The Rivers That Made Me

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After years of cooking and telling food stories, I realised something simple and true: if you really want to understand Indian food, just look at its rivers. Not through research papers, but through how flavour changes as you move along a river’s course. Food carries the memory of water.

This story could be about any river in the world; every river shapes its own land, cuisine, and culture. But I come from South India, and the rivers I speak of are the ones that shaped my family, my palate, and the way I think about people and places. These are the rivers I know deep in my bones.

The first river I came to know was not one of the grand rivers flowing through the Southern Peninsula. It was Musi. A small tributary of the Krishna, humble and now almost forgotten by the city that grew around it, Hyderabad. But for my maternal grandfather, it was the river that shaped his childhood. He and his friends would sit on its banks, dip their feet into the water that once fed fertile fields. Musi taught me that rivers don’t need fame to influence a life. They just need to exist in the stories we inherit.

From Musi, my imagination expanded to the river that shaped my mother’s world.

My mother grew up in Kondapalli near Vijayawada. A place where gongura grows like a second skin on land, where banana plantations stretch endlessly, making  Andhra Pradesh the leading banana-producing state in India. 

Every visit to Goddess Kanaka Durga started with a dip in Krishna’s waters.. Among the many legends, the one I recall is when the river reached Indrakeeladri on her way to the sea, the mountain stood in her path. She asked Goddess Durga for passage. The goddess absorbed the river’s force like a nose stud, allowing her to squeeze through a tiny opening, the Bejjam. The river burst forward with such force that the mountain split into two, Seetanagaram on one bank, Indrakeeladri on the other. Even today, the goddess’s nose ring is removed every night, because if Krishnaveni ever rises high enough to reclaim it, it is believed the city would face destruction. Myth or warning, belief or comfort, this is what rivers do. They hold the emotional weather of a place.

Gongura, leafy greens, bananas, freshwater prawns, bazaars bursting with produce, this is a river that feeds wholeheartedly.

Years later, life brought me to another river, one I hadn’t grown up with: Kaveri. Every time we cross Somvarpet on our way home to Coorg, we stop. Not out of ritual, but out of instinct, the same instinct my mother had with Krishna. Kaveri is not just a river; she is a goddess. The Kodavas call themselves “Kaveri’s children,” and you understand why when you see how the landscape changes around her, pepper vines, cardamom, coffee estates, wild mushrooms after the rains, akki rotti and thambuttu shaped by mist and moisture. Kaveri is devotion, a constant presence, steady and nurturing.

If Krishna is childhood and Kaveri is faith, then Godavari is scale. The Dakshin Ganga. A river that spreads into a magnificent delta before meeting the Bay of Bengal. The Coringa mangroves rise like guardians on either side, and the land is so fertile that rice doesn’t just grow; it thrives. West and East Godavari are places where people don’t let you leave without eating. Here, food feels like an extension of the river’s generosity: prawns, crabs, coconut-based gravies, rice soft enough to mix with your fingers. Godavari is abundance made visible.

And maybe that’s why my paternal side carries so much artistry in its bones. They are children of this river, the writers, the poets, the extraordinary home cooks. The people whose imagination flows as she does. I haven’t yet sat by the Godavari long enough as an adult, not in the way I long to. Still, one day I want to return to her as a granddaughter of her soil, to sit by her banks with a notebook, breathe in her generosity, and write about the people who inherited their stories from her waters.

Then there are the rivers that entered my life through marriage. When I first visited Coimbatore, I met Siruvani, a river whose water tastes like honey. My body wasn’t prepared. My stomach protested, not because the water was unclean, but because it was too clean. Too pure. Too sweet. I didn’t know that water could taste like a blessing. And suddenly, the flavours of Coimbatore made sense, the gentle spice, the generosity of ghee, the softness of every dish. You understand a cuisine differently when you taste its water.

But long before Siruvani, another river shaped the stories of my maternal great-grandmother, Bhavani Kutty Ammal. She grew up near the Mahadeva Temple along the Periyar. For her, Periyar wasn’t a river; it was a companion. The sound of it framed her childhood. Its produce shaped her cooking. Periyar fed the land, and the land fed her stories. She passed them down without realising she was passing down an entire geography.

And somewhere between these rivers, the ones of my childhood, my mother’s childhood, my marriage, my ancestry, my travels, I met the one I would come to study as an adult: Netravathi.Not through family, but through curiosity. Through food. Through landscape. Through the desire to understand how a river shapes a coastline’s cuisine. Following Netravathi from the Ghats to the sea taught me that every river is a kitchen in motion. In her upper reaches, food is forest-led. In her plains, it becomes agricultural. Near sacred towns, it becomes ritual. In her estuary, it becomes fish and coconut and brackish sweetness. And finally, at the sea, she becomes sediment, prawn nurseries, and the coastal flavours Mangalore is known for.

After years of cooking, learning, and unlearning, I’ve realised something simple and profound: Flavour is geography. Geography is held together by rivers. And rivers are held together by stories. These are the rivers I grew up with, married into, listened to, learned from, prayed to, cooked from, and returned to. These rivers raised my imagination. These rivers shaped my palate. These rivers made me who I am.