Because I saw the kind of lives they led: going to bed on an empty stomach for over half the year; frowned in debt without any hope of ever surfacing; their unborn generations bonded to service those debts; their blood sucked dry (talking of which, the Bengali word for 'sucking' and 'exploitation' is the same, have you ever noticed?); their children bony but with swollen bellies, arms and legs like reeds, hair bleached to brown with malnutrition; their lives shrivelled by worry. Because their lives were like this, I thought they would be simmering with anger and all we needed to do was a bit of stoking and there would be a giant conflagration that would bring down the blood-suckers and burn them to cinders. How hopeful it all seemed.

Then that hopefulness curdled: what I hadn't reckoned with was that decades and decades of this slow-burning flame of resentment and deprivation had burned them, not the perpretators. The embers of anger we had thought of fanning had burned down into the ashes of despair. They were already dead within their lives. They had no hope, no sense of a future, just an endless playing out of this illness of the present tense until its culmination in an early death.

It is true that rural people eat a lot of rice, but not for the reasons she had assumed. They eat rice because there isn't much else to eat: the vegetables they grow; the roots and leaves they forage; the occasional fish from the ponds and canals; the even rarer duck, which sometimes appears on the flooded rice fields during the early part of the growing season. But that is the ideal, almost aspired-for, scenario. The truth is more naked: they eat so much rice because they are filling themselves up against the time they know will come when they won't even have this staple to fill their stomachs.