“Je Ravi vich paani koi naeen,
te apni kahani koi naeen ”
If the Ravi holds no water, there is no story to tell.
The Ravi begins the lament. Sajjad Ali gave it voice as a river of absence, a dry bed, a silence where once stories flowed. Yet this year, the Ravi is no empty vessel. It is swollen, insistent, restless. It slips back into streets that thought they had erased it, writes its own story across the walls of housing societies built over its chest. Basements filled in minutes, boulevards became canals, chandeliers flickered out under brown currents. And the Ravi whispered its truth: you may pave me, you may sell me, but I will return.
And then, as in Gurdas Maan’s haunting refrain, the Ravi turns to its sister river:
“Raavi toh Chenab puchda,
ki haal a Sutluj da.”
Ravi asks Chenab, what has become of Sutlej?
The Chenab answers in grief. Waris Shah placed Heer on its banks, lovers yearning for the ferryman in Paar Channa De: “Take me across.” But this year there was no ferryman. Families waded through torrents, livestock carried away, villages swallowed whole. The Chenab’s crossings were not of love, but of survival.
And the Chenab carries another voice, one written in 1947 but echoing still:
“Ajj beiley lashaan bichiyaan,
tey lahoo di bhari Chenab.”
Today, the fields are lined with corpses, and blood fills the Chenab.
Amrita Pritam’s cry for Punjab was about Partition’s dead, borne by rivers that could not refuse. Today it is corpses of another kind, of crops drowned, of homes erased, of dreams carried off in silt. The poison she spoke of – “kisey ne Panjaan paaniyaan vich diti zahar rala” i.e. someone has mixed poison into the five rivers – is not gone. It lives on as greed: unchecked real estate, villas raised on floodplains, nullahs buried under plazas, fertile fields cut into “prime plots”.
And what of the Sutlej, asked after by the Ravi? Perhaps it remains silent, but its silence is its testimony. For when India opens its dams, the Sutlej roars back into Punjab with a force no embankment can contain. Its waters too are heavy, carrying both the memory of partitioned lands and the present reckoning of climate and neglect. The Sutlej does not need to speak, its flood is answer enough.
Together, the rivers tell one story: that what we call disaster is not nature’s cruelty, but our own. What is natural about paving over drains, burying wetlands beneath concrete, or slicing fertile land into gated colonies? What is inevitable about cutting forests until the hills weep torrents with the first storm? They are choices. And every choice leaves its mark.
The Lahore High Court has said so in its own language. In striking down the Ravi Riverfront Urban Development Project, Justice Shahid Karim declared: “Any scheme if established without [a] master plan is unconstitutional.” The ruling laid bare what the rivers already knew: that land was seized illegally, that ordinances violated the Constitution, that loans were squandered. The judgment was a mirror held up to our folly. But law is slow, and rivers are swift. Where we ignore judgments, they deliver their own.
Look at the sentences they have written. Children’s swollen schoolbooks floating in drowned streets. Footballs, once stitched for the world, now lifeless in Sialkot’s flooded alleys. Farmers dragging cows through chest-high torrents, both staggering with exhaustion. Villages crouched on islands of mud, their people staring at horizons that no longer exist. These are lines in the rivers’ long poem of memory, verses of arrogance drowned.
Climate change has intensified rains, yes. India’s dam releases have added pressure, yes. But the deepest wound is self-inflicted: the housing societies stamped on riverbeds, the drains clogged with garbage, the fertile fields sacrificed to greed. The Ravi is not punishing us. It is remembering itself. It is tracing old courses, reclaiming lost ground. Its language is flood, its pen is water, its ink is ruin.
The River Ravi was a covenant, a pact between land and people. Villages grew on its edges because they understood its moods. Fields were sown with the silt it left behind, songs were written to its rhythms, saints prayed by its banks. The river was mother and muse. Today it is treated as enemy, nuisance, wasteland to be tamed with concrete. That shift in imagination, from covenant to conquest, is at the heart of our drowning.
Sajjad Ali sang: “Akhhan ch dariya kol ke, main zakhmaan di thaan te ror laan ” I turn my eyes toward the river, and place stones upon my wounds. Once the rivers of Punjab were where we placed our wounds. The Ravi carried the verses of saints. The Chenab bore the love songs of Heer and Ranjha. They were balms, metaphors, lifelines. Today, they are wounds themselves; raw, relentless, unforgiving. The rivers remind us that they are not obstacles, not commodities, not blank land for housing schemes. They are memory itself, and memory cannot be buried under concrete.
If we had listened, to the courts, to the planners, to the quiet warnings written in every monsoon, perhaps the Ravi would have remained gentle. Instead, it roars. It roars through the housing societies drowned boulevards, through Sialkot’s submerged factories, through the lives of villagers along the Chenab. It roars through every ordinance passed in the dark, every no-objection certificate stamped without care.
The waters will recede. They always do. Screens will flicker on to other crises. Politicians will cut more ribbons. Developers will sketch new brochures. The forgetting will be swift. Until the next cloudburst, the next dam release, the next reckoning.
But rivers do not forget. They remember their courses, their beds, their floodplains. They remember saints and poets, refugees and farmers. They remember where we once honoured them, and where we later betrayed them. They wait, patient as time. And when the skies open, they return, to remind you whose land this truly is.
