Whispers of Summer

Morigaon used to hum in the summer—soft, slow, and sun-drenched.

The mighty Brahmaputra flowed along its northern edge, steady and watchful. At the same time, the Killing, Kollong, and Kapili rivers journeyed down from the south, weaving through the land before surrendering themselves to the Brahmaputra’s embrace.

Mayong, also known as the Land of Black Magic, is a mysterious village in Assam’s Morigaon district, perched along the banks of the Brahmaputra, just a few kilometres from Pobitora Wildlife Sanctuary.

Ancient temples crumble across the flatlands, their stone spires half-swallowed by soil, as if the earth itself were trying to forget. In Mayong, futures are read in broken glass, and seashells hum secrets into calloused palms. Nothing here is ever quite what it seems. The bez—some say there are 120—still walk its dusty paths: traditional healers and witch doctors who claim to cure illness, lift curses, and banish spirits that refuse to leave. At the village’s edge, a dim museum shelters relics and brittle manuscripts beside a stone slab carved with symbols no one has ever translated. Together, they guard Mayong’s whispered legacy of magic—half remembered, half imagined, but never gone.

The village came alive under the weight of heat—children racing along the dusty paths, old radios playing half-lost songs, bamboo leaves clicking like wind chimes in a language only the monsoon could understand. Mangoes ripened with lazy patience, and even the cows slept longer in the shade. The river nearby—the Brahmaputra—stretched out in gleaming silence, watching it all.

But in the summer of 2016, it changed.

That summer whispered differently, not of nostalgia or joy, but of warnings people didn’t know how to hear.

Amrita had returned from Delhi after her first year in college. The city had been exhausting, and she longed for the slow rhythm of home—the clinking of steel tumblers, the laughter of her cousin Tito, the comforting predictability of power cuts during dinner.

Titu was twelve. Bright, loud, always barefoot. He followed her everywhere that summer, asking questions she didn’t always have answers to.

“Baideu,” he asked one afternoon while drawing diagrams in his torn notebook, “if rivers give us life, why do they take it away too?”

She had chuckled, thinking it was just another one of his random thoughts. “You’ve been reading too many disaster comics,” she’d teased.

The rains came early. No wind, no warning. Just a grey ceiling above and water below, rising each hour with a quiet, unstoppable resolve. By the third day, the Brahmaputra had eaten half the village’s fields. Still, no one expected the embankment to break.

On the fifth night, it did.

Amrita woke to her father shouting. Water burst through the floorboards, brown and frigid. In seconds, it was waist-deep. Furniture spun. Walls groaned. Her mother screamed a name—Amrita wasn’t sure whose.

She grabbed Titu’s hand and climbed. Up to the roof, stepping over collapsing beams. She didn’t stop. She couldn’t.

By morning, the village was a lake of debris and silence. They huddled on the tin roof, drenched and shivering. Her parents hadn’t made it.

She lied to Titu. Said they’d swim to safety. Said it would stop raining soon.

When the rescue boat came, it was nearly full. One man shouted, “Two more!”

A voice rose from below—hoarse, certain. Her father’s. “Take them!”

Amrita pushed Titu first. She reached for the side, but the roof cracked beneath her. She slipped, hit something sharp, and vanished.

When she surfaced, the boat was drifting away. Titu screamed her name. His arms reached for her like branches in a current.

Then he was gone.

They found her three days later, wrapped around a log like a forgotten prayer. She was bruised, burned, and silent. Her family was never recovered.

She never returned to college.

Now, every June, she returns to Mayong.

Parts of it have been rebuilt—new houses, fresh paint. But some ghosts remain: a broken well, half a school wall, the banyan tree blackened by lightning.

She teaches under that tree now. Not officially. Children gather because she listens. They remind her of things she tries to forget—and things she refuses to.

Each summer, she brings paper. Folds boats. Writes names that the government never recorded. Names the river tried to erase.

One boat is always for Titu.

She sets them afloat at the edge of the river, barefoot in the silt. Watches them drift toward the current.

Listens.

And sometimes, in the hush between breeze and ripple, she still hears him.

“Baideu,” he whispers, “if water gives us life, why did it take ours?”

She has never found the answer.

But she comes back anyway.

Because sometimes, the only thing heavier than grief… is forgetting.