It was many years ago that I met that woman in Shondeep. It was after the cyclone in Bangladesh in 1991. Our helicopter had landed in the damaged airstrip of Patenga airport in Chittagong. There had been no fire, so why were the leaves all charred? What had happened on that fateful night of the 29th April? My questions to the ‘experts’ resulted in the standard response. The NGO workers told me of the bags of wheat they’d given out. The engineers talked of the torque of the wind, the government officers spoke of the funds they had allocated. Then the woman spoke. In a quiet but controlled voice she said, ‘The land became the sea and the sea became a wave’. It took those words, for me the photographer, to see what had happened that night.