Hareshwar Pegu rowed his boat to a makeshift clinic in his flooded village to pick up his sick brother before rushing to see if their waterlogged, mud-and-thatch home was still standing. The 40-year-old farmer was among millions of people hit hard by the annual monsoon rains and floods in India, Nepal and Bangladesh. Nearly 200 people have died since mid-June from drowning, disease, lightning strikes and mudslides.

The swirling, gray waters of the Brahmaputra River have overshot its banks and gobbled up land in this village, sweeping away 150 homes in the past three weeks. ?Thank God, our house is intact so far,? Pegu said after a seven-hour boat ride to get his brother treated by a paramedic in the eastern state of Assam. ?But we have to dismantle it and move to higher ground with whatever belongings we can carry with us. The river is closing in.?

All along the river?s path, the story is the same. Fed by heavy rains, the Brahmaputra River and its many tributaries have caused flooding, affecting more than 1.2 million people in 19 of Assam?s 24 districts and 2 million people in all of South Asia. The Brahmaputra is one of Asia?s largest rivers, originating as the Tsangpo in Tibet. It flows 460 miles across the Assam plains before entering Bangladesh and terminating in the Bay of Bengal. ?Look how large chunks of earth are just falling into the river, piece after large piece,? said Ananda Ram Dao.

Anger

The river washed away a health center, a weavers? training station and a school in the village. ?We have now put up the nurse and another paramedic at a house belonging to one of our village elders,? said Mohen Moran, one of the village?s young men. He is angry at state authorities for failing to provide sandbags and dikes to protect the homes of Bonkual?s 500 families.

When a representative to India?s Parliament visited yesterday, villagers demanded officials do more to protect their homes from the river and give them land to build new homes. ?The post office is under waist deep water, the school inspector has ordered the dismantling of the high school. Things are bad and totally uncertain,? Dao said. About 125 families with about 1,200 people, have since moved in to a mud shelter built a decade ago for their cattle.

In the nearby village of Goroimari, Dhiren Hazarika said he can no longer sleep at night for fear the river could swallow up his home. ?I cannot do anything other than pray to God to save us this day,? he said.

With the floods an annual phenomenon, thousands of people in Bihar state have learned not only to live with the floodwaters, but even to welcome them. ?Schools are closed as floodwater has drowned it so I am catching fish for my family?, said 14-year-old Ismail from inside a small boat which he and his mates use to venture out in, searching for food offered up by the river.

Others use their boats to ferry displaced villagers from one side of the ever-receding shore to the other. Tens of thousands of bamboo huts covered in plastic sheeting have sprung up along high points on the banks of the Baghmati river between Raksia and Shivnagar villages in Muzaffarpur district, 95 kilometers north of the state capital Patna. Traders have set up stalls while shopkeepers have turned their huts into thriving places of business all year round ? flood or no flood.

While many move during the dry season back to the fertile floodplains to cultivate crops, others have opted to remain permanently in makeshift huts scattered along a 150 kilometer stretch of the Baghmati. ?We used to live on the dry river bed but were displaced every year, so we permanently shifted on to the embankment,? said Abida Begum, whose husband and young son work as labourers in New Delhi.

She lives in the hutlands with many other women whose male relatives too have migrated to big cities. Money sent home by the breadwinners is used to pay for rice and pulses. Meagre pickings from the river supplement the diet. ?We and our kids enter the floodwater daily to catch snails and crabs as nothing else is available,? said Abida?s daughter-in-law Rukhsana. For many people the floods hold no terrors ? they have no property in any case, and are content to live in the huts on the embankments.

Wasbir HUSSAIN