The river is sluggish and bright blue against broad sandy banks and a distant tree line, many miles away across the rice fields. At the water’s edge, a small enterprise of bamboo stalls sells dusty packaged cookies and water bottles brought here by jeep. Background music from a battery-powered radio; we are many miles away from the nearest electrical pole, the lyrics in a strange language. Little girls in what look like Disney princess outfits (but that pass as normal here), boys in blue shorts and white school shirts, some torn and threadbare but all immaculately pressed. One boy has a pink My Little Pony backpack so dirty that the imprint is barely visible; his white uniform shirt has a gaping hole under one arm. He climbs out to the end of a rickety scaffolding that hangs out over the water and dangles there like a monkey, hooting and laughing. In America every adult present would be panicking and the ferry-keepers would be worried about litigation, but here no one cares.
It’s a perverse thrill to be here in an alien land under the warm sun surrounded by people whose lives are as different from mine as is possible. Somehow I am happier here than when I am home. A man behind me is shouting something in a singing voice. Bicycle bells. Activity growing as the ferry time approaches.
Why is this all somehow comforting? Is it because I have no responsibility? I am utterly in the hands of fate, like a child. I am warm in the sun beside a beautiful river and I can do absolutely nothing but wait for the ferry and bathe in the foreign sensations. A giant black and shaggy pig wanders by with two piglets. The breeze evaporates the sweat on my neck. This is as simple as life can get. Just waiting. Waiting for the ferry to Majuli Island.
A wooden canoe with two men poling across the river. Scooters arrive with whole families (mom, dad, baby, grandma) crammed on the single seat. A man with thin legs in white robes with a long gray beard. He looks massively wise. I will never look (or be) as cool as this guy.
The Brahmaputra River is tremendous, dozens of miles across, one of the largest rivers in the world, but this is the dry season so the river bed is mostly rocky desert with a few blue channels. To reach the ferry station, we drove for miles along an unbelievably bad temporary road. The locals scrape a new road across the dry bed every year because each monsoon reshapes the river. Last year the ferry terminal might have been miles away; the channels move every season. Absolutely nothing here is permanent. These people, mostly tribes from Majuli Island, live at the total whim of the river and its floods.
The ferry landing is small and wooden, handmade and crooked. There seems no way to get a car across it. It will be interesting to see how it is done. There is no sign of the ferry. This is fine by me as the moment is perfect just waiting. Sometimes just waiting is the most perfect state of being.
Motorcycles are cramming together on the landing. The river seems too shallow for a ferry capable of transporting cars and bikes. I realize that the structure I thought was the ferry landing is actually a crude wooden barge. It has a shabby corrugated tin roof. Schoolchildren are crowding aboard, throwing their bicycles and backpacks on the roof. In the distance, smoke begins to rise in a solid white column against the blue sky. Someone is burning the stubble in their rice field.
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The rickety platform I thought was the ferry landing or a barge turns out to be the ferry itself. It looks completely unseaworthy. There are so many people and motorbikes crammed on the flat deck it’s not clear why it doesn’t just sink to the bottom. There’s absolutely no room for the two cars (one of them mine) that still wait on the river bank.
Then again, this is India, where there is always room to cram one more thing into an impossible space. Not only do they manage to get my car aboard, they get the other one on too, using two sun-bleached, hand-hewn planks far too thin to support the weight of a car but that somehow do. The ferry rocks and sinks even lower in the water. People are packed so tightly on deck that they are shoved into a single mass, pressed into the sides of the car, flattened against the windows.
My wife and I are the last to board. We are the only whites, the only Europeans (the name they give all whites). There are lots of stares. I am a foot taller than anybody else on board. As usual I smile and nod and call out friendly greetings in English. Some return my smile, mostly the kids, many do not. Nobody is comfortable. My wife and I are aberrations, unpredictable curiosities dressed in Western clothes, carrying bright, clean backpacks full of who-knows-what. My wife, always the ambassador, brings out her phone and starts to show a video she’s just taken of the car being loaded onto the deck. Everyone is fascinated. The crowd smells of sweat. Everyone but us is wearing the traditional garb of the island’s tribes.
There isn’t room for us. Our driver motions for us to get into the car. We squeeze through the crowd and manage to get in, but it is sweltering hot inside so we roll down the windows, knowing that if this ferry sinks the car will be our coffin. The smell of the crowd fills the car. A woman leans into the window and stares at me, scowling.
Next to her a man wearing a colorful head scarf pulls out his phone and shoves the cracked screen up into my face and begins playing a video. I make hand motions to indicate that I can’t see the video without my glasses, but he doesn’t understand. The smiling man shoves the screen even closer, insistent. It’s a homemade video of a traditional dance of some kind, but without my glasses it’s all a blur. I thank the man and smile and he smiles back, but he’s not through. It’s obvious he wants me to watch the whole video. I look at the status bar at the bottom of the screen. It’s hard to tell, but it looks like the video is about fifteen minutes long.
The man keeps repeating a word: “Mishing! Mishing!” which I learn later is the name of one of the dominant tribes on Majuli Island; the man is showing me a video of a young woman (his daughter?) performing a tribal dance. He’s determined for me to watch the whole thing. I manage to dig my glasses out of my pocket. The crowd around me stares expectantly, studying my expression to see how I react to the video. I try to smile, though it’s hard to maintain the expression as the long minutes drag by with a blurry cell phone shoved in my face.
Finally, it is over. I thank the man profusely, which seems to satisfy both him and the surrounding crowd. They turn away, no longer interested. I feel like I’ve passed some kind of test. I am no longer a curiosity. I’m just a boring European.
-*-
Somehow my wife and I escape the sweltering car and make our way into the shaded space beneath the flimsy corrugated tin roof, which I assume is a passenger cabin because it is filled with people. I am wrong. It is the engine compartment. An antique iron-block diesel sits roaring and trembling in the middle of the deck with no safety precautions whatsoever to prevent somebody from burning themselves on the exposed exhaust or losing a finger or two in the spinning pulleys and belts. The decking is made of rough wooden planks, wide and the same dusty featureless gray that is the national floor color of India, a mixture of clay and cow dung. I’m surrounded by diesel stink, a press of sweating passengers, a narrow uncomfortable plank for a seat. I am as happy as I’ve ever been.
The ferry captain has a tough job. The shifting river bottom must make the route different every few days. I wonder if he has a depth finder. I wonder how often the ferries run aground on new sandy shoals? The river banks are crumbling mini-cliffs of pale sand on both sides of the narrow channel, sometimes higher than the sides of the ferry. They are miniature albino versions of the walls of the Grand Canyon, geology in sandy microcosm.
The breeze is damp and cool. The landscape flattens. I see an occasional duck or kingfisher, otherwise nothing but a white featureless weirdness. The sky is white, the water is white, the sand is white; the only difference between the three is in texture. It is surreal, floating in a milky void bisected by a thin horizon line of slightly darker milk. The chugging drone of the diesel obscures all other sounds. The passengers all seem to sense the alienness of their surroundings. Everyone is quiet and subdued, even the children. The only movement is when the young men tending the engine spit some kind of nasty red juice over the side, something they do every few minutes.
Something spindly, insubstantial, and huge looms ahead in the channel. It looks like a spider’s funnel-web strung between a triangle of long bamboo poles, with the wide end of the triangle submerged in the river. It’s moving. The whole structure, as big as a house, is swiveling on a surrounding frame. A man is standing at one point of the triangle. His weight causes the web (a fish net?) to pivot on hinges. The triangular net rises slowly out of the water and I can see hundreds of silver sparkles moving inside. The man shakes the huge net to bump all the fish together, then with a massive swing of his arms he dumps the fish into a holding area (four bamboo poles with nets slung between). He shifts his weight and the entire assembly sinks back into the water. I am amazed. I’ve just seen a stone-age technology every bit as sophisticated as a modern industrial fishing operation. A man with a net and a clutch of bamboo poles has landed hundreds of fish using nothing but his smarts, his weight and a bit of determination.
After an hour on the Brahmaputra we finally reach the river island. The ferry approaches another small collection of wattle huts at a low spot on the river bank, a mirror image of the place from which we’d left an hour earlier, complete with wandering pigs and dusty open-front huts selling water bottles and potato chips. The ferry grinds up against the bank. There’s nobody in charge of the embarkation, the ferry simply unloads itself, people pouring off the edges of the barge like rice spilling from a ripped bag. The air roars with the sounds of motorcycles as they cross the rickety wooden planks to the shore and speed away. The school children merge into clusters of two or three and begin the long walk to the village. I look around. The island of Majuli is green and exotic and beautiful. I can’t wait to start exploring.
To see all the posts in this series (Seven Weeks in India), click here and scroll through the post listings.
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