January 23, 1999, Saturday, “sunny”
(actually smoggy) 6-18C
[09:56, in train from Delhi to Kanha)
After
three almost intolerably smoggy days in Delhi, but only three, instead of the
ten in the logical plan, I’m now in a train with Anne and Kim on the way south
to Kanha National Park.
I'll
be staying at Kanha until Feb.2, then go back to Delhi for two weeks of school
presentations and the Valentine's Day Save the Tiger Walk starting from the
Delhi Zoological Park. A week of heaven
in tiger country before plunging back into the eye-watering, nose offending,
lung-burning atmospheric cesspool of the over-polluted city where every breath
one takes seems to contain enough smoke from ten cigarettes.
“On
a train” and “go back” may conjure an effortless, even enjoyable image, but
boarding a train in a Delhi train station is like jumping from the frying pan
into the fire. The train station itself
is like a war zone, with people jostling one another to get at the ticket booth
– crowds everywhere, but not a single queue in sight - then jostling one
another to get into the train, and then with luggage in tow dash for the first
available bench one could find.
The
journey itself involves a bone-aching 20 hour train ride plus a four hour car
trip, one way, totaling 26 strenuous hours not including waiting time. The first two or three hours would indeed be
enjoyable, due to partly to the newness of the experience and the changing
scenery, but soon, the landscape and experience begin to repeat itself, and you
turn to reading or napping in the narrow and hard and uncomfortable bunk. 20 hours of it, and you can’t wait to get
your feet on to terra forma again, even if it is the same dusty dirt.
As
I recall from my previous trips, the train would first pull out from the centre
of Delhi, through the heavily urban areas, then the “suburbs”, the
tertiary-urbs, then quarternary-urbs, etc., until it finally leaves the city
complex behind. Then, it would chug
through intermittently lush and desiccated countryside comprising mostly paddy
fields, wheat fields, irrigated fields, dried out fields, mango groves, papaya
plantations, cluttered villages, occasional towns, a few rivers and belts of
semi-desert. After sundown and at night,
we’d clattered through miles of pitch darkness punctuated by clusters of dim
dots of light, each a small cooking fire or a kerosene lamp, then suddenly, the
glare of yet another train station with people sleeping on the dusty ground and
hawkers pushing their ware and trays of local delicacies, some raising the
merchandise up to the train’s windows – not recommended fare for tender-gutted
foreigners – and some bring their steaming jugs of chai right on board. When they walked by, and I caught a whiff of
the aromatic tea, my automatic response would be to call out, “Roco! Roco!”
The few minutes of pleasure would return us inevitably to another hour
or two of tedium. Hard as we might try,
we’d lose count of the number of stops, but they would seem never-ending.
And
the same thing all over again in reverse from Kanha back to Delhi, and from
Delhi back to Kanha all over again within the next three weeks. Discomfort aside, it is a waste of four
working days in my limited time in India, in which every minute is precious,
not to mention the unpleasantness of it all.
This is why I’m so upset by the schedule Pradeep had set for me. At best, I could take a six hour car ride
from Kanha to Nagpur, then fly for two hours from Nagpur to Delhi, but it is
much more expensive, and would still consume two otherwise productive working
days. So, setting a schedule that
involves an extra back and forth trip, as the one Pradeep has arranged, does
not show good judgment and organizational skill, especially given all these
past weeks of preparation time..
By
this arrangement, considering extra traveling expenses, Anne and Kim will have
to stay on at Kanha and/or Bandhavgarh instead of coming back to Delhi with me
for the Tiger Walk and school outreach.
While
in Delhi, the two people I work most closely with, other than Pradeep, are
Dynamic Tour manager Manoj Sharma and Tiger Trust employee Sucheta Tiwari, who
used to work for WWF – World Wildlife Fund - at the Ranthambhore tiger
reserve.
There
are lighter moments. One day, at a
MacDonald's joint (! - Manoj's idea) having a "maharaja vegiburger ",
Anne said that most of her friends wouldn't consider marrying a man who can't
cook.
I
took the bait and said, “That explains why I'm still single.”
Kim,
in her usual somewhat sarcastic way, said, “That's one of the reasons.”
Sucheta, a beautiful woman in
her twenties, came to my rescue. “He’s
married to the tigers,” she said.
“So
are you, but you’re married.” I said self-deprecatorily.
Sucheta
said, “I'm married to a real live tiger, but don't tell him.”
Back
to Anne, I said, half-jokingly (half seriously – half-empty/half-full?), “May
those women who use cooking ability as a vital criterion end up marrying some
wife-beating gourmet chefs.”
I
brought Anne and Kim to visit Ashok Kumar – world known tiger conservationist
specializing in urban undercover sting operations, having uncovered stashes of
tiger skin and sacs of tiger bone in Delhi and Calcutta in yesteryears. He is also an executive director of Wildlife
Preservation Society of India (WPSI). In
spite of his exploits, he is a gentle and mild mannered man, with a good sense
of humour. On his desk is a plague with
a quote from his opponents: “Next to God, Ashok Kumar is everywhere.” And in spite of his international profile,
he is not well known in his own country at least by appearance, and he wants to
keep it that way to prevent blowing his cover.
Ashok (“a-SHOOK”) invited us to his place for dinner some time before we
return to Canada. He said he would
invite Belinda Wright as well.
Belinda,
a majestically beautiful British woman who has lived her whole life in India,
is also a WPSI director and a world renowned tiger conservationist in her own
right, who was the first to investigate tiger-poaching in the 1980s and among
the first to bring the tiger-poaching and tiger-parts-trade issues to world
attention. Her TV documentary Land of
the Tiger is both poignant and magnificent, and her book Through the Tiger's
Eyes is exquisite and deeply touching.
When I first met Belinda, it was at the Tigers 2000 conference in
London, England, in 1997. Before my
departure from Vancouver, I had written Ashok and Belinda about my first trip
to India. In the conference, we sought
each other out. At first sight, she
took an intense look at my face. Then a
smile began to beam on hers. “Perfect,”
she said.
“Thank
you,” I said, a little taken aback.
“I’ve never had that word used on me before.”
“I’ve
been looking for an Oriental man to participate in a sting operation in
Calcutta with us. You look perfect for
the part.”
“Oh, I see. You want
somebody looking perfectly like a tiger-bone-trading criminal. Thank you very much.”
Of
course I said yes.
Pradeep
was not present at the conference. When
I told Ashok and Belinda that Pradeep was chosen as our project partner, they
exchanged an open glance and said, also in sync, “Why, of all the tiger
conservationists in India, did you choose him?”
Belinda
invited me to stay at her place in New Delhi, which, like her, was beautiful in
a regal fashion. After being driven by
Belinda herself in her unidentifiable car (some Indian make) through the greys
and browns and whites and blues (the latter two ancient bits and pieces of
plastic bags) littering most Delhi streets, then a quiet suburban road, we
turned into a walled estate with manned gate, and, voila, a piece of earthly
paradise filled all the senses. What a
treat after several days in metro Delhi.
I will not attempt to describe its beauty, since words would do it no
justice. Suffice to say that her home
was a miniature palace, and her garden, replete with exotic flowers, a
miniature Eden. She had two dogs – a
spaniel and a street dog. The spaniel
had the run of the house, and the street dog’s domain was Belinda’s expansive
garden. Notable is that after seeing
the thousands upon thousands of scrawny, unkempt and flea-infested street dogs
everywhere in Delhi, I found this one a specimen of its breed at its best –
medium small, but exceptionally handsome, well proportioned, athletic and
muscular, even compared to most domestic dogs on North America, albeit somewhat
detached and aloof – not a couch-cuddler.
This is one extraordinary woman.
After
being pampered for two weeks in Belinda’s residence, with her servants treating
me like a prince, I was flown over to Calcutta to be fed to the wolves. In Calcutta, we met up with Ashok and had a
couple of strategizing sessions, at the second one Ashok had dyed his silver
hair dark. Unfortunately the sting had
to be aborted mid-operation due to Ashok’s being recognized at the wrong time
in the wrong place. He considered
himself lucky to be escaped alive.
Later, I heard that another undercover agent was killed on the job in a
subsequent operation. These people are
dedicated and gutsy. Belinda herself,
being a white woman, stands out like a dove among crows, and yet, she is as
much on the front line as Ashok and other Indian operatives.
But
this contains a side story that is very telling on the Indian social
system. When I was in Calcutta, I was
put into a safe-house to stay for about four days. It was a windowless interior room on the fourth floor of an
apartment building, with only one door.
If the building caught fire, I’d be toast. Even without a fire, I was roasting. The ambient street temperature was a sizzling 42oC or
about 100oF. When I first
walked into the anteroom, which also served as the servant’s quarters, I felt I
was entering an oven within an oven.
There was no thermometer in the room, but it must be 50oC
plus. “How can I last three hours,
let alone three days, in this heat?” I thought to myself. But as soon as I opened the door to the
master’s chamber, I was welcomed by a blast of cool air. The servant ushered me in, then closed the
door from the outside. The cool air
originated from an air conditioning unit mounted in the wall between the
master’s and servant’s quarters, with its cool end in the former, and its hot
end in the latter. Master standing on
the servant’s head, and the servant has to say thank you.
The
following month, Ashok also invited me to stay at his house in New Delhi and I
did so for about ten days, also treated like a prince, during which period I
also befriended his daughter Malina.
Yesterday,
I stayed at Pradeep’s Dynamic Tours office to write and send e-mail while
Manoj, Sucheta, Kim and Anne went ahead to the Dilli Haat fairgrounds around
14:00, where a craft fair featuring exclusively Gujurati folk products was
taking place, to set up the Gigantic Tiger Cub. While I was typing away on my laptop, a servant girl came into
the room and began sweeping the floor with a broom. Wherever the broom went would rise a cloud of dust, and the dust
would then settle on the shelves and the books and the furniture and my clothes
and the computer key board and screen and inside my lungs. Then she would begin to dust the shelves and
books and the furniture with a feathered duster, and the dust would fly
again. Come to think of it, I have never
seen a single vacuum cleaner anywhere in India that I can recall. This office is a microcosm of the city, a
city of dust, and certainly not the only one.
Many African places are the same.
I
arrived at the Dilli Haat around 18:00 and found that Manoj used the 500 watt
voltage converter on the blower, instead of the 750 watt one as recommended,
and burnt it up. So now, we can’t run
the blower and the slide projector at the same time. I cursed beneath my breath.
It began to get dark. The
evening was supposed to be when the majority of the people would come. I went with Sucheta to buy a handcrafted 100
watt lamp in the fair. We put it inside
the Big Tiger with the shade removed, and lit it up like a lantern. The reporter from Asian Age did come and
gave me an hour-long interview inside the Tiger Cub, with the lamp casting the
shadows of our talking heads on its butt.
Anne loves the lamp. She bought
it from us to send home to her parents.
Right
now, as the train clatters along, Anne is reading by the window, and Kim is
writing in her journal.
This
is only the third hour of the tortuous 20 hour train trip. We'll see how it goes. At least now we’re finally far enough from
Delhi to see some real rural landscape and smell some real country air, instead
of the garbage-filled back alleys of outskirts-Delhi, where children and even
adults, male and female, urinate and defecate in broad daylight right on the
side of the train track.
This
time we’ve taken packed meals with us, prepared at the Bajaj Indian Home Stay
where we stayed the last couple of nights without health problems, to forestall
eating train food which did make me sick in my first train trip in 1997. I remember having to go to the toilet to
throw up, which is basically a hole in the floor through which one could see
the gravel underneath rushing by. The
floor of the washroom is awash indeed, with urine. I bent down to vomit, and my favourite pen fell out of my
breast-pocket right through the hole out of sight. When I staggered my way back to my bunk, I was treading urine all
the way to the foot of my bunk which means that there were urine-tracks leading
from the washroom to every bunk, already dried or still wet. Enough to make me want to go back to throw
up again!
We're
constantly worried about theft and just can't all sleep at once. The risk of theft is real and
ubiquitous. In train stations, there
are hawkers selling various things. One
of the most popular items is the lock-and-chain.
Having
conversed in English with Anne and Kim for some time along the lines of the
last couple of paragraphs, except instead of “urine” we were saying “piss”, I
felt obliged to be neighbourly to the lone older Indian woman in a sari sitting
in a meditative position in the bunk diagonally opposite mine, and gave her a
palms-together, head-bowed greeting of “Nemaste”. She returned the greeting, smiled and said, “Nice to meet
you. I'm from Detroit, here to visit my
daughter in Agra.” Shit! I mean, oops!
Something
bothered me significantly, which I shared with both women, first with Kim on an
impromptu basis while Anne was sleeping, and then with Anne after she had
awakened, Kim participating.
First,
the total lack of media at the Ahlcon School presentation. It was more photogenic than any presentation
to any Canadian school, with an exotic setting and a huge audience. It was a glaringly missed golden
opportunity. Back in December, when
Pradeep came in to WCWC for a meeting with me and Adriane, we agreed that I
would send off media packages to the Delhi media ASAP, which I did before
Christmas, with a cover letter and some 20 pieces of highly persuasive
newspaper articles including the Georgia Straight, the New Internationalist,
the Hindu, the Global & Mail, the Vancouver Sun, the Toronto Sun, the
Vancouver Province, etc. All Tiger
Trust would have to do was to make one follow-up phone call each to the 25 or
so Delhi media outlets I mailed the packages to, or, even easier, fax them a
media release with my speaking schedule as he has arranged it. Evidently, they did none of these. The Asian Age interview was due to the
in-coming call from the AA reporter to Tiger Trust's office when I was there,
and when I asked to speak to the reporter on the phone, Sucheta either did not
hear me, or refused to hand me the phone.
Goodness knows how many other phone inquiries came in when I was not
there.
Second,
when I expressed that most logically, all the school presentations in Delhi
should occur within the first week or ten days I was there and all the media in
Delhi done before I go to Kanha, Sucheta said that it was difficult or
impossible at this time due to school exams, etc.
Third,
they pretty well herded me out of town, but not before having me leave my
slides in Delhi for their own presentations.
At one point, while reading her draft for the bilingual pamphlet for
distribution to the students, I thought that it would serve very well as the
opening of the tiger portion of the WCWC 98/99 members' report. So, with Sucheta's permission, I copied and
pasted the draft into my members' report draft file. But when I read down to the bottom of the piece I found this:
[The program Schedule for the visit of
Mr. Anthony Marr and team:
Date Venue Time
21.1.99 Ahlcon Public School 9.00
a.m.- 11.00a.m.
22-23.1.99 Dilli Haat all day
25.1.99 Sri Ram Public School 10.30
a.m.-1.00p.m.
28.1.99 The Frank Anthony
School 11.30 a.m.-1.30 p.m.
14.2.99 Save the Tiger Walk 10.00a.m.- 2.00 p.m.]
Now
since Sucheta requested my slides, obviously the Sri Ram and Frank Anthony
presentations are on tiger conservation.
The question is: Why did they
cut me and WCWC out? They curtly stated
that the train tickets had already been reserved. What's the big deal about canceling a train ticket and booking a
new one? Did they ship me out to Kanha
for me or for them?
Anyway,
the train is rolling; it cannot be turned back. Time to look forward.
We'll arrive at Gondia shortly before 05:00 tomorrow, eighteen hours
from now. Another several hours by jeep
to Kanha. So, hello tigers, here I
come!