We lie on our stomachs on either side of the tiny culvert. There is a high stakes race in progress and we are helping our own candidates along with long sticks, in case they get trapped in rocks or plants on the way. This is the paper boats regatta held in the canals that crisscross the area my grandparents live in and all the cousins are keen competitors. The rules are clear, your own candidate can be pushed along the tiny waterway but no attempt can be made to pierce another boat’s body or to drown it by splashing water on its prow. The water flows swiftly, carrying our boats under the culverts to the other side, and we skip and race alongside the bank yelling exhortations to our own boats to not obey the laws of physics and not collapse and drown, ever, ever.
The canals are everywhere, the canals are Dehradun. My grandfather loves the canal system, to him it’s an old friend. He tells us the canals were introduced to Dehradun over 300 years ago and the water was drawn from the Rispana river and the Bindal river, that flow in the area. He refers to it as chotti nadi – the little river system. He is a tree scientist and the restless swirling canals have helped water the trees he has studied, monitored and grown from seeds, grafts and cuttings, all his life.
The canals are everywhere, the canals are Dehradun. They gush and eddy alongside the roads leading any place we go. One smallish canal races and rushes right outside my grandparents gate, so we step across it to go in and out, we pick up plants that grow alongside and see which leaves are hygroscopic, the water beading into perfect pearls on the surface, we hang worms on strings and tie them to sticks and sit on the banks of a larger canal for hours trying to fish, we crisscross the little rivers to go fetch the doctor for a sick cousin, we traipse alongside them to drop off kheer my grandmother has made for her favourite nephew, we watch our grandfather and his neighbours make tiny little channels to draw water from them or drain water into them, we see them all huddle together to desilt a certain section or get the accumulated leaves from under one culvert cleared up.
The canals are everywhere, the canals are Dehradun. Inside the forest where my grandfather used to work and which we know like the back of our hand, the canals show up gurgling under red bricked culverts covered with dark green moss. They are familiar and reassuring. At some places, dhobis are allowed to wash clothes on the sides of the canals. We kids always love coming upon them. We don’t know what art is, but we can see the choreography in the way the dhobis beat the clothes without mercy, flinging them against the rocks lining their canal ghats, we gawp, slack-jawed and admiring at the way the immaculately hung washing in the backdrop billows and dances in the breeze.
The canals are everywhere, the canals are Dehradun. When my grandmother needs us to get some rations from the shop she frequents, we jump. The shop owner who we all know as Lala ji has a shop sitting literally on the canal and a working atta chakki, a water-propelled flour grinder where the wheat my grandmother grows in her home can be fed in one end and with impressive groaning and clanking, atta appears at the other. Lala ji is of indeterminate age but routinely kind to us, allowing us to inspect how the frothing canal water runs his chakki. Despite being the grandchildren of a scientist, we all know it’s not water, it’s magic that dunnit.
The canals are everywhere, the canals are Dehradun. My grandmother claims she can’t digest any rice other than the Dehradun basmati, and my grandfather says it’s not just the wonderful soil but the sweet and icy water from the Rispana fed through the canals that’s responsible for its distinctive taste. He shows us notches in certain parts of the canal where horses could drink from, in the days when tongas were the prime means of transport. He claims the reason Dehradun is so temperate is because the canal system cools the air, making fans unnecessary. When I declare one day that I will be prime minister, my grandfather treats it as inevitable. Nehru’s family is called Nehru because they lived next to a nahar (a canal) and if he can be the PM, so can you, he says with irrefutable logic.
It’s 2025 and roads and flyovers and malls and coffee shops abound in Dehradun. But the river with the sweetest water, the Rispana, no longer sings her song, she has been quiet for years. The mighty Bindal on whose banks my grandfather’s cousin culled tigers at the behest of the forest department — is remembered only because there is a perpetually jammed bridge over where it used to once flow. And the chotti nadi canals that were everywhere and that were Dehradun — they are just a fever dream from our childhood. Built over and concretised, the delicate ferns and duckbacked plants that grew on the banks a faint memory, the everyday rhythms of life lived alongside it faded and worn.
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I remember. And I grieve for the canals that were everywhere, that were Dehradun. For myself and for the paper boats that we raced in them, that despite our entreaties and prayers are now drowned forever. For my children and all the children who will never know the rivers and the little rivers of my hometown. And how they could be fellow travellers, familiar companions, much loved friends.
Vatsala Mamgain loves food, cooking, running, trees, reading and telling long-winded stories
