Until they have been judged, paid their karmic debts, and are allowed into the ancestral spirits world, bhuta-preta seek a human to enter, dominate, and make sick. Many people take these spirits for granted, and encounters with the spirit world are not considered hallucinations. But actual possession does carry a social stigma because the type of people Hindu culture considers especially susceptible to possession include the lustful, idle, im potent, bankrupt, recently widowed, and the relatives of prostitutes and convicts.
—Mary Orr, “India Sketches”
“Ah, come on,” I chide.
“Forget it. I’m not going with you.… My grandmother wouldn’t lie about something like that. She was too religious to make up a story about the gods.”
His grandmother once saw a black beast moving swiftly along the edge of the river. At first she had no idea what it was, but when it raised its head above the treetops she knew it was a burru. She ran and hid, saying prayer after prayer. Like a python, the beast eats its dinner, usually an elephant, in one gulp. The earthen mounds in the marsh are its dung heaps, each containing the skeleton of a devoured animal.
“Those mounds are sacred,” Shankar says, pointing into the marsh.
“Holy shit!”
“Cool it! This is no place for jokes. The area is taboo, man, taboo. Let’s split.”
“Give me thirty minutes?” I entreat.
Shankar consents, but he won’t participate in my survey of the flora and fauna. I wade into the ankle-deep water and head for the widgeons. After a couple of yards I slip into a trench and plunge up to my neck in water, so I swim to one of the sacred mounds. The birds are shrieking horrifically. What happened to the sweet, inviting chirping? I leap for the next mound, miss, and fall flat on my face, mouth in ooze.
“Had enough?” Shankar calls.
I’m about to concede when my legs start to disappear into the soft bottom. I recall this feeling from a trip up the Congo River years ago. Once the muck is over your knees, it’s nearly impossible to get out. I grab frantically for the reeds and slowly inch out on my belly.
“Now I’m ready to go,” I confess, spitting out mud.
“Ugh! Look at you. Leeches, leeches, everywhere. Serves you right,” Shankar rejoins.
We use cigarettes to burn them off. Shankar attacks those on my back while I go after the suckers in my armpits and crotch.
“Hold still. Don’t move,” Shankar advises, removing one from my left ear.
A mile farther on, near the mouth of a small tributary, we hear a loud splash. What was that? The answer arcs through the air: it’s a Ganges dolphin. We ship the paddles and wait for it to reappear. The mammal is nearly seven feet long with a snout like a barracuda and dull black skin. Ganges dolphins differ form their salt-water cousins not only in appearance but also in behavior; neither playful nor gregarious, they surface only for air, exposing their tiny eyes and chiseled teeth.
Since leaving Dibrugarh, the turtle catchers are the only people we’ve encountered. But Shankar is quick to remind me that many people are probably watching us. We’re in the middle of the Badlands.
“This is where that boat got robbed, don’t you think? The captain said they were near the mouth of a small tributary,” Shankar recalls, adding that the dacoits attacked him not far from here.
As the sky turns purple, we begin to search for a safe place to camp. We don’t want to sleep on the shore, and the only islands we pass are too wet, barely a foot above water. We keep paddling, hoping to find other boats or a ghat not shown on the maps. After the incident in the whirlpool, we resolved not to travel at night. Yet here we are paddling by the light of a quarter moon, able to see only a few yards off the bow. Every time I’m ready to pitch the tent, Shankar finds something wrong with the place. When he wants to stop, I demand that we push on. We’re both hungry and irritable, but our bickering ends when we sight a campfire. We paddle toward it cautiously, trying to be quiet, picking up speed as we discern the lines of a fishing boat, about fifty feet long, with a bluff bow and wineglass stern. The massive rudder is made of a latticework of teak boards. On deck a fire dances above the lip of an oil drum hanging by davits. No one appears to be aboard.
“Hell-o.… Hell-o. Can we come aboard? Hell-o.… ”
Silence. I shine my flashlight up the curve of the sheer to the deckhouse. The light catches the eyes of five men huddled in the shadows. I lower the beam and see three knives. I douse the light and we’re about to paddle off when someone shouts in Bengali, “Go away.”
“Phew,” Shankar exhales in relief. He responds, “We’re friends, not robbers. Look! Look at him.” He takes the flashlight and shines it on my face. “A firang. He’s a firang.”
I hear the men gasp. Shankar continues, “We need a place to sleep.”
They confer privately while we stand in our boat, holding on to their rail. One man keeps shaking his head. Finally a decision is made.
“You can come aboard.… Leave your knives behind.”
A crewman bends over the side and gives us a hand up. None of them has seen a westerner before, and the man helping me won’t release his grip. Another crewman holds a kerosene lamp to my face, raising and lowering the wick as he moves the light.
“Hmmm,” he muses, adding something Shankar doesn’t understand that causes the crew to explode with laughter. Whatever the joke, it breaks the tension.
“My name is Gopal. Welcome,” says the captain. “We were ready to kill you. We thought you were dacoits.”
I thank him for his restraint and present them with Michael Jackson lighters. The captain, wanting to reciprocate, motions for us to sit down. He scurries into the cabin and returns with a small paper bag.
“Dreams,” he announces.
The fire is lowered from the davits and brought amidships, where we gather to talk. They’re all from Lalgola, a town on the Ganges in West Bengal. Gopal, afflicted with a tubercular cough, is almost thirty years old; the others are in their teens or early twenties. All have thick, callused hands. There are no winches or motors aboard; their arms alone pull in the 150-foot nets.
“This boat,” Gopal declares proudly,“our home, was built in 1953, and it’s still in good shape. My father helped build her.… He was a good fisherman and we worked the Ganges together for years. I grew up on this boat.”
The boat, made of teak, is double-planked below the water line. The mast is a debarked babul tree stepped far forward, like that on a cat-boat. However, it’s used exclusively as a towing stanchion; no sail has ever been hanked to it. An arched roof of thatch, tin, and bamboo covers the foredeck; all fishing is done from the aft quarter, where the deck is flat and open. The boat’s name is Lucky, but Gopal has often thought of changing it.
“Years ago my father and I were fishing. Just the two of us. I was asleep and when I got up, he was gone.… My mother cried and cried. She said that is what happens to all fishermen. He heard the river calling to him.”
Mosquitoes are bad news in West Bengal. Apart from the obvious problems of malaria—the disease was rife in rural areas north of Calcutta—the insects were also an indirect cause of house fires. Due to a sudden plague of mosquitoes in the district of Midnapore, villagers had taken to lighting fires on the floor in the middle of their wood and straw huts. The smoke worked splendidly at keeping the mosquitoes away, but more often than not the fires got out of hand reducing the huts to ashes. It was not unknown for whole villages to be burned to the ground.
—Peter Holt, In Clive’s Footsteps
Gopal assumed command at the age of seventeen, and for the first few years he was moderately successful. That was when the fish population of the Ganges was still thriving.
“But each year we caught less. Now there is nothing for the nets in the Ganges.”
This is his second season on the Brahmaputra, and it may be his last. As an outsider working the Assamese waterways, he must pay the state a 40 percent tax on his catch. That’s the law, anyway; the actual tariff may v
ary according to the official on duty.
“If Shiva is kind, the tax man will take only four of ten fish. Sometimes he takes six. We have no one to protect us. We are not Assamese, so no one listens to our complaints.”
Sunal, a lanky man who should wear glasses but doesn’t, recounts an incident from two weeks ago. They were fishing downstream and had brought their catch to Sibsagar market. The tax man took most of their fish.
“We went to the police and they told us to leave if we didn’t like it here. The tax man is Assamese, the police are Assamese, and we are Bengalis. That is not good for us.”
A hush comes over the boat when I ask about the river pirates. The dacoits have left them alone, but the fishermen are superstitious and are afraid that mentioning the dacoits will ruin their luck. Gopal does tell us that spies in the market tip off the dacoits, identifying which boat has delivered a rich load.
We’ve dipped into the dream bag three times, postponing dinner until everyone’s stomach is growling. At Gopal’s command the food is prepared. Lobas, the twelve-year-old cook and apprentice fisherman, takes charge. He greases the pots and reaches into the hold, pulling out five containers of spices: hot chili peppers, green peppers, black peppers, more chili peppers, and curry powder. He takes some of each pepper and pulverizes everything with a porcelain rolling pin.
“The juice,” he confides, “you must get all the juice.”
While the ingredients simmer in mustard oil, Lobas dices some potatoes as a special treat for us. He adds water and drops in seven small fish called bhangnon-mas. After bringing the pot to a boil, he adds two fistfuls of curry powder. A half hour later, when the rice is cooked, we wolf down the food.
“Delicious,” I say to Lobas, who beams.
Slowly at first and then with a numbing intensity, the spices release their power. I ask for the water bucket. My insides feel as if they’re melting and dripping out through my pores.
“Ah, you really do like it,” Lobas says, watching me down a quart of water.
In the morning Lahey-Lahey looks woefully small next to the high-sided fishing boat. The crew of the Lucky call our boat Susek, Bengali for dolphin, but Gopal is more critical: “It’s no bigger than a Christian’s coffin! May the gods smile on you.… You paddle a toy.”
With this encouragement, we bid farewell and head out into the morning mist, hoping to make Sibsagar before dark. Several hours later we near the spot where the dacoits had attacked Shankar. For the first time he recounts the details of that day.
“I was lost in those islands over there, next to the bank. I took the wrong turn and followed a stream that led to a sandbank. I saw this guy standing in the shore and asked for directions.… When I got near him, he started running at me.… Two more came out from hiding. Phew, I was lucky. I hit one with my paddle and jumped aboard. Then, man oh man, I rowed like crazy.… The next morning I took the bus home.”
The story gives me an idea, and I suggest that we pretend the dacoits are closing in for an attack. “How fast can we go?”
We stroke double-time, thrusting our paddles into the river, pulling as hard as we can. Lahey-Lahey surges forward. We pour it on and pull triple-time. The boat slices cleanly through the water, no longer staggering between strokes. In rapid fire our paddles punch the surface. Whack! Whack! Whack! Shadows barely keep up with us. Everything rushes by—the shoreline is a blur of jungle colors. Faster, I want to go faster. I feel invigorated by every stroke; all that matters is movement. One moment blends into another. Faster! Ever faster into the unknown. I feel the pink duck is nearby, hiding just beyond view.
“Whoa! Look at that!” Shankar exclaims, ending our sprint.
“Keep going. Faster!” I urge.
“Check it out, man. Ahead,” he says, pointing to someone walking along the beach.
I snap back. “Sorry.... oh, yeah, I see him.”
Shankar takes the binoculars for a closer look. “Well, dude,” he drawls, watching the lonely figure, “he looks like a genuine fisherman. I can see a net, but we keep going and stay away from the shore, right?”
Not noticing us, the man continues walking toward a giant bamboo wishbone with a net strung across it. The contraption is suspended between a pair of thirty-foot poles. He releases a line, sending the mesh down into the water. A few minutes later he grabs a length of jute and uses his body weight as a cantilever to raise the king-size scoop. As it climbs into the air, the net shimmers like a spider’s web covered in dew. Slowly the thousands of water droplets fall away, each a prism releasing miniature rainbows. The trap is effective; he catches a half dozen fish while we watch.
Beyond him a herd of water buffalo drinks from the river. The large bulls wear iron bells that clang like buoys. On the bank above the herd a shack is perched perilously close to the edge. As we round a sharp bend below it, we surprise several women bathing. Even though they’re wearing saris, they’re embarrassed, and we try not to stare. A little farther on we moor Lahey-Lahey next to five other boats. A path angles up to the flimsy building we saw from the water. Above its entrance the word “Tea” is scrawled in white paint.
The owner of the teahouse is hastily sweeping the dirt floor. He saw us coming, but he’s not quite ready.
“Just one minute more.… Please be patient,” he says.
“It looks fine. We don’t care,” I reply.
“You should care,” the shopkeeper tells me. “Just a few more seconds.… ”
Finally he allows us to enter his neat shop. He tells his son to leave the cook fire and alert the village that a firang has arrived. We sit down just as the water comes to a boil. On the wall near the kettle are postcards of exotically colored Hindu saints in various coital positions.
“They look happy,” I observe.
“And we know why,” he says, rubbing his fingers inside two cups.
“Where are we?” Shankar asks.
The man thinks for a moment. “Ahhh, yes. Rupahimukh Ghat. That’s it. Rupahimukh Ghat.”
The village is not listed on my map. He sees my confusion and adds, “Kalitas Town. That’s what we call it.” That name isn’t listed either.
“How many people live here?”
“Several hundred. It changes. Sometimes more, sometimes less. It all depends on the blessings of the gods,” he says, eyeing my notebook suspiciously.
As we drink our tea, the little shack fills with villagers of all ages. We’re especially honored when the Village Council appears. Every time I ask someone’s name, the answer is the same:“Kalitas.” In this remote village people share food, chores, and a name.
“We are all Kalitas. We come from Kalitas. Our children are Kalitas,” Kalitas tells me.
“Don’t you use initials?” I ask, remembering how the Gurkhas lessened the confusion.
“What for? We know everybody. I am Big Kalitas. Over there is my father, Old Kalitas, and there is my daughter, Baby Kalitas.”
I take out my Polaroid and line up the Kalitas clan for a portrait. Pleased, Big Kalitas grabs my hand and leads me away from the teahouse.
“Come, you must meet Mother Kalitas.”
Only half of the village buildings survived this year’s flood, and those that are left bear scars from the deluge. The high-water mark on his house touches the eaves, and sections of plaster are missing from the façade, exposing the bamboo lathing. The left side looks as if the breeze is the only thing holding it up.
“We are starting to rebuild, but we have no money.” Big Kalitas sighs. “Our cows are all gone, lost to the river. Look at our fields covered in sand. It will be a year before the next harvest…everything must be tilled three, four times.”
Once we’re inside the two-room house, villagers crowd around the openings, vying for a good look at us. Outside the back door I can hear the splish-splash of milk squirting into a metal bucket. Baby Kalitas stares at me with large black eyes. She giggles when I smile at her but recoils when I go to pick her up. Mother Kalitas stands nearby, ready to st
rike a match the second her husband lifts a cigarette.
“During the flood,” our host tells us, “the government made us leave. They took us to the hills on buses. Hundreds of us, all from different villages were kept like goats.… They promised help when we came back. Since then one helicopter has come and unloaded six bags of barley. Six bags of barley!”
As the Village Council leader, this Kalitas must deal with the complaints of all Kalitases. “Sleep is something I want but don’t get,” he says wistfully. He’s unsure whether relief will ever come.
“Several years ago a calf was born with two heads. That was a good sign, we thought the gods were pleased with us. But you know, when I think back, the calf never knew what it was doing. One head wanted to go right, the other left. It died after a couple of months.”
Daughter Kalitas, a slender teenager, brings us a tray with two cups of fresh milk and a bowl containing bread and sugar, the traditional offering of hospitality. After eating, we’re led to the village center, a vacant lot where the temple once stood. The elders sit in chairs, with the oldest at the head of the group. Two men come from a nearby house with instruments, and a holy man follows, carrying an urn of water. The musicians set up and begin playing cymbals and a khol (drum); Priest Kalitas chants, “Water cleanses, water creates, water redeems.” He digs his heels in the sand. From the depression he scoops up a handful of dirt and tosses it into the air. “This is the earth. This is our home. May Shiva bless us all.”
The music grows louder as the tempo increases. Our host asks us to stay, but with several hours of daylight remaining, we decide to push on. After we have shaken hands with all the villagers, an informal procession escorts us back to the river, led by the holy man. A young girl presents me with a bouquet of wildflowers, and I bend down to kiss her cheek. Shankar puts several of the blossoms in his hair, to the delight of the Kalitases. The cymbals sound farewell. As we move downstream, a figure bolts from the crowd and runs along the bank, waving and keeping pace with Lahey-Lahey . It’s the girl who gave us the flowers.…
Travelers' Tales India Page 34
