It needed to be big, for it was home to an extended Nyishi family of forty-nine, nineteen of whom were here now. Head of the clan, and of the village of twenty houses, was the gambura, a wizened old soul with filthy bare feet, a tatty baseball cap and earlobes that hung down like a pair of socks on a washing line. He sat cross-legged by the end hearth, turning a log in the fire as he spoke, his bald, cadaverous but extremely cheerful eldest son translating for Tapir from Nyishi to Assamese. Of course he knew about the crash; it was part of village history, and you could find something from the wrecked plane in every one of Karoi’s twenty houses. At this the son dashed down the hut and returned with a silver Chinese coin and a rusted, circular object that looked a bit like a wheel hub – a section of the plane’s landing gear. The villagers had seen the plane burning in the sky, the gambura said, and heard the explosion as it crashed. The following morning a group of them had trekked to the still-smouldering wreckage and found one man alive. He had a broken ankle, so they gave him drops of water collected in bamboo and carried him back to the village. Two of the Nyishi then walked to the nearest tea estate in Assam in order to send a message to the Americans, and a doctor was parachuted in soon after.
‘But doctor parachute stuck in tree,’ laughed Tapir, ‘so willagers had to rescue him too!’ Tapir had an endearing way of mispronouncing certain letters.
Three weeks later, once the Nyishi had been able to clear a landing strip with axes and dynamite supplied by the Americans, Jacobs and the doctor were evacuated. Apart from an American team, who returned a few months afterwards to remove the human remains, Clayton and I were the only foreigners to have come here since then.
It could have been down to the three-way translation, but the story seemed a little muddled. Clayton had been told a hunter was the only one to witness the actual crash, but the gambura told it differently. The gambura also told us seventy people died, including women, and that the villagers carried Jacobs to the village the following day. But in his report Jacobs said he was carried down from the mountain on 11 February, days after the accident. It was like Nyishi whispers, handed down through largely illiterate generations, morphing as it travelled through time. When I asked the old man when he’d been born, several minutes of debate with his son ensued. Finally, he said, ‘I was born after the earthquake, after 1950.’
By the end of the conversation it had been agreed that the gambura’s younger brother would take us to the site the following morning. It was about six miles away, on the summit of a mountain south of the village; if we left soon after dawn we’d be back before nightfall.
As we finished talking I noticed a woman walk past with a protesting white hen under her arm. It wasn’t difficult to guess the chicken’s fate.
‘No, Tapir! Please tell them I’m a vegetarian and not to kill the chicken for me!’ I pleaded. The woman laughed and carried the hen off in the other direction, and I was sure it had been granted a reprieve. But when supper appeared Tapir’s plate steamed with rice and boiled chicken.
‘It tradition,’ said Tapir. ‘Respect for the guest.’
As he ate, Tapir told me about various other meats he was partial to. Being an Adi, the list didn’t exclude much. Crow, snake, elephant, bear, porcupine, barking deer, his friend’s dog – he’d eaten them all.
‘Your friend’s dog!’ I exclaimed, appalled. ‘What did your friend say about that?’
‘He bring dog round for us to eat – he eat it too!’ he laughed. ‘Oh, and many cat too. But I no like cat.’
His favourite was a particular type of poisonous beetle the Adi literally go wild for. Eating these was a bit like a game of entomological Russian roulette; you popped the crunchy little morsels in your mouth whole and hoped it wasn’t the one in a thousand that would kill you, put you in a coma or send you crazy.
On telling me about this, Tapir shook with laughter. ‘Sometime the poison make you think you beetle and many Adi hurt their heads trying to get under rocks. Doctors very angry and not treat people.’ It was a ludicrous vision.
After supper – a very normal plate of rice and sweet potatoes – Tapir showed the family photographs from other crash sites he’d reached, his finger swiping across images of femurs, skulls, rotted leather brogues and bits of fuselage jutting out of snow.
‘The man who willagers rescue here lucky,’ he said. ‘At one crash site I see, one man live too. He walk to nearest willage but the people newer see white man before and he was so long [tall] with pale hair and pilot uniform that they afraid. They think maybe he yeti, so they kill him with bow and arrow.’
Next it was my turn to take centre stage.
‘Mem, you lady – you sleep in tent,’ said Tapir.
‘No, no need, I’ll just sleep here by the fire,’ I replied, not wanting to be a spoilt memsahib. But Tapir insisted. A lady must have her privacy and, before I had time to protest, he’d whipped out the tent and was laying it out in the space between two hearths. Nineteen pairs of eyes turned to look at us. Even the teenagers dragged their gaze away from the television to watch us wielding tent poles and nylon, almost poking granny’s myopic eyes out with the end of an unruly pole. Careful inspection of the tent followed, the family members walking around it, stroking, prodding and peering at it from every angle. Even more entertaining was the sight of me blowing up my inflatable sleeping mat. Eager to see what was next, they pulled up cane stools and sat with expectant faces in a semi-circle around me. Rising to my new role as stand-up comedian, I lay on my inflated mat with a pantomime ‘aaaaah’. They slapped their thighs, rocked on their stools and broke into peals of laughter. Next I pulled out my fluffy anteater and handed it to the bald son. This caused another outbreak of mirth. He stroked it, convulsed with a fit of high-pitched, infectious laughter, then passed it on around the giggling circle.
‘Are you married?’ the son asked, probably thinking a grown woman with a teddy bear was a highly unsuitable wife. I told him I wasn’t.
‘And ladies and gentlemen, the final exhibit of the evening,’ I said, unpacking my bulky sleeping bag and diving into the tent. Everyone laughed and filtered back to their hearths. What a very jolly family they were.
My night’s sleep was less entertaining. Someone was watching television until the early hours. I had to ‘attend to potty’, as Mark Shand called it, in the outside shed around two in the morning, my knotted, paining stomach having a rare revolt against something I’d fed it. Then a pair of cockerels started crowing at three, after which the Noah’s Ark under the hut mooed, oinked, clucked and bleated until I crawled out of my tent at five. I felt nauseous, under-slept and about as fresh as a week-old turd.
Tapir, who’d spent the night curled up on the bamboo floor like a cat, was already up and packing away his sleeping bag. The family were stirring too.
‘No problem!’ he laughed, when I commented on his sleeping arrangements. ‘I sleep anywhere. When hunting I sleep in tree so safer from leffard and python.’
Given that this pocket Rambo had told me he was Arunachal Pradesh’s former kick-boxing champion, I wondered if it was really the ‘leffard’ and python that should be hiding from him. Next he checked his anti-venom kit to make sure the syringe-like suction pump was working properly.
‘If mountain pit wiper bite we suck out poison with this. Otherwise you die after five, maybe ten, minute.’
Discussing sucking fatal doses of snake venom out of my body wasn’t my usual pre-breakfast conversation. ‘Do you think we’ll need it?’ I asked.
‘I hope not. But many people die here from pit wiper and we need to be careful of snake today. They wake up this time of year.’
I didn’t need reminding. I’d seen two black and yellow ones slither across the road just yesterday.
Powered by tea and Maggi noodles, we set off with the headman’s brother just after six. A slight man of about sixty with wire-rimmed spectacles, greying hair and a blue tracksuit, he led us into the forest on a steep footpath, his flip-flops squelching in the
mud. Below us Karoi’s roofs looked like flotsam in a sylvan sea, lapped at by roiling emerald waves of valley, ridge and spur. A laughingthrush whooped and trilled somewhere down in the valley and above us an unseen bird wolf-whistled cheekily as we sweated past. I asked Tapir its name.
‘I don’t know name in English. But this bird seasonal. When it make this noise we plant paddy. And we no get married now – wery unlucky!’ As with everything he said, he followed this with a tumble of laughter. If I were a doctor, I’d prescribe Tapir as an antidepressant: I have no doubt that a few days in the jungle with him could banish all but the worst cases of the blues.
It was a hot, sultry day and we climbed steadily through a sombre forest of slender, mossy trees, ferns and clumps of bamboo. Sunlight filtered through the canopy, fracturing the crepuscular light with beams and stippled pools. There was almost no birdsong now, just the sound of our feet scrunching through the loam, my breathing and the thwack thwack of our guide’s dao on bamboo and branches. It seemed that everything in the jungle was out to get us. Barbed stems of bamboo and vicious, thorny creepers clawed at our shoulders. Dam dum flies swarmed and bit. Leeches wriggled. The friendliest creatures in the forest were the biggest – the village mithun, docile beasts that eyed us idly as we passed. One, a massive piebald bull, ambled up to me and licked the salty sweat off my hands and arms, wrapping his long, rasping tongue around my fingers. The last time I’d seen a mithun tongue it was hanging from a piece of cane in Sadhu Mihu’s house during the reh festival. I much preferred this one.
For the last half-hour we climbed steeply to the summit of the ridge where the plane had crashed, hacking a path through bamboo and shrubs. By now sweat was sluicing down my back and the effort and slight altitude (2,000 metres) making me breathe like a pair of overworked bellows. Then I saw it – the first bit of wreckage: a bent, four-foot-long propeller, its tip still painted yellow. Beyond, spread over an area about half a kilometre square, was the rest of what remained of the plane. The majority of the metal had long been salvaged by entrepreneurial locals but the parts that were either too heavy, or not worth taking, were still here. In one small clearing lay the main arm of the landing gear, a riveted, rusted column of steel at least five metres long. All around it, half-rotted into the leafy mulch, were disintegrating lengths of rubber piping, crumpled bits of aluminium tube, twisted sections of panel, shards of pottery and damp, mouldering bundles of white nylon. It was this that affected me most, the nylon – the remains of the thirty-four men’s unopened parachutes. Among this heap of metal, it felt like the only direct link to the men themselves – a visceral reminder of their deaths here. Squatting down beside the landing gear, I picked up a decaying rag, suddenly acutely aware of the stillness and silence of the forest. A lot of lives had been cut short here, and for a few moments I imagined I could feel the men’s ghosts among the guard of trees. How sad that they’d died here, on this lonely mountaintop, thousands of miles from their families. And what cruel, cruel irony that they’d been on their way home.
Further down the same slope lay the rusted, mossy hulk of one of the radial engines. Two of its propellers were still attached and the third lay bent among the leaves. At all the sites he’d seen, the propellers were always intact, said Tapir. The main engine had once been near here too, our guide told us, but the 1950 earthquake had dislodged much of the wreckage and now it lay at the bottom of a deep ravine.
I wandered among the remains of the C-46 for an hour, examining bits of metal, thinking about the men, their families and Jacobs’ miraculous escape. I thought of the parents of the plane’s pilot, Cecil Weaver, who lost their other son, Ralph, a bombardier, just two days later when his bomber crashed in England on its way home from Germany. I thought of 21-year-old Freddie Raubinger, who was on his way home to Michigan to start a job as a mechanic and delivery driver for the local newspaper. A brilliant fighter pilot and a ‘prince of a fellow’, he’d survived 120 combat missions flying P-51 Mustangs against the Japanese over Burma, only to die on his way home. I thought about Jacobs’ rescue by the ‘natives’, and his crash report saying how they’d been so fascinated by the zips on his flying suit they ‘nearly wore them out, zipping them back and forth’. I thought of the wake of heartbreak this single crash had left behind it, and how what was left of these men was flown back to America to be buried in a mass grave at the Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery in Missouri, five years later.
Afterwards the three of us sat on a fallen tree and Tapir produced a tiffin of rice and omelette for our lunch. Every time we’d paused that morning he’d magicked something different from his ‘I could swim across a river with this’ waterproof bag – toffees, biscuits, Pepsi, water. I was beginning to wonder if he had a lamp and a coatrack in there, à la Mary Poppins, and asked him this as we ate.
He chuckled and reached into the bag’s apparently fathomless depths. ‘When trekking you need everything.’ Out came a first-aid kit, torch, power bank, waterproof poncho and Swedish FireSteel. He proudly gave me a demonstration of the latter.
‘At high altitude matches not work, so this very useful. Sometimes I use gunpowder from bullets I find at crash site to make fire too.’
Tapir made Ray Mears look like Barbie.
It began to rain as we left. Not the sort of rain that pitter-patters down in delicate drops, or sploshes playfully on the end of your nose, but a thunderous, blinding wall of water. We trotted, slid, squelched and half-tobogganed down the mountain, flayed by the cataracts of rain. Tapir galloped ahead, bamboo staff in hand, his hooded green poncho slapping and billowing behind him like some fleeing wizard of the woods. In his wake jogged the gambura’s brother, jaunty red umbrella held aloft, jumping over roots and fallen logs as nimbly as a goat.
What a relief it was to be back beside the middle hearth three hours later, drinking tea and eating popcorn made in a wire basket over the fire, a kitten curled in the nook of my arm. Tapir, meanwhile, was showing the family how the FireSteel worked. They crowded around him, like children around a magician, exclaiming, ‘Oooooh!’ and ‘Aaaaah!’ as the sparks made a ball of cotton wool leap into flames. Afterwards we gave the gambura a list of the Americans who died here, as well as Jacobs’ full name and the correct date of the crash. It was an important part of Karoi’s history, and the family were grateful for the information.
The thought of peeling ourselves away from that warm fire was almost too much to bear. But Tapir needed to return home to plant his rice and was catching an early Sumo from Sagalee the next morning, so we had to make it back there tonight. I packed up the bike, took photographs of the family outside their hut, and gave the plump, jovial matriarch 2,500 rupees, around twenty-five pounds, for having us to stay. A fortune by local standards, she smiled delightedly and enveloped me in a warm, bosomy hug. How different I’d found these laughing, kindly Nyishi to the warring, slave-raiding, ‘barbarian’ Dafla of Ursula’s Hidden Land, or the ‘cruel and stupid village people’ the Adi hotel manager in Itanagar had warned me I’d find.
The track had been pummelled to liquid mud by the night’s rain, and it was a hellish ride back to Sagalee. How we stayed upright I’m not sure. When we reached the yellow Inspection Bungalow at dusk, the swarthy, moustachioed Nepali caretaker said there was only one room left, and it had just one double bed. By that point I was so insensible with tiredness I’d have shared a bed with Donald Trump if I’d had to. Besides, unlike Trump, I felt sure Tapir wasn’t the groping type. But when we unlocked the door to the musty white room we found two double beds – quelle luxury – plus a bathroom with someone’s dirty Y-fronts hanging on the door.
I washed under the trickle of a shower, hopping and swearing at the cold, and then sat on the steps watching purple fingers of lightning bolt across the black sky and listening to cracks of thunder and rain hammering on the metal roof. All I wanted was to eat and fall into bed. But the gas and electricity had gone out, the cook was drunk and the firewood was wet. In the end Tapir cooked us chapatti ov
er a smoking, sputtering fire, the cook lolling and blathering on a stool beside him. By nine o’clock I was asleep.
18
THE SELA PASS
I’d spotted it when riding out of Itanagar a few days ago: an impossibly shiny tower of gleaming glass with the words HOTEL emblazoned across the front. A beacon of order and cleanliness, it rose out of the dust and disarray of the town centre like the sword of hope, as at odds with its surroundings as an alien spaceship. I didn’t care how much it was. I was going there, and that was that. As much as I adored staying with families, I had a long few days’ riding ahead of me and, for one night only, wanted space and quiet. I wanted to wash in hot water, to sink into a soft bed, to eat something that wasn’t rice, chapatti or Maggi noodles and to not be woken up by cockerels, pigs or people at 3 a.m.
It was only here, amidst all the polished glass and pressed uniforms, that I realized I was emitting a most unladylike stink. My panniers were damp and fetid, I reeked of sweat, and my boots, clownishly swollen with mud, smelt like a dead stoat was rotting somewhere in their depths. I suspected only a sheep dip would really clean me, but for now a hot shower would do. Soon the bathroom tiles were spattered brown, my clothes were dripping muddy puddles onto the polished white floor, and I was sprawled across the soft, king-sized bed in a white, towelling robe.
At supper, in the empty hotel restaurant, I was waited on by seven nervously obsequious staff. They stood stiffly in starched white shirts and blue waistcoats, pretending not to watch me eat, the occasional scrape of my cutlery amplified by the formal silence of the room. It all felt very sensible and serious, a world away from the cosy fireside humour of my tribal friends. As glad as I was that I’d spent an extravagant 4,000 rupees, about forty pounds, for a hot shower and the comfortable bed, the hotel was a soulless place, with little relation to the Arunachal Pradesh I’d come to love.
Land of the Dawn-lit Mountains Page 24
