Treading Water

Piya Srinivasan

I spent my childhood in Guwahati, a town on the banks of the Brahmaputra. Not being Assamese and growing up in the 1990s among a community that was fiercely protective of its ethnic identity, I learnt to adapt. I learnt the songs, the smells, the regional inflections that give a group of people dominion over a city’s economic and cultural resources. But the feeling of being an outsider stayed with me. I only felt a true sense of belonging when I stood on the banks of the river.

My cultural memory of the Brahmaputra, discovered through the songs of the region, was benign and generative: a river of legend, folklore, myth, sustenance. The river was my first experience of something larger than the life I had lived. It did not demand that I perform belonging. Indeed, the town seemed to change its nature on the riverfront that ran parallel to the river, a stretch assigned to leisure, recreation, and contemplation. It held a kind of generosity that other public spaces in the city did not concede. Water did not insist on allegiance. When I was older, I would go up to one of the highest points in town from where the river looked like the sea. The limitless horizon was a metaphor of possibility, life, movement.

Approaching June, the water levels of the Brahmaputra would rise above the danger mark and flow beyond the banks, into the city. To be thrilled by this occurrence was only possible from a place of safety, most often a car. It took me some time to realise what the river took away. My memory of a benign river prone to occasional exciting outbursts would be destroyed when I became aware of the realities of large-scale displacement of riverine communities during the annual floods in Assam[i]. The land that water took away would then emerge in a different location on the river, a geographical formation called chars, riverine islands formed through silt deposits. Much of Assam – known as a ‘waterscape’[ii] in ancient texts due to the Brahmaputra’s numerous tributaries crisscrossing the state – would become unrecognisable under the sheets of muddy water that submerged its low-lying areas.

Natural disasters are one of the largest reasons for human migration[iii]. People wading through waist-deep water, carrying their children, livestock, and belongings wrapped around their heads to drier land is a common sight in India. One day a person has their family around them, their cattle, their small patch of agricultural land, their homes laden with belongings, children’s schoolbooks, toys, their identity cards, their ephemeras. The next day it’s all gone, washed away.