1

VANISHED WILDERNESS
by Subroto Mukerji

“Allah does not deduct from a man’s 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 perennial
mantles of white, slicing through the lower valleys. A blue-white
fury, it wore down everything it came up against, rushed past, or ran
over, as it hurled itself like a writhing snake at the plains far below.
 2

It watched, unmoved, as eons came and went, as

creatures 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 enough
for all, a bounty it shared readily with those who dared to try and
snatch sustenance from it. Occasionally, one of them fell in and was
swept 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 existence
around it, alone and proud, content to be but itself—invulnerable,
emotionless… eternal.

As the car topped the rise and halted at the crest of the
ridge, the boy sucked in his breath with a hiss. After the dust and
mud of the hour-long drive, the sight was breathtaking: an unspoilt
valley, heavily wooded, and probably teeming with game. The river
was a thing of wonder, winding and snaking, battering itself against
rocks the size of houses, a splash of royal blue such as he had never
glimpsed before.

It was a thing of creamy rapids and boisterous riffles punctuated by

deep, deceptively-still pools where the water seemed to take a
breather before plunging into a stretch of white-water even more
violent than the one before. Never before in his young life had he
seen so marvelous a thing. He had seen deep, contemplative lakes,
cheeky little mountain torrents, submissive streams, sleepy, lotus-
filled ponds. But this…this was something altogether different.
He sprinted down to the golden beach, revelling in the
sound of the virgin sands crunching under his ‘hunter’ boots. The
pool was a thing of beauty and mystery, deep and alluring, cloaking
its denizens with a reflection of the azure skies above. Eighty yards
across the expanse of smooth, blue-green, glassy water, myriad rock
pigeons fluttered about in clumsy, noisy lovemaking on the sheer
rocky cliffs where a few hardy plants clung in audacious defiance.
With trembling hands he assembled the old cane rod
and fitting a spool reel, ran the line through the rod-guides and
wrapped a ball of dough around the hook. Then he peeled off about
twenty 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 the
water’s oily-smooth surface forty yards away.
 3

The line tightens as the bait hits the bottom, rolling with
the current, and it has not come to a stop when the rod jerks in his
hands like a thing alive and the reel screams in panic as line smokes
off it. The tip of the rod is whipping with the sheer violence of the
passage of the line through the tungsten-carbide line guides; the rod
bends in a graceful arc as the boy rears back in the age-old
technique of the mandatory strike against the fish’s bite. The
tortured shriek of the racheted reel is a symphony to his ears, and
he glances down apprehensively as he sees the last of the hundred
yards 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 on

his 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 his
fingers 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 this
way 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,
 4

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

Drawn reluctantly to the surface, its dorsal fin cuts the

water like a knife as it cruises in the shallows, turning over on its
side now and then as its strength fails it. Fifteen minutes later, it is
gasping on the bank, a sleek, thirty-pound mahaseer, all golden
green and silver, and the boy thinks he has never ever seen such a
lovely thing in his life. He loves that fish, for to him it epitomizes the
wonder of it all.

The next Sunday, they do not cross the river, but follow
its 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 drops
into a deep rut, he braces himself against the jerk, but to his utter
surprise the jeep sails through it unperturbed, its unique suspension,
so hard on the spine on asphalt roads, at last in its element, its
springs designed for just such terrain.

The boy looks longingly at the controls, but it will some

years before he will be old enough to drive. He watches closely,
yearning, learning, filing everything away in his mind for the future…
the racing change into a lower gear, the heel-and-toe technique as
the jeep plunges into gullies then up a spur, the powerful engine
roaring in triumph.

Dense jungle on either side, dark, silent, expectant…a

leopard, startled into breaking cover, bounds across the track. There
are birds everywhere; the air is redolent with the scent of exotic
flowers. A profusion of butterflies, like a colorful veil carelessly
thrown over the vegetation, adds a touch of the surreal. It is a
fantasyland, far away in time, a land none has ever seen before.
The track descends sharply, and the jeep crawls down it
cautiously till the path starts leveling off; now there is blue among
the trees, and he knows they are with the river again. The forest
thins away as the jeep comes up against its most formidable
opponent, the small, football-sized boulders that were once the
riverbed.

A halt for changeover to 4-wheel drive, then the jeep

creeps 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 to
itself across the ages.
 5

There is
an old

abandoned fishing lodge, here at Buxar, where men have come

years ago and left for distant shores leaving behind a few chairs and
books no one wants. Mouldy, covered with the dust of years, but
books! The boy, wondering, picks one up…it is one he has often
wanted to read but never could find, Col. A.J. St. John Macdonald’s
timeless classic ‘Circumventing the Mahaseer’.

They are all there, Isaac Walton’s ‘The Compleat Angler’,

the first known treatise on fishing, which is classified as literature,
Skene Dhu’s ‘The Mighty Mahaseer’, Capt. Conway’s ‘Sunlit Waters’,
Thomas’ delightful and authoritative ‘The Rod in India’.

What manner of men were they, those ghosts of the

past, to have left such a fortune behind? Is it their legacy to a future
generation? For any soul hardy and daring enough to come here, to
the river, to this utterly wild and desolate spot, unafraid of the
 6

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, a
ripple in the river, a duck rising smoothly into the blue, even loving
the most vicious animal of all…Man…loving everything, every man,
every woman, so deeply, so completely, so compassionately, loving
the all in a way that other, civilized men and women can never
understand.

What man in his right mind will venture into this rugged
country, teeming with game and predators, unarmed and
conspicuous, in search of the elusive thing called…called what?
What do you call that thing which fills your heart till it’s fit to burst
with the sheer grandeur of it, that feeling that you are one with all
creation, all things come together in an insanely logical unity; for a
moment the obscurest of scriptures makes absolute sense, there is a
feel of the Absolute, the selflessness of it all is paramount, poetry
comes alive, there is a pattern, never before glimpsed, an
underlying purpose that is lost in the selfishness of urban life, the
preoccupation with the self… unmindful of the Self.

As the days become weeks and then years, he explores

the terrain, here treading in the footsteps of forgotten legend Anil
Deva Mukerji, hunter, tracker, woodsman and conservationist non
pareil, there lying on the rocks watching the crocodiles frolicking in
the 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 chasing

yearlings, streamlined streaks of silver in the deep water, but so
clear is it that it seems they fly through air. One of them comes
lunging right through the surface, preceded by a spray of young in a
tearing hurry to get away from the marauder; thwarted, he hangs in
the air, slowly shaking his head from side to side, peering up at the
sky in surprise, then falls back into the pool with a thunderous
splash.

The young man watches, fascinated, camera and fishing

rod forgotten. There is not a soul within five hundred square miles.
Men are at work in stuffy little offices elsewhere (where is
elsewhere? Is it is preferable to this? Then why do they stay there, in
that ‘elsewhere’ till the day they die, kowtowing to false gods, eating
cold, stale food from little tin boxes, their pale skins untouched by
rain or wind or sun. What manner of men would give up all this for
that?). He knows that one day he may have to join them, those tin
 7

soldiers, but for now he stocks up on memories—those that are

worth keeping—for memories are made of this.

He goes to Garjia, where an obstinate sliver of quartzite

has 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 climber’s delight. He visits
placid Tumaria, where the river widens out and branches into
numerous shallow channels that a man can easily wade through. He
remembers a deep, oily run with steep gravelly banks, where his
partner hooked a big fish that sulked for half an hour at the bottom
before it was ‘pumped’ up to the surface.

Or a stretch of boulder-filled rapids that a sow crosses, a

wild piglet firmly grasping her tail in its mouth…and its siblings
similarly attached in tandem one to the other, strung together like
so many sausages. She powers her way through the fast current like
a motorboat, her little family tossing in her wake, to emerge
triumphant on the other side with her team still attached to her and
intact. In all the days he spends on the river, he never meets
another soul. And all around him is the jungle, companionably silent,
never complaining, never demanding anything but understanding
and respect.

He remembers the nameless place that once he reached

by 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 has
brought with it the scent of tiger, once smelt, never forgotten, a
scent men know instinctively from caveman times.

Slowly, without making any quick movements, he looks

around; in a clump of bushes fifty yards away, the motionless horns
of a cow can be seen at ground level. A tiger’s kill, concealed in the
vegetation! And the big cat must also be there, watching unseen.
 8

Slowly, he turns and walks back the way he has come,

wondering if he is mistaken but not willing to take unnecessary
chances. The tall man in the sola hat is approaching, and the youth
lets him walk down the beach, determined to stop him if he gets to
the point where he himself had caught the tiger smell. But he
needn’t 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 being
interrupted 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 see
again. I hope you enjoyed it, because the real thing’s long gone,
gone that unique unspoilt wilderness, vanished forever, a victim to
man’s insatiable lust for energy, for hydro-electric power. The waters
of an earth dam at Kalagarh have inundated thousands of acres of
jungle, including my favorite fishing spots, now buried under a deep
reservoir that has backed all the way up the valley.

Tourist resorts have sprung up along its banks, and since

wild creatures don’t 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. Motorboats
plough across placid, soulless deeps that give no hint of the
vanished glory of Champion’s Pool or the raging rapids of Buxar, and
the waters have long since carried away with it the books I’d
admired, just as the current of life has swept away their authors.
9
 10

They had made an earthen dam over it, the fools, not
knowing that, in the entire span of its existence, nothing had ever
managed to hold it in check for long. Beneath the earth’s surface,
deep within it’s crust, it sensed the first of a series of convulsions
that would get progressively stronger and more violent, like a
woman’s contractions, as the over-burdened tectonic plates shifted
uneasily and came together.

Soon, the pressures would reach levels where the plates

would slide one over the other, tearing rock the size of cities off
each other, releasing energy equivalent to hundreds of atom bombs.
The dam would explode like a paper bag, and a tidal wave of trillions
of acre-feet of water—billions of tons of it— would smash its way far
 11

into the plains, bearing aloft on its foaming crest the pulverized
remains of towns and villages, like so many corks bobbing on the
surface 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 of
contemplation
than upon mere survival” ~ Aristotle

©Subroto Mukerji