India rose up from the sodden, table-flat stubble plains in a wet green wall of hills and they let me down at an anonymous lay-by and the rattling bus rolled away into the cold drizzle.
There was a dirty yard hemmed by dripping trees where a few trucks had tipped loads of coal into great heaps. It was low grade, broken coal, and the rain had turned the dust to black mud. There were no people anywhere.
I walked on a little way and saw tin roofed huts with dripping gutters, and one crooked pole across the road, weighted at one end with a block of rough concrete, and held down with a rag of frayed rope at the other. A thin chicken was mincing back and forth beneath it. Just beyond the barrier pole the road bent left into a solid bank of wet trees and the land rose abruptly. It was another country.
I found the border guards dozing in a tin hut that smelt of rain water and paraffin. They stamped me out of Bangladesh and I slipped around the corner of the pole and walked up the broken rising road into India. There was no one at the immigration post and I had to wait for almost an hour before a thin, shivering man with a green blanket over his shoulder and droplets of rain in his moustache came and filled in my details in a damp ledger and thumped an inky stamp into my passport. And I walked on, uphill.
The road was unsurfaced, and brown-water streams were breaking it apart. There were country trucks, loaded with coal parked along the bending verge beside the dark forest, but their engines were cold and their doors were locked.
It was not long after midday, but the air was so wet and heavy that it seemed like an early nightfall was already slipping out from between the muddy, rotting trees. No one passed me on the road, but I saw a collapsing wooden shack where a couple of men with dripping noses squatted around a guttering stove, their blankets draped from the tops of their heads down across their shoulders. The road bent on, narrow, and rain-cut and steep. Back on the other side of the barrier there were no hills at all.
The village was down below the road in a wet hollow. There were mildewed white walls and red-rusted tin roofs, rattling gently in the rain. The place smelt of woodsmoke and chickens. There was a small bazaar where women with pale, Chinese faces sold live catfish from broken plastic buckets. There was no bus to Shillong until the morning. There was no jeep, and no minibus either. One driver, squatting on a broken concrete step half-heartedly offered to take me, but he was drunk, and he couldn’t even be bothered to think of a price. I ate muddy river fish and cold rice in a damp shack. I had almost no Indian money but a thin Sikh in a gloomy hard-ware shop, warmed by a smoking stove changed the last of my Bangladeshi Takkas, and told me to go to the police station.
The police station had mould on the walls and no glass in the windows and chickens sheltering under the desks. They gave me tea and said I could stay in the inspection bungalow. The bungalow was on the top of a little hillock above the bazaar. The chowkidar trembled as he walked. His eyes were cloudy like water after clothes have been washed in it and his voice was cracked. He fumbled with the keys when he let me into the room. There was a sign on the wall that forbade cooking or consuming alcohol. The rain was coming down heavier now, thundering over the roof and the electricity had failed. It was so dark outside that I couldn’t see to read, even when I sat beside the window, so I went back out and wandered with my hood up, beyond the last of the rotting houses, past a mildewed church with white walls and a red roof. I could see the thick mist smoking over the trees on the steep slopes above the village to the right. To the left there was only an empty grey hollow. Half a mile on, through the wet forest, a bridge crossed a dank gorge. There were Punjabi soldiers sulking over their cold guns in wooden huts at either end. From the empty void to the south strange, satanic noises rose: cracks and clanks and metallic grindings, and flashes of sizzling electric light sparked the mist like far-off thunderstorms. It was Bangladesh, and they were lifting gravel from the banks of the river where it ran onto the unrelenting flatness.
Back in the village it was darker than ever, though it was only two o clock. A little gaggle of men were squatting outside a shop selling beer in brown bottles. They all had the same pale, Chinese faces, and they all had woolly hats, beaded with the thin rain, pulled low down on their brows. They were all drunk. The women were still selling muddy catfish, and quite suddenly, quite bizarrely the afternoon prayer call rung out, very loud and very clear over this wet, lost village where there were no Muslims. It was coming out of Bangladesh, 200 yards away. I hadn’t seen another foreigner for a month, and I felt like the last tourist in the world.
And then, suddenly there was another Englishman standing in the road in front of me. He held out his hand and said, “You must be Timothy.” This wasn’t all that odd: he had crossed the border after me and had seen my name in the damp ledger. He was a professional photographer and he had been working in Bangladesh. For a while we wondered if we could hire a jeep to Shillong together, but the only driver was now even drunker and he laughed idiotically at us.
It was almost completely dark by mid-afternoon. I had read the sign on the wall in the bungalow, but the chowkidar was too senile to care, and we bought beer in brown bottles and clambered back up the slippery steps and sat drinking in the room waiting for the electricity to come back on, while the rain rattled endlessly on the roof.
The photographer was more than a decade older than me, and he laughed at how young I was. He had travelled all over Asia in his twenties, and said he had once been as enthusiastic as me. He told me about being robbed in Thailand and that, once he had stopped shaking, it had felt so good to have absolutely nothing (though they hadn’t found his money and passport, secured inside his clothes). I had never been to Thailand. He told me that the most beautiful women in the world were in Vietnam. I had never been to Vietnam.
He laughed at me for pretentiously refusing to read modern literature, and he warned me not to travel too much, not to see too many places in too short a time. He said that he had made this mistake, and that now, in his thirties, very little impressed him, very little seemed new. Even Bangladesh with all its light-dark strangeness had just been another hot dirty country, and worse yet – it had no beer. I scoffed back at him; maybe that could happen to some people I said, but not to me. I was too sensitive to the world around me to become that cynical.
It turns out that he was quite right about the books. For a while, about the time I landed in Cairo a few years later, I thought he had been right about travel too. But he wasn’t.
Outside it really was dark now, and it was still raining. There was still no electricity and the beer had all gone and the last prayer call was echoing out of another country.
© Tim Hannigan 2008
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