Airtel et al, Pt.2
Labels: favourite language, hellotune, herohits
'Adventure Land'
When the bus stops I disembark and promptly hunt down some chai. It’s late evening, and the air is chilly, even (especially?) after seven hours spent in the back of a trundling, sweaty bus. Before too long I am met by the 4x4 that will shuttle me through Jim Corbett National Park and Tiger Reserve, on up to the village of Marchula. From the village, I’ll begin the two-kilometre hike to the Himalayan Outback’s riverside camp. I throw my stuff in the truck and we roar off.
A little later we stop and I realize I’ve been dozing. I also realize that we’re not merely stopped, but stranded: the engine won’t start, we don’t get cell service, and we have to walk up the road for help or reception or something.
Sometimes it pays to go with the flow, I tell myself tritely. The guy in the passenger’s seat and I set out. His name is Dharampal, I learn. Lakhi, the driver, will stay with the vehicle.
Between our soles and the asphalt, there’s a thin layer of noisy sand. Each footfall seems to rip the night.
Hmmm. We really are in the middle of nowhere.
It’s a few hundred metres of walking before I’m able to take stock of all that’s happening:
(1) we’re abandoning our vehicle
(2) to walk, at night,
(3) through a ‘Tiger Reserve’, which is
(4) a parcel of land in the Himalayan foothills singled out because of its
(5) exceptionally high density of tigers – the tiger being, among other things,
(6a) one of the few animals, along with the polar bear, known to hunt humans for its food and
(6b) a creature exceptionally fond of doing its hunting and other sinister activities in the night.
But tiger attacks are rare, right? My pace, along with my pulse, probably quickens with the thought. Sure! You hear about tiger attacks in India from time to time, but that’s probably only because of the sheer number of people here. In a country of over a billion, someone is bound to get munched periodically.
Holy-god-what-is-that!? Something is breaking branches in the roadside thicket! Before realizing it, we’ve made an abrupt detour toward the opposite shoulder. Then, just as quickly, we stop. Unable to go on, twenty meters from the thicket-beast, we wait for it to reveal itself:
A deer. It is a deer.
We keep walking.
“Very dangerous place,” intones Dharampal, a little breathless.
“Uh-huh!” I answer, not liking the way it sounds. I clear my throat, but don’t like the way that sounds either.
Tiger Attack. I consider the idea seriously for the first time. Statistically unlikely in the grand scheme of things, for sure.
Then, all at once, I recognize our plight for what it really is: the culmination of an unusually elaborate conspiracy with fate to be successfully stalked, killed, and ingested by a tiger. I have to hand it to myself: I’m in the best position I can be in if my goal is to get devoured.
“Adventure Land,” Dharampal adds thinly, no doubt having similar thoughts.
From out of the darkness, a dimly lit checkpoint emerges. (We’re saved!) After an unfruitful interaction with the sleeping guy in the tiger-proof hut – (they have no phone, and the truck they are about to send down-road doesn’t think we could use a ride; it rumbles off) – we are out walking in the dark again, this time back the way we came.
I try to hail a passing convoy of Land Cruisers and they nearly run us over, not slowing one kph.
Who wouldn’t stop!? We’re going to be eaten! Don’t they know this?!
“Are they tourists?” I ask Dharampal after the dust clears.
“Yes,” he responds. I imagine Indian drivers with white cargo, under orders not to render aid to any roadside ruffians, even if said ruffians’ lives are in serious danger.
We plod on.
Presently we arrive back at the truck (The Truck!). Lakhi has been asleep in the back. Just then another group of SUVs comes barreling down around the turn. I step into the roadway melodramatically.
They stop. They are Indian tourists, in open-air 4x4s, out for a night-time jaunt in their resort’s vehicles, hoping to see some wildlife. They agree to give us a ride down the road. We hop in.
In first gear, we crawl along, waiting to surprise some animals or something. The engine yells indignantly on the downgrade.
One man in the backseat passes me some whiskey, and I realize he’s drunk. He manages to ascertain my country of origin, that I’ve been to India once before, that I traveled in this state, though it had a different name then, and that I am here “for fishing.” He also manages to goad me into taking a few pulls of his dilute whiskey before I begin nodding off again.
I am awakened periodically: whenever a terrified herd of unfortunate animals winds up in our headlights (often), we stop the trucks, everyone cheers, and we watch them filter, trembling, into the woods. (This may be the moment wherein most drinking is accomplished.) I wonder how many of them are wasted – the driver? – before slipping into sleep again.
I awake to doors slamming. We‘ve parked the 4x4s, I guess, and the wildlife enthusiasts have headed for their rooms before I can say thanks. Hands in pockets, I pace the grass and dirt parking lot while Dharampal calls someone at the camp.
It’s got to be past 2am by now. I sit on the ground for a moment, but a guard I hadn’t noticed sees me and invites me into his hut. He offers me his spare plastic chair, then closes the door to the cold. We exchange a head bob as he sets down across from me.
The fluorescent light is the only sound. I pull my hood over my eyes and begin to doze.
The guard must take out a bidi and light it, because the smell wakes me. I listen to him pull air through the small cigarette: it crackles and hisses.
The light whines.
At some point, help arrives.
Labels: bidi noises, indian transit, man-eating
Sunya Mahseer
I am a hapless fisherman. What am I doing here. Who am I, even, and what could these people possibly think of me. Also, where can I learn what I need to know about fly fishing.
It’s the morning of my twelfth day on the Ramganga, and I’m posing questions so rhetorical and melodramatic that they don’t require question marks. After five days of pretty dogged, determined fishing – which itself came on the heels of seven days of ‘guiding’ other anglers on this stream, during which I could have at least gotten a sense for what ‘doesn’t work’ – I’ve hooked one (1) fish, which I promptly lost.
Day is just breaking, and I’m sitting on the porch of my cottage, glaring at the river and sipping chai furiously. Like many anglers, I don’t mind spending a day fishing and not catching anything. Per se. It’s just that at any given fishless moment on the water, chances are good that I would rather be in some stage of catching a fish. Right now, the only thing that really stings is that the guys in camp here are really pulling for me. Each time I return from the water, I am asked by at least three of the staff, their smiles optimistic, “Anything? Any fish?”
Steadily I’ve been running out of answers, by which I mean literally having trouble finding something to say. The saddest loss, which I’d been making flamboyant use of until yesterday as it had become a sort of rallying cry for me, was ‘mahseer hoga’. In my own brand of pidgin Hindi, it means ‘mahseer will happen’. Another phrase, ‘karingi mahseer’, which had fallen out of use a few days before but was also a favorite in its time, translates as something like ‘I will mahseer’.
And now that I think about it, Even my line about how the zero was invented in India has worn itself thin. (‘Zero’, in Hindi, is ‘sunya’.) If I come here, spend two weeks in camp, purport to be some sort of expert or authority on the subject of fly fishing, and don’t catch a fish – well, what’s my deal? What kind of weirdo am I?
I need more tea, and stomp off across the camp toward the kitchen tent.
For the first week, I had fished vicariously through the Russians, trying a number of different tactics, all of which seemed promising in their own way. We’d fish pocket water, riffles and rapids, first down and across, just letting it swing, then stripping slowly, and finally, stripping frantically. We would fish another section of similar water, this time up and across, stripping as soon as the fly would land. We used an intermediate line. We used sink-tips. We tried buggers, bait fish patterns, and nymphs. We’d hook up only rarely, and – what was more troubling – never when I had a fishy feeling.
We also focused our efforts on the clear, still pools, where we knew there were mahseer because they were plainly visible in prodigious numbers and really mind-blowing sizes. But in all the time I spent watching during the day (sometimes while a Russian frothed an adjacent stretch), the fish seemed to only be playing – never hunting, foraging, or keying in on insects. They would cruise up and down the pool, always in the top half-meter of the water column, with no apparent regularity or reason. Casting to them in the daylight, with the water clarity being what it was, proved a bad idea (though the experience of spooking two or three dozen fish at once is really novel the first few times). So we fished the pools when light was low or when it was dark, and day-by-day, night-by-night, we became more and more discrete.
Before long, we were communicating exclusively in birdcalls and sign language. To get my angler’s attention, I’d whistle softly, playfully. Then I’d pantomime directions, as this time, for example, to Egor:
Walk softly to the edge of this pool. I’ll be over there in that grass. Wait for a bit (my finger tracing the hands of an imaginary watch on my wrist), being perfectly still. Strip enough line from your reel to cast across the pool. Wait, perfectly still, for the sign from me. Then we will make a cast to that water there. We will let the line and fly sink. On a signal from me you will retrieve the fly, gently at first. Then we will make another cast, wait, and try again.
I had decided to approach these pools, still as they were, like small flats. Fishing a full intermediate line, we’d place our fly – a crab, crayfish, bugger, or minnow, preferably with a weed guard or up-riding hook – at a good distance from any mahseer we’d see, and wait to retrieve until a fish entered the vicinity. Failing that, we’d wait until things felt vaguely fishy – or, if that didn’t happen, until someone got antsy. Despite my faith in the method, it never worked.
Now the Russians have left and I’ve been doing it all over again. Here I try crustaceans; here I try leeches. One day I concentrate on fishing water forty feet from me. The next day, I’m casting sixty. After that, eighty – still to no discernible effect. Longer leaders, lighter tippets – nothing helps. Which is why I’ve taken the morning off, opting instead to guzzle chai and let my thoughts rumble. For the first time since my arrival, the skies look threatening, and my hope is that rain could put a little sediment in the water. With some turbidity, waving a fly rod by the river’s edge might seem slightly less foolish.
Labels: chai-as-sustenance, hapless fisherman, sunya mahseer
In Which I Read 'The Rod in India'
These are some notes from an experience I had while spending two weeks in the north at a new fly fishing lodge. A little more information about my time up there can be found on Leland's 'Official' Blog. I'm looking for feedback on this piece, because I might want to put something similar into an article I write for a fly fishing publication. It would need to be shortened up a bit, I know, but I'm also curious if anyone has any ideas how I can mix interior monologue and dispassionate narrative fluidly, while maintaining distinction between the two. One more thing: I need a better ending. Okay here goes:
I spend a hot, dusty afternoon on the open-air veranda and peruse the camp’s dozen-volume library for the first time. The Rod in India by ‘Henry Sullivan Thomas, F.L.S.’ captures my curiosity. I pull it from the shelf and open it. The faded title page doesn’t disappoint:
THE ROD IN INDIA
BEING
HINTS HOW TO OBTAIN SPORT
WITH
REMARKS ON THE NATURAL HISTORY OF FISH
AND THEIR CULTURE
AND
Illustrations of Fish and Tackle
Wow. First published in 1873. This is great. I sip my tea and read the introduction:
Not a few lovers of the gentle art are condemned by their calling to pass the best years of their existence in India, sighing, amongst other things, for the banks of Tweed, or Usk, or other familiar stream in the old country, looking forward to the too far distant time when furlough, or other favouring circumstance, shall take them home to the land where they may again beguile the speckled beauties from the stream, or once more do battle with the lordly salmon…
‘Lordly salmon’! Ha-ha! What an old codger! Whee!
…To such it may be a comfort to know that they need not wait so long for the “good time coming,” that there is as good fishing to be had in India as in England; and to minister such comfort to exiled anglers is my present philanthropic object.
That’s very noble of him! I flip forward to CHAPTER II: THE MAHSEER, and learn that
In my own opinion, and that of others whom I have met, the Mahseer shows more sport for its size than a salmon. The essence of sport, or in other words of the enjoyment of any pursuit lies, I take it, in the exhibition of superiority therein, whether of skill or courage, not the exhibition for others to see, but the difficult attainment of it for our own satisfaction.
I wonder what exactly he means by that. What a verbose guy he is. INTRIGUING. I thumb to CHAPTER III: THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE MAHSEER, which begins with an epigraph by none other than Sir Izaak Walton. Charming indeed. I learn more:
The Mahseer is a carp, though, as we shall see hereafter, very different in size, flavour, strength, activity, and so forth, from his ignoble namesake in England
Hmm, fascinating. CHAPTER IV: CIRCUMVENTING THE MAHSEER – whose title I take to be an eponymous homage to that more-famous volume on Indian angling (which could, in my current estimation, not but fail to equal the rare grace of this particular narrative which I have in my hands before me – begins:
Some people complain that the Hindu does everything in a way opposite to that which you would naturally expect of a sane man…
What?! My scalp tightens. I sit up and make sure I’m alone, then keep reading:
…because opposite to that way in which all Europeans are accustomed to do[,] the like acts. On entering a house he has not the ordinary politeness to take off his hat, but instead thereof, he kicks off his shoes…
Why would he say that!? And as though Hindu people are all the same! Does anyone know this is in here?
…in place of making himself a little extra civil before a big-wig, he folds his arms, and stands bolt upright, and so forth…
Where is this going?? This bad man!
…Similarly, the Mahseer, being a thorough Asiatic, does many things by contraries.
My jaw drops. I slam closed the book. It puffs dust, and I hastily place it on the shelf. Hands in pockets, I pace the veranda. Maybe I whistle something. ‘A thorough Asiatic’?!
Labels: lordly salmon, racialized colonial supremacism, the rod in india
Airtel et al, Pt.1
"Itho ru super
value talktime
offer. *121*2#
dial seithu
sirappu
recharge salugai
petridungal!.
Ippoluthe dial
seyyavum.
Sender:
AT-Airtel"
And:
"Last day to avail
Full TT on 202
Top Up! Easy
Recharge with
202 Top Up &
get Full TT of
Rs.202 only today (09-Apr-
09). Call 171706
(Toll Free) for
info."
Airtel will also SMS me to share information on subjects other than new opportunities to buy talk time, or TT. As with many other phenomena here, these SMSes provide a good window for watching 'traditional' and 'modern' value systems at work/odds/play, etc.:
"Are you in love?
Know more Love
Tips to impress
your Partner.
For Boys SMS Boy
to 51515
For Girls SMS Girl
to 51515.
Charged at
Rs.3/SMS."
And:
"Everyone wants
his/her partner
to be perfect.To
know if yours is
a perfect
match,SMS
KADHAL (Your
name)
(Partner's
name)to
51515.eg
KADHAL Asin
Santhosh
@Rs3/SMS"
'Asin', I'm pretty sure, refers to Asin Thottumkal, a much-admired Malayali actress who got her start in Tollywood, but has just recently made the transition to the Bollywood big leagues. I believe 'Santhosh' refers to the fictional, geeky South Indian guy who has SMSed this thing for Rs.3 in Airtel's li'l diegesis. Here's another noteworthy SMS, sent a couple weeks ago:
"Msg from
National Assocn
for Blind- Take
part in unique
Car Rally for the
Blind on Sunday,
29-Mar from
Hotel Savera.
For details log
on to
http://harsha.ko
da.in
Sender:
AT-CarRally"
Labels: indian pop culture, modern india, technology in india, unique car rally
Indian Roadways and Conveyances, Pt.1
When deciding if you’d like to fish mahseer, you need to ask yourself if you’d like to come to India. While India emerged from colonial rule in 1947 with an expansive rail network and at least 50 million English speakers, there are other aspects of travel here that one might find challenging. Beyond the gastrointestinal trials you’ve no doubt heard so much about, there are a few other considerations that need to be weighed. Ask yourself: “do crowds of people swirling over and about the roadway on two dozen different methods of locomotion overwhelm me?” “How do I feel when every person I talk to tries to invite me into their shop or home for chai or food? Am I flattered or frightened?” “Do I find it funny or infuriating when my bus driver, barreling along at high speed within inches of pedestrians, depresses the horn for no less than twelve continuous seconds?”
This last question brings up an important issue, and you'd do well to consider at length: “How do I feel about honking more generally?” In the West, horns are used only in emergencies, or when danger is imminent. But in India, horns are used whenever possible! Here, drivers actually encourage their peers to honk as a matter of policy. Hand-painted on the back of trucks, auto-rickshaws, and an unpredictable assortment of other vehicles, one can find words of exhortation: “Horn please,” “Sound horn,” “Blow horn,” “Horn okay,” “Okay,” and even, “Good luck.”
...
Here are another couple paragraphs, still in the works, crafted toward the same end:
Some of the brightest and most idiosyncratic moments in India -- the times when you hear yourself thinking: 'I can't get over this place! What!' -- seem to take place during the actual experience of transit. I travel to the Himalayan Outback’s Ramnagar camp on the day of the Hindu festival of Holi. Holi celebrates a miraculous event, even by the standards of Hindu mythology, wherein one Prahlad, a sort of model of devotion to god, emerged unscathed after being carried into a fire by a demoness, Holika.
Among other things, Holi is a day on which people all over India throw paint and pigment at each other and have a really good time doing it. It is also a day when grinning little kids line up on the road’s shoulder and shoot Super Soaker-style water cannons at passing buses, effectively marking, with festive and probably-toxic coloration, those passengers-dumb-enough-to-have-their-windows-open-when-it's-90-degrees-out as just that: dumb.
When I’m not scanning the shoulder ahead of the bus for mischievous looking groups of kids (friends of the water cannon operator will stand by, you see, clasping their hands in anticipation and clapping once the bright stream of god-knows-what-they’ve-bottled lets loose), I watch my fellow passengers. Four men whom I’m pretty sure have never met take turns reading a paper. Another man, face painted, falls asleep with his cheek on this neighbor’s shoulder, leaving bright colors on the pale shirt. I watch, again betting they don’t know each other, wondering what will happen when someone else takes notice. Nothing comes of it.
Labels: hindu festivals, horns, indian transit