Land of the Dawn-lit Mountains Read online

  Although the Indian government has cautiously been allowing foreigners into Arunachal Pradesh since 1998, travel there remains tightly controlled. Those who wish to go must apply for a thirty-day permit and travel in groups of two or more, with a guide, and only to stated areas. All this sounded deeply dull. I’d need longer than thirty days to explore the Portugal-sized state, and I definitely didn’t want to see it through the window of a minibus full of German lepidopterists. Luckily I knew just the man who could inveigle his way around these tiresome restrictions.

  Six months after our meeting in Delhi, I dialled Abhra’s mobile number: there was that familiar laugh at the end of the line, his cheerfulness infectious even from 5,000 miles away. Of course he could arrange a longer permit, he chuckled. He knew just the man. And yes, his new travel company, Native Route, would be delighted to help me with contacts and logistics. I trusted Abhra implicitly. With him on board I knew my idea was possible.

  While Abhra worked his magic on the guide and permit situation, I turned to the happy conundrums of when, where and how. Maps of this part of the world are both scarce and inaccurate – even London’s Royal Society for Asian Affairs, whose drawers bulge with yellowed, musty old maps of the Empire, had a paucity of relevant cartography. Every other corner of Asia was represented, but not this part of India; it really was a forgotten land, a blank space in the popular imagination. Instead I turned to Google Earth, poring over jade forests and snowy ridges, my eyes greedily following the contours from which rivers purled and plummeted and great peaks soared. I befuddled myself with weather charts and rainfall statistics, rooted out contacts and delved into obscure, out-of-print books by long-dead explorers. The deeper I dug, the more excited I became. With India’s BJP Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s efforts to bring India’s eighty million tribal people into the religious mainstream, border tensions with China and the rush for resources to feed, water, power and supply India’s exploding population, this long-ignored state seemed on the cusp of exponential change. It could not have been a better time to write about it.

  Abhra, meanwhile, had been working his charms to good effect, pulling the creaky strings of Indian bureaucracy to secure me the promise of a two-month permit. As for whether I’d have to travel with a guide, that remained a blurred point and something even the law was unclear on. While Abhra’s influence meant I’d be able to avoid the spectre of any sort of guided tour, and essentially travel independently, the sensitivity of the border area, overspill of insurgent activity from Assam and Nagaland, and regularity of police and army checkpoints meant I couldn’t entirely dispense with guides. Initially resistant to this, I conceded that either I accepted this situation or didn’t go at all, the thought of which was by now unbearable.

  I’d soon hatched a plan to loop and wiggle from one end of the lozenge-shaped state to the other, travelling roughly 3,000 miles from the humid jungles of the Patkai Hills bordering Burma in the east, to the gompa-clad Himalayan heights of Tawang in the west. It was a journey that would take me through dark, primal jungles, thickly forested hills, remote valleys and to places that few, if any, Westerners had visited. It wouldn’t be easy. Arunachal is carved into a series of steep, forbidding valleys by the great tributaries of the Brahmaputra – among them the Lohit, Dibang, Siang, Subansiri and Kameng – which pour down from their sources high on the Himalayan plateau. Since these make it impossible to traverse the state in a straight line from east to west, I’d be forced to travel up and down each valley. Given these difficulties, I would travel by a combination of means – a motorbike that Abhra agreed to find for me, plus foot, boat and public transport.

  Deciding when to do this was even more problematic. Northeast India’s climate and terrain have been the nemesis of many a would-be conqueror and explorer. Not only is it the wettest place on earth, hammered by monsoon rains from April until October, but either side of this annual deluge stalks the ferocious Himalayan winter. During a military campaign in Assam 300 years ago, Mullah Darvish of Herat wrote:

  ‘Its roads are frightful as the path leading to the Nook of Death . . . its forests are full of violence . . . its rivers are beyond limit . . .’

  In 1926, Frank Kingdon-Ward said of the region: ‘The frivolous might say there are two seasons; eight months wet, and four months damned wet.’

  Being of a reptilian disposition, I dislike the cold and had no wish to battle my way through blizzards and white-outs. But nor did I fancy being washed away by floods and landslides or trekking through humid jungles dripping with rain and pit vipers.

  To complicate things further, Arunachal ranges from Himalayan summits of over 7,000 metres to the near-sea-level plains of Assam, and is home to almost every climatic zone on earth. In late spring and summer it would be beautiful in the higher-altitude areas but wet, sticky and malarial in the lower jungles. In winter these jungles would be cool, dry and appealingly free of snakes and leeches, but the higher passes would still be cloaked in snow. Autumn was the obvious time to go, but it was already late summer and I wouldn’t be ready in time. It was a temporal catch-22.

  In the end, factors outside of my control delayed my departure date by more than a year. But on 1 February 2016, almost two and a half years since I’d first met Abhra, I dragged my bulging holdall off the baggage reclaim at Guwahati airport and walked out into the mist of the Assamese winter.

  2

  ALL I NEED IS A HERO

  Abhra was busy creeping after snow leopards in Himachal Pradesh for the BBC’s Planet Earth II, so I was met at the airport by Manash, his business partner. Blessed with the almond-eyed good looks typical of the tall, paler-skinned Assamese, Manash was to be my Man in Assam. An Enfield-riding, rock ’n’ roll-loving fount of knowledge and resourcefulness, he was to prove an indispensable addition to Mission Arunachal.

  As Manash steered his Scorpio 4WD through Guwahati’s honking, polluted streets, the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin crackling out of the stereo, I took in the passing bedlam of Northeast India’s largest city. An exploding metropolis of over a million people sprawled along the southern banks of the Brahmaputra, it was India in all its Technicolor madness, a riot of barging cars, darting auto-rickshaws, wandering cows, dirt and noise. Bangladeshis pedalled between the traffic on dilapidated bicycle rickshaws. A man stood urinating onto the dusty verge. Women squatted beside piles of burning rubbish. People stared. It was hard to imagine it had once been known as Pragjyotishpura, the ‘light of the East’, the city where Lord Brahma first created the stars. One of the nation’s fastest-growing cities, it was seeping inexorably into the surrounding hills, the bloating peripheries frequently pushing leopards into its concrete alleys.

  Speeding under lines of the tall, slender betel palms, which give it the modern name Guwahati, ‘market of betel nuts’, I remembered that to love India you have to hurl yourself at it feet first – embrace the chaos, the oddities, the unexpected, the frustrations, the failures. If you don’t, it will probably drive you mad. And besides, the India I was heading for wasn’t India as we know it; it was another world entirely.

  The following few days passed in a whirlwind of mechanics, paperwork, shopping, packing and pujas. I first met my motorbike down a rutted alleyway the next morning. A 150cc Hero Impulse that Manash had picked up for 39,000 rupees (about £390), it stood at the back of a mechanic’s cluttered shed, a plain thing but perfectly suited for the task. Light, simple and designed for off-road use, I was glad to have chosen it over a beautiful but brutish Royal Enfield. A crowd assembled as I swung my leg over the saddle and tapped it into first gear for a spin. But it had been six months since I’d been on a bike and nerves and unfamiliarity sent me careering down the alleyway, narrowly missing an oncoming rickshaw and almost knocking an old woman to an early grave. Thankfully I’d calmed myself and the wayward Hero by the time I returned to the gawping crowd, and I glided to a stop with limbs and pride intact.

  For the rest of the day we threaded through a maze of choked streets, scour
ing the city for all-terrain tyres, Manash weaving expertly through the traffic ahead of me on his old black Enfield. It wasn’t long before I felt accustomed to the Hero and the familiar irregularities of Asian traffic. My last journey, a solo exploration of Indochina’s Ho Chi Minh Trail, had begun in the cacophonous streets of Hanoi, a city whose roads were even more frenzied. Here cars pushed and barged and beeped, rickshaws cut you up and no one cared a jot about those pointless white lines on the tarmac. But at least there were no women staggering across the road under back-breaking yokes of fruit and vegetables, or swarms of mopeds, or streams of gossiping girls bicycling nonchalantly through the clamorous mass of man and machine. Compared to Hanoi, Guwahati’s traffic was verging on sane.

  We passed markets where trays of live fish flapped and gasped at the roadside, zipped down side streets, and dived into boy racer shops bustling with gelled heads and gold chains. When the tyres eluded us I bought the Hero a Sex Pistols sticker instead, the closest thing I could find to a Union Jack. In the fusty offices of an insurance company, where plump workers typed idly under Krishna calendars, Manash encouraged the woman with 400 rupees, around four pounds, to insure my bike. Had he not, it would have taken a week, instead of an hour, for her to do the job.

  It was dusk before we found the right tyres, and two thin, grubby boys squatted barefoot in the street to fit them by the light of a mobile phone torch. I crouched on the pavement beside them, keen to see how it was done, only to be distracted by a pathetic, limping beggar who appeared beside me, babbling and holding out his hands for money. It was impossible not to feel sorry for him, so I handed over some notes and watched him hobble away, a poor pitiful creature, the sort you sadly see so many of in India.

  Occasionally our errands would take us along the banks of the Brahmaputra, where couples sat on benches under palms and fishermen poled narrow wooden boats into shore. Vast, still and perpetually foggy at this time of year, the river looked placid and benign, but under that silken surface eddied knots of lethal currents and the gift of life and death. The only male among India’s major rivers, the ‘son of Brahma’ is the fluvial spine of Northeast India, its lifeblood, destroyer and shifting serpentine heart. By the time it reaches Guwahati, its waters have travelled a thousand miles from their source beneath Mount Kailash, flowing east through Tibet as the Yarlung Tsangpo, thundering south through Arunachal Pradesh as the Siang, and then emerging onto the plains as the Brahmaputra. South of Guwahati it becomes the capricious Jamuna of Bangladesh, then the Padma and, finally, as it merges with Mother Ganges and flows into the Bay of Bengal, the mighty Meghna. A frequent companion over the coming months, never would it look the same.

  The one thing we couldn’t find in this entire heaving city was a top box. Setting off on a journey through some of the wettest mountains on earth without a lockable, waterproof box on the bike was unthinkable. But such a thing apparently didn’t exist in Guwahati.

  ‘Come on, Manash, this is India; there’s always a solution. There must be someone who can make me a top box,’ I said one evening.

  ‘I’m damn sure there is too,’ he replied, a determined look in his eye. Manash, I’d learnt, was not a man accustomed to giving up.

  Besides working with Abhra, Manash was also involved in project-managing a slew of government-funded solar power installations in remote Assamese villages, part of Modi’s drive to bring electricity to 400 million rural Indians. The fabrication work for these projects was done at a local factory and, within minutes, Manash had made a few calls and arranged for them to make me a top box the next day.

  ‘It’s not going to be the top box of your dreams,’ he warned, with a wry smile. ‘It’s going to be an Indian-style top box. But it should be OK.’

  At 10 a.m. we arrived at a cavernous warehouse on the industrial fringes of the city. Steel girders lay stacked on the dirt floor and blade-thin workers, their backs shiny with sweat, stood and stared as I walked in.

  ‘You Britishers are very stronger [sic], mentally and physically,’ said Probir, the factory owner, as we sat drinking tea in his beige, air-conditioned office. On the dirt track outside the warehouse, three of his men bent over the back of the Hero to measure it up. The measurements had to be precise; a millimetre out and the new box’s bolts wouldn’t fit into the pre-existing rack at the back of the bike. The men furrowed their brows and chewed the ends of pencils with paan-stained mouths. They squinted. They conferred. They measured their hands against the rack and scribbled vital digits on a scrap of paper. No one thought to use a new-fangled device such as a ruler or measuring tape. Why bother when hands and eyes would do?

  Probir wobbled his head from side to side in the classic Indian manner that variously means: Yes, OK, I understand, Hello, Maybe or You’re welcome. ‘We will do the needful.’

  The top box, he said, would be ready that evening.

  In the meantime, there was one more thing I had to do before I left Guwahati. No journey in India could possibly start without a puja, a ritual to invoke the blessings of the deities and ask for good luck on the road ahead, especially for a wildly superstitious traveller such as me. Where better to do this than at one of the country’s most ancient and powerful monuments to the divine feminine – Kamakhya, Guwahati’s Shakti temple to the mother goddess.

  The late-afternoon sun glowed through the mist as we climbed the marble steps to the temple. A begging torso, his head the only protrusion from a grossly malformed body, solicited the passing crowd for rupees. Sadhus with matted locks and dirty orange robes squatted under a banyan tree. Lines of stalls offered gaudy Shiva figurines, garlands of orange marigolds, incense, coconuts and butter lamps. And at the top, under a stone gateway guarded by a pair of muscular granite hounds, skulked a pack of priests, scarlet-robed and vulpine-eyed, who scanned the approaching crowd. There was big money to be made from the superstitious, particularly at somewhere as famous as Kamakhya.

  Manash, wise to the rapacity of the temple’s holy men, had called his family panda, or priest, in advance and, just as the pack prepared to pounce, a bony old man with a comb-over and rheumy, bespectacled eyes materialized before us, a plastic bag of offerings clutched beneath the folds of his faded navy shawl. Under the glare of the jilted priests, we took off our shoes and walked barefoot into the temple compound.

  Beyond the gates, crowds of devotees milled around the sprawling, squat stone building. Bells rang. Priests chanted. Families took selfies in front of the ridged beehive dome. Pigeons flapped around stone effigies. Throngs of sari-clad women rubbed ringed fingers on the worn feet of elephant-headed gods, adding to the slick of 500 years of grease and vermilion. And among it all strutted, butted, nibbled, grabbed and chewed numerous fat stinking billy goats.

  I’d expected goats, but bloody, headless carcasses, not live, well-fed pets, their coats smeared reverently red. For Kamakhya is a sacrificial temple, a place whose courtyards have oozed with blood for more than a thousand years. Hindu mythology, never one to shy away from a ripping yarn, relates how the temple’s origins lie in the marriage of Lord Shiva, one of the most powerful gods in the dizzying Hindu pantheon, to a beautiful goddess called Sati. But Sati’s haughty father didn’t approve of his daughter marrying a dreadlocked ascetic who spent most of his time meditating at the top of Mount Kailash, and excluded her from the family. Shamed and furious, Sati went into deep meditation, burst into flames and died.

  Mad with grief and hellbent on destruction, Shiva rampaged through the universe with Sati’s lifeless body on his head. The other gods tried mantras, chanting, jokes and dance to soothe him, but nothing worked. Eventually Lord Vishnu mounted his eagle, Garuda, and flew up to Mount Kailash, flinging his discus at Sati’s body and slicing it into fifty-one pieces. The place where each piece fell to earth became a site of worship of the divine mother: of these, the most powerful was where Sati’s yoni, or vagina, had fallen, a hilltop overlooking the Brahmaputra River west of modern Guwahati. From then on Kamakhya, as the site was soon known,
became a powerful centre of worship of the divine feminine.

  No one knows how old Kamakhya is, but by the tenth century it was already an important centre of sacrifice, mysticism and sorcery. And it wasn’t just wild boar, alligators, lions and rhino whose heads thudded from the chopping block. Humans, specifically men, were frequently offered too. After the original, pre-Aryan temple was destroyed by Muslim invaders in 1498, its reconstruction was celebrated with the decapitation of 140 human ‘volunteers’ whose severed heads were presented to the goddess on bronze platters. In need of particular divine favour, one seventeenth-century ruler offered the goddess the heads of 700, apparently willing, devotees.

  There are whispers that human sacrifice hasn’t entirely disappeared from these parts. Possessed of a mind drawn to the edges of things, this was one of the many mysterious subjects that had initially attracted me to write about this forgotten corner of the subcontinent. Incredulous when I’d first heard tell of it in Delhi two years previously, a subsequent trawl through the internet turned up a series of disturbingly recent Indian media reports involving Tantrik priests, superstitious villagers and decapitated bodies. In 2013 a fifty-year-old woman from Mumbai had been killed in a Tantrik ritual. Uttar Pradesh had suffered a spate of alleged sacrifices in 2006, the illiterate villagers apparently goaded by travelling priests promising bountiful harvests and untold wealth. And there were persistent rumours that children were secretly sacrificed to ensure the successful completion of large-scale construction projects.

  Only hours after arriving in India I’d found myself sitting in the dimly lit corner of a restaurant, being told with surety that human sacrifice still took place.

  The journalist lowered his voice and looked furtively around us. ‘It’s best no one overhears this conversation.’ He paused to light another cigarette before continuing, his leather jacket creaking as he lifted the flame to his mouth. ‘It’s not just for big construction projects, it happens here too. Every summer a Tantrik fertility festival is held at an important local temple and it’s said that in the middle of the night, in a closely guarded ceremony, a child is sacrificed. Rich men pay priests a lot of money to do it, believing it will bring them even greater wealth.’