That same afternoon, while we were all recovering from the marathon sight-seeing tour of Patna and Bankipore, the head of the Water Transport Board announced that he had arranged for us to travel down the river in a motor-boat belonging to the railways which was leaving early the following morning from a place called Mokameh Ghat for Manihari, a place on the left bank of the Ganges a couple of hundred miles downstream from Patna where the Ganges makes its last big bend to the south before it enters the sea.
Thankfully we abandoned the negotiations which we had started with the owner of another bhur, a similar boat to the one on the roof of which we had travelled down to Patna the previous evening.
‘Good,’ said Wanda, who had had enough of bhurs, when she heard the news. ‘I did not want to travel in those boats.’
There was just time before the train left for her to pay a last visit to the post office, where she persuaded one of the clerks to allow her to sort through the pigeon-holes of poste-restante mail. This time her diligence was rewarded; filed away under my Christian name were a number of letters.
At Mokameh Junction terrible confusion reigned. The night air was filled with the smoke from the cooking fires of the vendors of hot food, strange unidentifiable smells and the moaning of the poor. A horde of fierce-looking porters took up our luggage and set off with it at a brisk trot stepping on the women and children who crouched among their bundles in the booking-hall.
There were no trains to Mokameh Ghat any more, but just as we were beginning to enter into negotiations with a couple of ricksha men, a party of engineers from a nearby oil refinery hailed us with cheerful cries, offering to give us a lift in their jeep.
‘Plenty of room! Plenty of room!’ they said.
Altogether there were four of us, together with all the baggage crammed into the jeep, and two more, hanging on the back. ‘All is well! All is well,’ they shouted, even when the basket containing all the lanterns and the bottle of lime juice fell off while we were travelling at forty miles an hour. Their insane optimism was justified, for nothing was broken.
We needed their optimism when we arrived at our destination, the ‘lines’ of the employees of the railway at Mokameh Ghat. The house in which it had been arranged that we should spend the night was in total darkness. After some time, during which I blundered about at the back of the house banging on the shutters and waking a lot of dogs, the door was opened by an Anglo-Indian lady who was wrapped in some blankets. She showed us into a Victorian-Gothic room where we left our baggage.
‘My husband is still at the workshops,’ she said. ‘It is the night of the Satyanaryan Puja.’
Until 1954, when a railway bridge was built across the Ganges, Mokameh Ghat was one of the few links between the railway systems north and south of the river. From it passengers, iron ore from North Bihar and freight cars had been ferried across the river on lighters. Now its importance had declined and the workers in the railway yards were mostly employed on repairs to river steamers.
We walked down to the river bank, picking our way across deserted sidings and over platforms on which electric lights blazed as if trains were still expected. The wind keened through the girders which supported the roofs of the platforms. It was very eerie.
It was more cheerful in the workshops where the men had been celebrating the Satyanaryan Puja, in which the tools with which they worked had been blessed, and the party was just breaking up. The priest was packing up his utensils and he offered us a thick mixture of milk and bananas to drink.
While we were consuming this peculiar beverage our host appeared. He was a tall, thin man, wearing a sports coat and flannel trousers. He carried with him an invisible but tangible mantle of gloom, as well he might, living in such a place. Together we went back to the house, passing on the way a floodlit court on which other Anglo-Indians were playing badminton. The house had originally been the Railway Institute – this accounted for the size of the room where we had left our kit which had originally been the billiard hall. No sooner had I got into my sleeping bag than I discovered that I had left my diary which contained all the day-to-day details of our journey on the platform at Mokameh Junction.
I crept out of the house so as not to disturb our hosts, expecting an eight-mile walk, but by a miracle found a ricksha man crouching over a fire by the side of the road. It was cold in the open ricksha and I was consumed by awful thoughts about what I would do if my diary was lost, but when I reached the Junction I found that it had been put in a place of safety in the Assistant Stationmaster’s Office. I need not have worried for, as the Duty Clerk said, as he handed it over, ‘Sir, it is of no value to anyone.’
In the morning, a cold, clear one, after a large breakfast, we said goodbye to our hostess. Both she and her husband had been very kind to us but I had rarely seen two people in such a state of despair. Under British rule their position, and those of other Anglo-Indians like them, had been unsatisfactory; but, at least as trusted railway officials, they had been part of a hierarchy, although almost completely cut off from the rest of it socially. Now they were like stateless persons. Their only hope seemed to lie in abandoning their Englishness and becoming as Indian as possible.
The motor-boat was lying alongside one of the paddle-steamers. The crew were already on board and the engine was running. There were five of them: the Captain, the Pilot – a tiny little man with a ragged moustache who sat up in the bows wrapped in a blanket – the Engineer and two deck-hands. As soon as the luggage was stowed aboard we set off. Our last sight of the tragic figure of our kind host was waving to us from the deck of one of the paddle-steamers.
How good it was to be back on the Ganges. We had never travelled so fast on it. We swept down towards the bridge, which was a mile long, at fifteen knots, just as a freight train rumbled over it. The river itself was half a mile wide, but below the bridge it broadened still more. To the left, by the bridge, a tall factory chimney discharged puffs of smoke into the air like a cannon. Here, on the north side of the river, the country was marshy and, according to the Captain, these flats were the roosting places of thousands of water birds which passed the winter nights there in the branches of the marsh oak trees which grow in the shallow water.
It was a strange sensation being in a boat with a Captain, a Pilot and a real crew. For the first time since leaving Hardwar, we were in a boat with nothing to do. It was the forty-third day of our journey and sitting on the deck, looking across the water was like many other days we had spent on the Ganges but all run into one reel and speeded up. Women in mustard-coloured saris were bathing in the river and we passed villages of houses built of brick and mud with red-tiled roofs and with cows and water-buffaloes huddled under the walls and others roofless and deserted. We passed dead palm trees which looked like old bent candles standing alone or in pairs in the flat countryside, groves of mangoes and willows with their branches streaming in the wind, and banyans balanced precariously on eroded earthless roots. We swept down past small white-spired temples, old men sitting in niches carved in the banks and places where little fleets of fishing-boats were moored under steep banks which had been worn as smooth and shiny as leather by the stream.
The navigation was difficult but the pilot never spoke. He leaned over the bows sniffing the river through his ragged moustache like a clever old hound on a scent. Sometimes he raised his hand and one of the deck-hands put a sounding pole over the side; sometimes he pointed to the left or the right and the boat crawled off across the stream at right angles to it; sometimes he waggled his hand and the helmsman reversed until he could nose it into another channel.
The boat only drew two and a half feet; but the river was a maze of shoals, and it was full of culs-de-sac with corpses floating in them on which big grey gulls paced up and down. In the narrows the water seethed like a pot of brown soup on the boil and in the long, wider reaches, where the silt had a chance to settle, it was a brilliant shade of turquoise. In these deep places dolphins came to the surface and nuzzled the bows of the boat.
Sitting on the roof of the engine-room, looking down into this great and noble river, the face of which was capable of such extraordinary changes of expression all in the space of a few moments, we both experienced that feeling which comes so rarely to human beings of wishing that the moment in which we were living might be infinitely prolonged.
The wind increased; sand licked across the empty wastes to the left and the sky turned from blue to brown. The river was very shoal now. It swirled angrily round little ponds of calm water and we grounded twice, much to the Pilot’s disgust.
‘He has spent all his life on this river,’ said the Captain. ‘He is a fisherman but no man can know Ganga. She is always changing.’ He was an imperturbable, friendly man.
At noon the Kharagpur Hills began to loom out of the haze to the south-east. Although they were not more than sixteen hundred feet high, there in the plain they were as impressive as the Himalayas. We passed two jagged reefs with navigational marks on them, the first rocks we had seen in the Ganges since our arrival at Bindhachal on the way down from Allahabad.
By one-thirty Monghyr was abeam on a promontory, partly hidden behind the walls and bastions of the fort. Long flights of golden steps led down to the river and red-sailed country boats were beating up close to the shore with a sort of drogue out on their weather sides to keep them on the wind; others were running down before it – bows on the big sails with the sheets free looked like spinnakers. Ten minutes later we fetched up under the northwest corner of the fort.
As soon as the boat was tied up, everyone, except the Captain and the Pilot, scampered down the gang-plank which had been run out over the muddy foreshore and disappeared up the steps of the ghat.
‘The name of this ghat is Kashtarini Ghat,’ the Captain said. ‘It means bathing-place which destroys pain. They have gone to eat. After eating in Monghyr they will need this bath which destroys pain.’
The beautiful, crumbling ramparts of the fort were partly enclosed by a deep moat, filled with vegetation. The ramparts enclosed some less lovely buildings, court houses and bungalows built at the turn of the last century; but up on one of the bastions on the west side, there was the plain tomb of a poet named Ashraf, and the view westwards up the Ganges from it was all and more than a poet could wish.
Ashraf was the son of a mullah who lived by the Caspian sea and he had given lessons to the daughter of Aurangzeb who was herself a poetess. In 1672 he took long leave of absence and went to Ispahan in Persia. He died at Monghyr while on his way to Mecca in 1704. We did not, of course, know all this, or of the existence of the tomb, but fortunately we met a diminutive schoolboy trailing along the road who spoke a little English and he offered to take us to it.
‘He was a poet,’ he said as we stood gazing at the unremarkable tomb. ‘’Ow do you do?’
It was difficult to know whether he was addressing us or the long dead Ashraf.
‘Dead, dead, dead,’ he said. ‘The poet is dead.’ He was a strange little boy.
Almost every European who visited Monghyr seems to have liked it. Warren Hastings enjoyed the air. Bishop Heber on his way upstream from Calcutta in 1823 remarked that the walls and gates of the fort were ‘Asiatic … and precisely similar to those of the Khitairgorod of Moscow’, and that the Kharagpur Hills were ‘not inferior to the Halkin mountains and the ranges above Flint and Holywell’. He also said that ‘the guns made there were very likely to burst and the knives to break – precisely the faults which, from want of capital, beset the works of inferior artists in England’.
In November 1837, the Honourable Emily Eden, the author of Up the Country, visited the hot springs at Sitakund which lie a mile or two beyond the town. Sitakund is the place where Sita, the wife of Rama, having been rescued by her husband from Ravana the demon king, immolated herself in order to prove her chastity to her husband. Having emerged unscathed but overheated from the flames she entered the pool the temperature of which has fluctuated between 100 and 138 degrees Fahrenheit ever since, according to the season. ‘It is the first time for two years I have felt the carriage going uphill,’ she wrote. Fanny Parks, the adventurous authoress of Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque, visiting Monghyr in 1844, found the beggars ‘a pest’ and that ‘the people selling pistols, necklaces, bathing chairs, baskets, toys, shoes, etc., raised such a hubbub that it was disgusting’. But she liked the fort and the temples and she found ‘the black vases, turned in white wood and lacquered whilst on the lathe with sealing wax, pretty’.
She also went to Sitakund. ‘The water is pure,’ she said. ‘It keeps like Bristol water on a long voyage; people returning to England make a point of stopping here on that account.’
Monghyr was the scene of the extraordinary ‘White Mutiny’ of 1766 in which a number of officers of the First Brigade, dissatisfied because their field allowance had been reduced, decided to send in their commissions and informed Lord Clive of what they were doing in a joint letter.
Clive immediately despatched a number of reliable officers by forced marches to Monghyr and himself set off for the place. The advance guard found the European regiment officerless, drinking, singing and beating drums. The next day the soldiers mutinied and there followed the extraordinary spectacle of British infantry and artillerymen being disarmed at musket point by sepoys of a battalion of native infantry which one of Clive’s officers had fetched from Kharagpur, over the hills.
It was difficult to feel very enthusiastic about the town itself. Most of it had been rebuilt after an earthquake had partially destroyed the place in 1934. A few shops sold spear-heads and daggers; but although there was supposed to be a considerable business in ebony, the only ebony article we saw was a truncheon in one of the weapon shops. More attractive were the articulated silver fish which are made at Kharagpur, and are sold, like all silver objects, by weight.
At a quarter to three we returned to the motor-boat feeling rather empty. The crew, of course, had not returned.
‘They are coming,’ said the Captain, equably; but by three o’clock there was still no sign of them.
‘Boggers,’ said Wanda, happily. ‘I am going shopping,’ and before anyone could stop her she was gone, carrying her useful bag.
No sooner had she departed than the crew appeared. At first I fumed, thinking of all the things I had missed seeing: the house of General Ghurgin Khan, an eighteenth-century Armenian gunmaker who had been in charge of the arsenal, the hot spring at Sitakund and the Dargah of Shah Nafah, a mysterious building (mysterious because we had been unable to find it) which enclosed the grave of a Muslim saint who had appeared to the Governor of Monghyr in a dream, and whose corpse had given off a scent of musk in 1492. But the river front was so beautiful in the afternoon sunshine with a force five wind blowing, more like a seaport painted by Rex Whistler than a place on a river, that it was impossible to care very much whether I had seen them or not.
At a quarter past four Wanda returned with her useful bag bulging.
‘We were waiting for you,’ the Captain said.
‘I also do not like waiting for other people,’ she replied.
As we chugged downstream Wanda began to prepare the dinner. According to her it was to be a Mutton Baffat, a complicated dish, for which she had been given the recipe at Banaras. It was remarkable for the number of ingredients which were necessary for its preparation. It required mutton, cloves, cinnamon, onions, green chillies, garlic, ginger, vinegar, powdered red chillies, cummin seeds, turmeric, coriander, poppy seeds, groundnuts, lentils, butter, salt, potatoes, white radishes, coconut and water.
The only part of the recipe which she found confusing was the part which dealt with the coconut.
‘What I can’t understand is – it says, “add second extract of coconut to the meat,” and later on “add first extract”,’ she said, working away with a roller and a flat stone which she had borrowed from one of the deck-hands who also acted as cook.
‘I suppose it depends on which end you open the nut,’ I said.
‘And it says “Dose of onion, 113 grams”; but I’m not putting onions in.’
‘It will be no good without onion,’ the Captain said.
‘Well, I don’t like onions,’ she said, defiantly.
By four-thirty Monghyr was nothing but a smudge at the foot of the Kharagpur Hills and ours was the only boat on the huge expanse of the river. The only signs of life were on the left bank on which hordes of men and women were building an embankment, using pink, square blocks of stone that looked like pieces of raw meat which they bedded down and then covered with wire mesh to prevent them being swept away.
According to the Captain the men earned one rupee a day for this work; the women only 12 annas.31
The stream took us away from the left bank and the people on it, into the middle of the river among huge sandbanks which, in the pale evening light, merged imperceptibly with the sky. Here, for the first time, there was an abundance of navigation marks – a single spar with two cross-pieces for the starboard hand, knotted plumes of grass on sticks for port. The air was full of small birds, and as the sun sank a thin, crescent moon rose as if to redress the loss of it.
As soon as the sun was gone the Captain anchored. There was no question of worrying about the amenities on the banks. The Pilot let his hand fall and the anchor was dropped in mid-stream.
Wanda now began to cook the Mutton Baffat. The preparation had been a complex operation. She had ground the spices with vinegar, boiled the radish in salt water, mixed the cut-up meat with the red chillies, mustard and cummin seeds and the turmeric, all of which she had ground up together with four peppercorns on the flat stone. She had sliced the green chillies, the garlic and the ginger and now she added the broiled and ground coriander, the poppy seeds, the groundnuts and the lentils, following the recipe which read like a prescription. ‘Dosage,’ it read. ‘One dose Poppy Seeds, 14 gms. Dose Vinegar, 28 gms,’ and so on. As each fresh ingredient was added she dropped another paper bag on the deck. There was little that I could do. I stood over her, knee-deep in receptacles, holding a kerosene lantern, like a surgeon’s mate in a field operating-theatre in the Crimea.
Down in the stern the crew were getting on with their own meal but the Captain still watched, entranced. He watched her add the so-called ‘second extract’ of coconut milk to the meat and the mass of spices, the sliced ginger, the garlic and the green chillies. He watched her cook this huge mess until the meat was, in theory, tender.
‘Put the radishes in now,’ he said.
There was a short interval and then, without being told to, she put in the ‘first extract’ of coconut milk.
‘You must put in the onion,’ the Captain said.
‘What onion? I’m not having onions.’
‘You are not putting in all the onions but must put in half an onion. You must make it brown in fat and add to Baffat. Without the onion Baffat is no good.’
‘I’m not having any onions. I’ve got to eat it, too. It’s my Baffat.’
‘You have spoiled the Baffat,’ said the Captain. He was genuinely upset.
‘Bring the chapatis!’ he shouted. ‘The Lady has cooked her Baffat.’
‘Please have some,’ Wanda said. ‘There is enough for everyone.’ It was an understatement. I had never seen so much food.
‘I am sorry,’ he said, laying his hand on his breastbone as if he was suffering from heartburn, ‘but it is against my religion.’
‘What about the others?’
‘It is against their religion, too.’
‘Just because I left out the onions.’
‘No, no, not because of the onions. I am telling you the truth. It is against the religion.’
For what seemed hours we plugged away at the Baffat; but however much we ate we seemed to make no impression on what remained. From time to time a bubble forced its way up from the bottom of the pot. It was like trying to empty a pool of radioactive mud which was constantly renewing itself from the interior of the earth. All the time we were eating, fresh piles of chapatis were arriving from the after deck. It was delicious but all the time I was eating it I wondered what it would have been like with the onion.
When it came to all seven of us bedding down for the night, there was not much room. Wanda slept in the well of the foredeck; the Captain and the Pilot on two benches on either side of her, the Engineer slept on the roof of the engine-room and the deck-hands on the narrow strips of deck on either side of it. I slept on what, in a larger vessel, would have been the fo’c’sle head, on top of the anchor cable which was of stout chain. A strong wind was blowing up the river against the stream raising a chop, and as the boat surged in it the cable alternately slackened and tautened underneath me. All through the night jackals howled out on the sand, and while it was still dark the chantings of hardy souls performing their pujas in the wilderness mingled with them. The dawn came at six, very strong and red; then the sun rose in the shape of an egg, distorted by the haze of dust that filled the sky. It was the coldest night that we had experienced on the Ganges.
As soon as the sun was up it vanished into a bank of cloud. The wind blew through our clothes like paper. It was like a January morning on the Mersey. There was none of the high spirits of the previous evening and for us there was some particularly ghastly washing up to be done. To the right in the far distance were the outlines of a range of flattened-out hills; geese rose like jets from the huge expanses of the left bank and flew overhead in long skeins rising and falling in unison as if they were chained together; astern, to the west, the sky was streaked with black clouds, as if a child had been scribbling with a crayon on a sheet of grey paper. Wanda made tea for everyone and we began to feel better.
Gradually the wind that had tormented us all through the night and the early morning fell away and towards eight o’clock it died completely. A thick fog descended on the river and, with the sun shining through it, it was as if the boat was suspended in a bowl of melted butter. Then it cleared. Ahead, in the middle of the river where it made a bend to the north, there was an island, a huge pile of rocks that might have been stacked up by a child with a white temple on the top of it glistening in the sun. To the right, separated from it by some hundreds of yards of river there was a high, green headland surmounted by a mosque, its base heaped with boulders as huge as those on the island. Below it there was a little landlocked inlet on the shores of which tall palm trees rose in solitary splendour and from it flights of ruined steps led up into a little town. The waters of this inlet were of the consistency of olive oil, undisturbed by a single ripple, and far out white-clad bathers were performing their pujas, lifting the water slowly as if it was heavy and letting it fall slowly through their fingers back into the river. Closer inshore, golden-skinned Brahmans were washing bundles of sacred grass. Deep-loaded boats full of pilgrims were setting out from the shore for the island, which was called Jahngira, one of the most sacred places on the Ganges, which was here called Uttara Bahini, ‘the reach where the river turns to the north’. There are three places on the Ganges which are esteemed for this reason, but this is the most holy of all. It was a beautiful scene and a visual affirmation of what Hinduism could mean to those who practised it.
We landed a little upstream of the town of Sultanganj and set off with the Captain through some dusty lanes to buy some fish for which we had developed a morbid craving as, so far, we had not succeeded in eating any while on the river. Whenever we tried to buy fish it was either just about to arrive or had just been sold. We were like those persistent investigators who, for years and years had endeavoured, in vain, to witness a performance of the Indian Rope Trick.
The earthquake that had destroyed the town of Monghyr had done the same job at Sultanganj and the main street was equally debased, except that here it was decorated with paper streamers, for this was the morning of the Sarasvati puja in honour of Spring.32
The little cobbled lanes that led down from the main street to the water were decorated with arches of banana leaves and in the courtyards of the houses that led off them the clay figures of Sarasvati, the wife of Brahma the Creator, painted white, full-breasted, black-haired with a crescent moon on their foreheads, sitting on lotus leaves and holding lyres were waiting to be put in the river. There was the sound of drums; long-haired Santal women, aborigines from the edge of the high tableland above the river, trotted down carrying baskets on bamboo poles; old men and women squatted behind mounds of freshly soldered conical containers made from tin cans, in which pilgrims would take home the water of the river for those unfortunates who had not been able to make the journey to it.
We came out on the river front and across the water the island of Jahngira rose from the water, mysterious, unearthly, irresistible. It was so irresistible that, in spite of being loaded with the fish, which was wrapped in straw, we decided to go there.
A boat was just leaving and, together with the Captain, we waded out into the river and got on board. It was full of country people all of whom were provided with conical pots. As the boat began to move the women began a dirge-like chant which they kept up until we were close in under the huge, pale rocks of the island which the river had worn away until they were as sharp as stone age axes.
The landing was on the south side. From it a long flight of steps led up to small, subsidiary temples that seemed to be part of the rocks themselves, from which sprouted mysteriously, for there appeared to be no soil for them to flourish in, a number of twisted trees. The steps were crowded with bathers dressed in brilliant shades of red, blue, saffron and gleaming white. They were like the steps of a cathedral after a royal wedding, only here the congregation was unconscious of its fine appearance and the air was full of happy cries and laughter. It was different in the rainy season, the Captain said. Then, when the Ganges rose thirty feet, the Mahant, the head of the monastery, and his disciples were often cut off from the shore for weeks at a time, as isolated as lighthouse-keepers.
Over the steps loomed a bulbous rock decorated with figures of the elephant god, lingams and a figure that might have come from an Egyptian rock tomb whom the Captain said was Parasurama, ‘Rama with the axe’, the sixth incarnation of Vishnu, and there were other, more ancient carvings of Buddha, one in a pose of meditation, the other standing.
The north side of the island was as deserted as the south side was crowded. There, on another enormous rock which had toppled over so that she was forty degrees out of the perpendicular, was a spirited carving of Ganga, narrow-waisted and wide-hipped, standing on her crocodile which had its mouth open, as if displeased at the weight he was being called upon to support. The island was a maze of caves and paths which wound up it to the top where, seventy feet above the water, there was a dark, cavernous temple called Gebinath in which a number of priests were crouched pouring water over a lingam from spouted pots. There was a strange, eerie atmosphere about this temple which contrasted with the happy scene out in the sunshine on the steps below.
On the western outskirts of the town was the palace of a Maharaja who had been one of the biggest landowners in Bihar. It was approached by a long, stony drive at the foot of which a sort of guard-house-cum-porter’s-lodge was being built. The palace was built in the White City oriental style which was popular in India in the twenties, with five white domes and some meretricious decoration. Under the glass porte-cochère there were rotting trophies of the chase and a huge beaten-up American automobile stood on the gravel sweep. Beyond it, on a little patch of grass and looking benevolently down the drive, a highly life-like marble statue of the previous Maharaja stood under a baldacchino.
We rang the bell and sent in a visiting card, and after an interval the brother-in-law of the present Maharaja appeared. He apologised for the Prince’s absence as if it was some gross social solecism.
‘He works for Tata, you know,’ he said. ‘That is why he is not here to welcome you.’
Another brother was a professor in the United States; the third had been killed in a hunting accident. He took us into a drawing-room which was more like an audience chamber than a living room. It was very formal and rather sad with long lines of uncomfortable chairs along the walls, moth-eaten tiger skins on the floor and on the walls portraits of Maharajas dead and gone. On a table there was a beautiful Sitar, a seven-stringed instrument like a guitar, in a painted case.
He led us into what had been a colonnaded courtyard. The spaces between the columns had been bricked up to enclose what were now the female quarters. Wanda asked him if she could go in, but was politely refused. When we left various handsome little upper-class girls and boys emerged to stare at us. It was an Indian Brideshead.
On the way back to the boat we met two young men dressed in loin-cloths who were performing some kind of penance. From a distance they looked as if they were doing press-ups. One behind the other they prostrated themselves, measuring their lengths and rubbing their foreheads in the thick dust. Then they rose to their feet, walked forward until they reached the marks which their foreheads had made and prostrated themselves again. Behind them the imprints made by their bodies stretched away up the road, recording their devoted progression.33
We sailed again at eleven. South of Sultanganj the river was almost featureless; the sun was hot and there was a flat calm. We stretched out on the roof of the engine-room and immediately fell asleep.
I woke to find myself being rolled backwards and forwards on the roof by the Captain. He seemed to think I was a chapati.
‘Wake up! Wake up!’ he said. ‘It is four o’clock. We are by Colganj.’
The boat was running before a strong breeze and there were white caps on the water. At the foot of a long strip of sand a country boat with a big red square mainsail with a topsail set over it was in irons, and beyond it, towards the northern bank, a whole fleet of similar ones were tearing down the river. Ahead there was an island with a high, tree-clad promontory at its western end on which a red flag was flying on a pole which rose above the trees. Someone up there had a fire going and the smoke was being whipped downstream by the wind.
I woke Wanda, using the Captain’s dough-rolling technique. It took some time and after a bit I began to wonder if she had died. When she came to she was very grumpy.
‘Can’t you leave me alone,’ she said. ‘When I am with you I never get any sleep.’
The island was abeam now. Well-fed black cattle were grazing in green water meadows which, in the rains, would be deep underwater. Isolated from one another by these lush pastures, curious clusters of rocks shaped like huge beehives rose into the air, half-hidden among the trees which grew from them. Downstream there was what looked like another island with a white tower, like a lighthouse, on a point and high red cliffs behind it.
We came in round the bottom end of the island, into what was really a silted-up channel of the river where, behind a sand bar, there was a small harbour in which a dozen country boats were loading stone for the embankments that the men and women were building further upstream.
On the river front there were some ruinous brick buildings, one of which had a bricked-up baroque gateway which had once opened on to the water. It was probably an old indigo factory. A mile or so inland there was a steep hill with a fine old European house on the summit of it.