Brian on the Brahmaputra

by David Fletcher

  In the event, he had two. India’s bananas were a little on the small side. Just like its elephants.

  He also had the company of Pamela and Julian, and of Sujan, one of their two principal guides. Communal eating was part of the Nature-seekers’ ethos, and here in the dining room there were just two long tables, so you always had enough table companions to field a football team. Although, of course, only a small proportion of them were within chatting distance. And on this occasion, for Brian and Sandra, it was Pamela and Julian, and sitting at the head of the table, next to Brian, the ever-smiling Sujan. They made an odd combination.

  Pamela was a GP. In fact, Brian had noticed that she’d introduced herself as a GP and not as a doctor. In the same way, he thought, as a forger wouldn’t necessarily introduce himself as a criminal. He’d want to be specific, wouldn’t he? After all, “doctor” and “criminal” both cover so many different roles. Or was that being just a little unfair? Maybe she was merely making it clear that, thanks to the remarkable negotiation skills of the Department of Health, she was now a very high earner – and still couldn’t believe her luck. But no. That was being more unfair than ever. And it entirely ignored the fact that Pam was a very nice lady.

  In appearance terms she was indisputably very nice indeed. She was young looking and probably younger looking than her actual age, and she had a pleasing face. It was glowing with health (and why wouldn’t it be?) and it even had a fine bone structure. It also had, as its natural expression, a faint smile and an air of rare serenity. This, Brian thought, might be a product of the caring nature of her work – or of her six-figure salary. Ultimately though, he decided it was just because she was a nice person. And not just in appearance terms. But in the way she spoke, the way she listened and the way she acted.

  Julian was similar. He wasn’t as attractive as Pam, and with Brian’s height, a rather gaunt face and an indecisive sort of grey beard, he was never going to be. But he was clearly cast in that same caring mould as his wife. He wasn’t a GP or even just a doctor. He was an academic – in some aspect of agriculture. Which must have been a source of endless hours of fun at academic gatherings… along the lines of: ‘What field are you in?’ ‘Oh, I’m in cereals.’ ‘Mmm, well watch out for the combine!’

  There again, academia might be a little more sophisticated these days, and Brian was sure there were just as many opportunities to show your caring qualities as a teacher and researcher as there were as a doctor. And no doubt about it; Julian was thoughtful, responsible – and nice. Just like his wife.

  This did cause Brian a bit of a problem. When he’d first seen them, back in Kolkata, he had pictured them as the man and wife proprietors of a health-food shop. In his mind, he could see them very clearly, standing behind a counter full of mung-beans and lentils, relishing the prospect of another of their grateful customers stocking up on some of their nourishing foodstuffs. But now that this image had been swept away by reality, another more alarming one had taken its place. It was one based on their pervasive air of thoughtfulness, their very obvious middle-class sort of decency, their commendable listening ability – and their recently admitted interest in “culture”. (Yes, they had admitted to being in that small minority of the party who put “culture” ahead of “nature” as their primary interest on this cruise.) It was, of course, the image of a pair of willing participants at a Gordon Brown inspired focus group, a gathering of the deluded and the demented who are prepared to take such a nonsense seriously, and who are even prepared for the possibility of having to confront our national embarrassment in person, of having to shake his hand and share the same air with him. The thought made Brian shudder, and it certainly didn’t help the small talk. The longer the lunch went on, the more Brian expected the arrival of a dishevelled Prime Minister and a questionnaire on something like: ‘What makes Britain British – other than its looming insolvency?’.

  However, relief was available in the form of Sujan. This was Sujan Chatterjee, one of India’s greatest ornithologists, joint leader of the tour, sole leader of the extension to the Sundarbans, and a man who both physically and temperamentally was the antithesis of Pamela and Julian.

  Admittedly he did, just like Pam, always have a smile on his face. But his smile was not a benign smile; it was a wicked smile. And it spread across a face that was large, expressive, brown, and “full-cheeked”. That is to say his cheeks echoed the rest of his body, which wasn’t so much fat as expansively generous, and designed to match his character. Indeed he couldn’t have been any other shape. It simply wouldn’t have fitted his nature. A lean Sujan would have been an oxymoron, an affront to the way things should be, and destined only to make him fodder for a focus group or a fate even worse.

  Like Pam and Julian, he also cared. But what he cared about was different. He cared about wildlife. He cared about birds in particular. And he cared about the planet in general. How else could one interpret his contentment with his one-child family, his one-female-child family, when so many others sharing his “culture” thought so very differently? He also cared about his stomach – as was always evident from a study of his dinner plate. (And his lunch plate, come to that.) And he cared about his charges, Brian and his fellow Nature-seekers. Although he probably had his own thoughts about them as well, his own wicked thoughts on occasions…

  And how did Brian see Sujan? What role had suggested itself for this all too clearly “rounded individual”? Well, it was obvious. If Bollywood ever got round to making an Indian version of “The Three Musketeers”, here was Portos, ready and waiting for a starring role as the overweight hero who is never seen without a smile on his face or a pile of food on his plate. And who knows? He might even have been a dab hand with a rapier as well.

  This lunchtime, though, it was just a fork and then a spoon. And the spoon was needed for his helping of a creamy sweet, something that looked a little like an Indian version of Angel Delight. Albeit not so fluorescent.

  It had been a useful lunch, in that Brian now knew a great deal more about two of his fellow travellers and one of his guides. But if challenged about what they had discussed, just two hours later, he would have found it difficult to recollect. Sizing people up, learning how to deal with them, knowing what to say and what not to say was, for Brian, such an all-consuming effort that it tended to obliterate the actual content of the exercise. And in any event, he suspected that whatever contributions he himself had made to the discourse, these were equally lost for all time in the minds of his lunchtime companions and almost certainly in the mind of his wife. She’d heard all his contributions so many times before that they were extinguished from her consciousness almost immediately. It was the way she kept sane.

  She also made a lot of allowances for Brian. Not least when he was ill, whether it was one of his interminable migraines or one of his man-magnified afflictions, such as his currently hardly-discernible gut-ache. It was now mid-afternoon. Brian and Sandra were sitting on the sundeck of the Sukapha admiring the endlessly flat landscape of the Brahmaputra as it drifted on by, and Brian was sipping a glass of water. He didn’t look happy.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, not too bad. I do feel a bit weak.’

  ‘You need more than bananas.’

  This was true. And not just in a Confucius saying sort of way, but in a practical way as well. Brian may have starved his stomach bug into submission, but he was also starving himself. Those Indian bananas were really very small.

  ‘You haven’t been to the loo.’

  ‘I know. But I’m still a bit concerned.’

  ‘Well, that’s better than being a bit caught short all the time, isn’t it? And anyway, you’re a much better colour. You’re obviously on the mend.’

  Brian looked at his wife. He knew what this meant. It meant: ‘For God’s sake, you’re not going to die and you’re not even going to test the soundproofing in the en-suite loo any more. To all intents and purposes you’re as fit as anybody else on
this boat, and you should just get on with your holiday and stop being a pain.’

  Conjugal shorthand like this must exist in many marriages, but for Sandra and Brian it had been refined into almost an art-form. And in common with other art-forms in the world, it could have an immediate and dramatic impact. It did so now. Brian put down his glass of water, took a theatrically large intake of breath, and announced that it was time to see Pauline again. With that he rose from his seat, picked up his new Canon Powershot, and started to walk towards the back of the sundeck where Pauline was standing looking over the stern of the boat.

  ‘Hi,’ he announced as he joined her. And as she turned to face him she gave him a disarming smile and a full frontal view of her two very large cameras. Both of them were hanging from straps around her neck.

  ‘Blimey, they’re big,’ he observed bluntly. ‘I mean, talk about whoppers.’

  Pauline either didn’t notice his gaucheness or she politely ignored it.

  ‘This one’s a long-shot and this one’s a wide-angle,’ she responded. ‘I find I need them both. And well, it’s just not possible to keep switching lenses, as you can well imagine.’

  Brian could well imagine. Although he could barely imagine at all how anybody could deal with two great humping pieces of kit like that. And in this heat and with a pair of binocs as well. There was just no way.

  ‘Of course, the lenses.’

  This made it sound as though he had only just realised that it was the lenses that were very large and not the cameras themselves. Which was so alarmingly close to the truth that he began to blush.

  Fortunately Pauline came to his aid.

  ‘That’s a Powershot, isn’t it? May I have a look at it?’

  ‘Of course.’ And he handed her his camera.

  As he did this, Yvonne appeared at his shoulder. Yvonne was the wife of Derek, and they were the other half of the Pauline and Dennis combo. All four of them were travelling together, as they had done on other similar holidays. And all four of them were into photography in a serious way. Indeed, Yvonne had a pair of cameras which if anything were larger than Pauline’s. They now adorned her chest like a brace of serious artillery pieces – and they looked primed for action. Brian could hardly take his eyes off them. And only when Yvonne asked him about his Powershot did he properly acknowledge her presence.

  ‘It’s a Powershot, isn’t it?’ she asked.

  ‘Errh… yes.’ He nodded as a greeting. ‘Errh… it’s the first time I’ve used it. A digital, I mean. I’ve tended to avoid them. But…’

  He paused to think. Why the hell was he telling these two technophiles that he was a raving technophobe who had to be dragged into the digital age kicking and screaming? But he had no choice. He had to plough on.

  ‘Errh, well you see, it’s got a twenty-times zoom. And that goes to eighty with the digital… thing. And well, I’m still trying to learn it.’

  Pauline was now operating the zoom and observing the Powershot’s display.

  ‘This is really good. Take a look at this.’

  She was now handing the camera to her artillery-festooned friend. Yvonne took it from her, repeated Pauline’s inspection routine and concurred that it really was very good indeed and added that she’d been considering buying one herself. Although Brian could not conceive where she might have parked it on her person had she not laid down at least one of her existing weapons.

  This was all going very well. Brian had two new and admiring Nature-seekers in his company, he was getting to know them, and they seemed very nice people. Not nice like Pam and Julian, but normal nice without all that depth of thought and concern. But then it started to get awkward. First, Yvonne asked him about what settings he used – which he assumed meant those other settings on that wheel thing on the top of his camera that he always had locked on “auto”. And then, worse than this, Pauline asked him a direct question about something called ISO numbers. He flannelled. But he flannelled very badly, and he was soon into admitting that it was a fair cop. He would, he promised them, attempt to do better in the future, and as regards the ISO query, he could do no more than refer them to his wife.

  This seemed to satisfy them and may even have won him some brownie points. Honesty, ignorance and incompetence in a male can often be very attractive to the opposite sex, and can lay firm foundations for a rewarding relationship, especially a temporary one where companionship rather than intimacy is the order of the day. He had made a good start with these two ladies and he looked forward to more of their company. And not just on the Brahmaputra. Pauline and Yvonne and their respective spouses were on the Sundarbans extension as well.

  So too were Bill and Tina. With them, his start wasn’t quite so good.

  It was dinner time. In front of Brian was a curry. (He’d decided he could now risk more than a banana. And anyway he was desperately hungry.) And across the table from Brian were Bill and Tina. Bill was a man in his sixties who had an air of latent pugnacity about him, and Tina was of a similar age, much smaller and entirely pacific. More to the point, Bill was a chief examiner in biology for one of the exam boards and seemed to know all there was to know about birds everywhere. As did Tina – presumably through a process of osmosis or through her own observations as they’d journeyed round the world.

  This was too much for Brian. He had to lay down a challenge.

  ‘OK, Bill,’ he started. ‘Unique birds. How many birds can you think of that are in some way genuinely unique?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Well, I’ll give you a prime example. How about a wrybill? You know, the only bird in the world with an asymmetric bill.’

  ‘Oh, I see…’

  Bill was hooked. Like Brian, he had visited New Zealand, and was well aware of a little wader that was found there, which had a bill that was curved to the left at its end. Or was it to the right? Well, that didn’t matter. But what did matter was that this bird was the only known example in the world of an avian species that didn’t have the normal symmetry arrangements for its beak-bit. What also mattered was that Bill was going to rise to the challenge.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Kiwis. They’re the only species with nostrils at the end of their bill. And the only birds with two ovaries.’

  ‘Mmmm… sorry, Bill, but I did say unique. And as you know, there are five different species of kiwis. So strictly speaking…’

  ‘The vernal hanging parrot,’ pronounced Tina. ‘It’s the only bird that sleeps hanging upside down.’

  ‘Errh, I think you’ll find that the Ceylon hanging parrot does the same…’

  Bill was now looking more pugnacious than ever, and even Tina looked a little “aroused”.

  ‘Ah,’ began Bill, his face now beaming in triumph, ‘the turacos. They’re the only birds in the world that have other than melanin and carotenoids pigments in their feathers. There’s a red pigment called turacin and a green one called… errh… turacoverdin… yes, turacoverdin…’

  ‘Errh… yes. But like the kiwis, Bill… well, you’ve just said it, haven’t you? Turacos – in the plural. There’s more than one species. So I’m afraid…’

  Bill muttered something under his breath. Then he put his hands to his mouth and started to drum on his upper lip with his fingers. He was in intense thinking mode. Because what Brian had said had implied that there were any number of other birds that were unique in different ways. And he clearly wanted to identify them himself rather than being told them by this lay-person across the table who probably didn’t even know the difference between a scapular and a primary. Tina was clearly equally eager.

  They were now sitting across the table from Brian, scowling in unison and occasionally making as if to announce the next member of this exclusive band of birds. But each time their announcement was frustrated by their own knowledge as they discovered in their memories another bird or another fact that scuppered the uniqueness. And now they were getting frustrated in their own right. Bill, in particular, looked potentially belli
gerent.

  So now Brian began to question the wisdom of his challenge. Why, he asked himself, had he been so stupid as to set a puzzle to which he knew only one answer: the wrybill? As far as he knew there were no other birds that were unique as an individual species, and if there were he hadn’t yet found them. So how was he now going to admit this fact and in doing so reveal to Bill and Tina that he had set them a misleading if not impossible task?

  Ah, he had it! He’d thought of a way out. He would draw the contest to a conclusion on a highly humorous note. That always worked. The charade could be brought to an amusing conclusion. And no doubt another promising relationship would be set on its way.

  ‘OK,’ he began. ‘Not easy, is it? And of course the reason it’s not easy is that, as far as I know, the wrybill is the only truly unique bird on the planet…’

  ‘What!’

  Bill now looked like something that was about to burst. Tina looked simply perplexed. Brian saw these reactions and immediately began to doubt the wisdom of his end-game. But he had to go on. There was no other way.

  ‘Well,’ he started, ‘there is one more, of course. But it’s not what you’d call a biological uniqueness. It’s more… well, more a cryptic uniqueness…’

  Bill now looked wild. Brian felt himself reddening.

  ‘Well…’ he began to laugh nervously, ‘you see, as well as the wryneck there is also the snipe.’

  ‘The snipe?’ challenged Tina.

  ‘Yes,’ responded Brian, wishing desperately that he hadn’t started all this nonsense in the first place, and wishing also that it had been Bill who had posed this final challenge and not Tina. Because that way he wouldn’t now be facing the imminent prospect of having to inform a woman in her sixties and whom he barely knew, that the snipe was a unique bird because it was the only bird in the world whose name was an anagram of “penis”.

  This time Brian felt not mildly ridiculous; he felt profoundly ridiculous. Bill and Tina, he suspected, felt something else.