There is something extraordinary about an ordinary canal bridge in Punjab. A tractor rumbles across, a motorcyclist sounds his horn, and perhaps a buffalo stands in the shallows below. The water moves steadily past, looking much like the water in any other canal. Nothing announces that it may be travelling from one great river to another, across land that had separated them for thousands of years. We have grown so accustomed to these waterways that we have forgotten how remarkable they are.

A natural river announces itself. It has a valley, a history, a name older than the country through which it flows. The Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi and Sutlej were known long before Pakistan existed. The Rig Veda called them Vitasta, Asikni, Parushni and Sutudri, and imagined them as living presences, moving towards the great Sindhu, the Indus, like mothers towards their calves.

But geography was less sociable than poetry. Across the Punjab plains, the rivers kept their distance. The Jhelum ran beside the Chenab with the Chaj Doab between them; the Rechna lay between the Chenab and the Ravi, and the Bari between the Ravi and the Sutlej. They shared a plain, a climate and a destination, and they never once called on each other. The only meetings came at the end. At Trimmu the Jhelum entered the Chenab. At Panjnad the Sutlej came in from the east to join the gathering, and at Mithankot the whole family, five rivers folded into one, gave itself to the Indus. A confluence is a meeting at the close of life. The rivers met the way old families meet at funerals, when there is nothing left to discuss. To join downstream was merely to surrender a name. For as long as anyone could remember, this was the only courtesy the rivers knew. Then engineers began teaching the rivers to visit.

The idea was older than Pakistan. In the early twentieth century, the Triple Canal Project had already demonstrated that water could be transferred between river systems, carrying the Jhelum towards the........

© The Friday Times