By the time we neared Sylhet, our last stop before the border, the low hills were unmistakable. We arrived at lunchtime, and I wanted to forge on, eager to enter Meghalaya now that I’d at last seen some serious rainfall. But Babu insisted that we stop because the border was best crossed in the morning. I assumed he knew what he was talking about so we checked into the Parjatan Motel, run by the government tourist authority.
It was perched on its own small hill on the edge of town, set in pleasant gardens dotted with viewing shelters that looked out over the more serious Khasi Hills across the border in India. At the motel’s entrance there was a sign that asked ‘Why choose Parjatan?’ followed by a series of answers:
It has open area and fresh air.
It is handled by professional staffs.
It is visited by people of taste.
It didn’t quite live up to its billing. The dining room was empty but for a small cockroach that the waiter swept nonchalantly from our tablecloth when he arrived with the menus. He was a small, round and sweaty man who looked like a butterball. I ordered a chicken cutlet (two pieces), which came with chips.
‘Drinking?’ the butterball asked.
‘Do you have lassi?’
The question seemed to startle him. ‘No one has ordered lassi here, sir, for 25 years,’ he said dismissively.
I took that as a no and ordered a bottle of mineral water instead.
The meal took just less than 25 years to arrive and when it did it was terrible. The cutlets were wafer thin, sad and burnt. They were accompanied by a plate containing eight chips. I cut into one of the cutlets and, failing to find any chicken, asked the butterball if he had made a mistake with my order.
‘No,’ he said definitively, ‘this is chicken cutlet two pieces, served with chipped potatoes.’
‘Are you sure this isn’t vegetarian cutlet?’ I asked. ‘There doesn’t appear to be any chicken here.’
The butterball looked uneasy. Despite the air-conditioning, small beads of sweat began to run down his neck towards his grubby white collar. But he remained defiant. ‘Definitely chicken cutlet.’
On further investigation, I found a small strip of meat. It was about a millimetre wide and a centimetre long. Babu asked if he could examine it. He pushed aside his plate of chicken curry, which looked like a far better choice despite the fact that most of the chicken pieces were actually bones, and peered through his round glasses at the specimen I passed as if we had just discovered an exotic new species of insect. Then he exploded.
‘Do you know how to run a restaurant?’ he shouted at the butter-ball, who now looked shocked as well as decidedly uncomfortable. ‘Where is the manager?’ Babu demanded. Clearly relieved at the opportunity to pass the buck, the butterball scuttled away towards the kitchen. He returned presently with a younger man in tow and Babu proceeded to scream at them both in Bengali.
I put my head down and ate some of my eight chips.
After a good half hour of wild gesticulating and ferocious finger-wagging by Babu, reflected in strained expressions and anguished responses from the restaurant manager, the atmosphere calmed and the butterball and manager faded away. Babu had been pacified but was still angry.
It transpired that the meagre food rations were a result of corruption all the way up the government food chain. ‘Everyone takes their cut, the regional manager, senior government executives, the suppliers, everyone except these guys, who are not senior enough yet,’ Babu explained. ‘I’m surprised they have any food left at all.’
A chicken actually cost 200 taka but the invoices showed that 350 taka was paid, the 150-taka difference disappearing into pockets up the chain. The hotel had to make a profit, which meant that when they received the over-expensive chicken it had to stretch a long way. Hence my virtually chicken-free cutlets and Babu’s bony curry. It was the same with the chips; 24 taka was paid for a kilogram of potatoes that actually cost ten taka. The result was my plate of eight chips.
‘It is terrible,’ Babu exclaimed, ‘scandalous, in fact. You come to my country and what do you think when faced with this shit?’
F O U R
The border crossing was hard up against the foot of the Khasi Hills that rose sharply out of the plains to disappear into a shroud of low thick clouds. A constant procession of brightly coloured Tata lorries lumbered out of the mist to cross into Bangladesh laden with gleaming black coal. As I waited for my passport details to be laboriously entered by hand into a vast ledger on the Bangladesh side, Babu pointed to an article he was reading in the Daynik Janoahanto, or Daily People’s Voice.
‘It is about lack of monsoon rains,’ he said. ‘First line translates as “It seems that October has arrived even before July has finished.”’ I had singularly failed to catch the monsoon in Bangladesh and it was time to move on. ‘I hope you have better luck in India,’ Babu told me.
As at the frontier coming into Bangladesh, the transition was abrupt. But this time it was not like returning to India. Going by the faces of the people it seemed more as if I had taken a shortcut into South-East Asia. We immediately became engulfed by dense jungle that glistened in the mist as the road wound its way up a series of hairpin bends into the ‘Abode of the Clouds’. Mosses and lichens clung to every rock surface and delicate green ferns sprouted from every crevice. I could hear the incessant torrent of waterfalls somewhere in the distance.
As we motored on, the fog closed in. Visibility fell from 20 metres to 10, and then to less than 5. I couldn’t see further than the concrete blocks that lined the road we were driving on. Beyond the blocks was just a milky void. It was an eerie nothingness that could have been hiding anything: more thick jungle, a precipitous valley, even an undiscovered ocean. It was impossible to tell. On crossing the border, I’d been briefly relieved to regain a vertical component after weeks in a two-dimensional country, but the all-enveloping fog now made Meghalaya worse. It was claustrophobic and unnerving. Driving along the thin strip of shiny tarmac that was just visible in front of the bonnet was an existence in just one dimension.
My unease wasn’t helped by the driver’s reluctance to employ any of the few mechanical aids available on his ancient Ambassador. The wipers were silent on the fogged windscreen and he hadn’t turned on the headlights. The rear-view mirror was also useless, being covered in a thick layer of condensation. It reminded me of the interior decorator’s comment at the dinner party in Calcutta about the clouds coming in through the windows. The driver was hanging out of his window, straining to see in front of him, when I asked why he didn’t use the windscreen wipers.
‘It’s easier to see without them,’ he grimaced. I couldn’t grasp the logic of that remark, but I let it go. ‘What about the headlights then?’ I said.
‘No, they just make it more difficult to see.’
The only saving grace was that he never exceeded 40 kilometres an hour and I wondered whether this was a concession to the quite obvious danger of his driving like a blind man, or because the vehicle simply couldn’t go any faster. I decided on the latter, since the word danger didn’t appear to feature in his vocabulary.
He swerved abruptly to avoid a figure hunched beneath an umbrella that appeared out of nowhere.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen fog as thick as this,’ I said nervously.
‘This is not thick,’ the driver replied, ‘when it’s thick people have been known to bump into each other while out walking.’
Briefly the fog cleared as a light drizzle began to fall. The jungle had disappeared to become flat, rough grassland. It looked just like Dartmoor in the misty rain. It was cold, too, a welcome relief after the torrid heat of the Bangladeshi plains, and there were even a few bedraggled sheep grazing beside a rocky outcrop. But there were also conifers growing, and thatched houses with walls made of flattened tin cans that loomed out of the haze. Tin cans that hadn’t been flattened, and were full of bright red begonias, lined their verandas.
We passed through a village. There
were more people beneath umbrellas and others wearing coracle-shaped palm leaf contraptions over their heads as protection against the elements. They looked like raffia tortoise shells. They were called knups, my driver told me.
We drove on, past a brief glimpse of a limestone quarry, into Shillong, which had a signpost welcoming me to the Scotland of the East, the name coined during the time of the British Raj when the hill station was a popular retreat from the heat of the plains. Here we picked up my new translator, a Khasi woman named Dulci who worked as a disc jockey-cum-newsreader for the Meghalaya branch of All India Radio.
During the 20 minutes we spent in Shillong the weather changed from mist to gentle rain, then to thick fog, and back to mist again. ‘They say that the weather here is like the women of Shillong,’ Dulci told me with a sardonic smile, ‘always changing its mind.’
Almost as soon as we left the town, the road to Mawsynram became swathed in thick fog and the landscape dissolved yet again into the miasma. ‘You see the irony of it all?’ mused Dulci as we crept through the twilight zone at 10 kilometres an hour, the driver once more hanging out of his window. ‘When it is not raining, it is foggy. When there is no fog, it is raining.’
The afternoon dragged on and what little light was able to penetrate the fog began to fade. It was difficult to gauge how far we had travelled, but even though I had been on the road for more than five hours, I didn’t think the distance could be that great since we hadn’t got into fourth gear since leaving Shillong. A few minutes later, as I sensed we had begun a slight descent in our journey, Dulci asked the driver to pull over to the side of the road. She jumped out of the car and almost immediately disappeared into the fog. ‘I want to show you something, Nick,’ her disembodied voice called, ‘your first view of Mawsynram.’
Distinctly unconvinced, I followed her into the phantom space. She was standing a few yards away, out of sight of the car, pointing.
I looked. ‘Oh yes, beautiful. What a fantastic view…’ I could see nothing whatsoever except the usual milky vacuum. ‘I can’t see anything Dulci, it’s just a cloud.’
‘But that’s the whole point,’ she said. ‘It’s the wettest town on Earth.’
For the briefest of moments the fog broke up and I saw a handful of houses on the far side of a valley. They were backed by a church steeple, all clinging to a grassy hillside as the clouds scudded by. Then the village melted away again into the haze. It was the only view I ever got of the wettest place on Earth.
I have to admit that I hadn’t been mentally prepared for the poor visibility. When I first started researching for my journey to Mawsynram, my mind was just so boggled by the enormity of its annual rainfall that I failed to consider what this might mean for my chances of actually seeing the place. As a geographer, I found the lack of visible perspective disconcerting. Of course, there are lots of other ways of getting a hold on a sense of place, including all the other senses for a start. Sounds and smells go a long way towards building up a mental picture of where you are, quite apart from conversations with people who live there. But a good clear view of a location puts it all into perspective, and that’s what I missed. It wasn’t as if I couldn’t see anything at all, it was just that the view was severely restricted. As Dulci had said, when it wasn’t raining, it was foggy, and when the fog eventually cleared, almost the moment we drove into the village of Mawsynram, it began to rain. As a result, I could never perceive anything further than the equivalent of the end of my short garden at home. I found it very disturbing.
But what rain. Half an hour or so before Dulci had stopped the car to show me the ‘view’ of the world’s wettest inhabited place, a peculiar noise had started to emanate from the opaque clouds that encased us on our drive. It sounded like hundreds of castanets being played, all slightly out of sync with each other. After some consideration, I decided they might be frogs. ‘Right,’ said Dulci, ‘They are known as jakoid in Khasi. You might be lucky, Nick, because they say the jakoids woo the rain.’
They’d certainly done that all right, because it came down in torrents. The heavens didn’t open because you couldn’t really see them, but they just sent forth an immense outpouring of water that was truly cosmic in its proportions. It was as if the bottom had fallen out of an ocean in the sky. It rained and it rained and it rained and it rained. It just kept on raining, non-stop for five days, an unremitting, incessant, ear-hurting deluge.
So, despite the parched frustration of my journey from Calcutta, I did, after all, get to see what I’d come for: Mawsynram, the wettest village on the planet, during a full-on monsoonal downpour. I set up the rain-gauge of my portable meteorological station in the grounds of the Public Works Department compound on the edge of the village and returned to meet the family Dulci had arranged for me to stay with.
My initial impression of Meghalaya as rather different in many ways from the rest of India was right. Politically I was still in the world’s largest democracy, all right, but culturally I was closer to South-East Asia. ‘The Khasis are thought to have migrated here long ago from somewhere like Cambodia or Thailand,’ Dulci told me. ‘Certainly many Khasi words are similar to Thai. The food too. We eat a lot of pork, and this is one of the few places in India where you can buy beef.’
But Khasi culture also came with twists of its own. The Khasis are a matrilineal society, in which inheritance passes to the youngest daughter and all the children take the mother’s name. This explained why the lady of the house where I stayed, Manolin, was definitely in charge. Roy, her husband, earned the money, but it was Manolin who decided how it was spent.
And mixed in with the traditional Khasi set-up were some unmistakable ingredients left over from the time when the British ruled India. In the nineteenth century, Meghalaya became a target for Christian missionaries, many from Wales, who preached the gospel, established churches and introduced roman script. Somewhere along the line, the Khasi people became acquainted with Scottish tartan, and men and women all over Mawsynram still wander round with tartan shawls across their shoulders against the cold.
Another legacy of British rule is a fascination with English words that stretches beyond the borders of bizarre. During the course of my stay, I met a boy named Manstrong and a girl called Barents Sea. She had a best friend by the name of Latrine. I was sad to miss three sisters with the unlikely handles of Hydrogen, Oxygen and Nitrogen, and a trio of brothers named Brake, Steering and Car Horn.
Manolin’s husband, Roy, was a pork butcher. He sold one pig at a time at the village market that took place twice a week in the main street, or ‘station’ as it was called because this was where the buses stopped. The rest of the week saw Roy travelling to other villages in search of pigs for slaughter because Mawsynram’s pigs were kept for breeding only. Roy’s business was affected by the monsoon in several ways, he told me. There was less demand for a start. When the rain came down in the vast quantities that it did while I was there, people who worked outdoors tended to stay at home. In consequence, they didn’t receive any wages. Day labourers in the fields or at the limestone quarries saved money during the winter to tide them over the monsoon days when they couldn’t work, but nonetheless they still tended to eat less meat. The other thing was that the meat went off faster in the high humidity of the monsoon. If Roy didn’t sell all his pork at the market during the winter, he could usually keep it for the following market day, but if this happened in the rainy season, Roy had to don his knup and hawk pork chops door-to-door. ‘I never have to do that in winter,’ he told me.
Roy never complained about the rain, but then he was a quiet and undemonstrative man, who generally preferred to leave the talking to his lively wife. Others I spoke to in Mawsynram were slightly more voluble about the annual deluge. When I asked Jackson Marbaniang, the village headman, if the villagers felt a sense of pride in holding the record for the rainiest place in the world, he answered, ‘Yes, in one way they are proud.’ He paused to gaze out of the window at the cascade of water p
ouring from his roof. ‘But in another way,’ he went on slowly, ‘the rain means trouble.’ I waited for him to elaborate, but he seemed mesmerized by the momentous flow outside his window.
‘Trouble in what sense?’ I asked.
‘Because when people step out of their house, to go to work or to the market, they get wet,’ he replied.
It wasn’t exactly what I’d been expecting, but I suppose it was a fair point. And it was one I heard time and again as people grumbled about the number of times they had to change their clothes each day after getting saturated. But perhaps the most common complaint reflected Jackson Marbaniang’s demeanour as he told me about the ‘trouble’ of people getting wet. It was simply that the monsoon was boring. While the incessant rains were gushing from the heavens, much of the village seemed to be transfixed by a sense of seasonal lethargy. The most glaring example of this came one afternoon when I fell into conversation with a man wreathed in a plastic mac sheltering beneath the bus shelter down at the station. The electricity had been off at Roy’s house all day because the power lines into the village had been brought down by the rains. I asked the man where he was off to.
‘I’m not waiting for a bus,’ he told me, ‘I’m just watching the rain.’
‘I see,’ I replied, which I suppose I did in one sense.
‘But you know how I comfort myself in the monsoon?’ he asked rhetorically, ‘I have some inner warmth.’ He rummaged in the depths of his plastic mac and pulled back a flap to give me a glimpse of something that was obviously not for public display. I craned my neck to see. He was grasping a small clear plastic bag that bulged with a transparent liquid.
Going to Extremes Page 23
