What the waters of Upper Assam are asking of us

There is an order to how Assam floods, and everyone raised near the Brahmaputra knows it in their body. The great river swells first, slowly, over days. There is a rhythm to it — even a terrible kind of courtesy.

This July, the water did not observe the courtesy.

Extraordinary rain fell over the hills of Mon in Nagaland — 137 millimetres in nine hours. It poured down into the south-bank tributaries, the Dikhow, the Disang, the Jhanji, and they rose in hours rather than days. They arrived in the plains before the Brahmaputra had reached its own peak, and so the Brahmaputra, still filling, would not take them. The water had nowhere to go but sideways, into the towns.

Sivasagar. Charaideo. Jorhat. Nazira. Amguri. These are not names from the flood map. These are the places that do not flood, the high ground, the old Ahom heartland. They have now seen their worst inundation in sixty years. Nine hundred villages under water. Ninety-eight dead, and the counting unfinished.

I keep returning to that inversion — the tributary arriving before the river. It feels less like a hydrological accident than a sentence spoken in a language I am only beginning to understand. The consequence arrived before we were ready for the cause.

The arithmetic of an unequal harm

Rain has been falling on those hills for as long as there have been hills. What has changed is what the hills can hold.

For two decades the upper catchments have been cut, quarried and mined. Hillsides levelled for stone, forest cleared for coal, slopes opened for aggregate. Each operation is, on its own accounting sheet, profitable. Each has an owner, a margin, a buyer. And each converts a hillside that absorbed water into a surface that sheds it, and fills the riverbed downstream with silt until the channel can no longer carry what it once carried.

So the water that killed people in Sivasagar was manufactured, in part, in a quarry in Mon, Nagaland.

And the men who made the money in Mon are not the families who lost their homes in Nazira. That is the moral centre of this disaster, and of the larger one it sits inside. The one who profits and the one who drowns are never the same person. They are rarely in the same district. Increasingly they are not in the same country.

Widen the lens and the pattern repeats at every scale. Assam’s per-capita emissions are a fraction of India’s, which are a fraction of Britain’s. The Eastern Himalaya is warming faster than the global average. The people of Charaideo contributed almost nothing to the physics now intensifying their monsoon, and they will pay for it first, and with everything they have.

In supply chains we have a name for this. We call it an externality — a cost that is real, that someone certainly pays, but that never appears on the invoice of the person who caused it. We built a global economy on the quiet assumption that the invoice would never arrive.

It arrived in Sivasagar in July.

The physics, stated honestly

No one can say that climate change caused this flood. That is not how the science works, and pretending otherwise hands ammunition to those who would rather nothing were said at all. This flood had a local, largely governance-shaped cause: extreme rain over a degraded catchment on a bad hydrological schedule.

But this can be said. We have moved atmospheric carbon dioxide from 280 parts per million to well past 420. These molecules are transparent to incoming sunlight and opaque to the heat the Earth tries to send back out. That is the whole mechanism — nineteenth-century physics, never seriously in doubt. The Earth has warmed some 1.3 to 1.5 degrees; 2024 was the first calendar year to breach 1.5. That number was never a cliff edge. It was a line drawn by people who understood that beyond it, certain processes stop being things we do to the planet and start being things the planet does to itself.

And there is one relation that matters most for Assam. For every degree of warming, the atmosphere holds roughly seven per cent more water vapour. This does not make it rain more often. It makes it rain harder when it rains — shifting precipitation out of the steady soak a hillside can absorb, into the violent burst it can only shed.

A hundred and thirty-seven millimetres in nine hours is precisely the shape of rain a warmer atmosphere makes more of.

So: climate change did not cause this flood. It is loading the dice, and we will roll them every monsoon for the rest of my son’s life and his children’s, because the carbon already aloft will still be shaping the climate a thousand years from now. That is what irreversible means. Not that the world ends. That there is no going back to the world we were given.

Lobha ( Greed) — the flood before the flood

Our tradition has a precise name for the upstream event.

The ariṣaḍvarga, (अरिषड्वर्ग) – the six enemies, are :  craving, anger, greed, delusion, arrogance and envy. What the tradition insists upon — and what modern environmentalism keeps forgetting — is that these are inner phenomena with outer consequences. The hillside is not cut because of an economic model. The model exists because of lobha, and it is only ever as strong as the appetite that funds it.

The flood in Sivasagar had a flood upstream of it, and that flood was in the human heart. This is not metaphor. It is a causal chain, and every link is visible.

The Īśa Upaniṣad says in one verse what I have spent this whole essay circling:

īśāvāsyam idaṃ sarvaṃ… tena tyaktena bhuñjīthā, mā gṛdhaḥ kasya svid dhanam : ईशा वास्यम् इदं सर्वं यत्किञ्च जगत्यां जगत्।
तेन त्यक्तेन भुञ्जीथा मा गृधः कस्य स्विद्धनम्॥

All this is pervaded by the Divine. Enjoy it, therefore, through relinquishment. Do not covet — for whose is wealth?

Notice: it does not say do not enjoy. Bhuñjīthā — enjoy — but tena tyaktena, by way of letting go. Take, but not as an owner. The world is on loan, not on title. Our civilisation read the first half of that sentence and tore out the second.

The Gītā then makes the same thought hydrological: beings arise from food, food from rain, rain from yajña (3.14). Yajña is badly translated as sacrifice, which in English became a word about loss. It is not about loss. It is reciprocity — that whatever you draw from a system must be answered by something returned. Krishna’s next verse is blunt: one who takes from this circulation and gives nothing back is a thief.

We took the carbon and returned nothing. We took the hillside and returned nothing. We broke the yajña, and the rain answered exactly as the verse said it would.

Let me be careful here. There is a crude version of karma abroad that would say Sivasagar somehow earned this. That is not karma; it is cruelty wearing a Sanskrit word. Karma is causality, not retribution — and our tradition distinguishes the individual’s from the collective’s. The tragedy of collective karma is precisely that it does not ripen where it was sown. A civilisation acts; a village pays. That is not justice. It is simply the shape of the thing, and knowing the shape is where action begins.

What, then, does one person do

I have no ending that resolves this, and I distrust essays that do. But I have three things.

Give now. Philosophy is not what a family in a relief camp in Amguri needs this week. They need rice, tarpaulin, clean water, cash. Give money first and think about cosmology afterwards; reversing that order is a species of spiritual vanity, and I include myself in the warning.

Aparigraha. Non-hoarding — the personal-scale form of mā gṛdhaḥ. Not asceticism, just the unglamorous daily interrogation of appetite: do I need this, or have I merely been taught to want it? It changes nothing in the atmosphere. It changes everything in the person — and people are what atmospheres are made of.

Dharma in the work. Whatever your trade, ask what the world needs from precisely what you already know how to do. Expertise built inside a misaligned system is not disqualified from changing it. It may be the only real qualification there is.

The Dikhow has begun to fall. The silt lies a foot deep in houses where children were doing their homework three weeks ago. Somewhere in the hills above, a quarry is reopening.

Mā gṛdhaḥ kasya svid dhanam.

Do not covet. Whose, after all, is the wealth?