Chandraghanta, the Fearsome One

She is beautiful, charming and graceful. But when

provoked she unleashes her power and destroys all

in her path.

© 2018

“Shouldn’t you be in school now?”, the stranger asked, smiling at me. How do I tell him that my school building is submerged except during extreme low tide? It wasn’t always so. When I was young, the waves would lash against the building, but the water rarely got into the building. The sea came closer and closer every year, and after the storms last year, the water never really left the building.
The teacher sometimes conducts lessons in his house, but most of the time, he is away looking for a job on another island. Soon he will leave. Soon they will all leave. We will all leave. We will only return in tourist season. But even that is no longer what it was. Fewer people are coming now than they did earlier.
This stranger. He is a tourist. But he doesn’t look like a typical tourist. He is actually looking at things, not just taking photographs. I wonder why he is here.
“Do you know I spent nearly six months on your island 27 years back?”, he said. “I am a marine biologist. I must have dived in these reefs over a hundred times.”
“What were they like?” I asked. “My grandmother tells me the coral was red and yellow and blue. But how is that possible? I have dived so many times. Coral is white.”
“Oh no. The coral on your island was never white. It was every colour you can imagine, and some colours you cannot imagine. I have some photographs I took when I was here last. I can show them to you sometime.”

The next day, I waited anxiously for the stranger to appear. And then the next day. Just when I thought he had forgotten his promise to show me photographs of my island, he appeared. He showed me photographs of the coral reef. I could barely recognise my beloved reef. Gone were the moody white coral. In their place there were bright colours- red, yellow, blue, purple. Every shade of blue. Colours as bright as the print on the sarongs I wear. Colours brighter than the flowers that dot my island.
“I can’t believe these are my corals”, I said. “How did they lose these beautiful colours? Did someone put a curse on them and take the colours away?”
“You could say it is a curse”, the stranger sighed. “sometimes, I do think mankind is a curse on itself.” He explained to me about global warming. About how people in far of countries made machines that released smoke into the air. The told me about global warming, and about how the colours were getting bleached out of the coral. He explained by ice caps were melting, and the sea level was rising.
“So that is why our school is now underwater?”, I asked.
He told me about how shorelines were shifting, and how land was getting eaten away.
“Will my island disappear?”, I asked in fear. My family has lived here for generations. What would happen to us if the island was no more.
“We cannot tell. Yours is a coral island, so the reefs might grow and recover some of the land that is lost. But we really cannot tell. Already, your island is much smaller than it was when I was here last.”
I nodded. I had heard stories about how the hungry sea often took away parts of the island.
“But if they know the islands are disappearing, why do they continue to make smoke?”, I asked.
He told me about how people don’t care about things they can’t see themselves. What happens in a distant island doesn’t matter to them, as long as you don’t ask them to give up their comforts. He told me how large companies didn’t want to stop releasing smoke, because they made more money if more smoke was released.
“So I might drown, and my entire family, and my entire island, and they will not care?”
“No, they will write about it for two days, and some people will protest for a week. But then they will all forget about it. Nobody really cares.”
We spoke about this every day, as long as the stranger was on my island. I couldn’t believe that my island was dying and nobody even cared. Sometimes my grandmother joined us. She remembered the island as it had been when she was a child. She remembered how the house we now lived in was once far inland, not on the coast. She remembered the big fish that were sometimes spotted near the island, but which have now disappeared. She and the stranger had much to talk about.
When it was time for the stranger to leave, I made a request.
“Take me with you. Take me with you so I can talk about my island and what they are doing to it. Take me with you. So I ask them to stop. Take me with you.”
He was reluctant, but my grandmother sided with me. “I am old”, she said. “I do not have many years to live. But she deserves a long life. Let her fight for it.”
The stranger finally agreed. He made my grandmother and me speak about our island and taped our appeal. He promised to return in a few months after lining up a few ‘speaking engagements’ for me.

This was one year back. I have visited many countries since. Spoken to many people. Some people listen to me. Most do not. They call me all sorts of names. But I will not back down. I cannot.
I am just 16. I do not want to die. I do not want my island to drown. I will keep talking about carbon emissions and global warming till they are forced to listen to me.

_____
I am Chandraghanta, the Fearsome One. The third manifestation of Nav Durga. I am every young woman fighting for the right to live.