The first bit’s an introduction to the essay below it. The essay itself from 2008. The introduction from 2016.

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In the summer of 2008, I was part of a group that travelled to North India on a tour of the “Himalayas,” as it were. After unforeseen circumstances turned the itinerary on its head, we spent four days in Leh by the banks of the Sindhu river. Our residence was an open field (bayalau: ಬಯಲು), with some ruminating cows and a group of donkeys for companions. Food was limited to dāl and chapāti, and sweet tea served the purpose of a snack. On one side of this field were mountains dry with the dust of summer; on the other the Sindhu river, beyond which stretched a vast, soundless, empty plain. On the banks of the river were some four stūpas, put up by the Vajpayee goverment. Besides venturing out to a nearby palace and to the nearest village for provisions, the group spent most of its time by the river—ruminating, chatting, reading, and playing some games of football at a height of 13,000 ft. above sea level. The darkness of the night was wholly unlike a city’s; a single oil-lamp oversaw dinner before it extinguished itself into the darkness around. While some of us went straight to our tents after dinner, some of us (I among them) went up to the stūpas on the riverbank, not saying much but listening to the darkness and the flowing river.

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On The Banks Of The Sindhu

There is something very restful about the gentle rhythmic sound of waves lapping along a river bank on a quiet night. It may be that the body, tired after the day’s toil and eagerly seeking a draught of “nature’s sweet restorative,” is charitably captive to the soporific lull of the lightly flowing river; or it may just be that the rushing river of the afternoon has bowed—like all else of nature’s creation—to the sanctity of the night; and shed its apparent urgency of the afternoon to rest under nature’s welcoming nightgown.

What is unmistakeable, however, is the tranquility of the occasion; the gently stretching soundless calm of the darkening night—a calm that induces contemplation and drowsiness in equal measure, each tempering the other just enough to leave one in a pleasant state of limbo between the two.

Sindhu, Sinnn-dhhu; the word enunciated slowly captures some of the intangible beauty of the Sanskrit language—its melodic rhythm that rolls so gracefully off the practised tongue the consequence of over three millennia of faithful oral transmission. Adding to the word’s fineness is the subtle impression of grandeur that is hid in its cadences—its sense as “the ocean”; “the great river” endowing it a fitting felicity.

To stand, therefore, on the banks of the flowing Sindhu seems to carry an importance; a consequence that lends the action a certain dignity. While perhaps not as revered as the Ganga and the Yamuna—and accordingly, not as dirty—it possesses a rich history that is unmatched by even the Ganga: for what it might lack in holiness, it makes up for through the grandeur of its presence.

For it is not only its place as one of our oldest rivers—old and vast and majestic enough to have lent its name to this land—that gives it an ineffable gracefulness; nor is it just its largely unsullied waters—immortal quivering remnants of some magnificent Himalayan glacier—that is its distinguishing feature. It is its quiet stateliness that is its hallmark.

Not for it the trifling sins of a hundred million Hindus; not for it a historic confluence with the hallowed river pair of the Ganga and the Saraswati. Wending and meandering its way down the imposing ridges of the higher Himalayas, past the evergreen valleys of Ladakh and through the Sindh province, it abides timelessly in its solitude; as transcendent in spirit as an ascetic who has seen the light.

For more about the essay, see notes.