By Saachi D’Souza
Before the city, there was a village: one long road, mango trees, and a house made of clay bricks whose red bled in the monsoon. Ira’s father had called it a home; her mother, a waiting room. When the water overflowed, it came not like a beast but like a large, gripping silence. The water climbed walls, then memory. Her sister’s anklet was found wrapped around a broken window. Her mother’s last word had been “run.” Ira did. At seven, she learnt that not all losses are loud.
In the wake of the morning, Ira was surrounded by the strong smell of wet earth. It pressed through the cracked window of her one-room flat in a basti, clung to her hair, and filled her lungs. Her bedsheet clung damply to her legs. There was silence, an eerie nothingness unfamiliar to urban life. No honks of rickshaws, no vendors announcing their wares, no children laughing. The city, for once, was still.
The last thing she remembered was standing by the window, staring into the black of night. The rain had swallowed the streetlamps, overflowed the drain, and crept under every door. Then, nothing. A thick blankness, like the sky had passed through her.
She rose slowly. Her clothes were soaked through though she couldn't recall stepping outside. There was mud on her floor and drops of blood. Her hair was soaked wet, her hands covered in black dust. There were scrapes all over her knees. Barefoot, she followed it to the kitchen, where small pools of water—the type she remembered jumping over as a child—had gathered under the table. The tap dripped into a steel vessel, a sound too steady for what she felt. Her hands began to tremble. She reached for the radio in the corner.
Static. Then: “...record flooding in parts of the city... evacuation underway in low-lying areas...”
The city had changed overnight. She felt it in her bones. When she opened the front door, the street had become a shallow river. Plastic bags floated past like messages from another world. A neighbour’s scooter lay half-submerged. Someone had left a slipper on her doorstep as if escaping mid-run. She stepped outside, ankle-deep in water, and suddenly, like a wave washing over her, she remembered:
A roof.
A rusted knife.
Names whispered into the wind.
She had climbed up there as if pulled by a force from the air or sea. The roof was slick with moss, the concrete warm beneath her palms, the air pulling, insistent, from all directions. The blade had been dull, kept behind an old cupboard since her mother’s time—a relic she wouldn't dare throw away. She’d gripped it tight, her fingers tingling with memory. The metal pressed into her palm, and she could feel its unforgiving rust. Kneeling at the parapet, she began naming the dead.
Her mother first, then her sister, who never made it across the rising river. Then came the children: the girl with the broken sandal, the boy who’d tried to hold a goat above his head as the water rose. She spoke their names into the wind, not prayers, but invocations. Each syllable a thread tugging at something ancient, visceral.
She hadn’t uttered those names in years. She hadn’t allowed herself to remember. But the rain, she realised now, had memory. The sky was listening.
It couldn't be, she thought. But some griefs do not die. They wait. They witness. They ferment in silence until called. She had thought the spirits were buried, forgotten. But grief is a hunger. And last night, she fed it.
She walked past a collapsed wall. A small tree grew sideways through the crack, roots exposed. The air smelled of fish and freshly laid concrete, although all it was, was decaying. Further down, a woman was sweeping mud from her doorstep. The jingle of her bangles the only sound, like prayer bells. Neither spoke.
She reached the bund by the river—a body once tamed by concrete and denial. Now, the river had reclaimed—eaten the walkway, gnawed at the footbridge. Men in plastic ponchos picked up and swept aside fallen tree trunks with grim precision. Somewhere, a child cried. Someone else laughed. In the aftermath of the flood, the city stirred.
No one would believe her, not really. They’d say the flood was opening a mental wound. They wouldn’t know that she had carried this crack in her chest since she was seven, when her childhood home drowned in the rising Brahmani, and she watched buffaloes float belly-up, watched the bamboo fence unravel like a curse. She doesn’t tell anyone about the voices, either. How the rain seemed to whisper to her. How the knife gleamed faintly in the lightning. How the water answered back. Last night, her grief had split her open.
She first heard the old songs in the wail of car horns and the groan of shutters shuddering closed. In the half-light, she remembered something her grandmother used to say: that when the river drank too deeply of rain, it remembered its own fury. It remembered the villages it carried away, the children it laid to rest in soil, the bones of ancestors it never forgot.
On the roof, she closed her eyes and let the last of the light wash over her.
Below, rumbling, slowly coming alive, the water whispered.
Do you remember me?
It wasn’t a voice so much as a vibration - low, ancestral, part-wind, part-blood. It echoed in her bones. Not cruel, not soft, just... sure. She stood still, her breath caught somewhere between then and now.
She did remember. Not all at once, but in fragments: the laughter of children playing in the shallows of the riverbank—a river that shimmered gold at dusk, that licked their ankles and made them tickle. A boy had once dared the deepest bend and never returned. That was the first time she heard her mother scream with a kind of grief she too would inhabit.
She remembered how her father had tried to build a wall of sandbags and prayer, only for the water to take both.
She remembered the sky turning red, purple, and yellow. The sound of buffaloes braying. The bamboo fence splitting apart like ribs. And her grandmother, waist-deep, still, refusing to let go of the door frame even as the current pulled her. Her sari trailed behind her, caught in the flood, looking more like a veil than clothing.
Do you remember me?
The water asked again. Not accusing. Just persistent.
She spoke into the dark. “Have you returned?”
But what she really meant was — Have I?
The wind shifted. A current curled around her ankles, a familiar tickle tugged at her feet. For a moment, she thought she could hear women singing folk songs while they ground rice into paste—the kind her mother used to hum in the kitchen while waiting for monsoon pakoras to cook in hot oil. The songs still live in Ira.
Ira walked home, barefoot, her feet able to feel every piece of destruction floating in the water. Wet gravel punctured her soles. The tea stall near her apartment building was still upright, the chaiwala serving shivering customers. This spot, her respite too often, awaited her right where she left it. Without needing to acknowledge anything, she helped herself to a cup from the last dry kettle and let out a soft groan. Around her, people were holding onto the warmth of their cups like life preservers. Some had loved ones battling in hospitals, while others had lost their homes. Ira drank her tea and quietly walked home. Uncle, drenched and weary, stared at her with the wide-eyed dread of someone who’d seen too much water. He looked away, noticing the same rhythms of the flood in her eyes.
By evening, a makeshift shelter was set up for the neighbourhood community. She volunteered to help, handing out blankets and warming chapatis. A child clung to her kurta, her favourite stuffed toy now damp and forlorn. A man shivered in a corner as his daughter draped him in a thick shawl. Lightning and thunder still loomed over the city. Ira felt the tremble in her hands and chose to stay busy—and moving—until dark.
That night, though her flat was unharmed, she spent the night in the shelter to continue helping out. As she lay on a mat with twenty others, she stared at the sky. In the stillness, she could feel the blood moving in her veins. Needles poked the insides of her muscles. Her body ached all over. Remnants of the previous night folded into her ribs like a second heartbeat. She remembered her mother’s hands—rough from rice husks, gentle in their persistence—and wondered whether she could ever forgive the rain for taking everything, or herself for summoning this reckoning.
She dreamt of her village again, not as it was, but as it could have been. A river that never bursts. A house that didn’t collapse. Her mother singing. The knife rustless.
She remembered digging her nails into the soil, calling out names that were never called back. The boat that found her had no seats. Just four other children and a man with a stick, who told them not to cry. The government truck dropped them off in a nearby district. Nobody ever came looking for the missing.
A week passed in the city. Relief workers came and went. News channels were aghast. Politicians posed, prayed, prodded. Hoardings were repaired, broken sewage lines mended. The water began to recede. Drones buzzed overhead like mechanical insects, capturing aerial shots of destruction for late-night news debates. A viral reel showed a luxury tower’s flooded basement gym—dumbbells underwater like drowning monuments. Meanwhile, no one filmed the broken pipeline near her lane or the elderly woman who had waited eight hours for a food packet. Relief came in press kits and promises. For areas like hers, only plastic sheets and televised pity.
Ira revisited the rooftop. The city below was patchy with mud stains, and the trees gleamed clean. Crows hopped across power lines. She stood at the edge, looked over, and then closed her eyes. She could feel eyes on her. Witnesses. Judges.
She touched the scar on her palm where the knife had bitten into her. She didn't remember bleeding. Only offering. Not sacrifice—no, not that. It felt like remembering. Like becoming. She knew then the flood was not only outside. It had been inside her for years. The monsoon was merely the language, the page, for the water to reveal itself, to make itself known, to rage. The state would name it a disaster. But she would remember it as a return.
The coastal road project had diverted two natural drains. In the high-rises, the generators hummed, elevators stalled, but bottled water was delivered on time. In Ira’s basti, children swam in what was once a road, now summed with sewage and shame. The city had grown taller, but never honest.
Some mornings, she catches herself whispering again. Not names, but stories. Fragments of lullabies. Her mother's warning about sleeping during storms. Her sister’s laugh when it first rained after the funeral.
The city continues. Garbage is cleared. Cement dries. People forget. But she walks differently now. Slower. Listening.
Some days, she swears she can feel the river inside her, pulsing beneath her ribs - the flood’s secret vow. It was neither comfort nor threat, but something more elemental.
A voice older than cities. Older than memory.
I remember, it said.
And so do you.
Saachi D’Souza is a freelance writer and editor based in South Goa, India. Her work explores themes of gender, cultural identity, climate and society, often exploring these topics through the lens of food, film, and community narratives.
Banner image by Velizar Ivonov downloaded from Unsplash.com