Brian on the Brahmaputra

by David Fletcher

  Brian started to climb the steps of the stairway. The first thing he noticed was an official sign at the side of the stairway which announced that: ‘Beautification Cum – Development Works of Unananda Temple Hillock is going on under GMDA’. The sign looked old. So too did the generous drift of litter that carpeted the hillside above it. It looked as though it had been there for years. Brian wasn’t so much shocked as bemused. He now knew that tidiness wasn’t an innate quality of this country’s population, but this wasn’t just anywhere, this was a small, discrete island, only accessible by boat, and the location of a temple, a holy place visited principally by a procession of “worshippers”. How could it get this filthy in the first place and how could it be allowed to stay this filthy (especially when the GMDA were on the case – whoever the GMDA were)? Perhaps it would be better at the temple itself.

  It was. But only relatively so. And this represented something of a dilemma for Brian – in the sense that he didn’t know how to react.

  He was a self-confessed atheist. There was no question about it. He didn’t believe in a responsive supreme being and he thought all religions were a product of the past and wished that education and enlightenment would one day sweep them all away. Only then, he thought, would either the world or the human species stand any chance at all. However, that was not going to happen in his lifetime, and meanwhile he couldn’t find too much wrong with people following a religion, particularly if somehow it made them better people and it didn’t turn them into people who only wanted to blow up other people. He had friends who were religious. Aspects of religion interested him. And here he was now experiencing a slice of a particular religion, and paying it its due respects – by being diffident in his manner and by being un-shoed in its place of worship. And he was finding all sorts of faults. And should he have been? As an atheist, wouldn’t he have been finding faults with this temple anyway?

  Well no. He didn’t find many faults with his local parish church. It was a bit cold if you ended up there for a winter funeral, but it was really a very nice place. He even took his bad-atheist ass up there to help keep the grass mown in the churchyard. Not as an act of worship in any way, but just to recognise that the church was a piece of his cultural heritage, and a piece of it that needed maintaining – with a lawnmower. Just as it would in his longed-for post-religion nirvana.

  But here, in this small temple… Well, it could have done with a clean. And the guys manning the shrine thing in the middle… Well… And there wasn’t a lot of serenity here, just a lot of people who seemed to be… well, paying for favours, just like his relatives did in his youth, when they lit a candle in his local Catholic church and made an offering of money. ‘Here God, here’s a little something. And now I’ve got your attention, you couldn’t see your way to doing me a little favour, could you? You see, I want…’. And that’s what was happening here. Brian was sure of it. He also thought he knew what they were asking for: fertility. Indeed there was an inner sanctum in the temple which was down some steps and so packed with worshippers that none of the Nature-seekers ventured down, and in which, Kunal admitted, was an enormous phallus and, in addition, another giant organ of some sort. And not, thought Brian, of the sort with pedals and stops that Mrs Grubbins plays at evensong every night. Yes, fertility was in high demand in this place, and he had to concede that the punters more often seemed to get what they wanted than not, as was only too clear in the village…

  And so the dilemma. Were these atheist-inspired misgivings or vestigial-Christian reservations, or was he just being objective? He didn’t know, but he hoped he was being objective. Indeed, he always hoped he was being objective. But in any event, whatever he thought and however misguided he was in his thoughts, it wasn’t going to stop what was going on here. Or even get any of that litter cleared. It was time to leave Peacock Island and go and have some lunch – and to keep his thoughts to himself.

  Lunch was as delightful as ever. Brian even treated himself to a chilli on a stick. Just to prove to himself that he had now fully acclimatised to the Indian way of eating – and to give warning to his stomach that he would countenance no further misbehaviour on its part, and that whatever he fed it, it would have to deal with without complaint. And anyway, a chilli might chase away this feeling he had in his throat. It felt almost sore…

  After lunch there was another expedition – to see a flock of greater adjutant storks. Brian and Sandra decided not to join it. They had seen many of these storks before and they were not desperate to seek out further of their number. Furthermore it was now stiflingly hot and the prospect of any expedition at this time of day was much less than appealing. But the real clincher was the location of this flock of storks; it was on Guhawati’s principal rubbish dump.

  Brian’s sensibilities had already been tested on this holiday, and he now knew his limits more clearly than ever. He could not cope with a rubbish dump. Not a rubbish dump in India, complete apparently with dump-dwellers and no doubt lacking in any deodorisation measures. From all accounts it was a very smelly place. So as the other Nature-seekers were packed into minibuses to be ferried to hell in Guhawati, Brian and Sandra retired with a supply of brewed nutrition to the comfort of the sweet-smelling sundeck.

  The Sukapha had now moved a very short way down the river and was moored off a section of the Guhawati riverside that definitely would not have qualified as one of the “Lonely Planet”s “pleasant patches”. It also offered no views of any green hillocks rising curiously out of the smog. No, all it had going for it was a graveyard of long dead metal boats, an assembly of… well, there was no other term for them; an assembly of rusting hulks, not so much lined up on the shore as cast about it like pieces of oversized litter – which is precisely what they were. They were thrown-away boats, boats that had once plied their trade from maybe the Bay of Bengal, up through Bangladesh to this inland port. Or maybe they were the ancestors of the Sukapha, smaller versions of the craft from which Brian was now viewing them – and marvelling at them.

  They were predominantly white, pale blue and pink. The white was off-white and was what was left of the paint with which they’d once been coated. The pale blue was also a remnant from their painted past, when clearly blue was the nonwhite colour of choice around these parts. The pink was rust. It covered as much of the redundant vessels as the white and blue did together. No doubt in twenty years’ time it would cover the vessels completely. And they would still be here then. Brian was convinced of it. Unless the price of scrap metal went into the stratosphere and somebody came here with the right kit and the right authority, these shells of past shipping would remain here until the second coming. In fact, they’d probably still be here after the second going as well. They were now just part of the land and a lot less moveable than much of the “real” land that borders the Brahmaputra along its length. Brian found them fascinating.

  He was also interested in their inhabitants. Because this was India, and no matter how decrepit and how uninviting a location might be, if it has some shelter to offer, or a vantage point to peer from, or just a flat bit of space to sit on, it will be inhabited. Consequently each hulk had a human tenant. One was sleeping, one was smoking, another was playing cards with his mate, and yet another was fishing (albeit he wasn’t actually “catching”). And there were other human passengers on these literal junks who were cooking, eating, phoning or reading, and that’s only what was going on outside. Brian could only guess at their hidden pastimes. For all he knew, these guys weren’t just using these ex-boats as a convenient daytime roost but also as their full-time homes. For them this might be a very pleasant patch of riverside despite all the visual evidence to the contrary.

  Of course, it wasn’t perfect for them. There was a riverside “re-sculpturing” going on just next to their haven. This took the form of a couple of ancient, heavy-duty “public carriers” that were repeatedly trundling onto the sandy riverbank, where a gang of labourers would quickly load them with as much of the riverbank
as they could publicly carry away. These labourers would wield their spades and within minutes another few tons of sandy land had become a load of sand for sale presumably to builders. Not a bad business really: labour costs low, transport costs very low, and raw material costs, zero. You just dig the stuff out of the ground – and presumably ignore the fact that you don’t own the ground, and that very soon the ground will have gone and the Brahmaputra will be just a little bit wider (and a little bit closer to the row of shanty dwellings at the top of the bank, and to that fleet of marooned rust buckets).

  Brian occupied himself with this view all afternoon. Sandra had taken herself away with a book, but Brian became captivated. It wasn’t like looking at birds and new animals; Brian appreciated that the cast of characters in this diorama were all of his own species, and that had he been born in Guhawati, he might have been amongst their number. But he hadn’t been born here; he’d been born many hundreds of miles away in England in a place called Rugby, a town that has given the world a game that is now even catching on in such far-away places as New Zealand. And that made him an outsider in Guhawati, an observer, and an observer of a way of life he could barely get to grips with. Did the guys on the boats have families? Where did they find the money to eat? Where did they find the money to buy the playing cards? Would those lorries keep on coming here until they physically couldn’t, until they’d carted away the whole riverside? Would anybody try to stop them? Was what they were doing illegal or just entrepreneurial? Did they abide by all the Health and Safety regulations – insofar as these extended to removing the sides of rivers? There were so many questions in his mind. And none of them with a satisfactory answer. Perhaps he should have gone to the rubbish dump instead.

  But then the Nature-seekers returned from the rubbish dump, and many of them were of the opinion that perhaps they should have stayed on the boat. The dump had lived up to all its advance billing, and although there were the promised birds there, there was also the smell and, even worse, the people who lived with this smell and with the total degradation of a rubbish dump life indefinitely. In comparison, Brian thought, lazing around, playing cards on a derelict ship seemed like a fairly easy number.

  Better though that none of those guys out there knew what life was like aboard the Sukapha. They wouldn’t “understand”. And especially on this night aboard the boat – which was the night of the Nature-seekers’ “Final Brahmaputra Dinner”. For tomorrow, they would be heading back to Kolkata, and from there either straight back to England or, like Brian and Sandra, down to the Sundarbans. So tonight was a bit special. This was immediately apparent in the lounge where all the Nature-seekers had gathered for the final on-board listing session. They had all dressed up. Not only in their uncreased party best, but also in their life-jackets. Tim had started it. He’d argued that these life-jackets had been such a low point of the Brahmaputra experience, that now, on this final night, they should be made a high point. Not for the whole evening but just for as long as it took to send a clear message to the boat’s management and to the guides, that these useless pieces of kit were much despised but had been worn valiantly and without actual rebellion, and might even have found their way into people’s affections.

  It doesn’t take much to keep Nature-seekers amused, and everyone, without exception, had joined in. So when Sujan and his colleagues arrived to join the party in the lounge, the party was all orange. The effect was even heightened by the Indian and Nepalese choice of dress. They had all donned their achkans, the long collarless shirts worn on the subcontinent to denote rank and status, and donned this night to add to the sense of celebration.

  This sense of celebration was then maintained after the listing process – and after speeches of thanks to Tika, Sujan and the boat’s crew. This was accomplished in no small part by the ship’s management and through their use of the ship’s wine stocks. “Riviera Red” and “Riviera White” flowed like the Brahmaputra itself – figuratively speaking. And although this product of Bangalore might not have made it in a competitive field, here on its own, on this night in Guhawati, it proved a champion of champions.

  It also softened Brian’s mood. Despite the earlier jocularity with life-jackets and a general overflowing of bonhomie, Brian had been feeling a little depressed. He had become very aware that he had spent a whole day which had been very anti-Indian. He had visited a village and had come away with dark thoughts about child labour and even darker thoughts about the number of children. Then he had visited a temple and had thought some very unreligious thoughts about the local religion – and its impact on that number of children again. And then he had sat and observed what could only be described as a mix of squalor and disfunctionality. And even for an aspiring misanthropic recluse, none of this was good. If only he could work that perspective trick a little better. See everything from their point of view. And then it wouldn’t look anything like as bad. Or would it? And it was just that they weren’t acknowledging what they saw… But no, that couldn’t be right. That would defy human nature. ‘And anyway,’ he kept telling himself, ‘if you were born here and didn’t have all those hang-ups we have, you’d wouldn’t see anything wrong at all. And if you went to England, you’d see a hell of a lot wrong there’.

  Eventually this mantra had some effect. Assisted as it was by the Riviera White, the table conversation and a growing realisation on his part that this really was his last dinner on board this boat. And with Brian, there was nothing quite like sentimental melancholia to take his mind off his congenital sense of guilt – whether that guilt concerned his vindictiveness towards people like Jim, his near lecherous thoughts about women such as Joanna Lumley, or his having had an “everything’s wrong with India” sort of day.

  He also had something else to distract him: the beginnings of a painfully sore throat and a small cough. He kept washing it with Riviera, but to no avail. He was getting a cold. From the sound of the other coughs in the dining room, he wasn’t on his own. Perhaps he and all those succumbing to this next epidemic should have been provided with Kunal’s “extract” for that night a little earlier. It was taken from “Sport in British Burmah, Assam & the Cassyah & Juntiah Hills”, by Lt. Col. Pollock, published 1879. Part of it read:

  ‘It does not do for a man in Assam to drink, or be given to sedentary habits. He should wear flannel and be ordinarily careful, and I believe he can go anywhere without running any great risk of fever. The one thing he must remember is, if he encamps near the foot of a range of hills, to avoid sleeping within the influence of the wind which nightly rushes down from the elevated plateau to take the place of the exhausted air of the plains, through one of the numerous gorges which abut onto the plains and through which generally a river flows.’

  So that was it. They’d got everything wrong, and Brian was convinced that he hadn’t seen anybody wearing flannel anywhere. What’s more, maybe all those negative thoughts about India were just a product of all that exhausted air. It had been especially stuffy today, and now he thought about it, he had no recollection of a wind blowing down from the plateau last night.

  Lt. Col. Pollock clearly knew his Assam very well…

  10.

  It was morning. Brian had eaten breakfast to the accompaniment of more coughing and was back in his cabin waiting for Sandra to ready herself for the day. As he waited he looked through the cabin’s rear window. The Sukapha was now a few hundred yards further down the river. From its new mooring Brian could no longer see a jumble of rust buckets but just a nondescript bank edged with nondescript buildings – and some people. He could see a number of Guhawati’s poorer residents going about their early-morning ablutions in the river. After scrambling down its muddy banks they would stand in the water, soap themselves, rinse themselves and then clean their teeth and finally wash out their mouths with a mouthful of the river itself. Then they would scramble back up the bank, dress themselves and amble away with their towel and the remains of their soap.

  As he watched he bega
n to feel like a voyeur. But he couldn’t help himself. Everything about this communal washing scene was just so fascinating. Here were men and women bathing together, and not for any other reason than necessity; there were clearly a limited number of accessible and suitable bathing sites within the city itself and this was one such site. They had very little choice. But they were bathing discreetly; there was the minimum amount of flesh on display, and how the women bathed themselves thoroughly whilst still modestly clothed was a revelation in itself. So there was good here: men and women sharing a common space for the conduct of a fairly intimate task without any embarrassment or discomfort and without any of them being overcome with lust. Men in Guhawati, it appeared, weren’t inevitably roused into passion by the sight of a woman rubbing herself, and the women didn’t need to be protected from their gaze. Indeed everybody seemed simply to ignore each other, and a man only looked at a woman when he was looking to avoid her as he left the river. All in all it was a very instructive display of people’s desire to behave decently and, of course, of their desire to keep themselves clean.

  However, as well as these encouragingly positive aspects, there was what in Brian’s eyes was a ruddy great negative: these people were bathing in (and cleaning their teeth in) a body of water that was quite obviously filthy. This was in the middle of a city. The river was abused. It had things floating on it. It inevitably had a great many more things floating in it, things that one couldn’t see but things that would make sick or even kill a western softy such as himself. But these people had to endure this. To keep clean, each day they not only had to expose themselves to public view while they bathed, but they also had to expose themselves to the dangers of any number of waterborne diseases. Brian began to wonder how any of them survived into old age.

  He also wondered what all these bathers would make of the bathroom in his cabin and the shower there. How they would react to crystal clear water at just the right temperature – and the privacy and the convenience of your very own shower cubicle. No bothers about a rogue bit of bare flesh and no climbing back up an eight-foot bank of mud when you’ve rinsed yourself off. It made him feel guilty about his thoughts of yesterday all over again.