vanished wilderness - by subroto mukerji

8/9/2019 Vanished Wilderness - by Subroto Mukerji

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VANISHED WILDERNESS

by Subroto Mukerji

Allah does not deduct from a mans life the hours he spends

fishing---old proverb.

Who knows where it came from or where it went. It flowed

from time immemorial, a thing alive, aloof from the rest of Creation.It hacked its way past jagged mountain ramparts in their perennialmantles of white, slicing through the lower valleys. A blue-whitefury, it wore down everything it came up against, rushed past, or ranover, as it hurled itself like a writhing snake at the plains far below.

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It watched, unmoved, as eons came and went, ascreatures on its banks lived, died, or drifted away, a torrent self-sufficient, answerable only unto itself. From time to time, the man-things came to its banks, living off it. It cared not, for it had enoughfor all, a bounty it shared readily with those who dared to try and

snatch sustenance from it. Occasionally, one of them fell in and wasswept away to his death.It gave life and took it away, cold, remote, detached,

uncaring in its wild beauty. It mirrored the rich tapestry of existencearound it, alone and proud, content to be but itselfinvulnerable,emotionless eternal.

As the car topped the rise and halted at the crest of theridge, the boy sucked in his breath with a hiss. After the dust andmud of the hour-long drive, the sight was breathtaking: an unspoiltvalley, heavily wooded, and probably teeming with game. The river

was a thing of wonder, winding and snaking, battering itself againstrocks the size of houses, a splash of royal blue such as he had neverglimpsed before.

It was a thing of creamy rapids and boisterous riffles punctuated bydeep, deceptively-still pools where the water seemed to take abreather before plunging into a stretch of white-water even moreviolent than the one before. Never before in his young life had heseen so marvelous a thing. He had seen deep, contemplative lakes,cheeky little mountain torrents, submissive streams, sleepy, lotus-filled ponds. But thisthis was something altogether different.

He sprinted down to the golden beach, revelling in thesound of the virgin sands crunching under his hunter boots. Thepool was a thing of beauty and mystery, deep and alluring, cloakingits denizens with a reflection of the azure skies above. Eighty yardsacross the expanse of smooth, blue-green, glassy water, myriad rockpigeons fluttered about in clumsy, noisy lovemaking on the sheerrocky cliffs where a few hardy plants clung in audacious defiance.

With trembling hands he assembled the old cane rodand fitting a spool reel, ran the line through the rod-guides andwrapped a ball of dough around the hook. Then he peeled off abouttwenty rod-lengths of line, and whirling the baited hook with its two-

ounce lead sinker round and round over his head, like a bolas,allowed it to slip from his hand and sail away gracefully to cleave thewaters oily-smooth surface forty yards away.

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The line tightens as the bait hits the bottom, rolling withthe current, and it has not come to a stop when the rod jerks in hishands like a thing alive and the reel screams in panic as line smokesoff it. The tip of the rod is whipping with the sheer violence of thepassage of the line through the tungsten-carbide line guides; the rod

bends in a graceful arc as the boy rears back in the age-oldtechnique of the mandatory strike against the fishs bite. Thetortured shriek of the racheted reel is a symphony to his ears, andhe glances down apprehensively as he sees the last of the hundredyards of nylon monofilament line swish away and the mooga(braided-silk backing line from Kanto Brothers, Bowbazar Street,Calcutta) come into view.

He is still a boy, and the rod is heavy and very hard onhis arms now, the whirling handles of the reel are an indistinct blur.He is careful to keep his hand away from them, for one touch of hisfingers will be enough to snap the line. It curves away to the right,away from the cliff face, then scythes back as the big fish runs thisway and that to dislodge the thing caught in its mouth.

The tall man in the sola hat now comes to his rescue,knowing the boy is in trouble, leaning back against the arcing rod,

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and now the fish shows the first signs of tiring, allowing abouttwenty yards of line to be recovered before it makes another maddash for freedom. The rushes get shorter and shorter, and at last thefish shows itself, a long shadow in the depths, struggling valiantly,trying to throw the hook.

Drawn reluctantly to the surface, its dorsal fin cuts thewater like a knife as it cruises in the shallows, turning over on itsside now and then as its strength fails it. Fifteen minutes later, it isgasping on the bank, a sleek, thirty-pound mahaseer, all goldengreen and silver, and the boy thinks he has never ever seen such alovely thing in his life. He loves that fish, for to him it epitomizes thewonder of it all.

The next Sunday, they do not cross the river, but followits left bank in the jeep, climbing into a ridge where the machine has

to go in first gear, engine straining against the acclivity. As it dropsinto a deep rut, he braces himself against the jerk, but to his uttersurprise the jeep sails through it unperturbed, its unique suspension,so hard on the spine on asphalt roads, at last in its element, itssprings designed for just such terrain.

The boy looks longingly at the controls, but it will someyears before he will be old enough to drive. He watches closely,yearning, learning, filing everything away in his mind for the futurethe racing change into a lower gear, the heel-and-toe technique asthe jeep plunges into gullies then up a spur, the powerful engine

roaring in triumph.

Dense jungle on either side, dark, silent, expectantaleopard, startled into breaking cover, bounds across the track. Thereare birds everywhere; the air is redolent with the scent of exoticflowers. A profusion of butterflies, like a colorful veil carelesslythrown over the vegetation, adds a touch of the surreal. It is afantasyland, far away in time, a land none has ever seen before.

The track descends sharply, and the jeep crawls down itcautiously till the path starts leveling off; now there is blue amongthe trees, and he knows they are with the river again. The forest

thins away as the jeep comes up against its most formidableopponent, the small, football-sized boulders that were once theriverbed.

A halt for changeover to 4-wheel drive, then the jeepcreeps along over the rocks, rolling over them one tire at a time,walking over them, plunging luxuriously on its deliciously deep,velvety springs, drawing ever closer to the current murmuring toitself across the ages.

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There isan old

abandoned fishing lodge, here at Buxar, where men have comeyears ago and left for distant shores leaving behind a few chairs andbooks no one wants. Mouldy, covered with the dust of years, butbooks! The boy, wondering, picks one upit is one he has oftenwanted to read but never could find, Col. A.J. St. John Macdonaldstimeless classic Circumventing the Mahaseer.

They are all there, Isaac Waltons The Compleat Angler,the first known treatise on fishing, which is classified as literature,Skene Dhus TheMighty Mahaseer, Capt. Conways Sunlit Waters,Thomas delightful and authoritative The Rod in India.

What manner of men were they, those ghosts of thepast, to have left such a fortune behind? Is it their legacy to a futuregeneration? For any soul hardy and daring enough to come here, tothe river, to this utterly wild and desolate spot, unafraid of the

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dangers and the things that live here, must surely be one of them,one who will realize the worth of these treasures, reading them,absorbing their lore, and leaving them here for those who follow.

Men who love the wilderness, who live in the wilderness,are men of a different breed, a dissimilar species, loving wild things,

clouds, birds, the dew on the open grass, a deer in the forest, aripple in the river, a duck rising smoothly into the blue, even lovingthe most vicious animal of allManloving everything, every man,every woman, so deeply, so completely, so compassionately, lovingthe all in a way that other, civilized men and women can neverunderstand.

What man in his right mind will venture into this ruggedcountry, teeming with game and predators, unarmed andconspicuous, in search of the elusive thing calledcalled what?What do you call that thing which fills your heart till its fit to burst

with the sheer grandeur of it, that feeling that you are one with allcreation, all things come together in an insanely logical unity; for amoment the obscurest of scriptures makes absolute sense, there is afeel of the Absolute, the selflessness of it all is paramount, poetrycomes alive, there is a pattern, never before glimpsed, anunderlying purpose that is lost in the selfishness of urban life, thepreoccupation with the self unmindful of the Self.

As the days become weeks and then years, he exploresthe terrain, here treading in the footsteps of forgotten legend AnilDeva Mukerji, hunter, tracker, woodsman and conservationist non

pareil, there lying on the rocks watching the crocodiles frolicking inthe shallows, from the very spot, over the pool that bears his name,where the great F.J. Champion photographed them in the thirties.

A squadron of three very large Mahaseer is chasingyearlings, streamlined streaks of silver in the deep water, but soclear is it that it seems they fly through air. One of them comeslunging right through the surface, preceded by a spray of young in atearing hurry to get away from the marauder; thwarted, he hangs inthe air, slowly shaking his head from side to side, peering up at thesky in surprise, then falls back into the pool with a thunderous

splash.

The young man watches, fascinated, camera and fishingrod forgotten. There is not a soul within five hundred square miles.Men are at work in stuffy little offices elsewhere (where iselsewhere? Is it is preferable to this? Then why do they stay there, inthat elsewhere till the day they die, kowtowing to false gods, eatingcold, stale food from little tin boxes, their pale skins untouched byrain or wind or sun. What manner of men would give up all this forthat?). He knows that one day he may have to join them, those tin

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soldiers, but for now he stocks up on memoriesthose that areworth keepingfor memories are made of this.

He goes to Garjia, where an obstinate sliver of quartzitehas resisted erosion and has split the river instead. It is a lone knife-

edge of rock towering over the twin streams that flow around it,topped by scanty vegetation, a rock climbers delight. He visitsplacid Tumaria, where the river widens out and branches intonumerous shallow channels that a man can easily wade through. Heremembers a deep, oily run with steep gravelly banks, where hispartner hooked a big fish that sulked for half an hour at the bottombefore it was pumped up to the surface.

Or a stretch of boulder-filled rapids that a sow crosses, awild piglet firmly grasping her tail in its mouthand its siblingssimilarly attached in tandem one to the other, strung together like

so many sausages. She powers her way through the fast current likea motorboat, her little family tossing in her wake, to emergetriumphant on the other side with her team still attached to her andintact. In all the days he spends on the river, he never meetsanother soul. And all around him is the jungle, companionably silent,never complaining, never demanding anything but understandingand respect.

He remembers the nameless place that once he reachedby wading through a fast, chest-high current. The beach is golden,and the rapids are perfect for casting his line and lure, but after a

hundred yards, he halts, his senses at full alert. The breeze hasbrought with it the scent of tiger, once smelt, never forgotten, ascent men know instinctively from caveman times.

Slowly, without making any quick movements, he looksaround; in a clump of bushes fifty yards away, the motionless hornsof a cow can be seen at ground level. A tigers kill, concealed in thevegetation! And the big cat must also be there, watching unseen.

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Slowly, he turns and walks back the way he has come,wondering if he is mistaken but not willing to take unnecessarychances. The tall man in the sola hat is approaching, and the youthlets him walk down the beach, determined to stop him if he gets tothe point where he himself had caught the tiger smell. But heneednt have worried; the tall man stops at the very same spot,wrinkling his nose uncertainly, then motions that they should retrace

their steps. The king of the jungle does not take kindly to beinginterrupted at the dinner table.

In these snippets from my memories, I have projected,to the best of my ability, a vision that mortal eyes may never seeagain. I hope you enjoyed it, because the real things long gone,gone that unique unspoilt wilderness, vanished forever, a victim tomans insatiable lust for energy, for hydro-electric power. The watersof an earth dam at Kalagarh have inundated thousands of acres ofjungle, including my favorite fishing spots, now buried under a deepreservoir that has backed all the way up the valley.

Tourist resorts have sprung up along its banks, and sincewild creatures dont particularly care for the music of Elton John,Gurdas Mann, Sonu Nigam, The Beatles, or a Britney Spears,whether on tape or CD, they have long since departed. Motorboatsplough across placid, soulless deeps that give no hint of thevanished glory of Champions Pool or the raging rapids of Buxar, andthe waters have long since carried away with it the books Idadmired, just as the current of life has swept away their authors.

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They had made an earthen dam over it, the fools, not

knowing that, in the entire span of its existence, nothing had evermanaged to hold it in check for long. Beneath the earths surface,

deep within its crust, it sensed the first of a series of convulsionsthat would get progressively stronger and more violent, like awomans contractions, as the over-burdened tectonic plates shifteduneasily and came together.

Soon, the pressures would reach levels where the plateswould slide one over the other, tearing rock the size of cities offeach other, releasing energy equivalent to hundreds of atom bombs.The dam would explode like a paper bag, and a tidal wave of trillionsof acre-feet of waterbillions of tons of it would smash its way far

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into the plains, bearing aloft on its foaming crest the pulverizedremains of towns and villages, like so many corks bobbing on thesurface of a millrace.

Then things would return to normal, as they always did,and it would be its old self again, running with the lay of the land, as

it had done from time immemorial.

The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness, and the power ofcontemplation than upon mere survival ~ AristotleSubroto Mukerji

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vanished wilderness - by subroto mukerji

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