The Search for the Pink-Headed Duck, page 14
Shankar and I have decided to begin our voyage in Saikhoa Ghat, a small village in the northeast corner of Assam, near Burma. Getting there from New Delhi gives new meaning to the phrase “down time.” I’m tipped off early by the man sitting next to me on the plane ride to Gauhati, the capital of Assam, that this is going to be a long flight. Minutes after we board, he opens a book. Noticing my inquisitive glance, he holds up the jacket of the thick volume: Great Russian Novels, a Reader’s Digest compilation of condensed classics.
“Enjoying it?” I ask.
“Very much. I read the first half, War and Peace, on the flight to Delhi. Would you like it when I finish?”
When the plane arrives, seven hours late, I disembark carrying the abridged Russian epics.
It’s two in the morning when we pull up outside the Barua family home. The lights are out. Everyone must have gone to bed, sure that we had missed the plane. Shankar heads for the light switch. I hit a chair, toppling it, and crash to the floor.
“Who’s there?” an alarmed voice demands.
Every light in the house pops on. Shankar’s brother Kumar is the first to appear. In short order he’s followed by Shankar’s mother, sister-in-law, and older brother.
“I knew it,” says Kumar. “I knew it had to be you. No burglar could make that much noise.”
Kumar, twenty-seven, is the youngest of the four Barua boys. A little taller than Shankar and twenty pounds heavier, he’s wearing a nightshirt that brushes the ground, protecting his legs from the mosquitoes. When we sit down to eat, he joins us, while the others return to bed.
The house is large by Indian standards, having four bedrooms and a spacious living room. Its decor reflects their life in the diplomatic corps. One wall is covered with mementos of Russia, another displays curios from Indochina, South America, and Europe. A collection of Venetian glass is showcased only inches from the chair I toppled during my entrance. On the mantelpiece is a picture of Shankar’s parents at a shipyard near the Black Sea. His mother is just about to christen the first ship built by the Soviets for the Indian Navy.
Like Shankar, his brothers speak perfect idiomatic English, spiking their language with American slang and cockney expressions. Next morning, when we eat breakfast together, I talk to Amar, the oldest son, who owns a chicken farm. He’s never heard of the pink-headed duck, but he offers some practical advice: “Use cornmeal to capture one. I will breed it with a pochard. We’ll make millions.”
The bus to upper Assam doesn’t leave until sunset, but I drag Shankar to the Blue Hills Bus Terminal early in the afternoon. The depot is packed. A large TV sits on a platform high above the vinyl floor, dominating the room. The sound is off, but a soap opera flickers on the screen. I’m rather pleased that I can distinguish five different languages being spoken around us. Shankar isn’t impressed; he can pick out twice that number, and he reminds me that a hundred and fifty languages and more than five hundred dialects are spoken in India.
Bunched in one corner is a group of Naga tribespeople, who appear to love primary colors, the purer the better. They wear red hats, blue shawls, yellow pants or skirts. Their speech is guttural, composed of many consonants and harsh sounds. Naga profiles reflect the look of their ancestral Shan cousins from Thailand and Burma. To me, the women are stunning, especially their alluring eyes, large black pearls floating in delicate cream faces.
In the middle of the room there’s a party of tribespeople from Arunachal Pradesh, the wildest and least populated state of India. One of the men is whittling, putting the finishing touches on a small stylized panther, I think, or maybe a tiger. He doesn’t seem to mind when I squat next to him. Using sign language, I try to ask him about his carving. Bewildered, he shakes his head and keeps on working. Shankar tries a Mishmi dialect. Finally a bystander offers to translate.
“Is it a cat?” I ask.
“No, bear.”
“Will he sell it?”
“Yes.”
“How much?”
“He wants your pants.”
“They are the only ones I have. Will he take a knife? A flashlight?”
“No. He wants your pants. He says you can keep that cheap stuff. Pants or nothing.”
“How about money?”
“No. Money is useless in the hills. Now he says he wants your pants and a carton of cigarettes.”
He keeps the sculpture but convinces me to give him a pack of cigarettes. Shankar and I wander outside. The smell of something burning draws us toward an alley. Upwind from a flaming trash can is a group of Meghalayans, all wearing rubber shoes and carrying waterproof bags. They offer us tea. The leader tells Shankar that they’re going home to Cherrapunji, which is just eighty miles south of here and is the wettest spot on earth. It holds two world records for rainfall: in one day 41 inches fell, and in one year more than 850 inches fell.
As we drink tea, the headman keeps nudging me and pointing at an embarrassed teenage girl, his daughter. Reluctantly she heeds his command to sit next to me. I’m intrigued by her silver earrings, which nibble her lobes like schools of minnows. Her father orders her to remove one, and as she does, her personality changes dramatically. No longer shy, she starts bartering in a quick, loud voice, sure of herself. Her father beams as we conclude the deal: one earring for a wrist radio, a knife, two bandannas, five Godzilla pins, a box of plastic toothpicks, and ten rupees. Later Shankar tells me that the earring is worth only three or four rupees.
The dispatcher announces our bus, and we hurry to load our luggage. Shankar curses when he sees the large letters on the coach proclaiming “Super Video Luxury.”
“What does that mean?”
“Pain,” he replies and covers his ears.
Each of these buses is equipped with one videotape, which is played over and over for the length of the trip, about fifteen hours in our case. I retrieve my medical kit and pull out a handful of cotton for my ears. After other passengers ask for some, I approach the driver.
“Nobody wants to see the movie a dozen times. Why not show it once or twice?”
“Impossible. The machine is supposed to be on the whole time. This is a Super Video Coach!”
We leave the city limits as the sun dips behind the horizon. The lower half of the sky is a sickly yellow, but the upper portion, above the dense smog, is a vibrant orange. We follow Route 37, a two-lane road running along the left bank of the Brahmaputra. After the second replay of the movie, I doze off, stirring only when the bus pulls up to an all-night restaurant with a parking lot filled with trucks and other buses. Everyone here seems to be in a hurry. Passengers wolf down their food, and the restaurant staff quickly lose patience with those who can’t make up their minds. Twice I’m ordered out of line and finally decide to eat whatever Shankar orders.
“Duta Diya,” I say—make that two—my first Assamese phrase.
We continue on, zooming eastward along flat terrain. Finally the morning light bleaches the video screen, dissolving the image into benign obscurity. On both sides of the bus are tea estates, giants in comparison to those in Darjeeling. Shankar tells me that Assam produces the bulk of Indian tea. While Darjeeling grows a high-quality leaf that imparts subtle flavor, the Assamese crop is known for its strong, pungent taste. Plentiful and cheap, it’s the tea of the people.
We debark in Tinsukia, a town that served as a staging area for American troops during World War II. Metal signs advertising American products of the 1940s are still in place. One billboard, its paint peeling, depicts a man who bears a striking resemblance to a young Ronald Reagan, exhaling a cloud of smoke. “I like the pack. I love the taste,” says the slogan, going on to urge “victory.”
Shankar and I switch buses for Saikhoa Ghat. The new bus, owned and operated by the state, has no battery and must be jump-started. We and the other passengers push it for almost a kilometer of fits and false starts; with a belch of black smoke, the engine finally comes to life. We climb aboard and drive past acre after acre of tea bushes until, suddenly, anything green vanishes. Pfft! The vegetation stops, replaced by a brown and lifeless plain.
“The flood line,” the driver explains.
He whistles as the hot air blows in our faces and deposits a thin layer of sand over everything. It’s high noon. The only breaks in the monotonous landscape are the stark remains of animals drowned by the monsoon flood. Two months ago this land was submerged under several feet of river.
A half hour later we stop near a clump of rickety bamboo structures. Saikhoa Ghat? The driver nods. This is it or, more accurately, what’s left of it after this year’s monsoon. A new settlement and ferry landing have been established about three kilometers downstream, and the latest reincarnation of Saikhoa Ghat is growing up around it. A middle-aged man with a boil under his left ear grabs our bags the moment we put them down. “Which way?” he asks. Rather than arguing, we hire him to lead us to the ghat. Thirty minutes later I stare wide-eyed into the Brahmaputra.
The river is an ocean. To the north there’s not a speck of land. The wind is blowing at fifteen knots, and whitecaps dot the blue expanse. Overhead the clouds have stretched to near nothingness. Shankar continues walking, but I linger, holding my hands over the surface to feel the reflected heat of the sun. As I dip my fingers into the water, I whisper to the river god. In the distance a gull screeches and banks in the pale sky.
I catch up with Shankar in the middle of town, a dusty place with sixteen flimsy buildings in a row. There are no streets, only footpaths in the sand. Chickens wander about, and several mangy dogs lie in the sun, panting. A fleet of small boats is hauled up on the mud shore, and several fishing nets, hoisted on long poles, snap in the breeze. Groups of men drink tea in the shade of the bamboo, thatch, and rope structures. Not one nail has been used. When the next monsoon threatens, the owners will be ready to take apart their shops and truck the pieces to higher ground.
On his previous trip Shankar made friends with Moti, the owner of a teahouse. He greets Shankar with a hug, then turns to me. He straightens, clicks his unshod heels in military fashion, and extends his hand.
“Now we are friends,” he says after we shake.
As he serves us tea, flies buzz around his butter-greased hair.
“Anything you want, Moti can get,” he whispers.
“Don’t tempt us,” Shankar replies.
“I am your friend and want to please you,” he says, quoting prices three or four times the usual black-market rate.
Like most people who work the river, Moti spends eight or nine months here in Assam and then returns home to his wife and children in Bihar during the monsoon season. The local Assamese tribes live in the hills year-round, having abandoned the floodplain centuries ago. Moti knows little about the hills or mountains; he knows the water. He shipped out as an apprentice cook before he was seven.
“It was a surprise to me,” he recalls. “I was one of six children, and I knew something was about to happen when my mother brought me a sweet and no one else got one. That night my father told me about my new job. I left the next morning.”
By the time he was sixteen he had saved enough money to start his first teahouse. He has lost everything six times, four times to the river and twice to a better hand of cards.
“Shiva has many tests for me. This year I returned and could not find my shop. Not a stick was left. I had to borrow to build this,” he says, pausing to look heavenward before asking, “Does the American play cards?”
Three long blasts of a steam whistle announce the arrival of the ferry. Several times a day, depending on the weather and currents, a sixty-two-foot boat chugs steadily across the river to Sadiya, gateway to the rugged and largely unexplored Mishmi Hills. There are fewer than twenty passengers aboard, but the water laps the starboard rail under the weight of a cargo of teak logs. As the captain supervises the unloading, he sees me lurking near the bow and waves me aboard.
At first he confuses me with someone else. “A white firang [foreigner] boarded my ferry seven or eight years ago,” he says before inviting me on a tour. He purchased the boat years ago at auction in Calcutta. It used to be a workboat servicing the fleet of British steamships that plied the Brahmaputra during the first half of the century. He’s intimate with every detail of her lines and scantlings. To his eye there’s no prettier vessel on the river. As he shows me the engine, he uses his shirttail to wipe a gob of oil from the valve cover. The hull, launched in Glasgow, is double-planked, and her heavy oak ribs indicate that she was most likely built for the North Sea. This boat will undoubtedly outlive its captain, a fact not lost on him.
“She has the beauty of a river goddess and the spirit of Ram. I want my ashes scattered from her stern.”
When I describe our plans to buy a small boat and paddle the length of the river, the captain puts his arm around me like a father and leads me to the bridge. Pointing downstream, he warns me about the dacoits who control a 150-kilometer stretch of the river called the Badlands.
“Between Jorhat and Tezpur is the worst. The Nareesch gang is there… Why does a firang want to do this?”
I explain my search for the pink-headed duck, and suddenly my intentions make sense to him. He can understand a pilgrimage, no matter what it’s for. As a boy, he tells me, he journeyed with his father to Mount Kailas, the hallowed fortress of Shiva in the northern Himalayas. The trip remains his most vivid childhood memory.
“Yes, you must do these things. The gods will protect you.”
I take out a map and ask about the uncharted area near Burma. He scratches his head while studying the map, speckling it with dandruff.
“That is no place to find a duck. Look on the river, not in the hills.”
Later I take out my Polaroid and gather the willing ferry crew for a portrait. The photo is a hit, and I ask them if they know of any boats for sale, offering individual portraits if they locate one. In less than an hour a crewman introduces me to Jodu Das. Short and well built, he’s wearing a lungi and a plaid shirt knotted at the waist. Jodu leads me to his boat.
The moment I see his skiff, I know it’s the one for us. Of the two dozen crafts moored near the landing, it alone appears speedy and maneuverable; certainly it’s the smallest and has the narrowest beam, good for paddling but inadequate for fishing. I check for dry rot with my knife and find none, so for forty-six dollars I become the owner of a twelve-foot skiff equipped with paddles and push poles. Shankar writes out the sales agreement in Assamese, Hindi, and English. I ink Jodu’s thumb with the tip of a magic marker and sign below his mark.
With everyone at the ghat watching, Shankar and I climb aboard and shove off for a test run. Within seconds we spin out of control and nearly capsize. It takes us a while to regain our balance and any semblance of control. We finally manage to steer a straight course, but when we turn to head upstream, we’re unable to make headway against the current. We land about a mile downstream and tow the boat back to the ghat. The gallery hushes as we near; no doubt our display has them laying down bets, setting odds on how long we will survive.
Jodu Das never gave the boat a name, but Shankar insists on one. Splashing water over the bow, he christens her Lahey-Lahey, meaning “Slowly Slowly” in Assamese.
Moti prepares a feast, which in this area means anything other than fish and rice. A dozen of us share a thin chicken stew. I sit next to the captain, who jokes that our inexperience will do us in before the dacoits have a chance. I tell him that I’ve sailed alone across oceans, but he’s not impressed.
“The Brahmaputra is more than an ocean. It is a god you must fear. The river swallows boats.”
After dinner I walk with the captain back to his ferry. We stand in the moonlight on the aft deck, looking up at the stars. Saturn is about to set, and Jupiter dominates Andromeda; the Great Bear in Ursa Major crowds the northern edge of the heavens; Polaris hangs twenty-eight degrees above the horizon, marking our latitude.
“They say each star is a saint,” the captain muses. “Someday I hope to be a star… Why not come with us tomorrow? See the river from the other side.”
I accept the offer.
In the morning a heavy dew slicks every outdoor surface. Great veils of mist rise from the river. It’s absolutely clear a few feet inland, but visibility over the water is less than a boat’s length. Moti tells me that the river gods are hiding themselves while they bathe. In a stern voice he warns me never to paddle before the gods perform their morning ablutions.
“It is dangerous to see the gods naked,” he says, wagging a finger.
I’m one of the first people to queue up for the ferry and almost the only one not restraining an animal. When the loading ramp is in place, the civility of the line disappears. Passengers rush forward, pushing and shoving, dragging their livestock, trying to secure their favorite spots on deck. The whistle sounds, and the crewmen scurry to their stations. When the engine is turned on, it sends tremors through the decking. The rumbling brings smiles to the faces of the passengers and grunts of terror from the animals. The captain climbs down from the bridge and heads to the bow, stopping now and then when he recognizes a commuter. At the prow he stands to port, faces the mighty river, and whispers a prayer. He produces an orange from under his shawl and lobs it into the water. It’s important, he says later, to start each day with an offering to Brahma.
“What happens if you don’t?” I ask.
“You will never have to remember anything again… This is His river.”
Back in the wheelhouse the captain orders the mate to cast off. The mooring lines are released and the boarding plank shipped. The engine slips into gear and the ferry lurches forward. It’s a perfect day for a boat ride, with little wind and lots of blue sky. River terns circle us, diving for anything thrown over the side.
