Travelers' Tales India

by James O'Reilly

  “It is a strange place.” An old man in one of the baked-mud villages on the southern edge of the Rann had finally agreed to talk about the place through a local interpreter. “I crossed the Rann many times when I was a young man. Now the only people you will find on it are people carrying drugs or guns. The army tries to stop this trade”—he flung out his small, cracked hands—”but what can they do? The Rann is so vast, the army cannot always use their trucks or their jeeps. They get stuck in the mud, even in the dry season. You can never trust the Rann. Every year it is different. It is very hard to know which way is safe for a crossing. One year”—he paused and studied the endless horizon—”many years ago, I lost my brother and eight camels. He was not so experienced as I was and we had a disagreement. I told him we had to go the long way because the monsoon had been late and the mud was not dry. But he was in a hurry. His family was very poor....” The old man smiled sadly, “We are all poor but he wanted to buy land and build his own house...he was in a hurry.”

  He paused again and we all sat staring at the shimmering whiteness. Even the sky was white in the incredible heat. “He was a good man. I was his older brother. He should have listened to what I told him.” Another long pause.

  “What happened?” A stupid question. I knew the answer.

  The old man shaded his eyes. “He had his eldest son with him, twelve years old. A fine boy...”

  There was a wedding in the village. We could hear the music over the mud-walled compound. Later there would be a procession and a feast of goat, spiced rice, and sweet sticky cakes.

  “He went a different way?”

  The old man looked even older. His face was full of long gashed shadows.

  “You must go to the wedding,” he said. “They will be proud if you go. Not many people like you come to this place.”

  “I’ve been already. But I think it made people a bit uncomfortable. I seemed to attract more attention than the bride and groom. One man looked quite offended, a man in a bright blue suit.”

  He laughed. “Ah! Yes. I forgot he was coming. He is with the government—very important. He likes to take charge of things...just like my brother.”

  “So what happened to your brother?”

  The old man shrugged. “He took the wrong path. We found two of his camels on our way back. They were almost dead but we brought them back home to our village.“

  The music of the wedding faded. It was hard to find shade from the sun. I looked across the Rann again. Almost one hundred miles to the other side, with no oasis, no water, no shade, just this endless salt-whiteness.

  “He could have reached the other side. Maybe he decided to stay for a while?”

  “His family is here. His wife and his children.”

  “Maybe the army arrested him?”

  “No, this was nine years ago. The army was not here so much at that time.”

  “So you think he died.”

  The old man drew a slow circle with his finger in the sandy dust.

  “He became a ‘white,’ like so many others.”

  “A ‘white’?”

  “We call that name for men who do not return from the Rann. Part of their spirit remains in the Rann. There are many, many of them. Who can tell. Maybe hundreds of men. Hundreds of whites.”

  “Back home we call them ghosts—the spirits of the dead still trapped on earth.”

  “Yes I know about your ghosts. Here it is a different thing. We are not afraid of the whites. When we cross the Rann we remember them. They protect us. Sometimes they guide us.”

  “But you never see them?”

  The old man smiled and spoke quietly.“As I told you, the Rann is a very strange place and you can see many strange things...it is difficult to explain. The Rann is not like other things on earth—not even like other deserts. It has its own nature and if you listen and look and think clearly, you will be safe...”

  “Your brother didn’t listen?”

  “He was a good man but much younger than I. And he had many worries. His mind was full of many things. He could not hear clearly.”

  “Do you think about him a lot?”

  “He was my only brother. We had five sisters. But he was my only brother.”

  “So, in a way, he’s still here.”

  “Of course. He is a white. He will always be here.”

  My long (very long) journey to the Rann began on the Nepalese-Indian border, in the gritty, noisy little town of Birganj. Sixteen hours of bone-crushing bus travel had brought me south from Kathmandu, over the passes and down through the gorges, and deposited me at this nonentity of a place.

  All I wanted when we finally arrived in Birganj was a simple bed and sleep. A simple bed came easily enough (a square of plywood and a sheet in a freezing cold $3.00-a-night hostel), but sleep was hard to come by in a room also occupied by an enormous Australian earth gypsy whose snoring seemed to shake plaster off the walls and made the windows rattle. Haggard and dizzy with fatigue in the early dawn, I tried to sort out my papers for the border crossing while he insisted on telling me hard-luck tales of his injuries, illnesses, and illicit dealings, all the way from Darwin (“best place in the land of Aus, mate”) to Dar es Salaam. His pessimism and chronic dislike of almost everyone he’d met and everything that had happened to him made me wonder why he bothered traveling at all. His ultimate tirade was directed at “that bunch of bastard wogs” in Bombay who had managed to relieve him of all his worldly possessions except his sleeping bag and had even run off with his money belt crammed with dollars from some emerald-smuggling escapade in Malaysia. The air was purple with his profanities, and I was tired of him.

  The monotony of our safari was shattered by a frightening experience. We approached a village in the early morning hours. I was looking forward to stretching my legs. As we entered the village, a group of men gathered before us. They shouted, “Pagal, Pagal! ” in threatening voices. One old man appeared with a rifle and made nasty gestures. Abdul did not utter a word. He prodded our animals to move quickly out of town.

  The men followed behind our caravan screaming insults until we were far from their town. Abdul explained to me that the villagers felt that apart from locals, only lunatics would come to such a remote place.

  A lone woman could only mean trouble. She must therefore be a witch. They wanted no part of us and our bad luck. Most likely I would never again have such an honour. I had been labeled mad and then banished as a witch.

  —Marybeth Bond, “Solo in Asia”

  “Isn’t there one single place you’ve enjoyed?”

  His mood changed. The swearing and cursing subsided, and this hairy giant of a man became almost teary-eyed as he told me about Bhuj, the idyllic Gujarat coast (“Not a bloody soul for miles. The best beaches in India, mate. No one ever goes there.”) and the mysteries of the Rann of Kutch.

  So thank you whatever your name is; I forgive you your snoring and your jaundiced outlook on life and your self-pitying tirades, and will remain ever grateful for your introduction to this truly fascinating corner of India. Now the only thing I had to do was get there....

  Bus travel seems endless. People get on, people get off, but the journey goes on forever. The only thing that changed were the occupants of the seat beside me. So far I’d had three Indian companions, each of whom had slept through all the noise, heat, and confusion. I envied them their tranquility.

  Then came a spritely young woman, a nurse from Eire, with a wonderful singsong way of talking. All her sentences ended in an upswing of Irish brogue. In spite of five months of backpacking around India from ashram to ashram, she still retained that bright-eyed enthusiasm of the novice traveler. Nothing seemed to phase her. She was totally in love with her life on the road—not a bit of the tired TET [Totally Exasperated Traveler] anywhere. I envied her too and was sorry to see her leave.

  And then Dick Davies arrived, a young Welshman with a prematurely old face, deeply lined and flecked with dark scars. He wore an old suede hat, A
ustralian style with one brim turned up, baggy green corduroys, and a torn leather jacket so stained with grease, food, blood, and mud that it was difficult to tell its original color.

  At first I thought that he too would sleep out the journey like my three Indian companions, but our conversation became animated when we compared notes on Kathmandu and the Himalayas.

  “I’m a real white-water nut,” he told me with a grin that made his old face suddenly look very young.“Himalayas, Central America, New Zealand, Africa, you name it. I’ve been kayaking there.”

  He was a true world wanderer, who had spent most of the last decade of his life seeking out white-water wonderlands all around the globe. I felt envious once again.

  “I’ve never done any white-water stuff,” I said. “Somehow I don’t think I’d enjoy it that much.”

  He laughed.“It doesn’t make that much difference what you do really. Like anything good in life, you end up pretty much in the same place.”

  “And you get there by kayaking.”

  “Yeah. Listen, I’m not one of the religious types. Y’know. You’ve met them. Nepal, Ladakh, the south. They’re all over India. They’re all looking for something that makes everything make sense.”

  “Centering?”

  “Centering? Okay—that’s your word. Call it anything you want. It’s all the same. You know what it is when you get there.”

  “And kayaking. That’s what you do.”

  “Yeah. But it could be something else—anything....”

  We both sat quietly for a while. Something he’d said brought back a memory.

  “Y’know, I almost drowned when I was a kid,” I said. “Near a waterfall. I fell under and couldn’t get back up. I’m sure that stupid experience put me off the idea of messing around on white water.”

  “Oh yeah. Well—that can do it.”

  “You never got close to drowning?”

  He nodded but didn’t seem to want to talk about it. The smoke from his cigarette curled around his hat.

  “One time I think I did drown.” He spoke slowly.

  “Meaning?”

  “Well, I don’t know really. Something strange. Still don’t know what happened....”

  I knew he wanted to tell me so I just waited. He lit another cigarette.

  “Ah—it was a long time back. When I first got started. I’d only been doing it a few weeks. And I was lousy. I mean lousy. I couldn’t get the hang of it. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. It wouldn’t come right. Anyway, this one day I was up in Scotland by myself, the Cairngorms, trying to get it right, and everything’s going okay until, hell—I was under the boat and then out of it and I couldn’t touch the bottom and I didn’t know where the hell I was. And jeez, was it cold! Real brass monkey stuff and churning away like mad. Currents all over the place, and I was flippin’ over like a hooked fish. I’d sucked in a lot of water, I couldn’t find the surface. It was black as pitch. I’d got no air left. I knew I was drowning. And all these weird things were happening. You get flashbacks like they tell you—I was crying because I’d broken my mother’s best plate. Then I was on a soccer pitch with the mates. All kinds of stuff. Coming home down the lane from church past the pub and hearing them all singing...and then it all sort of went quiet and it wasn’t like I was in water or anything...it was just okay and there didn’t seem to be much to worry about anymore....”

  His cigarette trembled in his fingers. The afternoon sun flickered through a filigree of tree along the roadside.

  “And then. Well everything got weird. I wasn’t in the water. I was on the bank, sitting on some sand, and the boat was right by me and it looked fine and I felt fine...I wasn’t even coughing or anything.”

  He shook his head and grinned.

  “Hell—I dunno what happened. Still don’t. I thought I’d drowned, lost it. Into the great yonder and all that. Weird. I don’t know how the hell I got to be sitting like a Sunday afternoon fisherman on a riverbank with the boat and everything—all together in one piece.”

  My spine was tingling. That was my story. The accident that had happened but never happened in Iran, twenty years ago. One of the strange events that changed my life and my way of looking at life.We sat quietly for a long time listening to the hiccupy rhythm of the bus engine....

  There is an indefinable mysterious Power that pervades everything. I feel it, though I do not see it. It is this unseen Power which makes itself felt and yet defies all proof, because it is so unlike all that I perceive though my senses. It transcends the senses. But it is possible to reason out the existence of God to a limited extent.

  —Mahatma Gandhi, Young India, October 11, 1928

  On the long bus journey south from Jaisalmer to Bhuj, across miles of deserty wastes, I did some homework about the Rann of Kutch. The owner of the hotel had very generously lent me a few books on Gujarat, and I scribbled away, delighted by one descriptive passage from a booklet by a Lt. Burns in 1828:...Rann comes from the Sanskrit word “ririna” meaning “a waste”... a space without a counterpart on the globe, devoid of all vegetation and habitation....Its surface shines with a deadly whiteness; the air, dim and quivering, mocks all distance by an almost ceaseless mirage. No sign of life breaks the weary loneliness. Stones and bones of dead animals mark infrequent tracks....Passage at all times is dangerous, travelers being lost even in the dry season. Because of the heat and blinding salt layers, passage is made at night, guided by the stars from dawn to dusk.

  Just my kind of place for a dry-season ramble!

  Gujarat has also been a “land apart” on the Indian subcontinent. Ruled for centuries by powerful and fierce Maharaos, the “Kutchis” have long had an outward-looking attitude to the world. Their fame as seafarers, merchants, traders, and even pirates has made them a major presence in East Africa, Arabia, and the Persian Gulf. Recent development here by the Indian government of the new port of Kandla is beginning to increase Gujarat’s links with the rest of the country, but the Kutchis still value their own history, traditions, and independence.

  The ruined castles of feudal chieftains, set high on the crags of Gujarat’s Black Hills, are still revered places. So too are the remote shrines of local saints, whose pious meditations and fierce penances (tapsia) were said to give them power over gods and the local warrior-kings.

  You can see that power here in the bleakness and broken ridges of the hills. Fragments of ancient fiefdoms still dot the sun-bleached desert and, as Bhuj suddenly appears—a gray, solemn bastion of towers and high stone defense walls—I wondered how much had really changed in this remote region since the wild rampages of a ferocious duo known as Mod and Manai in the ninth century A.D., and the cruel vengeances of the warrior Ful in the next century.

  Tales of cunning, intrigue, murder, and massacre are the very stuff of Gujarat legend. Our contemporary scandals and conspiracies of financial finaglings and political philanderings seem like schoolboy pranks when set beside the tangled complexity of regal power plays in and around Bhuj....

  The following day brought another unexpected series of incidents.

  “Please, sir, do not forget, if you wish to visit the Rann, you will be required to carry a permit,” the hotel manager advised me.

  Getting a permit. Okay—no problem. I was more familiar with Indian behavior now and foresaw no difficulties....

  “It is best, sir, if you will get to the office early,” he advised. It was not even two o’clock in the afternoon. Plenty of time.

  But I should have known better.

  The process required visits to three separate government offices; endless filling out of forms (and filling them out twice due to a clerk’s inability to spell my name correctly); languorous pauses for betel nut chewing and tea; returning to previous offices to “clarify” form entries; minute inspection of every detail of my passport (including the binding!); an impressive display of seal-making using a stick of red wax and a candle (only to have the seal snapped into half a dozen pieces a few minutes later by th
e next official on my list—in the next room); constant confusion over the forms themselves, which were all in English, only hardly anyone spoke English; meticulous compiling of papers (at one point I carried fourteen different sheets of paper from one department to another held together by sewing pins); a warning from the next to the last official that if the forms were not all completed by closing time at 6:00 p.m. I would have to start the whole process over again the following morning; and finally, at five minutes to six, waiting for the last signature from a man who looked very imperious and sat on a tall chair raised on a carpet-covered dais and seemed to be far more interested in the condition of his fingernails than in my pile of wilting, ink-stained forms.

  Allow lots of time for paperwork. Procedures may prove more costly if officialdom senses that time is at a premium. If you’re willing to sit it out in offices (take a thick book along) you may win out. Also, try again. I’ve gone back to exactly the same office the same afternoon (hair combed differently, different clothing) and the same official has not recognized me. It has sometimes happened that the second or third time I’ve been successful. Go back on a different day, or try another city for your permit.

  —Michael Buckley, “Getting the Run Around,” Great Expeditions

  But I was proud. Throughout the whole four-hour ordeal I had never once raised my voice or played the arrogant colonial (whom I’d discovered deep in my psyche while traveling in India). I smiled. They smiled. They shared tea with me. They offered me betel “pan” and I accepted (it took hours to get all the little pieces of nuts and spices and whatever else goes into its elaborate preparation out of my teeth). I offered them bidi cigarettes, which they accepted (but on one occasion politely mentioned they would have preferred Marlboros). And then—clutching my precious papers like winning lottery tickets—I returned to the hotel for a traditional vegetarian thali dinner (usually the only food available in Bhuj hotels).