After father dies saving farm animals in Assam floods, daughters vow to fulfil his IAS dream

Santak, Nazira sub-division, Sivasagar, Assam

The first thing that catches the eye is a school bag. It hangs from a nail above the door, blue, slightly faded, exactly where it has always hung. Below it, still taped to the wood, is a laminated school ID card. The house behind it has been scrubbed of the silt that swallowed it whole barely two weeks ago, but the two things on that door were left untouched. Nobody wanted to move them.

Twelve-year-old Principriya Gogoi stands beside that door now, scrolling through her mother's phone in a dim room lit by a single window. The light falls across her face at an angle, turning her into something closer to a silhouette than a girl. She is looking for a photograph of her father. There aren't many. There isn't a single one of the two of them together.

"Had I known this day would come, I'd have taken lots of pictures with him," she says, still scrolling. "If only I had known this day would come, I'd have told him I would study harder. That I would make him proud."

She looks up.

"I want to become an IAS officer. That was my father's dream. I will become one. I will. For him."

Beside her, her younger sister Ayushree, 10, starts to cry without a sound. "I will also study hard," she manages, her voice barely making it past the tears. "I will fulfil my father's dream too."

Nobojyoti Gogoi was 53. He worked, he raised two daughters, and by every account of the people who knew him, he wanted one thing above everything else — for his girls to clear the UPSC exam and become IAS officers. It was, his family says, the only ambition he ever spoke about without embarrassment.

On July 19, that dream drowned with him.

Santak in Nazira was among the worst-hit areas in Sivasagar during Assam’s 2026 floods, which, as of August 3, have killed 87 people and affected 11,45,109 residents across 25 districts, according to ASDMA-based reporting. The floods also submerged nearly 14,000 hectares of arable land, while Sivasagar remains one of the hardest-hit districts.

Nobojyoti's village was one of the places the water reached first, and hardest.

He had two pigs. To most people, that might sound like a footnote. To Nobojyoti, his family says, the animals were everything — a livelihood he had built and protected for years. When the flash flood hit, the water in his house rose past six feet within what felt like minutes. The farm animals were outside, and before he could get to them, the current had already dragged them toward what used to be a field and was now a churning pond. There was no gravity holding anything in place anymore, only the force of the water, throwing people, animals, everything, in every direction.

He went after them anyway. One pig, he managed to save. The other, he couldn't let go of. He kept moving with it, further into the water, until the water took him too.

Before that, he had already got his wife, Rupa Gogoi, 41, and his younger daughter Ayushree to safety on higher ground. From there, there was nothing left for them to do but watch, and scream, and hope. Ayushree saw her father struggle in the water. She saw him go under.

Principriya saw none of it. She was 45 kilometres away in Amguri, at her maternal uncle's house for the summer break, when it happened. It took her four or five days to make it back home. She never saw her father's body.

"I wasn't here. I couldn't see him. Not even his mortal remains," she says. "This is my biggest regret."

Rupa Gogoi has not had the luxury of grief without arithmetic attached to it. "My younger daughter saw her father drown right in front of her eyes. I tried so hard to save him, but I couldn't," she says. "He had so many dreams for our daughters. I don't know how I'll fulfil them without him. As they grow up, their expenses will only increase, and I don't know how I'll manage."

There is no photograph on the wall, no framed portrait, nothing staged for anyone's benefit — just a school bag on a nail, an ID card on a door, and two girls who have decided, on their own, what happens next.

Principriya remembers her father mostly in small, ordinary gestures — the kind that only mean something after they're gone. "What I miss most is when he'd come home after work. He would sit with us, and before he ate, he would feed us first. For him, we were everything," she says. "He used to take care of my mother. Now we both will. We won't let her worry alone anymore."

Her hands shake a little as she says it, her breath catching somewhere between the sentences. "I wish he were right beside me. His dream is mine now. I promise you, deuta — wherever you are, I know you're watching over us. I will make you proud. I will become an honest IAS officer."

It is a long road from a flooded village in Sivasagar to the corridors of Lok Sevak Bhavan, and both sisters know it. But in a house that the water tried to erase, a blue school bag still hangs by the door — and so, for now, does a promise.

ALSO READ: A torn Ramayana survives what the Assam floods could not take