Slowly Down the Ganges. Eric Newby
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it to evaporate. For the inhabitants of India have a simple genius for concocting exasperating situations which, however long he may have lived in the country and however much he may have anticipated them, burst on the victim each time with pristine force. One of the prerequisites of real exasperation is that there should be no one to vent one’s anger on, and there was no one. The wind whistled through the reed walls of the bridge-builder’s hut but there were no dormant figures inside it to rouse from sleep and galvanise into activity. We were alone on the river bank under a vast sky.
It was at this moment that G. announced that the Executive Engineer of the Irrigation Works, who had been away on our first morning in Hardwar, had come back.
‘He has returned from Tour,’ he said. ‘Now he is giving us his boat. But first we are speaking with Assistant Engineer. He is feeling kindly towards us.’
The Assistant Engineer lived in a bungalow that was almost completely shrouded in bougainvillaea. It was difficult to imagine why he should be feeling well-disposed towards us. After an interval he appeared in a dressing-gown. The patience of Indian officials in the face of requests that must appear to them to be either lunatic or frivolous has to be experienced to be credible. What we were doing in this instance was the equivalent in Britain of waking a fairly senior officer of the Metropolitan Water Board at a quarter to seven on a winter’s morning, in order to ask him to wake a yet more senior official and request the loan of a boat from one of the reservoirs in order to go down to Southend.
‘I think Executive Engineer is lending you one boat,’ he said, when we explained the situation to him and he called the Executive Engineer on his telephone. The conversation was very brief.
‘He is not lending you his boat,’ he said.
‘We must now visit Executive Engineer,’ G. said.
‘But he’s just said he isn’t going to lend it.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said the Assistant Engineer. ‘Now you must visit him. He is lending you his boat.’
The Executive Engineer, who was in even greater déshabillé than his assistant, lived in a vast building close by the headworks of the canal.
‘I have no boat,’ he said without preamble.
‘You have two boats.’
‘I am needing two boats. I have no boat that I can spare.’
We showed him a letter from the Prime Minister. In Delhi it had had all the magic of a pre-war British passport. ‘We, Edward Frederick Lindley, Viscount Halifax, Baron Irwin, Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, a Member of His Majesty’s Most Honourable Privy Council, Knight Grand Commander of the Most Exalted Order of the Star of India, Knight Grand Commander of the Most Eminent Order of the Indian Empire etc., etc., etc., His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Request and require …’ Here, in the sticks, the impact was visibly diminished.
‘You must go to Delhi,’ he said, brightening momentarily. ‘The Prime Minister is in Delhi.’
‘We have just come from Delhi. He is in good health. We spent some time with him.’ This last tossed in carelessly.
‘Then you must go to Roorkee. At Roorkee there is Army Bridging Unit. They have many boats. It is only thirty miles.’
For what seemed ages the fruitless conversation butted backwards and forwards.
Finally, Wanda had a brilliant idea. She has developed a great capacity for overcoming disaster. Not that she has ever been without it.
‘You have two boats,’ she said. ‘It is obvious from what you say that you must be having two boats’ (effortlessly she slipped into the vernacular). ‘There is a boat in the river by the bridge which although unsuitable for a long journey is excellent for your canal. Lend us your boat and if you need two boats during the next two days use that one.’
Only in India could such an illogical argument have had any chance of acceptance. The boat that Wanda was offering the Executive Engineer was not even hers to offer. I tried to picture the scene in which the Executive Engineer tried to borrow the Contractor’s boat, and having succeeded, watched it sink in the canal. But suddenly he capitulated. Perhaps because he was even more alarmed by G.’s suggestion that he should close down the Upper Ganges Canal and divert its waters into the river, thereby allowing us to rush headlong downstream in a boat of really large draught.
The boat had most probably been built in the time of the British. Perhaps the prototype had been designed in a moment of nostalgia by an engineer who was an exiled rowing man. It was a five-oared skiff fitted with swivel rowlocks. It resembled what used to be known as a ran-dan, only in a ran-dan bow and stroke have oars and two uses sculls, and this was even larger. A few rare examples of ran-dan are or were employed until recently at the two Universities for conveying dons about their occasions and they are still used on the Thames by swan-uppers; but instead of being built of varnished mahogany this boat was constructed from mild steel plate put together with rivets. It was twenty-five feet long, had a five-foot beam and to show its official status it was painted battleship grey. Loaded it drew eighteen inches; and it needed thirty-two men to lift it.
We set off down the Ganges at two o’clock in the afternoon. It was 6th December, my forty-fourth birthday. Our immediate destination was the Balawali Bridge, twenty-five miles as the crow flies from Hardwar, a journey which we believed would take two days. The boat was deep-loaded, so deeply and with such a quantity of gear that only three of the five oarsmen’s benches could be occupied. Besides the six occupants (we had recruited two more boatmen and the Irrigation Engineer had sent one of his own men to ensure that his boat was not misused) there was the now augmented luggage, plus further purchases we had made in the bazaar at Hardwar; sacks of chilli powder and vegetables; namdars – blankets made from a sort of coarse felt; teapots, kettles, hurricane lamps and reed mats. I had even bought an immense bamboo pole from a specialist shop in the bazaar as a defence against dacoits (robbers) whose supposed whereabouts were indicated on some rather depressing maps which G. had annotated with this and similar information, in the same way as mediaeval cartographers had inscribed ‘Here be dragons’ on the blank expanses of their productions. G. himself had made an even more eccentric purchase from the same establishment – two officer’s swagger-canes about a foot and a half long which now, as he stood in the middle of the boat directing its final trimming with them, made him look like an old-fashioned sailor semaphoring. Our bills were paid. We had left a hundred rupees for a lorry-man to come to collect the boat downstream. Prudently we had put this into the hands of the men from Shell who by this time, together with the one who had told me that I had liked roses, were the only people we trusted. We had paid the thirty-two men who had come tottering barefooted across a mile of hot shingle with the boat upside over their heads all the way from the canal to the Ganges; we had shaken hands with everybody – some, whom we had never seen before, had wept; and for the second time in two days we had advanced money to boatmen for them to buy provisions for the journey (we never saw the first two boatmen again). We were ready to go.
As we crouched low in the boat while the current took us under the bridge, an old bridge-builder who was wearing spectacles as large as the headlamps of a Rolls Royce, dropped sacred sweets on us as a provision for the journey. His tears wetted our heads. The boatmen put their oars in the rowlocks and rowed off smartly. We were off.
Two hundred yards below the bridge and some twelve hundred miles from the Bay of Bengal the boat grounded in sixteen inches of water. This was no shoal. There was no question of being in the wrong channel. At this point the uniform depth of the river was sixteen inches. I looked upstream to the bridge but all those who had been waving and weeping had studiously turned their backs. The boatmen uttered despairing cries for assistance but the men at the bridge bent to their tasks with unwonted diligence. As far as they were concerned we had passed out of their lives. We might never have existed.
We all got out, including Wanda, who was wearing an ingenious