We crossed the jeep on our way to
the Brahmaputra and I saw the foreigner I had seen earlier in the day, now
seated in the back seat. He recognised
me and we exchanged a smile and a wave.
With his floppy hat and white beard, he looked much like the many others
who travel around India looking for the wildlife experience.
When we reached Nameri two days
later, there he was again, at the lunch table of the Eco Camp. As we settled down to a meal at the next
table, he introduced himself, his slow, careful English marked by a distinctly
French accent, and asked politely, though hesitantly, if he could join our
fun-loving group. It wasn’t particularly
unusual and he seemed a decent sort, so we invited him.
Gulven, his name was. An unusual name, I thought, and have
remembered it since.
He was quite an odd chap: in his mid-sixties,
of medium height but heavily built, with lidded eyes and a puffed pinkish face behind
his poorly trimmed beard, his clothes rather shabby and unwashed (he wore the
T-shirt I had seen on him two days ago), the stubby fingers – equally unwashed
- tearing the roti and dipping it in dal and veggies. I instantly recollected a word from the Enid
Blyton days – ragamuffin!
He chewed his meal deliberately,
much as one would consume an unloved but necessary vegetable, and was entirely
unfussy in his choice of food though it was, he said, his first trip to India. He had flown in from Paris to Dubai to
Bangalore and then to Guwahati – all without an overnight break. Immediately after landing at Guwahati, he had
taken a bus to Kaziranga for a couple of days and the previous day had taken a
handful of local buses, hitched rides and walked the last few kilometres to
reach the Nameri Eco Camp. If this was
not unusual, he added that he had had no reservation at the Eco Camp (which is
generally full); he just landed up, asked for any place to stay and was given a
small room used at times by a field researcher.
Wow.
He did seem jetlagged – the eyes
struggled to stay open - but, as I
realised over the next couple of days, Gulven always looked this way.
Though his conversation was mild and polite, I wasn’t particularly impressed with his personal hygiene and thought of drawing
the conversation to a close as lunch ended. He then took out his bird book –
Field Guide to Birds of the Indian Sub Continent – and I could see a common
interest. The book was new but had been
well thumbed already.
We began chatting about what we
had seen and, almost instantly, he disagreed – perhaps a trite too sharply –
with my identification of one of the birds that I said I had seen in Kaziranga.
A rude, unhygienic Frenchman, I thought,
and we have to put up with this for a couple of days, and, what’s more, it’s
his first trip to India and he thinks he knows it all.
“I spent four years in
Bangladesh,” he said, almost reading my mind, “and did a number of trips around
the country, which is why I know a bit about your birds.” When he spoke of his
birds, he was frank, unapologetic and to the point.
He wandered off with a guide into
the jungle, but requested before leaving that he join us on our rafting trip
down the Jai Bhorelli river the next day, offering to pay for his share. Our group, after a quick thought, agreed and
that was about all I saw of Gulven for the day.
As we set off down the river the
following day, Gulven came into his own.
Along with the expert guide, he seemed to recognise every bird and know
a bit of its genealogy, aided by a photographic
memory. Seeing a bird shoot out over the
canopy over us, he emphatically declared it to be a peregrine falcon, with the
additional explanation “Normandy has
them.”, even as he pointed out a Nameri jewel– the ibis bill – to the rest of
us. Indeed, watching and identifying birds was his only interest, almost to the
exclusion of all else. My friend, Jairam, recalls that evening:
The following day, I joined him
and a guide on an early morning trek to see a particularly rare bird, the white
winged wood duck. It was the day before
our departure and he mentioned that he too would be leaving Nameri, onwards to
Manas National Park. Did he have
accommodation there? No. Did he know anyone there or indeed a broad idea of the
route? No, again. This peculiar, lone, scraggly stranger had an extraordinary capacity
for travel, I thought, almost to the point of self-flagellation.
During the walk, he was completely
focused on birds in the awe-inspiring canopy above and being in his company was
an education in birding, no less. The
guide led us to a stream and we sat behind a bush in complete silence for the
better part of an hour, until, voila!, there was a rush of noise and quacks and
four wood ducks flew past the stream, not stopping by, possibly because they
had sensed our presence. That moment,
that single second of spotting, seemed to make his day, though all I had seen
was a white and blackish blur that, as it flew by, seemed to remonstrate
angrily at the humans around.
That evening, Gulven told me of
his life in France: way past his working prime, struggling for money with a
broken marriage behind him, no children and afflicted with bi-polar disease, a
damaging psychological condition of extreme mood swings, that he now took
medication for. He spoke of a partner – “She’s
my girlfriend, nobody gets married in France anymore…” – with little
enthusiasm, much less than he had reserved for the ibis bill. She had no interest in accompanying him and
he wanted no burden, so here he was alone.
He mentioned that he’d want to go back and apologise to her for something,
but at this point he was speaking more to himself. He saw the longevity of people in the
developed nations and the complexity of their relationships differently: it was
a curse if you ran out of money before your end, for you were certain to be
alone. His tone as he spoke was soft
and, as when he described birds, precise, always factual and never quite
feeling sorry for himself.
The next day, we dropped him to
the market in Tezpur town on our way back to Guwahati, with his two modest
shoulder bags, one with his binocs and bird book and water, the other with the
minimal needs for travel. As we said our
byes and I got back into the car, I could not help but feel sympathy and
admiration for this curiously odd fellow from beyond, who had chosen to live
for the moment and not beyond it, on his own uncertain terms and often clinging
to flotsam, in a world of birds that he had chosen to inhabit alone.
