Monday
Each day begins with tea.
It’s hot and syrupy sweet, but to call it “hot, sweet tea” is to imply there’s any other kind: there isn’t.
I’m staying in a room attached to a small primary school which forms the head office of People’s Action for Development, the NGO I’m working with. My bed is a slab of plywood nailed to a set of two-by-fours. A few brightly patterned sheets have been apologetically laid over the top, but they serve more for decoration than comfort. Like all the timber in the building, the bed is being rapidly devoured by a silent army of innumerable insects, and it creaks disconcertingly when I shift around at night.
Our electricity has been out for over a day and the backup generator ran flat last night, meaning there's currently no power. The bathroom is a concrete outhouse with no windows, so I shave with the door open to let the light in, using my phone as a mirror.
I drink my tea sitting on the front steps, watching a herd of 20 cows walk past down the lane. Each morning, a sullen, wordless man collects them from houses on the neighbouring tea estate and sends them out to graze before returning them in the evening. The cows move in silence, their brown hides dragging across scrawny frames, the only sound coming from the scuffing sandals of the man at their rear, and the occasional flick of a whisp of bamboo he directs at their heels.
As it’s the first week of the month, there's an all-hands review meeting today. It’s rather ambitiously scheduled to start at 10am: people arrive around 11. An extension cord is run outside to power the projector off a car battery, and we watch each team give an update on their projects. Under my loosely-defined role as “person engaged in media and communications,” I give a monthly wrap-up presentation too.
Most of the team has English as their fourth or fifth language, so I swap out all the usual mind-numbing buzzwords and corporate nonsense for plain English and write everything out in full so it’s easier to follow along, without dumbing down the content. “Engagement” becomes “people liking and commenting on things”. “User experience/user journey” is “the things people click on so they can get to other stuff”. “Cross-platform integration and assimilation” makes way for “things talk to other things and it all looks nice”. Green numbers are good, red numbers not so good. There’s lots more green than red: happy days.
I notice I’m waving my arms around like a blow-up bendy puppet outside a used car dealership. People nod along enthusiastically, but I’ve long learned this is out of politeness and eagerness to please rather than understanding, so I get someone to follow along behind me and repeat what I said in Assamese.
Everyone starts nodding again, but for real this time.
Success.
Later in the afternoon, the power comes back on.
I end the day watching a gecko hunt insects across my wall.
Tuesday
Alex, the head teacher of the primary school, lives onsite here with his family and they cook meals for me. I eat alone in a separate room, and they eat in the kitchen after I’ve been served. I found this deeply uncomfortable at first and offered to eat together with them, but from the way this was vigorously refused with slightly panicked looks I realised I’d encroached on a custom and quickly backed down. Over time the arrangement has settled: after pleading with them several times they’ve stopped buying expensive meat or fish from the market just for me, and I eat just like they do- roti for breakfast, rice for lunch, rice for dinner.
Today, Alex announced they were leaving to go to his wife’s village for Easter and wouldn’t be back until Monday. He was concerned about how I would manage for food while they were gone. When I suggested I could cook for myself he laughed at me, which I tried to take the right way.
In the evening I scratch together a curry with what I can find in the kitchen: pebble-sized potatoes, chickpeas and rice. I play Russian roulette with the unmarked jars of spices on the shelf, taste-testing each one before tossing them in.
A dragonfly the size of my hand strafes me in the bathroom as I’m brushing my teeth.
4 people call to check if I’ve had dinner.
Wednesday
One of the staff is even later into the office than usual, moaning about getting no sleep. When I ask why, he says he was up all night driving to neighbouring Arunachal Pradesh. It turns out two children were kidnapped from his village yesterday and taken into the mountains. Somehow, they escaped and found someone to call their parents, who then asked for help bringing them home. The deadpan delivery of his story betrays the fact that instances of child abduction are far from rare. With both parents working long hours on the tea estates, children face either walking several kilometres to school alone or skipping school and staying home. There have been several kidnappings in Assam in the news already this year, and few end as happily as this one.
I don’t feel like cooking dinner so I call Arun, who runs a small restaurant in the village.
“Come by after 7:30,” he says.
I arrive around 8; dinner isn’t ready yet. I take a seat at one of the two linoleum-covered plastic tables: I’m the only customer. A few-weeks-old kitten wobbles around under my chair and headbutts my shoes.
“Would you like tea or coffee?”, Arun offers. “Actually,” he adds before I can answer, “I don’t have any coffee.”
A while later, dinner is still only a mystical smell emanating from behind the curtain in the kitchen. A knot of hungry-looking men arrive and rip through like locusts on their way through to the back room, pillaging the display case for pastries and lunch leftovers. Alcohol is relatively taboo here, and they’ve come to drink in private – “away from their wives,” Arun adds with a resigned look.
One of the group I recognise from previous evenings- a shifty, wispy, mute man of indeterminate age who communicates with hand gestures and wild head nods. I lift my head and our eyes share a wordless half-second conversation. He and I have more in common than it first appears. We’re both prisoners to our lack of language, never quite able to say what we want with its true meaning, all subtlety and nuance lost in translation: his to a hybrid game of life-long charades, mine to a linguistic cocktail of verbs in the present continuous.
Dinner eventually arrives, and it’s well worth the wait. Steamed rice, pork curry, fried potatoes & beans, and a side of raw green chillis, red onion & wedges of sweet lime.
Out of curiosity, I pick up one of the chillis and bite it in half. My fight or flight activates and there’s an initial burst of heat, but it’s hardly the world-ending fire I was expecting. It’s not until a few minutes later that the tide starts rolling in. My eyes begin watering, my lips are burning, and my fingers start twitching unnaturally. I play it off as best I can, and in time the sensation mellows to a pleasantly smooth glow.
Thursday
Today is a holiday for the organisation and the beginning of the Easter long weekend. It’s well-timed: I’ve not really had a full day off for weeks, and I’m suffering from a mild case of what I would call “Too Much India” syndrome. It’s a relatively harmless condition cured by a short stint of detachment, after which I’m refreshed and ready to dive back in.
India, and specifically Assam, is so wildly all-consuming and brain-stretching in its chaos to me that it can be physically tiring just to take it all in. Don’t get me wrong- I love it here. The work is interesting and meaningful, and I’m gaining invaluable experience putting into practice what I learned at university. In effect, getting TMI is a positive sign - it means I'm making the most of my time here, and not sheltering or withdrawing from anything.
But it’s certainly possible to have too much of a good thing.
My escape is to binge-watch the entire first season of Reacher on Amazon Prime.
Overall, I like it. It is certainly more watchable than the Tom Cruise movie adaptations, which I struggled to enjoy mainly because I wasn’t able to perform the necessary cognitive gymnastics to separate Cruise’s Reacher from the one I’d shaped in my head from the books.
My batteries recharged, I feel ready to tackle my next mission: getting a haircut.
The barbershop is a roadside shed, the walls painted a washed-out lime green. I sit in one of the handmade timber chairs, and two cheque-patterned tablecloths are draped around my neck. I show one of the barbers a screenshot from a Google image search of “short back and sides”. He nods, and we begin.
Mercifully, he sticks to the script, at least at first.
It all seems to be wrapping up and I’m almost ready to get out of the chair when things start to get very interesting. It all happens in a blur. Without warning, my barber begins a full head and face massage, vigorously digging his fingers into my skull until I feel like I’m sitting in a washing machine. Right when I feel like he’ll push through bone and touch my brain, he stops, grabs a tuft of my hair and yanks my head towards my shoulder. My vertebrae crack like someone stepping on dried noodles. He changes grip and pulls in the other direction: same result. Spots appear in my eyes. Next, white powder is tossed over the back of my neck, and wiped away with a brush that comes with a dustpan.
Suddenly it’s all over. I’m concerned that the post-haircut experience is some kind of special extra treatment I’ve unwittingly acquiesced to at an exorbitant cost.
The barber seems to sense my fear.
“Only 50 rupees sir,” he says with a winning smile.
Friday
It rained heavily overnight.
There’s been a surprisingly large amount of rain so early in the year, and people are concerned this will mean less rain during the monsoon in June-August when it’s needed to irrigate crops, and farmers' yields suffering as a result.
The rain always arrives the same way. A few thick drops land first, as if knocking on our corrugated iron roof to request entry. When this goes unanswered the drops increase into a horse trotting on cobblestones, before growing into a gallop, and then multiplying once more until the rain is no longer falling, it’s sprinting towards the roof in a uniform wall of unfathomable volume.
By some trick of the brain, though you can barely hear yourself think through the roaring radio static, the noise is relegated to an unconscious part of the mind until you almost forget it’s there, and it fades into the background.
For this reason, I can never quite tell when the rain ends. Suddenly I notice it’s no longer there, but it could have been minutes since it stopped, my brain still singing the noise to myself even after it’s gone.
I’m heading to Guwahati for the weekend to watch an IPL game, and I’ve decided to treat myself – I’m flying, rather than taking an overnight train or bus. It cuts the travel time from around 10 hours to two, and it's still pretty cheap.
The airport in Lakhimpur is almost deserted- there are only a couple of flights each day. As we board the plane, individual ticket numbers are ticked off a bingo card list by staff at the gate.
Arriving in Guwahati feels quite different to anywhere else in Assam. The airport has a Starbucks (fear not, dear reader, I gave it a wide berth) and the city is one of a couple in the Northeast with 5G. Guwahati is hosting meetings as part of India's presidency of the G20 this year, and there are giant posters along the main highway into town proclaiming India as the "mother of democracy."
Hmm.
Saturday
Gameday!
The area around the ground is awash with pink- the team colour of the Rajasthan Royals. I spot only a handful of supporters for the opposition, the Delhi Capitals. Though there's no IPL team based here, the Royals have an agreement with the Assam Cricket Association and so they are the 'home' team. Local support is also secured through one of the Royals' players, Riyan Parag, being from Guwahati. This is the second of two IPL games being played here this season, and the first time the tournament has come to Assam.
I have to surrender my headphones and any coins in my wallet at a kiosk before going in: I'm given a hand-written number on a piece of card as a token in exchange for 30 rupees (I'm almost certain the person in front of me paid 20).
I make my way into the ground nice and early so I can watch the teams warm up. Because of the shape of the stands, my seat in the second row of the top tier feels very close to the edge of the ground, and I can peer over the railing at the boundary rope below.
Delhi win the toss and chose to bowl first. There's a lot of fanfare to get the game underway, and it just keeps getting louder. The ground seats 50,000 and it's almost full, but attendance would be more accurately measured in decibels.
The first ball of the match goes for 4.
The crowd erupt.
The same thing happens on the second ball, and the third. 20 runs come off the first over.
Everyone is screaming. The energy in the ground is unbelievable. Noise washes over me. A kind of delirium takes hold of the crowd, unleashed with every ball struck to the boundary. When a fielder turns to jog towards the outfield the entire stand starts yelling their name, and gets even louder when they raise a hand in acknowledgement.
I've watched the All Blacks in Wellington, I've sung along to Sweet Caroline at quarter-time at a sold-out SCG, I've seen Celtic FC play in Glasgow, I've watched 25,000 perform a Viking clap before Canberra Raiders games, and I was there to see Scott Boland take 6/7 at the MCG.
Nothing comes close to this.
Rajasthan pillage their way to 68/0 after the powerplay.
At one point I think they could go on to score 250, but they eventually settle for 199/4.
I've told the people around me I'm supporting Rajasthan, because Trent Boult, their opening bowler, is also a Kiwi. He doesn't let me down, taking two wickets in two balls in the first over of the chase and killing the game before Delhi had a chance to build their innings.
Rajasthan cruise home: Delhi finish on 142/9 and lose by 57 runs.
The fireworks display afterwards appears just coordinated enough to seem deliberate, but the individual flares don't have much height to them and I'm showered with still-burning cardboard fragments as I walk out of the ground.
Sunday
At Guwahati airport, I spot the first white person I’ve seen in Assam since arriving here in January- if you ignore the stick-figure cricketers at the game yesterday. He also happens to be about 6'8”, and so for 10 glorious minutes, I bathe in the rare feeling of not being the most conspicuous person in the room, as people surround him asking for photos and go live on Facebook filming him. I try to catch his eye to give him a look of support but he’s trying his hardest to seem interested in the patterns on the ceiling.
I don’t manage to slip through completely unnoticed either. Someone comes up and asks if I was at the IPL game yesterday. When I say yes, he then asks why I’m not travelling with the team. I realise I've been mistaken for one of the players, despite standing in line for a flight to a small town in Assam, not to Jaipur or Delhi, and while wearing scrappy jeans and a pink t-shirt with "She'll Be Right" written across the front. It makes me wonder what I could have got away with if I’d bought some team kit and worn it around town. There's one final moment of comedy to finish the trip- I take a call just after landing back in Lakhimpur, so I'm late exiting the terminal. As I go for the door I'm stopped by security. They think I'm in the wrong part of the airport and should be getting on a plane, not coming off one. I try to explain that I've just arrived, and want to leave the airport, but this gets mixed up with arriving at the airport and departing on a plane.
Confusion reigns. I make upward and downward motions with my arm for take-off and landing. Eventually, I find my ticket and show them.
"Oh, arrival not departure!”
I manage a weary nod, and they let me through.
Later, Wilfred calls me. The organisation's bank account has been frozen, and his staff haven't received their monthly pay. He thinks it's a mistake- a miscommunication between the central bank and the local branch- but he can't be sure. He'll head to the bank tomorrow and try to straighten it out.
Time to get back to work.
Commentaires