Slowly Down the Ganges. Eric Newby
‘Mauli hai?’
‘Nahin!’
‘Kotha hai?’
‘Nahin!’
‘Rahu hai? Tengena hai? Lachi hai? Saunl hai? Gaunch hai?’
‘Nahin! Nahin! Nahin! Nahin! Nahin!’
‘Blast! Bam hai?’
‘Hai!’
‘Elephants come here in the rains,’ Karam Chand said helpfully, sensing my exasperation.
Sometime in the dark watches after midnight he woke me. He was in a state of alarm.
‘SAHIB! Tarch hai?’
After some fumbling I found it in the bottom of my bedding roll.
‘Ek nilgai bahut nazdik hai,’ he said. In the beam of the torch two brilliant eyes regarded us unwinkingly.
Three parts asleep, unwilling to do so, but because Karam Chand wanted it we blundered about in the sand looking for the nilgai, the blue cow, a most inoffensive but destructive animal held sacred by the Hindus for its imagined relationship with the domestic cow – which, not unnaturally, had vanished. As a result I could not sleep any more.
At four it was fearfully cold. In spite of wearing skiing under-wear, a woollen shirt made from a piece of sixty-year-old Welsh flannel that had been one of my father’s bequests to me, a fisherman’s jersey, thick whipcord trousers, and being rolled in two thick blankets inside a bedding roll, I was frozen. I had read somewhere that the more clothes one wears the colder one feels, but this was no time to start stripping. Karam Chand, Bhosla and Jagannath had the felt blankets we had given them at Hardwar, the two extra blankets we had issued to them before we went to bed, a thin piece of carpet and a miserable quilt – and they wore cotton clothes; nevertheless they all three slept soundly.
At five the fruit bats began to go over. The men continued to sleep like logs.
‘They must be used to cold,’ I said to Wanda, who lay in bed with her teeth chattering.
‘They must be,’ she said picturesquely, ‘otherwise they’d bloody well be dead.’
It seemed as if the dawn would never come. The moon, a pale hemisphere, was churning its way through a sea of cirrus that was moving away, high over Garhwal. There was no wind and the river between the shoals was like sheets of black glass. At about six the sky to the east became faintly red; then it began to flame and the moon was extinguished; clouds of unidentifiable birds flew high overhead; a jackal skulked along the far shore and, knowing itself watched, went up the bank and into the trees; mist rose from the wet grass on the islands on which the shisham trees stood, wrapped like precious objects in their bandages of dead grass. Frozen stiff and full of sand we waited for the kettle to boil. It was only the second day of our voyage but the stubble on G.’s chin was beginning to sprout prodigiously.
The old man appeared, picking his way towards us through the sand on his painfully thin legs like a ragged heron. On one of his shins there was a deep, festering sore which Wanda had insisted needed attention. He had filled it with sump oil from a motor bus and underneath it was all rotten. ‘The nearest village is Bhagmalpur,’ he said as she probed about in the huge cavity, watched enviously by the boatmen who wished that they, too, could attract some sympathy and be the centre of attention. ‘It is a place of little consequence, but it is my village,’ he added, deprecatingly. The only place on the map of the area in which we found ourselves that had a name at all was Bhogpur.
‘Bhogpur is two kos from Bhagmalpur,’ he said.
If Bhogpur was two kos from Bhagmalpur then it might be possible to make a reasonable guess at our position. It depended on what he meant by a kos.
‘There are seventy rassis in one kos,’ Karam Chand said.
‘There are twelve hundred laggis in one kos,’ said Bhosla in a sudden garrulous outburst.
‘There are three thousand six hundred gaj in one kos,’ said Jagannath, the youngest boatman.
‘Now I am telling you,’ said G. ‘If one kos is three thousand six hundred gaj, there are two miles and eighty yards in one kos.’ If this was so, then we had not travelled more than five miles since the previous morning.12
We left the old man standing on the bank with a parting gift of boracic lint, penicillin powder and biscuits, and carried the gear two hundred yards downstream to a place where the shoal ended; here we loaded the boat. It was now a quarter to eight. What the boatmen called Zirrea, small ringed plovers, compact little birds with neat scarves of black feathers round their necks and yellow legs, rose from the shingle in which they had been pecking, almost invisible, and wheeled over us, uttering despairing cries while a pair of orange-coloured Brahminy duck watched us warily from the shallows on the far side of the river.
In slow succession we dug our way through the sixteenth shoal and descended the sixteenth rapid and so on through the eighteenth and nineteenth, up to twenty-one. It would be tedious to enumerate them all but as we proceeded downstream, literally step by step, I made a note of them. It seemed unlikely that I would pass this way again and I knew that if I kept no record, for the rest of my life I would suspect that my memories of the Ganges below Hardwar were the figments of a disordered imagination.
Even when we had completed our excavations there were only nine inches of water over the twenty-first shoal, but by rare good fortune, four men appeared and without being asked helped us to work the boat through to the accompaniment of a lot of ‘challo’ing and ‘shabash’ing while all the time covertly regarding Wanda who was a remarkable figure in red woollen skiing under-wear rolled up to the knees: for the sun had temporarily vanished behind some clouds and it was unusually cool.
‘You are by Bhogpur,’ they said; but it was little comfort to us. We had thought ourselves by Bhogpur two and a half hours ago, and it was now a quarter past ten.
As we came to the head of the rapid a line of bullock-carts came out of the jungle on the left bank and began to rumble down over the foreshore towards the very place through which we had just hauled the boat. There were so many of them and we were so unused to traffic of any kind, that we decided to watch them cross. There was no need to anchor, we simply stopped pushing.
As the leading bullocks entered the water, possibly because it was cold or because the stones with the water running over had a different feeling, they halted. The driver did not lash them. He simply waited perched high in the bows of his cart until they had become accustomed to the new element. The carts were piled high with grass. They were of the kind called chhakra, the heavier sort of bullock-cart, but not the heaviest. They were as simple as a jeep and yet, in their own way, as complicated; machines that could go anywhere; the despair of western economists because of their maddening slowness, the destruction which they wreak on unmetalled roads, and their great weight, grossly disproportionate both to their capacity and to the pulling power of the undernourished beasts which draw them.
Nose to tail with squeaking wheels and the groaning of stressed timbers, the carts lumbered across the river and, as they went, the drivers exhorted their beasts: ‘Mera achcha beta!’ (My good son!) ‘Aur thora!’ (A little more!) ‘Jor se cballo!’ (Get on with it!) Soon they disappeared behind one of the islands on the other bank and once more we were alone. For the first time we noticed that the Siwalik Hills to the east of the Hardwar gap were invisible. The river was running to the south and parting company with the whole range.
Now we entered a reach that was perhaps a mile long and a hundred yards wide down which we paddled until we came to an open expanse of shingle on the left bank which extended inland towards the forest. ‘This is our village,’ said the leader of the four men who had been helping us. ‘It is by the Rawasan Nala,’ and when he invited us to visit it, although Karam Chand and the boatmen were reluctant to stop, the