Kumar Sen is a writer from Kolkata, India. His work has appeared in Reading into Culture, Unbroken Journal, New World Writing Quarterly, Flare Magazine, Behemoth Magazine, and SFWP Journal, among others. Trained as a mathematician, he writes in Bengali and English, often exploring sensory detail and the subtly absurd. He is also a musician, composer, and bibliophile.
The first thing we threw away was the calendar.
It had swollen into itself, ink loosening, dates bleeding until July slipped into August without permission. The squares refused to hold. Time was no longer something we could point to. It sagged, softened, spread.
Water teaches you this: chronology is a luxury of the dry.
When the river rose, it did not arrive as disaster. It came as rumor—through open windows, through half-read messages, through the small theater of denial. Someone said the dam gates had opened. Someone said the rain upstream had not stopped. Someone said, it won’t reach here.
We believed that last one because belief is easier than lifting anything heavy.
By evening, the water touched the first step. By night, it was inside, testing the legs of the table, the edge of the sofa, the threshold as if it were a question.
We watched it as if it might reconsider.
It didn’t.
There are things you learn to lift and things you learn to leave.
We lifted the photograph where my mother is twenty-two and not yet tired of smiling, her hair unpinned, her face turned slightly away from the camera as if the future were calling her from just outside the frame.
My father carried the television, its cords dragging behind him like something alive. I took the books from the lower shelves—novels I had pretended to read, textbooks I had already forgotten—stacking them too high, letting them lean into each other for balance.
We left the rug. Too heavy. The wooden stool with one uneven leg. A box of receipts curled at the edges, proof of a life itemized into transactions.
The water kept rising without asking what any of it meant.
At some point—what day, we couldn’t say—we stopped counting in dates and started counting in inches.
Ankle. Shin. Knee.
There was a moment—I remember this clearly, or I think I do—when I stood still and let the water reach me, just to know. To measure it against my own body, as if that would make itfinite.
As if anything about it was.
Later, when the water left its faint line on the walls and everything smelled like something that had once been alive, people came to help clean.
They wore gloves. They spoke in careful, efficient language. Salvageable. Contaminated. Total loss.
No one said: this is where you learned to read.
No one said: this corner held your first argument about leaving.
After the flood, language loses its adjectives. It forgets how to carry what cannot be sorted.
I nodded when they spoke. I let them decide what could stay.
It seemed easier than insisting that everything already had.
The body remembers in ways the mind edits out.
For weeks, I felt it—the water—though there was none. Not cold exactly, not even wet, but a pressure, a persistence, something like a hand that does not unclasp—
No, not a hand. Something larger. Something that does not know you enough to hold you gently.
I would wake in the night and touch the floor.
Dry. Always dry. I didn’t believe it.
There is a quiet shame that follows loss.
It asks useless questions: why didn’t you move sooner, why didn’t you know, why did you think your house—your particular arrangement of walls and objects and habits—would be exempt.
I replayed it differently each time. In one version, we leave early. In another, we lift more. In another, I am decisive, efficient, someone who understands rivers.
But the river does not recognize revisions. It does not pause for better endings.
It arrives. It stays. It leaves when it wants.
Months later, we replaced the calendar.
A new one, stiff and certain, each date contained within its obedient square. We hung it on a nail that had rusted but not given way.
I stood there with a pen, unsure what deserved to be written down.
Birthdays felt like guesses. Appointments felt like promises I wasn’t authorized to make. The future—once divisible, manageable—had lost its edges.
I wrote only this, scattered across days I could not fully trust:
water recedes
Not because it had, not entirely, but because I needed to believe in direction.
In retreat. In the idea that something, once arrived, could also choose to leave.
Even now, I don’t measure time the way I used to.
There is before. There is after. And there is that long, indistinct middle where everything loosened—walls, objects, language, the idea that anything stays where you put it.
People ask if we’ve recovered.
I think of the photograph, now warped slightly at the edges, my mother still smiling into a
future that did not warn her. I think of the line on the wall that no amount of scrubbing has erased. I think of how, when it rains, I still notice the floor first.
I say yes. Because recovery is a word that ends conversations.
But what I mean is this: we have learned to live with the watermark. We have learned that some
things do not return, only settle into shapes that resemble what they were.
The calendar fills again. Dates harden into plans. The river stays inside its banks as if it has always understood restraint.
Still, when it rains, I listen. Not for thunder. Not for wind.
For something quieter, beneath it—the sound of movement without permission, the sound of
something arriving that will not ask what matters—
And I write it down, just in case.
As if naming it could keep it from happening again. As if the squares will hold.
Volume 16.2, summer 26
kumar sen
