The Search for the Pink-Headed Duck, page 13
“Yes, sir,” I reply, wiping away his spray.
The men stand at attention as the officer checks their weapons and makes a short speech. There will be no more fires, no chatting, and absolutely no bird watching.
On command, the troops pair up and follow the commander to positions overlooking a road. An hour passes without a word being spoken. I wonder how long it will take me to get out of here. The man on my right stares at a picture he has in his wallet. The commander studies a coin, apparently memorizing its every detail. The other men keep their eyes fixed on the road. The forward lookout whistles, and the men hustle for new positions, spreading out. The soldier next to me reloads his gun and plants a kiss on the gunsight. We hear a diesel engine, and seconds later a truck rolls into view carrying a detachment of CRPF troops. The driver downshifts and stops directly below us.
Our commander comes down the line, saying something to each of his men, and even pauses to speak with me. I have to strain to hear his whisper: “This patch of road is a favorite resting place for the CRPF. There is a spring near the edge of the tar.”
Lazily the CRPF climb over the tailgate of the truck. I count them as they stretch their legs and joke with each other. There are twenty-two of them and nine of us, including me.
“You stay here and you stay low,” the commander orders. “If you see anybody flanking us, shout, damn you, shout.”
The Gurkhas creep closer to the unsuspecting CRPF. As ordered, I watch the flanks, shifting around a bit to get a good picture without having my head blown off. I freeze when the commander raises his hands. The men light eight fuses, which sputter as the GVC count down before lobbing the bombs. Two snag in the brush while the other six careen down the slope. Kaboom! Kaboom! All eight explode. The startled police leap to their feet and race for cover. The GVC open fire with a salvo of eight whip-cracking sounds. The police return the fire, blindly shooting up the slope at us. Abruptly our commander orders, “Run! Run! Run!”
We sprint madly up the hill, and once we’re well beyond range, we pause to catch our breath. I look back through my binoculars, and it appears that all the bombs and bullets have missed their marks. The commander describes the action as “harassment.”
“We don’t have to kill to scare them.”
We set off at a normal pace for a GNLF training camp to the east. The police never trail a Gurkha unit into the hills without heavy reinforcements. The Gurkhas’ knowledge of the terrain and their unsurpassed stamina make it foolish. “The hills belong to us,” the commander states flatly.
We move in silence, working our way along the boundary of a tea estate. Two hours after the skirmish, we arrive at the training camp, where other patrols are already gathered. I head immediately to the command post to find out when I can leave. The GNLF flag is at half mast. Several gray blankets lie on the ground near the flagpole. I’m a few feet away when a man from another patrol lifts the blankets, one at a time. My stomach knots, tighter and tighter, as each corpse is revealed. A head is nearly trepanned, brains spilling out, flies swarming around the cortex. Next to him is a body with a gaping hole where a leg once was. A hand lies on the chest, but the arm is missing. The third dead man is missing most of his left side. I close his eyes.
“Show the world what the police have done,” says one man, who hours before was tossing a bomb.
As I focus my camera, I realize that no picture can capture the horror; any two-dimensional image will only sanitize the experience. There is a smell, putrid and dense; lips caked shut by blood; fingers that will never uncurl; the faces of the survivors contemplating their own fates.
I put down the camera. My breath feels hot and an acrid taste lingers in my throat. As I stare at the bodies, I find myself wishing for a different world.
“Take more pictures,” a voice urges.
I walk away. “When can I leave?” I ask the commander. Quickly he rounds up two men to escort me to the road, where I will wait until a jeep loaded with milk stops. The messenger who was supposed to transport me has been detained and this driver has taken his place. As we head to Darjeeling, the man talks excitedly about skirmishes in every part of the district. Both state and Gurkha troops have died, and the area around Kalimpong has seen particularly heavy action. He asserts that the GNLF acted only in retaliation for a brutal police action.
What provoked the police? The driver doesn’t know. There has been no progress in New Delhi, he tells me, and I suspect the outburst has been a show of strength by both sides.* Trying to resolve a question haunting me, I ask the driver what Gurkhaland means to him. “Freedom,” he replies. “Gurkhaland is freedom, isn’t it?”
Late that same night, I’m on the mail train to New Delhi.
*The fighting continued for months, but in November 1988, Ghising signed a peace accord, accepting the original offer of a Hill Council.
9
Hindi by Yourself
The train ride from Darjeeling to New Delhi takes more than forty hours, and as I walk from the station to the Grand Life Hotel, I come upon a puzzling scene: Swedish Christmas carolers, dressed in wool caps and bright red and green costumes, singing in the sweltering sun. One of the singers, a blonde with unusually large hands, doles out samples of eggnog. Bystanders accept them gratefully, but I don’t see anyone going back for seconds. Thoughtfully, the Lutheran church has printed a Hindi translation of the Christmas songs. People glance at the lyrics, scratch their heads, and politely return the brochures.
Everyone at the hotel is in a jolly mood, especially Mahout, a sure sign that business has been good.
“Wonderful, things are just wonderful… No snags in Bombay, the airport here is cooperating, Calcutta is wide open… We are going to celebrate, and you are just in time for the party.”
Crates of champagne are stacked in an ice truck hired by Mahout. Workers are decorating the ground floor to resemble a discotheque. The front desk has become a bar, with liquor bottles and glasses covering every square inch. Mirrored globes, strobe lights, bunting, and crystals hang from the ceiling. The caterer, a wiry man in a brown suit much too large for him, fusses over the details.
“Everything must be perfect… Mahout has promised me a color TV if he likes it.”
The guests start to arrive around seven. Most of the women are wearing elegant cocktail dresses or saris, a few of the daring sport miniskirts; the men are decked out in tuxedos or silk suits, and many flash gold ID bracelets. Mahout, the perfect host, greets each guest warmly.
“Good evening. I’m so glad you could come… I would like to introduce you to my new friend, the last great white hunter. Did you know that this man has just…”
He then proceeds to exaggerate my adventures, embellishing them with whatever strikes his fancy. “He followed the spoor of the abominable snowman for three weeks… He climbed Mount Kanchenjunga without oxygen, says he smoked a pack of cigarettes on the peak … subsisted on yak for two months…”
Since Mahout refuses to let me pay for my room or anything else, I feel obliged to let him brag all he wants about me. During the course of the evening, various people offer to help me secure a permit for my trip down the Brahmaputra. I decline, assuring them that the paperwork has already reached the highest level. One man persists, however.
“I have much influence,” says Jawaharlal by way of introducing himself. He buzzes around me like a horsefly. No doubt he has friends in the government; indeed, many of the guests at the party are politicians or well-placed government officials. Even so, I feel uncomfortable around him. I pull Mahout away from a beautiful woman—no easy task—to ask about Jawaharlal.
“Oh!” he says, looking at the pudgy man and laughing. “He is a good friend. We prepped together. He works for RAW. Right at the top.”
“Raw what?”
“R-A-W. Research and Analysis Wing. What you would call a spy.”
According to Mahout, RAW is an intelligence organization, a combined CIA and FBI, monitoring activities inside India as well as around the world.
“What’s he doing here?” I ask nervously.
“We all know him and like him… You just have to watch what you say.”
“But he knows all about my trips! I could get deported!”
“Oh, stop. He is after much bigger fish than you, small fry.”
Mahout and Jawaharlal, both strident nationalists, have developed a working relationship. Although they live on different sides of the law, they cross boundaries when they feel national security is at risk.
“We are friends and we are businessmen,” Mahout says, “and we are loyal to India.”
At ten o’clock the strobe lights come on and the music blares.
“Let’s rock,” Rani says, taking my hand, leading the way to the center of the dance floor. She looks delicious in a gooseberry-colored sari.
While each night at Mahout’s hotel is a new experience, my days are routine. I become expert in lessons 182 through 297 in Hindi by Yourself, my latest self-help book. After a morning of bird watching in Lodhi Gardens, a lush oasis right in New Delhi, I usually head to Lok Nayak Bhavan, where I join the office workers on break. I have played enough hands of Indian whist that I’m beginning to win occasionally. My card partners are all from the plains and click their teeth whenever I mention the Himalayas.
“Brrrr. Darjeeling is too cold for me,” one man says.
The recent fighting in Darjeeling has made the headlines in Delhi. As far as they’re concerned, both the Gurkhas and the state police are wrong.
“What good does a gun do?” asks Prem, the best card player in the group. “If I was in charge, I would make them sit in one room until they worked it out. No one could leave, not even to go to the bathroom… Once they find peace, then they could piss.”
I’ve brought the director a present from the hills, a bag of choice Darjeeling tea. He’s embarrassed by the gift so, realizing my error, I charge him a dollar. There’s no news about my application, and since he knows of no other case like mine, he’s unsure what the delay indicates. It may simply be because the minister has been away for a while.
In the late afternoon I often go to the movies. The theaters are open all day and the tickets are cheap. Off Connaught Place there’s a cluster of mammoth halls, each fronted by a huge billboard advertising a racy scene in the film. Today I’m lured inside the Odeon by its marquee with a bare-chested man embracing a woman in a tattered dress. His face is painted with iridescent colors, and sparkles have been sprayed across his forehead, glittering beads of celestial sweat. Her ruby lips glisten around a tongue curling like a fresh-cut orange peel.
As in most Indian theaters, there’s no box office per se. I simply thrust some money into a small hole in the wall. Out comes a ticket and, when I’m lucky, some change. I walk into the darkened hall and look for an isolated seat. It takes me a couple of minutes to become accustomed to the soundtrack; Indians like it loud.
Today’s feature is a typical Hindi movie, produced in Bombay and more than likely written, shot, edited, and released in less than three months. The film is dubbed and the producers probably followed the usual practice of having writers concoct dialogue only hours before the cameras are ready to roll. The plot is simple: boy meets girl, loses her, and miraculously finds her again. The story has several twists, but dramatic flow isn’t a priority. In this film, seconds after a tense scene in which the hero is shot by thugs who kidnap his girlfriend, the action shifts to a dream sequence. Hero and heroine are magically transported to an enchanted forest, where other actors, dressed as trees, join them in a song and dance number. Before the credits roll, the hero has killed the bad guys, married his gal, fathered a child, and moved into a marble palace.
However preposterous the plots of most Hindi movies, they may be the most powerful force in New Delhi’s effort to make Hindi a truly national language. Pundits claim that film has done more to accomplish this than the entire education system. Perhaps they’re right, because in Darjeeling, where Nepalese is the lingua franca, a Gurkha standing outside a theater told me, “They [movies] are the only reason I learned Hindi.”
Eight days after my return to Delhi, while browsing in a bookstore, I notice a man flipping through a government study on the rivers of India, a book I’ve been hunting for. I wait for him to return it to the shelf, but something in the volume catches his eye. He pulls up a stool and settles down.
“Excuse me, are you going to buy that book?” I ask.
“I don’t know yet. Why?”
We start talking and introduce ourselves. His name is Shankar Barua, and he suggests that I buy the book and lend it to him. In exchange he graciously offers to buy me a cup of tea.
Shankar describes himself as an artist working as a photographer to make ends meet. “I used to work in Assam,” he tells me. “I was a tea broker. I had a car and a membership in a fancy club, but I split that grind to return to my art.”
“Assam? Do you know the Brahmaputra?”
“That’s why I want the book. I have all these pictures of the river, and I need some words to go with them. The first story did well.”
He hands me a magazine. I open it to the dog-eared pages and see his byline on “Down the Brahmaputra,” the story of his attempt to paddle the river from near the border of Burma to Bangladesh. On his fourth day out he was attacked by dacoits, and his trip was aborted. He wants to try again, but not alone.
Astounded by this chance encounter, I remember the charms His Holiness gave me in Sikkim. They’re in my pocket, and I fondle them as Shankar recounts some childhood memories. He remembers playing on the riverbank near Gauhati, throwing sticks into the channel, imagining their journey to the sea. Often he would dream he was a captain sailing to faraway ports.
“If the dacoits had left me alone, I would have become the first person to travel the river alone from Burma to Bangladesh.”
Shankar was born in Assam, the son of a Foreign Service officer. He speaks fluent Assamese and at least three of the myriad dialects of the river people. His father taught him to revere the Brahmaputra, the most powerful of the local gods, telling bedtime stories about the ghosts that hover along the river’s edge, waiting in the early morning fog to snatch naughty children.
I gladly accept Shankar’s invitation to join his wife and their baby for a meal of spicy Bengali food. Over several hours of conversation, we discover that we share many of the same vices, as well as similar tastes in music and books. I propose that we join forces on a voyage down the river. Each of us has something to offer: Shankar knows the land and the language, and I’ve got the money and the survival skills.
“Far out, man! This is really something else, eh? Doesn’t it blow your mind how we met?” he asks, going on to hum the musical theme of “The Twilight Zone.”
Shankar’s knowledge of American slang and pop culture is remarkable. As a child growing up in Laos, where his father was posted, he watched armed forces broadcasts from Vietnam. “My parents spoke English, but I learned American by watching Mary Tyler Moore,” he says. One of his brothers lives in California, and Poonam, Shankar’s wife, works for the American Embassy. Shankar seems to have committed to memory every issue of People and Rolling Stone magazines. As he says, “What’s wrong with trying to keep up?”
He’s two years younger than I and eight inches shorter. Being the son of a diplomat, he has lived all over the world. He came home to Calcutta for college, where, in his words, “I really learned how to party.”
For the next week we meet almost every day to make plans and assemble our gear. If I don’t get the permit for the Brahmaputra, he assures me that he will go anyway. “You’ve bought the expensive stuff and I’ll think of you when I use it.”
On the thirteenth day after leaving Darjeeling, more than three months since my initial visit to Lok Nayak Bhavan, my card-playing friends tell me that the director wants to see me right away. “Good luck,” they shout as I fly for the door.
“Quack, quack,” goes the guard at the door again, allowing me to barge in front of several dozen people. The director orders tea and tells me to sit.
“This is it. A decision has been made, and I am waiting for your file… Do you always smoke two cigarettes at once?” he asks, pointing to the one I’ve just lit and the one in the ashtray.
Ninety minutes later the messenger arrives with my file, now the size of an auto repair manual. Slowly the director reads the verdict. He stands, offers me his hand, and says, “Congratulations! You got it.”
I call Shankar from the bar in a nearby hotel. He can leave in a day. When I spring the news on Mahout, he pulls me to the refrigerator and yanks out a magnum of champagne.
“I’ve been saving this,” he says, beaming.
“To the river!” I toast.
“To Brahma, the Creator,” he adds.
10
Lahey-Lahey
Hindus revere the Ganges as the eternal stream of life, mother of all rivers, heavenly water to nourish the body and purge the soul; the Brahmaputra, son of Brahma, is her consort. Born in the Himalayas almost within sight of one another, the two rivers flow in opposite directions, gather strength, and loop back to merge into one. Their paths form a giant circle marking the center of the physical universe for Buddhists and Hindus alike.
The Brahmaputra has many incarnations along its 2,900-kilometer path through Tibet, India, and Bangladesh, its name changing from place to place, culture to culture. In Tibet, where it rises and is known as the Zangbo, or “the Purifier,” it flows eastward, coursing 1,800 kilometers parallel to the main ridge of the Himalayas. It’s navigable for a third of that length, and riverboats zigzag along it two miles above sea level, as close to the stars as a sailor can be.
The river swings south near Mêdog, entering India in grand fashion, tumbling down gorges and rock canyons hewn by the lesser gods as a present to Brahma. Picking up speed as it loses altitude, the river, now called the Dihang, races through the Mishmi Hills. At the tip of the Assam Valley, near Saikhoa Ghat, it assumes its familiar, ancient name and heads west, reversing course to chase the setting sun. Here it widens to ten miles in spots, slowing and spreading out as the land flattens. After entering Bangladesh, the river is known by three different names, the most famous being Padma, an avatar birthed near the river’s confluence with the Ganges.
