Land of the Dawn-lit Mountains

by Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent

  The scarcer rhinos become, and the more the price of horn rises, the higher the demand seems to be. Among the new breed of Vietnamese super-rich, a gritty shot of ground-up rhino horn is the ultimate ‘look how disgustingly rich I am’ status symbol – the equivalent of a mountain of coke at a 1980s pool party. Unless these bragging billionaires find a better way to flaunt their wealth than downing powdered toenail, it’s hard to see how Marco Polo’s unicorn will survive.

  The irony of this is that Kaziranga is probably the safest place in the world to be a wild tiger, an animal even more endangered than the greater one-horned rhino. It takes ten minutes to shoot a rhino, hack off its horn with an axe and leg it out of the park. Shooting, skinning and deboning a tiger is a much messier business. Kaziranga, home to the highest density of tigers in the world, loses very few to poaching.

  To my disappointment, though, I didn’t so much as catch a whiff of tiger scat, although everyone around Kaziranga had a tiger story to tell. Those dratted Canadians, having admired their lunch, had also been lucky enough to admire the striped derrière of a large male as it padded along the sandy track in front of their jeep that very morning. A local teenage boy recounted how a snarling tiger had leapt out of the long grass and grabbed their mount’s trunk on a recent elephant safari.

  ‘The elephant shook its trunk and ran very fastly.’ He shuddered at the memory.

  And a stilted, tribal village on the edge of the Brahmaputra had lost a cow to an old hungry female only days before, one of 150 taken from local farmers each year.

  ‘Be back before sunset,’ the staff warned me, when I set out for a late-afternoon walk near that very spot, the sun already a crimson orb in the haze. The most dangerous wildlife we have in England are angry badgers; taking one’s evening stroll in tiger country adds a certain frisson to the experience. I imagined orange stripes in every clump of whispering grass, had a minor seizure when a cow bellowed nearby, and was glad for the four trotting curs that joined me. As desperate as I was to see a tiger at some point during my travels, I’d prefer it wasn’t the last thing I saw.

  In the village, life carried on as normal: children shouted, dogs barked, geese honked, and bony men yelled at bony cows as they beat and drove them home. They’d lived cheek by jowl with claw, fang, horn and tusk for countless millennia; it was as normal for them as having a cup of chai. For the first of many times over the next few months, I thought how lily-livered we are in England; how removed from the real wild our mollycoddled, sanitized, urban existences have become. Maybe it would do us good to throw the odd tiger into the mix.

  *

  At 9 a.m. Manju’s staff lined up outside his red-brick house to, in Manju’s words, ‘bray and squeak’ their way through that day’s rendition of the Assamese national anthem. Afterwards a middle-aged English couple, the three Canadians, Manju and all twenty staff gathered on the steps outside reception to watch the Brave British Biker set off in a glorious spurt of dust and brio. But a poor night’s sleep had left me feeling as twitchy as a rabbit’s nose and nothing seemed to be going smoothly that morning. The bungees didn’t want to stretch over my luggage. The top box wouldn’t close properly. Sweat ran in sticky rivulets down my spine, even though it wasn’t even fifteen degrees. Wedging my features into my best fearless smile, I swung my leg over the saddle, turned the key in the ignition, gave a triumphant wave, pulled the throttle and . . . fell over, tumbling hands-first into the dirt. It wasn’t the exit I’d hoped for.

  I dusted myself down and, on the second attempt, rode away from Wild Grass, this time keeping the rubber side down. Maybe it was just the lack of a good night’s sleep, but my ignominious fall had brought about a sudden, unwelcome sense of apprehension: all at once the thought of two months travelling alone in those inhospitable mountains yawned ahead of me like a bottomless chasm and my brain churned with anxiety. I’d been so calm when I set off yesterday, but now I felt like a quivering mess.

  Locked in this internal struggle I rode east under a flinty sky, shivering with cold and uncertainty, the clouds tumescent with approaching rain. The traffic was just as merciless, the goats just as dim, but all of it appeared distant beyond the fog of my doubting mind. At Nimati Ghat a colourful, disorderly throng of cars, motorbikes and foot passengers pushed and revved and jostled to board the green tub that would take us forty minutes across the Brahmaputra to Majuli Island, three wiry men lifting the Hero onto the very last space on the clanking metal deck. Scores of men in grubby dhotis swarmed along the steep, crumbling banks, shoring up the monsoon defences with rocks and sandbags before the river raged again.

  Majuli, once the world’s largest river island, is another one of Assam’s ‘must-sees’. But sleep again proved elusive and, the next day, I looked listlessly around the famous Kamalabari Vaishnavite monastery, with its bizarrely identical, feminine-looking monks, and dawdled through an unremarkable landscape of beige paddies dotted with grazing cattle, their attendant egrets and lesser adjutant storks, who picked their way around pools of water like snooty old duchesses looking for lost pearls. When the owner of the guesthouse where I was staying took me to a mask-making studio, I felt trapped and irritated, as if my long-dreamt-of journey had morphed into some dull guided tour.

  I didn’t want to be on Majuli, in Assam, hearing how masks were made and looking politely around monks’ cells. I wanted to be puffing up hillsides, tramping through the jungle, splashing through rivers and drinking moonshine in villages miles from the nearest road. Assam, with its traffic and crowds and rubbish and pollution, was part of the problem. I felt disengaged. If I could just get beyond this, into Arunachal, into the guts of the adventure, then I’d be OK. Sod the Ahom ruins and ‘must-see’ tea estates that, in a fit of ‘shoulds’, I’d planned to visit – I’d reach Arunachal as soon as I could.

  In Jorhat I unwittingly sniffed out the worst hotel in town, a dismal place with spluttering brown water, scuttling cockroaches and damp, stained walls. Whoever had named it the Paradise Hotel had either been blind, an optimist, or both. But at least it was cheap.

  ‘Is it really like paradise?’ I asked the man on the desk, taking in the dark concrete staircase and bare light bulbs.

  ‘We think so,’ came the sincere reply.

  Manash, who by chance was installing solar panels in a nearby village, came to visit for the evening.

  ‘This is the wrong Paradise Hotel,’ he laughed. ‘There’s a much better one around the corner.’

  But by then my belongings were strewn about the room and I was too idle to move.

  Jorhat was once the tea capital of Assam, the centre of a booming industry that began in the 1830s. Until then all our tea had come from China, but, as relations between Britain and the Celestials cooled in the lead-up to the Opium Wars, the British were forced to look elsewhere. Local tribes such as the Singpho had cultivated and drunk tea for centuries, but it was only when a Scottish trader called Robert Bruce was given Assamese tea by a Singpho king in 1823 that the notion of an Indian tea trade was born. Although Bruce died the following year, by January 1839 the first chests of Assamese tea were being sold at auction in London. By 1900 more than a million acres of virgin jungle had been cleared by the British in Northeast India and Ceylon to make way for the black gold.

  Jorhat’s Gymkhana Club, founded in 1876, soon became a favoured haunt of the cognac-quaffing tea planters. A pastiche of refined British society in the midst of the malarial jungle, there was lawn tennis, a swimming pool, horse racing, polo, billiards, ballroom dancing, champagne and six-course banquets, where turbaned butlers served jungle fowl alongside Scottish salmon. Crystal glasses clinked beneath sporting prints, hunting trophies snarled from the panelled walls, and punkah wallahs cooled the memsahibs as they gossiped over tea. The first aeroplane ever to land in Assam touched down here in 1928 and the club’s golf course was only the third to be built in the world. Nehru gave a rousing speech in its sprung ballroom in 1937, pleading with world leaders to back the movement for
Independence. Prince Philip visited in 1960. Few places in Assam can boast such a grand colonial pedigree.

  I’d heard that the Gymkhana Club was still standing, a relic of the Raj where the modern generation of Indian planters sip chota pegs of whisky in wood-panelled rooms. A sucker for a bit of faded romance, and convinced they’d have gin, I suggested to Manash that we pop in for a snifter. But when we walked down its rutted tree-lined avenue at dusk we found a sorry shadow of the formerly grand establishment. The ballroom was deserted, the ivories of its grand piano tuneless and mouldering; the tiled swimming pool was filled with leaves and brackish water; the eight tennis courts were overgrown and the polo fields long gone. On the walls hung stained sepia photographs of burra sahibs with pipes, pith helmets and pressed linen suits, their wives in bonnets and starched white dresses – a 1907 golfing party, an Edwardian luncheon by the polo pitches. A handful of cane chairs sat empty in the bar, the shelves that had once held bottles of Kimmel, Bristol Cream and Haut Sauternes now offering just Johnnie Walker and Royal Stag. There was definitely no Gordon’s. The whole place reeked of neglect and disrepair.

  A noticeboard pinned with the January 2016 Bulletin – a single A4 sheet listing that month’s prizes – was the only evidence anyone still came here. Underneath the awards for Best Dressed Lady, Best Dressed Gentleman and Best Dancing Couple was the prize for the Most Energetic Dancer, won by a Mrs Gayatri Goswami. I imagined a stately woman flinging herself around the empty ballroom to sparse applause.

  The only living relic was a diminutive, elderly Naga who peered at us over the mahogany bar, his small, watery eyes framed by gold-rimmed spectacles. Above him a British Airways poster showed cricketers on an English village green. When we asked for two shots of Johnnie Walker Black Label he shuffled off to fetch the bottle, barely able to reach the shelf. The first Naga I’d met, he looked completely different to the Assamese, more like the sort of character you might find mixing potions in a Chinese apothecary. He’d been the bar manager here since 1962, he told Manash in Assamese, as we leant on the bar to drink our whisky. He’d fled here from Nagaland after two years in prison for fighting with the Naga National Council and had been lucky to escape with his life. When he arrived, the club had only three Indian members, the rest were British, and there was still dancing in the ballroom every day. In those days a man travelled from Calcutta once a year to tune the piano, but since he’d died in the 1970s no one else had come and, by 1974, the last of the English had gone. Gripped by his story and the atmosphere of the place, I asked him how he felt to see it now.

  He raised one hand and put his bent, arthritic fingers to his mouth to intimate eating.

  ‘When I arrived the English ate with silver knives and forks. Now people eat with their hands. Things change.’

  Few buildings I’ve been in have felt so haunted by the ghosts of a vanished age.

  Manash, ever resourceful, made up for the lack of Gordon’s at the club by hunting down a bottle of Tango-flavoured gin in one of the numerous wine shops in Jorhat. Its label read, ominously I thought, ‘for sale in Assam only’, and I doubted the medical-grade alcohol had ever encountered a juniper berry. But beggars can’t be choosers. We sat on the hard wooden beds in Manash’s dismal room in Paradise to drink it, and he told me about the village he was working in – one of many in Upper Assam that Modi’s solar power initiatives was bringing electricity to. It sounded pretty wild. Not only had a man been killed by a tiger while collecting firewood in the forest just the previous day, there’d also been a recent accusation of witchcraft.

  ‘It’s common in Assam,’ he said, in response to my surprise. ‘It’s nearly always about some village rivalry or jealousy over property.’

  In Europe, witch-hunting has long been consigned to the history books, a ghastly medieval phenomenon that saw as many as a million men and women accused of bizarre supernatural offences before being tortured and hanged or burnt at the stake. But in Assam witch-hunting has remained part of the fabric of village life. In 1837 J. M’Cosh wrote: ‘The Assamese are by the inhabitants of most provinces looked upon as enchanters . . . the women . . . are believed to be all enchantresses.’

  And it seems such beliefs still prevail: nearly ninety people have been beheaded, stabbed or burnt alive in witch-hunting incidents since 2010, with another sixty injured. A woman had been beheaded by a superstitious mob from her village just months earlier, and in 2014 gold-medal-winning javelin thrower Debjani Bora was tied up and severely beaten after being branded a dain, or witch, in her village near Kaziranga. Witch-hunting was only officially banned in Assam in August 2015, when the government passed the Assam Witch Hunting (Prohibition, Prevention and Protection) Bill, stating seven years’ imprisonment and a five-lakh rupee (around £5,000) fine for calling or identifying a witch – significantly less than the fine for publishing an inaccurate map.

  I studied the European witch-hunts as part of my history degree at Edinburgh, and what was happening in Assam (and Jharkhand, Orissa and several other Indian states) was eerily similar, just five hundred years later. It was violence motivated by ignorance, illiteracy, fear and superstition, where illnesses and the unexplained were often blamed on black magic. You wouldn’t want to be a rich, propertied widow in rural Assam when a jealous neighbour fell foul to a mysterious illness.

  The next morning, the road from Jorhat to the border of Arunachal became increasingly dangerous – a violent swathe through the calm of endless tea estates, where man and animal gambled recklessly with life, as if frantically trying to reach somewhere before Assam ran out. Vehicles of all kinds veered, swerved, honked, sped, dashed, cut up and overtook head-on. Men leant over the steering wheels of their tiny Tata cars, absentmindedly picking their noses and talking animatedly on mobiles as they drove me into the verge. Truck drivers roared up behind me, so close I could have polished their bumpers. Long convoys of Ashok Leyland army lorries – bored soldiers staring out of their open backs – sent the traffic behind them into even greater paroxysms of impatience. Sandy-coloured cows lay on the tarmac idly chewing their cud, impervious to the stream that swerved and beeped around them. I felt like Mel Gibson in the final scene of Gallipoli, sprinting across the sand to Jean-Michel Jarre’s Oxygène, waiting for that stray bullet to hit me.

  But by far the worst culprits were the demented bus drivers of the Assam State Transport Corporation, who screamed past in their red barouches, honking and listing, scattering everything in their path. Woe betide any valiant fool with a notion to hold onto their sliver of road – it was move or die. On several occasions I was sent veering onto the dirt verge, my wheels bumping along ruts made by previous escapees, shaking my fist pointlessly at the disappearing bus.

  Until now I’d been fairly sanguine about the driving here. This is India, I’d told myself. Just accept it. But as I swerved, tooted and braked through the crazed traffic of Upper Assam, I became fired by a bellyful of righteous indignation, furious that my fate should rest on nose-picking nonchalance and bovine stupidity. I shook my fist, swore liberally at my assailants and stuck my tongue out (again pointlessly) at one lunatic driver who sped past inches from my panniers. I even swore at several cows, goats and dogs, all of whom seemed afflicted by the same incautiousness as their countrymen. Amidst my rantings I considered how, when it comes to driving, the whole of India seems in the grip of a collective madness, where perfectly reasonable men transform into murderous psychopaths at the merest grip of a steering wheel. The only thing you can say is that the driving is predictably awful: expect the worst and it will probably happen. Of all the dangers I’d imagined on this journey, I’d omitted to consider the very real one of death on an Assamese road. I was craving the wilderness ahead.

  4

  WHERE’S JOHN?

  In Dibrugarh I picked my way along the banks of the Brahmaputra, between piles of rubbish and stinking turds, realizing too late that I’d wandered into the communal loo of the neighbouring slum. I’d wanted to see the river here; not
only were our ways about to part, but few other places in Assam were such potent reminders of its power. Meaning ‘fort on the banks of the river’, the town was built by the British in the nineteenth century as a last line of defence against the bothersome hill tribes, and remained the most important trading centre in Assam for seventy-five years. But in August 1950, one of the century’s most violent earthquakes changed the course of the Brahmaputra and sent its waters crashing through the town, obliterating three-quarters of it. The Great Earthquake, as it became known, shook the region with the force of 10,000 atom bombs, causing catastrophic landslides and wiping out whole communities. Today India’s ‘city of tea’ is still a teeming hub for the local tea, oil and coal industries, but the river remains a threat: more of the town is carried away each year and some believe that if erosion continues at the current rate, Dibrugarh may vanish altogether.

  But now the river looked benign, a beast in hibernation, its waters drawn back beyond a wide expanse of grey sand. People fished in shallow inlets and cattle wallahs had erected flimsy bamboo shelters on the flats, the greyness and little figures reminiscent of an L. S. Lowry. Keen to avoid the unpleasant scenario of walking back to my hotel smeared in human excrement, I walked gingerly down the steep bank to the sand, pursued by a rag-tag mob of screeching children. They surged and giggled around me, bundling into shyly grinning groups as I took their photos, then yelling with delight when I showed them the screen. One of them was a hauntingly beautiful girl, a tiny thing in a dirty yellow dress with huge, melancholy, kohl-ringed eyes. I wondered if beauty amidst such poverty could ever lead anywhere but a brothel.