2nd Letter from India

I write this letter on board a timber boat during our passage through the plains of Assamup the River Brahmaputra. It has a flat deck just wide enough for the Rolls, reassuringly wedged between 8 large rocks. The bumpers overhang the gunwales by a foot or more, so that to get from the cabin, where we sleep, to the prow where we talk and read and watch the river flow past, involves some delicate footwork.

We are in company with Bob and Sandy from Canada and Claire from home, all old friends and companions on previous expeditions We are travelling upstream towards China, some 200 miles from here. This is a forgotten corner of India, where roads are bad and communications poor. The population density is a tiny fraction of the rest of the sub-continent. It is an unsettled land, where tribal rivalries vie with the conflicting territorial claims of China and India to discourage outsiders. We have seen few visitors from outside India.

It is dark now. We are moored beside a lonely sand bar in the middle of the Brahmaputra, about 5 miles wide at this point. The back seat of the Rolls has become our drawing room. Panelled in English walnut, with tables which fold out to bear laptops, books installed on the chauffeur’s division and windows on all sides, it is a comfortable place in which to write. Through the windscreen I can see a great fire blazing on the sand, figures in the darkness lit by dancing flames. I can hear a lot of laughter, as there always is on journeys with these companions. Assamese voices murmur from below as they prepare a dinner of vegetable curry and roti. One of them sings as he pulls water from the river in the bucket.

A great quietness descends on the river at night. It is winter, and the dew falls with the darkness. We woke this morning to thick mist. I walked along the sand bar to which we were anchored and lost sight of our boat after twenty yards. Oliver wrote GUN 7 in large letters in the sand, that being the Rolls chassis number, and proceeded to film it as the car, the boat and a pale yellow sun emerged from the mist. A flock of invisible birds greeted the dawn. Martin, our local guide, brought us coffee in cheap plastic cups.

Navigation is by sight and the colour of the water, for the channels constantly shift with the rise and fall of the river. Twice we have run into sand bars below the surface and pushed the boat off with long bamboo poles. The current is fast, for it is a mere hundred miles up stream that the Siang River falls out of the Himalayas, turns west and changes its name to Brahmaputra, or Brummie Pooter as the first British settlers endearingly called it when they came here to grow tea in the middle of the 19th century. From a plantation near here the first consignment of tea was sent to Mincing Lane in 1838.

We embarked from Majuli Island 2 days ago, having travelled about 1500 miles since I posted the 1st letter. We have sort of got the hang of things now: which petrol pumps are to be trusted; who to trust to look after the Rolls at night, how to get soldiers at check-posts on side, which road-side stalls have the best roti and dal.

The best one so far was in a small village in Assam. We drew up there for breakfast not long after dawn: the roti-wallah spun his rotis through the air to land neatly in the wok 6 feet away. It always landed dead centre. He grinned at us as he did so, sitting cross-legged on the table. In 15 seconds the roti was done, and the wok-wallah whipped it out and threw it into the fire. 5 seconds later it was a hot, hollow sphere of crisp, fresh and lightly charred deliciousness on our tin plates alongside the very finest chilli omelette. We dined on a round table in the street. Oranges were stacked on stalls close by, a cow drew up to inspect our breakfast and a trio of goats climbed on the running board of the Rolls. No restaurant in London, I reflected, could match this for style.

Before us lay the foothills of Nagaland. We climbed in the Rolls after breakfast, and drove to the border. Notwithstanding the ceasefire agreed 6 months ago armed soldiers are a frequent sight in these parts, and the insurgents are still active. On the whole they don’t travel in 1936 Rollses, so our entry into Nagaland was relatively trouble-free. I gave the Customs Chief a signed postcard of the Rolls standing in front of the cottage, of which we had printed a good many before we left. These cards have proved an effective smoother of the bureaucratic path, assisted this time by our appearance on North-East News at prime time the night before.

We drove up into the forested hills through one of the remotest parts of India, our spirits high and the Rolls in fine fettle, pausing frequently to savour the landscape and take marsala chai at roadside tea-shops. The road was rough, scarred by the monsoon rains and strewn with rocks rolled down from precipitous hills. We crawled round potholes and blew our excessively loud horn as we crept round hairpin bends until we reached Kohima, set famously on a hill at 5000 feet in the heart of Nagaland.

There, in 1943, a band of British and Punjabi soldiers, vitally supported by Naga villagers, held the Japanese advance and turned the tide of the war against the Japanese. The battle of Kohima, largely forgotten in our collective memory of the war, was as significant on the eastern front as El Alamein was in the west. We talked to old men who were there, walked on the tennis court which was the epicenter of the battle, dwelled on the brief but harrowing epitaphs of the young men who died there and found the grave of Private Harman VC, who has a chapter to himself in Peter de la Billiere’s book on courage.

We have now covered 3700 miles since leaving Bombay 2 ½ months ago. The road has taken us across the plains of Upper India through Jaipur, where we stayed in a fine palace and attended a Brahmin wedding, and Bharatpur where we heard from his youngest son the true story of the maharaja who bought 14 Rolls Royces in the 1930’s and, out of pique, famously converted them into dust carts, much to R-R Ltd’s irritation.

We paid our respects to the Taj Mahal but preferred the Little Taj, which we had more or less to ourselves as dusk fell and the temple monkeys played, and along the Grand Trunk Road to a small mansion in the cantonment in Lucknow not far from the ruins of the British Residency, famously relieved after a six-month siege during the Uprising, as it is now officially known, in 1857.

By the time we reached India’s border with Nepal the Divali Festival was in full swing. Every village was celebrating, stalls sold flowers in narrow streets ablaze with coloured lights, fireworks rent the night air and rickshaws carried giant speakers at deafening volume. Driving north through Uttar Pradesh the land became greener and more fertile, and we passed through magnificent avenues of Chestnut trees, their branches creating a tunnel of light through which we could see faint silhouettes of high mountains drawing closer as we approached the border with Nepal.

There we said goodbye to Binesh, our guide, translator and friend for the 1000 miles we had travelled from northern Rajasthan. His method for finding the way to the remote places we wanted to go to was simple: he asked the locals. Maps meant nothing to him. I produced our new iPad with a flourish to assist the cause. Binesh was not impressed. Finding our way through Lucknow it led us into maze of narrow crowded streets until we were comprehensively lost, swallowed into the insanity of India’s traffic jams. We extracted ourselves with considerable difficulty. Binesh was delighted: “Binesh-GPS better”, he triumphantly announced.

The Holloways, with whom we have been on many expeditions over the years, greeted us at the border bearing garlands of fresh marigolds which they threw over the headlights. They accompanied us in their jeep up the mountain road to the Kathmandu valley to the fine house in which they reside. We gazed at the snowcapped peaks of the Himalayas from the balcony, drank gin and tonic with ice and lemon for the first time in weeks and accompanied them on a 4 day stroll through the foothills with 5 porters and 4 tents.

Tomorrow the children arrive. We have not seen them for nearly 3 months. They have all started new lives since we left England – Rose moved to London to study law, Carmody to Bristol to start her PhD and Katherine has left St Christopher’s to review some diverting options. These are significant explorations, as ours have been, and will inform conversations round campfires in the rainforests of Namdapha in the north-east corner of India and the elephant-grass flatlands of Kaziranga, all of which is highly exciting.

Rupert & Jan Grey

17 December 2012