Brian on the Brahmaputra

by David Fletcher

  This was a walk. The party of Nature-seekers was splitting up into two groups. One group would visit a tea plantation and a temple; the other would go for a leg-powered trek in the Kaziranga Park – near to which they were still moored. For Brian and Sandra there was no choice. They would be in the walking group.

  So off they set. Eleven of them in just one minibus, while the others set off down the river. It was an interesting schism involving the breach of partnerships. Sandra and Irene, its only female members, were accompanied by their husbands, but they were also accompanied by three further husbands: Derek, Bill and Alan – who were all on their own. There were also three guides: Sujan, Tika and Imran. And then there was Jim…

  It was only a short ride to the start of the park trail, and Brian had decided he would keep himself fresh by really concentrating on what was around them as they drove along, rather than on the oncoming traffic. And it was fascinating; little snippets of India that said as much about the country as a million words would ever say.

  Here was the site of a recently disassembled travelling fair, a huge expanse of open ground now blanketed with litter. Litter, for which as far as Brian could see, there was no means of clearance. It would probably stay there forever. Compare that to a small children’s playground further up the road. It was pristine. It was full of slides and climbing frames and there were shrubs and small trees, and it was surrounded by a neat, brightly painted fence. It was also quite clearly unused. The fence looked as though it was there to keep the children out, less they damage its slides or injure any of its shrubs.

  What would Ghandi have made of that? He was further along the road, a small bronze statue looking a little out of place within a confusion of small huts and rickety shelters. He also looked a little irrelevant. Then there was a man with a bicycle. He wasn’t riding it, but he was using it to transport six very long lengths of bamboo. It was as much as he could do to push the bike along. How he’d got the thing upright and moving in the first place was something Brian could not imagine. He also had a little difficulty getting his head around the Indian approach to dental hygiene. It wasn’t that it was novel or peculiar; they used toothbrushes here just as Brian did back home. But Brian would never have considered using his brush at the gate to his house or on the pavement, a practice which seemed to be almost obligatory around these parts. It was as though one not only had to practise good dental hygiene, but one also had to be seen to be practising it. And there was no ignoring it. At this time in the morning, public teeth-brushing was at its height.

  And so it went on: garishly decorated but empty election booths for the forthcoming elections, tumbling down shops with adverts for mobile phone networks, very small cows trying to eat plastic at the side of the road, road-signs extolling the virtues of good driving, people with threadbare clothes, people with colourful clothes, women with especially colourful clothes, people with mobile phones to their ear, people in a hurry, many more people not in a hurry – and now people with guns. Yes, Brian’s minibus had just pulled into the park rangers’ office to collect their entrance permit – and their armed guards. Walking in Kaziranga means walking through tiger territory. And one does not do this without weapons to hand. Even if, as Brian suspected, the weapons had no ammunition…

  It was just as well they met no tigers. All they encountered were birds, flowers, trees and the exquisite delights that are awarded to all those who stroll slowly through an unspoiled landscape.

  There were birds of the forest: warblers, flycatchers, babblers, and a wonderful example of painted extravagance: a golden-fronted leafbird. Then there were hornbills and vultures and a pair of red-wattled lapwings. They were nesting in an open stretch of marshy meadow between the trees and didn’t take kindly to the presence of some nosey strangers. They shouted at them. A rapid, high-pitched ‘did he do it, did he do it?’ and for as long as the strangers lingered. Brian and his companions weren’t wanted here. So they pressed on – to discover dragonflies, butterflies, strange indigo stains below holes in earth banks, fungi that looked as though they’d been carved out of turnips by talented chefs, fungi growing out of cow pats (or were they buffalo pats?) – and ants.

  Actually it was Brian who discovered the ants, directly after he’d discovered a single ant on his leg. (He had discovered it through the medium of pain.) Brian was dismayed. Since he had arrived in India he had been pleasantly surprised not to have encountered biting insects. Indeed, he had encountered few insects at all, whether of the biting variety or otherwise. On the first night on the Sukapha there had been a very well-attended convention of big beetles on the sundeck, but these had been harmless. They had clearly possessed no teeth or no desire to nibble on humans. All they did was forget to leave after the convention’s conclusion and end up getting swept off the sundeck’s flooring the following morning. Then there had been a few moths around the ship’s lights, and these had posed no threat whatsoever. But now he had been bitten. His dread of biting insects, which for the past few days had been pleasingly quiescent, had now been aroused. It was a dread that was well justified.

  Brian was normally bitten by anything that could bite, by any insect that had the facility to inflict a wound on his person that would either be immediately painful or interminably itchy. At home he was frequently bitten by horseflies and clegs, and not that infrequently by gnats, midges and mosquitoes, and on holiday he was bitten by everything that knew he was coming. He was still convinced that on one occasion, as he drove off the ferry at Calais, word of his presence in France and of his intention to travel its length into the Camargue, was passed to the mosquito population of that terrible place within hours. Only by knowing that he was on his way so expeditiously could they have assembled themselves in so great a number and then inflicted so much pain through so many bites. He would never return there again.

  Nor would he ever again fly to Perth in Western Australia, proceed immediately to the veranda of a friend from the past to share a few tubes of Fosters, only to allow the local mosquitoes to make a meal of him as he drank. The next day he had so many bites around his ankles in such a disgusting state of suppuration that he could hardly walk. Then there was his first ever meal in Belize (in the civilised surroundings of a Belize City restaurant, but again on a veranda). Here he had sat down, picked up his napkin, and before he’d even delivered the napkin to his lap, the biggest mosquito in Central America had landed in the exact centre of his forehead, directly above his nose, and had bitten him as though it had a personal grudge against him.

  Mosquitoes were his principal tormentors, but there were plenty of others. Sand flies, which left him looking like a new species: a bare-skinned, red-spotted primate previously unknown to science. Ticks, which in Brazil, he had been obliged to coax off his person with a cognac-soaked cork, and which always threatened to depart without their mouthparts which then became septic. Or tsetse flies in Botswana, which could bite through armour if they chose to. And let’s not forget the stings as well. Like that time in a montane forest in Costa Rica where, when he had carefully brushed off his hand an apparently harmless variety of montane bee, it had flown away, only to gain height, take aim, and fly down in a literal bee-line to sting him on the top of his head.

  There was no doubt about it. Brian was irresistible to all biting insects and even pretty attractive to the stinging variety as well. And now word might be out. The ant grapevine was probably already in action, spreading the message throughout the length and breadth of Assam, to every insect with nipping and stinging tendencies, that the Big One was here. That the most delectable of feasts was within their midst. And currently he was in Kaziranga and without any Deet. It was true. He wasn’t at the moment wearing any insect repellent. It was so awful, and, of course, he’d been lulled into this false sense of security. Only now he knew he wasn’t secure. There could be a swarm of mosquitoes gathering even now, ready to pounce on him in the next few minutes. Or later on, back on the Sukapha, when he’d lowered his guard. And what abo
ut the ants? There were loads here on the ground. This was all very unsettling. It rather took the shine off the rest of the walk. And for once Brian was relieved to be back on the minibus and facing whatever hazards lay in wait on the road. At least if he lost a leg in some horrible accident, his leg wouldn’t itch.

  As it transpired, the journey home involved no horrible accidents and Brian and his companions were soon back to their floating haven. They were not, however, back on board their floating haven. The other group of Nature-seekers had not yet returned. This meant that the country boat had not returned. This presented a problem in that the depth of the water at the mooring spot had prevented the Sukapha from edging close enough to the shore to allow the use of the gangplank in the normal manner. Instead the country boat had been drawn up between its bigger brother and the shore to act as floating gangplank and a platform for the real gangplank to the shore itself. Without the country boat there, the real gangplank was not long enough, and it now sat uselessly on the sand, where Brian and his colleagues stood uselessly, marooned from their final destination and with not even a grappling hook between them.

  The problem was soon resolved. Four of those fit crewmen appeared, first with some bamboo poles, then with some twine, and then with an additional length of gangplank. Within minutes this resourceful quartet had constructed a super-length gangplank, supported by the bamboo poles at its centre, and with a bamboo handrail – supported by themselves as they stood in the water. This boat was quite a vessel and its crew were quite a revelation. Brian was delighted and impressed.

  He was also delighted that for the rest of the day he simply had to eat lunch, then stare at the Brahmaputra and its banks as the Sukapha made its way down to its next mooring, and then attend the bird-listing session and finally eat dinner. Nothing much more was required of him and that was just fine. Riding in jeeps was tiring. But walking all morning (in the heat of the near-tropics) was simply exhausting.

  Lunch was served as soon as the culture vultures had returned to the boat, and the boat set off down the river as soon as lunch was consumed. Virtually everybody then gathered on the sundeck to take in the sights, or if you were Tim or Dennis, to take a few nods. They were asleep within minutes. The others remained awake and they all had their own way of observing what was around them. Some like Julian kept a vigil at the deck’s railings. Others like Pauline preferred to observe as much as possible through the lens of a camera. And then there were those like Brian who found that they could easily combine drinking, biscuit-eating, chatting and lounging with viewing and spotting whenever they chose.

  Brian also squeezed in some thinking. He thought about his companions and where they all lived. Because, quite remarkably, if one made Norfolk an honorary county of the Midlands, eighteen of the twenty-three members of the party hailed from this middle of England. Only the heterosexual pair of Judy and Rosamunde hailed from the south (Hampshire and West Sussex), and Tim and Karen, together with Jim, were the only representatives from the north. Tim and his wife came from West Yorkshire; Jim came from somewhere near Blackpool. So the overwhelming majority of these Nature-seekers were Midlanders, drawn from just Warwickshire, Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, Northamptonshire and Derbyshire.

  What did this mean? Why were there so many mid-England provincials on this trip and so few from elsewhere? And why no “metropolitans” at all? No one from London and no one from any major city. (Everybody in the group, no matter where they were from, had their houses in the countryside or in a modest-sized town.)

  Perhaps it was a UK version of the American phenomenon. Because Brian had discovered that to whichever odd and out of the way place he had ventured, so too had some Americans. But that these Americans would always be from either the West Coast or from the northern part of the East Coast, from California, Oregon or Washington state, or from any of the New England states. Those Americans in the centre of America or in its south never seemed to make an appearance. And maybe they never made an appearance anywhere outside America – or even got as far as its coast. But most definitely they’d not have made it here to Assam. The reason, Brian believed, was not just their lack of opportunity, but also their lack of interest. If the good lord had meant them to go to Botswana, he’d have issued them with a ticket. And he hadn’t. So they’d stay where they were.

  Yes, America was two countries, not one. There was the almost secular, almost sophisticated, almost normal coastal America, and there was the completely non-secular, completely unsophisticated and anything but normal middle. This second America did not send its sons and its daughters to anywhere where their blinkered and rather warped view of the world might ever be challenged. Only coastal America did this. And in this way they could continue the war. The Civil War. For that’s what it was. That war was not over. The forces of reason and advancement were still locked in mortal combat with the forces of superstition and ignorance. And if not quite mortal combat, then at least a pretty entrenched combat, and one that would only ever be resolved if some light was let into the centre. Maybe by exposing its citizens to real foreign travel.

  But how could you argue for a similar two states in Britain? You couldn’t, could you? The Midlands were rather more sophisticated than they were given credit for and they were hardly a hot-bed of fundamentalism. But it was very difficult to argue that the other parts of Britain were unenlightened and full of God-fearing people either. There was really no case at all to support a view of two Britains at each other’s throats and reconciled only to non-reconciliation. So that couldn’t be it. It had to be something else.

  Then Brian had it. It was more to do with city versus country, cosmopolitan values versus the values of middle England, a middle England in sociological terms that was now at its strongest in the physical middle of England. The Midlands might have more than its fair share of urban centres, but in some way it had retained an outlook that was still based on good old-fashioned rural rumination, a rumination that required a constant supply of new facts and new experiences that could be chewed over indefinitely. It was not an outlook that was based on contrived sophistication, nor was it an outlook that owed anything at all to that arrogant, metro-centric refinement that is generally no more than a shallow, follow-the-leader desire to conform and that leaves no room for real choice or for real self-improvement.

  So whilst Midlands Nature-seekers might not be the most polished individuals in the realm, and they might even be regarded as a bit nerdy, or even very nerdy, they did see things and they did experience things that few other people did. They saw wonders that many other people were simply unaware of, and they experienced places and people that gave them a more informed and more intense view of the world than was enjoyed by most of this world’s population. They were not just interested in birds; they were interested in everything. So interested that they sought out the obscure and the odd and the ignored – and the new. Whenever they could and whenever they could afford to.

  The metro-thinkers did not. Their interest took them only as far as the Sunday colour supplements when they were choosing where to go. So this year it might be that place with that fabulous infinity pool, and next year it might be that charming, out of the way place in Portugal, which was so off the beaten track that there was only one golf course there. Even though Ryanair got you within twelve miles of it. Or how about that newly built spa resort in Malaysia, where not only could you get a pile of hot stones laid on your back, but you could also enjoy “The Real Malaysia” – safe in the knowledge that back in your room there was a wi-fi connection, a flat-screen TV and a phone by the side of the loo.

  ‘What,’ thought Brian, ‘do people do in these places? What do the Sunday supplements suggest they do in these places? Or maybe they don’t suggest anything. Maybe there’s the assumption that it’s not activities and experiences their patrons want, it’s just the opportunity to conform and, before the heat rash sets in, the opportunity for some hot-weather sex.’ Then he checked himself. It wasn’t that he thought tha
t everybody should buy a pair of binoculars and go off and frighten birds. No, he believed there was just as much legitimacy in a horse-riding holiday or in a wine tour or in looking at cathedrals or fine buildings. That wasn’t Sunday supplement conformism and neither was it a denial of curiosity. Indeed these sorts of holidays were just the sorts of things other Midlanders might choose…

  Then Brian checked himself again. He was becoming as bigoted and as ridiculous as some of those American fundamentalists. He knew there was a kernel of truth in his thinking, but he always took it too far. Then he tended to throw out balance and detachment and end up where he was now: in the realms of pure fantasy. That wasn’t good. He should never forget that despite his own frequent travels around the world he still knew very little about anything, and clearly not enough to explain why this current contingent of Nature-seekers included nobody from the nation’s cities and certainly nobody from its capital.

  It must be time to stop thinking quite so much and get back to some more biscuits and some more watching.

  This change of occupation was timely. The Sukapha was now well west of “the bridge”. Some time ago, it had sailed under the same bridge that they had travelled over by minibus the day before. They were therefore now into a stretch of entirely bridgeless river which would retain this status until they reached their final destination in two days’ time, the at-least-one-bridge-equipped city of Guhawati. But it wasn’t an empty stretch. There were boats here and there, and occasionally there were people on the shore. Brian studied them.