green man reader with book road sign arkansas delta

Breaking with tradition, it remained nameless.īivas Bhattacharjee, Skeletons of Goddesses, 2012. To the north, our house faced a smaller pond. Everyone avoided it - except for crickets, frogs, and fireflies who made the eerie habitat their home. This pond, its surface coated with shiny blue-green algae, received the murdered victims of political violence. Gumro is a Bangla word meaning pain and anguish bottled up within. Gumropukur, to the west, evoked a different kind of silence. The killing and trapping took place at such a scale that, by the 1970s, the teals had vanished, and Poddopukur went quiet. The poorer trappers caught them alive, to be sold in urban markets. Wealthy hunters shot the teals - baali-haans in Bangla - for sport, and considered their meager flesh a delicacy. The pond used to attract migratory birds, especially the common teal, who rested here on journeys between West Asia and Australia.

It used to attract migratory birds.Įast of us, massive Poddopukur - “Lotus Pond” - was once carpeted with Indian lotus, water droplets adorning their hydrophobic leaves like scattered pearls. The pond was once carpeted with Indian lotus, water droplets adorning their leaves like scattered pearls. Mallickpukur, behind our house, was named for the caste of its owners, and served as habitat for a waddling of domesticated ducks, who noisily asserted their presence in the evenings. In the small town of Kalna, every pond - or pukur in Bangla - tells a story.Īmlapukur, a pond near my ancestral home, borrows its name from a row of amla trees - Indian gooseberry - that once adorned its banks. Known as shapla (শাপলা), the lily is the national flower of Bangladesh and a major edible wetland plant in the Bengal delta, an important part of Bengali and Bangladeshi cuisine. These lilies ( Nymphaea nouchali) bloom in a small pukur or pond next to an abandoned warehouse in rural West Bengal.

Green man reader with book road sign arkansas delta