We often recollect those idyllically happy and halcyon days of our childhood with great enthusiasm. Today, my thoughts were centred on ponds, which were once an integral part of our village life.
Ponds played crucial roles in the life and culture of our villages. Till a few decades ago, our village had a plethora of ponds. In olden days, almost all the households had their own ponds which catered to everyday needs for drinking water and irrigation.
These ponds were perennial and were consistently recharged by rain. The village ponds served the dual functions of flood control during the monsoon and irrigation during summer.
Ponds were an integral part of temples and sacred groves. While a huge pond is a feature of many temples, the sacred groves accommodated a number of them which vary in numbers and size in accordance with their vastness. Those ponds, which were home to many water plants, fishes and birds, formed an integrated ecosystem. The ponds would be fringed by dense thickets of various types of medicinal trees and shrubs which provided hiding places for birds and animals. The water percolating through the roots of such trees eventually got collected in the ponds and the devout believers had deep faith in their medicinal properties. Normally, the temple ponds would be protected by a wall or barbed wire fence.
Every year, before the annual festivities, the temple ponds would be drained and cleaned of mud allowing a fresh recharge of pristine waters. We the children thoroughly enjoyed the draining and cleaning of the vast temple pond. The drain water carried along with it a large number of fishes such as climbing perch and snakehead.
Within a couple of days after draining, the water would be recharged naturally reaching its original level. A flight of steps led to the bathing ghats where people used to wash their hands and feet before entering the temple. All temple ponds I have seen had a ubiquitous greenish colour imparted by certain algae. By the late 1960s, the practice of manual draining of temple ponds had been replaced with pumps driven by motors which indeed has taken away much of the thrill and charm of the pond cleaning.
We had a large pond in the northeastern corner of our homestead. Till the mid-1970s, this pond remained as the main source of drinking water in our locality. People from the immediate neighbourhood would come to collect water. The pond surface was completely carpeted with a thick layer of water cabbage. During rainy season, the water would breach the barrier and overflow to the front courtyard bringing with it a lot of fishes. It was a fascinating sight to see the white-breasted waterhen walking gleefully over the water surface.
Later, with the arrival of piped drinking water, the ancient pond became a victim of neglect and a few years ago it was unceremoniously filled up to build a house. Along with the pond, the waterhens too vanished forever, forming part of our collective memory.
Fast-paced urbanisation has killed the once ubiquitous village ponds and were completely erased from the landscape. Thus we lost open reservoirs for collecting rainwater leading to frequent flooding after heavy rain and during hot summer months exacerbated the shortage of potable water. Only the temple ponds survived the onslaughts because of the sanctity and traditional beliefs attached to them.
Claude Monet, the French painter, once remarked, “All of a sudden I had the revelation of how enchanting my pond was.”
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