Story of a sinking land

You couldn’t hope for a more perfect climate change victim than Ajay Patra, the head man of Ghoramara — the island in India’s Sunderban chain that is next in line to be submerged beneath the rising sea.

You couldn’t hope for a more perfect climate change victim than Ajay Patra, the head man of Ghoramara — the island in India’s Sunderban chain that is next in line to be submerged beneath the rising sea. The hungry tide had already claimed all but seven of the 100 hectares his family had once owned, Ajay told me. Each year, he directs his villagers to pile felled trees onto the mud, in the deluded hope of building the island back up. And each monsoon, the sea ripped the crude barriers down, tearing off another chunk of his birthright. He was like a modern-day Canute.

As we sipped tea outside Ajay’s large mud bungalow, I excitedly scribbled down my notes, imagining how all this would go down in the Ecologist magazine or perhaps the Independent.