Islamabad, Pakistan – Seven decades ago, one of South Asia’s greatest fiction writers, Saadat Hasan Manto, published a short story set in a village in Pakistan’s Punjab province. The plot revolved around rumours of an Indian plan to “shut down” water to Pakistan by closing off rivers that irrigated the province’s crops.
A character in the 1951 story titled Yazid responds to that chatter by saying, “…who can close a river; it’s a river, not a drain.”
