A.K.Ramanujan's "A River"

Madurai is a city celebrated for its temples and poets. The poets in Madurai quite often pen poems about cities and temples. Their poems narrate how every summer a river flowing through the Madurai reduced itself to a narrow stream, and how later it got flooded with rain waters. While the river is reduced to a narrow stream it cannot, its water cannot pass through the Watergate as the debris of straws and women's hair obstruct the flow. The bridge over this river is like puzzles of repaired patches. The stones of the bridges glisten once again with the onset of rain, and the dull ones retain their original hue.

The poets limit the subject of their writings to floods in the rivers .What Ramanujan implies is that poets only idealize or commercialize the situation,and nothing is done practically to prevent, or reduce the damage done by the devastation. A visitor to Madurai gets to hear of the impact of the flood-how the flood waters religiously washed away three village homes, one pregnant woman and several cows every year. As an imminent flood lurked over the people's minds they constantly talked about the rising water levels.

The poets objectively cited the lines composed by previous poets, little did they care for the pregnant woman drowned in the flood. The speaker brings out the poignancy of the situation by pointing out that perhaps the lady carried twins, and that maybe she could feel them before they crossed the threshold of 'existence'.

The visitor says that the water in the river was ample to provide poets with subject matter for their poems, though only once in a year .The poets seemed to feed on the tragedy. The tragedy recurs yet again, as three village houses, a couple of cows named Gopi and Brinda; and a pregnant lady expecting twins that lacked conspicuous moles to tell them apart. The image of the lady is a condensed one. From the exterior, only one life is lost. In reality ,however, there are three. The lives inside her do exist, but they are devoid of identity defined by the lack of moles, and their explanation in terms of statistics. In contrast, are the attribution of proper nouns to the cows-Brinda and Gopi.

The recurrence of the tragedy is to add to the poignancy and to underline the havoc wrought by the flood.