March 6, 2026

Vyeth, Jhelum, Vitasta

Some rivers just flow. They do their thing, fill lakes, annoy geographers, appear on maps as a thin blue-ink squiggle and nobody makes a fuss. The Vitasta, or the Jhelum as the rest of the world insists on calling it (the British were nothing if not persistent with their renaming habits), is not one of those rivers. The Vitasta does not merely flow. It presides. And somehow, without my fully realising it, this river has been threading itself through every chapter of my life. From the cold morning ghats of Srinagar to a slightly battered kretch (kashmiri for a ladle) in an English suburban kitchen that, twenty-five years and six house moves later, still has things to say about my monj haakh.

The Origins

Before we get to the Koshur divers and the rain-drenched afternoons, we need to go back. All the way back. Because the Vitasta doesn’t just have a source. It has a genesis and it’s the kind that puts Norse mythology to shame.

According to the Nilamata Purana, the oldest surviving text of Kashmir’s history and mythology, the valley was once a vast lake called Satisar, home to a water demon who was making life generally miserable for everyone. Kashyapa Rishi, in the grand tradition of sages who don’t take nonsense lying down, drained the lake. But the valley needed water to sustain life. So the gods got involved, as they do and Lord Shiva obliged by striking the earth with his trident near the abode of Neelanaga. The opening measured exactly one vitasta (an old measure of distance, taken from the stretch between the thumb and little finger when the hand is fully extended) and through this fissure, Goddess Parvati herself gushed forth in the form of a river. Lord Shiva named her Vitasta himself.

She didn’t just flow. She arrived.

Verinag: Quiet Beginnings

She arrived at a spring called Verinag, tucked into the foothills of the Pir Panjal ranges in Anantnag district, roughly 80 kilometres south of Srinagar. The spring, also known as Nilakunda, is said to never dry up and never overflow. It simply is, season after season, century after century. Even the Mughal Emperor Jehangir was so enchanted by it that he built an octagonal stone basin and an arcade around it in 1620. His son Shah Jahan, not to be outdone, laid out a full garden beside it. The Archaeological Survey of India has since declared it a Monument of National Importance, which frankly feels like the bare minimum.

Lately, the Instagram algorithm seems to have worked something out. My feed is full of Verinag: the glittering spring, the arched stone arcade, the water so turquoise it looks artificially lit. Beautiful. Meditative. But missing one thing entirely. Mami, who came from that small but breathtaking lake town, would have watched every reel with great attention and even greater commentary. She always had a peculiar name ready for anyone who didn’t know whether they were coming or going.

The gap between the screen and the real thing is where grief tends to live. February marked a year since she left, quietly, the way the Vitasta moves through its deepest stretches: without fuss, without warning. March was always her month, her birthday folded into the beginning of spring. Now it holds both. The void she left hasn’t filled. It has simply become part of the landscape. Healing isn’t something you can see. It’s something you carry, the way the Vitasta carries the entire valley, without stopping, without ever being thanked for it.

I went to Verinag once. It didn’t just rain, it poured with vengeance that day. And yet the water of that spring glistened as though the sun was out, as if even the clouds knew better than to dull those waters. What stayed with me wasn’t the garden or the Mughal stonework but the stillness at the centre of the spring itself. Those calm waters rising up from the earth there have been doing so for so long that it had simply stopped being surprised by anything.

Srinagar: The City

From Verinag, the Vitasta flows northward, gathering pace, until she arrives at Srinagar. Here she doesn’t pass through the city. She is the city.

The Kashmiri word for the river, Vyeth, is how most locals actually know her. The old neighbourhoods of Srinagar are named after bridges, the famous kadals, seven historic wooden structures built between the 15th and 18th centuries from deodara timber, held firm not by bolts but by the weight of heavy rocks at their foundations.

Amira Kadal. Habba Kadal. Fateh Kadal….

Each one a neighbourhood, a postcode, a meeting point. “Second bridge” was as specific as a Srinagar address ever needed to get.

And then there is Purshayar, that ancient ghat and temple on the bank of the Jhelum, where on early mornings the river was never a backdrop. She was a participant.

The men in our family would take their dip at dawn. The brave ones, (and there was always at least one) would dive straight from the temple platform into the deep, cold water below. This is not a gentle river in Srinagar. This is a river that once, in 1841, washed away five of the seven bridges in a single flood. And there were our men, launching themselves off a temple platform into her depths before breakfast, entirely unbothered by this fact.

The Vitasta, one imagines, was equally unbothered. She has seen far worse. Alexander the Great’s army crossed her waters. The Greeks called her the Hydaspes, and it was on her banks in 326 BCE that he fought his last great battle. Colonial-era English writers who summered in Srinagar waxed lyrical about her. Lal Ded, the great 14th-century mystic poet of Kashmir, crossed her waters at dawn to worship at a temple on the far shore, her Vakhs eventually becoming the earliest compositions in the Kashmiri language. Every conqueror and every poet has stood at these banks and felt the pull.

And then there were our people, who quietly took a dip and went home for breakfast.

Baramulla: Where the River Leaves

The Vitasta doesn’t linger. She passes through Wular Lake, the largest freshwater lake in India and flows northwest until she arrives at Baramulla. That is where I was born.

Baramulla, ancient Varahamula, sits at the point where the Kashmir Valley ends and the mountains close in around the river like a gate. It was, for centuries, the literal gateway of Kashmir. Every Mughal emperor, every merchant, every pilgrim had to pass through here. By the time the river reaches Baramulla, she is wide and unhurried. The mythology is behind her. The history of Srinagar is behind her. She is simply moving, as rivers do, toward whatever comes next.

There is something in being born in the town where a river prepares to leave.

Crossing The Seas

When I was packing to leave for the UK, caught in that particular nervous excitement of moving to a country you’ve mostly seen in films, Mami took charge of my bags.  Not in a hovering way. In a purposeful way. She knew, with the quiet certainty of someone who has fed people all her life, exactly what I would most need in a foreign land: a kretch to stir my monj haakh, and a thaal to eat it in.

I suspect I did not fully appreciate this at the time. I was young and moving to Britain. I had things on my mind.

Twenty-five years later, six house moves across this grey and beloved country later, I still find myself reaching for that same kretch when the monj haakh is on the stove. It has outlasted more relocations than my friendships. And every time I pick it up, I remember the first time I met her, as a bride in rain drenched Verinag.

The Vitasta rises at Verinag, quiet and inexhaustible, and carries everything given to her: all the way from those Pir Panjal foothills, through the old kadals of Srinagar, past the ghats at Purshayar, to the wide gateway of Baramulla and far beyond. She doesn’t make a fuss about it. She just carries.

Mami was like that.

Her kretch is like that.

Some things flow on regardless. They ask nothing in return except that you remember where they came from.

Vyeth flows on. And so do we.

Dr. Sheetal Raina is the founder and editor of ISBUND, an immersive platform dedicated to preserving and celebrating Kashmiri culture. Deeply connected to the heritage and traditions of Kashmir, she brings a distinctive voice to cultural discourse - blending academic insight with heartfelt commitment to her roots.

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