Waking Call for the Water Kin and Others Listening
Kolkata, India
2021, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
When I was little and my grandfather still existed in flesh and bone,
he would show me the waters rushing in, flooding our courtyard
every monsoon—point a finger at the dirt and the grime concoction
even the tallest child would stand knee-deep in,
and whisper, “water has memory,”
like an ancestral secret he was passing on to me,
“water has memory, and it will always remember.”
Ten-year-old me derived from this that you should never use your journal pages
for paper boats, not if you want your secrets to stay around, forever. Eighteen-
year-old me still carries the words
around, tucked between my weakening lungs.
You see, this is how it has always been; we carry blood in our veins
and our gods carry rivers in their hair, and we are intertwined—our
watery sorrows holding us together.
You see, my people speak in poems,
and the first one taught to us is about a tiny stream
cutting through sandbars, ask the child who has barely
learned to talk and she will tell you about “Amaader Chhoto Nodee,”
in one breath, like she has been carrying it in her lungs.
You see, this is how it has always been, my grandfather
used to say water has memory watching the water rush in,
and my people say “Jawl-i Jeebon,” water is life,
while being swallowed whole in the delta,
this is how it has always been,
a teary tapestry stringing us together.
and yet,
and yet.
Some of the oldest stories of the world are about children leaving mothers
and languages losing meaning, and how humans
burn the flowers when they build homes out of concrete,
and this one is no different,
this is the same lore—
kin of the rivers choking up their arteries
till all that you see is polythene wrapped around fish-bones,
till all you see is grime and oil and the ugly,
till all you see is chemical foam and pieces of places
we used to call home, till the waters rise, and swallow us whole.
You see when you split the earth open and get cruel, cruel,
cruel, you tear the roots and the stem
and your people apart—and now
the world’s come to a standstill and we have nowhere to go
and all of us are staring at things we
have done, things we have begun,
things that will end us all,
the poems we forgot, and
now we must see what we
have done in startling intensity.
When I was little, my grandfather
used to say that water has memory and
my people still say Jawl-i Jeebon,
but we have always put our ashes
in these waters and now there are
headlines about bodies floating downstream.
Water is life
and water has memory
but it takes just
enough cruelty
to make a proverb die.
Water is life
and water has memory
and my grandfather is
not around anymore
and the waters are rising.
Water is life
and water has memory
and all that remains is the
unforgettable stench of death
and the waters are rising.
Water is life
and water has memory
and I hope
we make it out of this.
Water is life
and water has memory
and I hope
we do enough to make the waters forgive.
…
Explanations:
- Amaader Chhoto Nodee (Our Little River), a poem written by Rabindranath Tagore, is one of the first things in Bengali literature taught to children at primary levels, and is about a little river and the rural life along its banks.
- “Headlines about bodies floating downstream” refers to hundreds of corpses of probable COVID patients floating down the Ganga because they had been dumped into the river. Human rights activists and ecologists have been horrified.
Reflection
Reflection
I think I have always felt connected to water bodies, perhaps more than one ordinarily feels. Bengali literature and music have always been littered with references to water and rivers and oceans, and perhaps it is the cultural factor that has entrenched in me my love for water bodies. This might have to do with the fact that my school is at an arm's length from the Ganga river or the fact that every story I have grown up with has been centered around oceans and rivers and their tributaries. Writing this triggered an odd sense of nostalgia that has probably always been present inside me but I have never had the time to ponder upon. It brought back memories of what my grandfather used to say and my childhood (still continuing, will never be letting go of that). I hope this piece helps people connect with that one element in nature that they share a bond with, and reminds people of things that they have long buried or shoved away because they do not think it is important anymore. The message in this is clear: I want people to wake up and start seeing what is happening around them. We have become so engrossed in our own lives that we do not even stop and smell the flowers life throws at us periodically in an effort to make us take a breather. If this poem manages to even inspire one person to introspect and look through their own history and take some action, I will be gratified. This contest actually made me look up the current water crisis and the rising water level topics, and although I had been aware, I had not been this informed. Now I know better and I know that I have to work twice as hard as I had thought I would need to, if I am to conquer this impending sense of doom.