On the Ganges

by George Black

  The following year, Wilson’s youngest son, Henry, fell off his horse and was swept away and drowned. His middle son, Charlie, went off into the mountains above Gangotri and disappeared. His eldest, Nathanial, was an alcoholic, a drug addict, a rapist, and perhaps a murderer. He was thrown in jail by the British and was never heard of again.

  NOMADS

  We stopped at a chai stall by a roadside shrine, where a red-headed, large-breasted, heavily tattooed young Western tourist, wearing a green halter top that left nothing to the imagination, was being ogled by a semicircle of Indian men with cell phone cameras. A sadhu was soaping his hands at a water pump, and some women were snapping and folding freshly washed saris. A little farther along the road, a large group of men, women, and children were trudging uphill with heavily laden packhorses. They were Van Gujjars, on their spring migration from the lowlands and the Shivalik Hills to the bugyals, the high Alpine meadows just below the snow line.

  I’d first heard about the Van Gujjars, a seminomadic and mainly Muslim tribe, on an earlier trip to Devprayag. The man who told me about them was named Praveen, but his friends called him Manto. He was a beefy man with a dense mass of black curls, a Tom Selleck mustache, and a surfeit of nervous energy. His leg jiggled constantly, and he never stopped talking. He would fall silent for ten seconds and then he’d say, “Also…,” and off we’d go again. He had an active Facebook page where he liked to post photographs of shop signs that said, “FRESH VISITABLE JUICE,” and, “SANTOSH TAILOR—SPECIALIST IN ALTERATION OF LADIES AND GENTS”; a notice on a hospital wall that said, “MEDICAL RAPES ARE NOT ALLOWED BEFORE 01:30 P.M.”; radical Islamist protesters in Pakistan holding up misspelled posters that said things like “WE MUST BUM INFIDELS.”

  When someone took him to task for being politically incorrect, he had posted a reply:

  I am Agnostic Atheist (Religeo-Philosophical position) Individualist (Social Outlook) Anarchist (Political Ideology) Un-Repentantly Right Libertarian (Political Philosophy) on Polity and Economics AND Extremely Conservative (Social Philosophy) Leftist on Social and Cultural Issues (Social Justice).

  “I’m a very restless person,” he said to me. “Maybe this is why I like to travel around with nomads.”

  The lives of the Van Gujjars revolved around their water buffalo. What they lived on was the milk, selling and bartering it to chai stalls and small restaurants along the mountain roads. Because of the large number of pilgrims, milk was always in demand.

  “You can tell where the Van Gujjars are at any given time by asking at the tea stalls,” Manto said. “When they leave for the plains in winter, all you can find is black tea or tea with powdered milk.”

  India is not a country of skim or 1 percent, or soy or almond milk. The price of milk is determined by fat content, and the milk that the Van Gujjars sell is rich and creamy from grazing their buffalo for months in the high pastures.

  “Sometimes they’ll walk for a month to reach the snow line,” he said. “I’ve walked with them from Simla to Dehradun, three hundred kilometers. I’ve stayed with them up at the snow line, up to forty-five days at a time, completely cut off from modern civilization. When they’re down on the plains, they have to work hard, lopping the leaves for feed for their animals. In the hills, they just leave the animals to graze. It’s a much easier life.”

  Not that their existence was entirely idyllic. “They lose one person every couple of years to wild elephants. Although they can hear the elephants, smell them, sense them. They know which trees to climb. If you climb up into a tree that’s too small, the elephant will shake it until you fall like a ripe mango. An elephant will kill you not by trampling you but by wrapping you in its trunk and tossing you in the air.”

  * * *

  On the way back downriver from Devprayag, Manto had turned morose. “Also, the government says the Gujjars can have land titles if they can produce papers to prove that they have occupied the land continuously for seventy-five years. But they’re nomads, and they’re illiterate! Then they go down to the towns, and we turn them into factory workers, or loaders and unloaders. We put them in a uniform and we call it development.”

  He stopped and stared out of the car window. “Frugality is our tradition,” he said after a while. “There is an obsession in the Himalayas to give people electricity even when they don’t ask for it. We used to have a school under a tree, but now it has to be in a cement building even if that’s hot and uncomfortable. The Gandhian model of the village, that is the solution. You must not think that I want to turn the clock back five hundred years. It’s just a matter of orientation. Happiness is not about piling up all the pleasures, the creamiest of the cream.”

  We passed a group of women in saris who were patching a torn-up section of road. The sight bothered me, but Manto shrugged. “An excavator can put hundreds of people out of work. We save them labor just so they can die.”

  I tried to find something that would lift his spirits, so I switched the conversation to the Raja of Harsil and his apples.

  He grunted. “Why do I want to eat an Australian apple? I have tasty, juicy apples right here. An Australian apple may look beautiful, very red, but it tastes like paper. Not even paper. Wastepaper.”

  * * *

  It was a hot afternoon, and it was a tiring drive along a narrow, twisting corniche high above the Ganges. There were more of those highway department signs:

  EAGER TO LAST, THEN WHY FAST

  MOUNTAINS ARE ONLY A PLEASURE, IF YOU DRIVE WITH LEISURE

  Manto had fallen silent. There hadn’t been an “also…” for a while.

  We passed through a tract of forest, part of the Rajaji National Park. There was a commotion by the roadside. A wild elephant was crashing around in the trees, and a man was whacking it with a stick. We drove on. After a bit, Manto turned to me and said earnestly, “I’m glad you didn’t ask to stop back there.”

  I asked why.

  “Oh,” he said, “because most people would probably have wanted to stop and take a picture and then post it on Facebook.”

  BIG FISH STORY

  What was a well-bred Englishman in the colonies without his rod and gun? One missed the weekend shooting parties at one’s country home, the ghillies and beaters on the grouse moors of Scotland, the stag at bay, the rivers alive with brown trout and silvery salmon. But India offered its own alternatives. The first tourists to follow in the footsteps of Captains Hodgson and Herbert after they reached the source of the Ganges rejoiced in the abundance of wild game. “Our party consisted of three European gentlemen, each taking ten servants, while our coolees, or porters, amounted to eighty at the least,” wrote Lieutenant George Francis White of the Ninety-First Regiment in an account of his travels published in 1838. “Our sportsmen filled their game bags, after a very exhilarating pursuit of the furred and feathered race, most beautiful to the eye.”

  Calling it sport was a stretch; it was more like wholesale slaughter. Multitudes of partridges and pheasants fell to the gun. So did countless musk deer, goat-antelopes, and leopards, and above all tigers, which brought a government bounty, since killing them was considered a public service as well as the finest of sport. Captain James Forsyth, assistant conservator of forests for Central India and author of The Sporting Rifle and Its Projectiles, bagged twenty in a month. Roualeyn George Gordon-Cumming, an old Etonian with outlandish muttonchop whiskers, took his rifle to two continents. “A mad sort of Scotchman,” said the explorer David Livingstone, after learning about his compatriot’s rampages in East Africa. In India, Gordon-Cumming shot ten tigers in five days.

  Lieutenant White was less impressed by the fish of the Himalayas, which were “usually the leather-mouthed kind.” No doubt by this he meant that they were members of the carp family, which vacuumed up their food from the riverbed with their thick, rubbery lips and were regarded in England as fit only for “coarse fishing” for the lower classes. But others begged to disagree, for the biggest fish that swam in the Ganges and its tribu
taries was the “Mighty Mahseer.” The largest member of the carp family, the mahseer could reach seventy-five pounds and tear a man’s arm out of its socket. Best of all from a gentleman’s point of view, it would rise to take a well-placed dry fly.

  “What is wanted is not conquered worlds, but more worlds to conquer,” said Henry Sullivan Thomas of the Madras Civil Service in 1873. “From this point of view it is that I say a Mahseer shows more sport than a salmon.”

  A mahseer made a tarpon look like a herring, wrote Rudyard Kipling in The Jungle Book. “He who catches him can call himself a fisherman.”

  Nonetheless, a fellow still missed his trout. While it would never grow to these monstrous proportions, the beautiful creature triggered a particular kind of nostalgia for the old country. And while salmon would never take to the upper Ganges, there was every reason to think that trout would thrive in the clear, cold mountain streams. The only question was how to get them there.

  * * *

  People told me that Dodital was the place to find trout. It was a small mountain tarn at the end of a well-trodden trekking route, barely a mile in circumference and the source of a tributary of the Ganges called the Assi Ganga. It was reputed to be the birthplace, or at least the favored retreat, of Ganesha, the elephant-headed son of Shiva and Parvati. Van Gujjars often camped in the meadows around it. Tal meant lake, and dodi, supposedly, was the local word for trout. Dodital was said to be home to the rare Himalayan golden trout. It was rumored that Frederick Wilson had stocked trout in the lake in the 1840s.

  None of this made any sense. There’s no such species as the Himalayan golden trout; the closest natural-born trout are in the tributaries of the Aral Sea in Central Asia. And getting fragile eggs to a lake ten thousand feet up in the Himalayas in the 1840s would have taxed even the formidable talents of the Raja of Harsil. British sportsmen made their first attempt to export trout to the colonies in 1852. They chose Tasmania and finally succeeded on the third try, twelve years later. Organized in “acclimatisation societies,” they moved on to New Zealand, Ceylon, Kenya, and South Africa—the portion that was then known as Zululand, to be exact, where the hills had a hint of the highlands and the green of the veld could be a stand-in for the water meadows of Hampshire. Whatever Henry Sullivan Thomas might say, there were always new worlds for trout to conquer. Finally, around 1900, the first eggs were brought from Scotland to a hatchery in Kashmir. If there were trout in Dodital and the Assi Ganga, Kashmir was where they must have come from.

  It was a bit more than forty miles from Harsil to the mouth of the Assi Ganga, almost two hours down the twisting mountain road. The Harsil valley had been pristine, but that word no longer applied to this stretch of the Ganges. The landscape now was disfigured by disasters both natural and unnatural, and it was sometimes hard to tell the difference, since their common denominator was broken rocks and scarred earth. In a gorge at Loharinag Pala, there was an abandoned hydropower plant, left half-built since 2008, when India’s Supreme Court barred any further construction within a hundred yards of this “eco-sensitive” section of the river. Below the ugly Maneri Dam, which dated from the 1960s, a furious cascade came hurtling into the Ganges in midair from a headrace tunnel cut through the solid rock. The surrounding mountainsides were disfigured by landslides. The upper Ganges ran through an active seismic zone, and the epicenter of the last big earthquake, in 1991, was just across the river from Maneri.

  The 2013 floods that the priests had told me about in Gangotri had killed six thousand people in this region. A year earlier, another flash flood had been more localized but still devastating. That had been three years ago, but the steep valley of the Assi Ganga was still nothing but a boulder field split by a thread of gray water. Big orange JCB and Hyundai earthmovers were shunting the rubble around, and a steamroller was laying apparently random stretches of asphalt. Hard hats were reinforcing the foundations of a ruined bridge.

  Four or five miles upstream, a steeply stepped path led uphill to a wilderness camp run by a sociable man named Anil Kuriyal. He had a bald dome, two large and exuberant dogs that gave me a slobbering welcome, and an expression that suggested perpetual optimism in the face of adversity.

  He said he had grown up in Uttarkashi, a few miles farther down the Ganges, and moved away to go to college. “I went to Delhi. I worked as a naturalist. I ran a wildlife camp in Madhya Pradesh. But in 2004, I came back. I had to. I missed the beauty of the Himalaya.” He found a place with a natural spring and built a few rooms for visitors, with space for tents on the grassy hillside. You could use his camp as a base for the trek to Dodital, twelve miles up the mountain, or to stretch out in a hammock and listen to the birdsong, or, until the disaster, to fish for trout in the Assi Ganga.

  “There used to be two fish hatcheries on the river,” he said. “The first one was built by the maharaja of Tehri in 1921, with brood stock from Kashmir. But they were destroyed in the earthquake in 1991. They were rebuilt, but then the floods destroyed them again. The cloudburst was right over Dodital. The fishing was wiped out. The river is now totally destroyed. You’ve seen it, nothing but boulders and scree. All the tree cover is gone.”

  Kuriyal got permission from the government to restock the lake with brown trout. “Sixteen boys carried them up to Dodital in oxygenated tanks. They walked all night. The lake is still swarming with fish. Just leave it to nature. They’ll come down the river again eventually, although it may not be in my lifetime.”

  He’d never been much of a fisherman himself, just an amateur, and it didn’t seem to matter much whether he caught anything. “I just love to cast the fly, see how it lands just where you want it. The ultimate is when the trout actually takes it, but if I just see the fish follow the fly, that’s enough for me.”

  Although the river had been full of trout, few anglers had made it to this obscure and remote place. “I can count on my fingers. Probably, in all those years, seventy or eighty. Most of them were foreigners from Europe or America.”

  He showed me a photo album from the days before the flood. The river was an enticing series of emerald-green plunge pools and slick boulder runs, unrecognizable from its present ruinous state. The anglers were grinning as they held up huge, golden-brown fish for the camera, the kind of trout-porn images you see on the cover of fly-fishing magazines, usually taken in places like Montana or Patagonia.

  Kuriyal knew that the sport would never catch on locally. For people here, fishing was a matter of nets or poison or dynamite. But there were tales of trout that migrated down to the Ganges and grew to a monstrous size. I told him I’d once seen a photograph of the biggest brown trout ever landed. It had come from an artificial canal in New Zealand, where the fish gorged on feed pellets that drifted downstream from a salmon farm. It weighed a little over forty-two pounds. The fisherman who caught it was standing under a sign that said, “Meat Supplied by the Happy Butcher Retail Shop. No Stress. No Mess. Mobile Abattoir.” He’d told the local radio station, accurately, that “it looked like a submarine. Very ugly. Small head, big belly. Just amazing.”

  “The local butcher in Uttarkashi says he had one that was twice that size,” Kuriyal said. “He caught it in a net in the big pool where the tunnel comes off the Maneri Dam. Most people are too afraid to fish there. They think the trout will bite off your fingers.”

  Twice as big? That was inconceivable.

  He nodded. “Forty kilograms, not forty pounds. He swears that was how much it weighed, because he cut it up in his shop and sold it by the kilo. And he sold forty kilos. He kept count.”

  THE AGE OF KALI

  In the village of Sangrali, sixty miles or so south of Gangotri, there is an outpost of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police and a tiny white temple with a single prayer flag, perched on a rocky promontory. It was an awkward place to reach, involving a hand-over-hand climb up a series of crude steps and notches cut into the hillside. You had to place your fingers with some care. Pallavi and Michael lived in the nearest house, and one of
their dogs had a disconcerting habit of bringing home the gift of a snake clamped in his jaws. One recent sighting had been of Trimeresurus albolabris septentrionalis, the white-lipped pit viper, which they had found exploring their flower garden. A leopard they called “the princess of the night” prowled the hillside sometimes, but legend had it that only the big cats on the other side of the river had a taste for human flesh.

  Paula and I went out onto a jutting platform of rock, where the ground dropped away sheer to the valley of the Ganges. The steep slopes in the foreground were sculpted into a green staircase of agricultural terraces. In the clear mountain air of early summer, the northern horizon was defined by a serrated line of snow peaks. Beyond them was Tibet. The only defect in the view was a thin column of gray smoke rising from a nearby ravine. When the breeze blew in from the east, it carried with it the unmistakable stink of burning plastic.

  On the way up here, I’d passed a knot of grim-looking women clustered at the roadside. They were there to complain to anyone who would listen about the improvised garbage dump in the ravine. Three miles downstream was Uttarkashi, a grimy cement and cinder block town of eighteen thousand souls. Uttarkashi is the abode of Shiva. But holiness and cleanliness are not necessarily the same thing. Like most Indian municipalities, Uttarkashi has no organized means of disposing of its solid waste—or its nonsolid waste, for that matter. So at night, the trucks nudged the pigs out of the way and scooped up the filth from the streets and marketplaces. Then, groaning in low gear, they labored up the narrow, serpentine road that leads to Sangrali and tipped everything onto the huge, smoldering pile that scarred one side of the ravine. Rain and gravity would take over from there, and having slithered its way down into the clear stream that flows through the cleft in the mountain, the whole noisome mess would end up in the Ganges.