Tonight
may tonight be a dream like no other,
glint of the moon run over your body
like silver bands of termites,
cutting through the film
like lungs falling
into a sigh,
the circular thuds of your movements
dance on no borrowed tongues
may the oil dry,
your eyelids soaked in ink
kiss-drop verses in your name,
may the resonant percussion slit the sky bleeding,
may it rain tonight
may the gentle clatter
of you, rubbing against the rain like bread on teeth
take you to your altar — dug, not raised,
descend tongue first
drink your fill,
empty your chest,
lie down,
wait…
Rachit Sharma
Waiting with uncertainty is the common predicament of the poor and the dispossessed. As the Yamuna started overflowing in Delhi at the beginning of this month, some 10,000 people were displaced from the lives they’ve built on its banks. Now, even as the river water recedes, they have a long wait ahead of them before they can return home.
There is no longer a flood situation, but these people wait at makeshift evacuation tents on Delhi’s sidewalks and under bridges as their homes and approach roads remain buried under six feet of mud and silt deposited by the river. They have complained about the lack of any support from the authorities to clean up their alleys and make their homes livable again. Their repeated pleas for help went unheard and the politicians vanished as the flood receded, a resident told the media.
Families find their lives stalled as some of them go to the banks during the day to remove the mud by scooping it with their hands, while their children wait in the camps guarding their belongings. The process could take months as they said they cannot afford to hire help. It is almost as if as the flood recedes, the people living along the river are also receding from government priority.
This destruction of both land and livelihood echoes Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence” — a gradual, often invisible form of harm disproportionately borne by the poor and marginalised. The flood’s aftermath, while not dramatic like an immediate disaster, inflicts deep and lasting damage that compounds over time. The work hours and school days diverted into recuperating from the flood will cause strains that will be too small for the rest of the world to notice but will add up to significant development hurdles, keeping these communities trapped in cycles of hardship and insecurity.
This sense of prolonged invisibility also resonates with Mamang Dai’s poignant line from her poem Remembrance from the book River Poems: “We dwell in the mountains and do not know / what the world hears about us.” Dai, a Sahitya Akademi-winning novelist and poet from Arunachal Pradesh, wrote this in the context of the alienation felt by the hill communities. But it applies to the people living along the Yamuna in Delhi, many of them migrants from other states. They remain cut off from the main discourse and political attention even while living within the country's capital.
Author Margaret Atwood explored the association between a patriarchal society’s exploitation of natural resources and that of people, especially women — a quality she aptly called “Americanised”. Atwood spent her formative years in the wilderness of Canada’s forests, following her father who was an entomologist. This closeness with nature is said to have shaped her environmentalism that shines through her novels. In Surfacing, her concerns regarding ecological destruction and oppression of women masterfully blend. The story unfolds through the eyes of an unnamed protagonist who returns to her homeland in a Canadian island in search of her missing father.
“The protagonist is unhappy to see the harm and injury done to the landscape of Canada by American business concerns. Wherever she looks, the protagonist finds the signs that her childhood version of Quebec is being violated by Americans and Canadians who have assimilated ‘American’ values of material progress and self-centred ecological destruction,” writes Sonia Khajuria in Ecofeminism in the Selected Novels of Margaret Atwood.
Her journey highlights the conflict between patriarchal control and a deep yearning for ecological and personal healing. Ultimately, she emerges with a renewed sense of self and a fragile hope for reconnection with society. Her friend David, who, along with his wife Anna, makes the journey with the protagonist, represents the oppressive, controlling male figure who tries to impose his human-centric, hierarchical worldview on the protagonist and Anna. He sees both women and the natural environment as resources to be controlled or subdued rather than respected as autonomous entities.
“He wants to hunt fish, which is an act of dominance, but doesn’t know how to turn his kill into food, which is an act of sustainability. With the protagonist’s help, David is able to catch a fish on his line but then asks the protagonist to kill it.”
David symbolises a patriarchal modernity that alienates humans, especially women, from nature and enforces separation and exploitation, underscoring how oppressive social systems contribute simultaneously to environmental harm and gender oppression.
The same authorities and businessmen who pollute Yamuna, also trap the people living along the river in precarious conditions in exploitative occupations and policies that neglect their needs.
In the evacuation tents, these people continue living amid poor sanitation, negligible privacy and the constant threat of vector-borne and water-borne diseases, holding onto hope that their homes will become livable again as they remove mud one scoop at a time with their bare hands.