When rivers misbehave

"Bachchoo was the rolling stone

Who gathered fields of moss"

From His Confessions

March.27 : Quiet flows the Cam. From the grassy slopes behind the august colleges with their dreaming spires one may see the undergraduates punting away on the serene river, a picture of infantile boisterousness, affecting indifference to their surroundings if they are in gangs, or the model of romantic devotion if He is poling his Beloved to Grantchester... and of course, the magpies guzzling dropped ice creams and scavenging the discarded cartons of Kentucky Fried Chicken with the portrait of their philosophic patron embossed in red and white, on the grassy banks and the Japanese tourists relentlessly caging the fleeting moment in their digital prisons… or so it was till yesterday.

I remember my first encounters with the Cam all those years ago. What would, in the India from which I came, be considered a very clean and well-kept gutter was here deemed the river on which the university town had been built, with picturesque bridges, the one designed by Newton in Queens, one of the colleges whose courts lie on either side, entirely of self-supporting wooden beams, and the humped stone ones over which one threw the bicycles of rivals and others too pretty to describe in this space or too numerous to mention. I brought with me an idea that rivers were unruly, strange brown gods who could change course at a whim and leave a specially-built compound of pavilions, such as Fatehpur Sikri, without water and sustenance, changing the course of empires.

My first adventure on the Cam came when, walking with a Pakistani undergraduate whom I had befriended in my first days there, we came upon, even in the cold autumn, on the opposite bank a group of boys and girls one of whom, for what must have been a dare, stripped off her clothes and dived cleanly into the water. We witnessed the performance from close quarters and whilst I absorbed the phenomenon as indicative of the bohemian weltanschauung I so wanted to cultivate in myself, my Pakistani friend went berserk, jumping up and down and calling to anyone in range, "Arrey nangi ho key kood gayee, yaar, bilkool nangi ho ke kood gayee..."

The poor man didn’t have a happy first term. Towards its end, the Cam’s waters getting icy in the November cold, I was sauntering down hand in hand with an undergrad girlfriend when the same Pakistani, walking alone, huddled in a great coat spotted us from across the river and shouted "Farrukh, yaar mujhe bhi dilaadey!" Whatever could he have meant?

But flowing summer or icy winter, the river was always the scenic spine of the town. So unlike the Mulla-Mutha, the two rivers becoming one on whose confluence my native town of Pune is built, with the rusting, dusty maroon-going-on-khaki railway bridges that ford it and the Bund garden where I used to be taken by my ayah as a child and where I witnessed to my horror my first murder as a fellow came by on a bike with a bed sheet turned into a tied bundle suspended by a rope, full of puppies which he had been assigned to drown. One of the puppies escaped as he parked his bicycle and we watched him chase it, bring it back and stuff it into the execution parcel with the other now squealing puppies, before taking his murderous bundle down the stone steps from the parapet to drown them.

My ayah’s friends, other servants who had brought their charges to the riverside garden to take the evening air, must have made me aware through their exchanged comments as to what was going on. My ayah tried to shield us from the horror of it and wouldn’t answer us when we asked why the puppies had to be drowned, why wasn’t life big enough to accommodate them? What had they done to deserve this?

I have never returned to Bund garden without the nauseous memory returning.

And then down the road, set away from the madding crowds, is the Pune Boat Club where I once, aged 16, arranged to meet the poet Adil Jussawalla so we could exchange verses and views. Adil lived in Mumbai and was visiting relatives in Pune and I had looked forward to the encounter only to find that a little before we got there, the currents of the river had claimed a life. A lone boatman had drowned and there were people dredging the river for his body. The verse was left unread. A bad omen if one believed in omens, which I didn’t, but still a bad taste in the mouth, a sensation not dependent on belief.

A year after that the river was hit by the green blight — water orchids that bred with the speed and beyond the capacity of the proverbial rabbits, covered every inch of the river and penetrated its shallows with the thick dark snaky roots of the green infestation. It clogged up the river for miles and was greeted by the town as the citizens of Egypt must have greeted the infestations sent by the God of Moses.

Botanical experts were called in to say where the scourge originated and how it could be removed because apart from clogging up navigation on the river, it was killing the plants and fish that lived in the river by denying them air and sunlight.

Cranky inventors wrote letters to the local newspapers patenting methods of using this aqueous field of plants to extract oil, make petrol, use as fodder or as a fertiliser. The schemes came to nothing. The river continued to be choked and the plague, as though to flaunt its mockery, began to put out on the dark green broad-leafed surface, a carpet of bright flowers. It was the stuff of science fiction films about alien invasion.

And then there were the floods. A dam up river from Pune at Khadakvasla, whose sluices had rusted and not been maintained, broke and released the waters of Khadakvasla lake into the river which flooded its banks, drowned people and cattle and dragged and scattered the grain out of granaries on the bank so that the town stank of death and rotting grain for months.

It was three years before I came away from Pune believing that rivers and politicians behaved badly only in India.

This week there are reports that the Cam has been hit by a blight of water orchid, which will kill the fauna and flora and suspend all diving and punting.

Farrukh Dhondy