In a Flooded-Delta City, a Choir Sings the Villages That Went Under

DHAKA — The program lists no composers, only villages: forty of them, each a place that the water took and the choir has refused to let go silent. The Tidewater Voices, an ensemble of some ninety singers drawn mostly from families who arrived in Dhaka along the same migration corridors now carrying past 120 million people worldwide, has spent two years setting lost place-names to melody. Their autumn concert filled a converted market hall three nights running. "We are not mourning," said director Farida Rahman, sixty-three, who lost her own delta village a decade ago. "We are keeping an address. When a child asks where we are from, there is a song with the answer." Ethnomusicologists at Pacific Rim University have begun archiving the pieces, calling them a living register of a coastline the atlases are quietly redrawing. The choir sees it more simply. A place you can still sing, Rahman said, is a place that is not entirely gone.