Sunshine penetrated into his soul, stinging and stabbing, burning and bruising, Bhuwan squeezed his eyes shut, his nut-brown, weather-beaten face resigned to fate and fatigue as he raised his head to the remorseless brilliance of a cloudless sky. The rain gods have been elusive this year, he sighed. Wiping the beads of perspiration off his forehead with a frayed piece of cloth, he sat down amidst the stalks of ripened corn undulating like a wave of gold in the breeze, relaxing for a fleeting instant before going back to the toil and trouble of life lived at subsistence level.
"Bhuwan,' a strident voice cut across the field, "Bhuwan!" The voice rippled over the amber stalks, reverberating in the stillness that hovered over a parched season and days bleached white by the sun. Bhuwan stood up slowly, his frail form trembling at the unexpected intrusion. Even from a distance he could make out Vishnu running towards him, waving desperately to grab his attention. Clearly out of breath as he approached Bhuwan, Vishnu still managed to blurt out his momentous news. 'Don't you know what's happening? He gasped. 'At long last, change is coming to Phulpukur."
Bhuwan could not comprehend why Vishnu was so thrilled; in all the years that he had lived there, nothing exciting had ever happened in Phulpukur. Bhuwan's eyes clouded with incomprehension; Bhuwan was sure of one thing-nothing could or would change. Phulpukur was eternal and so was the despondency that eclipsed the lives of tenant farmers like Vishnu and him. So why all the euphoria? After all, no one in the outside world was bothered about Phulpukur.
Tucked away in the southernmost corner of West Bengal, in the marine delta zone of South 24 Parganas district, Phulpukur was a sleepy little village, whose existence, unfortunately, was inconsequential to the rest of the world. Once upon a time, however, the district had been the capital of Maharaja Pratapaditya of Jessore, who challenged the mighty Mughal Empire and established the independence of southern Bengal. Not much of that glorious past had survived, eroded by time and a general disregard of history, as successive generations of Phulpukur's inhabitants had been transformed into a breed of stoic humanity, struggling to meet the bare necessities of life.
In the not so recent past, Phulpukur and its surrounding district used to be an extension of mangrove forests and saltwater swamps that formed a part of the Ganges delta. The terrain-marshy, damp, and dank-was virtually uninhabited; only a handful of farmers like Bhuwan and Vishnu struggled to cultivate small patches of arable land, breaking their backs to yield a pitiable harvest of rice, sugarcane, timber, and betel nut.
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