Going to Extremes

by Nick Middleton

  Mr Luitel told me he had been at the regional meteorological centre in Guwahati, in neighbouring Assam, before being posted for a year to Cherrapunji. It was a job he had volunteered for. ‘This is because I am knowing that it is going to be a most interesting experience,’ he said, his eyes lighting up. ‘This place is most famous for its rainfall. People all over the world know of Cherrapunji. They may not know of Guwahati, or even Delhi, but Cherrapunji they know.’

  Unfortunately, after having been in Cherra for just three months, he already wanted to go home. The strain of living in a place with so much rain was getting to him. ‘These people here are accustomed to these conditions, you know. They just continue with their business when it rains. But for me I am simply stuck in this building. I cannot go out because of the rain.’ His eyes had now taken on a doleful appearance.

  Culturally, he also felt rather isolated, he said. The people weren’t unfriendly, just rather reserved, and besides, he couldn’t speak Khasi. He also missed his family who were still in Guwahati. He usually telephoned them every day, but all the phone lines out of town had been down for the last four days due to the torrential downpour. The other thing he mentioned that was getting him down made me smile in agreement. He said that the incessant rainfall made him continually think about going to the toilet.

  I felt for Mr Luitel, drawn to the Khasi Hills by the allure of a meteorological phenomenon that had turned out to be his nemesis. But at least there were only nine months to go before he could return home. His sorry tale reminded me of something I’d read about Cherrapunji during British times. When selected as a hill station sanatorium for European pensioners in the East India Company’s service, the town had been equally vindictive. The story went that many were driven insane by the unremitting rainfall.

  Mr Luitel’s experience echoed many of my own feelings about my time in the world’s wettest range of hills. I’d found the Khasis reserved at first, though very warm after a little perseverance. Their hilly abode was for me a curious combination of paddies and pine trees, knups and tartan shawls. In some ways it was the Scotland of the East all right, but it was a Scotland with leeches.

  Like Mr Luitel, I too had been attracted by an extreme that had to be seen to be believed, but my initial delight at the cataclysmic outpouring of water had soon waned. The ceaseless torrent had become a high-pressure version of the Chinese water torture. For the Khasis I met, life went on despite the weather, but more for some than for others. Roy just kept on selling his pork without so much as a word of protest. However, I couldn’t forget the intent look on the face of Mawsynram’s village headman as he gazed out at the rain and told me that the monsoon meant trouble, or the electrician who stood in the bus shelter watching the deluge when he should have been out repairing the power lines. For them, surviving the monsoon season appeared to rely on a sort of mental hibernation.

  But on my final afternoon in Cherra, I came across what could be described as an antidote to the seasonal lethargy. It was a game that is best described as a cross between archery and darts, known simply as ‘arrow’. In essence that’s all it was, just an interesting Khasi sport that involved opposing two-man teams throwing arrows like javelins at small bamboo targets. But there was also a whole lot more to the game than that.

  I learnt the basics of its other dimension from a young secondary school literature teacher named Ïasaid. He was a short man with a large vocabulary, picked up, he told me, from studying the Oxford English Dictionary. He was the sort of character who should have had a nervous tic, with an air about him of being permanently perplexed. It was as if he carried all the metaphysical problems of Meghalaya on his shoulders and he was worried that he might have to pick up some more before solving those he already had.

  Ïasaid told me that arrow was really about para-psychology. Certainly the game itself was just a game, but it was what came before that was really important. The players just threw the arrows, but they only did so after a thinker from either side had come to an agreement about how this particular game should be played.

  ‘First the two parties come to an agreement,’ he said. ‘A typical start to such an agreement is for the first thinker to provide his own arrows, and then the other thinker also.’ I nodded; I was following him so far.

  ‘The agreement may continue for as long as is necessary. Just like in a court of law, it is down to the verbal jousting that goes on between the two thinkers. In the agreement there must be no flaw at all. It must be perfect. If you lose in the agreement you will lose the game.’

  He was beginning to lose me. ‘If your thinker loses the argument in the agreement his team will lose the actual throwing of the arrows?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said definitively, ‘you will not win.’

  I paused. ‘Why is that?’ I asked. ‘Because the throwers get some sort of handicap written into the agreement?’

  ‘A handicap of sorts, but only of the mental kind.’

  ‘I see,’ I said, which I didn’t at all.

  ‘In the agreement you can do tongue fu,’ Ïasaid continued.

  ‘Tongue fu?’

  ‘Yes, a sort of verbal kung fu.’

  Now I was completely lost. ‘So how does tongue fu work exactly?’ I asked tentatively.

  ‘It is just logic, like a game of chess. You try to kill your opponent’s idea, to gain advantage in the agreement. It is crucial never to say “yes” while making the agreement. If you say “yes”, you will lose. You have to keep the agreement going.’

  It seemed like a Khasi variety of sports psychology, but this was a highly formalized pre-match verbal jousting that appeared to dictate the outcome of the match itself. I was familiar with football managers at home trying to out-psych opponents before a game, but what perplexed me was Ïasaid’s complete certainty that the outcome of the agreement would irrevocably dictate the outcome of the match itself. If that was the case, I wondered, then why bother throwing the arrows at all?

  ‘Because your team will still have a chance, resting on the terms of the agreement,’ Ïasaid told me.

  I was floundering. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand,’ I said.

  ‘Here is an example,’ Ïasaid replied, ‘Once in the competition, one of the men throwing the arrows, his dhoti, or loincloth, dropped off and everything shows. The thinker from the opposite side found fault with him by saying that this is outside the agreement. You see, no part of the agreement said that a thrower could remove his dhoti. So that man who lost his dhoti, he consistently lost.’

  At last, I thought I was getting it. ‘He was disqualified, you mean?’ I said.

  ‘No, not disqualified, he just consistently lost in the throwing of the arrows.’

  So it really was all in the mind. I reckoned I had just about grasped it, but I still didn’t understand how it could happen.

  I soon found out. Ïasaid took me to a foggy piece of ground on the edge of Cherrapunji where a match was scheduled. A small crowd had gathered, sheltering against the light drizzle beneath umbrellas and knups. He managed to get me on to one of the two-man teams, throwing the arrows for a small hamlet just outside Cherra against the home side. Two elderly men were introduced to me as the rival thinkers. The Cherrapunji thinker had a shock of white hair and carried a black umbrella. My team’s thinker, who held a red umbrella, had deep wrinkles in his face and looked more kindly. They set about making the agreement and after 20 minutes they broke off.

  ‘The agreement is set,’ Ïasaid told me, ‘you will throw the arrows with the red mark.’ He looked over towards the two thinkers, who were gathering up their arrows. ‘This man with the white hair is more cunning,’ Ïasaid added, referring to the opposition’s thinker, ‘because he makes your thinker obey.’ The negotiations for the agreement had been in Khasi, so I had no idea what they’d said. ‘You will lose,’ Ïasaid announced.

  The two teams gathered around to place their bets. The Khasis love gambling and everyone put in some money. I was becoming slightly irri
tated by Ïasaid’s conviction that my team would lose before we had even started, so I threw 20 rupees into the pot for my team to win.

  Each team provided their own target, a cylinder made of tightly packed grass wrapped in bamboo mounted on a stick, and a referee staked out the targets opposite each other, about 20 metres apart. The four throwers would all line up and dispatch their arrows towards one target and then move to the other end to throw at the second one.

  Each thrower was issued with ten arrows by his thinker. My team went down on our haunches into a huddle. My thinker handed me ten long wooden arrows, each with a piece of red tape round its shaft. With his hand still on the bunch of arrows he looked deep into my eyes. ‘Your job is to throw these arrows,’ he said gravely. ‘Clear your mind and concentrate. Think of nothing else but the arrows.’

  The four of us lined up and took aim. By this time, the fog was so thick I could scarcely see the tiny target at the other end of the range. It was more like throwing a javelin than a dart, but while the three Khasis were able to hurl their arrows in such a way that they flew straight through the air, mine wobbled all over the place. The first few fell far short of the target, but with an increase in effort I found my line. After ten arrows each, however, our opponents had hit the target twice. My team was two down.

  Having thrown all our arrows, we recovered them from the grass at the other end and turned to aim at the second target. The Cherrapunji team made two more direct hits in quick succession. I was trying to focus my mind on throwing, but the knowledge that we had already lost in the agreement kept nagging at the back of my mind. The only chance we had left, it seemed, was for one of the opposition to lose his dhoti. My teammate hit the target … 4–1. We each had four arrows left.

  One of the opposition’s arrows flew through the air, grazed the target, and fell away. There was a sharp intake of breath from the crowd. I threw mine and missed again. My teammate threw and struck the target a second time. The crowd clapped … 4–2. Three arrows left.

  We all missed. Since I had little chance of ever actually hitting the target, it was all down to my teammate scoring with his last two, and the opposition missing with theirs. We all missed again. With his final arrow, my teammate struck home, but we had lost 4–3. We all shook hands. Ïasaid had been right. It seemed that we’d been predestined to lose. He came over and congratulated me on my throwing, even though I had not hit the target once. He was holding some banknotes. Unbeknown to me, he had put ten rupees on the opposition to win.

  I still wasn’t sure I’d completely grasped the full intricacies of the thinkers’ mental gymnastics, but I was sure that the para-psychology of the arrows had been concocted, at least in part, to keep the Khasis sane during the monsoon.

  I left Meghalaya and drove further north, into the neighbouring state of Assam. I’d seen the rains, but there was still one aspect of the monsoon that I was keen to experience. Having missed any significant flooding in Bangladesh, I was heading for the Brahmaputra River, which spills out on to its floodplain at this time of year.

  Descending from the Khasi Hills felt like returning to India after my sojourn in the ‘Abode of the Clouds’. I was back in the land of rickshaws, notably absent from Mawsynram and Cherrapunji, and revisiting the muggy heat of the plains. I was aiming for Kaziranga, a national park set on the banks of the Brahmaputra, a land of alluvial swamps and elephant grass. It is also one of the last homes of the Indian one-horned rhinoceros, the species that Marco Polo thought was a unicorn.

  Like rhinos the world over, Kaziranga’s are on the endangered list, so the main task of the park’s rangers is to patrol the swamps on the lookout for poachers. I joined a group of three rangers for a week in their encampment deep inside the park. Their base had reed and clay walls, its wooden floor raised on brick pillars 2 metres above the ground against the floodwaters. In one direction was a swollen river, in the others swamp, dense woodland and elephant grass that towered 2 or 3 metres above the ground. Asian open billed storks roosted at the tops of the tallest trees.

  The rangers stayed out at the base for about a month at a time. When going out on duty, they took basic supplies of rice and oil with them but they largely led a self-sufficient life in the wilds. They kept a few chickens at the base and grew marrows on a bamboo frame. A lemon tree also grew nearby. Otherwise they foraged for the stalks of the rattan palm, which, when stripped of its thorns, could be eaten raw or made into a curry, and the tips of ferns, which they fried.

  Kaziranga is home to a large number of wild animals, including elephants, Indian bison, swamp deer, gibbons, buffaloes and tigers, but it is the one-horned rhinoceros that attracts the poachers. Its single black horn can be sold illegally for unimaginable wealth for use in traditional Chinese medicine. Poachers often worked at night, I was told, digging pits for a rhino to fall into and returning later to hack off its horn with an axe. The poachers preferred this method to using their guns because a rifle shot was likely to bring unwelcome attention from the park rangers. The rangers themselves carried their rifles wherever they went. When I asked one of them what the procedure was should he come across a poacher, he answered, ‘If we can arrest them, we do. If not, we shoot them.’ Two of my three companions had been involved in shoot-outs with poachers in the previous 12 months. Both complained that the poachers usually had better guns than theirs.

  Patrols took place mainly on foot. There was something primeval about the landscape we walked and waded through. I got the feeling that this was no place for men, an alien environment, more waist-deep swamp than solid ground, where the grass outgrew the people. Marching through the grass felt incredibly claustrophobic. We could only walk on narrow paths walled with swards that loomed up all around, leaving nothing else to see but the trail in front of us and a ribbon of blue sky above. It was almost as bad as the fog in Meghalaya. I was back in a one-dimensional world again.

  I assumed these paths had been trampled by previous patrols. A few had, one of the rangers told me, but most had been created either by a rhino, an elephant or a buffalo.

  ‘Aren’t they rather dangerous then?’ I asked Jagannath, a good-natured man with a wide moustache and a ready smile.

  ‘Yes,’ Jagannath replied simply.

  I asked him what I should do if we encountered a rhino, and Jagannath said that usually it was easy to scare them away. ‘But if rhino charges, the best thing to do is to run.’

  I thought he was having me on until later when we came to a stretch of deep chocolate-brown water and, before plunging in, Jagannath and his colleague, Borah, both removed their canvas boots. I asked them why, and Borah said it was easier to run and climb a tree in bare feet should a rhino charge.

  We encountered no fewer than four of the beasts on my first afternoon out. Three we spied from a distance standing waist deep in the water at the other side of a wide river. They looked like prehistoric tanks having a bath. The fourth was rather closer. It appeared before us as we rounded an almost imperceptible bend in the run through the grass we were following, standing with its back to us about 30 metres away. It just looked very solid and immovable and I could clearly see the thick armour-plating on its hind legs. But Jagannath and Borah unshouldered their rifles and advanced slowly shouting ‘Ha!’ as if they were laughing at it, and the rhino slowly turned and pushed its way through the grass.

  I’d read that rhinos can’t actually see very well, and have been known to charge at trees, which viewed in one way is risible. But in another, it provides little solace because a person might well look very similar to a tree to a partially sighted giant mammal. However, the apparent ease with which the rangers dispatched the specimen in the grass, just by laughing at it, eased my mind somewhat. Until, that is, I discovered that they bite.

  That evening the rangers showed me the scars they had picked up from close encounters with these antediluvian creatures. Negou had been bitten on the upper arm. Still missing one bone, which had been crushed beyond salvation, he had spent no less than
three years in hospital after the attack. Borah turned his head to show me where he had been bitten above his right ear.

  The rangers were risking their lives to save a species that was actually more of a danger to them than the poachers they were protecting it from.

  The thought of being charged and then bitten by two tonnes of angry leviathan was bad enough, but a greater everyday menace to me were the leeches. Like the grass and the rhinos, the leeches in Kaziranga were gigantic. In fact, Jagannath called them elephant leeches and funnily enough, the first one I saw was stuck fast to the leg of an elephant that I was about to board to go out on a sit-down patrol. The leech just hung there sucking blood, looking slimy and repulsive. Thicker than my thumb and nearly twice as long, it looked like a giant vampire slug.

  ‘They also go on water buffalo,’ Jagannath said as the elephant’s minder, or mahout, swept the leech away into the grass with his stick.

  ‘Do they ever attack people?’ I asked cautiously.

  ‘Very rarely,’ said Jagannath.

  ‘So it does happen?’ I wanted to get the facts straight.

  ‘Yes, but very rarely,’ came the reply.

  That afternoon, the first time I set foot in some water, which didn’t even come up to my knees, I got three of the big fat bastards on my right leg. They made the stringy leeches in Meghalaya look positively friendly.

  But despite the leeches and rhinos and the claustrophobic grasses, Kaziranga was also a magical wilderness. The stretches of muddy water were alive with jumping fish and a thousand dragonflies that darted hither and thither in a glitter of luminous orange and electric blue. The skies provided daily exhibitions of towering cumulonimbus clouds etched against a hazy background of Himalayan foothills, and when dusk fell I lay beneath my mosquito net marvelling at the fireflies dancing to the night music of the jungle.

  One day we were called to assist in policing the migration of a family of wild elephants who were moving from the floodplains as the waters rose, crossing a road and passing some villages on their seasonal passage to the Mikir Hills. I had glimpsed the life of the rangers in their waterlogged park and admired them for a bravery that they were too modest to acknowledge.