In our 4th-grade class, our geography book featured these amazing maps of Bangladesh. I was particularly drawn to the map where you could see the blue lines of the rivers throughout the map, connecting and spreading. It almost looked like the blue lines were holding the whole country together, like veins, carrying life through the land. I would often try to follow the lines with my finger and pretend I was travelling through these rivers. In my head, I would create scenarios of storms, moonlit nights, and moments of quiet beauty. 

 

Living beside the bank of the River Padma in Rajshahi, where storms often rise during the summer, sometimes bringing rain and sometimes just the sandy gusts of wind, I have witnessed the river changing its nature with every season. In summer, it arrived as wind and sand, in monsoon as roar and flood, in winter as a deceptive calm. Padma was never stable; it was always becoming something else.

 

In my 7th grade, I had to do an assignment on my neighbourhood. I lived just beside the river at the time. There was an old library where I went to interview some elderly neighbours. I don’t remember his name, but there was this 80-year-old gentleman who told me all the tales of how the very place we were sitting was full of forests once. Tigers would roam around, and the Padma lay far, far away. Still, he said, the roar of Padma was much scarier than the tigers.

 

My mother had a habit of singing while doing house chores, songs from her own childhood. Through her voice, Padma entered our home not as geography, but as melody. She often sang Sorbonasha Padma Nodi - a song where the Padma unfolded to me as a vast, never-ending, untamable wilderness. Padma here is sorbonasha- disastrous, Padma here has no shore, no boundary, no promise of arrival. The lyricist Abdul Alim says:

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পদ্মা রে তোর তুফান দেইখা 

পরাণ কাঁপে ডরে 

এই না আমায় মারিস নে 

তোর সর্বনাশা ঝড়ে।

 

Padma, seeing your storm,

My soul trembles in fear.

Do not kill me now

With your destructive winds. 

 

He does not curse the river; instead, he pleads with it. Fear and intimacy coexist. Padma is destructive, yet addressed as something alive, something capable of mercy.

That Padma feels unfamiliar to me; my childhood Padma was a bit arrogant but calm and silent. Her wilderness was only visible in the whirlpool where she collided with the dam near the bank- maybe as a protest, a resistance against attempts to stop a once mighty river. 

 

When I last visited her, she had lost all her glory, like a tired, old lady. The chars (a tract of land surrounded by the waters) rose from her body like wrinkles. The Padma from the song was long gone. 

 

Padma carries many stories within her, many names shaped by memory, song, and loss. But here, I choose to see her as Sorbonasha—not out of fear, but because I like to remember her as a mighty, all-powerful river - as a river that once refused to be contained. 

 

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