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Ghost fish of Yamuna
today as I was crossing Yamuna, the flood plains looked lush
dream like,
the stranded cluster of homes was puffing out trees,
the smoke suspended midair like a twin blue tunnel
with a grainy shore of cotton pods,
a serpent — ouroboros — eating its own tail,
an eternal shout of cyclic renewal,
what do you call that which devours itself mouth first?
slow and soft and slithering easy like a thread stuck in the throat
her fish float around her waist in silent circles,
moss moves like mosaic, avoiding the criss-cross of the nets,
the one who built the boat that once moved how sarod sails in silence
has run away to a sight of no water,
every night a catfish appears on the surface
to wail with the djinns of the eighth city of Delhi
over a famished
daria,
badal &
baadshah
Rachit Sharma
In the 41 km Gaza Strip, over 62,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel in the past two years, many of them children. Some were killed while queuing for food at aid centres that were bombed deliberately.
Now the United Nations has declared famine in the strip, with more than 640,000 people facing catastrophic food insecurity — an orchestrated disaster.
The genocide is mirrored by a parallel ecocide: 80 per cent of Gaza’s tree cover wiped out, cities buried under millions of tonnes of rubble, toxic chemicals and medical waste seeping into the soil to linger for decades.
War assaults more than the generation that suffers it. It bleeds into the future like effluents mixing into rivers slowly, killing lifeforms and the capacity to sustain life.
American anti-war poet William Stanley Merwin mourned such losses in his verses written during the Vietnam War. The United States military had launched a chemical warfare in Vietnam, spraying millions of gallons of herbicides to clear tropical forest cover. These chemicals found their way into Vietnamese waters and soils, where their traces can still be found. From Merwin’s celebrated collection The Lice, here’s the bleak poem The Asians Dying:
When the forests have been destroyed their darkness remains
The ash the great walker follows the possessors
Forever
Nothing they will come to is real
Nor for long
Over the watercourses
Like ducks in the time of the ducks
The ghosts of the villages trail in the sky
Making a new twilight
Rain falls into the open eyes of the dead
Again again with its pointless sound
When the moon finds them they are the color of everything
The nights disappear like bruises but nothing is healed
The dead go away like bruises
The blood vanishes into the poisoned farmlands
Pain the horizon
Remains
Overhead the seasons rock
They are paper bells
Calling to nothing living
The possessors move everywhere under Death their star
Like columns of smoke they advance into the shadows
Like thin flames with no light
They with no past
And fire their only future
Beyond the battlefield, the same impulse to destroy plays out more quietly. Industrialisation and “development” carve open mountains, dam rivers, strip forests bare. In the Himalayas, this hunger has unstitched the land, pushing mountain slopes to collapse. The floods and landslides in Uttarakhand, Himachal and Sikkim are not natural disasters but human-made wreckage, the rivers themselves carrying the wounds of our greed.
But what of the life that endures where it began? What of the fishers after the fish have died, the boatmen after bridges have replaced boats?
British anthropologist Tim Ingold’s essay The Perception of the Environment (2000) helps explain how those who live off rivers and forests relate to nature. Livelihood, he argues, is not mere extraction but dwelling, inhabiting a world where humans and nonhumans are bound together through reciprocal relations. Many Indigenous peoples see survival as dependent on respect for other beings who share their land.
Ingold illustrates this with the caribou and Cree hunters of subarctic Canada. The Cree say a caribou, even when pursued, may stop and stare, not out of fear, but to offer itself as a gift. This gift demands respect; abuse it, and future hunts may fail.
Western biologists, on the contrary, interpret the same act by the caribou as an instinctive survival mechanism, pausing to assess danger when chased by a wild predator.
The contrast underlines the point that livelihood is a dialogue of mutuality, not a mechanical extraction from nature.
Ingold urges us to not separate the naturally real from the culturally imagined. He invites observation of the surroundings as ‘sentient ecology’, which describes how people relate to their environment not as an external, objectified space, but as a range of relations felt and enacted every day.
A poem from the Sundarbans written by Bishwanath Purokait illustrates this assimilated identity of man-nature:
(translated from Bangla)
The rivers on which bridges have been built – are they happy?
Now, so many people gather here to watch the sunset
Lovers lean on the railing in pairs
I too cross the Matla Setu sitting in a brand-new auto
I recognise the driver —
He used to be a boatman.
Along Delhi’s Yamuna floodplain, farming has endured for decades, though the crop area has been shrinking. Across 56 bastis, nearly 9,350 migrant households — mainly families from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar — grow vegetables, cereals and fodder, according to the 2022 study Bottom-Up Mapping of Yamuna Floodplains. But they remain unseen, branded encroachers, as bulldozers clear land for restoration and beautification.
The river they depend on is poisoned: Studies found lead, cadmium, chromium and pesticides in crops, prompting a ban on edible farming. Between eviction and toxic soil, these quiet stewards face erasure, when they could be help in healing the Yamuna.
Across rivers, from the Matla to the Yamuna, memory lingers long after the boats are gone, and waters turn red. In these shifting landscapes, the scars of violence, greed and change are etched deep, but so are the quiet acts of endurance.
The poem is part of a new series titled ‘Memories of Yami’ by Rachit Sharma, poet and founder of Dillipoetry.