A River Carried Me Here

Where the mountains will hide your sorrow

And the rivers guide your spirit

The river that flows by the town I live in has many lives, many avatars, many names, many stories, many legends, many worlds. The town I associate with has its own legend, of great gods fighting over the love of two, spilling blood into the river, giving it the name the City of Blood. So goes the story, one of the many, as the river traverses from the high reaches of the Himalaya, gushing down the plains is a vast braided expanse, a river taking a hundred forms, no, a hundred-thousand.

But it is not this river that carried me here. It was another, much smaller, much lesser known. This river I speak of is yet to speak to me, but I’ve learned that without it the air doesn’t move, the ground doesn’t breathe, the rain doesn’t fall, the elephants don’t walk. And indeed, hell hath no fury like its floods.

Rivers, small or big, carry stories. They are its memories. The difference lies is how we perceive them. One is as much likely to learn of them by staying put along its bank for a lifetime as one is by traversing the whole length of it. Both vastly different, both equally expansive. Fortunately, people have done both, and it is for an impatient mind like mine now to absorb it even as I wait to hear stories straight from the river. Patience is virtue when waiting to be carried in the sway of a river’s narrative. There are countless, always-changing turns on this braided river, every turn a turn in the pages of a book. And there are many pages to turn till I am caught in the river’s flow.

It is one of the few rivers with a masculine name. It arises from three headstreams of Kubi, Angsi, and Chemayungdung glaciers in the Kailash range of the Himalaya, south-east of Lake Manasarovar, in Tibet. The headwaters are called Dangque Zanbu, for the Horse River, and is known as Yarlung Tsangpo, for the ‘purifier coming from the sky’ – a fitting name as it flows straight west-to-east. It is also referred to as the Red River because it is said the water appears a deep brown due to iron content. It drops about 4,500 m in the 1,700 km stretch before turning south and entering India, in the state of Arunachal Pradesh, here it is known as Siang, for, as per the Adi peoples, ‘the river that flows through our heart’.

Flowing with a wild rage, cutting valleys into mountains, it twists and turns west. It is considered the most difficult stretch of the river if one is to follow, with very few cane bridges straddling over it for local commute – and it remains the most isolated part of the river to tread. It bursts forth through the foothills as it churns its way through the saucer-shaped state of Assam, creating a distinct ‘sleeping U’ cusp, its eastward flow to the north and the westward to the south separated by about 200 km.

Now called the Brahmaputra, the Son of God, braided like a maiden’s long braided hair, shimmering golden silver as the sunlight plays with its white sands, creating gigantic river islands – the chaporis – it meanders, slowly now, but in an expanse so vast one cannot see the other shore. It then turns sharply south as it enters Bangladesh, where it is known as Jamuna before merging with the Ganges, known as Padma, and meeting Meghna as they flow south, forming the world’s largest delta. A 2,900 km long journey from the headwaters of the Kailash Range to the Bay of Bengal.

If the river is mystical, the mountains are elusive. The riverbank offers only glimpses of the high mountains far over the northern horizon, a wall with jagged top running east to west. That beyond lay the many rocky folds – the tallest in the world – is hard to comprehend. For the most part, the Himalayan foothills remain hidden in layered clouds, yet here and there they peek through, higher than one expects them to see. On clear days, they appear as a gigantic dark shroud over the northern horizon, menacing, but bewildering.

Far beyond lies Pakke Tiger Reserve, my friend announces as we look upon the mountains from the shores of Jia Bharali. Far beyond lies Eaglenest Wildlife Sanctuary, he announces as we look north from the Jia Gabharu. And from here, along the coast of Sankosh River, they rise in Bhutan. And farther beyond flows the Brahmaputra in the opposite direction. We stand in the cusp of this river – it cradles this land between its two banks.

During winters, one may glimpse the high glaciers of the Eastern Himalaya, ice and snow, melting and rolling down the rocky ramparts. All rivers are unique, but Brahmaputra’s journey is unique among India’s rivers, a trait shared by very few of the long-flowing rivers: its dramatic turns. Only one comes to my mind, Ma Narmada, the river I am very fond of. Narmada arises in the Maikal Hills of Central India, and after flowing north a while like the rest that rise at Amarkantak, turns violently to the west, and continues draining straight to the Arabian Sea.

Brahmaputra’s course turns violently south as it flows east, then west, into a cusp that has captured my fascination ever since I’ve come along its shores. There is no name to it, but between the east-flowing Brahmaputra and the west-flowing Brahmaputra lies a line – a ridge – of peaks which split the tributary rivers into two, those flowing north to the Tsangpo, and those flowing south the Brahmaputra.

Such lines are a geological feature, separating two watersheds apart, called a watershed divide. Brahmaputra’s has me in its awe because it creates its own divide – the Brahmaputra Divide, a river splitting its watershed into two watersheds, interacting only along the cusp as the river turns – I don’t know the word for it.

Of course, one can make two arguments. One, that really, Tsangpo and Brahmaputra are two different river systems, with different identities and different origins – to this I argue that a river flows in a transient phase of being the same and not the same water. Technically, however, it is one stretch of a body of flowing water to which many other rivers merge with – making it, in essence, one river. And two, that this is merely a feature of the fold in the river which is seen along many rivers that bend gently about – to this I agree to an extent, but the matter is of the sheer scale of this riverfold.

I mapped this divide and compared it with the Ganga-Brahmaputra Divide separating both the watersheds, and found something curious. The Brahmaputra Divide is more-or-less the same, if only a little longer, as the Ganga-Brahmaputra divide. In other words, the Brahmaputra divides itself longer than the two watersheds do. This might not mean much, but if it’s not about finding the secrets of the river, what am I even doing?

The Brahmaputra Divide lies roughly between two of the tallest mountains in the world, the Khangchengyao at 6,913 m – a part of the Khangchendzonga Range – to the west and the Namjagbarwa at 7,782 m, the eastern-most tallest Himalayan mountain. The divide itself isn’t very straightforward, with many north-flowing and south-flowing rivers giving the ridge a zig-zag pattern.

It is curious that the western edge of this divide touches the Ganga-Brahmaputra Divide, and the state of Sikkim is perhaps the most unique to showcase this: it’s cube-shape is all-too-cute and difficult to miss, its northern boundary is formed by the Bramaputra Divide, in the sense, all rivers arising from Sikkim flow south towards Brahmaputra, and the northern flow to Tsangpo, and Sikkim’s western boundary is formed by the Ganga-Brahmaputra Divide, in the sense, all rivers to the west of this flow to the Ganga, and to the east flow to the Brahmaputra. Similarly, the western-half of Nepal’s northern border is formed by the Ganga-Brahmaputra Divide, in the sense the rivers in Nepal flow to the Ganga and north of it to the Tsangpo.

This play of rivers and mountains shaping our imaginary political boundaries is not unique, but in case of this divide, it is not merely a line drawn on a river or a mountain range, it is drawn in a way the natural features have divided these watersheds.

The high-resolution PDF version is available here.

Of course, I have not travelled with the river to grasp even one of its stories, yet to know that I live along its northern shore less than a kilometre away, and point straight to its southern shore hundreds of kilometres north flowing in the opposite direction, gives me a tingling sense of wonder and awe. I hear the river here, and I imagine the Tsangpo gurgling far up in the lap of the Himalaya. I see its waters flow seamlessly, and I imagine its rapids through the rocky mountains.

A little over a decade ago, it was the wind that blew me thither. As I explore this land of the rivers, new words begin trickle through my mind, as a river now carries me. This is hopefully a new beginning of the Brahmaputra Diaries.

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This was the longest break I have been on, but it was not for nothing, I hope. The news will be out in a few months as I return to writing on Sahyadrica more frequently.