A River Runs back
By Amarjeet Sidhu
Speaking Tiger, 2025.
Fragile Threads that Bind Life to Vanishing Roots
By Pushpinder Syal
From the title, a reader might expect this novel to have something to do with nostalgia (Greek nostos – returning home, algos- pain). But what it turns out to be is something harder and more difficult – to look at the past without nostalgia, a sense of never being able to return. It traces the sad, slow decline of the `landed gentry’ - their entitled world, their robust fields and crops, but less robust progeny, their arrogance, smugness and alarm at the vanishing of their way of life, their clinging to some form of superiority and power.
The one character who remains to represent this past is Bibiji, the putthi teemeen (the contrary woman) who is the dominating sibling among the progeny of the Raigarh sardars. Though her sister Hardev has many talents (among which is being able to sing in a Surinder Kaur voice, or a Lata Mangeshkar voice or a shabad kirtan voice, whenever the occasion arises), Bibiji – Avtar Behenji – is the sharper, critical one, who knows everything, so doesn’t need to learn anything. She is brutal in putting down the youngest brother Baljit Singh, who is as quiet, unassertive and unremarkable as a child as he is in adulthood. When he does assert himself, Bibiji gives him short shrift. He tries to remove himself further and further by first simply moving his chair away to the bottom of the garden, then to a separate house in the city, and is constantly leaving that house to go away to various places. According to his family, including Bibiji, he marries below his class, so she makes sure she has nothing to do with his wife. For her, men are only useful in so far as they do what she says, like her loyal retainer Nachhatar. She ignores Nachatar’s wife, who in turn has the choicest abuses reserved for that `Bibiji’ whose service her husband has chosen above his own family. But Bibiji is unfazed by any of it. She is the strong woman, the dominating `Bebe’ found in many Punjab families, presiding over family affairs and controlling what’s left of the ancestral lands/property.
The trajectory of her life is in fact inclusive of the story of the members of many landed families, most of whom are entirely directionless - the brother who starts many adventures in business or trade, but is unable to carry anything through, the son who picks up quarrels and is finally killed in land rivalry, the daughter who casually runs away, and just as casually comes back to do fashion design, the fathers who sit with their whisky, or stomp around with shotguns – none of them actually doing any work:
Father never did a day's work, though he was sent to study medicine in England. He returned with an engineering degree, married the daughter of the Sidhpur Sardars and spent the rest of his life riding his Indian Chief motorcycle or driving the Sunbeam two-seater, its top down, with mother, or the children, or alone. When older, he walked through the village lanes or fields, or just inspected his collection of stamps and coins, books and magazines, and walking sticks, that is, when he was not with his whiskey and guns or preparing for a shikar trip. (p. 62)
And then, later, one sharp damning narrative comment: `Miscegenation had left its scars on the Sardars’. (p.120). Generally, Amarjit Sidhu does not elaborate on aspects of the economic and political situation in Punjab, but the text gestures towards those realities by delicate strokes of the brush around characters and the old house and land, instead of overt narrative commentary. Through it we can see the decline of the true spirit of farming in Punjab for which the high caste Jats are mostly responsible, and the advent of the Bihari labourers who are resented, but have become indispensable. This is poetically rendered, as the poet Surjit Pattar has also done in his famous poem `Aaya Nand Kishore’, the story of a child of a migrant labourer for whom Punjab becomes home. Today, the landlord families who benefited the most from the `Green Revolution’, the electricity subsidies and support prices oppose the return to multi-cropping and diversity in favour of retaining the kanak-chona (wheat-rice) pattern that they are so used to growing, in spite of heavy soil degradation, water shortage and reduction of land holdings.
In the novel, the old world of these families is contrasted with the onrush of new roadside shops and eateries, new aspirations of city life, growth of rural slums on the periphery of fields, the recalcitrant attitudes and silently rebellious actions of the next generation who vote with their feet to get out of all this. What the writer does not touch upon is the way the spaces of these old farms have been appropriated by the newly successful cohorts of the music industry, the armies of immigration agents, the drug traders and the post militancy scenario of gang shootings outside farms and `marriage palaces’. But this is understandable, as the frame provided is that of Bibiji’s observations. The spare, unemotional prose suggests - `you can fill in the blanks, this is inevitably where it’s going.’
The quiet tenor of Bibiji’s reflections on change covers a deep sadness at the passing of things. The question of regret does not arise, or the self-questioning that perhaps it might be her very urge to control that had been the problem. Some of the other characters certainly think so, but according to her there was no problem if only they would listen to her. She was not afflicted, it was others’ stupidities and afflictions she had to put up with, and comment on with cutting disdain. But the writer, with a careful, considered use of dialogue between his characters, still manages to create an enabling identification with Bibiji. Being consistently with her as she watches the world from the window of her Ambassador car, being taken all the way to her childhood in Rangoon, being involved in the memories of the books on `etiquette’ that she read while growing up, builds a very specific sense of the person, touched with understated poeticality. An instance is the repetition of a single sentence woven into Bibiji’s train of thought that becomes a poignant refrain. The main moment in the novel is Bibiji’s hearing of her brother Baljit’s death, her travelling in her green Ambassador to attend the cremation and her return to her solitary home. Through the day, Bibiji unravels in her mind, her family history, the people who were part of it, the snippets of her childhood and youth, coming back to one sentence: `Baljit Singh was dead’….`Now Baljit Singh was dead in Golf Greens...’, `Now Baljit Singh too was gone, Now no-one will remember...’ “Baljit Singh, I’m talking to you”, she said. But: `Baljit Singh had made his final escape. She looked at him now. He was a body covered by a white sheet.’ (p.103)
This recurrent thought carries all the grief, all the despair, and the irrevocable sense of the past into which people disappear one after another. `It is always about loss, never about gain,’ Bibiji thought, holding her palm for a few seconds on Baljit Singh’s cold forehead. `Now there was no one that remembered. Only Nachhatar clung on.’ (p.33) Bibiji’s present has only this connection with Nachhatar, deeply evoked through just one piece of dialogue: “Don’t you die before I do, Nachhatar” she said. “No, Bibiji”.
While some elements in this novel evoke another narrative, Attiya Hussain’s Sunlight On a Broken Column about the era of the fading Muslim aristocracy in Lucknow, the narrative style of A River Runs Back is based on an imagistic turn which is very specific in sketching of certain moments. The real impact of the book is such that after reading it once, a compulsion is felt, to turn back, to re-read and re-capture the memories in a circuitous way, and that is perhaps how the river (of memory) runs back. It is in the half-articulated silences and terse dialogues that the poetry inherent in this twilight world emerges to provide a nuanced portrait of the characters who inhabit it as shadows – all too briefly, for soon they too will be gone. The echoes of their voices will remain on these pages, in the stamp of these word images, just like the peacocks and parrots embroidered on sheets and pillow covers in that distant time when there was a wicker chair in the garden on which a woman sat, talking to a man who listened while drawing lines in the dirt with a twig, and saying:
“Yes, Bibiji.”
About the Author
Pushpinder Seyal is a writer and a former professor of Punjab University, Chandigarh.