Brian on the Brahmaputra

by David Fletcher

  Precarious too was the future of the tiger. For despite the huge expanses of pristine mangrove on the unpopulated islands, there were very few of them, and far too few for Brian ever to have a chance of seeing one. But he kept on trying, looking up every creek and peering through the netting and the tangled mangroves whenever he ran out of creeks. But nothing – other than the occasional bird. And then they were often the birds one associates with human habitation: little cormorants, little egrets, collared doves, spotted doves and house crows and drongos. Rarely was there anything more interesting. And it was therefore just as well that there was also a constant flow of river traffic – as this provided a whole host of distractions.

  The Sundarbans, as far as Brian could tell, boasted no roads. At least no roads that might carry four-wheeled traffic. Instead, commerce and people looked to the water for their practical means of transport, and the channel the Nature-seekers were now using was clearly one of their principal thoroughfares. It was the Sundarbans M25, full of small passenger ferries, small fishing boats and all sorts of freight hulks, built to the same basic design as those they’d seen earlier full of bricks.

  They didn’t see any others with bricks. Maybe, Brian thought, they really weren’t capable of floating with a cargo of bricks after all, and what they’d witnessed earlier was not the unloading of a pair of brick boats but the withdrawal of stock from a pair of brick stores. But no. Here was a cargo boat, not loaded with bricks, but hopelessly overloaded with rice-sacks, so much so that the boat seemed hardly to be above the water, and the lower sacks at the side were intermittently not. As the vessel ploughed its way along, saltwater was washing over its lower line of cargo, and as this was rice, that didn’t seem to Brian to be a very good idea. Not if you cooked your rice without salt anyway. Then there was another big black hulk – carrying nothing but watermelons, thousands of them, sitting in the hulk’s open hull – which, for this cargo, had been lined with straw as a cushion. It made it look like the nest of some fabled giant bird, a bird that not only laid giant green eggs but a bird that also had a case of giant and rampant fecundity. It was just as well it was only fruit. Had they really been eggs, the whole world would soon have been up to its neck in fabled giant birds.

  The last boat Brian took an interest in was one a little like their own – but scruffier – and with a gentleman in its lower cabin who was bailing it out constantly. He’d either spilt a lot of something inside the boat or he was trying to prevent the boat from sinking. Brian suspected it wasn’t a spillage problem and he hoped that the gentleman and the guy upstairs driving the boat made it back to a quayside before they sank. And that’s when Brian’s boat made it to a quayside. They had finally arrived on “Heronry Island”.

  It then transpired that although they were now on the island, they were nowhere near the heronry. This was on the far side of the island some miles away and their journey was not yet complete. There was still some way to go. At first sight this appeared to be something of a problem; it was obviously too far to walk and there were clearly no motor vehicles available. But Sujan was already smiling. He knew it wasn’t a problem at all. Because, as on many of the lived-on islands in the Sundarbans, there were always the “cycle vans”!

  To give them their full description they were “kerosene-driven three-wheel cycle vans”, but even this more expansive moniker doesn’t really describe them completely. For these “vans” were not much more than motorised platforms built out of floorboards and scrap – and they were just about to provide the Nature-seekers with the sort of experience that they would never forget.

  Each of them looked like a generously-sized tricycle, but the sort of tricycle that could have been an unsuccessful prototype of a machine never put into production by BSA in the Fifties. And each was surmounted by a square of wood, on top of which was a simple metal frame which supported a blue fabric roof. They all had a driver’s seat at the very front and a kerosene fuelled “motor” beneath it, but they were all marginally different, their exact specifications having been dictated by whatever scrap was available for their construction at the time. Nevertheless these subtle differences in their appearance and in their construction did not detract from one feature they all shared in common. Yes, they all looked like nothing less than a potential death trap.

  This didn’t seem to faze Sujan in the least. He selected two of their number and invited the Nature-seekers to board. This process had to be seen to be believed. For with ten Nature-seekers, Sujan, three “assistants” from the boat and two drivers, that was eight people per van, seven of whom had to share the four-foot square of floorboards which now constituted the van’s passenger accommodation. It was incredible. Two daredevils seated themselves on the leading edge of the floorboards, with their legs dangling to either side of the kerosene power-plant, two seated themselves on the trailing edge with their legs dangling over the back, and the remaining three took the side positions and arranged themselves according to size. That is to say, Sujan, for example, had a side to himself. And without seatbelts, a safety video or even a prayer, the kerosene was ignited and the vans were ready for the off.

  Brian and Sandra had the trailing edge of the first vehicle. This wasn’t a good choice. For as it moved off and then gathered speed, they had a terrible view of the speed that it had gathered but no view at all of what disaster that speed might lead to. If they were going to hit anything, they would be the last to know about it and the last to be able to take any evasive action. Sandra actually began to feel a little sick and Brian found that he was gripping the metal frame supporting the van’s roof as though he never wanted to let go of it. And he really didn’t. The van was now rocketing along at such a speed that should it have come to an unscheduled stop as it hit a bicycle or another van, there would almost certainly be a record death toll in the annals of accompanied bird-watching. It wasn’t just that there weren’t any safety features on this machine; it was also that safety didn’t appear to be a locally known concept. The driver was clearly pushing his machine to the limit to get his passengers to their destination as quickly as possible. (If they made it to their destination.) And if something horrible happened on the way, then so be it. ‘And what the hell’s safety anyway?’

  It made Brian think. All those times on the country boat on the Brahmaputra when they insisted on those stupid lifejackets, and now this: an excursion into the realms of extreme sport, Indian style, without so much as a gum-shield.

  Brian tried to concentrate on other things: on the local houses, the local flora – and the weather – which was now looking a little threatening. But he was failing. All he was really aware of was the following van, with a subdued looking Alan and Lynn sitting either side of its driver – and bouncing a lot – and the locals, for whom the sight of two racing tricycles full of funny white people must have been a sight to behold. As they passed them, the local inhabitants would stand with hands on hips or with hands on heads (it was obviously a local custom) and either wave, gaze in disbelief, smile or actually burst into laughter. Brian even began to wonder whether the Nature-seekers were the first ever humans to be carried by these machines. Maybe normally they were reserved for rice-sacks or bricks. They certainly had the right suspension for rice-sacks or bricks, a view with which his bum would now wholeheartedly agree. Just as it would not dispute that it had become airborne for a second.

  This happened when the leading van left what was a reasonably level road for a side road that was no more than a path of bricks, and that started at a few important inches below the road. Brian and Sandra had known nothing about its arrival – until it arrived. And then they were both jolted upwards from the surface of the floorboards. Had they not both been holding on for dear life, they would now have been on the brick path and just about to be run over by the second van. And what a way to go: mangled to death by a kerosene-smelling tricycle. Not exactly up there with being killed in the Isle of Man TT or dying from a sky-diving accident, is it?

  Nevertheless
, Brian was still alive and still able to see his own discomfort mirrored in the faces of Alan and Lynn, who were now being bounced about on the yellow brick road just as violently as he was. And he was still able to draw some comfort from the fact that he didn’t have a side seat. Because those poor unfortunates didn’t have to cope with just the acute bumping, but they were also faced with the threat of instant limb removal at any time. Their route ran through a series of little settlements, and in many of these there were hedges of sorts and various fences that abutted the path itself. And as the path was not much wider than the wheelbase of the tricycles, this meant that the side-passengers’ dangling legs were often no more than centimetres from these barriers. And Brian could not believe that sooner or later they would not be closer than this – and that an amputation below the knee would become an odds-on certainty. It never did on this outward trip, but its possibility made Brian decide that he and Sandra would avoid that position at any cost for the ride back. Even if it meant walking, missing the boat and having to learn Bengali to allow them to spend the rest of their lives on this island.

  Then, eventually, the van drew to a halt. It had been half an hour of excitement and terror – and astonishment. But now it was over, at least for a little while, and Brian could enjoy some herons.

  Or so he thought. The heronry was on the far side of a channel from a linear village that nestled behind the protection of a rather weatherworn and un-surfaced dyke. But it appeared it was too early in the season and the heronry was deficient in one very important ingredient: the presence of herons. There were absolutely none of them there. Which meant that the Nature-seekers had sailed for three and a half hours and then put their lives on the line for a further half an hour to see precisely nothing at all in the heron department, and would now have to invest a further four hours of their lives to get back.

  Brian took all this in his stride. As he kept telling himself, birding holidays were as much about experiences as they were about birds. And who could have asked for a more genuine experience? He would remember it forever. Or for as long as he survived on the way back. And there was the village as well. This was fascinating in itself. For not only was it full of beehives, and therefore presumably some very sensible fellows who had abandoned bee-hunting with all its perils in favour of beekeeping with none, but it also had a flaming water pump. Yes, quite incredibly, there was a water pump at the edge of the village that didn’t need pumping because the water was constantly being forced to the surface by dissolved gas – which, with the application of a cigarette lighter, could be made to ignite. One was then presented with the sight of a spout of (drinkable) water on top of which was a healthy looking flame. It must, thought Brian, be methane, but to have so much of this dissolved in the ground water that it pushes the water to the surface without the need for pumps and then burns there so freely, was quite remarkable and well worth a photo. Although at the time Brian didn’t notice the presence of this water-source pun.

  What he did notice, however, was the intense interest being shown by the villagers in the presence of such odd-looking strangers, this band of weird and wonderful folk who dressed like aliens and who were draped about with all manner of even weirder looking machines, some of which they held to their eyes as if to shade them. It was pretty damn clear that these local inhabitants hadn’t seen too many outsiders before, and if the heronry was so bloody unreliable Brian could well understand why. But he hadn’t yet learnt just how infrequently the outside world impinged on this community. And when he did, and when he learnt what the villagers actually thought about the Nature-seekers, he found the revelation even more fascinating than the burning well – and a reinforcement in spades of his suspicions about the locals’ ignorance about how others lived.

  Sujan told him. When they’d been in the village, a number of the villagers had approached him to ask him (in Bengali) who the Nature-seekers were and in particular where they were from. Now, to understand the remainder of this tale, it is necessary to be reminded of some Indian geography, and how the state of West Bengal, of which the southern edge is the Sundarbans, is bordered to its north by the state of Bihar. From this island in the Sundarbans to the nearest point of Bihar is probably no more than two hundred miles. But for the inhabitants of this island that is a long way indeed. And not just in distance terms, but in imagination terms as well. For when Sujan told them that his companions were from England – which was a very long way away – their response was at first puzzlement and then a realisation.

  ‘Ah!’ they would say. ‘You mean Bihar!’

  ‘No,’ he would reply. ‘They’re from England… a long way away.’

  ‘Yes,’ they would agree. ‘Bihar… a long way away.’

  ‘No, England… a very long way away.’

  ‘Yes, Bihar… a very long way away. These people are Biharians.’

  ‘No, they’re from England.’

  ‘Yes, Biharians…’

  ‘Yes,’ conceded Sujan eventually. ‘These people are Biharians…’

  He could not convince them otherwise. So he gave up. He knew that they lived such isolated lives and had such little education, that they knew nothing about England, had no concept of where it was – or that anything could be that far away – on a globe shaped object. And they could only countenance somewhere far away as being Bihar, a place they had heard of which they knew to be distant but which they had never visited and never would visit. And this incredibly narrow view of the world enabled them to accept a band of white bird watchers as a delegation of their fellow Indians from an adjacent state, always assuming, of course, that they had a concept of the nation of India. This was by no means certain, and it was quite obvious that they had no concept whatsoever of any England being involved in its creation as a nation.

  For Brian, this insight into the lives of these people made the boat trip and even the tricycle trip very well worth it. He found it completely astonishing that there could be people living within just a few hours’ travelling of Kolkata, in a supposedly modern nation like India, who knew next to nothing about their place in the world or even about their place in their own country. It was appalling yet at the same time almost reassuring. Ignorance as a concept is terrible. But in practice it does at least allow you to live a life which may not be that much worse than those lived by others who have all the knowledge in the world – and in some ways it might even make that life better. How, for example, can you worry about North Korea or Iran if you’ve never heard about them, and how can you yearn to be somewhere other than your own village if you have only a very vague idea of where somewhere else is?

  India, even at the nub-end of this holiday, was continuing to provide surprises. Brian just hoped that the tricycles didn’t do the same on the way back. They didn’t. Partly because Brian and Sandra had secured the forward-facing “seats” on the leading van for the trip and partly because there were no unforeseen incidents. In fact the only incident worthy of mention at all was the interruption to the ride when the two tricycles attempted to rejoin the road. For not only was the road a few inches above the level of the path, it was also at the top of a slope. Not a steep slope, just a very gradual slope. But, for a kerosene-powered tricycle, a slope too much – when it is carrying anything. So all the passengers had to dismount while the empty tricycles struggled their way to the top of the slope, and they were allowed to remount them only when the road had been regained. From then on it was simply a mix of plain sailing and plain terrifying. For example, several cyclists approaching the vans seemed so entranced by the sight they were witnessing that they forgot to steer their machines, and the leading van had to undertake a number of swerves. But at least Brian and Sandra could see what was happening now, so only a manageable amount of plain terrifying, and Brian was even almost sorry when the ride came to an end. But only almost.

  Then it was aboard the Sundari again and for most of the Nature-seekers a visit to one of its loos. It had not only been a long time, but it had also been a
very bumpy time, and bumpiness has its consequences. So too does a very long morning without food. Everybody was very hungry.

  It was just as well then that, directly after the relief session and when the boat was underway, the refreshment session arrived – in the form of a wonderful kedgeree with all the trimmings, including some wonderful dahl. The boat’s master had been cooking this while they had been doing their tour de island and he now presented it just as the weather was getting even more threatening than before and as the water they were sailing on was becoming rougher by the minute. Then it began to rain. So another new experience for Brian, and for all of them, he imagined: a kedgeree lunch aboard a small boat being assailed by worsening weather. And then a new twist to the new experience; Sujan asked the assembled company to move their plastic chairs back as far as possible within the confines of the upper deck. In setting off from the camp that morning, the boat had apparently engaged with the Mayan steps a little too vigorously and had sustained a small hole in its prow. The master had applied some sticky tape as the kedgeree was cooking, but he was not entirely confident in his work. He therefore wished to raise the prow as far as possible out of the increasingly restless water, and he was seeking to achieve this by pulling the weight of the passengers from the front of his craft. That way there was a much better chance that the sticky tape wouldn’t be tested beyond its capability and that therefore his boat wouldn’t sink. Everybody moved back willingly and Brian thought of that chap in the other boat on the way out who had been bailing all the time. Maybe he could empty out the remains of the kedgeree dish and use that for the job. Or maybe he should just have a look at those knots on the life-belts instead.