Atique and I saw a more typical adaptation effort in the town of Mirzakalu, on the banks of the lower Meghna, the megariver formed after the Padma, Brahmaputra, and hundreds of other tributaries flow together. South of a small ferry dock, a crowd of workers was lifting sandbags, mixing cement, and sliding large stone blocks into place to form a new seawall. It stretched as far down the shore as we could see. The ground was so covered with sandbags that Atique and I skipped from one to the next, as if they were stepping-stones, in order to reach the foreman. “This embankment is temporary,” Atique said, even before we got to the man. “Within six months, it will go away. Just look behind it.” I looked, and I saw the beginnings of a second, higher seawall five hundred feet inland—the backup plan. The workers gathered around us, and we asked them how many times walls had been built here. They argued among themselves. “Seven, eight times,” Atique finally translated. Shortly before Cyclone Sidr, the shoreline had been a mile “that way,” one man explained, and he pointed toward the middle of the broad river. The foreman told us that they had been working on this latest seawall for three weeks, laying some ten thousand blocks and forty-five thousand sandbags. The blocks weighed 120 kilograms, or 265 pounds, the sandbags 160 kilograms. Most of the workers came from Rangpur, in far northern Bangladesh, adjacent to Enamul Hoque’s hometown of Dhubri in Assam; only Rangpuris could easily lift the blocks and sandbags. Two of the men ripped off their shirts to show me where they carried the loads on their backs. There were but a few scratches and old scars. They found a day laborer from Mirzakalu and had him take off his shirt, too. His back was bleeding from half a dozen cuts.
Some of the locals displaced by erosion had gone to new chars still growing in the middle of the Meghna—the sediment of the Himalaya or Assam, deposited here. To visit them, Atique and I climbed into a wooden fishing boat and sailed across the chocolaty water. Soon we were skirting mud flats and entering a canal flanked by low fields, thatched huts, and a few tin-roofed shacks. Children swam in the canal, and fishing boats were moored along its mud banks. The char, first settled in the 1970s, was named Zahiruddin. In 2002, the last time it was surveyed, it covered almost fifteen square miles and had eight thousand residents; by now, the population was surely bigger, but no one could say if that was true of the char itself. It had no dikes. It had few cyclone shelters—concrete structures on concrete stilts—though the government was building hundreds of them all over the mainland. Its residents were among the most vulnerable people in the world. We docked the boat and wandered around the char’s fields, trying to find someone to talk to, but the day was too hot; almost everyone was inside his hut. At last an old man appeared, shirtless and holding a large black umbrella for shade. He showed us the thousands of red peppers he had spread out to dry on three squares of cloth. “He is one of the fortunate ones,” Atique translated. “He came from the mainland eighteen years ago, so he has a title to his land.” Months later, when Cyclone Aila struck Bangladesh with seventy-five-mile-an-hour winds, it pushed a storm surge far up the Meghna. “Char Zahiruddin completely gone under water,” read one NGO’s report.
“Want to go to the hotel and get fresh?” Atique asked me. He meant “freshen up.” We made our way back to solid ground, and in the evening, after the air had cooled, we went to an outdoor play where performers dressed in green danced on a stage ringed by cloth and held up by bamboo struts. The subject was cyclones, and the play, underwritten by aid groups, was like an extended public service announcement. “It’s about what went wrong during Sidr,” Atique explained, “and then how the whole family can change and be ready.” The crowd of hundreds of men, women, and children sat in the dirt, in the dark, while the cast, illuminated by dim fluorescent lights, played flutes, banged on drums, sang, and yelled. One actor unrolled a large scroll, upon which were painted revolving images of a disaster: A family watching television, and the numbers 1 through 5—the cyclone intensity scale—flashing on the screen. Other people in small boats, huddled around the radio. Rickshaw drivers yelling warnings to those passing on the road. Families grabbing their gold jewelry and anything else portable and rushing out of their homes. Eventually, people filing calmly into cyclone shelters—an image that looked uncannily like the Edward Hicks painting Noah’s Ark. It was a hopeful play: Early warning systems, cyclone shelters, and education were why relatively few people—3,000—had died in Cyclone Sidr. Sixteen years earlier, in 1991, a similar cyclone had killed 138,000.
A million tons of rice were lost during Sidr, however, and the following spring, in the midst of the 2008 global food crisis, Dhaka was yet another place where riots broke out over the spiraling price of rice: Garment workers went on strike, smashing cars and throwing bricks at police, who responded with bullets.
One morning, Atique and I visited the fringes of the Sundarbans, hopping on motorcycle taxis that sped us down elevated paths to the village of South Khali. This and surrounding villages near the city of Bagerhat—which, like Touba, near Senegal’s Great Green Wall, was founded by a Sufi saint—were among the worst hit by the cyclone. Of the fifty South Khali families that survived the storm surge, clinging to palm trees or clustering on the second floor of the combined school–storm shelter, half had since moved away. It was the emptiest place I would visit in Bangladesh. We walked to where the path ran into the Bay of Bengal and watched fishermen untangle their nets. At the yellow two-story school that had saved people’s lives, a villager pointed out how it could be improved: If there were an entrance on the second floor, people could get inside even after the flooding began. I noticed the words on Atique’s gray T-shirt: “Beach Tour.” A fisherman eventually offered to take us across a creek into the Sundarbans, where a forest watchman in a lonely cabin told us that Bengal tigers, their ecosystem disrupted, were killing more villagers than ever before. We ventured a few hundred feet into the brush until we were advised to turn around.
On the ferry back north to Dhaka, Atique was sullen. “In fifty years, all the islands will be gone,” he finally said. “It will cause strife. Environmental refugees will have no place to go, or they will go to cities. Talk about Islam, about fundamentalism—these people will be angry. This will cause a war. Americans want to have their houses, their cars. They don’t see what it is doing to Bangladesh.” He urged me to have a look at the lower decks, so I did. They were more crowded than they had been on our way south. Each family had staked out an area of floor with a blanket, fathers, mothers, and children, together holding down their private patch. Many had large bags—seemingly all their possessions. “Do you know why?” Atique asked. “They are all moving to Dhaka.”
• • •
IN FACT, SOME AMERICANS—those in the defense establishment—did see what was being done to Bangladesh. In the years following Cyclone Sidr, Bangladesh was front and center in a series of war games and intelligence reports. One of the largest such games was held in July 2008 at the Center for a New American Security in Washington, D.C. John Podesta, soon to be the head of Obama’s transition team, played the role of the UN secretary-general. The featured speaker was the Shell alumnus Peter Schwartz, who had just been running a closed-door scenario involving submarines and Arctic melt for an unnamed client. A separate study he had done on the future of maritime navigation in the high north had recently been featured on The Colbert Report. “For the first time, my seventeen-year-old son knew about what I was doing,” Schwartz joked at the podium. “[Colbert] made me a hero. But just as important, even Colbert is recognizing the threat of the melting Arctic.” He turned more serious. “We are already seeing signs of climate change,” he told the war gamers. “This is not a fifty-year issue. It’s not, in my view, even a twenty-year issue. It’s a today issue, whether it is flooding in Bangladesh, storms in Myanmar, or droughts in Australia.”
The script of the war game imagined water tensions between Mexico and the United States, an influx of refugees from the Sahel and North Africa to Europe, the construction of floodgate
s to protect New York City and Shanghai, mass crop failure followed by mass flooding in India, a category 5 cyclone that killed 200,000 people in Bangladesh, and 250,000 climate migrants camped out at the India-Bangladesh border. The game’s outcome, unlike the subsequent, actual events in Copenhagen, was a robust global climate treaty.
The following winter, the National Defense University ran its own version, describing what could happen if millions of flooded-out Bangladeshis streamed into India: Food and water shortages. Epidemics. Religious war. A 2010 exercise at the Naval War College determined that the U.S. Navy would be hard-pressed to respond to a major disaster in Bangladesh without mobile desalination plants and shipboard capacity for thousands upon thousands of flood victims.
The most robust look at the implications of climate change for Bangladesh, South Asia, and, by extension, the U.S. military was the classified work of the National Intelligence Council (NIC). After its initial, global climate-security analysis, the NIC had gathered more specific climate data for six countries and regions. Bangladesh appeared to be among them. “We take that data,” an official told me, “and give it to a group of political and social scientists—people who understand how humans react—and say if this is what happens, given the other things that are going on in the region, how will the people react? We never look at climate change by itself. I mean, you gotta look at it in the context of other issues. Will we see cooperation to solve problems? Will there be tension? Will there be migration? If they migrate, where will they move?”
The reports produced for the NIC by outside defense contractors gave clues that the intelligence community worried about the same things everyone else did. “Anticipated inundation and salt water intrusion in the Ganges delta may displace tens of millions more Bangladeshis,” read one prepared by Centra Technology and Scitor Corporation. “India would not have the resources to cope with Bangladeshi immigrants pushing into West Bengal, Orissa, and the Northeast . . . About half of Bangladesh’s population, unable to sustain themselves through agriculture, will migrate to cities by 2050, and most of this migration will probably be to India. In addition, major disruptive events such as cyclones may generate mass refugee movements into India on much shorter timescales than the overall shifts in climate.”
In India itself, such studies were far fewer. When I visited, there had been only one government report probing the links between Indian security and Bangladeshi demographics, climate change, and sea-level rise—and it was classified. “Apart from its high population growth rate, it’s very clear that Bangladesh is going to lose a very significant portion of its landmass,” the report’s author told me in Delhi. “It is a ticking time bomb.”
But India, which was climbing in the ranks of the world’s worst carbon emitters—per country, not per capita—was waking up. Forty percent of its GDP is dependent on rainfall, and precipitation, including the timing of the monsoon, was changing. NASA satellites showed groundwater levels in its north falling by as much as a foot a year as irrigation sucked aquifers dry. India was ranked the world’s twenty-eighth most vulnerable country on the Climate Change Vulnerability Index put out by the British risk consultancy Maplecroft—well below Bangladesh, which was second, but well above most of the rest. At climate-security conferences, a former commander in India’s air force, A. K. Singh, began warning of fights with Pakistan and Bangladesh if shrunken glaciers forced India to keep water from shared river systems on its side of the border. A flooded Bangladesh would further destabilize the subcontinent. “It will initially be people fighting for food and shelter,” he told NPR. “When the migration starts, every state would want to stop the migrations from happening. Eventually, it would have to become a military conflict. Which other means do you have to resolve your border issues?”
• • •
ENAMUL HOQUE did not dislike foreigners per se, and with me he showed himself to be nearly as gracious a host as Atique. Almost as soon as I had arrived in Dhubri, he came to welcome me at my hotel, which consisted of a few rooms above a clothing shop that were lately being overrun by a hatch of thumb-size grasshoppers. The hotel was “bad for his status,” he said, so we drove to his house in a white Tata hatchback he had borrowed from a friend. Along the way, he assured me that I was in good company. “I am a very popular man in Assam, all over India,” he said. “But I get phone calls. People threaten me—call me black sheep. I say back to them in Arabic: ‘The only God is the homeland. Do everything for your homeland. Otherwise, you are not a true Muslim.’ That is what I say to them.” The fact that the infiltrators and their apologists were usually Muslim and that he was also Muslim was not as important as the fact that he was Assamese and he was Indian and the infiltrators usually were not.
Inside his two-room house, he had his servant grab a roll of border maps for me, which we spread out on a desk next to the book You Can Win, by the motivational speaker Shiv Khera. (“Winners don’t do different things. They do things differently.”) On a wall was a jaapi, traditional Assamese headgear that looked like a mix between a Mexican sombrero and a conical Vietnamese nón lá. Enamul sat at the desk and began telling the story of immigration to Assam. The first wave entered as refugees in 1971, when Indian forces helped Bangladesh, then known as East Pakistan, gain independence from West Pakistan. (For two decades after the partition of India, the two were a single Muslim state.) By 1979, AASU’s leaders were so worried by the population boom that they launched what is known as the Assam Movement. The anti-immigrant campaign included mass student rallies, sit-ins, and the massacre of 2,191 illegals in one six-hour period. (Enamul didn’t mention this.) It so roiled the northeast that the government sat down with AASU and signed an accord in 1985, promising foremost to build the fence. “That is why the work started in 1987,” Enamul said, “and that is why out of all the states, the first part of the fence was in Assam.”
The maps Enamul showed me were living documents—constantly changing not just because new roads and fencing were still going in but because completed roads and fencing were sometimes consumed by erosion and because new areas of undefended land sometimes appeared in the middle of the river. “See here,” he said, pointing. “Once upon the time, miles of border fence were built here. Now it is all dismantled, so we have to rebuild.” He flipped to the next map. “This area is a very nice area for crossing,” he said. “It is very vulnerable.” He pointed to Bangladesh. “Chaos from global warming is starting from that side,” he said. “After ten years or twenty years, the Bangladeshi people, they are bound to migrate. Because after ten years or twenty years, Bangladesh is not fit for living for a human being. The situation is very alarming. Presently, they are coming by any means, and they are searching for their livelihood, and they are settling hither and thither. It is a silent invasion.”
Enamul did not dare take me on one of his border patrols without permission from the BSF, but he had an equally important tour in mind: He wanted to show me Dhubri as he knew it, what was at stake if it was overrun by Bangladeshis. The next day, he picked me up on his moped at 5:00 a.m., and we puttered past shuttered storefronts until we reached the Open Air Theatre Cultural Complex, where he regularly practiced yoga with his Hindu friends—more proof that his fight was not sectarian. Dozens of middle-aged people were sitting in auspicious pose in the dirt, women on the left, men on the right, legs crossed, fingers forming mudras, while three leaders chanted from an elevated stage. Enamul and I put down mats on the men’s side, and after an hour of my flailing while everyone stared at me, he was gracious enough not to comment on my flexibility—once declared “the worst I’ve ever seen” by a Manhattan physical therapist. His friend with the car soon came for us, and we drove out to a famous potters’ colony on a riverside spit of land, where we stood for hours under the beating sun, observing folk artists and their terra-cotta rhinos and elephants.
The tour’s most important stop was in the afternoon: a visit to a decaying wooden mansion that had been perched on one
of Dhubri’s only hills for the last hundred years and to the blue-eyed raja who still lived in it. To meet him, we parked at the base of the hill and walked through uncut grass past an old cannon, then up a rickety staircase past his drying laundry, then into a second-floor study, where he sat surrounded by hundreds of photographs and oil paintings of his ancestors. For a few minutes, fans kept the room cool, and after the power went out, the soft-spoken raja offered us cans of Coca-Cola, which he somehow served with ice. “You should not drink the water here,” he warned me. He briefly showed us the armory downstairs, which had dusty trunks, mounted tiger heads, and an elephant gun, but mostly we sat in the sweltering study and talked about the old days. “We had seven hundred square miles,” he said. The system of lords and vassals had ended barely two decades earlier, after the government started collecting taxes directly rather than using the raja and lesser nobles like Enamul. The raja’s land, which had stretched across Assam and even into present-day Bangladesh, was gradually claimed by the government and distributed to the masses. This mansion was one of the few holdings left. He wanted to turn it into a museum.
The raja’s father, a member of the Assamese parliament, had been a great hunter. “He killed seventy-six tigers and eleven leopards,” he said, “and he caught more than a hundred elephants.” He pulled out an old hunting log, becoming increasingly nostalgic as we flipped through the ragged pages. “One tiger, two male rhinos, and one female,” he murmured. “From this, I think we can also make a list of extinct animals.” Over time, he said, his father noticed that the tigers were disappearing, and he became a great conservationist. The raja hovered over a photograph of his father’s favorite elephant, Pratap, who died in 1962. The animal’s grave was in the front yard, near the cannon. “My father was always telling me: Pratap is different. Pratap is unique. Every elephant has a breeding period, you know? At that time, every male elephant becomes very arrogant. But Pratap, he was very loyal, very calm. My father said: I will call him at the time of breeding with a female elephant and see if he comes over or not. My father called him. He came over.” Enamul, sipping on his Coke, took the moment to loudly belch.
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