During a reporting assignment to the remote islands of the Bay of Bengal after a cyclone had ripped through the region, I interviewed Joydeep Gupta, India Manager of international environmental news portal, Earth Journalism Network. He pointed out the irony that the people of this delta area, namely the Sunderbans, who were amongst the lowest contributors of carbon footprint globally, are amongst the worst affected by climate change-related superstorms. Indeed. It was telling. The thatched roof of Dilshad’s mud hut in Goshaba, the island in the Eastern Sunderbans, nestled on the banks of the blue-green Durgaduani River, had been blown off by strong winds blowing at over 100 kilometres per hour during the severe cyclonic storm Fani in 2019. She, or her family, it goes without saying, lets out little greenhouse gases into the environment. She has never seen an air conditioner, much less been cooled by its treacherous cold air, which actually heats up the environment. She has seen a refrigerator when she went to work in a house in the city but has never thought of owning one. An overhead fan is the way she keeps herself and her family cooled in the summer and uses a hand fan made of palm leaves during blackouts. She cooks her meals of rice, lentils and vegetables on an earthen stove. And yet nature has taken out its fury on her. The pots and pans of her tiny kitchen flew out in different directions during the severe storm and lay scattered all around the morning after.

After Fani, her home and island was once again devastated, a year later when the awful Amphan ripped through her island on 21 May 2021, right in the middle of the pandemic. The islanders were devastated and yearned for respite, but Yaas followed a year later, hitting Sunderbans in May 2022. And now, just over two years later, Dana has struck.

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Fortunately, however, the scale of devastation was much less than anticipated. “Other than extremely heavy rainfall, we did not face the destruction we feared,” said Dibos Mondal, a school teacher from Sagar Island on the western side of the Sundarbans, where the Ganges flows into the Bay of Bengal. The cyclone, which made landfall on Thursday, 24 October, crashing into coastal Odisha in the dead of night, is supposed to have spared people the devastation witnessed in previous years during earlier severe cyclonic storms. Whether an alert administration or the severity of the storm (though it still gusted at no less than 110 kilometres an hour when it hit the coast) was somehow less ferocious, it reportedly caused less damage or destruction than the cyclones that preceded it. The word “Dana” is understood to mean “generosity” in Arabic, and the name was given by Qatar, the country that was in the queue of nations in the rotational order of listing names of superstorms. Usually the names of cyclones are ferocious, like “Fani”, for instance, which, named by Bangladesh, means “a snake’s hood, ready to strike”.  Which is why in Bengal a few people erroneously thought that “Dana” was “a warning of a formation”.  A member of a neighbourhood club shouted, “Dana badhchhey, dheye aashey,” to the horror of some with terrible experiences of the impact of cyclones. It translates loosely to mean, in an ominous message, “It is forming and it is approaching”. In Bengali, “dana” also means “wings” or if pronounced “thana”, it can mean a “grain”. Dana is also a name, like Hurricane Katrina.

Unfortunately, Dana was not as generous with everyone. Even as people of Calcutta thanked the heavens for the virtual “no show” of the cyclone, which fell short of going on a rampage, two deaths were reported from the city. Trees fell. Electric wires snapped. A young man was electrocuted. I received a message from a gentleman, distraught and devastated by the news of the loss of the life of the 25-year-old Sourav Prasad Gupta of Bhowanipore on Friday evening while he was crossing a waterlogged street. “I hope he will find a mention in your column,” he said. Of course he will. We are shocked and saddened by his untimely passing due to a cyclone, not of his own doing. He was a victim. Of collective human indifference to the devastation and destruction of climate change.

“Cyclones are caused by excessive heat,” explained a scientist of the Indian Meteorological Department in layperson’s terms. When the sea or ocean water gets hot, centres of depressions are formed with the hot air rising and creating a hollow centre. This hollow centre is the “eye of the storm”.  The surrounding water rushes in to fill the void and keeps getting sucked into the vortex. High winds and heavy waves twist around the whirlpool like a giant spinning top travelling around the ocean, stopping only when it crashes into shore.

Ambarish Nag Biswas, president of West Bengal Radio Club (Ham Radio), which leads disaster management teams to cyclone-hit areas, recalls witnessing the “eye of the storm” of Cyclone Fani. He says, “It was too late for our disaster management team to move to safety. The super cyclone had landed near Digha, where we were deployed for rescue work. The sky had turned completely black, and visibility was zero. Rain pounded the ground, and winds, blowing at over 190 kilometres per hour, swished around us, sweeping everything into the vortex. Our boys just had to anchor their vehicle like a boat, bobbing up and down on the coastal street that had merged with the sea. It is a miracle that they lived through the ordeal, and the story they narrated on their return gives us goosebumps even today. They fell into the path of the ‘extremely severe cyclonic storm’ as it was called, and they saw the ‘eye’, the hollow centre of the cyclone, with their own eyes. According to one of the men who had witnessed the twister as it passed them, it was like a giant with a massive, spherical body that stretched up to the sky.

This is the second reported fatality linked to Cyclone Dana in West Bengal.

Odisha’s coastal districts and parts of West Bengal were battered by extremely heavy rain and gusty winds as severe Cyclone Dana made landfall on Friday.