The silt crept seaward year by year, extending the delta one row at a time from the old riverbank in the north. Karim's father had fished every new sandbar as it emerged. By the fourth year the delta filled the survey grid. Then the spring flood came — not the gentle kind, but the kind that reshapes land. The newest bar, the southernmost row, the one Karim's father said was always the weakest because the clay hadn't set, washed out to sea in a single night. Everything north of it held. The next dry season built it back.