Rivers and us, it’s simple. We didn’t need to spend too much time on what we would name this blog. We want to use this platform to talk about rivers and what they mean to us, inviting as many people as possible to share their experiences and stories. City life doesn’t offer one many chances to witness a river in all its rapturous glory. Most rivers in the city are tamed and packaged to cater to groups of loud, boisterous, picnicking families and tourists. At least the fortunate ones are, the rest are merely carriers of sewage.
As much as we’d like to disassociate ourselves from such embarrassing childhood memories (like almost drowning and being rescued only to find your swimming trunks weren’t as fortunate) most of us have at least one childhood memory revolving around some water body: a river, a lake or a pond. So, what is your happy memory? We’d love to hear it. Drop us a comment.
As much as we’d like to disassociate ourselves from such embarrassing childhood memories (like almost drowning and being rescued only to find your swimming trunks weren’t as fortunate) most of us have at least one childhood memory revolving around some water body: a river, a lake or a pond. So, what is your happy memory? We’d love to hear it. Drop us a comment.
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The silvergrey Mutha lit by a pearly moon. The brown Mutha, heavy with monsoon mud. And the glorious pink-gold Mutha, backlit by the October sunsets. The many colours of this river have painted so many memories that my whole childhood in Pune seems coloured by its water.
Each day as I crossed the bridge one way to go to school, the sight of its bluegrey waters, tinged with the vivid emerald of water hyacinth, was the last beautiful thing I saw before I turned inward, preparing for the drudgery of another day sitting at a wooden desk, feeling wooden myself. And crossing it the other way, in the glare of the afternoon, I'd feel the stoniness of school gently carried away as I crossed the bridge. From deep inside myself, I would look outside the car windows and see the astrologer who still sits on the pavement by the bridge, and the saffron shrine on the grey stones by the bank, and the purple hills on the horizon, and the frothy white water as the river leapt over the bund. And I'd come home again, I’d flow again. In the evenings, there was a thunderstorm of roosting birds in the big raintrees by its banks, and this sound still reminds me of shopping trips with my parents, taken in the gentle dusk before I had to come home and do homework.
Later, much later, I had my first kiss in a small park by the riverside. And my old friend the river was the first of my friends to see me leap silently from child to adolescent, leaving the lonely inwardness of my school years behind forever. It carried away the hardness of school desks, school teachers, school friends and school lunches, and swished its silvergrey thrill at my electric milestone.
The last thing I saw with my homeward eyes before I left for university in England was the Mutha at sunrise. The further waters tinged with orange gold. The silent gush of a post-monsoon river, biding me fair journeys. After that, I was out in the world, and my journey had begun.
And though I have been an absent friend for so many years, still the Mutha welcomes me back each time, with its swathe of silvergrey. And when I spot it from the road, I am in from the world again, home again, and all the hardness of the outside flows gently away.
Madkhol..a little village close to the town where I grew up. A river flows there still, with a rocky bed and rushes growing on the banks. At places, the water forms deep pools and at others, it fans out in thin sheets.
When my sis and I were growing up, my mum would take us there during our exams. This would be a reward for studying hard, and a very nice reward it was.
Sitting together on the rocks, not saying much, but just sitting together. watching the water turn from white to yellow, orange, and then white again. listening to frogs, letting fish nibble our toes.
If i could go back in time for an hour, I think I would choose one of those.
I was about eight before I saw my first body of water. We had been living in various cities in Iran, moving a lot and taking a vacation was just not feasible. No one in my family, except my father, had ever seen an ocean or a large lake, but we had books and stories about oceans and roaring rivers. I remember vividly the day we went to the shores of the Caspian Sea. I don’t remember why, or what the trip was like, or who was with us. I just remember holding my Mom’s hand, watching the waves come in, and looking down at me feet to see seashells. In Farsi there are many names that have to with bodies of water: Sahel (beach), Sadaf (seashell), Darya (river/lake). I just remember being mesmerized by the endless water, it seemed magical, like the storybooks becoming real. It still does, because in my life it is still so rare.
My childhood was a river. The Couderay. A river as big as the town
that shares its name (pop. 92). My earliest memory is of almost
drowning in that river when I was three. Why my parents thought that
it would be a good idea to send me to the swimming hole with two
10-year-old boys, I'll never know. Watching from the shore as my
brother and his friend frolicked in the heart of the river, I was
determined to join in the fun. I was unaware of the steep drop off
that made this particular spot ideal for swimming. I clearly remember
sinking below the water, watching the bubbles as I tried to call out
for help. After what seemed an eternity, each boy had grabbed an arm
and pulled me out. Shortly thereafter, my mother taught me to swim in
that same river. Strange, I can't remember ever being afraid of the
water despite the brush with death. Instead, the river became my
summer home.
It was the place where my friends and I snuck off to while our mothers
played softball. "Don't go down by the river," they would tell us, as
the part of the river near the ball diamond was known for its rocky
rapids and was not visible from the field. Every few innings they
would look around for us and not finding any evidence of our presence,
they would send some adult down to drag us out of the river. Life was
much more innocent back then. Parents could lose track of their kids
without too much worry.
My father taught me to ice skate on that river. While he had the grace
of Dick Button, I never quite mastered the figure eight. It was in the
winter that the river again attempted to teach me the lesson of the
fragility of life. As winter approached spring, several feet of snow
still covered the ground, perfect for cross-country skiing. Our house
sat on a hill and below that hill was the river. I thought it would be
fun to fly down the hill and shoot across to the fields on the other
side. We had a bridge near our house, but I would lose all the
momentum from the hill by using it. I decided that the weather was
still cold enough to ensure a thick layer of ice on the river. I was
wrong. Just as I was approaching the other side, I fell through the
ice. Since the embankment on the other side was covered with several
feet of snow, I had to take off my skis under the water so I could
crawl up the embankment. By the time I walked back home, hypothermia
had nearly set in. Lesson learned.
When I look upon the river today, my thoughts are tinged with sweet
sadness. The sweetness stems from the fond memories of summers spent
playing in the river and winters spent skating on it. The sadness from
the realization that today's children cannot experience the same joys.
Years of below average rain make it difficult to find a place deep
enough to swim, even for small children. The winters rarely get cold
enough to ensure that the ice is thick enough to skate on. Is this
change permanent? I hope not.
i remember drowning. all the time. every picnic, every outing involving water would always have one rescue mission. but i loved water anyway, still do. would sit in it till my skin was all crinkly and my lips were blue and the only way i would get out of the water. was either being forcibly dragged out or drowning. i remember it so clearly, drowning once and actually thinking ''wow its so pretty in here..if i were a mermaid i would..'' only to have my train of thought disturbed by someone yanking me out of the water by my hair! ah...good times :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEwiG9tAacs
I never gave much thought to how a river has shaped my childhood (its like you don't sit back to think, objectively, how important some things are in life!) but now that i'm thinkin, all sorts of memories are 'flooding' (the pun..hehehee!) my mind...my first swim, bihu celebrations, going fishing, staying in thatched shacks to protect the paddy fields, riding rafts made of banana trees when the paddy fields got flooded and all sorts of things!!
the river brahmaputra, i think has humbled me more than any other river (i haven't seen the nile or the amazon yet)...when i was a kid, i never imagined a river could be so large till i actually stood by the embankment trying hard to see where it ended. One day i'd like to navigate the brahmaputra, when i'm middle aged, with a pot belly with three or four of those diseases, high bp, diabetes, rheumatism et al..well, jerome k. jerome's three man in a boat (to say nothing of the dog!) happens to be one novel i dig!!
Captured on camera: Tehri Garhwal! In December 2005, some Global Xchange volunteers (google it and Pravah too)- the SEED work placement and an enthusiastic Shri Bhuvaneshvari Mahila Ashram team crossed what used to be the old Tehri town in Garhwal, Uttaranchal and captured the half drowned clock tower on film rolls, during a break as we traveled farther up towards Nai gaon on the peak of a marooned mountain. It was an exiting sight, a half submerged clock tower and we went there the following month with our entire GX team specially to visit the dam development site. Near the bakery of the tiny Anjanisain market where we spent much of our time most mountains are step farms, you see these steps everywhere with crops of different colours and the mountains are sprinked with rocks and pine trees. Higher up, the mountains were lush green and tall, like enormous pencils sharpened properly, the curves were sharp and steep (and i think someone puked on the way to Tehri). Suddenly the landscape was eerie light brown and ugly (bare like empty of life, with dust surrounding the mountains, from one angle the gigantic triangles appeared to be crumbling too and they had these machine type cylindrical things screwed in them..Among the other “development tourists” who gazed at the mountains that were relatives of some former residents of old Tehri town. It was strange to meet people who were moved away, for us who would get water and electricity in Delhi. It made me feel guilty and embarrassed and i could not look at the people in the eye and then all of a sudden it wasn’t so cool to talk about the submerged clock tower that we had seen earlier. Stranger still, we could not locate the half submerged clock tower that day, we looked and looked and looked. The mountains were there, the backwaters seemed higher and vaster- our cool looking yellow half submerged clock tower was gone, it was fully submerged. Thanks for creating this space. hope this strange but significant memory, of wonder and guilt rings a bell in urban hearts.... varsha
Walking companion: little Nallah near Poonamali high road: when you cross Chetput bridge and walk towards Poonamali High road in Chennai in southern India, you cross a nallah. In the morning it’s green and black with weeds and dirt and sometime it stinks, but only slightly. Along the nallah runs a railway track and over it is the bridge on which move buses and cars. Alongside the road is a pedestrians paradise- the nallah is lined with these lilac coloured five pointed flowers that have pretty and leathery petals and an inner structure looks like sturdy architecture, it’s firm for a flower and quite amazing. There are believe me, i used to walk across that nallah everyday to reach work and that particular urban trail had the most widest horizon en-route! The sky was blue at 7:30am and a fisher was usually sitting near some water surrounded by green weeds, which in turn were rounded-up via stake nets. The stakenets speak by their presence, there must still be some fish left there, amidst the black and green of what would have formerly been translucent water. For the fisher and me, strangers whose paths intersected at the nallah near Chetput, the nallah of black water was a space that rejuvenated our energies and boosted our ability to practice our livelihoods, each morning. Seeing the nets near the nallah daily, i would imagine how a fisherperson’s life would be, how central the water-body would be to the life of a community of fisherpeople! How their lifestyle would be governed by the nallah, the patterns of fish and the levels and quality of it’s waters and it’ link to the market. The residents of Madras who have seen the city grow share that the nallah was once not black. The steady increase in it’s blackness and it’s experience of a series of cleaning projects that have consistently proceeded one another may culminate in sparkling clear waters, fish that are visible and healthy and aesthetic perfection someday.
Periodic Miracles along the river Mahi? The first time my extended family got togeather in one geographic place in life, the entire bunch of us kids and cousins went to bathe in river Mahi, in Gujarat as our ancestors would have done. There were little brown thorns sticking out of our feet and an assortment of shells bubbling out of our hands at the end of that day, and we boasted about crossing the shallow waters of the river barefoot. Our grandfather told us that the mighty river Mahi was as deep as the ocean,and it's waters still and deep when he was a young lad and it would have been a miracle to cross the waters without a raft a few decades ago. The fringes of a highway that lead to the river are still surrounded by mangoe orchards, the winds still still blows near the site where we splashed and waded and drew designs on the grey sand with stones a decade ago, but i doubt that there is water in the mighty Mahi to wade across today. i wonder if we would have to describe our river bathing trip to our grandkids as a miracle. we wonder if the Mahi would live till then…..
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