Brian on the Brahmaputra

by David Fletcher

  The downpour lasted almost half an hour. Then it stopped, just as suddenly as it had first arrived, and the sun came out. This was the signal to move on again. And when the tarpaulins had been rolled back from the U-frames and when all the Nature-seekers had been prized away from a wonderful view of a purple heron that had just emerged out of nowhere, the jeeps started off.

  The rain had turned the tracks into mud. Progress was therefore slow, and the rest house seemed a distant memory by the time they’d arrived at “The Office of the Park Officer”. As they had originally entered the park through an unmanned entrance, they still had to obtain their park pass and pay for this pass. Hence this visit to the Park Officer’s office. This was a scruffy building embellished with a veranda on which there were the skulls of an elephant, a rhino and a buffalo and the bodies of three of the officer’s park rangers. The bodies were still alive, although not very animated. Their duties may have been no more than guarding the three animal skulls. Or maybe they brought them out each morning and took them back into the officer’s office each evening, in the same way that Arkwright moved his tin baths and his brooms out of and then back into his shop in “Open All Hours”. But Brian doubted that the skulls were for sale.

  Securing the necessary pass and paying for it was a protracted process. For all Brian knew, it required a phone call to Delhi and the approval of a minister. But it certainly wasn’t straightforward. No matter. It simply gave everybody an opportunity to stretch their legs and to have a look round. All six jeeps were still together, so there were now Nature-seekers all over the place either peering into trees or just being nosey. For the Office of the Park Officer was flanked by a number of houses, which Brian assumed must be the homes of the guardians of the skulls and some other park rangers who were currently on more active duties. They weren’t very salubrious, and indeed it was difficult to tell which were occupied and which were “resting between tenants” – and might well be resting until they collapsed into total dereliction. Brian was upset. On whatever the modern state of India was spending its resources, it wasn’t spending much of them on the Orang National Park. Then he almost got angry. This was a country with a space programme.

  Fortunately nature rescued him from his simmering fury. A large cuckoo-shrike had just been spotted, and it was now sitting on a branch in full view. It was engrossing. Then somebody found a blind snake. That isn’t to say that somebody had poked its eyes out; it was born that way. It was a Diard’s blind snake and it was sightless because it spent most of its time under the ground or under leaf litter. But here it was on the surface and quite happy to have its photo taken. Bill was especially interested in it. So much so that he became temporarily visually impaired himself. His glasses fell into the leaf litter as he leaned over the snake to get that last prize-winning snap and they immediately disappeared. Needless to say, keener eyes were soon there to help and it wasn’t too long before Bill was returned to his normal eagle-eyed vision. He was then able to join in the fun centred on Ron and Irene’s jeep.

  The postcard models, Jerry and Edith, had not come to the park. Brian thought that they had finally realised they were in India and they needed time to come to terms with this. When he’d communicated this to Sandra, Sandra had informed him that he merited the word “despicable” and that she sometimes wondered why she had married him and had not yet remembered. This is by the way, but Jerry and Edith’s absence did explain why there was one jeep that was the sole property of Ron and Irene. On the previous safaris they had formed a quartet with the missing duo and, just like Brian and Sandra, they therefore now had a jeep to themselves. Unfortunately, however, it was not a well jeep. While driving around this morning it had already stalled on a number of occasions and would then not start again. Each time it had to be push-started by the drivers of the other jeeps travelling with it.

  But now things were being sorted out. The jeep’s engine cover was up and all the jeep drivers were gathered around its engine administering some mechanical aid. To be precise they were administering the contents of several water bottles. Part of the group’s stock of drinking water was being poured over the engine block and presumably over anything else near the engine block that was looking anything like sickly. Brian’s first thought was that this was a libation, the offering of a precious liquid to appease the god of jeeps. But no, this was a piece of genuine mechanical therapy designed to restore the engine to rude good health. Unfortunately it was not a piece of effective therapy, and the engine remained sick. Ron looked on in amazement. He thought he knew what the problem was (something to do with worn bushes, whatever they are). But he also knew that water pouring would not only not cure it, but it might also make matters worse. There were electrical things next to that engine, and even Brian knew that water and electricity are not the best of playmates and that they often squabble. So don’t pour water over your engine!

  After fifteen minutes of this treatment further damage had miraculously been avoided, but inevitably the jeep still wouldn’t start. Muscle power once again had to replace the starter motor, and Brian watched as Ron and Irene disappeared along the track, their jeep sandwiched between two others, its driver over-revving its engine to avoid another stall. He later found out that this didn’t work. Further stalling and further push-starting was to plague them to the end. (The water treatment was abandoned.)

  Brian’s trio of jeeps moved off in the opposite direction. More marvels were sighted, more photographs were taken and more challenges were overcome. The tracks were still very slippery from the downpour, and some enthusiastic driving was called for, not least when their route took them through a series of deep gullies. One of them in particular was almost too much of a challenge. But with each jeep summoning up about eight thousand revs and their drivers summoning up the assistance of that jeep god (who may well have existed after all), they all got through. And a brown crake and an elephant with calf later, they were back with the country boat. The jeeps, despite Brian’s reservations and all his defamatory thoughts about them, had done their job. Sort of. And he now felt almost sad that he’d not be seeing them again. He just hoped they’d make it back to their cardboard boxes with those cellophane fronts.

  But now it was time for his next encounter – with a life-jacket. Or should he just mutiny?

  He didn’t. He didn’t want to delay lunch. And he didn’t want to delay the departure of the Sukapha. As soon as the Nature-seekers had seated themselves at the dining tables, the Sukapha was casting off its moorings and setting off down the river. The afternoon would be another session of relaxed observation from the sundeck, and that’s where Brian and almost everybody else returned to when the meal was at an end. What would this stretch of the Brahmaputra reveal to them?

  To begin with it revealed more of the same: immense expanses of water, endless flat landscapes and the biggest skies Brian had ever seen. Then there were more boats. Some of them were little bigger than the tiny fishing boats they had seen before. And some of them were ferries. They had aboard them cycles, motorbikes, other chattels and lots of people. They were all clearly licensed to carry a maximum number of people exactly equivalent to the maximum number of people they could carry without sinking. If these boats had been any lower in the water, they would no longer be on the water but in the water – with the water in them. But obviously they knew what they were doing. They didn’t even bother with bright orange life-jackets.

  This was Brian’s initial view. But then he began to wonder whether they just didn’t care. Whether they were just fatalistic, and if the boat sank then the boat sank, and that was that. What made him think this was the appearance along one bank of the river of increasingly large “cliffs”.

  The Brahmaputra runs through a colossal flood plain. Its waters are full of silt, washed away from its sides and deposited in any number of huge sand banks within and beside its flow – and eventually in the Bay of Bengal. There is a constant reshaping of its course. Nothing about this mighty river is permanent, and
that includes its cliffs.

  Theses cliffs are cliffs of sand, scaled-up versions of the sand banks which occur all along the length of the Brahmaputra. And whilst Brian had already seen some really high banks over the last few days, he had not before seen banks quite this high – up to thirty feet tall – nor banks that were quite so unstable. Because this was their outstanding feature: their collapsibility. If one stared along a stretch of these cliffs of sand, one had to wait no time at all to see a piece of cliff dropping off. With the help of the flow of water beneath them, small slivers or sometimes great wedges would simply detach themselves and then slide into the river. It was real-time erosion, a disintegration of land that was happening so quickly as to be unreal. But it was real. One minute land was there; the next minute it was gone. And in hours, days or months, it would be land somewhere else or just river bed or sea bed. The river would decide.

  Now, this was endlessly fascinating to watch, but it was also the cause of Brian’s reflection on fatalism. For the land that was disappearing was lived on. In many places, just beyond the cliff edge, there were houses. Brian had always thought it must be deeply unsettling to live on the slopes of a volcano. But volcanoes are normally quiet and unthreatening. They are just potentially dangerous. Whereas the Brahmaputra is anything but unthreatening and it is constantly dangerous – and constantly eating away the land on which people live. How many months would have to pass before one of those houses was in the river? And how long would it be before one of their occupants was in the river? For what was truly amazing was not the proximity of the dwellings to the cliffs, but the proximity of the people. They would be not just yards from their edge, but inches. Men, women and children would be lined up on their very brink, waving at the boat or even running along and waving, and never more than inches away from where the land disappeared – and where a slice more of it might disappear at any second. But they just didn’t seem to notice or to care. Hence Brian’s thoughts on fatalism and his increasing concern that the transit of the Sukapha might locate a weakness in this fatalism’s armour, and deliver some poor hapless villager into the clutches of the Brahmaputra along with half a ton of sand. It was extremely unnerving, and especially so with the children. It was as though they weren’t even aware that there was an edge there at all.

  Inevitably nobody did fall in, and maybe these river folk knew a lot more about crumbling cliff edges than Brian gave them credit for. But he still found it deeply unnerving. Because there was one thing he was sure of: these people, and particularly the youngest of these people, were distracted. And when people are distracted they are inattentive and they are careless.

  The cause of the distraction was the Sukapha itself. It was as clear as day that the Sukapha’s passage was a big event. Indeed, the Sukapha was not just a big event for these riverside dwellers, it was also the biggest thing they ever saw or were ever likely to see. It dwarfed all the other boats on the river and it also dwarfed their buildings, even their temples and their meeting houses. It was also a manifestation of another world, a world that used metal and glass rather than reeds and mud, a world where energy sprang from an oil-powered machine and didn’t have to be coaxed out of overworked bullocks or out of their own overworked limbs. Rural, riverside Assam was a place where machines of any sort were largely non-existent, a place where nothing was on more than a modest scale, and a place where modernity had barely made a mark. So to see some enormous, out-of-their-world palace floating past on the river must have been for them an enthralling experience and an almost incomprehensible experience – and a distracting experience. Even if they knew everything there was to know about crumbling cliff edges, as far as Brian was concerned, they were in real danger, the sort of danger that only fatalism can deal with. ‘There again,’ he thought, ‘if their fatalism can cope with the prospect of their homes disappearing into the river in the foreseeable future then I suppose it can cope with just about anything’.

  But he knew that he’d have stood well away from the edge.

  He’d even stay well away from the edge of the sandbank where the Sukapha had now moored. It was no more than three feet high, but it was as crumbly as a child’s sandcastle and not meant to bear the weight of an overfed Brit. He and Sandra were on the sandbank. The mooring pits had been dug, a beach volleyball game was in progress, and the Nature-seekers had been invited to stretch their legs on dry land for an hour. There was not much to see, but it was pleasant to be left to one’s own devices for a time whilst not on the boat.

  Brian and Sandra just walked – and just avoided the edge. And as they walked back to the boat they spent a little time watching the volleyball game and watching the local villagers who had turned up to watch too. They were all slender. They were all as lean and spare as Brian had been when he was in his school’s cross-country team and had not yet started to shave. They were fishermen and farmers. One of them was carrying a wooden plough and a wooden rake over his shoulder. They were all hard workers and light eaters. They were not emaciated, but just the shape our species was designed to be, with no hamburger fat around their middle and no fat anywhere. Whatever problems they might face in their lives, obesity for sure wasn’t one of them. And from what Brian had observed of the pace of change along the Brahmaputra, it never would be.

  Brian was still thinking about these people when he sat down to dinner. He was thinking about what they might be eating this evening. He was also reflecting on all those disintegrating cliffs and what such a state of constant instability must mean for these people’s lives and for their sense of permanency. Did they see “temporary” and “permanent” in the same way he did? How could you see it in a “western” way if your home might not be there in a little while or the ground you were actually standing on might not be there within the next few seconds? After all, aren’t all our concepts of permanency rooted in the unmoveable? And what’s more unmoveable than our homes and the ground we stand on? And if these aren’t permanent, then how can we develop the concept of permanency or indeed the concept of the temporary? For these chaps, everything is temporary. Even the course of this humungous river beside which they live.

  Brian thought that his musings were worthy of discussion with his table companions. He also thought that there might be an opportunity to broaden this discussion by using the life of a Brahmaputra local as a metaphor for all their lives, and in particular how permanence in the way that they understood it was possibly a construct. How it was much more realistic to see everything as temporary and our whole lives as just a fleeting ripple in the torrent of time.

  But he couldn’t get any takers. Instead Dennis kicked off a conversation about the worst people on TV and radio back home, and this soon drew contributions from the whole table.

  To begin with there were the no-brainers: Jonathan Ross, Russell Brand and Graham Norton. And Sandra made a very astute observation about what it was that made these people so offensive – when somebody like Julian Clary, who could be equally outrageous, always managed to do this with a certain degree of charm and without causing offence. It was, she said, that Mr Clary, for all his rudeness, was genuinely funny, a vital qualification that allowed him to get away with just about anything. The aforementioned trio, on the contrary, were not funny and just grotesquely smutty, although all three of them were under the misapprehension that they were the funniest thing since an Alastair Darling budget. Brian could only agree with Sandra’s observation.

  The no-brainers out of the way, it was then the turn of the more esoteric turn-offs. First to get a mention was Sandy Toksvig, who all on her own has ruined forever “The News Quiz”. Everybody agreed that she suffered from the same delusion as the initial trio: she thinks she is funny. It has clearly never occurred to her that she is not in the least bit funny, and that the combined effect of her inane giggling and her gross unfunniness in the company of so many others who are funny has destroyed the programme completely. Why don’t the producers see this? And why don’t they see that Griff Rhys Jone
s isn’t quite the national treasure he’s made out to be and that neither is Toyah Wilcox (who has now developed the very irritating habit of popping up on programmes about Seventies music and presenting her highly distorted views on its principal players – and her supposed significance within their number). And then how about Ann Robinson? How could anybody think she was a good idea?

  Anyway, having exhausted who not to have on the telly or the radio, the conversation then turned to what to put on in their place. This was easy. There was no shortage of contributions. More bird and wildlife programmes of course with, if possible, Sir David Attenborough narrating every one. More Clive James talking common sense and exploiting more of that moral authority he’s earned. Then there was more of “Have I Got News for You”, but with the power given to the panel to subpoena people. With this, not only could they ridicule those of the great and the good who deserved it in their absence, but they could also do this in their presence – and cross examine them. It would be great. And how about a modern “throwing to the lions” type programme, where it was MEPs who got thrown and the public who were the lions? One MEP per programme. And he or she need turn up with just their expenses record and their attendance record. It would certainly be a way to engage the public with European politics.

  This idea led to another on a political theme: the repeated showing on consecutive nights for the next ten years of every episode of “Yes Minister” and “Yes Prime Minister”. That way the great British public might finally wake up to how they are ruled and who is doing the ruling. This proposal met with unanimous support. Although Alan suggested that it might be better to make it compulsory viewing in schools. Or even to have it as the entire syllabus for Politics A level – on the basis that everything one would ever need to know about British politics was contained within its five magnificent series. Brian thought this was a brilliant use of a brilliant piece of writing and acting, and wished he’d thought of the idea himself.