On June 20, as the water level rose, Dipankar Dhar waded past a refrigerator, an LPG cylinder and scores of vintage books — all floating around his waist — after descending from the first floor of his three-storey house on College Road. A rescue boat was ready. Dhar and his family exited the house with a few clothes and basic necessities, climbed onto the boat, and sailed to the edge of Park Road. This was the nearest “island” in Silchar, a town where only about 10% of the land had been spared the sudden flooding close to midnight of June 19.
The Dhars were among the first to check into a hotel on Park Road. “We could have stayed on the first floor like many others marooned in our locality. But our kitchen on the ground floor went 6 ft under water and there was no way we could cook or organise our food,” said Dhar, a contractor based in Kolkata who had come home recently to settle a property dispute.
Shyamsundar Roy, a businessman, and Moushumi checked into the same hotel with their eight-month-old baby three days later. They had been banking on the water receding, as has often been the case with Silchar, within a day or two from the ground floor of their four-storey building on Bibekananda Road. “We shifted the ground floor tenants to the second floor and hoped for the best,” said Roy. “But it was becoming unbearable. After the inverter battery drained out, for three nights we had no power. We hired a boat to a point near the hotel, a 10-minute drive from our house on normal days. And here we are, on a forced staycation.”
