Water and Word

Mohenjo-daro (source). Summer. The river still where they left it.Tens of thousands of people and a grid you could set a watch to.One brick (source). One ratio. ایک اینٹ۔ One to two to four.Makran coast to the mountains — same brick, same floor.Somebody agreed on something across a thousand miles of groundand left us not one line on who decided, or how, or when.Bathroom in the house. Drain in the street. Drain under the street.پانی صاف۔ Water leaves clean. London waits four thousand years for that.

راجا کہاں ہے؟ Now go and look for the king. دیکھو۔No throne room. نہیں۔ No tomb with the gold still in it. نہیں۔No wall with a war painted on it, no man up on a horsewith his boot on a smaller man. نہیں۔ Not one.A hundred years of digging, and the grandest thing out of the groundwas a bath (source). Watertight. Lined with tar. Nobody knows what for.There's a stone head in a case they call the Priest-King (source) —they call him that because they had to call him something.Same reason we call the city "the mound of the dead."That's our name for it. They never told us theirs.

کوئی تخت نہیں۔ کوئی تاج نہیں۔ کوئی نام نہیں۔No throne, no crown, no name for the king.Just the drains (source), just the drains, running under everything.کس نے لکھا؟ Who was holding the pen? (کون؟)

Here's the whole archive. Soapstone seals the size of your thumb.A bull. A unicorn that isn't one. A man sat with his knees out wide.And signs (source) — four hundred of them, maybe seven, depends who's counting.Five to a line. The longest they've got would fit on a train ticket.

That's not a chronicle. That's a label. A tally. ایک نام۔ A name on a sack of grain.And there's no Rosetta — nothing written twice, once in a tongue we kept.زبان نہیں معلوم۔ We don't know the language. Not the family, not the grammar, not the sound.Some of them say it isn't writing at all. And they might be right.

A hundred years. The best minds of a century, the grants, the careers,the universities, the computers, the statistics, the papers, the peers —شہر کچھ نہیں کہتا۔ And the city says nothing back. Politely. Completely. چپ۔The oldest us there is, and it will not take my call.

کوئی تخت نہیں۔ کوئی تاج نہیں۔ کوئی نام نہیں۔No throne, no crown, no name for the king.Just the drains, just the drains, running under everything.کس نے لکھا؟ Who was holding the pen? (کون؟)

Eighteen fifty-six. Laying line from Lahore down to Multan (source).They need ballast. Hard core. Something to pack under the sleepers, hold the rails true.And there's a mound out there in the Punjab — اینٹ — four thousand years of baked brick,nobody using it, nobody asking, nobody with the first idea what it is.

لے گئے۔ So they took it. سب۔ Enough to ballast a hundred miles of track.The first city anybody ever built — crushed, and laid down flat,so the cotton could make the port on time.And they weren't villains, the men doing it. They were engineers. They just weren't reading.

And here's the part I can't put down.کاغذ۔ The paperwork for that railway survives. All of it. Every sheet.The tonnage. The cost per mile. The names of the men who signed it off.پڑھو۔ We can read every word of the receipt and not one word of the thing it was written on.

کوئی تخت نہیں۔ کوئی تاج نہیں۔ کوئی نام نہیں۔No throne, no crown, no name for the king.Just the drains, just the drains, still running under everything.کس نے لکھا؟ Who was holding the pen?I know who was holding the pen.

Half four. Raining."But where are you from from?"Give me a minute.

वितस्ता, असिक्नी — असिक्नी, वितस्ता — वितस्ता, असिक्नी, परुष्णी।Jhelum (source), Chenab (source) — Chenab, Jhelum — Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi (source).परुष्णी, विपाशा — विपाशा, परुष्णी — परुष्णी, विपाशा, शुतुद्री।Ravi, Beas (source) — Beas, Ravi — Ravi, Beas, Sutlej (source).Say it back. Say it back. Say it back to me.

Same water. Every name on it replaced.No walls this time, no grid, no drains, कुछ नहीं, nothing to dig.Nobody's found the city because there isn't one to find.They didn't build. They said. सप्त सिन्धवः — seven rivers, that's the country,not a king, not a capital, just water and how much.Their best story is a god cracking a mountain open to let a river out.Ten thousand six hundred verses. One thousand and twenty-eight hymns.Out here. In the cold. By men watching the water move.And not one of them wrote a single word of it down.

वितस्ता, असिक्नी — असिक्नी, वितस्ता — वितस्ता, असिक्नी, परुष्णी।Jhelum, Chenab — Chenab, Jhelum — Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi.कागज़ नहीं। क़लम नहीं। No paper. No pen. Nothing to burn.Say it back. Say it back. Say it back to me.

Learn it straight. Learn it word by word. Learn it two forward, one back.जटा। Forwards, backwards, forwards. घन। Again, and deeper, and again.Eleven ways, so if one syllable slips the pattern breaks and you hear it break.Error-correcting code, twelve hundred BC, and it's built out of men.Not a library. A relay. मुँह से कान तक — mouth to ear —father to son, sixty generations, and the drift is almost nothing.And the alphabet turns up. It's right there. And they say no.Because the sound was the thing, and a page is a picture of a noisethat somebody has already stopped making.

वितस्ता, असिक्नी — असिक्नी, वितस्ता — वितस्ता, असिक्नी, परुष्णी।Jhelum, Chenab — Chenab, Jhelum — Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi.कागज़ नहीं। क़लम नहीं। No paper. No pen. Nothing to burn.Say it back. Say it back. Say it back to me.

Now listen to the words themselves.पितर। Pitar. Pater. Padre. Father.मातर। Matar. Mater. Madre. Mother.नव। Nava. Novus. New.देव। Deva. Deus. Divine.राजन्। Rajan. Rex. Regal. Royal.सप्त। Sapta. Septem. Sept. Seven.Seven rivers. Say the number in any of them, it's the same number.

Seventeen eighty-six. Calcutta. A judge on the Company's payroll,William Jones, stands up in front of the Asiatic Society and says:Sanskrit, Greek and Latin are too alike to be an accident —they have sprung, he says, from some common source.Man's out here administering a colonyand he's just worked out he's related to it.

कागज़ नहीं। क़लम नहीं। No paper. No pen. Nothing to burn.Say it back. Say it back. Say it back to me.

From the mouth, the priest.From the arms, the soldier.From the thighs, the trader.पाँव से। From the feet. Everybody else.Book ten. The last one in. The newest part of the oldest thing we have.Three thousand years, and it's still deciding who gets a chair.

वितस्ता, असिक्नी — असिक्नी, वितस्ता —Say it back.

देवानंपिय पियदसि लाजा हेवं आहा।Thus speaks King Piyadasi, Beloved of the Gods.

I took Kalinga (source) in the ninth year.A hundred and fifty thousand carried away.A hundred thousand killed.And many times that number died after.

Cut the numbers into the rock. Not the victory — the numbers.I am the first king in the history of the worldto publish his own body count and call it a wound.Read it. I had it cut so you would have to read it.

Because after — walking it — I saw what a province looks likewhen you have finished winning it.The priests. The householders. The ones with nothing to do with any of it,dead in the road outside their own front doors.

And I had them cut the word for sorrow into the stone.Not glory. Sorrow. I am a king. I chose the word.

देवानंपिय पियदसि लाजा हेवं आहा।Thus speaks King Piyadasi, Beloved of the Gods.

So. No more drums for war. Drums for dhamma.भेरीघोष gone. धम्मघोष in its place.Banyan on the roads for shade. Mango groves. Wells at every half-kos.Rest houses. Medicine for men, and medicine for animals —and where the herbs would not grow, I had them carried and planted.

In my kitchen, hundreds of thousands were killed every day for curry.Now: two peacocks and a deer. And the deer, not always.And in time, not even these three.Judge me by the kitchen if you like. I'll take that.

Honour the other man's sect. Speak well of it.Whoever praises his own and damns his neighbour'sdoes his own the greater damage.I had that cut too. Two hundred and fifty years before your era.

देवानंपिय पियदसि लाजा हेवं आहा।Thus speaks King Piyadasi, Beloved of the Gods.

I put it on rock so it could not be carried off.On pillars polished till a man can see his own face in them.In Prakrit for my people. In Aramaic for the west.And in Greek — Πιοδασσης — for the ones who came with Alexander and stayed.They rendered my dhamma as εὐσέβεια. Piety. Close enough.

Two thousand two hundred years I have been standing at the side of a roadsaying: be gentle with your servants. Give to the poor.Do not slaughter. Listen to the other man's god.Perfectly legible. A finger deep in granite. Across a subcontinent.

And for most of that time, not one person walking pastcould read a single word of it.

Eighteen thirty-seven. Calcutta. James Prinsep (source), assay master at the mint,cracks Brahmi (source) — and the letters open like a door.And a name falls out that nobody had attached to anybody:Devanampiya Piyadasi. Beloved of the Gods.It takes them a while to work out that's Ashoka (source).Fifty years after Jones (source). Same city. Same payroll.

His wheel (source) is on the flag.His lions (source) are on the emblem.His stone is on the passport.Two thousand years unread —and then a whole country's front door.

مَوْسِم — mawsim — the season.In on me in April. Out on me in October.Nobody sails against me. Nobody argues.اِنْتَظِر। Wait. اِنْتَظِر। Wait.

I'm a wind.Up out of the southwest in April, wet, and I don't stop until September.Then I turn and come back the other way till March.Twice a year. Every year. Since before anyone was counting.

You can't buy me. You can't tax me. Your flag's a piece of cloth out here.Know when I'm coming and you cross an ocean in forty days.Don't, and you're dead three weeks out with a hold full of pepper (source)and a very good map.Learn me, and the sea is a road. Ignore me, and the sea is the sea.

They named me after a season. مَوْسِم। Mawsim.Arab sailors' word. Portuguese sailors took it — monção.You took it off them. Monsoon.Even my name came to you by boat.

مَوْسِم — mawsim — the season.In on me in April. Out on me in October.Nobody sails against me. Nobody argues.اِنْتَظِر। Wait. اِنْتَظِر। Wait.

Out of Muziris (source): pepper. കുരുമുളക്. فلفل.Out of Muziris: cardamom, ginger, cinnamon, pearls.Out of Gujarat: cotton, indigo, carnelian.Out of Ceylon: sapphires and elephants.Out of the Ganges: nard, malabathrum, muslin by the bale.Into India: wine, coral, glass, copper, tin —and money. Money in great quantity. The handbook (source) says it twice.

And there's an invoice (source). Not a metaphor. A real one.Second century. One ship. The Hermapollon. Muziris to Alexandria.Nard and ivory and cloth, and the paper is still in Vienna.One cargo: about seven million sesterces.A rich Roman's whole fortune. Floating. On one hull. On me.

And Pliny (source) in Rome doing the arithmetic, complainingIndia drains the empire fifty million a year.ذَهَب। Gold. Going one way.He's right about the number. He just hates the direction.

مَوْسِم — mawsim — the season.In on me in April. Out on me in October.Nobody sails against me. Nobody argues.اِنْتَظِر। Wait. اِنْتَظِر। Wait.

Nobody plans for the waiting.You come in on me in May. You cannot leave until October.Five months on a beach, in a town where you don't have the languageand you do have money.So you rent a room. Then a warehouse. Then you marry somebody.

Not conquest. Weather.Arab traders on the Malabar (source) coast doing business for generations,and Islam arrives on this coastline by ship and by marriagecenturies before it ever arrives up north on a horse.

Copper plates (source) in Kerala, land and privilege to a Jewish (source) merchant.Syrian Christians (source) there so long nobody remembers them arriving.Mosque, synagogue, church and temple on one wet strip of coast,every one of them standing there because of a windthat will only blow one way at a time.

A thousand years like this.Everybody's boats. Everybody's gods. Nobody's ocean.

And then, in the year fifteen hundred and ten,a man arrives with cannon on the deck,and he doesn't want to trade with you.He wants to sell you a piece of paperthat gives you permissionto sail on me.