A collaboration with a Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre colleague, Sayanti Sengupta. My illustration on her photo is inspired by Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide. So it’s, in fact, a three-way collaboration. Here is an excerpt from the book that inspired this piece:

“The islands are the trailing threads of India’s fabric, the ragged fringe of her sari, the ãchol that follows her, half wetted by the sea. They number in the thousands, these islands. Some are immense and some no larger than sandbars; some have lasted through recorded history while others were washed into being just a year or two ago. These islands are the rivers’ restitution, the offerings through which they return to the earth what they have taken from it, but in such a form as to assert their permanent dominion over their gift. The rivers’ channels are spread across the land like a fine-mesh net, creating a terrain where the boundaries between land and water are always mutating, always unpredictable. Some of these channels are mighty waterways, so wide across that one shore is invisible from the other; others are no more than two or three miles long and only a thousand feet across. Yet each of these channels is a river in its own right, each possessed of its own strangely evocative name. When these channels meet, it is often in clusters of four, five or even six: at these confluences, the water stretches to the far edges of the landscape and the forest dwindles into a distant rumor of land, echoing back from the horizon. In the language of the place, such a confluence is spoken of as a mohona — an oddly seductive word, wrapped in many layers of beguilement.”

Printed on professional quality archival smooth matte paper, 10 mil thick, acid-free for longer print life. Printed by my collaborator Steve, a small business owner in Savannah, Georgia, USA.

Size: 4 inches wide x 4.5 inches tall.