The River Stays the Same

Tipurr was three days old. This was the ninety-sixth time he turned three days old. An element from his culture, the Matwans. An oddity amongst the known world, its origin can be found in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. In a small corner inches West of India and inches East of Bangladesh. Officially recognized as an unrecognized people, the Chittatong natives found themselves with no governance. Leading to an on and off perpetual war for independence from their Bengal overloads. This conflict had spread its claws through Tipurr’s life. Forty years engaged in this conflict. And Tipurr himself came from an especially remote region of this especially remote place. Beyond floodplains littered with murky-brown bogs and knolls which flirted with the skies but never touched them. To explore this region one must survive the ups and downs and descend a sun refracting haze that turned air into glittering diamonds. There lies the Matwan village. Where Tipurr was born. Where his father, grandfather, great grandfather, and so on were born going back to the sixteenth century. An indigenous tribe fleeing from a genocidal Malay force. Dozens survived, and a new ethnicity was born.

The Matwans denied classification. A truly unique people. Comparative studies attempted to classify them under an archetypical roof. Island cultures, flood cultures, mountain cultures. The Matwans were all of these. Special.

Each year the torrential monsoons from its neighboring India would march upon the village, and with it an entire season where the ground beneath the Matwans drowned and only the apex of their Markahni hill would breach the surface. Under normal circumstances, a flood culture would follow certain pathways; to use the limited resources and knowledge of the times to adapt to tragedy. They’d analyze the stars and sun and predict the rising waters to cultivate crops in perfect windows. The culture should interpret these floods as a kind of insemination. A Great Earthen Goddess making love to a Powerful Atmospheric God. The Matwan blazing red soils pregnant with fertile salts. The Matwans refused this. The native Balsa wood proved to be the most buoyant on the planet, with its upwards force supporting their entire lifestyle. Sanded woods crafted into crescent boats which held their entire lives. An early form of house-boat. As the tides rose, so did the Matwans. Equipped with obsidian laced spears they’d flow with the river and with time itself, harvesting fish that came from what they called the “unknowable below”. Each year as these waters descended the homes of the Matwans altered as well. Adrift to miles away from their last one. They observed a previously unobserved pastoralism. The rest of the year, when the waters drained, the ground germinated with two foot tall grass, and they referred to it as the second second river. This intense cycle of up and down, blue and green, and the ephemeralness of home led to a disregarding of time. Each year renewed the soil as well as its peoples.

Tipurr was only three days old. This is the ninety-sixth time he’s turned three days old.

As the Matwans were discovered by the outside world, Tipurr took a leading role in the village. This coincided with an alteration of his mental state. He lived through British ownership, and the fishing spears which were sacred turned into the fingers of a war machine. They called their invaders the Pale-men and their decapitated heads lined pikes pointed to the heavens. And their resistance, even to the Pale-men who saw them as lesser beings, proved extraordinary. Only when the germs of the colonists found new prey, was their valiant effort thwarted. Tipurr lived through plague, and saw many indigenous, including his wife, Tijann, rot away. This occurred when he was six months old for the thirty-fourth time. A silent curse that radicalized the survivors. War spears turned to lightning-staffs and the world laughed at their nomenclature and the Matwans in embarrassment added the first word adopted from another culture. Gun. Their lexicon continued to change, with the advances of technology and the ideas of outsiders creeping into his home. The way a parasite creeps in through scars and advances through veins until your brain is captured, Tipurr felt this change. Words like decade, causality, sequence. All previously foreign to the Matwan world. He grappled between the truth he’d always known and a cold logic that stitched the fabrics of thought he could not piece together. When his face showed wrinkles and he looked like a dried apricot a cognitive dissonance took him.

In the coming years, the Matwans decreased to a fifth of their previous thousand strong. Most who died were women and children. Tipurr felt shame at his inability to adopt the survivors. His old tradition dictated surviving widows would practice grief over their husbands for only until the next flood, as they’d be reborn and remarry when their husbands were washed away. Tipurr never married again. Some say it was his reading of the Pale literature. He was caught with An Age of Innocence in his study. And notions of permanence and that of a sad death took root. One which led to heaven or hell instead of rebirth in the sky. As the shame of his inability to do his duty shook him, he looked for answers in more literature, book after book the ideas of the Matwans shrunk. Empires of millions existed in lands he failed to pronounce. Aqueducts harnessed the water his people considered the origin of life. He learned of Gods beyond his understanding tied not to the natural but to metaphysical and ethical concerns. As the floods came he thought of numbers and letters. Atoms. Bonds. H2O.

Tipurr for the good of his people kept up appearances. Through shaken belief he still conducted traditional burials. He’d mummify the deceased. Jerkifying them until the rains swept them away. Adrift. But he remembered the process of decomposition and lamented their bodies would be absorbed by soil and eaten by fish and cows. The dead do not evaporate. The dead do not return to the sky.

After twenty years of occupation and fighting, they became Pakistani. Tipurr struggled to grasp how a lifelong Matwan could be turned into a Pakistani with the signing of a paper. Years later he was turned to an Indian then a Pakistani again and finally into a Bengal. He rejected all these terms. Through the confusion, maybe even because of it, he knew he was Matwan and nothing more.

Mysterious men came into the village. The Bengali who came with notebooks and papers and questions. The totality of the Matwan culture recorded into written symbols they could not understand. A “protected tribe”. Another paper offered to them revealed plans extending beyond Tipurr’s expected life. Plans that began with gray sludge that hardened into unnatural boxes with oddly transparent squares. They called them buildings but Tipurr saw prisons. A new language was taught inside and the children of those who’d passed found new parentage not in Tipurr but in information. Their new history was a struggle against people they’d never met for purposes they never considered.

The youth preferred the label of Bengal over Matwan and children would grow up and celebrate with a sweet sponge called cake. You turned one day old once, and you’d never do so again.

The erosion of this culture inspired an intense fervor in Tipurr. And wherever concrete was poured and steel erected he stood opposite. He exhibited artifacts from previous generations and a new generation of children encircled him to feel the wood which floated on air and the obsidian tips of fishing spears smoother than even glass. Tipurr’s learned individuality shed and a culture spoke through him. He rectified new and old in codifications of what made Matwans special and what was culturally pervasive.

As the war for the Hill Tracts began Tipurr signed a declaration of independence. Child soldiers and old veterans rallied around him. He doubted the ability of his followers to understand the consequences of such a statement. Liberty or extinction. This was the way. Many of his soldiers considered themselves seven years or nineteen or thirty years old.

The people of the Hill Tracts united and dozens of ethnicities as special as the Matwans rejected their fate to align themselves with Tipurr. A quest for survival confirmed by those who were different from him yes, but united in a commonality that alluded outsiders. The various leaders all spoke separate languages but with enough connective tissue to navigate political turmoils. A similar conjugation revolved around the floods and the renewal the floods brought. No male or female. No singular or plural. Only high and low. Purr and Jann. Tipurr and Luanjann and Granpurr and Plijann. All one year old.

A new storm was brought with them, a high tide they’d float upon to self-determinate and declare a one Hill Peoples. Little else mattered. Perseverance. Preservation. Purr-Jann. A type of battlecry. Inscribed upon crimson flags (blood of the enemy) with black rainclouds (may they be washed away).

Across the next ten risings and fallings of the plains came traps adorned with spikes across the floors of forests. Dams erected by the Bengal, considered a great concrete blasphemy were destroyed, and the natural order returned.

Mass graves of mummified corpses sank into the unknowable below and the brown swamp waters were stained red. The stench of raw onions mixed with rotten eggplants emanated from soil as the corpses were absorbed into the Earth. An accidental militaristic success, as invaders vomited and alerted warriors hidden in trees. Children died but those who lived throughout the war shed their age. All the youngest survived. They were all one. Rise and fall. High and low.

All this death weighed upon Tipurr. He felt his house-boat sinking. Each decision like an iron weight strapped to his chest. After twenty years of war the Bengali strategy changed. Where the Matwan sought tradition their colonizers advanced to an inhuman future. Traps could not harm iron birds of the sky. A thundering machine called a drone dropped canisters that plummeted into soil and exhumed a rot even greater than the one brought upon by death. Yellow-green cat’s eye smoke swirled and collected into biting mist. To inhale the mist was an assured death and to even feel it rendered one paralyzed. Tipurr once again felt confused. Drones and mustard gas. How to beat an enemy that does not bleed?

As the bodies piled above the horizon their previous tradition of mummification became impossible to upkeep. Children and wives and cats and dogs and tigers and elephants. All burnt to keep plague away.

Tipurr found himself increasingly old. Eleven months. Through living in his village for so long he learned how to notice changes in humidity and how the direction and strength of the wind would correlate to the monsoons. He knew when a storm would come, and this one unavoidable. Without permission of the other Purr-Jann leaders, he met with the Bengali. And a deal was struck.

The ethnicities of the Chittagong Hill Tracts were to be guaranteed survival at the cost of independence. The Bengalese announced them as an independent people with a right to live but with no right to sovereignty.

Houses of wood burnt and replaced once more by gray sludge. The mouths of oral tradition sown shut and the stories of a culture unbecoming of Matwans enforced. Chronology took root. Past. Present. Future. Tipurr lived through all of this, and thought of those who died for his cause. The ones he led to battle. The small children. He wondered if it was all fate. If the social aspect of life paralleled the biological and the course of evolution decided upon survival of the fittest and he and the Matwans were not fit to survive. He grew into a Matwan golem. A creature of stone. Unable to communicate with the outside world, his cries would echo inside the walls of his chambers. Tipurr was alone. Forgotten.

When the next year came he could no longer determine his age. Was he ninety-six or three days old? The only thing he remembered was the great calamities he caused. This grief accelerated the death of his mind, outpacing the death of his body. A stress induced dementia.

“Doctor,” Tipurr said. “Doctor, do you hear me?”

“Tipurr.” The doctors voice sounded far away. “Tipurr, are you awake?”

“I can barely hear you. I can’t see you at all.”

“Tipurr,” The doctor took a solemn tone. “I’m new to this hospital. You don’t recognize me. But for the last two months I’ve been in charge of your care. ”

“Hospital?”

“A place of healing. ” The doctor sounded further away. “Do you feel my hand?”

“No.”

“I’m holding your arms.” The doctor touched across his patients body, checking for life. “Tipurr, this is Bengal Eastern Province Hospital, I don’t want to shock you, but considering your life, I doubt there’s much that can. You are blind. You’ve been blind for, well I don’t know how long. I wish to be earnest. I respect you, and what you’ve done in your life, and to uphold that earnestness, I must say, you don’t have long left. You’re incontinent, disabled below the waste…..”

The doctors words grew so quiet it sounded like the murmur of bass. Tipurr heard a great droning. And then a drop of water hitting a window.

“Doctor.” Tipurr’s voice shook. “Did you hear that?”

The doctor stood silent. Tipurr heard more drops.

“The rain. I hear it. The rains outside. And… The winds. It’s beautiful. And… I know what day it is. It’s the third day of the flood season. Yes. Do you hear it?”

Tipurr heard the sprinkle evolve into a downpour.

“Doctor. Take me outside. I can feel it. My life’s over, isn’t it, or so soon to be that I’m a ghost inside skin. Give me this. So I can be at peace.”

And through one sided arguments the doctor relented. And Tipurr was placed into a wheelchair. When outside the old veteran guided the doctor across trails. He pointed out each curve. At the end of their route, through thirty minutes of jungle, Tipurr asked to be left alone. Through another one-sided argument, the doctor agreed.

The downpour grew torrential, and the stone that encased Tipurr eroded away. Chunk after chunk until the droplets penetrated his skin and the rising swamp water of below tickled his toes. He couldn’t tell if he was crying. And the flood rose and Tipurr opened his eyes. He saw a horizon perfectly split. Light blue skies with clouds in the shape of ancestors contrasted by an ocean underneath. Between the two a white ladder. As he regained his vision a storm-wave knocked Tipurr from his wheelchair. He crashed and flailed his arms to try and reach the ladder but he sank. Further and further below he went into darkness. Into an unknowable below. At the bottom a hundred dead bodies. Mummified corpses with brown cured leather faces and black hole mouths. Fear and adrenaline shook him and the legs that left him returned. Kicking and screaming he breached the surface and took one stroke after the other. Left and right. Left and right. Before the water cleared from his eyes and he was at the ladder. When he grabbed the first rung the storm ceased, and the waters calmed. The glowing white metal was cool to the touch. Tipurr climbed. Up he went and as he approached the top he looked below and saw an ocean planet eclipsed by cloud. He took one last step.

Tipurr, the last Matwan, died on March second of 2025. With his death his people went with him. He was ninety-six years old. After an extended search, his body was never found. The recorded cause of death was drowning. To all those of the Hill Tracts, those who had forgotten their ways, his death was a reminder, a candle in darkness. They knew in their hearts water did not fill his lungs. The Earth and the unknowable below could not take him. When Tipurr died, he was the sky.