Please provide an explanation of the poem "A River" by A.K. Ramanujan.

"A River" by A.K. Ramanujan describes the river in
Madurai, which...

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...is among the oldest continuously inhabited
cities in the Indian
peninsula.

This city is a
place of patterns, where the river dries up and then transforms to a swelling monster
that carries away homes, animals and people. However, the pattern has been going on (it
seems) for so long that the people, indeed even the poets, have little concern for these
events. However, the author seems to say, just because the river swells once a year and
people treat it like a "bad habit," does not mean that the effects
of such a catastrophe are insignificant.

The beginning of
the poem describes the dried up river, and scenes that people take note of
casually—enough that the writer describes stones as animals—a charming
observation:

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...the wet stones glistening like
sleepy

crocodiles, the dry
ones

shaven water-buffaloes lounging in the
sun…

However, there is
foreshadowing in the next line, which will lead to images that are anything
but charming.

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The poets only sang of the
floods.

When the flooding
begins, everyone pays attention, though much the way they do when the river dries up;
there is little—if any—alarm, and their notice of the amount of
water seems conversational in nature. The water rises; it is measured. Three village
homes are carried off, and two cows that seem to get swept away as regularly as the
flooding occurs. However, one small note is made, almost offhandedly, tucked away
between floating houses and cows—to demonstrate how unconcerned the townspeople
are:

...and
the way it carried off three village houses,

one pregnant
woman

and a couple of
cows

named Gopi and Brinda as
usual.

One wonders how the
people can be so unaffected…and then the writer notes that the
poets—even the new (young) ones, react in much the same
way:

The new
poets still quoted

the old poets, but no one
spoke

in verse

of the pregnant
woman

drowned…

This
tragedy builds in the writer (and the reader) like the flooding waters. We want to ask,
"What do you mean, nobody spoke about the pregnant woman who drowned?!"
This poet cannot remain quiet, and he is not
unaffected. He makes the loss real and meaningful to the reader—she is drowned "with
perhaps twins in her."

"Oh, no," we think, and having
absorbed what we thought was the most horrible
image—the drowned pregnant woman—we discover that it can, and
is, more
horrible. "Twins." The loss is greater: not just of mother and child—but of mother, and
two babies swimming within their mother as she
(and they) drowns in the river…and the people and the poets make no note of
it.

Our sense of loss increases: we read about the babies
within, "kicking at blank walls / even before birth." The poet reminds the reader once
again of the man: "he," who says "the river has water enough to be poetic about only
once a year…" and again indifferently lists the "fatalities" like items on a shopping
list—the houses, the pregnant woman, and the cows. Our poet wants his readers to be
painfully aware of the loss of the woman: even the readers who never knew her—and we
should be, as should the people of Madurai. If her neighbors choose
not to notice or remember it, we can pay tribute by remembering her
and marking—even in the expanse of the wide world—her loss. The poet makes sure of
this:

...one
pregnant woman

expecting identical
twins

with no moles on their
bodies,

with different coloured
diapers

to tell them
apart.