A RIVER by A.K. Ramanujan

In Madurai,
city of temples and poets
who sang of cities and temples:
every summer
a river dries to a trickle
in the sand,
baring the sand-ribs,
straw and women's hair
clogging the watergates
at the rusty bars
under the bridges with patches
of repair all over them
the wet stones glistening like sleepy
crocodiles, the dry ones
shaven water - buffaloes lounging in the sun.
The poets sang of the floods.

He was there for a day
when they had the floods.
People everywhere talked'
of the inches rising,
of the precise number of cobbled steps
run over by the water, rising
on the bathing places.
and the way it carried off three village houses,
one pregnant woman
and a couple of cows
named Gopi and Brinda as usual.

The new poets still quoted
the old poets, but no one spoke
in verse
of the pregnant woman
drowned, with perhaps twins in her,
kicking at blank walls
even before birth.

He said:
the river has water enough
to be poetic
about only once a year
and then
it carries away
in the first half - hour
three village houses,
a couple of cows
named Gopi and Brinda
and one pregnant woman
expecting identical twins
with no moles on their bodies,
with different coloured diapers
to tell them apart.

I first read this poem in 2002 and hated it. This was around the time we used the term global warming to describe the environmental crisis. Terms like climate change came much later but all schools had started introducing some form of environmental studies by then. Ramanujan died in 1993, well before the apocalyptic possibility of humans destroying the planet had become a cause for concern. In fact, his generation, and even mine for that matter, has grown up reading the poems of Wordsworth and Shelley who describe the beauty of nature. When you look at The River in that context, it's impressively ahead of its time. 

In fact I think I think I hated the poem so much in school because around the same time, I was obsessively reading the Anne of Green Gables series (for those of you who haven't read it, please do - it's about 80% richly descriptive of the landscape and 20% about Canadian rural life that I didn't understand at all). So I was dragged straight from the laughing brook of Rainbow Valley with its pretty moss covered logs that make convenient seating spaces to this River Vaikai, repulsive, realistic and deadly. I still recoil in disgust when I read it. 

Obviously, that was Ramanujan's intention. He wanted us to shake off our idyllic notions of nature and the complacence with which we treat human suffering. Consider this - most of you reading this poem in school live in large cities. The fact that you've come to my blog on the internet to find an explanation of the poem means you have access to some amount of infrastructure. It's very easy for us to romanticize life by a river in the wilderness. We think of it as a vein of life and nurturing, which it is. All the great civilizations were built on the banks of rivers. Yet, as people who have not experienced its havoc, we don't consider that the river is also destructive, either by going dry and leaving behind the parched cracked earth, or flooding and submerging all that crosses its path. Consider what it would be like if your urban jungle collided with the destructive force of nature - that is what happened each year to Madurai. 

Ramanujan sets his poem in Madurai, where art flourished at the peak of Tamil culture. The poets of Madurai sing only of the splendour of cities and temples. They ignore the revolting decay of the city that Ramanujan paints for us in great detail. The image is loathsome as he describes the flotsam in the river and the ridges in the sand - bed that look like ribs. He describes the filth floating in the water. He shows us how poorly the dam and bridges are maintained, covered in rust and patches of shoddy repair. The stones resemble sunning crocodiles and water buffaloes lolling about in the sun.

But the poets sing only of the floods when the river shows some sign of life, when the ugliness is hidden from view. But with this new dynamism, the river also brings destruction and death. 

Ramanujan then introduces a persona he refers to only as 'He'. Whoever this persona is, he appears to be an outsider who can see the river for what it truly is and is not taken in by the poets' idyllic picture of it. Ramanujan goes on to describe the countdown to destruction as the water rises steadily over the bathing ghats. The poets continue to produce the same old stories, turning a blind eye to the pain and havoc brought on by the flood each year. They are so awed by the turbulence and fury of the river that they almost lose their sense of compassion towards those suffering around them. And so Ramanujan takes it upon himself to hold up the true picture.

He, (Ramanujan) as well as He, (the persona) talk about the lives lost in the flood. Unlike the other poets who are blinkered, he wants to immortalize in verse the drowned pregnant woman and the animals whose lives were also lost. 

Notice how the lines about the pregnant woman and the cows who were washed away are repeated. When do you repeat something? When you don't want people to forget. When you want to make sure they have heard you. Notice also that to emphasize the irony, the pregnant woman is nameless but the cows' names are mentioned twice. Right at the end of the poem, after shocking us out of complacence, Ramanujan talks about loss, to draw us towards empathy. How does he do that? Think about how you feel when you read about the pregnant woman. How did you feel when you read the last four lines of the poem? He first mentions her in Stanza 3 as the pregnant woman with "perhaps twins in her". Then he brings her up again in Stanza 4 but this time with more details in the last 4 lines. What are those details? Did anyone actually know if this nameless woman was going to have identical twins with no moles on their bodies and different coloured diapers to tell them apart? She's been swept away by the flood and in fact, no one will really know. What those lines convey, without explicitly saying so, are her dreams, the anticipation that she and her family must have had, what they imagined it would be like when the children were finally born. 

Hopefully, those of you reading this have never experienced a natural calamity, and hopefully you will never have to. But think back at all the times you have read about it in the news. How reports post numbers of people who have died. Ramanujan's poem is a reminder that the casualties of nature are not just numbers, they are real people and real animals who had dreams, who had names and who experienced pain and suffering and who deserve to be remembered, who deserve to have poems written about them, just like the river that swept them away.