On the Ganges

by George Black

  We passed a couple of crocodiles sunbathing on a mudbank, twenty feet long and brutally armored. As the boat drew closer, they disappeared into the water in a great swirl of mud. In the idle warmth of the morning, my friends and I debated which would be the worst way to die: crocodile, tiger, grizzly bear, or shark. The tiger severs your spinal column with a single bite to the neck. With a grizzly, there would be the stinking meat-breath, the claws that could rip open the side of a car. With a shark, the silent, invisible attack from below, a chunk of your thigh gone suddenly, blood in the water, the helpless flailing. But the crocodile seemed the worst: the double horror of being clamped in those terrible jaws and then being dragged under to drown.

  The cook called up from below. “Lunch is ready, sir.”

  It was another spread in varied shades of green, and he stood nearby as we picked at it without appetite.

  “Sir, you would like tourist thing?” He gestured at a storage locker. I imagined cheap souvenirs, bangles, T-shirts, bamboo flutes. I shook my head.

  He paused. “I have very special tourist thing. I can show you.”

  He opened the locker. Inside was a cooler, and in the cooler were a dozen bottles of Heineken, well chilled.

  * * *

  The Bonbibi was named for the goddess of the Sundarbans, who is believed to control the movements of the tiger. Bon, from the Bengali, the forest; Bibi, from the Urdu, the lady. Lady of the Forest. She is a syncretic deity, typical of the traditions of Bengal. In certain village shrines on the margins of the forest, she is depicted as a Hindu goddess wearing a green or blue sari and seated on a howling tiger, her countenance peaceful and serene. Her brother, Shajangali, carries a club to drive away the beast. He is dressed, in one scholar’s description, “like a member of the Muslim gentry.”

  Many of those who venture into the forest to make their tenuous living—the fishermen, woodcutters, and honey collectors—will conduct elaborate rituals before they leave home, imploring Bonbibi to protect them. Anthropologists have documented ceremonies in which a variety of objects are offered to the goddess—conch-shell bangles, vermilion, scraps of red cloth, green coconuts, earthen pots, decorated figurines, sweetmeats, hemp, and incense. In the Indian section of the Sundarbans, there was a brief experiment in which forest workers tried wearing a mask on the back of the head to confuse the tiger, which attacks from behind. There is no evidence that this made any difference, any more than the prayers to Bonbibi.

  Official reports say that about one person a week falls victim to the tigers. But many more deaths go unreported. The honey collectors, the mowalis, are especially vulnerable. They work for two months each year, in April and May, pursuing the rock bees that swarm south from the Himalayas in search of the nectar-bearing flowers of the holly mangrove, Acanthus ilicifolius, and the river mangrove, Aegiceras corniculatum. A skilled collector can bring back two hundred pounds or more. Once he has paid the forest service for his permit and given the forest guards and government officials their cut, this may bring him the equivalent of about seventy-five dollars for two months of unimaginably hazardous work. The mowalis work singly or in pairs, and their presence is disruptive at this time of year, since the tiger cubs are only a couple of months old and are still in their dens. The first attacks are likely to be defensive, but the kill will convert the tiger from a “circumstantial” to a “dedicated” man-eater.

  Later that day, we sat idle at anchor for an hour or two. There were bangs and grunts from the engine room, and a member of the crew emerged at intervals, grasping a monkey wrench and smeared with black grease, and muttered anxious mechanical reports to the captain. A small boat pulled over beside us, and the boatman tossed a rope across the gap and tied up. A fresh-faced young man in a green polo shirt climbed aboard the Bonbibi, and I was startled to see another Western face in this remote place. His name was Adam Barlow. He was English-born and had written his thesis on the Bengal tiger at the University of Minnesota. Now he was living in Dhaka. He said he was on his way to Chandpai, with the aim of teaching villagers how to anesthetize their problem tiger, put a radio collar on it, and return it to another part of the forest, far from their homes.

  I asked him how they usually dealt with the problem.

  “Normally they put out bait for the tiger,” he answered. “Then, when they’ve lured it into the village, they gather by the hundreds, arm themselves with sticks, and form a circle around it. Then they beat the tiger to death.”

  ON THE BEACH

  One of the forest guards took up position behind me and the other walked in front, and they carried their rifles slung across their shoulders as we crossed an unstable wooden gangplank at the mouth of a tidal channel called Kotka Khal.

  The outpost at Kotka was where Bangladesh finally dissolved into the ocean. There was not much here but a forest department sign, a couple of concrete buildings, one of them reduced to a broken shell by the most recent cyclone, and a watchtower on the far side of the channel. To the west, the beach stretched for three miles of gray-brown sand, strewn with coconuts and palm fronds, until it ended at the mouth of the broad Betmore Gang, which sounded like a Mafia casino operation but was still another of the Hundred Mouths of the Ganges. In many parts of the world, you might have expected to find a Club Med or an expensive eco-resort on a beach like this, but here you had the tigers to worry about.

  The edge of the beach was carpeted with the spiky knee roots of the mangroves, and beyond them a narrow trail led into the forest. The guards’ rifles had bayonets and chipped wooden stocks, and they looked as if they belonged in a museum. The problem was not so much the age of the guns, one of them said, as the age of the bullets. They were forty years old. But he told me not to worry; if we encountered a tiger in the forest, they fired correctly at least one time out of four.

  We found day-old scat on the trail, there were claw marks gouged deep into the bark of a sundari tree, six feet off the ground, and a male had left fresh pugmarks in the sand, as broad as the spread of my hand. But there were no tigers to be seen, and we went back to the beach. “You were unlucky,” the guard said.

  I stood at the water’s edge, letting the tide slap gently at the soles of my hiking boots. The Indian Ocean stretched away to the horizon, vast and brown and thick with silt, and if you sailed in a straight line due south, your next landfall would be at Mikhaylov Island, off the West Ice Shelf of Antarctica, five thousand miles away.

  HOLI ON THE HOOGHLY

  Once, in Varanasi, I’d seen a banner strung up on one of the ghats warning visitors of the perils of Holi, the spring festival of colors. It said, “For your Information it is Dangerous Festival for the girls. All Man will be totaly Drunk. Don’t give any hug this day! Nobody keep control so don’t take any Risk.”

  In Calcutta, meanwhile, hugs were actively encouraged. On the concrete pillars of the flyover that makes a feeble attempt to speed traffic along Chowringhee Road, there were giant billboards that showed a woman in a wet sari wrapping herself around a Bollywood-style hunk with three-day stubble. The text said, “Holi Gets Wild.” I think it was an ad for deodorant.

  A friend took me to a Holi party in the garden of a small gated apartment complex in a quiet middle-class neighborhood. I exchanged greetings and holiday wishes with the hosts. She was a molecular biologist, he was an engineer, and they had a small organic farm on the banks of the Hooghly. The engineer fixed me a vodka mojito, complete with a sprig of mint, and one of the guests came lurching toward me with a plate of pakoras laced with bhang. She thrust it into my hand and told me I had some catching up to do. Looking around at the crowd, it was clear what she meant. There was a lot of lurching and swaying going on, and several of the dancers seemed to have passed out in armchairs. Kids were running amok, and two of them came running up and showered me with the obligatory colored powder, green, red, yellow, and purple. “I think the colors symbolize triumph,” somebody slurred. “Maybe triumph in war, or something.” Another of the ads we’d seen on the way to
the party, from a construction company, urged people to use organic colors this year.

  Most of the guests seemed to be in their forties or early fifties. When I asked them what they did, that typical American question, most answered with something vague about being semiretired or freelance or some kind of a consultant—teaching or college administration or IT, which is big in Calcutta. All of them spoke flawless English, lightly accented in a way that hinted at an English or American education. One man said he was digitizing the vast art collection at the Victoria Memorial, the Taj of the Raj, as people sometimes call it, and played a little jazz on the side. “Count Basie makes my heart skip a beat,” he said. We agreed that the Count’s recordings of blues numbers with Jimmy Rushing were particularly fine.

  “Calcutta has always been a wonderful place,” a woman said. “This is where I have got to see people like Jacques Derrida, Edward Said, Sasha Waltz, Herbie Hancock. They all come here. It’s wonderful.”

  Everyone seemed to refer to the city as Calcutta, not Kolkata. For reasons no one can fully explain, some of India’s postcolonial name changes have stuck, and some haven’t. Most people these days seemed to say Chennai, not Madras, but hardly anyone referred to Bangalore as Bengaluru. Mumbai versus Bombay was a more even split, like Varanasi and Benares.

  Debating the relative merits of Calcutta and Kolkata, and the possible origins of the name, called for another round of pakoras and mojitos. The most common theory was that the city had been named for the goddess Kali, its most important deity, whose celebrated temple was at Kalighat. A more outlandish idea was that Christian missionaries had been so appalled by the pestilential swamps along the Hooghly, and the speed with which they carried off foreign residents, that they compared the area to Golgotha, the Place of the Skull. The story I liked best told of an early British visitor who asked a passing grass cutter what the place was called. Misunderstanding the question, the man said, in Bengali, kal kata. It was cut yesterday.

  “Kolkata has the long Bengali O, of course, but they sound almost the same, so what does it matter,” a woman said.

  “There were public opinion polls,” a man chimed in. “Most people preferred Calcutta.”

  “Calcutta, Kolkata. It’s a matter of identity. This is our cultural schizophrenia,” said a third person.

  While no one seemed to be losing any sleep over the problem, there was always that slight cultural uncertainty in Calcutta. Use the Bengali name and you were affirming a proud and distinctive heritage, filled with song and poetry and nostalgia for an ancestral homeland that was now divided in two, east and west. Use the anglicized version, and you might be implicitly endorsing the idea that Calcutta’s deepest identity was to have been the second city of the empire, the pinkest part of Queen Victoria’s map, with all its splendors and all its cruelties. But if you were a jazz-loving IT consultant, Calcutta also marked you as a sophisticate, a citizen of the larger world; if you said Kolkata, did it mark you out as a modernizer or a bumpkin?

  We left the matter unresolved, piled into a rattletrap Ambassador taxi, mildly stoned, and headed for the ghats, where so many people were soaping the Holi powder off their bodies that the river had turned a deep purple.

  THE WORLD OF APU

  Hovering below the surface of this talk of Derrida and Basie, there were always the shades of Bengal’s two greatest artists: Rabindranath Tagore, the white-bearded poet-novelist-composer-polymath who cemented a distinct idea of Bengali culture at the turn of the twentieth century and became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for literature; and the incomparable filmmaker Satyajit Ray.

  Calcutta was a riddle, Tagore wrote in a recollection of his childhood. “Something undreamt of was lurking everywhere, and every day the uppermost question was: where, oh where would I come across it?”

  Ray, who was born into the city’s cosmopolitan elite, struggled mightily over his feelings for Bengal, the emotional push and pull between village and city, aspiration and disappointment, idealism and failure, the desire for change and the desire for continuity.

  What should you put into your films? What can you leave out? Would you leave the city behind and go to the village where cows graze in the endless fields and the shepherd plays his flute? You could make a film here that would be pure and fresh and have the flowing rhythms of a boatman’s song.…

  Or would you rather stay where you are, right in the present, in the heart of this monstrous, teeming, bewildering city, and try to orchestrate its dizzying contrasts of sight and sound and milieu?

  The two most celebrated scenes Ray ever shot are in Pather Panchali, the first of his Apu Trilogy. One is of rain, the other a train. The enduring rhythms of the village, and the surging energy of escape.

  In the first of these scenes, dark clouds build up over the fields, thunder rumbles in the distance, lily pads stir in the wind, Apu’s mother takes in her drying laundry, his father looks up at the sky and unfurls his umbrella, the first drops of the monsoon pock the surface of a pond. Apu, who is six, takes shelter under a tree, bare-chested and shivering, then breaks into a smile as he sees his sister, Durga—named for the goddess revered by Bengalis—tossing her long hair as the water streams off it in the downpour.

  In the second scene, they press their ears to an electricity pole, listening to the hum in the wires, crouch in the long grass where Apu turns to his sister and asks, “Where are we?” and she says nothing in reply, then they sprint across the field to a raised embankment where a train thunders past them, trailing black smoke.

  At the start of the sequel, Aparajito, Apu is nine. In blurry black and white, right after the certificate of approval from the Central Board of Film Censors, we see the Ganges through his eyes, flashing through the struts of the Malviya Bridge in Varanasi, just above Raj Ghat, where the porters load wood for the cremation grounds. His father prays and preaches on the ghats but soon falls sick. “Here it is not as good as it is in our native place, isn’t it?” he asks Apu. After being blessed with a last mouthful of gangajal, he dies.

  Halfway through the film, another train whistle blows. The train clatters across the river again, this time in the opposite direction, headed back to Bengal, and Apu watches the ghats recede into the distance. He dozes with his head on his mother’s lap as she stares out at the passing landscape. A boy poles a boat along a canal; a man leads a bullock cart along a mud embankment.

  Back in the village, there have been subtle changes. A horse-drawn tonga arrives one day, with a man who wears a topi and a white suit with a rosette in his buttonhole and introduces Apu to “the tender leaf of literature.”

  “In which land are the trees and plants the most green?” the man asks. “In which land are all equally welcome? Where is it that golden vegetables and lotus are grown? It is our Bengal. Our land called Bengal.”

  In school, Apu is given two books. One is Livingstone in Africa. The other tells the lives of the great scientists: Archimedes, Galileo, Newton, Faraday. At sixteen, he places second in the district exams. He tells his mother that he has been offered a scholarship to study science in Calcutta, worth ten rupees a month. He begs her permission. “Will I not go? Everyone goes there,” he tells her.

  They argue.

  “What’s wrong with being a priest like your father?” she demands. “What will happen to me?”

  He shows her a globe, a gift from his headmaster. The blue oceans. He studies it in the third-class carriage. The train steams into Howrah Station, along a converging web of tracks. On the platform, Apu is pushed and jostled in the crowd of other passengers. Outside in the street, he is startled by a motor car. His reaction suggests that he has never seen one before.

  He takes a job in a printshop on Patuatola Lane, near the University of Calcutta and the bookstalls of College Street, and studies at night. He learns the meaning of the word synecdoche. He becomes familiar with the great sights of the city: the Victoria Memorial, the Kalighat Temple, the Keoratala cremation grounds. He sits on the riverbank, g
azes at the ships, and dreams of the blue oceans.

  His mother sends him plaintive messages. “Why do you never write or come home?” He shuttles back and forth on the three-hour train ride to his village, stricken by guilt and ambivalence. A letter comes from a neighbor to say that his mother has fallen ill. He hurries back but finds the house empty. He mourns her death with an old man who wears the sacred thread across his left shoulder.

  “Where will you go?” the man asks.

  “Calcutta.”

  “Why to Calcutta?”

  “I have college.”

  “What about your mother’s last rites?”

  “I’ll perform them in Calcutta, at Kalighat.”

  The old man touches Apu’s forehead in blessing. Apu heads off barefoot along the muddy path, away from the camera, and never looks back.

  THE AGING PROSTITUTE

  If the undreamt of was lurking everywhere in Calcutta, as Tagore believed, the only way to find it was on foot. No matter how suffocating the heat and humidity, I rarely tired of walking the streets of the city, and somehow I always found myself drawn back to the claustrophobic neighborhood around Howrah Bridge—now renamed Rabindra Setu in honor of Tagore. It was one of those places that seemed to distill something of the essence of India within its narrow, chaotic confines, although you knew, of course, that whenever you thought you had found the essence of India, you had probably just ensnared yourself in clichés.

  Half a mile from the bridge, on BBD Bagh, which was once Dalhousie Square and is still the political heart of Calcutta, there were digital displays from the city government that said, “KEEP KOLKATA POLLUTION FREE and KEEP YOUR VEHICLE’S POLLUTION WITHIN LIMITS.” There was no indication of how this was to be accomplished in practice. Across the Hooghly, the redbrick towers of Howrah Station and the fishing boats and ferries chugging along the far side of the river were usually no more than dim shapes in the smog.