River

It was Upen who had the idea. Crowds were jostling at the bus station. There was no place at all to sit out the next six hours. She thought she would retch and die if she heard that Tamil film song, interrupted in the middle by a kind of cough, just once more. A knot tightened at the pit of her stomach.

“Taru, the river flows close by. Why don’t we go there?”

Taru thought about it. She didn’t know much about rivers. She had been ten years old when she was shown the water flowing at the bottom of a small square hole and told, “This is the source of the river Kaveri.” At that very instant a leech had attached itself to her thigh. When they had burned it with a cigarette and pulled it away, the blood had come spurting. She remembered the blood. Somewhere in the depths of her mind the notions of river and blood became one. But in no other way was she moved by rivers.

She had seen rivers when travelling on trains, far below; sometimes as narrow as the cord tying back her hair; at other times spreading like a many-headed Ravana. The rivers she had seen were glimpsed through the iron bars of the windows of her railway carriage, or flashing intermittently upon her eyes as the train rattled past the iron supports of bridges.

Their forms had been incomplete.

They were magical blue lines, but also sometimes brown as the bed of sand beneath, or water-weed green, or gutter-black and covered in soap suds. It seemed impossible to link all these images into the notion of a river.

“What do you think?”

“Very well. Come on.”

When they reached the river bank, there were very few people there. A few men were swimming in the distance. Five or six women were washing clothes nearby. The river was dark grey, with touches of blue. They sat on its bank.

She looked at those women. They were laughing at something or other. Laughing, they beat their clothes against the stones, again and again. One of them was rubbing a piece of turmeric against a small stone. The glass bangles she wore moved up and down, rising and falling. She scraped off the ground turmeric and smeared it upon her cheeks, her feet and into her armpits. She dived into the water with a little leap, and lifted her head about a foot further away. Again she dived in, and reappearing still further away, lifted both hands high up and shook away the water from her hair sideways, starting from just above her ears. Very slowly. As if she had any amount of time to spare.

Taru watched the river flowing about the woman’s waist.

“Taru, shall we go into the water?”

Upen stood ready to go in, having changed out of his clothes.

“You go in first.”

He went a bit further, climbed in, walked along parting the water with his hands, and then began to swim.

The river flowed on, drawing to itself all that was going on, in it and about it, like a sannyasi, without being troubled or fragmented. That steadfastness seemed to loosen all the constrictions within her.

Women of the epics must have stared at the river water, having set afloat upon it small bamboo baskets carrying their babies. They had trusted the river as they set down their baskets upon its water, giving them a firm, thrusting punch with their hands. And as the baskets floated away upon it, the river too had changed its form. It was no longer just a river but the waters that supported life. The waters of the womb. The water upon which the tiny foetus floats. The river was but an extension of the same waters, into the world outside.

She looked at the river.

It seemed to offer protection. One could dare to put one’s trust in it.

She opened her bag and took out a lungi. She tied it to her chest and removed her clothes.

She placed her feet in the river. When she was waist high in the swiftly running water, her feet began to tickle. Fish! They were biting her feet. She shrieked; then laid her head back and laughed out loud. Swiftly she dipped under and rose. She walked on, parting the water and splashing. The river spread out over her. She kicked her legs out again and again and began to float. When she lay back and looked up, the sun’s rays shone right into her eyes. Again she wanted to laugh.