“For the past six months, we have not been able to sleep because of the “thieves”. They come at night and eat our food”, says the Garo village headman’s wife Mimita. She says that almost every night, a herd of 40 to 50 elephants moves across the border from Meghalaya, India into the Sherpur District in Bangladesh. The elephants sneak up silently, in search of food, they destroy paddy fields, sometimes houses. Visar Kobir headman is angry: “If they eat our rice, how do I feed my family?” He is sad too, he has lost his brother Opu Mark because of a clash with a wild Elephant on 27 May 2021. Another villager survived a clash with an elephant, in his helplessness he filed a case against the giant with the local police.

The villagers in the border areas whose lives depend on subsistence farming, spend months of sleepless nights during the rice cultivation seasons twice every year. They light fires, roam the fields with strong flashlights and use horns and drums to keep the elephants at distance. They are frightened to lose their rice; the months of hard physical labor could be in vain, and their livelihood lost at any moment.