Hunting the griffon (India)

Thursday 21 November 2019

The name evokes something mythical, something to inspire awe and perhaps fear: griffon. The griffon we were seeking, however, was far from mythical, although neither Sally nor I doubted its ability to inspire awe. It was her idea to go looking for them, and she had a good idea where to look. The griffon she wanted me to see was the Himalayan griffon, the largest bird in the Himalayas, slightly bigger even than the huge lammergeier.
She and Prem co-opted one of Prem’s friends, Dina, to drive us towards the Rohtang Pass, to a point where she’d previously seen huge vultures circling; those birds, she felt sure, must have been griffons. Even if we didn’t achieve the ultimate goal of seeing the griffon, we’d surely see other birds — enough to make a day’s excursion worthwhile. Besides, any day in the mountains is a good day.

Dina picked us up in his Bolero (a cross between a jeep and a ute) and drove at high speed up the steep, winding, pot-holed road, dodging walkers and dogs, squeezing past oncoming vehicles, sometimes overtaking cars that were only speeding, and all the while he talked and laughed with Prem with an energy that matched his driving. As far as I knew, he had no English, or maybe about as much as I had Hindi, but despite that, and despite what sane people might consider insane driving, I warmed to him immediately. Like Prem, he was impossible not to like.

I saw white streaks on cliffs on the far side of the narrow valley in the area where Sally had seen vultures circling. This was promising. Less promising was the point where we stopped, which turned out to be a popular lookout partway up the endlessly switch-backing road to the Pass. The place was chaos: a bedlam of cars and other vehicles parked or trying to park on the roadside. The jam must have stretched for a kilometre, possibly more. Dina parked with one wheel almost off the road (I exited the car carefully on the other side), and after Prem, Sally, and I had set off up the mountainside, he shifted it to a more satisfactory spot before catching up with us. We tried an initial bird observation spot but decided it was too populated and noisy, so we moved further on. The sound of the crowd began to fade, and immediately we began to see birds — crows, of course, but also spot-winged tits. We moved further around the mountainside and dropped down to a grassy four-wheel drive track, where Prem and Dina set about preparing a fire.
But before they’d even lit it, Prem called out.
‘Pete!’ he said, pointing, and there, soaring towards us, was a huge and spectacular bird. It passed behind a tall cedar, emerged, circled, and cruised off across the valley. I managed a few underexposed and soft photographs, but they were good enough to confirm the identification. Himalayan griffon. Then, shortly afterwards, it was Sally’s turn to call out. I looked up and saw her pointing at another large vulture, but one noticeably different. By then I had the camera set up better, but I had less time to photograph and the angles were less satisfactory. Nevertheless, this was unquestionably a lammergeier. Within a few minutes, Sally’s goal of helping me see the griffon had not only been met but exceeded.

We ate lunch and relaxed by the fire. I photographed Himalayan woodpeckers — record shots. Sally came back from a short foray to report a dead horse further along the track, and when I checked it out, I found large feathers scattered around the corpse, which was now little more than dry skin shrivelled over a skeleton. Very large feathers. Feathers so large they could only have been from one of those two huge vultures.

Later in the afternoon we walked back along the track to Dina’s vehicle, and he drove us down to the riverbed. He and Prem built another fire in a small cave — little more than an overhang at the base of a cliff, but enough to provide some shelter from the bitter wind — and Sally heated the quiche and biryani and rajma she’d prepared. I was hungry by then and ate plenty and tried a tiny amount of Black Bow whisky and listened to Prem and Dina singing local songs. We talked, firelight flickering on the faces of my friends, while the light faded. Just before night closed in completely, I looked up at the sky and saw a small shape, silhouetted, flitting around above us. To see a little bat beginning its nightly hunt as our day drew to a close seemed as perfect as I could have wished for.

Saturday 23 November 2019

A day of rain continued throughout the night — steady, unrelenting, unvarying rain — and this morning, when I draw back the curtains, I see snow low on the mountainsides, coating the ground well below the timberline. Pale blue smoke billows from the chimney of a nearby house and flows down the valley; two crows fly past, going up the valley, and the pooled water on the flat concrete roof of the house next door dances with raindrops. Pigeons fly in to land on the verandah, displacing a myna, which flies across to the concrete roof and hunches, apparently disgruntled, in the rain. Mynas can look after themselves, though — too well, unfortunately, in places where they’ve been introduced, and they now sit near the top of the list of the world’s worst invasive species. This one will quickly find shelter elsewhere. It flies off, and I think about what it means to say a species is invasive. That’s straightforward enough, though, even if the definition undoubtedly provides much for ecologists and others to argue about. I’m more interested in what it means to say a species is ‘worst’. That’s a value judgement, and although I don’t agree with the arguments of the self-titled ‘compassionate conservationists’, whose manifesto, it seems to me, relies too much on cherry-picked examples to argue that conventional conservation doesn’t work and which would abandon far too many unique species to functional or actual extinction, I do agree with them that too often conventional conservation programmes demonise invasive species and refuse to accept they have any positive characteristics.
I like mynas. I admire their intelligence, their adaptability, and their appearance. Nevertheless, if I could remove mynas from northern New Zealand, I would. An even clearer example: stoats. I love them and always get a thrill of delight when I see one, but that’s always tempered with concern about the devastating effects even a single stoat can have on populations of native birds that, unlike stoats, are found nowhere else in the world.

New Zealand’s lucky, though. We could have suffered far worse if the efforts to introduce other animals had succeeded. Several serious attempts were made to introduce mongooses to control rabbits; all failed, but if they’d succeeded, we’d unquestionably have lost far more species of birds and invertebrates. And thinking of mongooses brings me back to India rather than remembering the stoats on the No. 1 Line track.

The russet sparrows arrive. How do they stay so dry in this unrelenting rain?

I brew Himalayan green tea with rose petals and drink it as I write to the sound of rain and birds and vehicles passing. How long will this weather last? Prem’s been planning an excursion to look for Himalayan monal, a bird I’d love to see (and, with luck, photograph), but searching for monal in the rain would be both miserable and futile — in this weather, Prem says, they hide away. Sensible birds.
Eventually the rain stops, and with no sign of the sleepers I pack and go for a walk up the road. Near a parked car on a flat area littered with broken glass, bottles, indeterminate rags, and other rubbish, a small flock of birds gleans — russet sparrows and one of the tits, which I can’t see well enough to identify or photograph. I have the wrong lens on, of course. Later, in an apple tree near the same spot, I photograph rock buntings. Slowly, I’m beginning to learn the birds, and this gives the journey a focus that makes it feel more intentional, less like aimless drifting from place to place. I don’t know why this should be important, and perhaps it isn’t.
I stop at the dhaba where Sally had bought vegetables and order an aloo paratha and chai. It feels good to be independent and alone in a little Indian restaurant, eating paratha, drinking a good-sized cup of chai, and scribbling in the notebook as I watch the people and traffic pass by. A few people notice me, and when I nod and smile in acknowledgement they respond with the head wobble and sometimes a smile. That, too, feels good.

In the afternoon I finally manage to make myself useful, breaking a large bundle of sticks into tiny pieces for kindling. Prem cooks an excellent dish of rice, veges, and apple; it has just the right level of spiciness and the apple’s a refreshing accent. This could be a very late lunch or an early dinner — it doesn’t matter. Would I like a glass of beer? Sally asks, but I opt instead for the alternative: the second flush Assam tea that arrived today, just two days after Sally ordered it online. Thursday’s drinking was enough for me, even though I tried to take care, and last night I relented and enjoyed a small amount of beer when Prem’s cousin visited; today, even though beer would have been perfect with Prem’s dish, I want a night off.

Blue sky appears towards evening, with big, orange-suffused cumulus at the head of the valley. Crows cross the valley, silhouetted against the nascent thunderheads. I love the way the tips of their wings bend upwards on that strong downbeat, as if they’re gently stroking the sky.

Sunday 24 November 2019

Too much to record; the day too full to do justice to. Let’s just say we went looking for Himalayan monal and saw griffons, Koklass pheasants, and a tree creeper. We heard a monal calling; Prem identified the call for us. He knows these mountains and what lives here — this is home for him. He led us through shallow, slippery snow wearing socks and flip-flops. I should have felt weak and soft but was pleased to be able to keep up and feel at home. I think I’ll always be pulled between the mountains and the sea. Maybe that’s what happens when you grow up in New Zealand.

Monday 25 November 2019

Around mid-afternoon I walked the back road towards Manali. Sally walked with me part of the way, just far enough to show me where the road went. I recognised the initial section as the part we’d walked to meet Prem on the day I arrived at Shanag, and from there the route finding was straight forward, with only a couple of junctions, where choosing the right branch was straightforward. I’d only just left Sally when I saw something moving on the trunk of an apple tree. A tree creeper! Stupidly, I’d packed my camera in the daypack, and I tried to watch the bird while retrieving it but lost sight of it when it flew to another grove of trees. I never saw it again. They’re strange, beautiful birds, and I hope I get another chance to photograph one. I have one poor but recognisable photograph from yesterday’s walk, a few minutes after seeing the Koklass pheasants, but that’s nothing more than a record shot.
At the bridge over the stream, though, I immediately saw a Little forktail. It flew off as I raised the camera, and I never saw that bird again either, but as I looked upstream, I saw another, different bird. Even from a distance, the distinct coloration and white patch on the head meant I knew I was looking at a Whitecapped water redstart, and I managed some fairly distant but good photographs. The walk was turning out well.

Further on, I photographed a white-bellied treepie and one of several yellow-billed blue magpies feeding on red berries from a tangled bush. A few cars bounced and joggled past on the lumpy road, and occasionally I’d pass small groups of people tending orchards, cutting grass, hanging out around houses, or attempting to split enormous, tough logs with blunt axes that bounced off the wood and left little impression. Mostly, though, the road remained quiet and peaceful.

I’d worked out a turn-around time so I wouldn’t end up walking in the dark. Turning back on a road I’m walking for the first time often deflates me — only slightly, but detectably nevertheless. The complete novelty of the road has gone, and with it the possibility of discovering something new and wonderful; instead I’m faced with a long trudge over ground I’ve just covered. But that doesn’t mean all hope of enjoyment has vanished. Far from it: new birds, or the same birds showing themselves more clearly, might appear; the view differs and might reveal things I’ve walked past; towards evening the light for photographing might have improved; encounters with people — simple conversations or even a smile — can be a delight. For example, on the way back I talked with a middle-aged man who had just crossed the road with a huge load of grass in two yellow sacks on his back.
I saw him stop and look back, evidently curious. He walked slowly, as if wanting me to catch up, and just before I did, he stepped down off the road onto a path leading to a house a short distance away.
‘Namaste,’ I said.
He looked up and nodded. He looked exhausted and broke off a thin twig of a dry weed with which to pick his teeth.
‘Where you come from?’ he said.
‘Shanag.’ I pointed up the valley at the village, although he must have known where Shanag was. He nodded.
‘Where you from?’ he said.
I told him New Zealand, and he nodded again and said, slowly, ‘Achaar’ — good.
He wanted to know how much I was paying to stay in Shanag.
‘Your room, how much you pay?’
I told him I was staying with a friend so wasn’t paying for a room. He gave his usual nod, and I couldn’t tell whether he was disappointed at the lack of information about how much money people in Shanag were earning from tourists or simply resigned to the uselessness of foreigners. I think he may have welcomed the novelty of talking with me and the chance to rest before the final plod back to the house. Perhaps he was wondering whether offering homestays to tourists would be an easier, more lucrative way of life than daily hard physical labour.

At the bridge I looked for the Little forktail and the Whitecapped water redstart. Neither showed itself, but I saw another small bird of a different type perched on a large boulder. Even from a distance I knew I was looking at a female Plumbeous water redstart. I photographed and climbed down to the river bed where I could manage some slightly closer photographs, but at the point where I’d have been in ideal range, the little bird dropped down behind another large boulder and vanished. I thought I was in a position where I’d be able to see it fly off, but it never reappeared, and I began to realise that the birds inhabiting these boulder-strewn streams were probably adept at discrete escapes.

I carried on, making it back to the dhaba near Sally’s apartment well before dark. I stopped for chai, and the women greeted me with smiles. The young woman who took my order came out with the chai on a tray and placed the mug carefully in front of me.
‘Danyavad,’ I said — thank you.
She looked directly at me and smiled beautifully.
‘Welcome,’ she said.

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Photos: 

1. A side valley in the headwaters of the Solang Valley, Himachal Pradesh, on the day of our search for the monal.
2. Dina (see the previous post for a photo of Prem).
3. Lammergeier
4. Common myna at Shanag, near Manali.
5. Koklass pheasant (female), Solang Valley, Himachal Pradesh.
6. Mountains near Solang, Himachal Pradesh, the evening of our big walk in search of the monal.

Photos and original text © 2019 Pete McGregor

Life as an animal (India)

These posts will be thrown together quickly — I don't want to spend my time in India agonising over them. However, I hope they'll give you some idea of what it's like here and will reassure you that I'm still alive and well 🙂

Sunday 17 November 2019

At the Madan Café I sipped strong milk coffee and unashamedly ate a honey pancake. The clientele were mostly as delightfully dissipated as I remembered, although this time they were mostly Indian with the better part of a week’s grey-and-white stubble. The one exception was a thin and ragged man in baggy shorts and an old T-shirt; he had a pale, white, smoker’s complexion and hair like Gollum and he intrigued me instantly. But, before I could think of something to open a conversation, an old woman came quietly up and held out her hand. I suspended my cynicism and caution and placed thirty rupees in her grime-blackened hand, thinking it wasn’t for me to decide whether she was a worthy recipient of charity. You just do it and do your best not to feel righteous.
After she’d shuffled off, the toothless bidi-smoker sitting opposite me at the table and watching the traffic turned to me and said something uninterpretable even if I’d known Hindi. He waved his hands in a similarly uninterpretable gesture, and I couldn’t work out if he liked what I’d done or was cautioning me against doing it again. He was clearly not the full quid but seemed to fulfill some kind of assistant staffing role. He kept turning to me and muttering something and gesturing, and I wondered whether he wanted something to eat. I offered him the remaining third of my pancake — I’d enjoyed it but didn’t need the whole thing — but he didn’t want it.

The man with the Gollum hair had heard me talking cricket with the young shopkeeper from next door and struck up a conversation, first about cricket, then about sport in general. Clive was from England but had spent the last eleven years living in Asia, mostly in India and Nepal. He’d broken his hip, and because Nepal’s public health system didn’t have the facilities to fix it and he didn’t have travel insurance, he’d had to spend eight weeks lying on his back in bed while the broken bone healed itself. His thigh wasted away and the tendons and ligaments around his knee shortened and tightened, and when he walked off down the street later, I saw he could hardly move that leg. To call his gait a limp was a gross understatement. He appeared to enjoy our conversation, or at least to have someone to listen to his theories about sport. I tried to steer him onto other subjects related to travelling and life, but he wanted to talk cricket and rugby and tennis.
   ‘You’re the joint holders of the cricket world cup,’ he insisted. Even an Englishman could see New Zealand had been dealt an injustice.
I liked him and wanted to photograph him but couldn’t bring myself to ask. Perhaps if I’d explained that I found his stories interesting he might have agreed, but I didn’t want him to think I was photographing him because he looked outrageously derelict, the way some people photograph homeless people. If I’d been a journalist tasked with investigating and documenting the lives and stories of people like Clive, I might have had a justification, but I wasn’t and I didn’t.

...

Along the back alley this morning, two dogs lay half asleep on a bench in front of a doorway. Below them in the filth and rubbish lay the emaciated dead body of a ginger kitten, its head arched back. I couldn’t tell if the dogs had killed it or carried it there, or whether it had died of starvation or disease or both, but the sight broke my heart. Whatever finally ended its life might have been merciful, but part of my distress was seeing it lying there, ignored, its suffering not afforded the least respect. When I walked back along the alley in the evening after dark, the small, dried body still lay there.

...

As I walked back from Connaught Place to Pahar Ganj, I saw a young man walking a large animal on a leash. The animal padded along slowly, and although I assumed it must have been a dog, from behind it looked peculiar, almost lion-like. As I drew closer, the animal turned its massive head, and I saw it was a bloodhound — but a bloodhound in terrible condition. The skin had shrunken over the animal’s hips; the body was hollowed out as if it hadn’t eaten in months; the brown fur was dull and gave little more impression of life than the fur on the dead kitten I’d seen that morning. As I walked past, I saw a long string of saliva drooling from the great flaps covering the mouth. The only thing suggesting the dog wasn’t one of the walking dead was its golf-ball-sized balls, which still looked capable of doing their job. Yet, despite its appalling condition, it still looked terrifying.

Monday 18 November 2019

On the rooftop at 7.30, waiting for breakfast, I looked at the sky and thought it less clear than the previous two days. There was no wind. Maybe the air would be worse, too, and I began to question my decision to turn down Sally’s hugely generous offer to treat me to a flight from Delhi to Kullu, not far from Manali. But I hadn’t been able to face the prospect of last-minute, late-night packing then getting up before dawn to get to the airport to fly out at 6.45, and I was trying to keep flying to a minimum. The decision had been made, and I hoped I’d be able to endure the fourteen hours in the bus. At least the seats in the massive Volvo would be more comfortable than the criminally cramped Airbus seats on the flight from Auckland to Kuala Lumpur.

I’d decided to buy tea for Sally, so I walked to Tooti Chowk, the frenetic hub of Main Bazaar. The shop I’d seen the previous day was closed, though, and so was Mr Bal Singh’s Uttam Tea Centre. I’d forgotten, or I hadn’t realised, that many shops were closed on Mondays. Would either tea shop open in the afternoon? I didn’t know, but I’d check. I wandered through the food market, which  was overwhelmingly dominated by vegetables and fruit, and tried not to hear the distressed cheeping of filthy chickens crammed too many to a wire cage. A man in a grubby black T-shirt and pants strode past, his feet in flip-flops covered in filth and blood and scraps of feather. I hadn’t eaten meat since getting off the plane (and some of what I’d been fed on the flights might have been meat in name only — meat as euphemism), and I hadn’t missed it. I’d had no ill effects whatsoever from eating the local food, and I hoped that would continue.

I checked out of my room and went up to the rooftop to write, but thinking about food had made me hungry. I packed away the pens and cahier and walked to the Capital Hotel dhaba. The dead kitten had disappeared at last, and beneath the bench I saw a tabby sniffing at the wall. She, at least, looked healthy, although her coat lacked any gloss. Excusable, I suppose: keeping your fur clean in the back alleys of Pahar Ganj must be a nightmare.

The Capital was busy, and I took a seat at the back. Everyone was eating Deluxe thalis: ninety rupees only. But I knew I couldn’t eat an entire Deluxe thali, nor even do it justice, so I ordered an aloo paratha. It came well-greased with melted butter and with a small dollop of typically astringent and salty pickle. As usual, it was far too hot for foreign fingers, but I managed to tear small strips off the edges until it cooled enough for me to rip it into less embarrassingly tiny pieces. Meanwhile, a toddler used his family at a nearby table as a base for exploring the dhaba, but he seemed unaware that I was an oddity even when his father pointed me out. Clearly, I was less interesting than his feeder bottle, and that was fine by me.

Tuesday 19 November 2019

At dawn I put my contact lenses in and watched the landscape slide past for the last several hours of the 14-hour journey from Delhi. I recognised the section along the dam; surprisingly, though, I didn’t remember the tunnel, which seemed to go on forever. I thought about the geology of the Himalaya and wished I hadn’t, but the more I tried not to think about earthquakes the more I imagined being trapped underground by rockfall, beyond all hope of rescue. The bus did finally emerge into daylight, of course, and given the behaviour of the traffic I was probably less safe on that section of road than in the tunnel, but that’s not how phobias work. I noticed, too, how I’d been less able to ignore how close the bus had driven to the edge of the road and the nightmare plunge into the lake, and I wondered whether I was beginning to lose my nerve, to lose my fatalism, to lose my ability to disconnect from reality when that was a sensible thing to do. Reading a recent article about outcome bias probably hadn’t helped. In short, outcome bias is the tendency to believe that because something hasn’t happened, it won’t happen. For example, people travel in dangerous places and return without incident; they then argue that those places are safer than they’re made out to be. The dangers are exaggerated, they say. If you live to tell the tale, the logic goes, the risks were overstated. The faulty logic of that should be obvious, but obviously it’s not.

Following Sally’s advice, I hired a taxi from the bus station to the Nehrukund bridge, where she met me and insisted on carrying my bags back to her place, a short distance away. In the afternoon we walked up the hill for an introductory tour of the village and to meet Prem, Sally’s friend, who had rescued a kitten for her.
  ‘I have a sick kitten for you,’ he’d said. ‘You need to look after it.’
He lit a fire by the stream and Sally made strong billy tea; we ate her apple cake with it and talked until the evening grew too cold. Prem, naturally, was impervious to the chill. He was from a farming and shepherding family. Sally had told me how bears would come down from the mountains to eat the apples in the autumn so the locals had to keep watch over their orchards. Jungle cats could also be found in the area, she said, and I asked Prem what sort of animals, other than birds, lived in the area.
  ‘Are there leopards here?’ I said.
  ‘Snow leopard,’ he said, indicating the mountains at the head of the valley. In the flat, dim light of evening, with a thin, partial covering of snow over black rock, they looked bitterly cold and hostile.
  ‘Have you seen a snow leopard?’ I asked.
  Prem nodded. ‘Yes, one time. Here, near camp.’
I didn’t doubt he knew what he’d seen — he knew the difference between snow leopards and common leopards — but to have seen a snow leopard so low down, in what was essentially a forested area well below the snowline, was unusual to the point of being remarkable. Perhaps it had been injured or otherwise unable to capture enough usual prey.

We walked the last part of the route home in the dark with occasional torchlight to let approaching vehicles know we were there. The kitten travelled the entire journey wrapped in Sally’s shawl, purring almost continuously. It was emaciated and desperately hungry, but, in the way of all cats, quickly found the wood stove, where it interfered with the stoking by sitting so close to the firebox that it singed the tips of its eyebrow whiskers so they curled like a hipster’s moustache. The cat clearly had panache.

---

Notes: 1.

Photos: 
1. Five-striped palm squirrel (Funambulus pennantii) on the rooftop of the Smyle Inn, Pahar Ganj, New Delhi.
2. Large-billed crow (Corvus macrorhynchos) near the route to Rohtang Pass, Himachal Pradesh.
3. Russet sparrow (Passer cinnamomeus) near Manali, Himachal Pradesh.
4. Prem at the campfire.
5. The kitten. It looks a bit like a demon cat in this photo but is actually a gorgeous little animal with a purr out of all proportion to its size. Bend down to stoke the fire and you're likely to be met with an enthusiastic hongi.

Photos and original text © 2019 Pete McGregor

Conversations with former strangers (India)

These posts will be thrown together quickly — I don't want to spend my time in India agonising over them. However, I hope they'll give you some idea of what it's like here and will reassure you that I'm still alive and well 🙂

Friday 15 November 2019

The flight from Auckland to Kuala Lumpur was awful — bad food and cramped seating — but at least I had an aisle seat and could move around enough to stay alive. Fortunately, the flight from Kuala Lumpur to Delhi had far roomier seats ( one of the more significant differences between a Boeing 737-800 and an Airbus 330-200), but the food was just as dire. I shouldn't complain, though — one of the most important things to leave behind when travelling, other than one’s dignity, is fussiness about eating (not to be confused with enlightened awareness of the way food might have been prepared).

At Delhi I was, inevitably, accosted by a taxi tout. Where was I going? Pahar Ganj? Oh, the Airport Express Metro doesn’t go to Pahar Ganj. 

'Taxi 400 rupees — cheaper than Airport Express,' he said.

I knew that wasn’t true and pointed out that the Airport Express would take me to New Delhi Railway Station for one hundred rupees (I discovered later it was just sixty: phenomenal value), but he kept insisting the Airport Express wouldn’t take me to Pahar Ganj.

‘But Pahar Ganj is directly opposite New Delhi Railway Station,’ I said. ‘Are you telling me the Airpot Express doesn’t go to New Delhi Railway Station?’

He knew the game was up and could only smile. 

‘You like India?’ he said.

Yes, I like India, even though people like him would try it on.

Saturday 16 November 2019

The tasks were going well. I’d signed up for a VPN and it appeared to have minimal effect on connection speed. After leaving a message for my bank to let them know transactions from India or Sweden (the VPN’s base) were legitimate, I walked down Main Bazaar to the ATM I’d used on my previous trip. It was still there, still working, still apparently straightforward. I inserted my card, asked for a large sum of cash, and tried to relax while it thought about the request, while I hoped I wouldn’t be freaked out by something disastrous like a ‘card declined’ message. The lights blinked to indicate I should remove my card. I heard the sound of rollers counting out cash, and I knew I’d be OK.

I carried on, intending to loop around and back to the Smyle Inn, and as I passed a side alley, a small boy in a startlingly white uniform and a backpack stopped and looked up at me, his eyes clear and bright in his copper-brown face. The previous evening I'd been walking along an alley when he'd called out to me. I'd answered in Hindi, and that had been enough to start a conversation. He'd thought I knew Hindi, and I had to explain I knew almost none. I asked him if he went to school, and when he said yes, I asked what his favourite subject was.
He thought for a moment then looked up at me from his bike and said, 'Science'.
'Science? Great! I teach people how to explain their science better,' I said.
This was a little too much for him to understand, though, because he asked if I was a science teacher. I tried my best to explain what I did, but I think my communication skills were lacking. We'd had an enjoyable discussion, though.

This morning he looked slightly uncertain whether I'd remember him. He looked hopeful, too. 
‘Hi Satim,’ I said, and he grinned up at me. ‘Are you on your way to school?’

‘Yes, school today.’

‘What time does school start?’

He looked startled and cast about for a reply, finally managing to say, ‘Seven and a half.’

‘Seven-thirty?’

He nodded, and I hoped it didn’t sound like I was correcting him. I hoped he’d now know to say ‘seven-thirty’, and I realised that if I’d been thinking faster I should have said ‘half-past seven’, but one lesson at a time was enough.

A man, tiny, no taller than Satim, came over and stood next to him. I wondered if he was Satim’s father, come to see what was going on, suspicious of the tall foreigner talking to his son. He said nothing, perhaps lacking English, and Satim didn’t introduce him. The man’s silence and questioning look took the edge off an otherwise enjoyable meeting, but eventually Satim said, ‘He is my friend.’ At the time I thought he was referring to me rather than explaining to the man that I was a new friend, but in hindsight that wouldn’t have made sense if the man didn’t understand English. I liked the idea that Satim might introduce me as a friend, but maybe that was just wishful thinking. 

‘I’m Pete,’ I said to the man, hoping that identifying myself might set his mind at rest.

‘Peety,’ Satim repeated for the man’s benefit. At least it wasn’t the usual Indian pronunciation of my name: ‘Peach’.

Satim said something in Hindi, something brief and barely discernible, to the man, who nodded and left. He looked reassured, or at least mollified, and I hoped my impression wasn’t also just wishful thinking. I looked at my watch. If Satim was right, school started in ten minutes.

‘Have a good day at school,’ I said, and he smiled. He seemed a little over-awed. I was no one important or significant, just one of innumerable foreigners passing through Pahar Ganj, but perhaps I was significant to him for a short time because I’d taken the time to listen to him and show an interest. It was just a few minutes, but how much contact had he had with people from other places, other cultures? I felt sure I'd contributed something to his learning, even if it was just how to say 'seven-thirty'. After all,a brief, fleeting conversation with someone in another language can teach a person more than hours of language lessons. 

I learned that lesson later in the morning when I was walking down Basant Road. A rickshaw wallah pedalled up beside me, and, emboldened by the way my attempt at Hindi the previous evening had led to the conversation with Satim, I said ‘Arp kaysa hair?’ — how are you?

His face creased into a big smile, his eyes disappearing into his leather-brown face.

‘Teek uh,’ he responded and added something I guessed was ‘You’re fine too?’

‘May teek uh,’ I said. I’m fine. He understood my rudimentary Hindi, but when he said something else, I had to confess in English that I knew little more Hindi than what I’d just used. I held my thumb and index finger up, close together, to indicate something infinitesimal.

‘Hindi good,’ he said, flattering me outrageously. I thought — at least I hoped — he’d appreciated my attempt to use his language, and he was happy to continue the conversation in his limited English, which was far better than my almost non-existent Hindi. Of course, if that had led to a fare for pedalling me to Connaught Place, so much the better, but, as I’ve felt so often in India, that would have been an additional outcome, not necessarily the main benefit of the interaction. In hindsight, I should have hired him, but I was enjoying the mild exercise.

Sometimes language might be almost insignificant for the communication, but even then, understanding a few words can add to the appreciation. Last night I ate at the open-fronted Capital Hotel dhaba opposite New Delhi railway station; I’d eaten there regularly on my last visit and liked it. Dal fry urad, half rice, and a plain naan cost me just 75 rupees — $1.64 NZ. I recognised the dangerous-looking cook with his puku like a bulging sack of rice, and I also recognised the man who made the naan and prepared the rice at the back of the restaurant. He delivered the naan promptly and carefully, and, later, as he walked past, he looked at my handwriting in the cahier.

‘Mast!’ he said. ‘Mast! Mast!’

He pointed at the writing and grinned with obvious delight. I could have guessed what it meant, but it added to my own enjoyment to know immediately that it was the equivalent of saying in New Zealand, ‘Choice’ or ‘Sweet’ or ‘Wicked’ or ‘Awesome’.

After my conversation with the rickshaw wallah, I carried on to Connaught Place, past a man who’d just finished pissing against a wall and was now wiping his hands on a thin stray dog, which didn’t appear to mind. I dodged an amorphous shit on the footpath and managed to cross the road into Connaught Place, where I tried to remember the location of the Coffee Day I used to visit. I failed, but with unsolicited assistance from a persistent but eventually helpful man, I found another Coffee Day and spent an enjoyable hour there, writing. The franchise is appallingly expensive — about the same as New Zealand prices — but it’s an indulgence I was prepared to afford. 

Partway through the session, a businessman walked in, saw my writing, and came over to peer closely at it. We started talking about writing; I held up the Lamy.
'Not many people use fountain pens now,' I said. He nodded.

‘When I was a boy at school, this was the only pen we were allowed to use,’ he said. ‘Your writing, … this pen, … it makes your writing better. Not so messy.’

‘No ballpoints allowed.’

‘No ballpoints.’ He wobbled his head, the all-purpose gesture of acknowledgement that can mean yes, no, or more often ‘I disagree or don't know but don't want to say so’. He gestured at an empty chair and I invited him to sit down. We talked for a while. He was from Chamoli District in Uttarakhand. I told him how much I liked Uttarakhand and rattled off some places I liked to visit: Almora, Kausani, Josimath, Rudraprayag. He repeated the names after me, nodding and smiling, and he added more, asking if I’d been to those places. Karanprayag, Badrinath, Rishikesh. Yes, I said, all of them, feeling an unwarranted affinity with him.

He wanted to visit New Zealand. He’d heard about how beautiful and clean it was — I heard this every time I said I was from New Zealand and had so far resisted the urge to point out how many of our rivers were now considered unsafe for swimming — and he’d also heard it was inexpensive. At that point I felt obliged to caution him, urging him to plan carefully and listen to the advice from his friend in New Zealand. He went a bit quiet, mostly restricting himself to nodding, but I think he appreciated my comments. Perhaps if he was used to Coffee Day prices, New Zealand prices wouldn’t surprise him excessively.

Finally, he stood up and held out a hand gleaming with rings. I shook it, he smiled and thanked me, and left. I didn’t see him order or leave with anything and hoped for the café’s sake he hadn’t been distracted by my presence. For me, though, an expensive coffee had been worth every cent.

---

Photos: 
1. Tailor on the street in Main Bazaar, Pahar Ganj, New Delhi.
2. It's not India without chai.
3. Musical instrument sellers, Main Bazaar, Pahar Ganj.

Photos and original text © 2019 Pete McGregor

The weirdness of memories

At Leon Kinvig hut in the Pohangina headwaters in November 2018. The pen is a Lamy Al-Star with a Fine nib, the ink Noodler's 

El Lawrence, the notebook a Moleskine extra-large cahier. This combination works better for me than any other — so far.

It was the middle of the week and early in the morning, yet I almost walked away from Jacko’s café because even at a quarter to nine more than half the tables in the main area had been occupied and I expected the remainder to be taken soon. But I didn't want coffee or hot chocolate; I wanted tea, passable tea, tea made with leaves, not tea bags, which are inventions of the devil, and I knew at Jacko's I could get tea made with leaves, and the secondary seating area still had enough free tables, so I ordered jasmine green tea and picked a table near the window.

The tea arrived a minute later, meaning it would have been steeped in boiling water and therefore ruined, but I’d given up being a tea snob and no longer asked them to use water well below boiling point. I used to visit regularly, and they’d quickly and happily learned to let the water cool, but that was the problem with Jacko’s — the café was too good and therefore too popular, so I seldom had a chance of getting at least a full hour to write without feeling guilty about monopolising a table that could have been taken by more lucrative customers. I’ve never felt comfortable adopting the café-as-office attitude. Consequently, I stopped going to Jacko’s when I couldn’t find a time I could be confident of an hour’s relaxed writing, and by the time I started visiting again the staff had changed and I didn’t want to start over with the request to let the water cool.

Rainbow over the back hill, the last sunlight of the evening just leaving. Mown

areas beginning to recover.

That’s one reason I chose jasmine green tea — because its strong flavour meant no one except a native green tea drinker would notice the difference, would notice any subtleties missing from the green tea, and, to be honest, nor could I.  Like my liking for instant coffee made with milk — if I wanted to sound less like a bogan, I could call it café con leche and say it was the norm in much of South America when I'd travelled there — my taste for jasmine green tea brewed badly could be rationalised by considering it a different kind of drink, more akin to a herbal infusion, the way South American café con leche was fine if you didn't expect coffee. Mostly, though, I’d given up asking for the tea to be brewed at a better temperature because I didn’t want to be an arse.

I sat at my table and sipped my jasmine green tea and jotted down three ideas I’d thought of as I’d driven to town. First, shortly after I'd driven through Ashhurst, I’d caught a momentary whiff of freshly mown hay, the scent no doubt accentuated by the heavy drizzle saturating everything including the faded-yellow stubble — all that remained of the once-lush paddocks — and the first idea I jotted down was the way that that mown-hay smell reminded me of two things. The first was one of the few facts I’d retained from my second-year plant physiology course; namely, that the smell of cut grass came from a class of plant secondary compounds called coumarins. Why on earth had I remembered that when I’d forgotten so much far more important information? (In the same class I’d also learned how confectionery manufacturers got the soft centres in chocolates, but why had I remembered that trivial fact, which had also only the most tenuous link to plant physiology?)

The second reminder was of the smells of midsummer, which of course meant Christmas and therefore reminded me of the smell of freshly cut pine branches (the poor person’s Christmas tree; we, being poor, spent significant effort sorting through the heap of branches to select the one that looked least like a hacked-off branch and most like a murdered baby tree). The memory of that pine smell, mingled with the hay scent, was so strong that I could easily have believed I was actually smelling it, that I’d just driven past a roadside stall selling Xmas trees (I hadn’t, but the sense was that strong). I’d read somewhere that humans can’t remember smells the way we remember sounds or things we’ve seen, but that struck me as nonsense. The recollection of particular smells, like ripe apples in a pantry or sun-crisped wrack among tide pools, was as vivid for me as any piece of of music or sight of a landscape. I'm not talking about what a smell evokes — that's something else entirely, and although smell seems better than the other senses at evoking strong memories, I'm talking about remembering the actual smell, almost as if I were smelling it anew.

Mad summer blackbird delousing on a Christchurch, lawn; last days of 2018.

The pine smell memory in turn reminded me not just of Christmas but also of a fountain pen ink I’d recently tried: the Sailor Tokiwa-Matsu, a beautiful, muted green tinged with blue but protean in the way it adapted to different papers and varying light. I wouldn’t be abandoning my favourite ink (Noodler’s El Lawrence) any time soon, but the Tokiwa-Matsu could easily have seduced me if I could have justified the expense and if it had at least some degree of water resistance (it had none at all). The thought of losing months of handwritten journal entries because of some accident like a bad spill of improperly brewed jasmine green tea or a spaniel wilfully pissing on an unguarded notebook (anything is fair game for a spaniel), ... well, that's one of the main reasons I use the El Lawrence.

What struck me so strongly about these memories was how they linked in ways that were so unpredictable that the links could be understood only after they’d happened. A smell reminded me of another smell, a midsummer smell, which reminded me of two apparently unrelated things: Christmas and ink. On another occasion I might have ended up remembering something totally different: not Christmas and ink but India, for example, or nearly drowning, or the wilfulness of spaniels. Someone  else noticing that cut-grass smell might have — would have, surely — been reminded of something utterly different, like nearly losing a finger to a lawnmower, and that might have triggered other memories, like the disinfectant smell of a hospital ward, the excruciating sting of a local anaesthetic, the weird, unsettling tug of stitches being tightened. I suspect the strangeness of memories mostly consists in the way they can be triggered by almost anything.

The second of the three ideas I wanted to jot down was about the T-shirt a friend had been wearing — a plain black T-shirt that read, ‘There are two types of people: those who can extrapolate from incomplete data’. I don’t know what had prompted the memory of that T-shirt, and I also couldn’t remember why I wanted to remember it, and that led me to wonder why we’re so bad at remembering. Maybe if we remembered everything, or even most things, our heads would be so full of unimportant memories that we wouldn't be able to retrieve what was what important? This reminded of something another friend had once said. We’d been chatting over a beer at the Celtic after our team had once again failed to win the quiz night, and he’d said, ‘It’s not my fault! I have an encyclopaedic memory — it’s just that I’ve lost the index.’

The third thing I wanted to remember? Well, I’d been driving and didn’t want to pull over to write it down, ... and I’d forgotten it. If the book of my mind had stored that topic, the index had no entry.

——————————

The small gorge in the Pohangina headwaters between Leon Kinvig hut and Ngamoko hut; midsummer, January 2019. Home to one

of the biggest eels I've seen — judging from its size, it's likely to be older than me. Long may it live there.

---

Photos and original text © 2019 Pete McGregor

Bending like a reed

At the City library the low afternoon sun was flashing from a sign that hung, swaying in a cool wind, over the footpath. The angle of the reflected light was such that it hit me — and, as far as I could work out, only me — at exactly the right angle to blind me, as if I was being questioned by a military interrogator who was convinced I was a spy or terrorist, or who just liked being a sadistic arsehole. I had to turn my head and close my eyes and lean to one side and trust that in a few minutes the sunlight would have slid off the swaying sign and I’d be able focus my attention entirely on Thom, whose talk, entitled Bend Like a Reed, was the reason I was sitting there with a dozen other people, listening.

I recognised three: the elderly woman who perfectly fitted the adjective I didn’t want to use because it sounded patronising (namely, ‘sprightly’); the young guy from Bruce McKenzie’s bookshop; and the dishevelled Poet, who slumped in the chair in front of me, spilling out of the ragged green jersey that looked as if it had shrunk in the wash but was still too big for him. The right sleeve had an enormous hole that must have driven him mad every time he pulled the jersey on and ended up poking his hand through the wrong hole in his sleeve. Mind you, I found it impossible to imagine the Poet being driven mad by anything, because I’d never seen him animated; if anyone wanted to explain ‘phlegmatic’, The Poet was the perfect example.

The sun did eventually move off the sign and stopped blinding me, and I could begin to concentrate on Thom’s silhouette and what he was saying. He mentioned his late colleague, Scott, whom I’d met several times and who was a good friend of a good friend of mine, and he referred to a point Scott had made about writing and the importance of ‘the abyss of mystery’, and gradually I began to understand what he was saying — or I thought I did. If I did, what Thom was saying reassured me, because I thought the same thing, and to hear Thom affirm it gave me some hope that maybe my own approach to writing — which seemed in so many ways to conflict with the conventional advice about writing — might not be as wrong as I thought.

If I understood correctly, what Thom was saying was that it’s important not to know — at least, not too clearly — what you’re writing. Perhaps what he was getting at was that good writing is an act of creation, which, almost by definition, must be spontaneous in the sense of happening at the moment of being written. If you know what you’re going to write, the writing is no longer an act of creation — it’s already been created.

The following evening (the evening I wrote the draft of this, in other words), I made my way to Barista, bought a coffee and sat down to write. I had no idea what I’d write about, so I began anyway, and soon after I’d jotted down some notes about being blinded in the library at the start of Thom’s talk, the sun slipped through the cafe windows and, reflecting from the varnished tabletop, dazzled me. I shaded my eyes, bent like a reed over the abyss of mystery, and carried on writing.

---

Notes: 
1. About Thom Conroy

Photos (you can connect them with the text if you think hard enough): 
1. Willow in wind and drizzle, Pohangina Valley
2. Waipawa River headwaters, Ruahine Range

Photos and original text © 2018 Pete McGregor

Bird skull stories (2)

So you’d like to hear another story about birds and skulls, and maybe bird skulls, would you? I could tell you hundreds of stories about birds — shall we start there? Yes?

Years ago I was walking alone down the headwaters of the Pohangina River in the Ruahine Range, a place of small tough mountains and wildness; a place of snowgrass fields on mountaintops, and whole mountainsides of leatherwood, which is the toughest plant you'll ever not want to try getting through; a place that can delight you with its warmth and sunshine and lovely old kaikawaka trees all gnarly and moss-hung, and small steep creeks that promise all sorts of surprises and hidden special places, and its special birds like karearea the falcon, and titipounamu the rifleman (the tiniest bird in Aotearoa), and ruru the morepork whose call at night is one of the most beautiful and melancholy of all owl calls, and most of all, whio, the blue duck, who you won’t find anywhere in the world in the wild except in those high, rushing, New Zealand mountain rivers. Only a few thousand of those wonderful birds survive in all the world, so what sheer joy it is to see them, especially when you’re alone in those places and you sit down to watch and they begin to settle and relax and think, oh, he’s OK, he’s no threat, and they climb out of the river onto a rock and preen their feathers and stretch their wings one at a time, and then they slip into the water again and swim right past you, so close you have to put the binoculars down and pull yourself together again.

But that's a different story. Let’s get back to ours, shall we?

There I was, walking alone down the Pohangina in the early morning when the sun, still low, was making the toetoe on the slips glow gold, so the reflection on the dark pools and shallow rapids looked like molten brass. I had all day to walk down the river to the next hut, and because it was summer and the river was low, the water felt only cool, not cold, and I was enjoying wading across and back again, so I took my time walking and looking around.

At a big pool in the shade with rapids downstream and a small cliff on the opposite side, I stopped to watch the colours on the water. I took off my pack and got the camera out. In the branches of a beech tree leaning out over the cliff and overhanging the pool, a little miromiro began calling and flitting about. I photographed the reflections then packed the camera away, and then, as I began to re-tie one of my bootlaces, the miromiro came flying across the pool, straight toward me. I stood up, and it landed in the shallow water — at my feet.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The little bird splashed and fluttered in the water right next to my boots, and I wondered whether it was in trouble and whether I should pick it up out of the water.

What would you have done?

Maybe wait and see, you say? That’s a good answer. I wish I could say that’s what I decided, but to tell the truth, I only did that because I was so surprised I didn’t know what to do. I just stood there, astonished, while it splashed at my feet.

Then it flew up out of the water with a flicker of sparkling drops and flew back to the tree on the far side of the pool.

Maybe it was having its morning wash? But why did it come right up to me, though? The water was shallow for several metres either side of me, so it could have had its bath further away, not right at my feet.

Do you think it liked me? I hope so.

Maybe one summer you, too, will walk alone down a river like that in the early morning, and a little miromiro will come down to splash at your feet. I hope that happens, but if it doesn't, maybe something else strange and inexplicable and wonderful will happen to you instead, and when it does, I hope the joy will flow through you the way it flowed through me, that day a long time ago, alone in a clear, bright, summer river in the early morning in one of the Earth's wild places.

---

Notes: 
1. This is Part 2 of the Bird Skull Stories. 
2. I know this one's not about skulls — not explicitly, anyway.
3. The facts in this story are true. This happened to me.

Photos: 
1 & 2. Miromiro on the No. 1 Line track (the first is a male; the second is a female). I didn't photograph the miromiro in this story.
3. The Pohangina River near Leon Kinvig hut, November 2018. Tthe pool in this story is about an hour further downriver.

Photos and original text © 2018 Pete McGregor

Bird skull stories

‘Tell me a story’, you say, so I think of the first thing that comes to mind and wonder how I can turn it into a story. First, though, you must tell me whether you want a true story or something made up, with fabulous characters that might not even exist, that not even a David Attenborough documentary could show you — creatures even more astonishing than the mantis shrimp or Vampyroteuthis infernalis, the vampire squid from hell — creatures that might live in Moominvalley with strange names from Tove Jansson’s imagination (although some real creatures have wonderful enough names, like the shortarse feelerfish, zombie worms, and bristlemouth fish, which are more numerous than any other animal with a backbone).

To return to your request for a story, though, let me start by telling you what happened as I carried the rubbish down the long driveway in the warm, wild nor’ west wind one morning not long ago. This actually happened; we can decide later whether to diverge from what happened to what might have happened. But now I see you’re impatient to hear the story, just like I was when I was your age. All right, then.

So, I’d carried the rubbish bag out to the gate, and as I took it the last twenty-five metres to drop it next to the neighbour’s bag, I noticed something old and dead lying in the weeds next to the letterboxes. Magpie, I thought, and on the way back I stopped to look more closely.

The remains of the bird had decayed to nothing more than pale bones and feathers, the quills still stuck in desiccated skin. The form of the body had gone; everything looked a little mixed-up except for a dry wing that had retained most of its shape. But, sitting on the almost-mummified remains, was the magpie’s skull.

Wind and rain and sun and time and insects had cleaned the skull almost perfectly, stripped it of nearly every trace of dried flesh and skin. The lower part of the beak had gone, but the upper part remained, still partly covered with its tough sheath, although even that had dried hard and begun to flake off. I looked at the skull with its beautiful sad lines and curves and the huge hollows where its eyes had once looked out on the world, and I wondered many things. How had it died; what had killed it; how did it come to end its short life? (Magpies don’t live long compared to us.) How had it ended up in those roadside weeds? Most probably, it had been a young bird struck by a car and someone or something had carried it or just tossed it off the road. I hoped it hadn’t been injured and had flapped and dragged itself there to die, but the way of things isn’t always as kind as we wish. Let’s not think about that too much, though, because I see that might upset you. (Good — I’m glad you find the pain of animals difficult.)

I picked up the skull. As I said, it was clean and old, so I wasn’t worried about getting my fingers covered in bacteria and objectionable smells and other pestilence. The skull was so light I could hardly feel it. I guess you could say it felt as light as a feather. (Later, I weighed it and found it weighed just two-and-a-half grams: about as much as a teaspoon of tea leaves. Now you know how much a bird’s skull weighs when the bird that lived there has gone. Isn’t that something?)

I didn’t know why I picked up the skull and took it back to the house and set it down on a sheet of white paper. Maybe I didn’t want to leave it there to get trodden on or blown into the oozing ditch or smashed to bits by a weedeater when someone decided to tidy around the letterboxes. Maybe I wanted to keep something beautiful. Maybe you have some ideas?

Ah, so you think maybe it was just a cool thing? You might be right, and you’ve taught me something, too: I thought kids stopped saying ‘cool’ years ago when saying ‘cool’ became uncool. So kids still use it? Thank you.

Whatever the reason, I did pick it up and take it back with me, and here’s where we need to decide what to do with the story. Shall we stick with the truth, or shall we make something up?

‘Both’, you say? There’s a thought, and I have to hand it to you — you’ve trapped me cleverly into telling you two stories, not just one. But maybe you’re right to do that, because everything has more than one story. Sometimes I think anything has as many stories as you can imagine, and as many true stories, too, if only you had a way of discovering them.

---

Notes:

1. Possibly part 1 of a series

Photos:
1 & 2. Magpie skull, Pohangina Valley, December 2017

Photos and original text © 2017 Pete McGregor