Seven ages of a river:

Tsangpo, Siang, Brahmaputra, Jamuna, Padma, Meghna… and?

WE see age in lines, in folds, in sagging skin. But age can also be sensed in the sound of the voice, for the voice is also time’s storekeeper. This is as true of rivers as it is of humans. There’s also the name – the changing names from infancy to maturity. This, too, is true for both humans and rivers. We hear of seven lifetimes and seven ages. This river begins life as Tsangpo, then becomes the Siang and the Brahmaputra, later Jamuna, Padma and the Meghna. The histories and geographies of these rivers have been documented, and yet our curiosity about them flows upstream. And so we turned to poetry, for a different dis-‘course’ of water and its life – poems by our contemporary poets, who’ve lived with the river, and what is called ‘folk song’, songs passed as inheritance through generations, like language, like water itself. Five of these poems, by Mamang Dai, Amlanjyoti Goswami, Dibyajyoti Sharma, and Maitreyee Bhattacharjee Chowdhury respectively, were written in English; one, by Chen Metak, in Tibetan (translated into English by Bhuchung D. Sonam); a Bhatiali song translated into English by Shalim M. Hussain; there are three more, the folk songs, in Bangla, and when Mursalin Mosaddeque, a student of medicine based in Dhaka, directed me to them, I found that they were nearly impossible to translate. So these are trans-creations, since both music and song are difficult to translate into any language – every language seems foreign, like land does from water.

What is the seventh river, then? You might find it in these poems, like a boatman does – it might not have a name, it might be hidden, but it’s there. It is that experience of the seventh river that reminds us how we are, in the beginning and the end, made of the same thing that makes rivers: water.

Curated by Sumana Roy

 

The missing link*

I will remember then

the great river that turned, turning

with the fire of the first sun,

away from the old land of red-robed men

and poisonous ritual,

when the seven brothers fled south

disturbing the hornbills in their summer nests.

 

Remember the flying dust

and the wind like a long echo

snapping the flight of the river beetle,

venomous in the caves

where men and women dwelt,

facing the night –

guarding the hooded poison.

 

There are no records.

The river was the green and white vein of our lives

linking new terrain

in a lust for land

brother and brother claiming the sunrise and the sunset

in a dispute settled by the rocks

engraved in a vanished land.

 

I will remember then the fading voices

of deaf women framing the root of light.

 

in the first stories to the children of the tribe.

Remember the river’s voice:

where else could we be born,

where else could we belong,

if not of memory

divining life and form out of silence –

water and mist,

the twin gods, water and mist,

and the cloud woman calling

from the sanctuary of the gorge.

 

Remember because nothing is ended

but it is changed,

and memory is a changing shape

showing with these fading possessions

in lands beyond the great ocean

that all is changed

but not ended.

 

And in the villages the silent hill men still await

the long promised letters, and the meaning of words.

 

Mamang Dai

(From River Poems, Writers’ Workshop)

* This is a reference to the River Siang in Arunachal Pradesh that was presumed to be the ‘missing link’ by the Survey of India before it was established that the Siang is a major tributary that links the Tsangpo of Tibet and the river Brahmaputra of Assam.

 

Lhasa diary

In a day, cold wind may blow,

A colourless and intangible wind

Rising through the openings in your stones,

On the walls of your house and iron fences,

Making hundreds of holes for spiders and scorpions to sneak in,

Fangs of darkness crowding in the dark holes will

Cut your sunrays into pieces,

Bringing the second black night

That even the lamps of your history cannot extinguish.

 

In a day, it may rain

Teardrop-like rain falling from your golden canopies

Hues of your white and red colours may turn

Into long bloody footprints left by scorpions,

Each imprint turning to a document,

Your emperors and princes will have

No stone pillars for their final testament, only elaborate tombs.

 

One day, from the walls of your water tombs

Yellow ducks will fly out in terror,

Singing you a skeleton-coloured poem

With a tiny little hole in it, and

Through this hole

You may be able to see once the world in which you live.

 

One day, a tongue of flame may shoot up from the crown of Iron Hill

The flame may hear the laments of your chained sunrays,

It may taste the sour air coming and going across the stone bridge,

Furthermore, it may feel the hunger of birds and fishes of Yarlung Tsangpo

It may see the sons and daughters of aristocrats decked in corals and turquoise.

 

One day, it is possible that I will see the white walls of Tsuglakhang

Hidden behind the garden of willow with its smooth walls,

It is possible that I will see the low terraces of the stone houses,

Seeing them I may have to follow your pointing finger to

A valley of history where the sunlight does not penetrate.

On a day like that

Silently I may call your name one more time.

 

Chen Metak

(from Burning the Sun’s Braids: New Poetry from Tibet, translated by Bhuchung D. Sonam)

 

By the river

July evening. A sepia sky

Ruddy with trouble.

Waters swirling dark

As the future we wear

 

Beneath our skins, up to our bones,

Our knees, the swarming currents

Running familial.

 

What do you want this time? I ask

As his glass eye peers at me, his heart

Raging as the waters below

As a train flies past.

 

You look just like your father

He smirks

Before entering his sound proof, water proof engine.

 

As I stood there watching the waters

Look back at us

In perfect symmetry – two brothers

Who could not have been, any more different

While our lives floated by.

 

Well… I… must be moving soon

I spoke first

But grew roots the moment my mouth opened.

The earth cavernous opened its jaw

To let the waters in,

As if nothing was enough.

The waters climbed, this time to the window

Where we once marked with broken pencil

Where the last record stood.

 

I walked back, to where I came from

And knocked at the future.

I did not know if she was

Still waiting for me.

 

When I looked around, same spot,

Years later,

He wasn’t there.

 

Amlanjyoti Goswami

 

We dream of fish

I cannot eat fish anymore,

the bones get stuck in my gullet;

cannot eat much else either,

an old man without teeth

imprisoned in his bed, smelling of

piss and filth, waiting

for the boatman to take me away

on the final voyage.

 

I close my eyes and my mouth tastes

ilish with mustard. I gulp, and I see other fish –

a roasted goroi for the breakfast of fermented rice,

a dancing kawoi in the field after the first rain,

a kingly bhokua caught in a bamboo net,

a rough kokila for the uruka feast,

and a single scale of a tall rahu, wearing which

she pledged her miserable life to mine.

 

I turn and find myself in a rice merchant’s barge,

riding the red torrents of the lunatic river. Is he

Tejimola’s father, in the quest for a lonesome lotus

which would be his daughter, to be killed and to be

born again? Is he Chando Sadagar, who would tell

me the oozing pain of Behula’s floating mausoleum?

 

The lunatic river takes the rice merchant

underwater to keep company with childless widows,

ugly virgins, paddy seedlings and mute goslings,

and the boatman tells me how a mermaid stole his

heart and how he now fills the emptiness inside his

rib cage with hyacinth roots and dry fish bones.

He opens the cave under his withering flesh

and I see river dolphins taunt my ambition.

 

I turn and Luit swallows me.

He is the creation, the farmer

of the fish, the satiation of man’s hunger,

our very breath, dark silt, rice fields,

thatched huts, betel leaves, fishhooks.

 

I dazzle like the fins of a kanduli,

amidst the sandy islands the Old Man River wears

like golden armour to fight

the surging blue waves, in a faraway country,

unseen yet ever present – his enemy,

his one true love, his everlasting death.

 

I jump from one boat to another.

I cross one river to find another.

 

In Bhogdoi, I witness Sukaphaa’s royal procession.

In Dihing, Joymati refuses to speak.

In Barak, the Goddess dances naked.

I find my grandfather’s bones in Kolong.

In Kopili, rice fields turn golden.

In Subansiri, I mourn for Jhonki and Panoi.

In Kushiyara, I meet him again,

the desperate lover Luit, mortal enemy,

rushing to his foretold death for a new birth.

 

The Old Man River, he cannot wait.

He is now his own lover – Jamuna,

fertility spilling out of her uncontainable youth,

drowning villages and cities, until they

come to life again when her youth is spent

and she is an exhausted old crone – Meghna,

at the edge of that inevitable end where you

despise your desired destination but cannot return.

 

I close my eyes and my mouth tastes

ilish cooked with mustard. I cannot sleep,

an old man without teeth waiting for the boatman

to take me away. But he wouldn’t catch me a fish.

 

Dibyajyoti Sarma

 

Pristine waters still*

…There’s something moving in the background –

A river maybe?

 

At Sukreshwar ghat,

a serpentine line of buses unwillingly crawl.

Like Gandhari, I watch the Mahabharata here

Blindfolded –

People walk around –

strewn somewhat, like the occasional devotion from the nearby temple.

 

There are cries of living here

and those trying to live.

Flowers strewn somewhere along the road,

remind me of Kamakhya sitting atop the hill –

Expectancy

and a certain Goddess peer down,

distant mirth, at the madness finally complete.

 

There’s something moving in the background –

A river maybe?

 

Bhuvaneshwari sits quietly above Kamakhya,

the river an innocent blur in her eyes.

I wonder if it is pregnant, incapable of anything but the miscarriage of overflowing.

There are no stains however –

no red of bloodshed, or stories of innocent lives whispering in jungles deep…

Maitreyee Bhattacharjee Chowdhury

* An excerpt.

 

Mad river

You mad river

In a strange illusion you have trapped me

In our happy lives

You have drawn a ravine.

 

You have taken someone’s land

You have taken someone’s tin house

You have taken my new budding love.

 

You mad river

In a strange illusion you have trapped me

In our happy lives

You have drawn a ravine.

 

Some of us go to Mondira

Some go to Goruchar

Some go to Norikata reserve

 

You mad river

In a strange illusion you have trapped me

In our happy lives

You have drawn a ravine.

 

Translated by Shalim M. Hussain

Bhatiyali song adapted by Manik Kana (Manik the Blind)

 

I ask you O Padma

I ask you O Padma,

you bringer of death and beauty –

don’t you have any sense,

don’t you have a home,

where your bank begins and ends?

 

Looking for its bank

I set out early.

Evening’s here, my day’s gone

but bank there is none.

 

Seeing the storm on the river,

I feel scared, I tremble,

don’t kill me o Padma,

your storm’s in fever.

 

My boat’s broken,

six oarsmen threaten.

Their axe wound my boat.

How do I get to the bank,

how do I stay afloat?

 

Song translated by Sumana Roy

 

I built a house by the Meghna...

I built a house by the Meghna,

I had such great hopes

The ruinous storm destroyed my house re,

my house broke…

My children lived in this house,

here they slept and woke.

I still look for them here re

on the bank of the Meghna

 

I lost everything but my hopes didn’t end

I built a house again, my destiny didn’t mend

The flood called again

and snatched everything away

I am alone, I roam around

Water falls from my eyes,

tears fill my day.

 

Song translated by Sumana Roy

 

This Padma, this Meghna

This Padma, this Meghna,

This Surma, this Jamuna,

and this – the river bank.

My shepherd-mind, it only sings –

this is my land,

this my prem, my everything;

in happiness and in sorrow,

in togetherness and in biraha…

 

By the Madhumati and Dhansiri

I lose and find myself, I return

time and again, without hurry

 

It’s a blue wave on a poem’s cover page –

this Padma, this Meghna,

this basin of a thousand rivers, their age…

 

Here the rivers are like women –

bak bak bak, they only talk.

The fearless sky stoops,

it touches the unguarded green –

like the heart’s love blooms within.

 

Song translated by Sumana Roy