We move out of Tinsoukia at a pace that would make a snail seem nippy. Seeing our impatience, a jolly, bespectacled lady in a gold-trimmed sari smiles broadly across at us.
‘This is a train for people who have no work.’
We talk about local things. She’s a professor at Dibrugah University and has strong views on the need for India to look east. She is a firm believer in an economic development initiative, ungracefully mnemonicized as BIMSTEC, to encourage co-operation between Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand and China. A recent meeting, however, was hobbled by the Indian government refusing visas to the Chinese delegation until the night before the conference. Understandably, they cancelled.
‘The Indians don’t really empathize with the Chinese then?’ I ask.
‘I don’t think our mind-set is still yet fully open to Chinese cooperation,’ she replies.
I take that as a no.
She agrees with Mr Das the coal-mine manager’s point about the cosmopolitan make-up of Assam, but has a different explanation for it. In 1823 a Scotsman called Robert Bruce first noted the commercial potential of the wild tea plant and within 20 years it had become a major and highly labour-intensive crop. The Assamese, being partial to opium at the time, were not good at hard labour, so it became necessary to look further afield for the work force, hence the widening of the gene pool in Northeast India.
We stay tonight at a tea plantation house called a changa, which is in effect a bungalow on stilts. Beneath the extensive boughs and trailing tentacles of an old rain tree, we sit round a fire and watch a delicately energetic dance performed by girls who look more Thai or Burmese than Indian. Assamese specialities are brought round. Long, rolled rice-cakes called bithas, made with molasses and sesame seeds, a grilled root with tomato and aubergine dip, feather-light pooris, chicken and fish from the Brahmaputra.
As night falls the handsome house behind us looks like an ocean liner, with its deep well-polished decks and white balustrade. It belongs to a local tea-planter called Manoj Jalan and his wife Vinita. His plantations employ 8000 people, and tomorrow he’s going to show me round. On an elephant.
Day Ninety Five : Dibrugah
The first thing I notice about my elephant is that it has no howdah. A howdah is a seat to make riding more comfortable, and I don’t have one. So I find myself being unceremoniously thrust up onto the elephant’s back and ordered to move forward until I’m tight up behind the mahout, the elephant driver. The elephant’s back is narrower here and there’s less chance of my doing the splits. Once I’m in position, the elephant is given an order and I feel myself rearing skywards as it straightens first the front and then the back legs. I’m now some ten feet off the ground and hanging on for dear life to a thin piece of rope that runs across its shoulder.
Manoj, a carefully turned-out, trim figure with boyish features, is next to me. He’s riding his own elephant and doesn’t look altogether happy.
My mahout shouts the order ‘Agit!‘ (‘Forward!’), one of 20 words of command the elephant has to learn, and this, accompanied, I notice, by a sharp blow to the back of the ear, sets the animal moving slowly ahead. There are three females and three young in our procession. The young elephants are not particularly interested in anything other than getting in the way and practising their trumpeting.
Feeling more secure, I look around. The mahout uses his feet tight up behind the elephant’s ear to control direction and, far too often it seems to me, strikes the animal with the blunt end of a machete. Elephants’ ears, seen from behind, look surprisingly delicate and vulnerable. Pale, curled at the edges and marked with long purple veins, they’re like giant leaves in autumn. I’m surprised, too, how much hair there is on an elephant’s hide, short little shoots on the full-grown females, much longer and thicker on the young. The prehensile trunk is always working away; on the lookout for a quick snack, a leaf or two, some shoots to strip and, if possible, an entire bush to uproot.
According to Manoj, the Assamese were the first to harness the natural skills of elephants to help with human activities, and their use became widespread in the logging industry when the railways were being pushed up into the plantations and oilfields. They showed the rest of India how to control and domesticate wild elephants but now, with logging drastically cut for environmental reasons, many of the mahouts and their elephants can no longer find work. A few, like these, are retained to clear bamboo cane or tidy up the tea plantations, but it’s a dying art.
Having overcome my fear of falling, I’m enjoying this slow, powerful progress through the undergrowth. I’m hardly aware I’m on a living creature. It’s more like being on board ship on a gentle swell.
All of a sudden there is the most enormous blast of sound, not unlike a foghorn at full volume. We’ve emerged onto a metalled road into the path of a group of men on bicycles. The cyclists are laughing and ringing their bells, the elephants are frightened and the mahouts and Manoj are shouting frantically.
‘Ghat! Pich-oo!‘ (‘Stop! Go Back!’) My driver rains blows down on the back of his animal. It seems only to get her more distressed and she bellows again and starts off up the track at a canter, which for one stomach-tightening moment I think might turn into a full-blooded charge.
The mahout brings her under control, but I’ve had a glimpse of the power of the beast and I’m not unhappy when, after two hours straddling her back, my elephant kneels once more and I can clamber off.
For a while I think I might never be able to close my legs again.
Among the many pleasures of Mancotta Bungalow is its collection of old books. I pick up a copy of The Survey of Assam 1825-1828. This was the first time this part of the world had been mapped and the provenance of the areas covered has a nice personal touch to it. We learn that the details of one large area of Himalayan foothill is ‘based on information of a Persian sent by Mr Scott into Bhotan (sic)’, and the entire map between Assam and China is ‘from information collected by Lieutenant Wilcox’.
A survey of Bengali exploration published in Calcutta in 1998 intrigues me in a different way. The index at the back of this book appears to record every word mentioned. A random glance at the ‘R’ column lists not only ‘Ranpur’ but ‘reached’, ‘reasonable’, ‘rather’, and indeed ‘random’, as well.
Day Ninety Seven : Dibrugah to Majuli Island
After a restorative break, it’s time to move on from the world of fresh bed linen every night, a whisky every evening and a copy of the Assam Tribune every afternoon. I think they used to call it the colonial life and I can feel myself slipping into it.
The danger is that in faithfully and tastefully recreating the colonial lifestyle you recreate colonial attitudes as well. There is no shortage of labour in India, and this, along with residual effects of the caste system and poor education, results in there being a lot of people happy to wait around and be told what to do. I look forward to my Scotch at sunset but I know that if I pour it myself, jobs might be at stake.
So servility is perpetuated.
The gates are unlocked for us and we leave Mancotta’s past behind and drive west. For several miles a vast plain of small, trim bushes, all neatly clipped and standing at a uniform height of about 36 inches stretches away on either side. Tall trees rise from among the bushes to shield them from the full glare of the sun. In this quiet period before the new shoots start to appear women in brightly coloured shawls and scarves move through the glades, grooming and trimming. It must have been a listless time for plantation managers. A time for chota pegs and perhaps a visit to the lines.