During the next few days, peering out of the train window, riding on Jeetender’s auto and strolling around the university campus and the roads of Tezpur town with Anju, I would be reminded of this statement time and again. The vegetation was the same shade of deep green, complete with the same wayside bushes with their little yellow and violet blooms. Leaning on to the bamboo fences of their village homes, middle aged women chatted with each others, One end of the top piece of their off- white attire tucked around the waist and the other thrown over their right shoulders in a similarly careless manner. The bulky brown sacks piled inside the roadside shops of Tezpur, emanated the known ration shop smell. It was a familiarity that was at once exhilarating and slightly disturbing. For what the sights evoked was not simple recognition, but a faint nostalgia mixed with images from disparate sepia frames of old Malayalam movies.
Yet, it is a familiarity that gets skewed with a second glance, and one begins to appreciate the landscape for its uniqueness. The slanting roofs of the houses are almost invariably tin thatched, to minimize damages from the frequent earthquakes. The blue gods sitting in the white-tiled pavement temples have too much vermillion on their foreheads. The bamboo fences are sewn in a unique crisscross pattern. And, riding across the 3.015 kilometre long Kolia Bhomora bridge that cuts across it, the enormity of the Brahmaputra surpasses any possibility of comparison.Similarly, beyond comparison was the trip to Kaziranga. The evening before, the air suddenly turned damp and chilly. We slept that night listening to the large drops fall loudly on the corrugated tin roof of Anju’s accommodation.
Early next morning as we took to the NH 37A, the rain had calmed down except for occasional sprays of thin drizzle through the open car window. The landscape looked refreshed as sunlight began to fall on the water glazed green. Established as a reserve forest in 1908, Kaziranga was declared a National Park in 1978. In 1985, it was declared a World Heritage Site by the UNESCO. Kaziranga is just a two- hour drive away from Tezpur University. While it is never explicitly spelt out, inscription into the World Heritage List is inextricably linked to the global tourism machinery. It becomes a brand that is proclaimed loud over the tourism promotion websites and brochures. Ten minutes into our trip World Heritage rhinos and swamp-deer began to appear on road side signposts as we drove past village dwellings with mud plastered bamboo huts, vast fields and meandering roads over the occasional hillocks.
From near the office of the Forest Ranger of the Western Range at Bagori we booked a two and half hours Jeep safari. Trekking by foot is prohibited for the casual visitor to Kaziranga. In tie- up with private entrepreneurs like Bimal Sharma alias Munna with whom we got our booking and accompanied by a forest guard, the park offers packages of elephant rides or jeep safaris. Kaziranga’s vegetation is a unique combination of alluvial inundated grasslands, tropical wet evergreen forests and tropical semi-evergreen forests. Areas of tall green trees with thick undergrowth are interspersed with steel blue lakes, marshes and lemon green grasslands and patches of tall ‘elephant grass.’ Elephant grass is said to offer excellent camouflage for the predators of Kaziranga. Sightings of animals and birds were so frequent, that it felt unrealistic. Rhinos with their calves, swamp, hog and Sambar deers and water buffalos lazily grazed the grasslands. The forest guard who was with us pointed out to us black necked storks, fish eagles and the great pied hornbill.
The intrusion of tourism into Kaziranga is so high that the animals are no longer alert to human presence. They rarely react to the jeep engine and human noises except for very rare instances where rhinos have charged towards the jeeps and a tiger with cubs once attacked a mahout. This possibly is conducive to the escalated poaching in Kaziranga, a major threat to its dwindling rhino population. We saw rhinos even on the fields in close proximity to human dwellings. Each time our jeep engine started up with a particularly loud noise, I was filled with unease and something close to guilty conscience as if I were violently intruding into a space that was not mine and toppling something that was delicately balanced.
I grew up with one of the most genuine wild life enthusiast I have ever met. Even while he was a little boy, my brother, Mathew, could spend hours on end listening to and distinguishing bird calls and even now seems to me much more at ease and harmony in a forest environs than in any human habitat. As a child I learned why I should never call Jaguar a leopard, listening to fantastic animal stories and peeping into his future plans centred on travelling to far off forest lands. So, Kaziranga was always there as part of a dream. True, I thought I would traverse the marshes on foot wearing knee length water proof boots and camp high upon a tree, listening to the noises of the night. But I am happy with the approximation...for now.
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