A journey of rich imagery

By Dilshan Boange

The heart of a writer is one that can connect with the beauty of the world and then recreate it in writing. When reading Along the Red River the autobiography of veteran Assamese journalist Sabita Goswami one cannot help, but see how her heart blends with the beautiful environs she travels through and how her words capture those moments and narrate to her reader with a beguiling lyrical touch. I wish to discuss certain instances in the narrative where poetic imagery gives insight to the aesthetic pulse in the journalist Goswami and how the metaphoric aspects relate to the title of the book.

The author speaks of how her home state of Assam is a lush and well hydrated land. One cannot help but feel that water is always a very prominent image that relates to the aesthetic and cultural sense of the narrator. Starting from the very beginning I wish to touch on how the image of the Brahmaputra River is delivered to the reader. Except in a few instances, the general form of reference refers to the great body of water, “the mighty Brahmaputra”.

Sabita on the banks of the Jiya Bhroli, a tributary of the Brahmaputra River

The Brahmaputra is the principal river in India which has a male name and is believed to have been created by Parashu Rama, the sixth incarnation of Lord Vishnu. The manner in which the author speaks of the great holy river to the Hindus makes one feel as though the cultural sensibility portrayed through the book shows how it is treated with some sense of personification.

Romancing rivers

The presence of rivers as givers of life and also bringers of destruction to the people can surely make those natural entities seem forces requiring reverence. The awesomeness of great natural wonders and sights often inspire in us feelings of wanting to become almost one with those elements. The nearness to such elements enchants us. And the author speaks in her lyrical pulse of a writer to the reader of such moments. Chapter 6 of the book says, “On a bright and sunny morning our ship anchored at Panaji docks. I was enchanted by the glistening beauty of the Mandovi River... I was fascinated by the new city and the flowing Mandovi that merges into the vast sea.”

Being a book of reflection that has its share of nostalgia, Goswami paints a mesmerising picture that romances moments bound to imagery of the landscape. Chapter 19 opens with the following: “My thoughts, like always took wind and escaped to my wonderful childhood and the exciting days of my youth.

The lush paddy fields, visible from the front yard of the house... My romantic youth when the intoxicating fragrance of kanchan and sewali flowers perfumed the air, the vast expanse of tiny white wild flowers in the backyard that glowed in the purity of the moonlit night, the colourful little fish that frolicked in the clear waters of the Jia Bhoroli river.”

The words speak of the heart of a poet who paints with words residing within Goswami as she unfolds herself for her readers to weave a narrative that is at times abundantly lyrical in its beauty of imagery.

Poignant moment

Just as the element of rivers and water merge with mirthful moments in the life of the author, she also reveals to her readers where the image of the river becomes woven with sorrowful events in her life as what she describes in Chapter 9 after casting her late husband’s ashes into the moving waters–“On the banks of the gurgling river Ganges, I sat taking stock of my own life. For a moment, I lost myself in the midst of the Ganges.

I felt as if the rumbling Ganges engulfed my insides. The Ganges is always revered as pure. Sitting on its banks, I pulled out from the depth of my heart my life’s sorrows, and pleasures and offered them to the pure Ganges!” The moment seems to be like a symbolic self cleansing through which the narrator sought to recreate herself in the image of the sacred river of pureness, and escape all the injuries suffered. What I found to be the most poignant and profound moment in the narrative that relates to how the author unveils her soul in the light of her bonding with landscapes and imagery of nature is found in Chapter 11. The moment comes in the wake of some rather challenging obstacles looming grimly in the mind of the author. “It was dark. As I walked out of the Municipal Corporation building, I looked at the vast Brahmaputra. I saw two tiny boats floating on the amber waters of the river.

On the western horizon the sun looked like a blood red sindoor bindi. I wanted to sit on the steps of Sukleshwar Mandir on the banks of the Brahmaputra to watch the sun set. I asked my husband to come with me. He did not refuse. Silently the two of us sat on the steps.

We didn’t utter a word. In the illusionary ambience created by the setting sun I expected an assurance. I hoped that my husband would hold my hand. He did not. Indifferent, he sat on a step above mine staring at the Brahmaputra, while I gazed at the setting sun.”

If Goswami had written this description purely from memory then surely that moment had been one that impacted her emotions incomparably, and one can clearly see the depth of emotions captured through that moment. The two tiny boats seen in the distance on the waters of the vast body of water would have seeped into her as metaphoric images of her and her husband.

And seeing the troubling times she faced, feelings of insecurity perhaps had lurked in her as to how the two boats in the distance will chart their course, and at what proximity to one another would they move could have been born in the subconscious of the author.

Describing the setting sun as a ‘red sindoor’ dot, which in Indian culture signifies a woman’s status of being a woman with husband, the narrative voice reveals a facet of her subconscious at that time, which is how the frame of mind had been set in the context of her thoughts of her marriage.

Had she, I wondered at that meditative moment, seen the face of ‘Kala’, the Hindu god of time, on the flowing ‘amber surface’ of that great body of water? Was it a moment of humbling revelation to her where the impermanence and mortality of man was shown against the magnificence of nature’s timelessness spoken through the mighty river whose age may not be measured in years but perhaps as ‘time’ itself?

The heart of the poet together with the pulse of the journalist weaves the texture of Along the Red River.

The ‘Red River’ being undoubtedly the mighty Brahmaputra, an element of nature that is surely very closely bound to the Assamese people and their conceptions of how the might and sanctity of Mother Nature can manifest as a single entity as old as the land and the memory of man.

And where does the river gain its redness one may ask? Leaving aside all explanations of geological and scientific discourses I will simply venture into the poetics of metaphor and imagery and link this symbol ‘the red river’ to the agony and turbulence that characterised the Assam Agitation which is at the heart of the book.

Years of violence

Surely there was much redness that the people of Assam saw in the years of violence that ripped asunder their civilian life. And for the people of Assam, like the journalist Goswami, the journey would have seemed like a journey along the waters of a forceful river that carried them off to destinations that they may not have been always predetermined.

The course of fate can be likened to being carried away in a river, whose turns we may not know beforehand, whose awesome strength at times may not be escaped through the power of our limbs alone.

Sabita Goswami can claim today that she is one who has traversed the waters and negotiated the turbulent turns to emerge a soul who can now complacently look back to her days that tested her inner strengths, as the tides turned turbulent; and speak of how she has triumphed in her journey –Along the Red River.