Wielding terror and fear in the absence of credibility, extrajudicial detention is a defining strategy of political terror. In this comprehensive survey of the tactics of illegal detention employed by the American, Israeli, and Assad regimes, enforced disappearance emerges as the swan song of decaying empires on the brink of collapse. · FEATURES Essay · Syria Wielding terror and fear in the absence of credibility, extrajudicial detention is a defining strategy of political terror. In this comprehensive survey of the tactics of illegal detention employed by the American, Israeli, and Assad regimes, enforced disappearance emerges as the swan song of decaying empires on the brink of collapse. Jacobo Alonso, Periplo - Safe Migration (2024). 18 laser-cut modules of polyester felt, 300cm each. Damnatio Memoriae In his Prison Notebooks , Gramsci describes the interregnum of a dying civilization as it gives birth to a new state order. “Now,” he writes, “is the time of monsters.” In our time of monsters, enforced disappearance reemerges as an extrajudicial tool for “extraordinary” times. Such Orwellian simplicity belies the systematic practice of one of the worst crimes of the twenty-first century. Millions of people across the globe have disappeared in political terror schemes as part of a practice that has only increased over the last few decades, tied to the wars of the current era. Enforced disappearance is a crime distinct even from arbitrary detention or mass incarceration–rather than leveraging the known carceral architectures of the state, enforced disappearance relies on parallel hidden networks created to remove someone entirely from visibility. The International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance formally defines the practice as: the “arrest, detention, abduction, or any other form of deprivation of liberty” by state or para-state agents followed by the state’s “refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person, which place such a person outside the protection of the law.” There are no exceptions to this protection under international law. The practice of enforced disappearance, when widespread or systematic, constitutes its own independent crime against humanity. While kidnapping by the state is deemed extrajudicial—exceeding boundaries of the law and the ordinary—the state, in emergency, engages in the conspiracy to kidnap with impunity. Total wars waged by imperial powers abroad, dictatorial regimes within, and occupying powers against indigenous populations deploy enforced disappearance as a defining strategy of political terror. Three contemporary cases exemplify, even define, each horrific model: the U.S.’s global war on terror, the Assad regime in Syria, and the Israeli genocide in Gaza. In each case, the carceral architectures of the state or occupying power expanded grossly in wartime settings to conduct systematic disappearance campaigns against tens and hundreds of thousands of people. Such campaigns were inevitably, and by design, tied to a litany of other crimes including torture, sexual violence, arbitrary detention, collective punishment, and extrajudicial killing. Collectively, they represent among the worst cases of enforced disappearance in this century. An Archipelago of Disappearance: the U.S. Global War on Terror In 2001, the United States launched its ‘global war on terror,’ initiating a new mode of warfare for the many imperial wars and military campaigns fought thereafter, including the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the expansive military campaigns undertaken in the Middle East, North and East Africa, and Southeast Asia. As part of this global war, the U.S. developed a conglomerate of overseas carceral architectures to facilitate the capture and detention of individuals across territorial borders or even arenas of war. The physical infrastructure of these architectures were created in tandem with new legal arguments inventing new categories of persons—i.e., the “unlawful combatant”—to systematically deprive those taken of their fundamental rights and protections. In Iraq and Afghanistan, these structures took on more traditional forms of carceral architectures under foreign military occupation: military detention camps, internment facilities, and converted prisons run by U.S. and coalition forces. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans, overwhelmingly civilians, were captured and held indefinitely without charge. One report puts the total number of Iraqis arrested in the first five years of the invasion alone at 200,000, of whom 96,000 spent time in U.S.-run prisons and camps. Their capture under the new “unlawful combatants” regime stripped them of age-old prisoner of war protections under the Geneva Conventions. Arbitrary detention, torture, abuse, and sexual violence were widespread and systematic in these prisons, cemented in infamy by Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Bagram in Afghanistan. ‘ De facto’ disappearance, first termed in a 2004 ICRC report , was endemic to the mass detention campaigns undertaken by U.S. forces, who rarely informed the detained individual or their family where or how long they would be taken. Beyond the localized carceral architectures in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States, as part of a broader war aim superseding delineated boundaries and war zones, created new extraterritorial carceral architectures to facilitate the forcible disappearance of hundreds of Muslim men and boys. Perhaps no site symbolizes this more than the notorious penal colony in Guantánamo Bay. Yet it was not the only one. Between 2001 and 2009, the CIA Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation Program ran a transnational network of covert prisons, known as black sites, for the secret detention and brutal torture of men captured in the “war on terror.” Euphemisms served as a doublespeak to conceal a secret disappearance scheme of an unprecedented transnational scope. “Rendition” was the act of enforced disappearance, “detention,” secret and incommunicado, and “interrogation,” simply torture. The locations of the secret prisons remain classified. Information that has been declassified is enough to paint a macabre network of torture sites across the world. Some sites were run entirely by local “host” nations, some collaborated with local security forces, and others remained under exclusive American control on foreign territory. Men captured and transferred to CIA custody were “rendered” across black sites, in what a Guantánamo defense lawyer once described as an “international criminal enterprise” of human trafficking between foreign “torture pits.” According to the U.S. Senate report on torture, at least 119 men were known to have been held in the CIA torture program. Torture in the black sites, authorized by secret legal memos written by the U.S. Department of Justice, took on perverse and methodical forms including waterboarding, sleep deprivation, walling, sodomy, mock executions, and pure human experimentation. At least one detainee died in CIA custody; no exact number is known. An untold number of individuals died in U.S. custody elsewhere in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then there is Guantánamo, the most infamous and enduring piece of the extraterritorial carceral architecture created in the U.S.’s global war on terror. A prison island—or, more accurately, an American penal colony on Cuban territory—the military detention camp encompassed the most diverse population of Muslim men and boys captured by U.S. or allied forces and disappeared across seas. Nearly eight hundred men from 48 countries were held in Guantánamo. When the prison first opened in 2002, only the nationalities of prisoners were disclosed. In 2004, the U.S. began revealing the names of the men and boys held, propelling efforts by international organizations, monitoring groups, and civil society to represent the men and contact their families. Testimony by survivors reveal the physical and psychological torture endemic to the first several years of the camp. Two decades of domestic and global backlash, litigation, and advocacy campaigns forced the release of most of the men. Twenty-seven prisoners still remain , including sixteen approved for transfer and three “forever prisoners.” Each carceral site or network in Iraq, Afghanistan, Cuba, or undisclosed locations across the world did not operate in isolation. Rather, they formed parallel and at times intersecting networks under the U.S.’s global war on terror. Many Muslim men captured and held in the U.S. military detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan, or tortured in CIA black sites, for example, were sent to Guantánamo. For many, the revolving door between carceral institutions across nations continued even after release. In this era, the U.S. pioneered powerful models of war and propaganda to conceal and acquit a disappearance and torture campaign amounting to war crimes and crimes against humanity under international law. Their proclaimed success foretold models others sought to follow. "Apátrida / Stateless" (2024), performance, isothermal emergency flag, 210x180cm. Courtesy of Jacobo Alonso. Annihilation and Enforced Disappearance in Syria Post-2011 Enforced disappearance has deep roots in Syria, practiced for decades under the Assad regime of both father and son—Hafez and Bashar al-Assad. Political dissidents, activists, and their relatives were routinely disappeared in secret intelligence and military prisons across Syria. These numbers first climaxed in the late 1970s and early 1980s under the reign of Hafez al-Assad, when tens of thousands of Syrians were disappeared in a systematic campaign culminating in the Tadmur prison massacre of 1980 and the Hama massacre of 1982. By then, Syrian prisons had gained a reputation for depravity, torture, and extrajudicial killings in an Arab world dominated by carceral states. The regime, entrenched in permanent ‘emergency’ doctrines and past successes quelling rebellion, was primed to respond existentially to any threat to its rule. In March 2011, a popular revolution arose in Syria, as Syrians joined the wave of Arab revolutions unfolding in the region. The response of the son mimicked the father: a total campaign of arrests, indiscriminate killings, siege, and collective punishment. In post-2001 fashion, Bashar borrowed the discourse du jour of an existential ‘war on terror’ necessitating extreme violence to ensure internal state survival. The results of the ensuing war were catastrophic: at least 350,000 Syrians were killed , 14 million displaced , and 155,000 forcibly disappeared . In this war, enforced disappearance became a primary tactic of state political terror and collective punishment. An integrated military-intelligence regime targeted civilians for mass arrest and torture. Hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children were kidnapped during protests, at military checkpoints, schools, hospitals, and from their homes, held incommunicado, and subject to horrific physical and psychological torture, including rape and sexual violence. The carceral architecture of the state expanded vastly to absorb the sheer volume of detainees. Military field courts issued interminable prison sentences and thousands of extrajudicial death sentences in secret trials lasting minutes. Sites like Tadmur military prison, closed in 2001, were reopened in 2011 to hold new populations of prisoners. The disappeared did not vanish in the fog of war. Smuggled documents, photos, and testimonies by survivors, defectors, and witnesses alike prove a meticulous record of the regime’s own systematic disappearance scheme. As early as 2014, the ‘Caesar’ photographs revealed over 28,000 pictures smuggled out by a military forensic photographer tasked with documenting the deaths of those killed in regime detention centers. The pictures evidence a perverse organizational scheme run by the state with bodies clearly marked by torture. State documentation and witness testimony elsewhere further uncovered the secret network of military hospitals, military-intelligence branches, ad-hoc detention sites, and prisons responsible for directing the arrest, torture, and killings of hundreds of thousands of civilians. In 2016, Amnesty International collaborated with Forensic Architecture to create the first 3D model of one such site: the infamous death chambers of Saydnaya Military Prison, where a then-estimated 13,000 prisoners were executed. Silence imposed on prisoners held in Saydnaya became a crude weapon of torture by the regime. Digital reconstruction of Saydnaya relied on architectural and acoustic modeling based on interviews with four survivors in a counter mapping effort that sought to break down both the physical and psychological architecture of silence imposed by disappearance. It was a powerful disruption to a structure that, until mere weeks ago, was impervious to time or human cost. The regime, backed by an impunity ‘won’ territorially in a war of annihilation, began issuing hundreds of death certificates for prisoners disappeared years earlier. Families who received the certificates were denied access to their bodies or any other means of verification. Enforced disappearance became its own phenomenon in Syria, spurring countless UN reports and proposed mechanisms that were all but paralyzed in achieving any resolution or accountability. In November 2023, the International Court of Justice issued a ruling against Syria, recognizing enforced disappearance as a violation of the Convention Against Torture, but fell short of ordering specific measures such as providing information of detainees’ whereabouts or allowing access to independent monitors. Elsewhere in Europe, former Syrian detainees and families of the disappeared pursued new avenues of accountability to bring individual perpetrators to account. In 2020, the first trial dealing with state torture in Syria took place in Germany against two former state officials who were convicted of crimes against humanity for their role in overseeing torture, sexual violence, forced imprisonment, and extrajudicial killings. As the fight for Syria’s disappeared stagnated, a Syrian rebel offensive launched in late November radically shifted the territorial status quo, culminating in the overthrow of the Assad regime ten days later. The liberation of each city was marked by the liberation of each prison within it, a metaphor physically upended by the breaking of each cell door. Once at Saydnaya, excavation teams worked for days to secure the release of the remaining detainees, some in levels below ground, captivating a nation scrambling to find their loved ones. Even now, the fate of over 100,000 detainees remains unknown . Enforced Disappearance As Genocide: Gaza After October 7 In Palestine, carcerality fundamentally underpins Israel’s settler-colonial project. Military occupation and an expansive apartheid regime form the larger prison within which the physical carceral architecture organizes the mass incarceration of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Since 1967, over 850,000 Palestinians have been arrested and imprisoned under the auspices of the Israeli military judicial system, the central mechanism of the occupation ruling over the West Bank and Gaza. Under this system, civilians are routinely arrested and tried according to an expanding set of Israeli military orders in military courts at a conviction rate of over 99%. Hundreds more are held indefinitely without charge or trial under administrative detention. It is a system bound up in innumerable individual human rights violations—arbitrary detention, fair trial violations, torture, forced deportation, the systematic prosecution of children—amid larger war crimes and crimes against humanity. One of them is the crime against humanity of apartheid. International human rights organizations and UN reports all describe dual legal regimes—military courts for Palestinians and civilian courts for Israeli settlers—that systematically privilege one racial group over another in a broader policy of domination and control under an apartheid regime. Other war crimes include the widespread prosecution of Palestinian civilians in military courts, the intentional deprivation of their right to a fair trial, the deportation of the occupied population to prisons and detention centers in the occupying power, and torture . Enforced disappearance comprises yet another feature of the Israeli carceral regime. Disappearance predates the creation of the military judicial system in 1967 and continued as an intermittent practice over the next several decades, often disguised by a patchwork of legal frameworks. In 2002, the Israeli Knesset passed the Unlawful Combatants Law , modeled after its U.S. post-9/11 predecessor , to retroactively legitimate the indefinite detention of Lebanese hostages. Three years later, the same law was applied to Palestinians from Gaza, enabling periods of secret and indefinite detention constituting de facto disappearance. More sinisterly, it laid the legal and structural groundwork for the total war on prisoners waged today. In retaliation to the breach of Gaza’s open-air prison on October 7, the Israeli regime issued a series of orders dramatically expanding its carceral architecture as it launched its genocidal war on Gaza. Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli prisons were cut off from almost all outside contact as conditions drastically deteriorated, prisoner abuse escalated, and Israeli occupation forces ramped up arrests across the occupied territory. Emergency amendments to the 2002 Unlawful Combatants Law broadened the scope of secret detention, which Israeli authorities immediately leveraged against the Gazan population. New secret military detention camps were erected exclusively to detain Gazans: Sde Teiman in the south and Anatot near Jerusalem. Elsewhere at Ofer Military Prison, Gazan detainees were cordoned off to open-air tent camps and the secret wing of Section 23 , held incommunicado, and hidden even from the larger Palestinian prisoner population. Beyond the known existence of these three sites, Israeli occupation forces disappeared thousands of Gazan men, women, and children across makeshift military barracks, settlements, prisons, hospitals, and open fields. The new clandestine regime served as an appendage to Israel’s larger carceral architecture. Whistleblower reports and testimonies by former detainees point to an integrated network of horrific torture camps across Palestine’s occupied geography. Among them, Sde Teiman stands as an emblem of the torture and abuse of Palestinian detainees, acquiring the same diseased colonial reputation of Abu Ghraib. Palestinians held in Sde Teiman are kept blindfolded in barbed wire ‘pens,’ starved, severely beaten, and subject to interrogations and torture that include electrocution, sexual violence, rape, waterboarding, and medical experimentation. In an adjoining ‘field hospital,’ injured Palestinian detainees were tied to hospital beds and practiced on by medical staff. Elsewhere across Israeli prisons and detention camps, Palestinian prisoners were subject to the same practices of torture, starvation, and deliberate medical negligence. The crime of enforced disappearance is central to the larger crime of genocide, a conclusion outlined months ago by Palestinian human rights groups and echoed in Amnesty’s latest report . Disappearance, like genocide, is practiced methodically: the population of Gaza is physically tagged, catalogued, and, if not forcibly displaced or killed , disappeared to unknown sites. Numbers accounting for the full magnitude of these crimes are still unknown, ranging between the tens and hundreds of thousands. They are, at the time of this writing, enduring crimes of no known boundaries. In October 2024, shortly after Israel launched its full war on Lebanon, a new amendment to the Unlawful Combatants Law designated two new military camps for detention in the north, prompting concerns they may be used to hold Lebanese detainees. This is the circular expansion of a law that first sought to legitimate the enforced disappearance of Lebanese detainees twenty-two years ago and which commandeers the legal architecture of disappearance today. The fate of the disappeared and detained remains central to ceasefire negotiations and emerging forums of accountability. "UN-Safe Migration" (2024), Polyester felt and laser cut fabric installation. Courtesy of Jacobo Alonso. The disappeared, in their absence, loom large over the present. Impunity granted to one political terror scheme emboldens another, cementing permanent states of emergency and creating varied national, transnational, and extranational architectures of disappearance. They are examples of a twenty-first century reality with the potential to produce even more destructive results, leveraging evolving surveillance technologies and age-old carceral traditions. It is an inevitability readily taken for granted; an inevitability, too, that serves the fear intended by these schemes. And yet, the enormity of resources required to sustain the secret disappearance of tens of thousands of people ultimately fail under their own grandiosity. The secrecy and structures of such crimes are untenable, even as they undeniably produce incalculable human loss. Our current moment only proves their frailty. Across the globe, the edifices of once horrific sites are being quietly shuttered by the state or actively dismantled by popular forces in the face of enduring local and global resistance. As Guantánamo turns twenty-three this month, another eleven Yemeni detainees held without charge were transferred to Oman, leaving only fifteen men remaining. In Palestine, the fight for tabyeed el-sujoun —to ‘cleanse the prison walls’—is carried on across all fronts by resistance groups, civil society, and transnational coalitions, including prisoners’ coalitions in the U.S. The breaking of prison doors in Syria, inspiring renewed efforts in places like Egypt , now beckons the daunting task of what comes after. New modes of documentation, accountability, and rehabilitation seek to tackle the crime of disappearance, with a particular focus on the survivors and families of the disappeared. The future of these structures, whether carcerality may emerge in new forms, will always remain a threat to the hard-won achievements of the present. Nevertheless, a rupture of a sort has begun, and the seam must be unraveled to its end. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Essay Syria Enforced Disappearances Disappearance Dissent Discourses of War Forced Disappearance Guantanamo Bay Gitmo Alienation Archive of Absence Archive Assad Regime Israeli Regime Sedneya Sednaya Prison Sde Teiman detention carcerality 9/11 post-9/11 world order prisoner's coalitions Hama War on Terror War Crimes CIA Abu Ghraib unlawful combatant Muslim Invisibilizing Muslims West Bank Gaza Palestine fair trial unfair trial Unlawful Combatants Law Anatot Nageb Ofer Military Prison Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 22nd Jan 2025 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

In the immediate wake of the COVID-19 crisis, disaster and religion became intertwined for many Rohingya refugees in the camps of Cox's Bazaar, allowing spurious claims to sway a vulnerable population. FEATURES COVID-19 and Faith in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh Sneha Krishnan In the immediate wake of the COVID-19 crisis, disaster and religion became intertwined for many Rohingya refugees in the camps of Cox's Bazaar, allowing spurious claims to sway a vulnerable population. COVID-19 IS directly impacting the most vulnerable section of society in Bangladesh—its Rohingya refugees—a community which narrowly survived genocide in their native Myanmar, now subjected to mass displacement in the region. Combined with the impact of Cyclone Amphan and Cyclone Yaas in 2020 and 2021 respectively, Bangladesh’s constant battle with the climate crisis is well-documented. The mass displacement and persecution, however, continue to impact the largely overlooked refugee population. Approximately 1.2 million Rohingya refugees have been living in the 27 camps in two sub-districts of Cox’s Bazar district since 2017. Late last year, there were state-led actions that alarmed both humanitarian and human rights groups. The Government of Bangladesh, in December 2020, began moving Rohingya refugees from Cox’s Bazar to Bhasan Char, a secluded island without adequate healthcare infrastructure or protection against extreme weather events like severe cyclones and tidal surges. So far, more than 20,000 people have been moved, out of the planned 100,000 refugees to the low-lying silt island. Grappling with the effects of double displacement, initially from their home country and now being forcibly shifted from refugee camp to camp, coupled with the uncertainties about their legal status and insecurity over their future in their host country, the plight of the Rohingyas is a humanitarian crisis that shames humanity. Faith and Health of the Rohingya Refugees In 2020, several months of lockdown measures, put in place by the Government of Bangladesh to protect against COVID-19, led to a severe loss of livelihood for many of the country’s vulnerable and poor. In Cox’s Bazar, women-headed households, persons with disability, and elderly people have resorted to strategies that affect their health and well-being. Women and children are eating less nutritious foods and fewer meals in a day, reducing the quantities they eat. These harmful dietary practices are a result of their socio-economic conditions, especially loss of livelihoods and limited food relief during the COVID-19 crisis. It speaks of people on the brink, left to their own devices, and at the mercy of their faith. The Rohingya people are predominantly Muslim. Their community leaders are usually imams and muezzins leading prayers at mosques. As witnessed the world over, several COVID-19 conspiracies were at play. This emerged as the case with both Rohingya and Bengali communities, who turned to faith in trying and testing circumstances and in the face of uncertainty and scant information. These are usually the circumstances in which people who have lost all hope resort to religion. Rohingya refugees in Cox’s Bazar too believed that COVID-19 was a punishment and a test of their faith. Disease and health, thus, became entwined with spirituality, religion, and other spheres of life, including financial struggle. For this article, we interviewed imams, muezzins, women faith actors, and local NGOs who were instrumental in raising awareness on COVID-19 preventive strategies, surveying 100 households from both the Bangladeshi host populations and Rohingya refugees in Camps 15 and 19 in Cox’s Bazar. At the inception of the pandemic, in the throes of fear and insecurity on the ground, there were numerous conspiracies about the government in Bangladesh, just like anywhere else in the world. During Jummah prayers, religious leaders who initially supported fatalistic notions about COVID-19 virus were encouraging people to wash their hands to maintain cleanliness, and to wear masks. In the face of uncertainty and scant information in the pandemic, both Rohingya and Bengali communities turned to their faith in trying and testing circumstances. In 2020, Dhaka Ahsania Mission (DAM) set up a health outpost in Camp 19, and provided basic health services to the people living in the camps. The health staff assisted people with COVID-19-related measures and treatments. The DAM facility had referred 26 suspected cases—22 Rohingya members and 4 villagers—to the nearest hospital, where two positive cases were found amongst the Bengali villagers. The health outpost provided screenings for COVID-19 symptoms and referred them to the hospitals, while for the non-COVID-19 cases they provided treatments. As per the data provided to us by DAM, over 400 patients were treated, consisting of both Rohingya refugees and host community members. An official from DAM mentioned the following about the caseload: "As per health data, there were 367 positive cases and 10 deaths amongst Rohingyas across 32 camps. Within Camp 19, there were five positive cases in refugees and three hospital staff tested positive. Approximately 5,000 positive cases in the host community." This must be viewed within the larger context of limited facilities for testing within the camps in Cox’s Bazar. A medical doctor noted that only 25,000 had been tested so far out of 1.2 million people as of January 2021. Specifically in Camps 15 and 19, there are no sentinel sites. Inside a Rohingya Refugee Camp (RRC) Masjid. Courtesy of Abu Yousuf Shazid Another NGO, Dushtha Shasthya Kendra (DSK), undertook an initiative for public health messaging, generating awareness and providing timely information and discussions with around 700 Rohingya community members. They employed an interesting approach of using public speakers and microphones in the mosques, as well as door-to-door campaigns for providing information on COVID-19 preventive measures. They provided training to community and faith leaders, dispelling some of the rumours and misinformation that were rampantly spreading in these communities. With the collision of science and faith, there were interesting ways in which Rohingyas resisted and adapted to the new circumstances. From an outsider's perspective, it appeared that faith leaders were fatalistic, which percolated amongst other community members participating in our group discussions. Rohingya men and women were concerned that the elderly were susceptible because they did not remain “clean,” presumably concerning their personal hygiene. Many people shared that initially they had lots of misinformation and misbeliefs, believing COVID-19 was an act of God to punish the non-religious. Depending on who their community leaders were, such views would be either contested or encouraged, especially during prayertime. While there is a strong feeling that the pandemic is religiously ordained, a significant proportion of the people still believe it to be as a response to their sins; or nature's response to man's cruelty, or even due to a lack of belief in Islam. There were strong associations between cleanliness and the disease. Several rumours emerged about what causes COVID-19, just as it was commonly observed in countries in the Global South as well as Global North. Qualitative data indicates people received COVID-19 information through social media, public spaces like tea stalls, religious gatherings, and meetings at mosques. While there is a strong feeling that the pandemic is religiously ordained, a significant proportion of the people still believe it to be a response to their sins; or as nature's response to man's cruelty, or even due to a lack of belief in Islam . It is essential to note that these fatalist attitudes were the result of a combination of misinformation, manipulation, and inappropriate channels of information that the Rohingyas had limited access to. In the absence of large-scale humanitarian support, abandoned by their host and persecuted by their native country, the Rohingyas largely relied on their faith to tide over challenging circumstances. Hearing their stories about the painful and arduous journey from Rakhine state to Bangladesh, it is remarkable that these communities continue to thrive and survive in the face of challenging and dire circumstances. They relied on their community leaders, unelected Rohingya called “majhis,” for information and guidance to not only make this journey to Bangladesh but also manoeuvre the flailing political, administrative, and governance structures in the camps. Religious actors & women leaders With the merging of faith and public health, a key group of actors emerged as powerful and influential in changing beliefs and attitudes about COVID-19. Imams and muezzins played a crucial role in promoting healthcare in the Rohingya community, and several humanitarian NGOs relied on these religious leaders to promote preventive messages on COVID-19. Within the Bangladeshi community, the imam is a leader of the community revered for their exemplary adherence to faith. Imams in the Rohingya community play a similar role, and thus it is widely accepted that an imam’s verdict and messages about COVID-19 are sincere and trustworthy. Majhi, although originally a term used to refer to the leader who helped Rohingya refugees flee from Myanmar to Bangladesh, was also the name of the camp in-charge in Cox’s Bazar. The majhi system was initially established by the Bangladeshi authorities to manage the influx of refugees in 2017, but over the years it became an administrative position elected without participation and representation of the Rohingya communities. In effect, majhi were no longer the traditional leaders or elders of the Rohingya communities, and they neither reflected nor represented the voices, needs, and aspirations of these displaced groups. Several NGOs trained and addressed misconceptions held by the imams and muezzins and enlisted their support in delivering COVID-19 messaging during prayers. Interestingly, some imams married scientific facts with religious edicts. A Rohingya teacher said: "Lots of people live here and it is difficult to manage them. If any message and information are needed to deliver to the people, the leaders act as the main role. For NGOs and other officials, it is not possible to reach all people. The leaders also discuss different issues with the officials." Religious gatherings, especially jummah/Friday sermons called by the imam, appear to be the best source of information for the masses. A woman leader, who actively participated in the DSK NGO’s training programmes, noted that every Friday at the time of prayer, the imam discussed how we could be safe from the coronavirus. However, since women do not usually go to the mosques, those who attended the training from DSK would share what they learnt with other women near their homes. She also shared that since schools were closed due to lockdown measures in 2020, they lost out on a vital and reliable source of information. They had to pay approximately 100 takas ($1) per month for school, hence many could not afford going to school. A COVID-19 DSK awareness poster in a refugee camp. Courtesy of Abu Yousuf Shazid There were other information sources that were reported as the highly trusted and least trusted information sources for COVID-19: radios, television, posters, billboards, social media channels, and websites. People relied on social actors from both health and religious institutions, such as community health workers, majhis, imams, madrassa teachers, traditional healers, and members of the Tablighi Jamaat. Some depended on their friends, neighbours, and community health events for health-related information. Of these, community health workers and faith leaders such as majhis, imams, and madrassa teachers emerged as the top three sources of information as reported. Imams and muezzins were considered as trustworthy by the community members. The majhi system was initially established by the Bangladeshi authorities to manage the influx of refugees in 2017 but over the years it became an administrative position elected without participation and representation of the Rohingya communities. In effect, majhi were no longer the traditional leaders or elders of the Rohingya communities, and they neither reflected nor represented the voices and aspirations of these displaced groups. Rohingya members were skeptical about messages received from posters and radio as these did not explain much of the instructions they had to follow. Many times, these were in languages—English or Bengali—they were not able to read or comprehend easily. The lack of educational and literacy programmes for Rohingya refugees is pivotal to understanding Rohingya communities. Rohingya refugees are not allowed to read and write in the local Bengali language. There are no integration programmes available for refugees in Bangladesh, particularly for the Rohingyas. Although the Rohingya language, Ruáingga, has some affinity to the Chittagonian dialect spoken in Cox’s Bazar, many refugees are unable to read and write in Bengali. The refugee members have poor literacy rates due to systemic persecution and lack educational opportunities in Myanmar, and continued negligence in Bangladesh. The access to and continuation of education for Rohingya girls is very limited. Parental attitudes towards education for girls reportedly shift once girls turn ten years old as societal norms may allow girl children to be married. With limited economic means young girls are not enrolled into education programmes run by NGOs in the camps. Their educational attainment levels are well below average after having fled genocide and war in Myanmar, a symptom of the abject exclusion of the Rohingyas from education in both host and home countries. Male teachers provided a different perspective on how religion was limited in its capacity to counter the global coronavirus pandemic. One of the teachers who was interviewed clarified that there is nothing related to COVID-19 in the Quran or Hadith, although Islam asks everyone to stay clean. He went on to reflect how teachers were “trying” to unlearn misinformation that they gathered through various mediums like social media or others. The madrassa teachers also had a role to play in the COVID-19 response. Firstly, teachers from schools or madrassas are very respected people in Rohingya society, an intellectual privilege that allows them an ease in delivering their messages. Rohingya exclusion from society, education, and other opportunities has fed into cynicism over science and outsiders, and they heavily rely on local actors and leaders whom they trust rather than external social workers. While the teachers are involved in the faith-based committee, they also have access to mobile phones which means they can access updated information. Their involvement in the training and awareness programmes has helped NGOs to build trust with refugee community members. This process has been capitalized to deliver COVID-19 preventive messages to the people, through teachers who have a unique way of perceiving and explaining scientific ideas with religion to counter misinformation amongst the people. Rohingya refugees are not allowed to read and write in the local Bengali language. There are no integration programmes available for refugees in Bangladesh particularly for the Rohingyas. Although the Rohingya language, Ruáingga, has some affinity to the Chittagonian dialect spoken in Cox’s Bazar, many refugees are unable to read and write in Bengali. Despite religious leaders being male figures, there were local women leaders who actively participated in religious activities. Although women leaders have lesser authority than their traditional male counterparts, Rohingya women can reach out to women leaders easily. Imams and muezzins did not interact directly with women and children because their religious responsibilities were largely centred around the mosque. An Arabic teaching room in an RRC Masjid. Courtesy of Abu Yousuf Shazid Since women did not have access to religious and educational spaces, they were more likely to have untested misbeliefs and attitudes towards COVID-19. Some women leaders in the Rohingya communities were included in NGO training and were enlisted for house-to-house visits and providing information on COVID-19 preventive steps. However, their numbers are few—most women leaders continue to believe and share their misinformation about COVID-19. For instance, a 35-year-old female leader (name withheld) explained her understanding about the cause of COVID-19 as being an “order from God,” and that we need to keep ourselves “neat and clean” in order to prevent ourselves from being infected. They have little access to information, with limited to no educational opportunities, and are unable to voice their opinions and apprehensions in relief and awareness programmes. Such misinformation is, of course, not limited to Rohingya or Bangladeshi women. In order to stop the flow, the government, humanitarian actors, and media will have to take steps to rule out every possible rumor with scientific fact. This should be accessible and available in several languages, written and orally presented widely. This reveals the fact that women are less considered for group and organized meetings; they remain as passive receptors of information passed onto them by their husbands. This provides fertile ground for the spread of misinformation and misconceptions, often used to suppress women further in such isolating circumstances. There were physical and social barriers that determined the uptake of COVID-19 preventive messages, such as low literacy levels, cultural and linguistic differences between host and refugee communities, and no access to basic health, educational, and livelihood opportunities. Local faith and community leaders can play a vital role in addressing vaccine hesitancy and cultural biases related to vaccine uptake amongst both Bangladeshi and Rohingya communities. Since women did not have access to religious and educational spaces, they were more likely to have untested misbeliefs and attitudes towards COVID-19. Some women leaders in the Rohingya communities were included in NGO training and were enlisted for house-to-house visits and providing information on COVID-19 preventive steps. However, their numbers are few. Gender experts are also alarmed at the increased rates of domestic violence during the pandemic. There have been numerous cases of intimate partner violence against women isolated with abusive partners. Women’s responsibilities and workload were overburdened as men were barred from going out during lockdown. COVID-19 has had a huge impact on women’s rights and their access to justice. There are strict restrictions imposed on them, which became stricter during the pandemic: limited movement outside the home and adherence to follow instructions. Several rumours reported by Rohingyas were shared by a senior official from DAM NGO during a telephone interview. "Rohingya people were scared. They used to say: 'If we go to the health post, we will be sent to Bishan Char island, or we may go missing. We may even be killed.” The official interpreted these rumours as symbolic of a genuine mistrust between the health system and refugee populations. However, they reflect the harsh realities of the Rohingyas who have no one to turn to and who fear further persecution from authorities, constantly coming across government initiatives that push them further into destitution. The Future of Humanitarianism in Cox’s Bazar No country was prepared to face such a pandemic, and yet, for persecuted communities like the Rohingyas, these uncertainties and health emergencies are symptomatic of a larger phenomenon that isolates, negates, and further reproduces the injustice and unfair conflict that they have faced not only with the government authorities. Misinformation and mistrust is not a unique phenomenon to the Rohingyas but it is important to unpack why people are peddling conspiracy theories instead—lack of information, spread of disinformation campaigns on social media and the Internet, and politicians and society leaders questioning the severity of the pandemic while silencing the needs and voices of Rohingya refugees. On September 29, 2021, Mohibullah, 46, chair of the Arakan Rohingya Society for Peace and Human Rights (ARSPH), was shot and killed by unidentified gunmen in Kutupalong camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. Several human rights and NGO workers have criticized this killing as not only silencing Rohingya voices, but also refusing to have a dialogue with the refugees for their safe future, either in Bangladesh or in a safe return to Myanmar. Many believe that the non-state actor Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), an armed group present in the camp, is responsible for this violent and gruesome murder. With disarray in camps and limited resources from humanitarian actors, violence has become rampant, resulting in murders and abductions. It is the responsibility of government authorities to ensure the protection of people in the camps, including refugees, activists, and humanitarian workers from both the Rohingya and local community, many of whom have shared concerns about their safety. Any humanitarian effort should build on an understanding of the underlying drivers of conflict, violence, and issues affecting social cohesion within the local Bangladeshi communities in Cox’s Bazar. Social cohesion factors such as a sense of social or group identity, sense of community, and attachment to place can be important adaptation drivers when considering how populations respond to public health and other crises. These factors, together with community-based leadership, including faith-based leadership, can play an important role in the development and increasing social bonds central to Rohingya capacities when confronting COVID-19 and a range of other hazards. Mapping out power relations and structures within and beyond the Rohingya community could help meaningfully engage with the persecuted minority. The battle for citizenship and statehood for Rohingyas is long and dates to colonial history and negligence by Burmese authorities. While these groups await their uncertain future, it is the responsibility and mandate of neighbouring countries like India and Bangladesh to be proactive and participatory in their approaches to the needs of this population. While the humanitarian world debates whether Myanmar is culpable for the genocide of the Rohingyas, their day-to-day needs and lived realities can no longer be brushed under the carpet or silenced through more violence. ∎ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Photograph courtesy of Abu Yousuf Shazid, depicting Dhaka Ahsania Mission (DAM) hand washing station. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Reportage Cox's Bazar Rohingya Refugee Crisis Bangladesh COVID-19 Religion Faith Leaders Intimate Partner Violence Disaster & Faith International Law NGOs Internationalist Perspective Humanitarian Crisis Human Language Longform Literacy SNEHA KRISHNAN is a writer, teacher, and translator. She is an Associate Professor for Studies in OP Jindal Global University and Founder-Director of ETCH Consultancy Services. Her poems have been published by Belongg, Analogies and Allegories, Indian Poetry Review, Lit Stream Magazine , and AllEars Magazine . Her translations and essays have appeared in Gulmohar Quarterly, The Hindu, The Statesman, Deccan Herald, Conversation, Medium, Feminism in India, Science Policy Forum and The Wire . Her short fiction has appeared in The Walled City Journal and the New Writing Anthology by Helter Skelter. Reportage Cox's Bazar 27th Feb 2023 On That Note: Heading 5 23rd OCT Heading 5 23rd Oct Heading 5 23rd Oct

Solidarity failed when it came to a dire Afghan refugee crisis, decades in the making. THE VERTICAL Everyone Failed Us Arash Azizzada · Irene Benedicto Solidarity failed when it came to a dire Afghan refugee crisis, decades in the making. “A group of women leaders are badly in danger and one of them is my mom. I really searching for a person who can help us. They attack our home at first…. I hope you can help us. Every one of us really get depressed, please help us to get out of here.” THE BARRAGE of messages I receive, like the one above from western Afghanistan on almost a daily basis has not stopped, even a year later. Desperate daily emails from Afghans seeking refuge and safety flood our inboxes. Some are social activists, human rights defenders, former interpreters, and women leaders at risk of retribution from the Taliban. Other marginalized groups such as Hazaras and Shias have already been victims of ethnic cleansing by the Taliban and remain targets of ISIS attacks. Women activists have been disappeared by the Taliban authorities. Afghans seeking evacuation hold onto hope in what seems to be a hopeless situation. No longer expecting the international community to come to their rescue, for governments and institutions to do what they’re supposed to do, they rely on community organizers like myself and others. For two decades, America bragged about what it was building in Afghanistan. Last summer, the “Afghanistan project” was exposed for the facade that it was: a hollow rentier-state that only held ever legitimacy with Western donors and not with the Afghan people. Despite obvious bubbles of progress where hope flourished amidst the violence, the impending threat of a drone strike or Taliban suicide blast was always around the corner. Some rural areas were battered and mired in misery due to violence and poverty; others flourished, led by Afghan women and marginalized communities. The only constant was never-ending conflict. It seems as if the U.S. built a house of cards in Afghanistan, created in its own image, a house that started falling when the chains of dependency were challenged. The alliance with human rights abusers, the elevation of notorious pedophiles, and funding of endemic corruption brought back to power an oppressive, authoritarian regime that is erasing women, marginalized ethnic groups, and the disabled from public and daily life. The U.S. ran prisons where innocent Afghans were tortured. Entire villages were wiped off the map, and this was excused away as collateral damage. The U.S. spent years telling Afghans to pursue their dreams, break barriers, and challenge cultural norms. Then, it turned its back on them and betrayed them. Perhaps those of us who dreamt of a better Afghanistan were at fault for having expectations of a country whose very existence was kickstarted by genocide, a country where American presidents attempt brazen coups and its own citizens storm its political headquarters. The grim reality that we bore witness to these past few months is one that anyone who has paid attention to Afghanistan could have seen coming. There is even a U.S. agency–the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR)--which is dedicated to overseeing how reconstruction money was used in Afghanistan. In report after report, year after year, quarter after quarter, SIGAR wrote about the ghosts that the U.S. created–schools and hospitals that didn’t exist and a 300,000-man army that only functioned on paper. The Washington Post even devoted a series titled “The Afghanistan Papers, ” to showcase how policymakers and Pentagon officials had lied and deceived the American people about its success and accomplishments for 20 successive years. Nobody cared. The failure to value Afghan lives, however, lies not just with policymakers and elected officials. Certainly, the list of those responsible for the current situation in Afghanistan is long, ranging from Afghan elites to American elected officials from both parties going back four decades. Administration after administration has deprioritized Afghan lives and centered the needs of American hegemony. Congress held hearings on Afghanistan and yet rarely featured any Afghans. Policy discussions on Afghanistan in Washington D.C. at influential think tanks left out Afghans entirely. Afghans were left invisible in an occupation that lasted so long that it became not the “forever war” but rather the “forgotten war.” Afghanistan had disappeared from the psyche of the American people. Even when SIGAR released a report on rampant corruption that was wasting billions or when the Washington Post talked about lie after lie coming from the Pentagon, America just didn’t seem to care. The right-wing was too busy destroying democracy, the Democratic party was too busy fundraising from defense contractors, and the anti-war Left was too white to put Afghans and other impacted communities at the forefront. In our own Afghan American community, too many in our diaspora were profiting off the occupation. Their kids will go to prestigious American colleges, while Afghan girls will not be able to go to school at all and are robbed of a future. An international audience did finally pay attention to us last summer. American media, though, centered on the feelings of almost a million veterans who served in Afghanistan rather than asking Afghans how a withdrawal would impact them. The images of Afghans clinging onto the bottom of a military cargo plane had the world hooked. What does it say about our humanity that it took those tragic images for everyone to ask what we can do to help? For just a few days, people across the globe valued Afghan life. But moments like that are fleeting–Afghan history is littered with broken promises. Some of us have read enough history to know that the international community will not learn the lessons of its failure in Afghanistan and begin centering on the needs of the Afghan people. The Taliban spends every day perfecting its repression while the world has moved on, despite empty tweets and statements of solidarity. Today, as a year has passed since the chaotic withdrawal, wide-ranging sanctions on Afghanistan and theft of Afghan assets by the U.S. continue to inflict immense pain on innocent Afghan people, causing a humanitarian crisis that will likely lead to mass-scale death through malnutrition and starvation, a policy that disproportionately impacts Afghan girls and women. The United States’ attitude remains the same: focusing only on self-interest, even if it harms Afghans, except now it is done through economic warfare rather than through bombs built by defense contractor companies like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. Afghans deserve justice and reparations for the harm America has caused in my home country. Despite that vision for the future, what America leaves behind are closed immigration pathways and a desire to pretend Afghans don’t exist in the first place. Perhaps if a few more Afghans clung onto a plane leaving the Kabul airport, someone would care. ∎ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Photograph courtesy of Arash Azizzada (November 2019). SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Op-Ed Afghanistan Refugee Crisis US Imperialism The Failure of the Diaspora ARASH AZIZZADA is a writer, photographer, and community organizer based in Los Angeles, CA. The children of Afghan refugees, Arash is deeply committed to social justice and building communities. He co-founded Afghan Diaspora for Equality and Progress (ADEP) in 2016, aimed at elevating and empowering changemakers within the Afghan community. He recently co-launched Afghans For A Better Tomorrow (AFBT), and has focused on evacuation and rapid response coordination efforts in the wake of America’s military withdrawal from Afghanistan. He has written for the New York Times , Newsweek , and been featured on NPR and Vice News . IRENE BENEDICTO is an investigative and data reporter with ten years of experience working as a journalist. She has covered breaking news and written in-depth long-form stories, local and international news from eight different countries on three continents, including the political hubs of Washington DC and Brussels, and three investigative data projects on migration, public health, and social inequities. Op-Ed Afghanistan 24th Feb 2023 On That Note: Whiplash and Contradiction in Sri Lanka’s aragalaya 27th FEB Universalism & Solidarity in a Post-Roe Landscape 23rd FEB Climate Crimes of US Imperalism in Afghanistan 16th OCT

The profile of Mahrang Baloch discusses how Mahrang's personal experience with her family members being disappeared prompted her to get involved in the activism against the state's Baloch disappearances. Mashal Baloch documented that profile extensively. Here, Mashal discussed the ethics of photojournalism, working with international correspondents, and how she has navigated being a self-taught photojournalist. INTERACTIVE Chats Ep. 6 · Imagery of the Baloch Movement AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR The profile of Mahrang Baloch discusses how Mahrang's personal experience with her family members being disappeared prompted her to get involved in the activism against the state's Baloch disappearances. Mashal Baloch documented that profile extensively. Here, Mashal discussed the ethics of photojournalism, working with international correspondents, and how she has navigated being a self-taught photojournalist. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Live Balochistan Karima Baloch Mahrang Baloch Self-Taught Reportage State Repression Pakistan Mapping Knowledge Humanitarian Crisis Photojournalism Baloch Missing Persons Baloch Student Long March Photographer Profile SAAG Chats Journalism Baloch Insurgency Geography Accountability Nation-State State Violence Human Rights Violations Extrajudicial Killings Enforced Disappearances Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. DISPATCH Live Balochistan 28th Feb 2021 For SAAG Chats Ep. 6, Nur Nasreen Ibrahim discussed the nature of photojournalism with photojournalist Mashal Baloch, who also discussed her work for the profile of Mahrang Baloch , published by SAAG. As a self-trained photographer, Mashal's sense of precarity and a profound drive to learn with few resources available to her is palpably true both for photojournalists in Balochistan and in many embattled areas across South Asia. Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Next Up:

Towards the end of FLUX, a key organizer with Muslims For Just Futures, Muslims for Abolitionist Futures, among others, performed a DJ set with Bhangra and urban music beats, featuring Major Lazer, Meesha Shafi & more, bringing a wide-ranging event about many intellectual and material shifts to an end. INTERACTIVE FLUX · A Celebratory Set by DJ Kiran AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Towards the end of FLUX, a key organizer with Muslims For Just Futures, Muslims for Abolitionist Futures, among others, performed a DJ set with Bhangra and urban music beats, featuring Major Lazer, Meesha Shafi & more, bringing a wide-ranging event about many intellectual and material shifts to an end. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Event Global Virtual Live FLUX Bhangra Music DJ Urban Desi Music Muslims For Just Futures North American Diaspora Muslim Abolitionist Futures Anti-Racism Islamophobia Major Lazer Meesha Shafi The Halluci Nation Boogey the Beat Northern Voice Jay Hun Sultaan Kisaan Bands Experimental Electronica Experimental Music Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. DISPATCH Event Global 5th Dec 2020 FLUX: An Evening in Dissent An uplifting set by DJ Kiran to dance to at the end of a weighty virtual event. Jaishri Abichandani's Art Studio Tour Kshama Sawant & Nikil Saval: A panel on US left electoralism, COVID-19, recent victories, & lasting problems. Natasha Noorani's Live Performance of "Choro" Bhavik Lathia & Jaya Sundaresh: A panel on the US Left & its relationship with media in the wake of Bernie Sanders' loss. Tarfia Faizullah: Poetry Reading Rajiv Mohabir: Poetry Reading SAAG, So Far: A Panel with the Editors Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Next Up:

With internet services partially restored and the curfew relaxed, the government in Bangladesh is spinning bizarre narratives about student protesters. Sheikh Hasina and the Awami League have variously labeled the protesters as both innocent and as Pakistani collaborators in the 1971 Liberation War. They have also alleged that students were misled by terrorists. Meanwhile, extrajudicial arrests of students continue. THE VERTICAL Update from Dhaka III AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR With internet services partially restored and the curfew relaxed, the government in Bangladesh is spinning bizarre narratives about student protesters. Sheikh Hasina and the Awami League have variously labeled the protesters as both innocent and as Pakistani collaborators in the 1971 Liberation War. They have also alleged that students were misled by terrorists. Meanwhile, extrajudicial arrests of students continue. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Opinion Dhaka Quota Movement Fascism Student Protests Bangladesh Awami League Sheikh Hasina Police Action Police Brutality Economic Crisis 1971 Liberation of Bangladesh BTV Zonayed Saki Internet Crackdowns Internet Blackouts BSF Abu Sayeed Begum Rokeya University Abrar Fahad BUET Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology Mass Protests Mass Killings Torture Enforced Disappearances Extrajudicial Killings Chhatra League Bangladesh Courts Judiciary Clientelism Bengali Nationalism Dissent Student Movements National Curfew State Repression Surveillance Regimes Repression in Universities Argentina's Military Dictatorship Dhaka Medical College Hospital Doosra Fake News Razaakars July Revolution Student-People's Uprising Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. DISPATCH Opinion Dhaka 23rd Jul 2024 EDITOR'S NOTE: SAAG received this piece along with other media organizations on 23rd July, with another update the following day. Part of it was published by The Wire. We chose to publish the piece lightly edited, in keeping with the author’s wishes. Due to the urgency of its message, it has not been fact-checked in accordance with regular editorial processes. The views expressed in this piece are the author’s and do not necessarily represent SAAG’s editorial stance. —Iman Iftikhar 22nd July There is a particular type of bowling in cricket called “the Google” or “the Doosra.” It is a rare spin ball that is meant to trick the batsman—one only a few bowlers have mastered. Good batsmen and women, however, can tell from the way the bowler’s arm or wrist acts which way the ball will spin and play accordingly. Except in the case of the deceptive Doosra. Many a famous scalp has been taken by the well-executed Doosra. In Bangladeshi politics, it is actually the infamous spin doctors themselves who seem to be falling prey to the Doosra, the outcome not going quite the way they intended. Bangladeshi citizens are faced with a dilemma. The coming 48 hours may be a “general holiday,” as declared by the government. The quota students, on the other hand, have declared a “complete shutdown.” The Army chief, Waker-Uz-Zaman, announced on TV that the army had brought things under control and the country is heading back to “normal.” At the same time, however, there are soldiers in the streets enforcing an ongoing curfew with orders to shoot to kill. A curfew isn’t what one associates with a general holiday, though sadly, killing unarmed citizens could be considered normal in Gaza or Kashmir. In Bangladesh, with no Internet, no cash, no banking services, and with people using pay-as-you-go accounts for gas and electricity on the verge of having their connections closed down due to non-payment, one wonders whether this really will become the new normal. The “shutdown” moniker makes some sense. Most shops are closed, and while there are people on the streets, especially in the hours when the curfew is called off, the city is tense (the curfew was relaxed today from 10 am to 5 pm. Offices and banks are to be open from 11 am to 3 pm). The only people venturing out any distance away from home, whether or not they have a curfew pass, are those on essential duty: hospital staff, journalists, and fire-fighters. People can be seen in the back streets, where there appears to be no military or police presence, but there are also reports of people being hunted down and killed in alleyways, a source of intense fear. The policing is site-specific. The Maghreb azaan floats across Rabindra Sharani, the outdoor recreation centre in the well-to-do residential area of Dhanmondi. There are no security forces here. Young women and men walk by the lakeside after dusk. Puppies frolic by the amphitheatre as kids play football and parents walk toddlers on the stage. I am also told that life is “normal” in the upmarket tri-state areas of Gulshan, Baridhara, and Banani. Diplomats and decision-makers live there, and it wouldn’t bode well to have an overt military presence in such areas. These are the normal zones. Mohammadpur, less than a kilometre away from Rabindra Sarani, is a curfew zone. Topu, the Head of the Photography Department of Pathshala, the South Asian Media Institute which I founded, rings me at around 7:30 pm to tell me that a graduate student Ashraful Haque Rocky has been picked up by the police. Luckily, he has a press card as he used to work for a prominent newspaper. They’ve taken his camera away, but so far, he’s not been roughed up. We’re trying to get someone from the newspaper to call the police to make sure he is not physically harmed or disappeared. We anxiously await more information from the police station. After lobbying through multiple sources, a message comes in just before midnight that Rocky has been released. He has his camera. For the moment, we know nothing more. News trickles in through our network that anyone taking injured students to the hospital, even if they are helpful bystanders, is getting arrested by plainclothes police. Injured students are arrested as soon as they are well enough to be released. They don’t always get beaten up or put in jail; sometimes, they are just extorted. A friend’s brother was released upon paying a ransom of one lakh taka, just short of $1,000, worth a lot of money in Bangladesh. Newspapers also report Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus bucking the government narrative with a statement to the international community on Monday, “Bangladesh has been engulfed in a crisis that only seems to get worse each passing day. High school students have been amongst the victims.” 23rd July Local news channels reported last night that there had been “no untoward incident,” though a friend provided eyewitness reports of two students and two passersby being killed by the police in the Notun Bazar area of Dhaka. A young rag picker was shot dead in a different part of the city. She also talks of the smart tanks stationed outside her house in Gulshan. Foreign Minister Hasan Mahmud summoned the diplomatic community to brief them on the current situation with a presentation. It didn’t go quite as planned. Unusual for diplomats, the UN Resident Coordinator asked the FM about the alleged use of UN-marked armored personnel carriers and helicopters to suppress protesters. The outgoing US Ambassador Peter Haas, who had been instrumental in the US government’s sanctions against the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) for its human rights abuses, was the one to respond to the FM: “I am surprised you did not show the footage of police firing at unarmed protesters.” There are dissenting voices among civil society personnel despite the fear and repression. 33 eminent citizens have asked the government to apologize unconditionally to citizens for the deaths of protesters since 16th July. The Communist Party of Bangladesh has demanded fresh general elections, while Rashtra Sanskar Andolan (Movement for State Reform) has demanded the government’s resignation. 25 women’s rights activists and teachers termed the Supreme Court’s verdict on the quota system “a trap to confuse the ongoing just protests against the fascist government.” 24th July My partner, Rahnuma, and I are both aware that martyrs don’t do good reporting. Working with limited resources, along with our wider team of dedicated activists, we’ve been looking out for each other. I’ve been out on the streets, on most occasions Rahnuma being my bodyguard. Even in this warlike environment, some show solidarity and want updates. A few even ask for selfies while heavy-set Awami League types scowl from a distance. Curfew and trigger-happy security forces have made it difficult to visit friends in the hospital, find safe homes, and get supplies. Finding ways to beat the Internet ban and get messages such as this one out has been far from easy. We’ve managed so far. It is for you readers to take the next steps to freedom. The broadband connection was restored last night, but selectively. We now have email and WhatsApp access at home, but no YouTube or Facebook, nor social media. My niece, two roads down, has none. Meanwhile, the spin doctors are working overtime. The students, who were called “razaakars” (war of liberation collaborators) a week ago, then became “komolmoti shishu” (sweet innocent kids) a few days later, and are now “obujh chhatro” (naive students) whom the “dushkritikari o jongi” (miscreants and terrorists) have exploited. The PM met with the business community on Monday afternoon. They were concerned about the effect this “problem” has had on the nation’s economy. Part of the discussion was aired on TV. The PM absolved the quota protesters of any ill deeds and reminded us that they were not the reason the army had been brought in. Strange then that one of the protestors' demands is that all charges against them be dropped. There is silence about the ongoing arrests of students. The spin doctors are working overtime to fit the quota protests, which spilled over into a nationwide uprising, into the government’s hold-all explanation, “the BNP-Jamaat-Shibir are responsible.” They will not be spared. They are the ones trying to hold back the country and turn back the development process. The entire cabinet nods. Some of the party faithful come to the podium to hail the PM for her leadership and for thwarting the opposition’s evil plans so successfully. They assure her that the nation will continue in its glorious journey under her able leadership. They would like her to be Prime Minister “for life.” The images of Sheikh Hasina and her father, Bangabandhu (friend of Bengal) Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, plastered on every wall across the country, the billboards and banners that litter the countryside, the Bangabandhu corner, required by law to be present in every library and prominently placed at the airport and all-important buildings, collectively create a North Korea-like adulation of the great leader. As in North Korea, the Bangladeshi leader has total control. The Argentinian army’s loss in the Malvinas (Falklands) Islands, while a loss for the nation, resulted in an unexpected gain. It broke the aura of the army’s invincibility, which allowed the resistance to build and eventually overthrow the military regime. It was one of the few instances where military rulers have been brought to trial. This aura of invincibility is important for the leadership to maintain. That is why the photo of the soldier on the receiving end of a flying kick by a student way back in 2007 was quickly hushed up and has disappeared from official archives. It is probably also the reason why the recent attack on the home minister’s house, though instigated by the helicopter fire on protestors down below in the first place, never made it to print and electronic media. Even the acknowledgment of such temerity, even if provoked, is dangerous. The business community needs the Internet to be up and running immediately. The downtime is costing them, and they are getting agitated. The great leader informed them that she had explained everything to the naive students, and they had understood. The students were no longer the problem. What was to be tackled were the terrorists and the miscreants, which she would take care of. You don’t bite the hand that feeds you. The business community knew where the red lines were and was careful not to cross them. They bowed and retreated. The media in Bangladesh long stopped behaving as the fourth estate and has morphed into a PR network for their corporations and for the government. With extremely rare exceptions (the daily New Age being one), independent media has perished. Embedded journalism is the norm. The few free-thinking journalists who still survive in this space worry about the moles surrounding them. Media owners confide that their headlines are dictated by military intelligence. Their own culpability, they conveniently ignore. Even the headlines, some say, are dictated by security agencies. Even so, there are brave journalists who do what journalists must. Rigorous research. Detailed fact-checking. Connecting the dots. Good reporters find holes in the spin doctor’s statements, who are caught in their own web of lies. Different ministers making contradictory statements create traps for each other. Why the police opened fire and killed “komolmoti shishus” is not an easy question to answer. If the attackers were BNP and their allies, why they were chanting pro-Sheikh Hasina slogans is also unexplained. If there was nothing to hide, why, after the claim that the internet shutdown was due to a technological issue was debunked by the industry experts, was the Internet still down? The government accuses international agencies who are reporting on the situation, of providing fake news. Why, then, is Dhaka Medical College Hospital refusing to provide figures for the dead and injured? In recent years, tyrants across the globe have often deployed the “fake news” accusation to deny human rights violations that are abundantly clear to the public and the rest of the world. They’ve also used the full spectrum of repressive state machinery, including media, to deny culpability and hide their own guilt. They have also banded together to share resources and copy from each other’s playbook. Sheikh Hasina, a long-standing member of the tyranny club, has been playing the game for some time. But arrogance has its drawbacks. It would be wrong to underestimate the public, and the Doosra can only take one so far. Especially when the spin doctors seem to be getting wrong-footed by their own ball. ∎ Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Next Up:

Poet Chandramohan S in conversation with Advisory Editor Sarah Thankam Mathews COMMUNITY Between Form & Solidarity Chandramohan S Poet Chandramohan S in conversation with Advisory Editor Sarah Thankam Mathews "One’s privilege cataracts one’s vision. Aspects of that privilege create a form of blindness, a cataracting of one’s advantage. My modus operandi is to illuminate as many blind spots as each of us have. It is not my fault that I may be born into a privilege, but it will become my fault if I do not make myself aware of it." RECOMMENDED: Love After Babel and other poems by Chandramohan S (Daraja Press, 2020) ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Interview Kerala Language Vernacular Literature Internationalist Solidarity Dalit-Black Solidarities OV Vijayan Dalit Literature Ajay Navaria Avant-Garde Form Poetic Form Deepak Unnikrishnan Resistance Poetry Love After Babel Chandramohan S is a Dalit Indian poet, writer and social activist. He is the author of Warscape Verses, Letters to Namdeo Dhasal , and Love After Babel . He is based in Thiruvandanapuram, Kerala. Interview Kerala 31st Aug 2020 On That Note: Heading 5 23rd OCT Heading 5 23rd Oct Heading 5 23rd Oct

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"There was no one else in the four-berth compartment. I was comfortable. Somewhere near the Andhra-Orissa border I woke up and found everything dark. The train wasn’t moving either. Pitch dark. You couldn’t see anything out of the window." FICTION & POETRY Two Stories Nabarun Bhattacharya "There was no one else in the four-berth compartment. I was comfortable. Somewhere near the Andhra-Orissa border I woke up and found everything dark. The train wasn’t moving either. Pitch dark. You couldn’t see anything out of the window." Translated from the Bengali by Arunava Sinha Cold Fire I WILL bring you the brochure and some other reading material. But if you simply watch this video, it’s about ten minutes long, it’ll be clear once you’ve watched the whole thing… this model of Akai VCR that you’ve got is my favourite too. This is the one we normally use at work. Yes, coffee, please… I was up very late last night… a new kind of elevated furnace is being used in village crematoriums these days, primarily through NGOs… the body’s put on a slightly raised surface like a stretcher and then placed on the iron furnace along with the wood… the ash that gathers beneath is a sort of bonus. People collect that stuff… I’ve seen it happen in Labhpur, close to Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay’s home. They offer training in Gujarat on this sort of thing. The concept is fine up to the village level. I’m switching on the VCR then sir. Some snow on the screen to begin with. Then the name—‘Cold Fire… which you have been waiting for. You had to wait eighty-four years for the fall of Communism. And in just six years you’re getting Cold Fire, whose elegance, whose exclusive company, only you or others like you deserve.’ Mr. K.C. Sarkar, owner of three tea estates, watched Cold Fire at work. Dressed in a dhoti and kurta, with sandalwood marks on the forehead, the body was laid on a coffin-like box. The lids opened, drawing the body in. The lids closed. The digital lights glowed. ‘Ten minutes later.’ The lights had been red all this while. Now the blue lights glowed instead. At the bottom, near the feet, a door opened, and two gleaming urns emerged. One was labelled ‘Ashes’, and the other, ‘Navel’. The lids opened. There was nothing inside. It was just like before. Polished, spick-and-span. Nagarwalla had told Mr. Sarkar about it at the club last evening. - I’m sending a young man to you tomorrow, KC. Fascinating! I’ve gone and booked it for myself. A lethal name too—Cold Fire! - I tried a vodka from Czechoslovakia once. Back in the Communist era—now of course the Czechs and Slovaks are different nations. That vodka was named Liquid Fire. Is this some kind of new liquor? - No sir. This is the ultimate spirit—it’ll make you a spirit. - Send him to me then. - I’ve ordered some chilled beer. Would you like some? - Beer after sundown? He was a pretty bright young man. His cologned cheek was permanently dimpled in an engaging smile. - How did you people come up with such a novel product? What prompted you? He began to stir a spoonful of sugar into his coffee. - I’ll explain, sir. Look, in the post-Communist world, the difference between the upper and the lower strata of society has taken on an absurd dimension. Every aspect of life—be it education, be it childbirth, be it transport—is different for them. For instance, if an affluent senior citizen like you needed to go on a vacation today, if you wanted to go to a coastal resort, your choice, even if you wanted to go somewhere close by, would be the Maldives or Seychelles, not Puri or Digha. If you have a vision problem, obviously Geneva would be preferable. But this form of existence that you enjoy, this free, superior, and magnificent lifestyle, is completely inconsistent with your funeral. For that, it’ll be the same filthy crematorium that everyone else goes to—Keoratala or Nimtala or Kashi Mitra or Siriti… horror of horrors! Have you had to visit a crematorium recently, sir? - Not exactly recently. Last year, when my father-in-law’s brother… - If you were to go now, you’d find it even more horrifying. For example, we have to visit the crematorium quite often on official work. Just the other day, about a week ago, what a horrible sight we saw at Keoratala. Three furnaces blazing. The area where they burn the bodies on wooden pyres had no corpses. A gang of criminals drinking and smoking grass. Meanwhile, six bodies were waiting upstairs for the furnaces. Four more downstairs, outside. And on top of all this, it was raining off and on. A hoard of ruffians with each of the bodies. You can’t imagine. - Practically hell, you’re saying. - I haven’t seen hell, sir. But I can’t imagine anything more hellish. One of the bodies was of a drowned man—decomposed. One was a BSF jawan shot dead by the ULFA. The rest were all old men and women from slums or lower-middle class homes, one was middle-aged, seemed to be a political goon, a group of people were shouting those typical Communist slogans, and in the middle of all this—chanting priests, all the paraphernalia of cremation, flowers—a couple of yards away the cot, mattress and quilts blazing—a bunch of urchins on the prowl, dogs, drunks, people weeping, body fluids oozing out from corpses, incense, prayers… - Oh my god, even your description is making me queasy. - Naturally. But whatever you may say, whether you book a Cold Fire or not, that’s your decision, I cannot imagine you amidst all this. Excuse me sir, I’m probably getting a little emotional… - Oh no, you are absolutely right. Since everything in my life is exclusive, why shouldn’t my funeral be that way too? If this frail body must burn just once, let it burn in style, don’t you think? Moreover, this can’t be thought of as a mere gadget. It’s a family asset if you come to think of it. - Right sir. People can buy Cold Fire for business reasons too. The very concept of cremation and funerals will change. - Have you read the Gita? - Yes sir, we had to take special training on thanatology. We had to read the Gita and the Tibetan Book of the Dead as part of theory. May I say something, sir? - Of course you may. Go ahead. - Do you believe in rebirth, sir? - I don’t exactly know, but this Cold Fire makes me think redeath might be a better idea. - This observation of yours is very philosophical, sir. Should I book one for you then, sir? - Of course. Wait, let me get my cheque-book. I think I can get hold of at least half a dozen other clients for you. - Thank you sir. I don’t have words for my gratitude. A large vehicle delivered Cold Fire to Mr. Sarkar’s residence the very next day. Family, friends, and relatives all showed up to take a look. It was certainly something to marvel at. Just that Mr. Sarkar’s ancient gardener and servant quit their jobs. The rare feat of being the first person in Calcutta to be cremated by Cold Fire was achieved by the famous gynaecologist Chandramadhab aka Chandu Chatterjee. Just the previous night he had hosted a lavish party at the Taj Bengal to celebrate his grandson’s first birthday. Scotch had flowed like water. The very next day stunned and grieving friends watched as Cold Fire was switched on at precisely eleven o’ clock in the morning, and the blue lights glowed at ten past eleven. The door near the feet opened and two gleaming urns emerged. One containing the ashes. The other, the navel. The whole thing was captured on video. Two hundred and thirty units of Cold Fire have been sold in Calcutta so far. ∎ The Gift of Death SOME people’s lives are so dreary that in the process of putting up with the tedium they don’t even realise when they just die. When you think about it, they seem to be under a cloud of doubt even after death. In that respect, few people are born as lucky as me. Whenever I get fed up of things, something inevitably happens to revive my spirits. But you can’t say this to too many people. Friends and relations all assume I’m grinding out an existence just like them. Hand-to-mouth. Brainless sheep, the whole lot. But then it’s best for them to think this way. Else they’ll be jealous. They’ll look at me strangely. I don’t know how to cope with envy. I’m afraid of the evil eye too. Good and evil—that’s what makes the world go round. The first thing I have going for me is my amazing contact with lunatics at regular intervals. Chance or fate, it just happens. An example or two will help me explain without creating problems on the business side. But it’s best not to tell the psychiatrist my wife took me to. Suppose she changes my pills? Just the other day this man—gaunt, half-dead, looks like one of those people who can fly—got hold of me. Had two terrific schemes, he said. He’d sent the details to every world leader. Two of them had replied so far. Both Thatcher and Gorbachev had praised his ideas. He’d be talking to both of them soon. He was flying out next month. I sat down to hear of his schemes. The first one was to build a projection jutting out from the balcony of every apartment in all the high-rise buildings coming up these days. Something like a diving board at a swimming pool. He would make a couple of prototypes to begin with. Once the government had approved enthusiastically, it would be added to the building plan, without having to be added on later. Apparently it was essential for people to have such high spots nowadays to stand or sit on. Without railings, not very large. It was for those who wanted to be by themselves. People were chased by thousands of things these days. He was being chased by the chief minister, by scientists, by the prime minister. The police commissioner too. Also by the Special Branch, the Criminal Investigations Department, and the Research & Analysis Wing. That was when the plan struck him. A slice of space—but outside the building. Speaking for myself, the idea appealed to me too. Entirely possible. But because I lived in a single-storied house inherited from my father, I didn’t give it too much thought. His second scheme was not exactly a plan—it was more of an adventurous proposal or proposition, though it was closely connected to the first scheme. He would stand as well as walk on the wings of a mid-air aircraft. He wanted to demonstrate this practically. Today’s youth would regain their courage if they saw him. The youth needed dreams, for the alternatives were drugs, cinema, and HIV. He wanted to perform this feat on an Indian Air Force plane. He had written it all down in detail. There were diagrams too. All of it gathered in a thin plastic folder. He kept these documents in a file tied up with a string. He wanted to know if I could help him with the second idea in. Whether I knew an Air Marshal, for instance. When I said I wouldn’t be able to help him, he requested me to pay for a cup of tea and a cigarette at least. I did. I have met several such insane people, in different shapes and sizes and with different behaviours. I have seen people who have gone mad with sudden grief. I’ve encountered not a few suicides too. Before killing themselves, some people develop a half-mad detachment. I’ve come across such people too. But then I’ve also run into not one but two cases where there wasn’t a whiff of insanity. Both of them used to spend time with mystics. One of them used to go to Tarapith, that den of mystics, every Sunday. The other was embroiled deeply in office politics. Both hanged themselves. All of these incidents are true. The age of making stories up has ended—why should people believe me, and why should I bother to make them up, either? Some of the lunatics and suicides I’ve seen were tragedies of love. But this isn’t the time for stories about women. Although the first person whom I told the story that I have eventually decided to recount here was my wife. A woman, in other words. And this was what led to all the quarrels and demands. For what? That I must see a psychiatrist. I was an able-bodied man—why should I abandon the business I ran and go see a doctor for the insane? She paid no attention. Her brothers came. Collectively they forced me to see a woman psychiatrist. What an enormous fuss they made. But it turned out to be a good idea. Very pretty. Western looks. And matching conversation. Very cordial. I liked her so much that I told her the story too. For years altogether now I’ve been taking the tiny white pills she gave me, thrice a day. Sometimes I take a blue one too. It gets wearisome. I get annoyed. But I like the woman so much that I can’t help trusting her. I try to tell myself that I’ve recovered from an illness. Not that I’m ill. The story that all this preamble leads up to is not about lunatics or suicides, however. In fact, it’s been three whole years. I was returning home by train from Madras. I have to travel indiscriminately on business. To save money I travel second class on the way out, but on the way back I give in to my longing for luxury and inevitably buy a first-class ticket. There was no one else in the four-berth compartment. I was comfortable. Somewhere near the Andhra-Orissa border I woke up and found everything dark. The train wasn’t moving either. Pitch dark. You couldn’t see anything out of the window. Once my eyes had adjusted to the darkness I realised that the train was standing at a small station somewhere. A deep indigo night sky. Hints of low black hills. A few lonely stars. People moving about. The glow of torches. Getting off the train, I heard that a goods train had been in an accident. It would have to be moved and the line, repaired. Only then would our train resume its journey. Almost without warning, the lights came back on. I went back to my compartment. At once I discovered that someone else had entered in the darkness. The man was—not probably, but almost certainly—not a South Indian. His appearance and way of talking made that obvious. In his forties. Fair, well-dressed, handsome. Slightly greying hair. His fine shirt and trousers, gleaming shoes and the tie around his neck gave him the appearance of a successful salesman of a multinational company. I wasn’t entirely wrong, but I still don’t know the name of the company or how big it was. So big that it was almost mysterious and obscure. After some small talk both of us lit our cigarettes. He was the one to offer his expensive cigarettes. When I asked him whether he wouldn’t mind a little whiskey, he said he didn’t drink. So I drank by myself. There was no sign of the train leaving. Neither of us spoke for a while. Almost startling me, the man suddenly said: Keep this business card of ours. Might come in useful. The card was black, made of some kind of paper with the feel of velvet. On it, an address in an unsettling shade of bright yellow. Nothing else. A Waltair address. Nothing else on either side of the card. Neither the name of a company, nor a phone number. - That’s not our actual address, mind you. You have to take a roundabout route to reach us. But when you write to us add your address with all details. Our people will certainly get in touch with you. It may take a little time. But they will definitely meet you. - What exactly is this business of yours? Seems to be some sort of secret, illegal affair... But then you’ve got business cards too—strange! - Look, our company doesn’t have a name. No name. We help people die—you could say we gift them death. Of course, it isn’t legal, but... - You mean you murder them. - Absolutely not! Murder! How awful, we aren’t killers. It will be done with your full consent. Different kinds of death, in different ways. You will choose your method, and pay accordingly. You want to die like a king? We can do it for you. We will fulfil whatever death wish you might have, no matter how unusual. You’ll get exactly what you want, just the way you want it. But yes, you have to pay. I had a long conversation with the man thereafter. I’m recounting as much of it as I can recollect. As much of the strangeness as actually penetrated my whiskey-soaked brain in the anonymous darkness of the station. As much as I’ve been able to retain three years later. His position was that, for a variety of reasons, each of us harbours a unique death wish within ourselves. That is to say, a pet notion—and desire—of how we’d like to die. Like a romantic, someone might want to leap from a mountain into a bottomless ravine on a cold, misty evening. Others want their bodies to be riddled by bullets. Yet others, to be charred to death in a fire. Someone else wants poison in their bloodstream, so they they begin with a slight warm daze and bow out as cold as ice. Some want to be conscious at the moment of death, while others prefer to be halfway to oblivion. One person wants to be strangled to death. Another is keen on being stabbed. Some people wish for death in a holy place, the sound of sacred chants ringing in their ears. But wishing doesn’t guarantee fulfilment. No matter what, the majority of deaths are uninteresting, drab, and dull. This company meets the demand for such deaths, fulfilling its clients’ death wishes. I remember some parts of the salesman’s pitch verbatim. - There’s a theoretical side to this too. Our R&D is extremely strong. You’ll find non-stop research underway, not only on the practical side of death, but also on other aspects, covering data from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Thanatos Syndrome, Indian thoughts on death, Abhedananda, and Jiddu Krishnamoorthy to the latest forms of murder, suicide and clinical death. Forget about India, no one in the world is engaged in this sort of business. It wouldn’t even occur to anyone. We’ve been told of a few small-scale attempts in Japan, but this isn’t a matter of automobiles or electronics, after all. They may have their Toyota and Mitsubishi, but those poor fellows still can’t think beyond hara-kiri. All those bamboo or steel knives—so primitive. Not at all enterprising. Incidentally, do you know which country has the most suicides in the world? - Must be us. - No sir, it’s Hungary. Magyars are incredibly suicide-prone. They offered access to all kinds of death. They would fulfill even the most intricate and virtually impossible proposals. A man from Delhi had always imagined dying when his jeep skidded on an icy mountain road. It was organised. If you wanted to die of a specific disease, their medical team would check on its feasibility. But they would not engineer someone else’s death on your request. You could only arrange for your own death through their services. I learnt a great deal from the conversation. Apparently, many people lived such bewildered lives that even though they had a vague idea of how they’d like to die, they could not express it clearly. The company had a choice of pre-set programmes for such clients. The most regal of these was the ‘record player’. A gigantic record player was set in the ocean at a distance. A huge black disc was set in it, the disc of death, turning at thirty-three and one third revolutions per minute. The record player was placed on a rig similar to an offshore oil-drilling platform. You had to get there on a speedboat. The fortunate man desiring death was made to sit on a chair over the spoke, shaped like a bullet or a lipstick, reaching upwards through the hole at the centre of the record. The record-player played an impossibly tragic melody—Western or Indian. ’s Aisle of Death, or the wistful strains of a sarengi, as you wished. Several thousand watts of sound enveloped the client in a trance. Revolving on the surface of the ocean along with the record, he was also transported to a place beyond the real and the unreal. When the music ended, the stylus entered the glittering space in the middle of the record with the sound of a storm, striking the man a mighty blow that ensured his death even before his body hit the water. His head was either torn off his body or pulverised. As soon as the corpse fell into the sea, hundreds of sharks swam up at the scent of blood. This was a very expensive affair. Very few people could afford it. Till date, not more than two or three people had heard the symphony of death. - Who are they? - Excuse me, but clients are more important to us than even god. We cannot possibly divulge their identities. Although we are practically friends now, you and I. Do you remember how Mr. ____ died? You should. - How could I not remember. Such a horrible plane crash! - It was a plane crash all right, but that was what he wanted. - But what about the other passengers? Surely they didn’t want it. - Sorry. It’s prohibitively expensive. Because there are other victims. - But they were innocent. - Innocent! My foot! In any case, there’s nothing we can do about it. None of them told us to kill them. But if they insist on taking the same flight, what are we supposed to do? Moreover, this was his choice. Yes, choice. We made all the arrangements to fulfil his request, using the money he paid us. - But. Why did he do this? - He had got rid of Mr. ____ the same way. Not through us, of course. Lots of innocent people had died on that occasion too. So he wanted a similar death. - How many more such cases have you handled? - Numerous. But why should we tell you about all of them? Can all such cases be talked about? Should they even be talked about? We offer many services. We sell suicide projects, for instance. Not as expensive. Lots more. Let me just tell you this, all the famous people who have died recently—from the Bombay mafia leader being gunned down to the Calcutta film star who committed suicide with the phone in his hand and forty sleeping pills in his stomach—it was all our doing. And then there are always the political leaders. It’s very easy to help them—all of them prefer a heart attack. - So you people help only the famous? Give them the gift of death, that is. - We’re still trying to consolidate our business, you see. The company’s a long way from breaking even. But yes, pride in our performance is our major capital at present. Later, of course, we’ll have to think of the economically weaker classes too. To tell you the truth, poor people are much more trouble. The bastards aren’t even sure whether they’re alive in the first place, how can they be expected to think of death? And besides, they’re unbelievably crude. - What about those even lower down—miles below the poverty line—beggars? - Impossible! Last year our R&D people studied the death wishes of beggars in three metropolitan cities—Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. Their findings were—how shall I put it—silly and delightful. Childish demands. - Such as? - In most cases the image involves eating. For instance, some of them want their limbs, heads, and bodies to be stuffed with meat, fish, butter and alcohol till they explode. They desperately want liquor. Then again, some of them wanted god to take them in his arms at the centre of Flora Fountain in Bombay. Infantile, and so naive. - But you have to say they’re imaginative. - That’s true. They’re bound to, since they’re human beings. But yes, we get a lot of valuable ideas from children. Just the other day our R&D unearthed a fascinating story from an American newspaper. - Tell me, please. - A boy, you know. About twelve. Somewhere near Chicago. The fellow had dressed up as Batman. He was Batman constantly, jumping from roof to roof with a pair of wings clipped on. No one took him seriously. Even the girls used to laugh at him. Child psychology, you see. So none of you can recognise Batman, he said. One day he was found in a deep freezer, frozen after several days in there. You’d be astounded at the kind of cases there are. Batman! Actually it’s not like I don’t drink. Pour me a strong whiskey, will you? What’s this whiskey called? Glender! Oh, it’s Scotch. I’ve never heard of this brand. I had poured a few whiskeys. For the salesman. And for myself too. After I had poured several, he had left like Batman, swinging and weaving. I had weaved my way to bed too. The train had started moving. I could still hear his voice ringing in my ears... - But yes, there’s a grand surprise in death, especially in accidental death—a thrill that we never deprive our clients of. Say someone has booked a death to be run over by a car. But not all his efforts will allow him to guess when, where, or on which road he will die. The virgin charm of sudden death will always remain. Who was this man? What company did he represent, for that matter? The gift of death—the idea couldn’t exactly be dismissed out of hand. Despite my best efforts, I hadn’t been able to do it for three years. Secondly, don’t we have our own visions of death, after all? Would it be fulfilled in this one life, in this life? For instance, I have a specific sort of death wish of my own too. But then the death by record player is very expensive. Naturally. I live with doubts and misgiving like these. These things lie low when I take my pills regularly. When they raise their heads, I visit the psychiatrist. She changes the medicine. Blue pills instead of white. In the darkness of power-cuts I pull that man’s black business card out for a look. The disturbing yellow letters are probably printed in fluorescent ink. They glow in the darkness. I don’t mind showing the card to anyone who gets in touch with me. You can check for yourself by writing to them. It might take a little time but their people will certainly get in touch. You can be sure about this. They will definitely meet you. ∎ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Artwork by Ibrahim Rayintakath for SAAG. Mixed media. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Short Story Translation Bengali Posthumous Stories in Dialogue Anarchist Writing Fyataru Magical Realism Working-Class Stories Language Violence Communist Slogans Banality Andhra-Orissa Border Class Rebirth Philosophical Fiction Philosophy Criminal Investigations Department Research & Analysis Wing BSF Crime Choosing Death Suicide Tibetan Book of the Dead Rachmaninoff Mafia Metropolitan Bombay Calcutta Madras Delhi NABARUN BHATTACHARYA (1948-2014) was a poet, short-story writer and novelist. Harbart , his first novel, won him the Narasimha Das award, Bankim Puraskar, and Sahitya Akademi Award. He published over 15 works of fiction, three volumes of poetry, and several collections of prose. The only child of the renowned writer Mahasweta Devi and theatre personality Bijon Bhattacharya, he lived and wrote in Kolkata. Short Story Translation 6th Oct 2020 IBRAHIM RAYINTAKATH is an illustrator from and art director from Kerala, intrigued by all forms of visual communication. His clients include The New Yorker, the New York Times, NPR, Harper Collins, and more. He is currently based in Bangalore. ARUNAVA SINHA translates fiction, poetry and non-fiction from Bangla to English. Sixty of his translations have been published so far, with 12 of them having won or been shortlisted or longlisted for translation prizes in India and abroad. He is an associate professor of practice in the Creative Writing department at Ashoka University, and Co-Director of the Ashoka Centre of Translation. He is based in Delhi. On That Note: Heading 5 23rd OCT Heading 5 23rd Oct Heading 5 23rd Oct

For decades, rural Peru has relied on journalists, human rights advocates, and indigenous organizers for protection from crossfire between state and vigilante militants that has weakened the region and enabled the growth of illicit trade activity. As indigenous Peruvians defend their land from exploitation and chemical damage in the service of the coca leaf industry, the government’s neglect of these native leaders’ efforts has led to their systemic and routine killing. · THE VERTICAL Features · Peru For decades, rural Peru has relied on journalists, human rights advocates, and indigenous organizers for protection from crossfire between state and vigilante militants that has weakened the region and enabled the growth of illicit trade activity. As indigenous Peruvians defend their land from exploitation and chemical damage in the service of the coca leaf industry, the government’s neglect of these native leaders’ efforts has led to their systemic and routine killing. Photograph courtesy of Tania Wamani. Police repression against Andean Indigenous Quechua-speaking women from Puno occurred in the capital city, Lima, during the demonstration for justice for the civilian victims killed by the police during the protests in Puno in January 2023. Lima's Forsaken For 24 days , Mariano Isacama was missing. Calls to the indigenous leader’s phone suddenly stopped going through on June 21, following threats he had been receiving through WhatsApp messages. The 35-year-old was a spokesperson for the Puerto Azul community, which is part of the broader Kakataibo indigenous group in Peru’s Ucayali province. He worked with the Kakataibo federation, FENACOKA, one of many indigenous-led organizations across Peru that aims to provide self-governance for communities. Coworkers quickly filed complaints with the police and human rights prosecutors against people they suspected of involvement and launched search parties. Isacama, like many leaders in Peru’s native communities, was not facing abstract threats. In the past nine years, 35 indigenous leaders have been killed in the country amid threats from various organized criminal groups. Leaders face near constant harassment for their public positions defending the environment. Illicit trades have grown around these native communities, so leaders are routinely threatened to either turn a blind eye or participate. Almost none of the murder cases have led to arrests or support for impacted families and communities. What happened to Mariano Isacama “They had time to find him alive,” said Herlin Odicio, a Kakataibo leader who helped search for Isacama, incessantly filing complaints with the state for weeks. “Unfortunately the justice officials did nothing in that respect.” Odicio had been working with Isacama for a while. The two would attend conferences and workshops together, or if one couldn’t go, the other would represent the Kakataibo community. Isacama’s deep involvement with the work made him a target. On July 10, more than two weeks after his disappearance, 40 members of La Guardia Indígena’s Kakataibo division arrived to search. As an autonomous, fluid structure that has gained support among Latin America’s indigenous communities in the past two decades, La Guardia Indígena attempts to train communities to protect themselves in ways the governments won’t. They carry out patrols and build strategies to confront armed violence through collective and grassroots action. The volunteer program is neither a political body nor an armed resistance organization, but rather a loose mechanism that’s been adapted and replicated within communities across Latin America. Courtesy of Tania Wamani. In Ucayali, they put together teams to head into the woods to look for Isacama. While they were searching, threats to the search party themselves were reported from nearby non-native settlers. Isacama’s body was found on July 14, hidden away in the wilderness. “We’ve already identified suspects,” Odicio said, “We hope the justice system will do its duty, which we’ve pushed for. If they don’t, and they do the opposite, the justice system we have as indigenous people is going to be something very different.” Odicio himself has been facing threats for years, and lives on the run as a result. In 2020, he was approached by cocaine producers and asked to ignore planeloads of the drugs flown off makeshift runways on his community’s land. He rejected the money, making him a target. His continued advocacy work and public profile as an environmental defender further puts him at risk. He reports having to change his location constantly, moving his family between cities and homes, and routinely receiving threatening messages—even from other members of the community. “Emotionally, I’m not doing well,” he said, after four years of living under threat and reflecting on Isacama’s murder, “It’s complicated, you know? But what else can I do? Keep working, that’s it.” How militarism gave way to cartels In recent years, lethal threats facing Peru’s indigenous leaders have grown into a crisis as various illicit trades in the Amazon and Andean regions flourish under state negligence. Indigenous leaders, local journalists, and human rights researchers have all documented growing cases of cultivation and transportation of cocaine, illegal logging and mining , construction of unplanned roads that facilitate these extractive programs, and the violence and corruption necessary to keep these operations functional. These problems started several decades ago in the wake of a shifting political and economic reality within the country. Peru’s government spent decades centralizing its population and economic policies around the capital of Lima. Rural areas struggle under neglect across the country, but in the particularly remote indigenous communities in the country, this has evolved into a crisis. Ángel Pedro Valerio, president of the indigenous organization Central Ashaninka of Río Ene (CARE), noted that the problem has grown over the past 40 years. Valerio’s Ashaninka community is located in VRAEM, a region that’s become defined by cocaine production, poverty, and the presence of the Shining Path militant group. “Inside our communities, since the ‘80s and ‘90s and 2000s, the Ashaninka people and the entire central region of the rainforest have suffered from terrorism,” Valerio said. “Many of us have had family members disappeared or killed. This political and social problem hasn’t gone away.” During an era of violence between the Shining Path and the central government, areas like Valle de los Rios Apurimac, Ene y Mantaro (VRAEM) were particularly hard hit. They were caught in the crossfire between a communist group accused of brutal attacks on civilians (including children) and a military run by dictator Alberto Fujimori, who was later sentenced to 25 years in prison for human rights violations. Fujimori died on September 11, 2024, several months after being released from prison for medical reasons. In the 1980s and 1990s, Lima’s population exploded as the armed conflict drove people away from Peru’s provincial areas. According to official state inquiries , Fujimori’s government was responsible for hundreds of forced disappearances and executions, including the killing of journalists and children , all under the guise of fighting terrorism. Civilians in rural areas were the most at risk, so many fled to the capital . In 1993, Lima had six million residents. In 2024, the city’s population is about 11 million –nearly one-third of all Peruvians live there. In the aftermath, rural areas were broadly left without infrastructure or police presence, as all modernization efforts focused on the capital. While skyscrapers fill the wealthier neighborhoods of Lima, infrastructural basics characterize much of the rest of the country. A 2023 United Nations report highlighted how hundreds of thousands in Peru live without basic nutrition, education, and healthcare. Earlier this year, a report in Infobae showed that 92% of the country’s high schools lack basic resources. Courtesy of Tania Wamani. VRAEM, though, has become defined by poverty and neglect. It’s known to be the home of what’s left of the Shining Path. “In recent years, the presence of illegal coca leaf growers has grown exponentially,” Valerio said of VRAEM. “They’re coming to invade the territory of native communities and those of us who live there can’t do anything about it. They’re opening large farms and deforesting the area, contaminating the water and the environment, degrading the soil. These coca leaves take a lot of chemicals to grow.” He pointed out that each time his organization files a complaint about threats from narcotraffickers, the state refuses to take action. He adds that state inaction puts them at greater risk. “Many of our brothers mention that they can’t file complaints because if they do, the first thing that happens is more threats,” Valerio said. “They brand us snitches and send us a warning.” A prosecutor’s vision In Lima, the central prosecutor’s office attempted to address this problem after years of neglect. In late 2023, they announced funding secured through the European Union to launch three task forces or workshops which would oversee environmental crime, human trafficking, and assassinations of indigenous leaders. “These problems have certainly grown because of a lack of attention from the central government,” said Jorge Chavez Cotrina, who oversees the attorney general’s division on organized crime. “Because the problem isn’t just to fight organized crime through police and prosecutors and the courts, but also has to be addressed by the executive branch. That is to say, before taking corrective actions we also have to take administrative actions—as in, prevention is key.” Cotrina said the three teams are mainly focused on partnering with indigenous leaders and working on building trust in the state by sending more officers into the field, participating in training programs, and sponsoring events. He said they’ve dismantled organized crime networks and opened investigations into murder cases of indigenous people. He argued, however, that this work is complicated by the lack of funds the central government provides them, pointing out that of the $3 billion budget his office was officially granted, they’ve only been disbursed $80 million. As a result, he said, they lack staff, forensic equipment, judges, and the ability to reach native communities that are the most remote. On top of that, Cintora points out that the problems can’t simply be addressed through arrests, and that prevention must consider economic development and increased governmental presence in the area. The centralized perspective of the government can exacerbate the problem by creating easier conditions for organized crime to flourish. Late last year, Peru passed a so-called “anti-forest law” swiftly denounced by activists, indigenous organizations, and leading environmental groups. The SPDA, a Peruvian legal watchdog and environmental NGO, declared that the law would openly promote and legalize deforestation in the Amazon, while putting local agriculture and communities at risk. Their legal opinion showed that the country would be violating its own laws by allowing this through and ensuring Peru's failure to meet international commitments regarding climate protection. Courtesy of Tania Wamani. “The legislature definitely has put in place a series of regulations without knowing the reality,” Cintora said. “When someone writes a regulation from their desk without knowing the reality, these are normally well-intentioned. But when you explain to them the reality, it’s counterproductive. And that’s what’s happening with issues like deforestation, illegal mining and the environment…The idea instead should be to call upon the rural communities that can give their opinion on regulations that would affect their territories.” A balance in trust Leaders like Odicio and Valerio remain skeptical of the state. Cintora’s vision is to work alongside communities, so they begin to trust police and prosecutors with time. “Our job is to gain their trust,” Cintora said, “and through these task forces, we’re having many meetings with different communities in the Peruvian Amazon, and we are on the right track.” One case took prosecutors and police a decade to resolve . In 2014, in the small town of Saweto, four indigenous leaders were killed. The case didn’t go to trial until 2022, when the state eventually won convictions against four men they accused of being involved. In 2023, those cases were declared null by a regional judge. For many in Peru’s activist communities, this signaled an important lesson: even in the rare case that the state seeks a conviction in these murders, the courts can’t be trusted. Only in April 2024, did the case finally go to the Superior Court of Ucayali and the sentences were restored. Cintora saw the case as a win, as it affirms faith in the prosecutor’s office for native communities. Despite funding problems, he hopes that this kind of work can make a difference in restoring collaboration with these communities. “With the small amount of resources we have, we do what we can,” Cintora said, “because we can’t sit around crying that there’s no money.” ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Features Peru Lima Indigenous self-governance Ucayali Rural strategic underdevelopment VRAEM Valle de los Rios Apurimac Ene y Mantaro Shining Path Central Ashaninka of Río Ene Kakataibo Militarism Cartel Drugs Cocoa Plant Amazon Rainforest Andres Mountains Trade Route Illicit Trading Forced Disappearance Free Speech Militant Anti-Forest Law Journalism Execution Underdevelopment Development Filmmaking Photography Human Rights Activism NGO Agriculture Climate Change Deforestation Community Security Climate Security European Union Human Trafficking Assassination Whatsapp Puerto Azul Conflict Justice La Guardia Indigena Volunteer Program Latin America South America Protest Search Party Aviation Transportation Logging Mining Construction Violence Corruption Politics Economy Poverty Terrorism Disappearance State Sanctioned Violence Policing Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 18th Nov 2024 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

"So Modhu traveled beyond Kalai, Mokamtala, Bogra, Sirajganj, across the Jamuna Bridge, to the city of Dhaka, two hundred miles away. There he pulls a rickshaw, earns a hundred takas a day, counts that money each night, again and again, can’t settle on one place where he can hide this money." FICTION & POETRY The Cuckoo Keeps Calling AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR "So Modhu traveled beyond Kalai, Mokamtala, Bogra, Sirajganj, across the Jamuna Bridge, to the city of Dhaka, two hundred miles away. There he pulls a rickshaw, earns a hundred takas a day, counts that money each night, again and again, can’t settle on one place where he can hide this money." SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Short Story Translation Bengali Bangladesh Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. DISPATCH Short Story Translation 23rd Sep 2020 Translated from the Bengali by Shabnam Nadiya MODHU wakes up at dawn and says to his wife, “Say goodbye.” Modina clasps her husband’s hand and says, “Not today. Go tomorrow.” The cuckoo trills from the branches of the koroi tree. Modhu doesn’t know what it means when the cuckoo calls during a spring dawn. He lies back again. Now comfortable, he goes back to sleep. The next day at dawn, Modhu again asks his wife to bid him farewell. Again, his wife says, “Not today, tomorrow.” Modhu again lies down like a good boy. Sleeps comfortably. The cuckoo calls from the tree. Modhu doesn’t hear. He is sound asleep. The cuckoo grows increasingly desperate. Coo. Coo-oo. Coo-oo-oo. Modhu sleeps, he doesn’t hear. His wife Modina lies awake; she doesn’t hear either. But Mafiz hears the cuckoo trilling in this spring dawn. He is not unromantic. He breaks into song: Oh, why do you call to me so early in the morning, oh, little cuckoo of my life? Modina doesn’t hear Mafiz’s song. Mafiz exits his home and gazes at the three-way intersection, the road that people take to reach town. Mafiz doesn’t see anybody taking that road. He walks. He places his foot on the threshold of Modina’s yard and, in a muted voice, calls out, “Brother, Modhu, have you gone to Dhaka?” Modina shoos cows. “Hyat! Hyat, hyat!” “Hey, girl, why are you shooing me?” Modina picks up a wooden stool and throws it at Mafiz. Mafiz sniggers like a jackal and leaves. As he goes, he says to himself, “No matter how many times you cut me, or hit me…” Modhu wakes up hungry. Modina serves him rice and eats as well. Not freshly cooked, steaming rice. Old rice, with water added. As he eats, Modhu asks, “Isn’t there anymore panta-rice left?” Modina bites her tongue in shame. Which means that there is no more panta-rice left. No more, meaning that in Modina’s judgment, because she herself has eaten too much, the panta has been finished before her man’s hunger has abated. Hence, Modina’s shame, hence, her biting of the tongue. “Now I need to go to Dhaka.” Modhu needs to go to Dhaka for pertinent reasons. Modina asks, “Isn’t it hard to drive a rickshaw?” Modhu knows that this is Modina being tender. Modina knows that driving a rickshaw in Dhaka city is grueling. But working the fields was hellish torment, and the wages were poor—merely sixty takas a day. One day in the month of Joishthya, Modhu had almost died while weeding the jute fields belonging to the Mondals. There was no water in the fields, there were no clouds in the sky, Modhu’s back was burning to ashes from the sun, his throat was parched wood, he was desperately thirsty, he was running for water, the solitary plains had become the deserts of Karbala, in the distance, Bacchu Mondal’s new tin shed glinted in the sunlight, there was a new tube-well near the outer yard of the house, Modhu was running towards it, stumbling on the clods of earth in the hoed field, shouting “A drop of water for me, please!” But before he had reached the tube-well, Modhu had tumbled onto the ground, his eyes had rolled back into his head, he foamed at the mouth. Modhu almost died that day. No more, meaning that in Modina’s judgment, because she herself has eaten too much, the panta has been finished before her man’s hunger has abated. Hence, Modina’s shame, hence, her biting of the tongue. So Modhu traveled beyond Kalai, Mokamtala, Bogra, Sirajganj, across the Jamuna Bridge, to the city of Dhaka, two hundred miles away. There he pulls a rickshaw, earns a hundred takas a day, counts that money each night, again and again, can’t settle on one place where he can hide this money. This is how, day after day, for fifteen straight days, Modhu drives a rickshaw. In Kawran Bazar, twelve of these drivers live in a windowless room; with them live twelve thousand mosquitoes; the mosquitoes sing, suck the blood of all the Modhus, and the Modhus all sleep like the dead. At the crack of dawn, when the tired mosquitoes are each an immobile drop of blood, the Modhus wake up; nature calls them. They not only feel the thunderclouds rumbling in their bellies, they hear them as well. They go out in a group, pull the tabans covering their asses over their heads, and they show their naked dark asses in a row as they hunker down at the edge of the Kazi Nazrul Islam Avenue, or some of them in front of the Hotel Sonargaon gate. They wipe their asses with newspapers because there is no water; not only is there a lack of water to clean themselves, the Modhus don’t have water to bathe. For fifteen days straight, Modhu doesn’t wash himself; sometimes the odor of his own body makes him want to vomit, especially when the sun is strong and Dhaka’s skies and air cease to be. This is how it is, day after day, night after night. But what happiness, what success! When Modhu returns to Modina after fifteen straight days, there is at least fifteen hundred takas in his waist pouch. Which means that for at least a month, he neither thinks of Dhaka nor speaks of it. Modhu goes to Dhaka city. The watered rice is finished, there is no more rice left in the house, Modina sits emptyhanded by the derelict stove. A cuckoo trills in a tree; Modina doesn’t hear it, but Mafiz does. It has never happened that a cuckoo sings and Mafiz hasn’t heard it. When Modhu crosses the three-way intersection of the highway and goes towards the upazila town, Mafiz peeks from behind the house. He spots Modina sitting by the stove doing nothing and he begins to joke around. “Brother, Modhu, are you off to Dhaka?” Modina turns her head. Joyous, Mafiz says, “What’s up, Modina?” “What’s your deal?” Modina scolds Mafiz in a solemn manner. “You’re hankering for a beating?” “If you beat me with your own hands,” Mafiz says as he grins with all his teeth and comes forward fearlessly, “my life would be a treasure.” “Go home.” Modina is even more serious. “Do you want a job, Modina?” Mafiz coaxes her. Modina isn’t willing to listen to anything. She threatens Mafiz, “I’m telling you, go.” Mafiz tries to get angry and says, “I’m here to do you a favor without being asked, and you want to shoo me off like a cow?” Modina asks in a serious manner, “What favor?” Mafiz responds with mystery. “You’ll get money, wheat. Want a job?” “What job?” “Shooing goats,” Mafiz says and chuckles. Although he hadn’t intended to laugh. Modina is furious. “Go away, you bastard. You can’t find someone else to joke with?” Mafiz moves fast to try to control the damage and speaks in a very businesslike manner. “Not a joke, Modina, for real! No actual work involved, just shooing cows and goats.” “Explain clearly, what sort of job is this then?” Mafiz explains it clearly. “Haven’t you seen those trees planted on either side of the highway? Those trees need to be guarded so that cows and goats don’t chew them up. That’s the job. They’ll pay cash, they’ll also pay with wheat. You sell the wheat to buy rice. And with the money, you buy beef, tilapia…!” “Stop, stop.” Modina stops Mafiz and suspicion rolls across her eyes and face. She narrows her eyes, creases her forehead, and interrogates him. “Why would anyone give me this job when there are so many people around?” “Why, I’ll arrange it for you. I’ll grab the Chairman’s hands and feet and I’ll beg…” Mafiz pauses for no reason. He can’t find anything else to say. But his plan and his words are quite clear. Still, Modina wants to hear more about this job guarding trees and the means to getting it even more clearly. “Go on, why did you stop?” Mafiz laughs and says, “I will grab the Chairman’s hands and feet and beg: Uncle, give this job to Modina, you won’t find a girl as nice as Modina even if you look and look…” Modina howls with laughter. A cool breeze wafts across the ditch and disappears. From the branches of the koroi tree, a cuckoo calls. Mafiz glances towards the tree and looks at the cuckoo. Then he gazes at Modina’s face and says in a melancholy manner, “Do you know what the cuckoo is saying? Mafiz says, “The cuckoo is crying. It’s crying and asking, Where did my own little cuckoo bird go?” “What?” There is a smile on Modina’s face; she knows what Mafiz is about to say. Mafiz says, “The cuckoo is crying. It’s crying and asking, Where did my own little cuckoo bird go?” Modina laughs again. Her laughter enrages the cuckoo in the koroi tree. Mafiz speaks the cuckoo’s mind, “Why do you laugh like that Modina?” “What is it to you if I laugh?” Modina asks cocking her eyebrow like a flirt. “My ribs shatter to bits and my soul wants to fly away,” Mafiz says. Modina laughs, shimmying her whole body. Mafiz looks at the tree but the cuckoo is gone. It has been raining all day in Dhaka; as he pedals his rickshaw Modhu is pretty much taking a shower. After getting drenched all day, all the warmth had left his body. Modhu cannot fathom where his body is finding so much heat in the evening. He feels cold, his head hurts, and soon he begins to shiver. He rolls around on the floor in the dark room, and like a child, he moans, calling out to his mother. It isn’t raining in the village of Modhupur; the moon is visible in the sky and a cuckoo is singing in the branches of the koroi tree. Mafiz stands by Modina’s window, grasping the grill and whispering, “Modina! Oh, Modina!” Scared, Modina scrambles into a sitting position, and spits on her own chest to dissipate her fear, and Mafiz whistles in the air saying, “It’s me, Mafiz!” The power has gone out in Dhaka city. In the box-like room where Modhu rolls on the ground by himself, shivering and moaning, the darkness of hell has descended: Modhu thinks he is dying. In the village of Modhupur, through the gaps in the branches of the koroi tree, slivers of moonlight land on Modina’s window; outside stands Mafiz, like a ghost, and inside is Modina. Modina’s teeth can be seen white in the shadow of moonlight, her eyes are shining, and she is pretending to be angry with Mafiz, telling him she was going to complain to Modhu when he came back, and Modhu would grind Mafiz’s bones into powder and apply it to his body. Modina purses her lips in laughter as she talks, and Mafiz says that Modhu wasn’t coming back to Modhupur anymore, he was going to die in Dhaka. Mafiz tells Modina, “Our fortunes were written together. You have no choice but me, Modina.” Modina slides her arm through the window grill and shoves Mafiz in the chest. “Go home, you stray cow.” Mafiz grabs Modina’s hand in the blink of an eye and says, “You don’t know this, but I know it for sure, Modina. I have you written in my fate and you have me.” Modina feels that Mafiz has lost his head. As Mafiz goes back to his own house, he dreams that Modhu has died in Dhaka. “He’s dead, that bastard Modhu is dead,” says Mafiz, willing Modina’s husband to die as he walks home. Right then, in Kawran Bazar, Dhaka, Modhu is freezing and shivering, and he is calling out to Allah, saying, “Don’t take my life, Khoda. Let me live this time around. I’ll never come back to Dhaka in this lifetime.” The next morning Modhu recovers from his fever; he sees that there is no more rain, the sky is a shining blue, and the buildings are all smiling. Modhu forgets his promise to Allah, and that very afternoon he goes out again with his rickshaw. He recalls the bone-shaking fever from the night before and laughs to himself. That morning, Mafiz places his foot on the threshold of Modhu’s yard and calls out in a low voice, “Brother, Modhu, are you back from Dhaka?” But Mafiz knows very well that if Modhu is supposed to be back fifteen days later, there are still three more days to go. Two days before the day that Modhu is supposed to return to Modhupur, he drops off a passenger in the inner side of Gulshan-2 and goes to grab a cup of tea at a roadside stall. He takes two sips of his tea and turns around to find his rickshaw gone. At first, Modhu doesn’t believe it. He thinks maybe someone has hidden his rickshaw nearby as a prank. But no, it isn’t that simple. The rickshaw has disappeared, meaning seriously disappeared. Modhu goes to the rickshaw owner and describes the situation. The owner points towards Modhu and orders his people, “Tie up that fool.” Before the ones under order had begun the work, the owner himself landed a kick in Modhu’s belly. “You fucking nobody, where’s my rickshaw?” A grunt emerges from Modhu’s mouth, he doubles over and grabs his mouth with one hand. One of the owner’s followers runs over and, almost astride Modhu’s shoulders, he grabs Modhu’s hair, shaking his head and demands, “Say it, you son of a bitch, to which of your fathers did you sell off the boss’s rickshaw?” The boss screams, “First, do him over real good.” Modhu is made over almost into a corpse, and thirteen hundred and twenty five takas, meaning all his earnings, are taken away from him before he is handed over to the police. The police take Modhu to the station and hit him some more in the hope of getting some money, but they quickly realize that not only will no one show up with any money for his release, the owner and his men had already beat him so much that he might very well die in the police station. In which case, the newspapers will start writing about death in police custody, and all those poor-loving human rights organization folks will drum up a furor. The police think about all this hassle and push Modhu out of the station. Modhu can’t walk; he falls onto the street in front of the police station and moans. The police feel inconvenienced and annoyed at this; they load Modhu into the back of a pickup truck, and drive around the city, along this street and that, and they focus their flashlights here and there looking for a convenient spot in which to dump him. As they search, one of them has an idea. “Well, then,” he says to his colleagues, “whose fault is it that we’re going through all this trouble?” They drive the pickup truck with Modhu in the back to the Begunbari house-cum-garage of the rickshaw owner and roar at him, “You, pal, have murdered the suspect before handing him over to the police!” The rickshaw owner doesn’t seem perturbed by the roaring police; he goes inside and quickly returns with ten thousand takas. He tucks it into the hand of one of the policemen and says, “There’s no more cash in the house, saar. Just manage the thing, please.” One of the policemen grows angry. “Is this a joke!” The rickshaw owner doesn’t quite understand what his anger means; still, out of habit, he goes back inside and returns with another ten thousand takas. Then he gets a louder scolding, and a policeman even utters the words, “under arrest.” Therefore, the rickshaw owner goes back inside again, and when he is late in coming back out, the policemen look at each other with suspicion. But before they lose their patience, the rickshaw owner reemerges with a page from his check book. He says, “Saars, an accident just happened. It is my fault, but I don’t want the guy to die. Here, I’ve written out one hundred thousand.” The policeman stops him midway and says, “Pal, you want to survive, then show up at the station tomorrow morning with five hundred thousand in cash. We don’t do checks-fecks.” The rickshaw owner says, “What arrangements for the body?” A policeman answers, “That’s the big trouble right now. What to do with this dead body, we’ve been going around all night…pal, that five hundred thousand won’t cut it. We’ll have to take care of the journalists; we’ll have to take care of the human rights people. Make it six lakhs and be at the station by nine a.m.” But Modhu isn’t a dead body yet. On the floor in the back of the pickup truck, he lies flat on his back with his neck at an angle, peering at them like a weak, sick kitten. There is still a spark of life in his dying eyes. It was the end of night when Modhu was carefully laid down behind a bush in a corner of the Suhrawardy Gardens, from the police pickup truck. Silence descended once the mechanical noise of the pickup truck disappeared in the distance. The silence reigned for a few moments; then suddenly, someone blew on the mosque microphone, and in a voice deep like thunder, began the chant of Allahu Akbar. When the quivering notes of the azaan floated to Modhu’s nearly numb ears, his eyes opened slightly. In the distance, he saw a light tremble. He tried to move one of his hands but couldn’t. He tried to move his legs but couldn’t. Modhu tried to make a noise with his mouth; he forced himself to say, Allah! But Modhu’s voice didn’t echo in the wind. Modhu would die and Mafiz would have Modina forever—this is what is written in Modina and Mafiz’s destinies. Modina doesn’t believe it but Mafiz’s faith doesn’t have an ounce of doubt. But why Mafiz counts the days till Modhu’s return is something only he knows. Two days before Modhu is supposed to come back, which was fifteen days after his departure, Mafiz, once again, stands by Modina’s window and says that Modhu will not return. He is going to die in Dhaka; and because when poor people die that far away, their bodies never make it back, Modina will never see Modhu again. When Mafiz is telling Modina all this, Modhu is rolling back and forth between consciousness and unconsciousness on the floor of the pickup truck in the streets of Dhaka. Modina protests the ill-omened, cruel words from Mafiz by scratching his chest and neck until he bleeds. But when Mafiz groans in pain, she covers his mouth with her hand and says, “Oh, does it burn?” When Mafiz sulks and wants to leave, Modina grabs his shoulder again and says, “Come tomorrow! The day after, he’ll be back home!” The next night, before the cuckoo sings in the koroi tree, three ghosts come to Modina’s house. They had whispered to each other as they came down the road that Modhu was gone. “Let’s go and eat Modhu’s wife.” These ghosts only eat people of the female gender; from age eight to fifty-eight, wherever they find a woman at an opportune moment, they eat her. These famous ghosts live in the upazila town; they came to the village of Modhupur after verifying and ascertaining the information that Modhu is absent, and truly they find Modina by herself in Modhu’s house, and when they find her, they begin to eat her. They take turns in eating Modina. After the first ghost, the second ghost, then the third ghost, then the first ghost again. While they eat Modina in turns, at some point, Mafiz shows up. Modina sees Mafiz and whimpers in the hope of getting some help, but one of the ghosts grabs hold of her nose and mouth so hard that not only any noise, even her breath cannot emerge from her. In addition, another ghost grasps her throat with five and five, ten fingers; Modina thrashes around, groans, her tongue lolls out, her eyes want to bug out. Seeing which, Mafiz, a single person, attacks the three ghosts; two of whom pick him up and slam him down on the ground; a grunt emerges from Mafiz’s throat, his eyes go dark; one ghost picks up a half-brick and smashes it down on Mafiz’s head; his skull opens up with a crack, and this encourages the ghost, so he begins smashing the brick down into Mafiz’s skull again and again. Right then, the cuckoo trills in the koroi tree. Ghosts don’t know what it means when a cuckoo sings in a spring evening. ∎ Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Next Up:

Descendants of enslaved and indentured labourers cultivated life amidst the ruins of climate catastrophe in nineteenth-century Mauritius. Today, deforestation and the sugar industry have left a legacy of natural disasters and public health crises. What path forward remains for the unification of the political and scientific in service of the island’s labouring population? · FEATURES Essay · Mauritius Descendants of enslaved and indentured labourers cultivated life amidst the ruins of climate catastrophe in nineteenth-century Mauritius. Today, deforestation and the sugar industry have left a legacy of natural disasters and public health crises. What path forward remains for the unification of the political and scientific in service of the island’s labouring population? Sabrina Tirvengadum, Sugar Cane (2023). Archival images, collage, digital painting, and generative AI. Gardening at the End of the World Mauritius shot up from beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean in a volcanic eruption eight million years ago. As the lava cooled and became rock, rain fell into the cracks, forming streams and rivers that ran down to the sea. The water fed forests that crept up the island’s young mountains. Before long, an unbroken chain of dense evergreen forest extended across the land. For eight million years, these trees sheltered a dense flourishing of life. The largest among them towered to seventy feet, suspended above the younger trees and the undergrowth. Bright pigeons and parakeets studded the canopy, ferns, flowers, and fungi abounded in the understorey, and, where the forest thinned, a community of giant tortoises grazed on the long grass. By the late nineteenth century, Mauritius was a byword for ecological disappearance. It began three centuries earlier, when Dutch colonists—the island’s first, known human inhabitants—began clearing the lowland forest for lumber. The colonists massacred the giant tortoises for the small deposits of fat on their backs, and introduced goats, pigs, and dogs, which devastated the indigenous plant and animal life. Within a century of Dutch arrival, the island’s tortoises and large birds were all either rare or extinct. Wild cattle fled from the settled areas, and the forests were overrun by millions of rats. But the destruction wasn’t complete until the arrival of sugar. Under French and British rule (1715-1810 and 1810-1968 respectively), the island was transformed into an enormous sugar factory; by 1840, all other large-scale cultivation had been abandoned. This, in turn, exposed Mauritius to an economic logic of growth at all costs. When sugar prices plummeted in the nineteenth century, the island was pressured to export ever greater quantities of sugar to sustain the colonial economy. The consequences were etched across the island’s landscape: massive deforestation, spiralling species loss, and ever larger sugar mills belching thick smoke into the air. By 1880, 43% of the entire island had been converted into canefields, and 80% of native tree cover had been lost. The result of these changes can only be described as a climate catastrophe. In precolonial Mauritius, a rich variety of forest life protected the island ecology from cyclones and fluctuating rains. Palm forests kept the low coastlands cool and humid, while mountain woods slowed the flow of rainwater and absorbed moisture into the subsoil. Colonial deforestation permanently altered the island’s climate. As the air grew hotter and drier, springs and rivulets near the coast disappeared. The few remaining coastal evergreens died, unable to adapt to the changed climate. Large quantities of water, previously retained in the highland forests, flowed directly into the sea during the annual rains. This, in turn, left the island exposed to fluctuations in annual rainfall: swamps, rivers, and streams dried up after a shortfall in the monsoon, while flash floods struck with grim regularity. Malarial mosquitoes, unknown on the island before 1860 , found a natural home amongst its stagnant marshes and congested plantation canals. By the turn of the twentieth century, malaria was endemic to Mauritius. This is a story about what comes after disappearance. It follows a little — known environmental struggle waged between Mauritius’ sugar capitalists, colonial scientists, and the island’s African- and Indian-descended working population. Faced with an increasingly volatile natural environment in the nineteenth century, the Mauritian sugar industry argued that the only way to keep the island from total ruination was to continue producing sugar, in ever larger quantities, for greater profit. Colonial officials, armed with growing meteorological data and population statistics, were all too aware of the ecological disaster threatened by sugar production. Yet at the same time, they accepted the argument — advanced by the powerful Mauritian sugar lobby—that the island’s survival was impossible without a flourishing sugar industry. To address this predicament, the colonial government turned to scientists working at the island’s botanical gardens and weather stations. Fusing imperial power with environmental science, it embraced early forms of geoengineering and climate adaptation, in an effort to stabilise the Mauritian plantation economy and protect it from the island’s precarious climate. For both the government scientists and the sugar industry, Mauritius was a site of experimentation—the question was how life, and the profits that depended on it, could be made to endure following the disappearance of the island’s indigenous ecology. But beyond the interests of state and capital, Mauritian working people had their own ideas about how to organise their lives in relation to the island’s disturbed ecologies. As the descendants of Africans and Indians shipped to Mauritius under brutal systems of slavery and indentureship, they held onto their own knowledge about the land, while cultivating seeds smuggled across the Indian Ocean by their predecessors. With these tools, Afro- and Indo-Mauritians in the nineteenth century sought out a future beyond the sugar estates and colonial environmental control. At the heart of the struggle lay a simple question: was life—human and non-human—condemned to simply endure the devastation of the natural world, or was it possible to cultivate something more than survival? On the Walk by Sabrina Tirvengadum Like today’s global climate crisis, the burden of Mauritius’ volatile ecology fell unevenly among the island’s inhabitants. Worst affected by far was the labouring population of the sugar plantations. For over a century, men, women, and children kidnapped in Madagascar and East Africa were sold into slavery on the Mauritian plantations; at its height in 1817, the enslaved population was 79,494—more than 80% of the total population of the island. Then, when slavery was abolished in 1835 , the former slave owners turned to a new source of bound, racialised labour: indentured workers, recruited in rural areas of north and south India under contracts granting free passage to Mauritius in exchange for five years of labour on the sugar estates. Indentureship sat somewhere between slavery and free labour: while only bound for a fixed period, indentured labourers inherited the former slave barracks, took the place of the enslaved in the canefields, and suffered the same daily humiliations at the hands of the white overseers. The enslaved and the indentured were on the frontlines of the transformation of Mauritius’ landscape. The labourers hacked away swathes of ancient forest at the orders of the overseers. They hauled the black volcanic rocks that scattered the island into neat rows marking the canefield boundaries. And they cultivated the fields with their bare hands: weeding, planting, and shovelling during the rainy season, and in the dry season, enduring long, exhausting days cutting cane and transporting it back to the sugar mill. At night, the canecutters slept in overcrowded huts, in dwelling areas shared with the plantation livestock, alongside the rats, scorpions, and snakes who were attracted to the sweetness of the canefields. Malaria, yellow fever, and cholera proliferated near the densely packed, unventilated huts. When epidemics hit the island, the enslaved and the indentured were the first to die. The sugar industry, in collusion with the colonial authorities, did everything in its power to keep the island’s working population bound to the canefields. Armed patrols scoured the island for maroons (runaway slaves). The colonial government paid a reward for the severed hands of dead maroons, while French law stipulated that captured runaways were to have their ears cut off. Even after the end of slavery, indentureship perpetuated the island’s system of racial control. Under the indenture contract, workers were banned from leaving the plantation without written permission from the estate manager. Discriminatory pass laws forced Indo-Mauritians to carry identity cards showing their occupation and residence; those without evidence of employment were arrested and imprisoned at the vagrant depot, before being re-indentured on a sugar estate for a year. Local police conducted weekly ‘vagrant hunts’, sweeping across the countryside and apprehending every Indo-Mauritian they found. Throughout two centuries of slavery and indentureship, the ultimate goal of the planters remained the same: to keep the plantation workforce ‘attached to the soil’ (a phrase often repeated by colonial officials), at the frontline of the colony’s environmental collapse. On 14 June 1886, Dr John Horne, director of Mauritius’ renowned botanical gardens, wrote to the Colonial Office in London on an “urgent” matter of “great importance.” Twelve months earlier, Dr Horne had returned to the island to reports from forest rangers about an infestation of what they called “the cuscuta creeper.” Cuscuta reflexa— or dodder, its English vernacular name—is a parasitic creeper plant native to India. It propagates from seeds dropped on the ground, which produce a threadlike yellow stem that gropes for assistance from any nearby plant. Contact made, the stem twines itself around its host, sinking tiny suckers into its flesh and stealing its nutrients. In this manner, the creeper grows up to six inches a day, quickly smothering its host. The creeper had never been seen in Mauritius, but now it was spreading quickly through the island’s forests and scrubland. Younger trees and shrubs were killed, unable to sustain the parasite during the worst drought in a generation. Older trees were soon garlanded with a thousand tiny threads, each studded with small, bell-shaped white flowers with bright yellow filaments. In his letter, Dr Horne pleaded for information from India about the creeper, and how to destroy it. Horne’s desperation was a product of the surprisingly long history of climate science and environmental policy in Mauritius. As early as 1645 , Dutch colonists fretted about the rate of deforestation, and enacted laws to curb the pigs and dogs which were ravaging the island. Under French rule, the colonial administration was heavily influenced by a school of scientists known as ‘desiccationists’, who argued that drought was caused by deforestation. The result was a series of forest reserves and laws restricting deforestation in the interior—some of the world’s earliest conservation measures aimed explicitly at climate change. In the second half of the nineteenth century, after a series of devastating droughts, floods and epidemics, these environmental policies intensified. The government pursued the creation of new forests along the island’s denuded mountains and rivers, spending millions of rupees purchasing land for reforestation from abandoned sugar estates. These they handed to Dr Horne, who cultivated the land with saplings taken from his botanical gardens. This is the context for Dr Horne’s urgency regarding the “ cuscuta creeper.” Fearing the destruction of his saplings by the parasite, Dr Horne successfully lobbied the colonial government for a law ordering its total eradication. In starkly martial language, the botanist mobilised his forest rangers to carry out an eradication order, advocating “attacking it in force, at one time, at all the places where it is growing.” But the creeper was not acting alone. As Dr Horne wrote to the Colonial Office, men, women, and children from the Indo-Mauritian community were intentionally spreading the parasite. They carried portions of the plant wherever they went, Horne reported, throwing it on trees and shrubs and allowing it to propagate. A year after it was first detected by the forest rangers, the creeper grew conspicuously in the bushes surrounding Indian villages and plantation tenements alike. To those spreading it, the creeper was not cuscuta reflexa or dodder, but akashbel or kodiyagundal (its Bhojpuri and Tamil name respectively). In the healing traditions of the rural recruiting heartlands, the plant was recognised for its medicinal properties, its stem ground into a paste as a treatment for rheumatism, and its juice used as an antiseptic. In Mauritius, indentured workers also fed the creeper to the goats and cows which lived around their dwellings, who were, according to Horne, “very fond of it.” If, to the state, the creeper was a parasite threatening the colonial management of the landscape, to the Indian-born estate workers, it was a valuable companion in the struggle for survival. From the earliest days of slavery, plantation labourers turned to the land as a means of collective nourishment. On provision grounds—patches of marginal plantation land used by enslaved workers for food cultivation—the enslaved adapted familiar farming practices to the Mauritian soil in order to grow the basic foodstuff that kept them alive. Indentured labourers inherited the provision grounds, to which they introduced seeds and cuttings carried in their jahaji bundles (ships belongings), from flowers and fruiting trees to vines and root vegetables. These they cultivated with great care in the early hours of the morning, before setting off for the canefields with their cutlass and hoe. Already by 1845, colonists complained that indentured labourers were spending all of their time “cultivating fruits and flowers” at the expense of the sugar estates. This ecological knowledge formed the first foundation of a life independent of the plantations. In the eighteenth century, maroon communities emerged in the forests to the southeast of the island, where the dense tangle of undergrowth formed a natural refuge from the colonial state. After emancipation, the majority of formerly enslaved workers left the plantations, squatting on the slopes of the island’s mountains and cultivating fruit and vegetables for the market in Port Louis. They put their familiarity with the landscape to use, foraging in the diminishing forest and scrubland for tamarind, ginger, and Mauritian raspberries, gathered by women and children and sold in the bazaar. Fruit by Sabrina Tirvengadum This pattern continued with indentureship. Upon the expiry of their indenture contract, “old immigrants,” as they were known, could either sign a new contract to remain on the plantation, or leave. Of those who left, thousands used the savings they had eked out on the plantation to purchase land, either from the sugar estates or from older Afro-Mauritian gardeners. Tentatively at first, but then in ever-increasing numbers, formerly indentured workers moved beyond the sugar estates and settled in the margins of the countryside. By the 1870s, their market gardens covered the hillsides of the Mauritian interior. These gardens cultivated a precious degree of independence amidst the colony’s steep racial hierarchies. Post-emancipation, they offered respite from the horrors of enforced labour, and an altogether different manner of working. Local magistrates reporting on the formerly enslaved population complained that Afro-Mauritians failed to cultivate their land in a suitably acquisitive manner. “They work to procure the immediate necessities of life,” one criticised, “and do not show any desire to increase their property.” The magistrates accused the gardeners of failing to treat agricultural work as an end in itself, rather than merely the means to secure a comfortable existence. “These people of African origin,” another wrote, “live…in the enjoyment of undisturbed repose, which they seem to think…is due to them for the labour and miseries endured during the period of slavery.” But the gardens also formed a more direct retaliation to the ecological devastation of the sugar estates, through the plants themselves. It is difficult to know exactly what was grown on these nineteenth-century garden plots. Unlike the sugar mills, whose ruined stacks still scatter the Mauritian landscape, the small garden patches left hardly any trace, except for what lies buried beneath layers of sediment. The archives of the colonial state offer little more: market gardeners were rarely an object of concern for imperial administrators, and when they were, it was usually in exceptional circumstances irrelevant to their cultivation of the soil. Occasionally, though, we are offered a glimpse, not through testimony itself, but in the form of large compendiums of the island’s flora, compiled and published by colonial botanists in the late nineteenth century. I found one of these while researching in the archives of Kew Gardens in London. It was published in 1886, making it one of the earliest written accounts of the Mauritian gardens. In the compendium, long lists of towering trees, hardy shrubs, fruiting vines and colourful flowers are printed alongside tantalising off-hand comments noting their presence in the hillside gardens. Little more is written. The plants, however, offer their own testimony. Some of them—mangoes, areca palms, bitter gourd, turmeric, and coriander—will have been grown from seeds brought by the indentured from India. Many, however, were products of the plantation world. Pigeon pea— ambredade in Mauritian Creole—a legume used as a rotation crop in the canefields and adopted by Mauritian gardeners as a multi-purpose hedgerow, abounded on abandoned plantations, from which the gardeners likely took cuttings. Shorter term cash crops were planted alongside subsistence provisions, decorative flowers, and medicinal herbs; small patches of sugarcane next to trees that took half a generation to yield fruit. This was an agricultural model far better suited to Mauritius than the factory-like system of the sugar plantations, with its reliance on a single, volatile cash crop. Many of the indentured had been gardeners in their homeland; all would have been familiar with the monsoon rhythms of the Indian Ocean world. Like the intercropping system of northern India, the sheer diversity of the Mauritian market gardens enabled some degree of protection from crop failures and monsoon fluctuations, with overlapping harvests taking place throughout the year. But the gardens were also a divergence from the reforestation projects with which the colonial state responded to Mauritius’ environmental collapse. The government reforestation projects envisioned trees as instruments of geoengineering. By keeping temperatures down, increasing humidity and retaining rainwater, the new forests would stabilise the island’s climate, and keep aridity—the colonial scientists’ great fear—at bay. In this plan, trees were a technological fix that could stabilise and preserve plantation production and enable the colonial order it underpinned to endure ecological catastrophe. The scientists and imperial bureaucrats behind reforestation did not challenge the dominance of the plantations, nor the conditions for life they had produced in Mauritius; in fact, by obstructing rural foragers’ access to the forests, they hampered a vital means of existence outside the orbit of the estates. The gardens, on the other hand, formed a deliberate alternative to the sugar estates, in which cultivation exceeded the ambition of enduring a fragile present. The plants themselves, carefully recorded in the botanical compendium, were suspended across multiple temporalities. Some were animated by memories of familiar landscapes and habits, transposed across the Indian Ocean: banyan and peepal trees planted next to makeshift plantation temples; turmeric, neem, and mango cultivated in the gardens, and used in rituals marking births, deaths, and marriages. Others responded to present needs: medicinal herbs from the Ayurveda, Siddha, and Unani-tibb healing traditions were grown in the gardens, and used to give comfort to aching bodies; market crops provided much-needed cash for families; cannabis ( gandia ) was planted, and smoked among friends at dusk beside their dwellings. Others still corresponded to desires for a relatively distant future: trees that would not fruit for half a generation, whose shade would shelter the grandchildren of their cultivators. Taken together, these plants suggest the cultivation of not only endurance in a damaged land, but also a degree of collective spiritual and material comfort. The plants, and the garden patches on which they were grown, embodied the idea that this landscape could be something more than a mechanism for profit: that life could survive in the ruins and that land could sustain something like home. To the sugar estates, the sale of land to former plantation labourers was a useful opportunity to cede uncultivated fields in return for much-needed cash during a protracted slump in the sugar market. Plots were kept as small as possible, to ensure that cultivators were not entirely independent of occasional plantation labour. Meanwhile, the colonial authorities treated the early gardeners with outright hostility. During the brutal anti-Indian vagrant hunts of the 1860s and 1870s, secluded communities of gardeners became a sanctuary for vulnerable Indo-Mauritians, particularly plantation deserters and the unemployed. In retaliation, the colonial police incessantly targeted areas of small-scale cultivation, described in government reports as “the resorts of vagrants, thieves, and other bad characters.” Government scientists deployed race science to blame high mortality rates on Indian-born cultivators, proposing limits to immigration and forced repatriation as a measure against disease. Local magistrates monitored the size of garden plots; where they determined that the plots were too small to sustain a living, the cultivators were declared vagrants and sent to the vagrant depot, resulting in a year’s re-indenture. Even beyond the colony’s political conditions, gardening was a hard life. The garden patches were exposed to flooding and drought, unlike the irrigated, dammed plantation lands. During the worst droughts, gardeners abandoned their plots and returned to the sugar estates in their thousands. Often the plots were on malarial land unwanted by estate managers. There was no assistance from the state in the face of disaster. When, in 1892, a cyclone tore through the island, leaving 50,000 homeless and devastating the exposed garden plots, the only government assistance consisted of four days of rice rations and state employment at one rupee a day. Meanwhile, the government advanced generous disaster relief loans to the sugar estates, enabling damaged mills to be not only swiftly repaired, but also enlarged and improved. Yet, throughout the nineteenth century, Indo- and Afro-Mauritians poured their labour and resources into garden plots and the compromised, partial freedom they offered, turning their enforced intimacy with the nonhuman landscape into a means of survival and nourishment. It was, to them, worth it. The sugar plantations, colonial reforestation projects, and the garden plots: each offered a different response to the devastation of Mauritius’ indigenous ecology. The plantations followed a logic of production at all costs; as the economic mainstay of the colony, the sugar planters argued that they alone stood against the total ruin of the island. Their response to the growing ecological vulnerability was to seek new ways to overcome environmental limits and convert more of the natural world into a mechanism for profit: importing high-yielding cane cultivars, building bigger sugar factories, and experimenting with new chemical fertilisers. It was, quite literally, the end of time: the replacement of seasonality and organic time with the flat production cycle of a single cash crop. Dr John Horne’s “tree plantations,” as he called the reforestation scheme, were ultimately no different. Sugar was the impetus for reforestation. Influenced by the powerful Mauritian sugar lobby, which directly funded many of their activities, colonial scientists conceived of the island as a closed system—a series of zones of experimentation and production in which the forests were maintained to feed the canefields with moisture. The leading proponents of tree planting were adamant, in the words of the island’s foremost meteorologist Charles Meldrum, that “every inch of land that can be spared should be devoted to agriculture [meaning sugarcane], which is the mainstay of the colony.” They saw no life without the plantation, and no world beyond sugar. Set against this essential nihilism, the gardens represented a choice about how to organise life in the ruins of ecological disturbance. The plants connected with a past that exceeded the plantation; their cultivation suggested a future beyond survival in the dead-end present. By 1889, akashbel —the cuscuta creeper—had won. Forest rangers reported its presence everywhere from the coastal lowlands to the heights of the interior. Dr John Horne abandoned his efforts to stamp out the parasite. Two years later, he left the island and returned to Britain. Today, the creeper can still be found in Mauritius, in almost the exact same locations mentioned in Dr Horne’s letter to the Colonial Office almost 140 years ago. As another climate catastrophe looms over the island, the yellow threads that appear sporadically in its trees and shrubs are a reminder of an earlier generation—a generation who, after the horrors of slavery and indentureship, and in the midst of ecological disaster, saw not the end of this world, but the beginning of the next one. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Essay Mauritius Climate Indentured Labour Climate Change Climate Catastrophe Nineteenth-Century Deforestation Sugar Cane Indian Ocean Volcanic Island Flora Fauna Ecology Colonization Indigenous Extinction Sugar Factory Export Colonial Economy Species Loss Sugar Mills Canefield Native Disappearance Capitalism Environmental Science Geoengineering Climate Adaptation Experiment Natural World Survival Labour Forced Disappearance Madagascar East Africa Racialised Labour Slavery Ancient Forest Volcanic Rock Dry Season Plantation Livestock Malaria Yellow Fever Cholera Endemic Militarism Violence Indo-Mauritian Indian Policing Workforce Attached to Soil Frontline Botanical Garden Cuscuta reflexa Climate Science Legislation History Community Medicinal Plants akashbel kodiyagundal Parasite Struggle Collective Food Cultivation Emancipation Afro-Mauritians Kew Gardens Archive Agriculture Reforestation anti-Indian vagrant hunts Sanctuary Freedom Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 3rd Feb 2025 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note: