Gulven

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: i remember when we invited him over for a drink, he said, 'never say no to a drink', with a twinkle in his eyes. He sipped his drink quietly, watching the merriment in our group with amusement.

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.