Poems on Yamuna: ‘Kalindi’

Kalindi 

her skin stretched 

like a deer's 

a thump away from a song, 

Malhar drops

like silver coins on her eardrums,

washing away 

bowls & bowls of ammonia stars, 

clots of white invisible temporarily, 

she’s full sounding 

bathed in new myths of an old city —

buttons of smoke leave the banks of her mouth 

howls led in labour,

travelled long through grainy ribs, 

and sketchy blood, on little rafts of trash, 

the blue lips sucked off all prayers, 

air

moistened whirling in blows

on to the face of the threshold city of impermanence, 

all poems & promises of 'former glory' shredded 

dusted off, 

her howls are 

hymns 

does she ever hum to delude herself that she has company?

does she know her modern myth is in the making?

– Rachit Sharma

Standing on the bank of the Yamuna near Okhla with the bustling capital city behind him, Rachit witnessed the aches of the ancient waters. The river moved furtively, soaking up the city’s poisons, towards the precipice of personal transformation and cultural reinvention. Once a lifeline of entire civilisations, its banks lively with colourful community activities, the river now wears the white scars of a rapidly urbanising society that only remembers it when it floods or as a posterchild of industrial pollution. 

As it rained, the river yawned in a break from this learning, giving the poet a peak of the still water underneath its wounds. The river remembered it is a body that sings and twists and dances with the drops; it lashes onto the torso of all the people who would come to bathe in her, wash their clothes and utensils, dip vessels to fill them with water, or simply watch the sun drown in it and listen to it sing. The people living on her banks still interact with her every day but “the city” has invisibilised them, like it has invisibilised the river’s festering wounds. 

In July 2023, when a sudden rush of waters engulfed their homes, thousands of them were moved to temporary camps across Delhi. But in the following weeks, as the river went back to its original form, many of these homes never did. The 2025 documentary Jamna — the River Story by Ishani K Dutta captured the life of a third-generation boatman who lives with his elderly mother on the banks of the Yamuna. The river is central to their lives — he earns a living from it and prays every evening at the temple situated in the middle of the river. Despite the dwindling income and pollution crisis, he tells the film crew that the river is his home, and he will never leave. 

After the flood, the narrow lanes of the settlements along the river were filled with knee-deep muck for weeks. The residents had lost the very little they owned — furniture, clothes, cooking stoves. They waited at the evacuation camps for the corporation to make their quarters habitable again. When the film crew visited the neighbourhoods some weeks later, some of the residents had returned and were trying to rebuild their lives from scratch. The boatman and his mother were not to be found anywhere.

The silent but regular suffering of these people and the river barely ever make it to news reports or television segments, because, as South African Rob Nixon put it in his seminal work Slow Violence and Environmentalism of the Poor, these stories that are dispersed over time don’t have a scope for the kind of spectacle the media likes to highlight. He talks about the conjoined disposability of ecology and human life whose long dying cannot be captured in the snappy, bite-sized doses of news the publications feed us. 

His book addressed the ‘slow violence’ or invisible assault on nature and marginalised communities that has been wrought by neoliberalism. Rapidly intensifying industrialisation has gradually polluted the world’s waterbodies, soils and air, erased many species from the face of the earth and harmed the health and well-being of the poor of the world, sometimes by design, by willfully discounting the long-term consequences of such actions. 

But violence, he argued, isn’t just a “visible act that is newsworthy, event focused, time bound, and body bound”, calling for a rethinking of the prevalent understanding of ‘violence’. 

A major river like the Yamuna has been allowed to be polluted for so many decades, despite small but visible symptoms of deterioration. The biodiversity and human lives tied to the river have also been facing an incremental decay. The poor who lack resources, and often the voice to fight back, are the principal casualties of fast capitalism and its slow violence, he wrote. “Chemical and radiological violence is driven inward, somatised into cellular dramas of mutation — particularly in the bodies of the poor — remain largely unobserved, undiagnosed and untreated.”

Even if the language of news falls short of addressing such violence stretched over years, as Nixon suggests, these “unspectacular” events haven’t escaped the sensory receptacles of the cultural expression. Way back in the 1960s, Mysuru-born poet AK Ramanujan in his A River, had urged his fellow poets to not focus on the beauty of the waterbody only when it is swollen during floods but also highlight the human sufferings as well as the river’s predicament during the dry months when the flow narrows to a trickle and the riverbed is parched. 

People may choose to forget the intrinsic bond they have with their natural surroundings, but the ecology that houses them never suffers in isolation — its destruction echoes in the human bodies and psychology. “My veins are rivers, noisy / with anklets, my nerves, wires / that carry music and light,” Malayalam poet K Satchidanandan wrote in My Body, A City (translated): 

How shall I describe the

port of my nose where

scents unfold their sails,

the untiring mills of my teeth

that grind the harshest of griefs,

the market of my tongue

full of noises and flavours,

the observatory of my skin

that records every change of season

No degree of attempted obfuscation of this link people have with spaces they inhabit, can break it. Satchidanandan ends the poem with a solemn edification:

Remember:

when you burn this body,

you are burning a city.

Remember:

when you bury this body

you are burying a people.

The poem ‘Kalindi’ is part of a series ‘Memories of Yami’ by Rachit Sharma, poet and founder of Dillipoetry. Yamuna is also called Kalindi because it originates from the Kalindi (or Kalinda) mountain of the Garhwal Himalayas in Uttarakhand. The series seeks to document the stretch of River Yamuna in Delhi, exploring its diverse strands of memory, culture, climate and collective future.