A River Of Stories

Manu Joseph treks the frozen Zanskar River in Kashmir and finds there is magic, beauty and humour even in the most arduous journey.

- Manu Joseph

He says magic is a lazy way of telling a story. It is reasonable, then, that he would have quarrels with supernatural tales, like The Famished Road by Ben Okri, which opens with these words: “In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry.”

How can a river become a global road, and how can it be hungry? As in sports, he says, doping should be condemned in literature, too. But there are times when even a person like him accepts that magic poetry may describe an irrefutable reality. A truth that can be framed by a poet’s hallucination has to be exquisite—or terrifying. At the moment, what he feels is terror. He is about to walk on a road; the road was once a river.

In the winter, the rivers of the Himalayas freeze. There is one that becomes a narrow, serpentine road of ice. Beneath the ice, the river trickles, flows, gushes, but the surface is hard and the mountain people who live near its banks have learnt how to walk on it. And they walk great distances for mundane reasons. Sometimes they burst into a run even though they have time for everything. They carry enormous things on their backs or in a sleigh on which, among the utensils and vegetables, sit their children, who have blood-red cheeks as though they’ve been slapped. The snow leopards and foxes, too, know how to walk on the ice road.

He has, after not much thought, decided to walk on the frozen river for eight days. Much can go wrong. Because the road was once a river, it would be always hungry.