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  • In the Underwater World of 2050
  • Brian Turner (bio) and Sonnet Mondal (bio)
Keywords

India, Kolkata, climate change, water, tourism


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[End Page 10]

On the gunwale of the Shiuli, I picture water overtaking each island and village. The cattle rancher I met, his cows and bulls rising with him in the tide. Pots and pans from his home. Children, in dream, rising. Parents swimming after them. The water lifting them all, one by one. Crocodiles move farther inland as split-tailed birds cry out in electric pulses. This isn't a dream. A recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change update details the rise in sea level, the millions to be displaced, land to be reclaimed by the greater ocean. The Bay of Bengal will push toward Kolkata. Much of Bangladesh will sink under, and seafaring ships will dock ever closer to the capital, Dhaka. The people living in the Sundarbans—once rooted for generations in a mangrove archipelago—will arrive as climate refugees in urban centers so populous my mind cannot fully comprehend the density and scale of them. The climate maps forecast the story. I've come here as a tourist of the ruins. A disaster tourist. Here to document the world that once was before it's erased by water, submerged forever—just as I do back home, in Florida. I'm trying to comprehend it. The erasure. And I wonder—Where will they all go? When I ask about this possible future and point to the tops of the mangroves and suggest that This may be where the low tide mark will be when your children are grown—time after time I'm told it isn't so, that it's been the same here the last thirty years. They shake their heads and pause to look across the water. Back in Kolkata, I think of the outer suburbs that will be underwater. The maps that detail their plight. And I wonder if sculptors will continue to shape humans and animals and gods from the mud of the Ganges. Will children who now live in the Sundarbans one day recognize a face emerging from the wet hands of an artist? Some familiar expression, perhaps, as each sculpture gazes upon the world, radiant and kind. What will the children make of these figures shaped by hand, here for a brief and beautiful moment, then given to the river once more? [End Page 11]

Brian Turner
Kolkata, India
@turners_lens
Sonnet Mondal
Kolkata, India
@theunsettledpoet
Brian Turner

Brian Turner is the author of a memoir, My Life as a Foreign Country (Norton, 2014), and two collections of poetry, Here, Bullet (Alice James, 2005) and Phantom Noise (Alice James, 2010). He's the editor of The Kiss (Norton, 2018) and coeditor of The Strangest of Theatres (McSweeney's, 2013). Turner's work has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, National Geographic, Harper's, and elsewhere. He lives in Orlando, Florida, and directs the MFA program at Sierra Nevada University.

Sonnet Mondal

Sonnet Mondal is an Indian poet and photographer based in Kolkata, India. He is the author of Karmic Chanting (Copper Coin, 2018) and five other books of poems. He is the founder director of Chair Poetry Evenings, Kolkata's international poetry festival, and is the managing editor of Verseville magazine.

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