Back of Beyond

by David Yeadon

  Now, he said, since the division of the Turkoman area, most of the tribesmen on the Iranian side had settled down in permanent villages scattered throughout the plain—Gomishan, Crupan, Fenderisk, and many others. Their nomadic yurt tents were now used to protect the harvested wheat from storms. Cooperatives were being established. Many of the young men were moving to the cities along the Caspian coastline and to Tehran. He was watching a way of life disappear. And he was sad.

  I left Pahlavidej in the evening. The sun was a great red ball slowly dissolving into the wheat fields. I passed a few Turkoman riders sitting proudly on their young stallions and saw women gathering water from a well, their red-and-gold shawls softly gleaming in the dusk light. I waved at some of the children as they gazed at the car. When they grow up, will they be riding the same stallions and wearing the same hats and looking every evening across those vast green-and-gold plains?

  Like the old man, I too was a little sad, and also curious about the future of this isolated corner of Iran, recently involved in border disputes with the USSR. “My life was like the air,” he had told me. But now there were new storms brewing in the north….

  I headed west, along the coast of the Caspian Sea toward Rasht. The Elburz Mountains rose to snowy fourteen-thousand-foot peaks. Their southern slopes facing out over Tehran and the great Salt Desert, Desht-e Kavir, were dry and cracked, but on this side they received abundant rain and were covered in dense subtropical jungle.

  I finally found my village again, at the marshy edges of the Caspian, beyond Rasht. The headman M’mad recognized me in spite of a new beard, expanded midriffs, and all the signs of an overindulgent Western life.

  Nothing much had changed. Their homes were still simple affairs of wood plank walls and reed-thatch roofs, and I went fishing again in the early mornings in a wooden canoe, catching catfish with an ease that almost made me feel guilty. They just seemed to lie there in the shallows waiting for me to toss in the bait, almost as if they wanted to be caught. Oh, and did we eat! Fat catfish steaks sprinkled with ground sumak, cauldrons of lobster-red crayfish, cracked open and dipped in melted butter, fresh salty slabs of goat cheese, thick dollops of mast and honey on hot flat bread and—God how I’d missed it—pungent, gray caviar (the villagers made their own caviar illegally, from sturgeon caught a few miles away in the Caspian Sea shallows). We spread it thickly on small rice flour pancakes cooked by the women on a griddle over a log fire.

  And then someone suggested a boar hunt.

  Well, I’m not much of a huntsman type, but the idea of photographing wild boar out in the marshes was too tempting a prospect to reject.

  “Fine,” I said, having no idea what I’d let myself in for.

  “Good,” he said. “We leave after breakfast tomorrow.”

  It was a warm clear morning, hardly a cloud anywhere. We left the village in three quayk canoes. The first carried four beaters, young men who had volunteered to arc through the northern edge of the outer marsh and drive the boar toward us in a shallow lagoon. They knew the place well. It was a favorite village hunting locale, the scene of regular forays for meat. The other two boats carried five older men, experienced hunters, and me. Their guns seemed old and rusty, but they’d obviously performed well on previous trips if their tales were anything to go by.

  We paddled slowly through fields of water hyacinth, waves lapping placidly under a rapidly warming sun. Unfortunately the mosquitoes were up as early as we were, waiting for us in biting clouds as we entered the lagoon. They were impervious to repellent and seemed much more attracted to my fleshy torso than the lean, muscular bodies of my companions. I lit a cigar. That didn’t seem to make much difference so I lit a second. Then everyone in the boat wanted one and in the other boat too. Pretty soon we were all paddling across the lagoon under a cloud of Jamaican cigar smoke, and the mosquitoes went off in search of other less aggressive antagonists.

  We beached the boats on the far side of the lagoon at the edge of a forest of reeds, well over head height. M’mad imperiously handed out rubber boots and gloves to ward off the razor-edged reeds, and then issued instructions. The hunters were to move north toward the beaters; I was to remain near the boat in a narrow stretch of lagoon to photograph any boar that made it through the gauntlet.

  The voices of the hunters faded away into the reeds. Soon I had the place to myself. There was no breeze. The sky was cloudless and the sun oppressively hot. And it was so quiet. I have rarely known such a stillness. The only sound was my heartbeat and the murmur of blood in my ears, rather like the kiss of a soft shower at dusk. There were no mosquitoes either. I felt an enormous surge of peace.

  I seemed to be there for hours. Occasionally, far, far away I’d hear the noise of the beaters, and then nothing more for long periods.

  Sometime around midday my troupe of frustrated hunters returned for lunch, complaining about the lack of boar.

  And it was then I noticed the leeches.

  In spite of my thigh-high rubber boots those cunning little black threads had switchbacked through every available gap in my loose clothes. I could see them in the green water, like discolored spermatazoa, but I missed them on the lily leaves and the overhanging fronds of marsh palm. The hunters’ legs were dripping in them. I thought I was safe until I pulled off my boots during lunch and found a dozen or so happily sucking away on my shins. They’d somehow slipped over the tops and down through two pairs of socks to find flesh.

  The local custom is to leave them alone until their sticky bloated bodies, ballooned to full finger-sized capacity, sealed up the wound and dropped off involuntarily. But some customs are hard to honor. I couldn’t bear to see them slowly increasing in girth with my blood. So I tried the other remedy of burning their tails with a lit cigar until they wriggled and fell. The only problem then was that in their haste to evacuate, they forgot to coagulate their incisions and I was left with oozing wounds. Khusrow, M’mad’s son, shook his head at my stupidity, scooped up a palm full of soft marsh mud, and placed little piles of the stuff on each sucker hole.

  “Five minutes, then wash,” he said.

  He was right. In five minutes I washed off the mud to find the holes sealed and only a few purple bruises left as souvenirs.

  After lunch I was alone again.

  The beaters had moved to another section of marsh further to the west and I had been placed in a shallow pool about fifty yards wide, away from the main lagoon and surrounded by reeds.

  “If we miss,” M’mad had told me, “boar come this way. Be careful. Very mad sometime.”

  He had presented me, proudly, with a double-barrel shotgun of indeterminate age and held together with twine.

  “If he comes at you—shoot!”

  Shoot! I hadn’t come to shoot. I’d come to take world-class photographs. I accepted the gun rather disdainfully.

  It seemed as if our hunt would be a flop. But it was pleasant in my pond anyway scribbling notes to myself and thinking how little had changed in this remote part of a restless nation.

  The beaters seemed to be getting closer. Maybe they were packing up, and we’d be home for more caviar and catfish steaks sooner than I thought.

  But there was another noise too. Someone was running through the reeds. I tried to peer in but they were too dense. Then I saw the tops of the reeds shaking a few yards beyond the edge of the pool. Maybe it wasn’t one of the hunters.

  It wasn’t.

  It was a boar. I could hear grunting—a very irritated type of grunting. And then it came. The biggest piglike creature I’d ever seen, but much more muscular and alert than any farmhouse porker. Its tusks projected a good four inches out of its mouth and hairs bristled along its thick neck and back. I stood very still and quiet and focused my camera. The boar, way out at the far side of the pool, paused and seemed disoriented. I extended my zoom as far as it would go. What a ferocious thing! I could see its eyes clearly. Angry, cruel eyes. One hell of a fine photograph!

  And then I dropped
my lens cap.

  I don’t know how it happened, and it didn’t make much noise. Just a little splash in the water. But it was enough. The boar turned. I must have moved. He saw me and gave a furious grunt. Oh God! He was coming at me.

  I’d heard all the tales of these creatures. They can do terrible damage to a body when angered, particularly in the area of the crotch, which seems to be inconveniently placed at their jaw height.

  He was coming fast. I could hear the hunters too, splashing back in the reeds and shouting. The boar was mad and scared. I dropped the camera and tore the gun off my shoulder. The sights seemed all buckled. I didn’t know how to use one of these damned things, and the boar kept coming, roaring across the shallow pool, white spittle blowing out the side of its mouth. I pulled one of the two triggers. Wham! An explosion of water erupted way off to the boar’s left side. The noise was deafening and the jolt almost knocked me backward into the water. And still it was coming, faster now…

  One last chance. I lined up the battered sights on its forehead. Wham! This time the recoil sent me sprawling into the pool. My ears were ringing with the sound of the blast. I’d had it. I should never have come on this dumb hunt. All I wanted were a few photographs. I closed my eyes…

  But nothing happened. I’d expected to feel…God knows what I’d expected to feel, but it wasn’t going to be pleasant.

  But nothing happened.

  I opened my eyes and the pool was empty. The reeds were shaking again all across the far side. Lots of shouts. I stood up very shakily. My legs were wobbling, like wonky pistons. My camera lay in the water. The gun was still smoking in my hand.

  M’mad was the first to break through the reeds.

  He stopped, but he wasn’t looking at me. The others burst through and he pointed. They cheered and leaped around in the water. Then M’mad called to me: “Davi, Davi. You got him! You got him!”

  He pointed again to a spot in the pool about ten yards from where I was standing. “You got him!”

  Something very black was floating just below the surface. Something with bristly hair.

  “You—big shot,” Khusrow called out.

  They approached cautiously. A wounded boar is notoriously dangerous. One of them jabbed the animal with the barrel of his gun, and rolled it over on its back, its legs sticking in the air. It was definitely dead.

  “Two shot—dead!” M’mad said.

  Blood was slowly returning to my head. I felt dizzy.

  “One shot,” I said. “The first one missed by a mile.”

  “One shot! Ah—you big, big hunter.” M’mad slapped my shoulder hard and I almost fell back into the water again. The others were admiring the wound on the side of the boar’s head. He looked harmless now—and smaller. Even the tusks in his open jaws seemed harmless. I felt sorry for him. He was just a rather large pig. I didn’t feel like celebrating at all.

  But they obviously did. Three of them were still shouting and dragging the boar by its legs out of the pool and back to the lagoon. The meat would last them for a week or more.

  M’mad and Khusrow insisted on lifting me onto their shoulders but hadn’t allowed for a combination of my weight and my waterlogged thigh boots with the result that we all came crashing down into the pool, laughing and spitting water like a bunch of drunks on a Friday night blowout. Then M’mad stood up looking very serious and pulled out his belt knife and said, “Wait.” He marched across to the poor dead boar and then marched back again. “The tail. Is yours now.”

  It was a rather pathetic little thing, about six inches long with a brush of brittle hairs at the end. I felt a bit silly accepting it but he looked so formal about the whole affair that I smiled, said thank-you, and vowed to dispose of it later.

  It’s still around the house somewhere in a box of travel trinkets. Not much of a souvenir really, but I never seem to get around to throwing it out.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I have not been able to return to Iran since the terrible earthquake of June 1990. Rasht was one of the hardest hit cities and my friends’ village also suffered severe damage. I have written to them but—not surprisingly—have received no replies to date. I send them all my sympathy—and my love. Along with a promise to go back again as soon as I can.

  11. TRAVELS IN INDIA

  The Travails of a TET

  I’m usually a mellow fellow, a tolerant world traveler, familiar with all the wackiness of errant schedules and the permanent out-to-lunchness of petty officials. But in the heat and hectic pace of India, agitation and aggravation sometimes smothered my benevolent nature, and I occasionally became your typical Western TET—Totally Exasperated Traveler. And what was even worse—I discovered fragments of a true colonial Englishman lurking in my subliminal regions and didn’t like him at all….

  Hot! It’s unbelievably hot in Allahabad, as only India can be, leaving you drenched, drained, and wandering in a druglike trance between infrequent patches of shade. I was so glad to be leaving. Just a couple of things to do—make an important phone call to the United States and catch the 7:30 P.M. train to Delhi. I had two hours, more than two hours. Plenty of time. No need to rush in this interminable heat.

  The manager of Allahabad’s best hotel was a skinny little weasly faced man with a penchant for pomposity that exceeded the absurd. He was obviously fully aware of the power of his position and loved every disdainful moment of his dealings with guests. A true Indian Basil Fawlty in miniature.

  “I’d like to call New York, please,” I said with a bright smile.

  “Ah.” (His eyes closed to slits and his thin lips curled under a full black mustache into a sneer.) “To America?”

  “Yes—New York, U.S.A.”

  “Ah.” His sneer became a wide smirk and he seemed to be preparing himself for a most enjoyable interlude.

  Now this was a hotel recommended in all the reliable guidebooks and it didn’t seem a lot to ask.

  “I can wait,” I said pleasantly. “I have plenty of time.”

  He smiled patronizingly. “Is not possible…sir.”

  “What’s the problem?” I asked gently, entering his snare.

  “The problem, sir, is Calcutta.”

  “Calcutta?”

  “We must go through Calcutta, sir, and they will not take our calls.”

  “Well—shall we just give it a try and see what happens?”

  His sigh and uplifted eyes were truly Shakespearian in gesture.

  “Sir, Calcutta does not answer us. Calcutta is so very badly lazy. Much, much time.”

  “I’m quite happy to wait in the dining room until you get through.”

  “Is not possible, sir. Please go to Central Telephone and Telegraph. Very quick there.”

  “But listen…”

  “Sir, I must attend now to other businesses, please.”

  He swept into his tiny cubicle of an office, delighted with his performance. Another anticolonialist victory.

  The taxi driver outside the hotel had apparently never heard of Central Telephone and Telegraph. The doorman instructed the driver, who stared blankly until the correct dialect was discovered for the conversation. Then he nodded, opened the door for me, and roared off (literally), using his one working gear.

  We drove for mile after mile with the taxi engine squealing in protest. My driver pointed out the key city sights with incomprehensible exuberance. My impatience increased. Time was getting short.

  Finally, after stopping three times to ask directions, we pulled into the forecourt of a large, distinctly unimposing concrete building at the far side of a stagnant and stinking drainage channel. On the roof was an appropriate array of telegraphic equipment, which gave me confidence that our mission might be accomplished. However, we had problems from the start. The large gates were closed and there was no sentry in the box at the left side. On the opposite side a watchman lay asleep on a low trestle bed. My driver called out to attract his attention, but he was dead to the world.

  Five long m
inutes later a man dressed in military guard’s uniform sauntered down the steps and into the sentry box. He paused, ignored our presence, and then returned to the building. My driver, whose power of patience seemed endless, just waited. Another five minutes later the man returned to the box, shuffled some papers on his desk, finally opened the gate for the taxi driver to walk through, and closed it abruptly in my face.

  My driver explained our need at great length. The guard seemed disinterested but eventually picked up a phone to call someone. Having received no reply, he strolled nonchalantly back into the building. Ten minutes later he reappeared, sauntering down the steps, and said it might be possible to place a call, although they were very short of staff. He asked me, through the driver, the location of the call. I offered to write down the number, but he said that was not necessary, he just needed the country and city. I told him, he nodded and disappeared again up the steps of the building. Eight minutes later he reappeared with a little torn piece of paper and asked the driver to tell me to write down the telephone number.

  “How long do you think this will take?” I asked the driver.

  He asked the guard. The guard had no idea and said he would find out. Before we could stop him he vanished into the building again. Four more minutes passed. He returned slowly.

  “Is not possible to call quickly. Calcutta is always difficult.”

  I asked if I could accompany him inside.

  “That is not possible.”

  “So you mean I have to wait outside here until you get New York and then you come all the way back to fetch me? That could take a lot of time. It will be very expensive for me.”

  The complexity of this logic eluded him.

  “Okay. Please tell me how long they think the call will take to place.” I tried hard to hide my impatience but didn’t succeed. The guard noticed my rising belligerence, turned, marched back to his box, and slammed the door shut behind him.