By Aysha Imtiaz
22 February 2021
In the highland hinterlands of subtropical Sylhet, a city in north-eastern Bangladesh known for its lush tea gardens, getting to school requires more than just waking up on time.
"I remember we used to cross a bridge and it got washed away every other year," said Dr Monjour Mourshed, professor of sustainable engineering at Cardiff University who grew up in Bangladesh. "We [the village children] were used to it; we'd just find a different path."
But what's more fascinating than the constantly altering school route is the calmness with which he acknowledged it. Mourshed's experience is the norm, not the exception, as Sylhet's geomorphology is subject to frequent change. "A mound of land in the floodplain of the Surma River... Sylhet inhabits nature-on-the-move," writes Dr David Ludden, professor of history at New York University and former president of the Association for Asian Studies, in a 2003 paper that underscores the temporal nature of the landscape. "Tectonic shifts continue to lift the highlands and depress the deepest-flooding 'haor' basins [large, shallow, saucer-shaped depressions]... Thumping earthquakes periodically destabilise water's established pathways."