"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.........

© The Express Tribune