Once, a river ran here.
Now, dust dances in its place like a ghost looking for its bones.
I stood on the cracked banks of what was once the Ravi River near my grandmother’s village in Punjab. My cousin, barefoot and curious, kicked a dry bottle cap across the dirt like a stone skipping across an invisible surface. He looked up and asked,
“Yahan paani kab aata tha?”
I didn’t have an answer.
As a child, I remembered the sound of water running—cool, confident, alive. Now the silence was louder. Fields that once rippled like green silk were stiff with thirst. Crops bent like old men, and the buffalo had disappeared, their watering holes replaced by pits of plastic and ash.
I didn’t come back to find the river. I came back because my grandmother passed away, and her funeral brought me to the land I had forgotten. But standing there, with dry earth under my feet and a burning sky above, I realized something: this land hadn’t just lost its people—it had lost its memory
It wasn’t just a river that vanished. It was a whole way of life.
Back in the city, we talk about climate change like it’s math—graphs, stats, rising degrees. But out here, it’s heartbreak. It’s the uncle who sold his land because the well dried up. It’s the mother who now walks four kilometers to fill two yellow cans. It’s the child who doesn’t know what a river is, but can name three brands of bottled water.
We blame the skies. We blame the politicians. But we rarely ask: what did we do?
I spoke to an old farmer, Saleem chacha, who pointed at the hills and said:
“Yeh toh bas intezaam ka masla hai. Paani chhupanahi, chhupayagayahai.”
He wasn’t entirely wrong. Dams mismanaged, canals clogged, trees chopped for highways, and rivers rerouted for greed. The system didn’t just neglect nature—it dissected it.
But I also met resistance. A young woman in Okara runs a seed bank out of her garage. In Thar, a group of children built a DIY water filter from sand and coal. In Islamabad, some friends formed “Pani Collective,” digging mini-check dams in hill areas to trap monsoon water. They aren’t waiting. They’re restoring memory.
APP30-290523 LAHORE: May 29 – Youngsters playing cricket in the dry beds of River Ravi in the Provincial Capital. APP/MTF/MAF/TZD/FHA
And I? I started small. Not with a dam or a protest. But with a bucket. Every morning, I collect grey water from our kitchen. I use it to water the lemon tree my mother planted the year I was born. It’s not heroic. It’s not even visible. But it’s mine.
We forget rivers the same way we forget people—not all at once, but by not saying their name. Not visiting. Not remembering.
So this is what I ask you to do:
Find one dry place in your life—a balcony, a sidewalk crack, a bare patch by your gate.
Pour water there. Drop a seed.
Give it a name. Call it Ravi. Or Chenab. Or whatever river once ran through your childhood.
And if you can’t plant, then protect. If you can’t build, then speak. If you can’t change everything, just change your corner.
Because rivers don’t die.
They wait.
For someone to remember them.
Rana Nafey Hassan
Student of School Mass Media and Communication BNU
