ARUNASSAM
an e magazine from ASSAM & NAGALAND

It seems so essential to put down one’s roots, and by doing so, acquire a sense of permanence and solidity, a feeling of belonging in a reality that, on the other hand, is so elusive that it always escapes us. But our existence comes to an end. Then, as the French writer Andre Marlaux has put it, ‘Death transforms life into destiny.’ Those who survive try to recall all the ‘whens’ and ‘wheres’ of the deceased, as if this poor recollection of the landmarks of a life could again give some consistency to what once was and is no more.

Having thus recounted Aroon’s whereabouts, I have indeed transformed his life into destiny. But, by doing so, I have sketched a lifeless map of facts and places to convey nothing of Aroon’s love for life, his energy, his openness, his curiosity towards places and people, his perpetual search for knowledge and understanding. How could those dry and petrified, render the way he was attuned to the places where he stayed, how they transformed and enriched his own personality and shaped his existence? His intelligence and warmth, his acute sense of observation and humour allowed him to shape people’s feelings and interests and, at the same time transcend them by taking distances and making allowances.

It is said all civilizations develop on the bank of rivers. In a similar way, I think that what we are is not only shaped by our roots in certain places, but is moulded by the rivers that we come across. Does not life itself wind along like a river? Think of the fresh spring of childhood when nothing seems to exist but joy, game and laughter! Then comes the impetuous stream of youth, with its passions, love and ambitions. Life goes on with its twists and turns. There are times when one feels the mighty and invigorating flow of happiness and success, times when we seem to easily control the flux and tame it according to our will. There are periods when the course of things seems slow and tedious, times also of desperate flooding when we are helplessly carried along by forces beyond our control. Once, some 3 years back walking along the Rhine, Aroon and myself started reflecting- as we often did- about the passing of life. We quoted a verse by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus: ‘Panta rei’ ‘everything flows’ and ‘ you can never take twice a bath in a river because the water that flows in it, is never the same.’ Little did we realize that Aroon was soon to join the ultimate flow of life and death, and that his earthly remains would be scattered partly in the Ganges, and the Brahmaputra partly in the Rhine, to join the great oceans.

Beyond all what water symbolizes, beyond all the philosophical thoughts that it may inspire, I must say that Aroon had a fascination for rivers. During the last months of his life, although he was extremely weak, withdrawn and mostly silent, he still liked to speak about all the rivers he had seen and of which he kept a vivid memory. He told me about the Dhansiri river and the bend it makes in Golaghat. It was on the Dhansiri river that Aroon, a small awe-stricken child, in the dim light of dusk experienced his first religious feelings when he witnessed the ceremonies of immersion of Mother Durga and Goddess Kali in the river. He remembered how, as a young schoolboy, he used to go with his friends to the then newly-built bridge slightly outside Golaghat. It was so exciting to cross it and wonder at people enjoying the cool riverbank, doing their laundry or taking a ritual bath. It was all there, right on the river: the source of life and also the mysterious sign that there was something beyond and above. Aroon’s thoughts bought him back also to the Kolong river which separates Nagaon and Haiborgaon (Assam) where his father was born. Kolong was not yet polluted at that time and with his friends, he used to take bath in the river, carefully avoiding the deep and the dangerous middle of the bed. Later, he said, he felt so sorry to see the river invaded by ‘meteka’, the aquatic plants that slowly choked the flowing water. So the river of his youth was already awakening Aroon’s inquisitive mind to the problem of water pollution that was later in his life as an oceanographer and limnologist, to become his main center of interest.

But with the mixed feelings of young age, water appeared both as a source of fun and good time and as a danger. When crossing the bridge by train in upper Assam, the tumultuous flow of the Dihang river always filled Aroon with fear, as if some life threatening force was lurking in its water. But Aroon was no coward and, always the explorer, he nearly drowned once in a pond in a remote place where his father stayed as a forest officer. Thinking back about all the anecdotes that he recalled, I realize how strange and how strong were Aroon’s bonds with rivers and waters. As a young man, crossing a bridge over the Kakajan, between Jorhat and Golaghat in a jeep, he was suddenly ejected from the vehicle driven by his friend and fell right on a rock in the middle of the river. He was miraculously saved and could crawl out of the water, although he remained unconscious for quite a while. Was there really some evil and destructive force that bought him several times near death? In his horoscope, the danger coming from water was clearly mentioned… Much later, in 1968, while on a scientific cruise on the USN Eltanine, sailing towards Antarctica, Aroon was again about to loose his life. In the bitter cold of the Antarctic night he had to go out to take some scientific measurements. He slipped on the icy upper-deck and fell but could only at the last minute hold on the rail. Who would have noticed, in the middle of the night, that a man had fallen overboard in a water so cold that it would have killed him anyway within minutes?

Brahmaputra, Ganges, Rhine, Orinoco St Lawrence, Mississippi, ‘The Ole Man River’, Rio Grande, to name but a few, formed like a garland around which Aroon’s life winded. They taught him the power and beauty of nature: its gentleness and its violence, the impermanence of things and the necessity for each of us to not to grasp at things but rather to let them go.

Rivers had also the magical power of opening the sluice of Aroon’s poetic talent. Among all the poems he wrote, many of them were dedicated to rivers. The following verses were written in Tucupita, a small town in Venezuela, in March 1973. They seem somehow to sum up Aroon’s rich and wonderful life journey ‘to nowhere and yet to everywhere’.