Anima Gogoi put the blanket in her bundle and not the land title, and she decided it on the embankment of the Dikhow toward four in the afternoon on the twenty-third of July, while the water of the Brahmaputra, which at Sivasagar always comes in sideways because the great swollen river pushes its own tributaries back and makes them run upstream, had already taken the yard, the henhouse and the first two steps of the house; and she told me afterward, on a cot in the camp at Nazira, with the calm of one who has already reckoned up what remains, which is not much: the blanket, an aluminum pot, the sack of rice held high above the head, the children's school certificates in a plastic envelope, and the cow, which is alive because a cow knows how to swim and a sheet of land does not.

The title she left in the tin box.

The box, she told me when I asked her why that of all things had been the one left behind, was an old tin of English biscuits, from when she was a girl and the biscuits still arrived in the bungalows of the tea gardens where her father worked as chowkidar, the night watchman; and inside was the patta, the paper of the rice field, four and a half bigha in her grandfather's name from nineteen sixty-six, which is the year the Brahmaputra changed course, ate the old village and pushed the people farther upstream, where the village had stood until yesterday, and which is also, by a coincidence that to her does not seem a coincidence, the only other time the water rose this high, sixty years ago, when she was six and they carried her off on the shoulders of her grandfather, the same grandfather of the patta.

The water rose a finger's width every ten minutes, she told me, and this she knew because she had planted a stick on the step and watched it; and at a certain point the stick was no longer any use, because the water had taken the step, the stick and the vegetable garden, and all that could be seen was the tin roof of the henhouse floating crooked, and farther off, toward the center of old Sivasagar, the many pukhuri, the great tanks dug by the Ahom kings three hundred years ago, which with the flood were no longer tanks but parts of the same single river, the Joysagar and the rice field and the road all the same brown water.

It was then that she loosed the cow.

The loosed cow went off by itself toward the embankment, which is the thing that animals do, to seek high ground, while Anima stayed on the threshold with the bundle still open and the tin box in her hand and had to decide, because the bundle she carried on her head and into the bundle went one thing and one thing only of the two she held in her hands: the blanket or the box.

And she chose the blanket.

She chose it, she explained to me with the patience of one explaining an obvious thing to a city person, because the blanket is needed at night in the camp, where the children and grandchildren would be cold on the wet embankment, while the title is needed to prove a land that now lies under three meters of water and that the river, in any case, will take back or give back according to a law of its own, not according to the paper; and because the land, she said, the land she knows where it is even without the sheet of paper, she knows it with her feet, the four and a half bigha behind the tamarind, and if the river leaves it to her she goes back to it, and if it does not leave it to her there is no patta that holds.

The eldest son was not with her: for three years he has worked on the building sites of Guwahati, eight hours by bus when the road is there, and that afternoon the road was not there and the phone came and went; so Anima sent him a single voice message, of thirteen seconds, in which she did not say come but said the cow is on the embankment, which in the family tongue, she gave me to understand, meant we are alive, and he answered two hours later with the same economy, the word aai, mother, and nothing else, because in certain families reserve grows as rice grows, in rows, and one does not name what one can show.

She set the tin box on the highest step still out of the water, with care, the way one sets down a thing one hopes to find again; then she put the bundle on her head, took the smallest grandchild by the hand and went down into the water up to her waist, toward the embankment where the cow was waiting.

The box, when she turned around one last time, was still there, a square that glinted against the gray, until the house too was nothing but water.

At the camp at Nazira, three days later, she told me that she was not thinking of the box. She was thinking of the Rang Ghar, the amphitheater of the Ahom, the great brick pavilion on the rise where the kings watched the elephant fights, which has stood there for three centuries above the plain and which this time too, she told me, the water did not touch, because the old people knew where to build the things that are meant to remain, and it was not the paper.