Brian on the Brahmaputra

by David Fletcher

  The conversation wound up in the area of excessive salaries paid to the BBC’s management and to its creative director, and clearly made about as much sense to a puzzled-looking Tika as had the debate on media personalities. Brian thought that maybe he should have been more forceful with his initial idea about existential impermanence, which would have allowed Tika to join in more. But it was now too late. For dinner was finishing, and the Nature-seekers were rising from the table to make their way to the boat’s lounge for a film.

  It was a film about tigers in the Sundarbans, the mangrove forests in the mouth of the Ganges, to where Brian, Sandra and eight other Nature-seekers were heading after they’d done with Assam. It was also a very bad film. It was American and its theme was the man-eating proclivities of these tigers. It had no redeeming features in terms of real science or real enquiry into the tigers’ habits, but just an unrelenting, sensational and impressively tacky focus on the danger that these animals posed. It was full of truly over-the-top dramatic statements, embarrassingly bad reconstructions of people disappearing – but no actual footage of tigers. And it had a commentary that would have made the sainted David Attenborough reach for a sick-bag. In short, it was as bad as “Friday Night with Jonathan Ross” even though Ross wasn’t in it. Brian and Sandra left after just ten minutes.

  Only in the morning did they discover that the expert brought in to solve the disappearances (that is, to ascribe them to man-eating tigers) was Sujan, their lead guide and the guy who was going to escort them to the Sundarbans. And he’d been in the lounge to watch them leave it after just ten minutes and before his starring role had even commenced. In retrospect, Brian had to admit to himself that this wasn’t the best way to bond with someone who was going to be responsible for their safety in the tiger-full Sundarbans, or as the dreadful film had described it, in the “Killing Zone”. But what could he do? And anyway Sujan didn’t seem offended.

  Furthermore, the early retirement from the lounge had given Brian a chance to catch up on some reading back in his cabin. And the reading proved a great deal more rewarding than some appalling film about a “Killing Zone”. It had been provided by Kunal.

  Kunal was the expedition’s “cultural guide”. He was the chap who led the visits to the villages and the temples. While Sujan and Tika would be on the lookout for new birds on these excursions, he would be on the lookout for new “cultural” experiences. He would point out how the houses were built, he would explain how the weaving looms worked, and he would generally ensure that the Nature-seekers got all the information they needed about how the Assamese lived.

  He was a very jolly character and looked a little like a dark Benny Hill. He was Assamese himself, but his still discernible Assamese features were now softened by a rather round face that was mirrored in a rather round stomach. Like many other Indians who have access to large quantities of good food he was obviously making the most of it. That said, his appearance suited his character and his jolliness was infectious. Brian liked him a lot.

  He also liked the way he had gone to so much trouble to entertain and to inform. For when one returned to one’s room in the evening, there, on one’s bed, was not only a typed-up copy of the next day’s schedule (in case one had not absorbed the earlier verbal briefing), but there was also an “extract” from Kunal. He had combed through a variety of chronicles and books from the past that were either about Assam or contained references to Assam, and had made “extracts” from these writings, purely to add a little bit more to the Nature-seekers’ experience – in bite-sized nightly helpings.

  This night, Brian had a chance to catch up on these extracts. He had been less than diligent the two previous evenings on account of his falling to sleep too promptly. But now he was fully awake and he collected together the three unread extracts.

  The first was an extract from “A Tea Planter’s Life in Assam c1890”. This contained an informative but depressing commentary on the Assamese jungle “in all its magnificent vastness”. It also contained a reference to the reason that this “magnificent vastness” no longer existed: the practice of jungle-burning as practised by planters and natives whenever they wished to make a clearance for a plantation, jungle-burning being “the most expeditious method of removing the tangled vegetation”. Brian found it difficult to argue with that.

  The second extract was almost as dispiriting. It was an extract from Shihabuddin’s description of Assam in 1662 during the Mohammadan wars, and it described the country then. For example, the extract starts with the observation that: ‘Assam is a wild and dreadful country, abounding in danger’. It then goes on to state that: ‘The trees of its hills and plains are exceedingly tall, thick and strong’, and that, ‘large, high-spirited and well-proportioned elephants abound in the hills and jungle’. Brian thought that should old Shihabuddin get himself reincarnated and make a second visit here, he might spot a few changes.

  Then finally there was an extract from the 1910 edition of “Encyclopaedia Britannica”. This was not in the least dispiriting. It was just hugely embarrassing. It contained the following passage:

  ‘The Assam peasant, living in a half-populated province, and surrounded by surplus land, is indolent, good-natured and, on the whole, prosperous. He raises sufficient food for his wants with very little labour, and, with the exception of a few religious ceremonies, he has no demand made upon him for his money, saving the light rental of his fields. Under the peaceful influence of British rule (!) he has completely lost his ancient warlike instincts and forgotten his predatory habits. In complexion he is a shade or two fairer than the Bengali. His person is in general short and robust, but devoid of the grace and flexibility of the Hindu. A flat face, with high cheek bones, presents a physiognomy resembling the Chinese, and suggests no idea of beauty (!). The women form a striking contrast to the men; there is more of feminine beauty in them than is commonly seen in the women of Bengal, with a form and feature somewhat approaching the European (!!!)’.

  Brian thought that Kunal must have found great amusement in making this extract, and it provided him with a whole new perspective on what must have been Kunal’s perspective on them, this band of travellers who one hundred years ago, despite their enlightened views on TV scheduling and TV personalities, might well have written similar words themselves.

  Just pottering about

  The Sukapha’s tender (and very caring)

  ‘Have you tried the sat-nav?’

  Heaven afloat

  Bamboo-zling

  Living on the edge

  Many hands make something work

  A kite in flight

  The Sundarbans in style: the M B Sundari

  ‘I dare you.’

  Ample transport for sixteen people…

  Spot the tiger

  9.

  Nobody had relapsed. Bananas were now very clearly “not wanted on voyage”, and instead everybody at the breakfast table was tucking into fried comestibles. A couple of them were also coughing. Brian didn’t really take this in. But he would remember it later.

  Breakfast completed, a full contingent of Nature-seekers was soon on its way to another village for another cultural inspection. This involved another trip in the country boat and another confinement in one of those damned life-jackets. They weren’t getting any easier. But soon the parole board had authorised their release and Brian and his companions were disembarking from their vessel to begin their tour of a place called Ganesh Pahar.

  This was a fishing village. It was of linear design, with a row of simple houses along the length of an unmade path, on the other side of which there was a slope to the river. As with many of the settlements Brian had observed the previous day, this place was really living on the edge. Its only plus point in this respect was that the slope to the river didn’t appear to be in a state of constant degradation and that it was protected from the worst of the Brahmaputra’s power by a spit of land. There was a channel between this and the village itself, and this must have mo
derated the abrasive power of the river significantly. That said, one of the first things that Brian observed was a lady climbing up the slope with a basket of earth on her head. This she was about to add to a pile of earth at the top of the slope, clearly about to be used to repair a section of path that had simply crumbled away. He now not only worried for the future of the village but also for his own safety. From now on he would keep to the village side of the path as much as he could.

  The village was quite pleasant. The houses were small, but all of them were well maintained and most were surrounded by a tidy courtyard. Many of them were also decorated. Around their doors was a border of white hands, each with a patch of red at its centre. These borders, Kunal said, were to keep something bad out of the house. Or something good in. Brian couldn’t quite catch his commentary.

  However, there was something they certainly weren’t keeping out, and that was the god of fertility; there were countless children everywhere and most houses seemed to have at least half a dozen. ‘Where,’ thought Brian, ‘will all these children go when they want children? And is there anywhere for them to go?’

  He immediately chided himself. What about looking at it from their perspective? What did this abundance of children mean for the locals?

  Well, whatever it might mean for the future, for now it meant a lot a little hands to get on with the re-plastering of the houses (with the much-used mud and dung concoction), more little hands to help out with the baby-minding (even the smallest of small girls was often holding a toddler within her arms), and more little hands to earn the families some money. This is where changing his perspective didn’t work. There was a group of five children sitting on the flat bottom of an upturned boat, and all five of them were making tiny little pots out of clay. Brian heard Kunal explaining that they were oil pots to be used with the offerings made in temples. None of the children was more than five years old and none of them was enjoying it. They looked sullen and bored – and resigned to their task. So too did the two three-year olds who were collecting the raw material for this work and bringing it up a slope from a creek below. It was child labour. Not in the depths of some sweatshop in Mumbai, but out here in the open in a small village in rural Assam.

  Brian felt uncomfortable. Maybe he hadn’t really taken on the local perspective. And just look around. There was a woman winnowing grain in a way that hadn’t changed in millennia; there was another crushing grain with a foot-powered see-saw device that must have been around for the same sort of time. And wherever you looked people were working and toiling, trying to carve out a life with the minimum of resources and with only ancient technology. Any wonder then that they tried to supply themselves with some help – even if the truth was that all this help just added to their burden?

  Brian was getting out of his depth. It was just as well that Tika distracted him by pointing out a fly-past of Himalayan swiftlets and then brought his attention to some weaver nests in a palm tree, complete with some baya weavers hanging from their sides. But then Brian came to the village shop. It was more a booth than a shop and it contained some sweets and other delicacies, all of which could have been carried away in a single Sainsbury’s shopping trolley. It made Brian think again – about the place he was in. And he felt troubled again. This village, he thought, might be neat and tidy – and peaceful and safe – but there was something being stored up here that was frightening. There were just too many people and very soon there would be far too many people. And of course, it wasn’t just this village. Or just Assam. Or just India. It was everywhere in the world. Brian knew all this already, but it wasn’t too often that he was confronted with it so forcefully.

  So he was glad when they left, relieved that he would soon be back in his cocoon and not quite so challenged by reality. Even if to start with he had to put that life-jacket on again and even if the cocoon wasn’t quite so accessible as usual…

  For what had happened while the group was walking around the village was that the Sukapha had gone walkabout herself. She had cast her moorings and was now sailing down the river with her crew on board but with no Nature-seekers. In doing this she had made the country boat’s return trip a very short one (as she was now almost down to the fishing village), but she had presented its boatmen with something of a challenge. They would have to catch her and then transfer their passengers to her while both vessels were still on the move.

  There were two boatmen; one was the captain and the other was his crew. They were a remarkable pair. They lived on the boat. While the Sukapha’s crew would bed down in that boat’s basement cabins each night, the country boat company would settle in the vessel’s tiny engine room, ready, should the need arise for any reason, to untie it from its mother craft and take it to safety. But despite the complete absence of comfort aboard the country boat, and despite a similar absence of any apparent facilities, each morning they would be ready, smartly turned out in their black uniforms, to welcome aboard any Nature-seekers requiring their services.

  Well, now it was the turn of the captain to demonstrate that his remarkable qualities didn’t stop at just his appearance and his courtesy, but that they also extended to his boat craft. The country boat was approaching the stern of the Sukapha which, whilst not at “water-ski speed”, was still going at a fair old lick. The country boat was obviously going faster but only marginally so, as would be expected. The captain was trying to dock with the Sukapha, not to ram it.

  He was sitting on top of the engine room. He was out of sight of the Nature-seekers, but Brian had seen him in action from the sundeck of the Sukapha on previous occasions and knew how he “drove”. For on top of the engine room he had access to the rudder, which he held in his left hand, and to a piece of string attached to the engine’s throttle, which he held in his right hand, and with which he could control the speed of his craft. He was therefore now pushing on his rudder and pulling on his piece of string in the expert manner that he must have learnt over years, and bringing the country boat towards the side of the Sukapha with no apparent effort whatsoever. It glided into and then against the side of the bigger vessel with barely a nudge, and within seconds the crew of the Sukapha had secured it tightly with ropes and the Nature-seekers were being invited to change vessels. Brian wondered how much the captain of the country boat got paid – and whether his crew of one got paid at all. Maybe he just made do with food and accommodation. But no. That was just the village getting to him, a reaction to all that hardship he’d seen – and to all those children and the sort of hardship they’d face in the future. Soon he had returned to reason and was up on the sundeck with far different thoughts in his mind.

  The Sukapha was now approaching Guhawati. In his “Lonely Planet” guide the introduction to this city reads: ‘Sprawling almost 20km along the Brahmaputra’s southern riverbank, the Northeast’s gateway city is a major business centre servicing tea and oil industries. Although not that attractive overall, green hillocks rise curiously above Guhawati’s noisy smog and the city’s water tanks and riverbanks are patchily pleasant. Come here to arrange tours to other Northeast states, see a few of the fascinating temples and then move swiftly on.’

  This was the 2007 edition of the guide and it gave the population of Guhawati as 964,000. Brian thought it was a fair assumption that the population was now in excess of a million, but he wanted to check out some of those other facts himself – about the patchy pleasantness of the riverbank and the curiousness of the green hillocks. And where better to do this than from the sundeck, right at its front, as they approached the conurbation. He might even get an insight into the advice to ‘move swiftly on’. Not, he thought, the most enticing of comments to write about a city. But who could tell? He might have a pleasant surprise.

  He didn’t. The Sukapha had made its way down the river through especially murky water, which was so murky and so swirly and therefore so full of hidden sandbanks, that the boat’s pilot had been deployed. He’d stood a few feet away from where Brian was sitting wit
h Sandra, peering over the front rail of the sundeck and passing steering instructions to the boat’s master inside his wheelhouse. Thanks to him, they were now past this watery murk, and instead into the murk of river-side Guhawati. It wasn’t very nice. Suffice it to say that the inhabitants of this city did not appear to regard the river upon which it sat as an amenity to be exploited for pleasure but as a utility to be employed for rather less laudable purposes.

  The Sukapha came to a stop. It had dropped anchor some way from the shore and just a little up-river from Peacock Island. This was a tiny hillock-shaped island in the middle of the river, which no longer boasted any peacocks, but which, at its summit, did provide a site for one of those “fascinating temples” referred to earlier. And that was where the Nature-seekers were off to next. They were about to make their second cultural visit of the day, and it wasn’t yet lunchtime…

  The country boat took them there. It deposited them at a decrepit looking landing-stage, and with Sujan, Tika and Kunal, the assembled party then strode off in search of the temple. This wasn’t too difficult. The island was no more than one hundred metres in diameter, and the only exit from the landing-stage was a stone stairway. This, it transpired, led to the top of the island and to the home of the holy place.