The River Never Forgets

"The River Never Forgets" is a haunting, poetic novella in which the Ganges, personified as a weary, wounded goddess, appears to a silent yogi named Chunmun Singh on a storm-lashed night at Rishikesh. Over the course of one cataclysmic encounter, she forces him to drink the full weight of her vast, ancient memory. Through twenty vivid, sensory-drenched chapters she relives the horrors she has been compelled to carry: the blood-soaked plains of Kurukshetra (replacing the misplaced Battle of the Ten Kings), Ajatashatru's weaponized flood, the terrified retreat of Alexander's armies who stopped short at the Beas River, dreading Her unseen presence (correcting the geographical conflation), Ashoka's eight-day river of corpses witnessed on the shores of Kalinga (correcting the impossible upstream float to Patna), betrayals at Chandawar and Plassey, the burning boats and Bibighar massacre of 1857, Partition's blood trains, the slow strangulation by modern dams, industrial poison, and the unending quiet murder of unborn girls. Each atrocity is rendered not as dry history but as intimate, physical violation—the taste of ghee-stuffed mouths, the smell of burning hair on boat-pyres, the thud of cannon-blown bodies raining into sacred water, the chemical burn of chromium on her skin. The river is never merely a backdrop; she is witness, victim, unwilling accomplice, and eternal mother who cannot reject even the children who kill her. By the end she stands before the yogi as a disintegrating crone of plastic and sewage, daring him to still call her "Mother" after everything humanity has poured into her. Chunmun's answer is wordless but absolute: he drinks the poisoned water, vowing lifelong penance. From then on he becomes the Silent Pilgrim, walking each year from Haridwar to Gangasagar, ritually drinking her filth and her purity alike in a futile yet unbreakable attempt to share her burden.