Waiting for a Ferry to a Sinking Island
Waiting for a Ferry to a Sinking Island
Jhal Muri at Lot 8
“Has the vessel left for Ghoramara?” asks a woman in a green salway kameez wearing outsized sunglasses. The ferry guard tells her it hasn’t arrived yet. She looks back at a group of women waiting behind her. “Let’s have some chai then,” she says. They walk across to one of the tea shacks on the jetty, struggling to hold on to their umbrellas against the strong wind that is churning the waters into choppy waves. It’s 9 am and already the day is unbearably hot.
We are at Harwood Point, or Lot 8, the jetty where people take a ferry to Ghormara or Sagardwip islands, two islands on the Sunderbans delta in the Bay of Bengal. I am on my way to Ghoramara, which is quickly sinking due to rising sea water levels.
I haven’t had any breakfast, so I follow the women to the tea shacks. It was 6 am when I set off from home, dawn breaking over the rooftops in Kolkata. I arrived at Lot 8 after a three-hour rickety bus ride. Like all good tea shacks in Bengal, the fellow at the ferry point has an array of glass jars filled with biscuits in all kinds of shapes, sourced from local bakeries. I order a cup of tea, and pick out some biscuits to go with it, both savory and sweet.
An adjoining shack is selling the popular Bengali snack teley-bhaaja, fritters made of eggplants, onions, potatoes, pumpkins or cauliflowers dipped in a chickpea-flour coating. Stocking up on a plate of pumpkin fritters, I move on to a jhaal muri shack where a man in a vest and lungi (a sarong-like clothing worn by men in Bengal) is briskly mixing sprouted legumes and puffed rice with chopped onions, cucumbers, tomatoes, and green chillies. He tops it all up with a drizzle of mustard oil and salt, and serves it in a paper cone. Up ahead on the road, flies buzz around the heaps of grapes, pomegranates, bananas, and guavas being sold at a few fruit stalls. A line of improvised vehicles stand on one side, made of wooden planks, old Jeep parts, and a diesel engine that looks like the front of a motorbike.
Arms laden with fritters and jhal muri cones, I head back to the women on the wooden benches. The tea arrives in a small glass. It’s milky and sweet and hits the spot. I dunk the biscuit embedded with nigella seeds in the liquid and bite off a chunk. Over cups of tea, biscuits, and fritters, we—fellow passengers to Ghoramara—get to know each other.
Some of the women are teachers who traverse the water of the Bay every day to teach at the only school in Ghoramara. One of them is a health worker at a government clinic. One of the teachers, Rituparna, says they skip school on rough weather days. “The boats are not in good condition and there have been incidents of capsizing.” The health worker—Snighdha—is waiting for a boy from Ghoramara. “He had a vaccine which seems to have gone wrong, his leg has swollen up,” she says. “I have to take him to Sagar Island which has a proper hospital.” Snigdha—born in Ghoramara—talks about the fear that the monsoon brings when it arrives in mid-June. destroying homes and lives. “My island’s nearly gone, swallowed by the river.” Her mother and brother still live in Ghoramara. “I got married and came out.”
Our conversation and short session of bonhomie is interrupted with the arrival of the ferry to Sagar Island. Snigdha finishes her tea and walks to the long line of disembarking passengers to look for the boy. I order another cup of milky tea, looking out across brown waters of the Bay of Bengal, waiting for the ferry to Ghoramara.