Text: Sanjit Bhakta Pradhananga

Photos: Milan Poudel

TS Elliot once described a river as a “sullen, brown god,” worshipped not just as a frontier but also for the sustenance that people draw from it. It then is of little surprise that the first civilisations sprang on the banks of rivers, with early humans using the brown god and its flood plains to transform their societies from hunting and gathering to making the monumental switch to agriculture.

Even today, all great cities boast their own rivers. New York dwarfs over the Hudson, Siene cuts through the heart of Paris, Tigris purrs past Baghdad and the Congo bleeds through Brazzaville and Kinshasa. Kathmandu, too, has its Bagmati, sludging lazily past the decaying, decrepit streets. But, perhaps, of all the murky rivers of the world, Bagmati epitomises how the brown god is “Unhonoured, unpropitiated by worshippers of the machine.” Of how the once conveyor of commerce transforms into just a problem confronting the builders of bridges.

But rivers are patient, to some degree, waiting, watching, waiting, even as people slink over them with their noses covered. Keeping its seasons and its rages, ready to remind humans of all that they choose to forget. For even if the dwellers of cities forget their brown god; it continues to nourish those that choose seek it out.

Kathmandu may have watched Bagmati die when it decided to pump its sewers into it, but if anything, the brown god reminds us is that a river will continue to live. It will survive, even thrive.