I was agape. ‘But who are the children?’
‘I don’t know, but they’re sold to the priests for around fifty thousand rupees [roughly £500]. I can’t tell you any more, but I’ve heard about it too many times for it not to be true.’
Whether it was true or not, what was certain was that in 2012 a plastic bag containing a man’s severed head and pieces of paper inscribed with Hindu mantras had been found on the road to the temple.
Nowadays, although humans are off the public menu, people still travel from all corners of India to make furred and feathered offerings to the goddess. When travel writer Mark Shand visited in the 1990s, he met a family who had made a ‘four-month, 2,000-mile journey from the south, hauling a young buffalo all the way’. Goats, buffaloes, chickens, ducks – generally male – are slaughtered here daily, usually, I learnt, in the early morning. The goat I’d later approach for a cuddle was one of the lucky ones, given instead as a live offering to the bloodthirsty deity. No wonder he was so happy to munch on my marigolds.
Probir was true to his word and that night my bespoke, handmade top box was complete. There was just one problem – the paint wasn’t dry. In their eagerness to ‘do the needful’, the steel box had been sprayed a dashing powder blue, with the sort of paint that takes days to dry. By 9 p.m. it was still woefully wet. Undeterred, Probir disappeared into the dark bowels of the warehouse and returned with a plugless hairdryer. Cramming the wires directly into a wall socket, we crouched hopefully around the box, blasting it with a hairdryer that had all the power of a gerbil’s fart. An hour later we gathered around the Hero to fit the perfect, powder-blue box. Except it wasn’t quite as perfect now; it was smudged, smeared with oily fingerprints and gummed with dust. The paint hadn’t been as dry as we thought, but by then it was too late, and perfectionism had been blunted by a desire to go home.
There was one other small problem: only two of the four bolts were in the right place. A tape measure might have been useful after all. We clustered around, tools and sticky box in hand, sawing and drilling, our efforts attracting a crowd of curious passers-by. It was almost midnight by the time Probir had bodged and drilled everything into place, grinning triumphantly at the completion of his ‘Number One Indian Quality Top Box’. I drove away, my smudged, fingerprinted, bodged box held on by three bolts, rattling in the night air. The whole episode was a perfect microcosm of all the maddening brilliance of modern India.
It was time to leave. Not only did my permit for Arunachal Pradesh start in a week, but Guwahati was in danger of turning me into a spoilt, overfed memsahib. For four days Manash (or Manny, as I now jokingly called him) had collected me each morning from his and Abhra’s soon-to-be office, an empty house in a gated city centre compound I temporarily called home. He’d fed me. He’d driven me to every seething corner of the city, hunting down tyres, top boxes and temples. He’d bribed fat insurance brokers. He’d even bought me a key ring for good luck.
But it wasn’t just Manny’s generosity that was to blame. Of my own volition I’d also stuffed myself with spicy fish curries, sticky rice wrapped in bamboo and smashed, smoky brinjal at the best Assamese restaurants, been taken to dinner by local journalists and fed an ever-increasing number of breakfasts by kindly, inquisitive neighbours. The latter had started with one elderly man popping his woolly-hatted head around the front door with a ‘You are hailing from?’ and an invitation to his house. Soon the popping heads had multiplied to three. Not wanting to cause offence, I’d accepted all their invitations – at this rate I’d soon be hitting double-figure breakfasts. This was supposed to be a rufty-tufty adventure through the wilds of India, for goodness sake. I needed to cut the apron strings and stride boldly forth.
After all the months of planning, excitement and apprehension, I awoke with only mildly simmering nerves. Rolling up my sleeping bag and shoe-horning the last of my belongings into my rucksack and faithful old panniers, I watched my mind as a sailor watches a surging sea, expecting a tidal bore of emotion to sweep over the horizon and swamp me at any minute. But it never came. I remembered the jaw-clenching, teeth-chattering nerves of that morning in Hanoi three years previously and thought how, just like each person, each journey has its own personality, its own set of fears and desires.
In a quiet christening ceremony, I sprinkled my steed with a pot of silver glitter packed specially for this purpose, and asked it to look after me in those unknown hills, the still-sticky top box perfectly holding the iridescent dust in place. By the time I heard the throaty single-cylinder thud of Manash’s Enfield approaching at 9 a.m., I was packed and ready for lift-off, the sparkling Hero looking like a packhorse under its virgin load.
Oh, the headache of packing for this expedition! How do you cram everything you need for a journey that’s going to be blisteringly hot, shiveringly cold, undoubtedly wet and extremely remote onto one small motorcycle? It was a question that had caused me some consternation. I was travelling by both motorbike and foot, so needed to be fairly self-sufficient, but I also had to travel as light as possible. Extremes of temperature necessitated bulky gear such as a proper sleeping bag, down jacket and body bag-style waterproofs. Remoteness meant spanners, spare inner tubes, a tyre pump, a medical kit and emergency food supplies. Recording the journey in words and pictures required a laptop, diaries, chargers, a hard drive and camera kit. Superstition called for my teddy bear – a small squishy anteater a dear friend had given me long ago – and a clutch of lucky talismans. Then there were water filters, a mosquito net, dry bags, a roll mat, a rucksack for trekking, four empty notebooks, copies of Mark Shand’s River Dog and Ursula Graham Bower’s The Hidden Land, and the absolutely essential travel yoga mat. Nothing could be superfluous.
I’d ride in waterproof trekking trousers, abrasion-resistant Kevlar leggings, a lightweight motorcycle jacket and walking boots, and take one warm fleece and two shirts, both of which had to pass the boob test. They couldn’t show a suspicion of cleavage, nor could they present a fleshy view to passing opportunists when I bent down.
‘Aren’t you worried?’ my boyfriend Marley’s mother had asked the week before I left.
‘About what?’
‘About getting raped, of course. It happens all the time in India.’
I wasn’t worried, I told her quite truthfully – attitudes to women are very different in the tribal Northeast. But I was still a woman travelling alone and, wherever in the world that was, the less I flashed my pearly white flesh, the better. Not that I’m blessed with a fabulously heaving bosom but, well, some people get excited by anything.
Without further ado I pulled on my open-face helmet, swung my leg into the narrow gap between panniers, ruck-sack and tank bag, fired up the Hero and wobbled through the compound gates behind Manash’s bike.
I was immediately cast into the midst of a shifting, sharp-edged metallic sea. Lorries beeped. Brakes squealed. Cars pushed. Rickshaws nosed through impossible gaps. Pedestrians dashed. Unused to the weight of my luggage, I lurched unsteadily after Manash, beeping furiously, intent on both staying upright and not losing sight of his khaki fleece as it led me through the surging tide. On the outskirts of town, at the junction with the main road east, we pulled over and I hugged him goodbye, waving at him in my wing mirror until he dwindled to a dot. Manash had been so incredibly generous with his knowledge and time and I was sorry to leave him behind.
My plan was to cross into Arunachal Pradesh at Jagan, a small town in the lee of the Patkai Hills, near the point where India, Burma and Tibet collide. From there I would wiggle anti-clockwise through the state, ending two months later in the far northwestern corner of Tawang. Barring some gross meteorological malfunction, this meant I’d be ahead of the monsoon rains. I’d also be less likely to succumb to malaria, drowning or the legions of poisonous snakes and blind, blood-sucking leeches that are the scourge of Arunachal’s summers.
But first I had to cross 500 miles of Assam, a state that was as populous as its neighbour was not.
A fecund finger of grass, jungle and wetland probing its way east along the course of the Brahmaputra, its thirty million inhabitants are hemmed into an area the size of Scotland by the Naga Hills to the south and the Himalayas to the north. Forced into compactness by this savage geography, its people are trapped like insects at the bottom of a leaky bucket, at the mercy of the mighty river. Rich in coal, oil, timber and tea, Assam had been the furthest point of Raj rule – an anomalous, multi-ethnic sliver of India thrusting between the Tibetan plateau and the jungles of Southeast Asia. Since 1947, many of its 240 ethnic groups have fought for independence from India, forming splintered liberation armies with lengthy names such as the National Democratic Front of Bodoland and the Karbi People’s Liberation Tigers. Most famous of all is the United Liberation Front of Assam, ULFA, who have fought an often-violent battle since the 1970s, maintaining that: ‘An independent Assam is our basic fundamental birthright.’ So far an estimated 30,000 people have died in this fight for Assam’s sovereignty.
That morning it felt like half of the state was heading east on Assam’s main artery, Highway 37. Auto-rickshaws trundled the wrong way down the dual carriageway under teetering piles of bricks, sacks, bananas and humans. Trucks belched black diesel fumes, the words ‘HORN PLEASE’ and ‘HORN DO’ painted merrily across their ends. Lorries made U-turns without warning. Chuntering red Tata taxis pulled out in front of me, only to stop seconds later to disgorge passengers onto the verge. Scrawny, sun-wizened men pulled handcarts into oncoming traffic. It was typical of the cavalier disregard for life that seems to characterize Asian driving. Certainly no one was paying the faintest bit of notice to the ‘Let’s take safety seriously’ road signs, least of all the assorted, wandering menagerie of skeletal cows, mangy dogs, imbecilic goats, chickens and waddling geese.
On top of this was the small matter of the 2016 South Asian Games, the cycling events of which were being sweated out on the concrete of Highway 37 that day. Without warning, all the eastbound traffic was funnelled to the other side of the carriageway and I found myself riding through a corridor of cheering, brightly clad spectators, paunchy policemen and haphazardly erected bamboo fencing. Pumping and panting in the opposite direction was a straggling peloton of cyclists, finalists in the men’s 40km individual time trial. One of them, a Pakistani, was closely followed by a moped, on the back of which perched a lady in an emerald-green sari riding side saddle, imperially upright, clutching a spare bicycle wheel. Behind came the follow cars, their official stickers pasted wonkily onto the doors as if stuck on late the previous night after too much whisky. If Basil Fawlty had organized the Olympics, I imagine they’d look a bit like this. Soon the clamour passed and I was back on the eastbound carriageway, bemused by the surrealism of it all.
Beyond stretched the dull, tabular landscape of the plains, their visage not improved by winter and a clinging fog. Rice paddies, so green and vibrant in the growing season, lay brown and empty. Rubbish sprouted from the verge like weeds. The tall, slender chimneys of countless brick kilns spewed black smoke into the haze and, for miles at a time, tea estates fanned uniformly from the road, the precious bushes dusty and drooping with pollution. I’d read that Assam’s tea estates were experiencing a decline in productivity, and it wasn’t hard to see why.
By mid-afternoon, when the highway narrowed to two lethal lanes, gently undulating hills had sprung from the surrounding plains and adobe and bamboo-hutted villages sat clustered amidst the paddies on raised islets. During the monsoon these villages become islands, the paddies an ocean, their owners poling across them in dugout canoes. Here great grey storks lumbered over my head, patches of jungle darkened the tarmac and yellow signs warned of elephants crossing. ‘We’re a long way from Kansas,’ I said out loud to the bike, stopping to take a photograph of one such sign. As I zipped my camera into my tank bag, two young men on a moped skidded to a halt beside me, all stonewashed jeans and hair gel, with a ‘Madam, one selfie?’ It was a question I would soon be used to.
3
TEA AND UNICORNS
It would be sacrilege to drive through Assam and not visit Kaziranga, India’s Serengeti. The world-famous wildlife reserve is home to two-thirds of the global population of the greater one-horned rhinoceros, or Rhinoceros unicornis, over a hundred Bengal tigers, 1,300 Asian elephants and more species of bird than you can shake a twitcher at. It’s also home to Manju Barua, naturalist, musician, botanist, Sanskrit scholar and authority on cricket, elephants, Shakespeare and the Beatles. Described by Mark Shand as ‘the Fidel Castro of Assam’, Manju had been a close friend of the late author, acting as his oft-exacerbated boat fixer in River Dog. It was at his charming but faded resort, Wild Grass, that Shand’s canine companion Bhaiti had ended his days. Intrigued to meet Manju, and see if any of Bhaiti’s curly-tailed descendants still roamed the grounds, I turned at dusk down the palm-lined track to Wild Grass.
A bear of a man in his youth, age had shrunk Manju, but he was still a splendid character. All silver beard and obsidian eyes and mischief, he had the air of someone who had just played a marvellous practical joke and was waiting for his victim to find out. Well into his sixties, Manju liked to play the doddery old man, but beneath the crumpled brown balaclava, tweed scarf and protestations about his age were an undiminished intellect and hearing capable of picking up a gnat’s squeak on Mars. As we discussed Henry IV and the English Civil War over a pot of tea and slightly curling cucumber sandwiches, he tuned in to passing conversations: flinging orders at idling staff here, picking up comments from chattering guests there.
Pausing as three nearby Canadian women remarked on the quality of lunch, he stroked his beard with a silver-ringed hand and chuckled. ‘The cooks were on form today, then, you were lucky. They’re not always on form, rather like the Indian cricket team.’
He was like a benevolent, ageing headmaster, his staff a rabble of devoted but unruly children. You couldn’t help but like him.
Sadly none of Bhaiti’s descendants were anywhere to be seen, so I had to make do with rhino-spotting instead, setting off from Wild Grass as daylight flooded the plains. Most people go on elephant safaris at Kaziranga, but I didn’t fancy the idea – something about clambering aboard one of these noble beasts for my own silly pleasure didn’t sit right with me. A jeep held no such guilt. For two hours the open-topped Gypsy bumped along sandy tracks through forest and grassland, my eagle-eyed guide excitedly pointing out feathery blobs at the top of distant trees. My favourite was the ‘greater pissing eagle’, the product of the Assamese tendency to muddle the pronunciation of certain consonants.
By the limpid, lacustrine waters of the Brahmaputra we stopped to admire a family of moat otters curled up on a sandbank, their lithe bodies entwined like oiled rope. The river here was several miles wide, and on the far bank we could just make out the shimmering grey forms of a herd of wild elephants. From a nearby copse came a sound like the bursts of a chainsaw – male rhinos bellowing as they locked horns over some hot rhino totty.
The one rhino we saw was a mammoth male, big as a van, his huge articulated backside just ten metres from the jeep. Myopic, cerebrally challenged and given to charging when startled, rhinos can be extremely dangerous, one-tonne battering rams fitted with three-inch incisors perfect for popping off human heads. The driver was careful not to get too close. Already this year three forest guards had been seriously injured by charging rhinos.
These prehistoric-looking pachyderms have every reason to be wary of us humans. When Marco Polo came across these curious creatures in the thirteenth century, with their ‘hair of a buffalo . . . feet like an elephant’ and ‘single large black horn in the middle of the forehead’, he thought he’d stumbled upon the legendary unicorn. But by the time Lady Curzon, wife of the then viceroy, came to see the ‘three-toed, one-horned beast’ here in 1902, hunting and poaching had driven them to the brink of extinction and there were only twelve left.
But since Kaziranga was established as a wildlife reserve in 1
908, the Rhinoceros unicornis have staged a Lazarus-like comeback: 3,400 individuals now roam the grasslands of Northeast India and Nepal, 2,400 of them in Kaziranga. But it’s a precarious existence. The Northeast is hit by extraordinarily heavy rains every summer and, shortly after I returned home from my 2016 journey, that summer’s monsoon displaced 1.6 million people in Assam and drowned twenty-one of Kaziranga’s precious rhinos, along with countless other wild animals.
There’s also the issue of poaching. Rhino horn – a substance made from the same compound as hair and toenails – is believed by the Vietnamese and Chinese to have miraculous curative properties and currently has a street value of up to $100,000 per kilo. That’s more than gold. Used for centuries as a cure for fever, gout, devil possession, impotence and a host of other ailments, in 2005 a rumour swept through Vietnam that it had cured a top politician of terminal cancer. Prices sky-rocketed, the poachers dusted off their rifles and the mutilated carcasses multiplied. In 2005 only one rhino was poached in Kaziranga. By 2015 the number had risen to twenty-three. If Kaziranga’s army of forest guards wasn’t tooled up with .303 rifles and a controversial shoot-to-kill anti-poaching policy, the numbers would be far higher. When I met Uttam Saikia (a local journalist turned anti-poaching super-sleuth) a few days later, he told me one suspected poacher had been killed by guards already this year.
Of course the situation isn’t simple. Most of the poachers are from Nagaland, a state riven by decades of fighting for independence from India, where rhino horn, drugs and arms all mix in a nefarious cross-border flow with Burma and China. But the trigger-pullers are guided to their prey by local men from the dirt-poor tribal villages that border the park. Rhinos might be the state symbol and pride of Assam but, while the reserve gets rich on conservation funding and tourism revenue, the villagers have no roads, no running water, no jobs and little hope. It’s not hard to see how the young men are easily swayed when pushy outsiders offer them 15,000 rupees (around £150) to lead them to ‘just one’ rhino. It’s exactly the same in South Africa, where impoverished villagers peer through razor wire at safari lodges that cost more per night than they earn in a decade. What’s one rhino to them when their children are starving?
Land of the Dawn-lit Mountains Page 3
