood up and said the traditional Assamese greeting “Namaskar" in their high-pitched voices when I walked in. They did not fully understand why I was there interrupting their annual exams.
To break the ice, I asked them in Assamese, “So, do you guys like floods?”
“WE DO!!!” they all screamed and nodded together. Few even jumped from excitement.
“They don’t understand that floods are dangerous,” Biswas responded.
I couldn’t help but wish they'd never have to.
