A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg (40 page)

S
ixteen of us were camped in a lush meadow, by a wide eddy on the Tons river, in the Abode of the Gods. There was a scent of rhododendrons in the air, and the temperature, at four in the afternoon, stood just shy of 80 degrees. The river valley was narrow, 400 yards across, and the hills rose steeply and spirelike on either side, obscuring a glittering ridge of the high Himalaya to the north. There were leafy alders on the meadow. Deodar pines, like lodgepole pines, forested the higher slopes. It was a young river valley, recently cut in geological terms, and the Tons, fed by spring snowmelt, was running high and fast.

It was our first day on the river, and Jack Morrison laid it out for his nine paying passengers. Jack is the president and chief guide of White Magic Unlimited, a rafting and trekking outfitting business out of Mill Valley, California. He had made a first descent of the river five years ago. The original plan had been to raft the more well-known Yamuna River, of which the Hindu scriptures say: “No mortal mocks her fury; no mortal stops her onward flow.” But the Yamuna had struck Morrison as a pretty tame ribbon of water—about class II Whitewater: “rapids of medium difficulty with clear, wide passages”—and he didn’t think American mortals would be willing to travel all the way to India for a gentle float trip. Hiking east, over an icy ridge, he came upon the Tons. It was his dream river, the river he could build his company around.

As Jack spoke, local people from the nearby village of Mori gathered about. The children came first, followed by old men, and finally, men who seemed to hold positions of authority in the village. They wore clean western-style clothes in subdued colors. Women did not come into our camp. They sat on the ridges in tight little groups, and occasionally the wind would carry the tinkle of giggles down into the meadow where we sat.

This would be the fourth time the river had ever been
run, Jack said. The trip was really “a commercial exploratory,” which meant there would be a lot of time spent scouting the rapids ahead and deciding on strategy.

There was plenty of big water, but what set the Tons apart from other big-water rivers Jack knew—he mentioned the Bio Bio in Chile and the Zambesi in Zambia—was the “consistency” of the white water. “It is one rapid after another,” he said, “almost eighty miles of class III and IV and even class V rapids. The Whitewater sections are separated by one hundred yards or less of flat water, which are probably moving at five to seven miles an hour.” Class V rapids are defined as “having extremely long, difficult, and violent rapids that follow each other almost without interruption … plenty of obstacles, big drops, violent current and very steep gradient.” The obstacles and drops on the Tons meant the rafts would have to do a lot of evasive maneuvering in heavy water. It was a very “technical” river.

The major danger, of course, was being thrown from one of the rubber rafts or having it flip. A person might be held down for some time in a big hole, might be thumped up and down in a circular motion—“Maytagged”—but the more deadly situation would be to be swept through several consecutive rapids. “On most rafting rivers,” Jack said, “there will be a quiet pool at the end of a rapid.” On the Tons, however, the rapids were “closely linked,” and even the strongest swimmer could be swept from one rapid to another. “The water is cold,” Jack said, “it’s all spring snowmelt now, and the longer you’re in it, the more it saps your strength. Swim too many rapids, and you’ll be too weak to make it to the bank. If you go in, do everything possible to get out after the first rapid.”

Such was the nature of our pilgrimage.

A
man feels a fool. Here I was, sitting under one of the alders, trying to read a book entitled
Hindus of the Himalayas
and getting absolutely nowhere because I was surrounded by a hundred or so Hindus of the Himalayas who wanted to know what I was reading.

The book, an ethnography of the region by Gerald Berreman, said that the plains Brahmins consider the people of the hills to be rude bumpkins. They live in this most religiously significant area of India, but according to Berreman, they engage in “frequent meat and liquor parties … are unfamiliar with scripture, largely ignore the great gods of Hinduism, marry across caste lines,” and do other things that made me think I’d enjoy their company.

I read that passage to a man named Ajaypal Rana who declared it “blasphemy.” His tone was mild, unconcerned. He might just as well have said the passage was “interesting” for all the passion in his voice. I read on. “Says here that people ‘conceal these activities’ and they ‘project behavior indicating adherence to the accredited values of society.’ ”

Mr. Rana smiled and asked if our rubber rafts were inflated with helium. “Just air,” I said. My friend seemed disappointed by the technological poverty of this arrangement.

T
he night was just cool enough for the thinnest of sleeping bags, and I had laid mine out under one of the leafy alders, in a field of calf-high marijuana and mint. The breeze felt like velvet, and the stars swirled above in the clear mountain air. Far to the south, the sky flickered electric blue as heat lightning shimmered over the baking plain of the Ganges River.

We had talked for several hours, the Hindus of the Himalayas and I. There were men with obvious physical handicaps
among the villagers, but they had been teachers or farmers or tailors. There were no beggars among the hill people.

Which had not been the case in Delhi. On the streets, the heat pounding down from above then rising up off the concrete kept battalions of beggars working feverishly. There was no shade, no place to sit, and so the horribly mutilated hopped or rolled or lurched along, hands (or what passed for hands) out, beseeching looks on their faces. The novelist and travel writer V. S. Naipaul, a West Indian Hindu who wrote two brilliant books about his travels in India, the land of his grandfather, found the sheer numbers of beggars particularly distressing. In
India: A Wounded Civilization
he wrote: “The very idea of beggary, precious to Hindus as religious theater, a demonstration of the workings of karma, a reminder of one’s duty to oneself and one’s future, has been devalued. And the Bombay beggar, displaying his usual mutilations (inflicted in childhood by the beggar-master who had acquired him, as proof of the young beggar’s sins in a previous life) now finds, unfairly, that he provokes annoyance rather than awe. The beggars themselves, forgetting their Hindu function, also pester tourists; and the tourists misinterpret the whole business, seeing in the beggary of the few the beggary of all.”

There had been, in Delhi, a young man, nearly naked but for a white loincloth. He was lean and dark, starkly muscled, and his right leg had been amputated just above the knee. He saw me—an obvious tourist—across a wide boulevard choked with the chaotic late-afternoon traffic that, in India, is a form of population control: that day, in Delhi alone, three died in accidents and seventeen were injured. The man came for me, threading his way nimbly through the cars, hopping on one bare foot and a crutch fashioned from the branch of a tree. I was amazed at his dexterity, the athletic fluidity of his movements.

The beggar hit the sidewalk, and just for a moment I saw triumph in his face, and a kind of joy. But as he fell into hop-step beside me, the light died in his eyes and he stared fixedly with a wet and pathetic spaniel-eyed beggar’s gaze. “Alms,” he said.

I am a man who habitually doles out spare change to winos, I suppose because I see the possibility that I might, one day, total my karma and find myself sitting in alley behind a tattoo parlor, swigging muscatel from a bottle in a paper bag. But this idea of sins in the previous life resulting in the mutilation of children by beggar-masters and misery pimps—I would not, I decided, perpetuate this system. I would not, as a matter of principle, give money to beggars.

“Alms,” the one-legged athlete moaned.

I stared through him and silently chanted the mantra that makes beggars disappear. “You are invisible.…”

He hopped along by my side for three city blocks—“you are invisible”—then peeled off and made for the other side of the street, playing picador with the taxis.

I kept replaying the encounter in my mind and it was keeping me awake. His misfortune wasn’t his fault. Giving him money: the penny or so he wanted, would it be such a sin? I thought: it would be like standing on the brink of hell and tossing in a wet sponge.

T
he first day out of Mori was the easiest. There were rapids without a lot of rocks. The people had gathered by the hundreds to see us off. It is a romantic conceit, but I had rather hoped they might regard us with awe. “Crazy brave fools risking watery death for naught but glory …” That sort of thing.

As it was, we had severe competition because a band of Gujars, seminomadic Moslem herdsmen, had come in that morning. I heard them driving their cattle along the trail above our meadow and saw them in the pale light of false dawn: fine tall people with aquiline features, shouting and laughing on the hillside above. The women wore intricately patterned pant-and-tunic combinations and covered their heads with colorful scarves of bright red or green. The older men dyed their beards red. All the males, men and boys, wore red skull caps embroidered with golden thread and topped by a red pom-pom on a braided stalk.

There had been Gujars among the Hindus the night before, but this was a special group. Their clothes were finer and brighter, the women wore more bangles, their cattle were fatter, and their dogs were bright-eyed and well fed. They were, I learned later, show-biz Gujars.

The group, about eighteen of them, set up in a meadow not far from us, and the people of Mori abandoned us for the Gujar show, which was undoubtedly more interesting than watching people load rafts all morning. The Gujars had with them several dusty black Himalayan bears, sometimes called moon bears for the white or orange-yellow crescent on their chests. The bears were controlled by a long rope that ran through the nose and out the mouth, but they seemed to respond to verbal commands. There was “sleeping bear,” who lay on his back with his paws in the air, “smoking bear,” who sucked on a six-foot-long stick of bamboo, “disco bear,” who danced, and “hugging bear,” who gently embraced a local child. The people of Mori laughed, threw coins to the Gujars, and strolled back to watch us cast off.

And so we paddled out of the eddy, caught the current, and went spinning down the Tons, crazy brave fools who would risk watery death but who were, demonstrably, no more interesting than your basic dancing bear. The Gujars had stolen our thunder and destroyed a romance. “Stupid damn hats,” a man paddling beside me said. “Makes ’em look like nitwits.”

T
wo days later, we hit Main Squeeze, the first really nasty rapid. It was hellishly technical. The river narrowed down to thirty feet, and, naturally, a bridge spanned the Tons at the point of its greatest fury. The water thundered between rock walls in wildly irregular waves that clashed, one against the other, throwing spray ten feet into the air. Just before the bridge, the river rose up over a rock—a domer—then dropped four feet into a hole. The hole was six feet long,
and at its downstream end, a wave four feet high curled back upstream.

We wanted to hit the hole dead on, power paddle into the curling wave, punch through, jog right to avoid the tree trunk pylon for the bridge, duck under the bridge—Jack Morrison said he’d never seen the Tons so high—then hit hard to the right. Ten feet past the bridge, the river widened to fifty feet, but a rock thirty feet wide cut the Tons into two ten-foot channels. The left channel was shallow and rock strewn. We would need to pull hard right as soon as we passed under the bridge.

There were three boats. Seven of us were in the paddle boat: three of us on each tube with paddles and Jack Morrison manning the oars from the frame in the back. Jack called out orders—“paddle right”—and muscled the bow into the line we’d chosen. We had spent two hours scouting Main Squeeze and we ran it smartly in thirty seconds.

Those of us in the paddle boat were getting cocky, impatient with all the scouting Jack thought necessary. We were a strong team and we worked well together. Why couldn’t we just R and R: read the river and run? There was some grumbling about this matter.

A
tributary I couldn’t find on the map—local people called it the Pauer—emptied into the Tons, effectively doubling its volume, just before the town of Tiuni. The river below gathered force and the gradient steepened until the Tons was dropping one hundred feet every mile. It was a wild ride, the Tons below Tiuni. There were, for instance, five major rapids just below the town, with no more than twenty yards of flat water in the whole run. Occasionally we hit a hole out of position and people were thrown from the boat—“swimmer!”—but we managed to right ourselves and scoop swimmers out of the water without stopping.

A mile downstream from the town, we passed a dozen or so men sitting on the rocks beside a six-foot-high pile
of burning sticks. We were paddling hard, dodging rocks, and punching through curlers, but there was time enough to see the body on top of the funeral pyre. A yellow sheet covered the torso to the shins and flames licked at the bare feet.

The ashes would be dumped into the Tons and they’d flow into the Yamuna, which empties into the sacred Ganges. There, in those holy waters, the soul of the departed might achieve
moksha:
liberation from the cycle of being, from the necessity of being reborn.

At the moment, however, the physical body was being consumed in the burning flame of Shiva’s open third eye.

O
n the second to last day, the river entered a long narrow gorge. The cliff walls that rose on either side were an oddly striated travertine that looked like decorations on some alien and inhuman temple. We had come seventy miles, dropped almost three thousand feet, and the river had spent much of its power. There were long flat-water floats where the river was so quiet we could hear the chatter of monkeys and the calls of cuckoos. The land, which upstream had looked like a steeper version of the northern Rockies, now took on a more gentle, tropical rhythm. Palm trees grew at the edge of the cliffs, and their roots dropped eighty feet into the nourishing water of the Tons.