The Congressmen jostled for the attention of the lone man behind the reception desk. He had been landed with the jobs of telephone operator, receptionist, concierge, occasional bellboy – he had helped me with my bags – and cashier. Looming over the Congressmen I successfully caught his attention. His name was Rishi. It said so on his name-tag.
‘You had a call, sir,’ he said, beaming at me as he pushed my room key over the counter and tried to grapple with two telephones at the same time.
‘Oh really, who from?’
He rummaged behind the desk, getting the lines twisted, and handed me a message. It was from a ‘Mr Banerjee, Ministry of Sports’.
I licked my top lip as I studied the slip of paper, noticing that my first name had been spelt ‘Fartquin’.
‘What does he want, this Mr Banerjee?’ I asked Rishi, as he tried to fend off an irate Congressman who was complaining that he didn’t have a room with a view.
‘He’s heard that you are a professional goalkeeper and is coming to meet with you.’
‘A goalkeeper!’ I exclaimed. ‘I’m not a . . .’
Then, with a sinking feeling, I suddenly remembered what had happened that morning.
Upon my arrival at Guwahati airport, I had been required to register myself at Passport Control. The aggressive bureaucrat behind the desk had handed me a form to complete that asked for all the usual details: passport number, date of birth, country of origin and so on.
As a foreigner in a land that thrives on paperwork and bureaucracy, I was forever filling in such forms. Indian hotels always wanted to know everything about me, usually in triplicate. Sometimes, to amuse myself, I would give a false name, and I often added an out-of-the-way occupation like ‘Brain Surgeon’ or ‘Concert Pianist’ for good measure.
On this occasion I had scrawled ‘Goalkeeper’ and had handed the completed form back to the man. He had examined it carefully, checking the facts with those in my passport.
‘Goalkeeper?’ he exclaimed. ‘That is no occupation.’
I shrugged my shoulders.
‘Yes it is. I’m a goalkeeper,’ I replied, deadpan.
‘You mean you are a player of soccer?’
‘Yes,’ I confirmed, and then I overstepped the mark. ‘I play for Manchester United.’
He returned his attention to the form, crossed out ‘Goalkeeper’ and inserted ‘Soccer Player, Manchester Unlimited’.
In the end, all the fuss was worth it. He soon produced an ink pad and banged an Assam entry stamp on to an empty page in my passport. This was an unexpected and welcome bonus and I thanked him heartily, leaving the airport delighted. I had a new addition to my visa collection, and a rare one at that.
Nevertheless, it seemed as if my bluff had been called. The bureaucrat at the airport had obviously rung the Ministry of Sports and tipped them off. Now this Mr Banerjee was coming to the hotel.
Perhaps the airport official was still suspicious and wanted someone to check my credentials. I imagined myself having to prove my mettle against an Assamese striker on some Guwahati football pitch. Or perhaps Mr Banerjee wanted me to come and coach his team or even play in a game. If that were to happen, I would be unmasked as a fraud and, in such a sensitive part of India, rife with insurgency and drug smuggling, my innocent joke might be interpreted as something more sinister.
Whatever the case, I felt certain of one thing: Mr Banerjee would want to talk about soccer and all I knew about the game was that England had only once won the World Cup. I couldn’t even remember in which year.
Up in my room, I tried to decide the best course of action. I had three hours to kill. If I remained in the hotel, I was a sitting duck. After a quick shower I slipped out. With any luck, Mr Banerjee would call while I was out, and later that night I would get clean away.
Sitting at the back of a local tandoori restaurant, I ordered a late lunch. While I waited for the platter of food to come, I tugged a box-file from my backpack and flicked through its contents. Dog-eared and yellowed with age, they were a clutch of private letters written by my godfather Charles that I had inherited on his death in 1989. Since then, I hadn’t delved deeper than the first two or three. But now I pored over each page, searching for references to the North-East Frontier, where Charles had been stationed during the Second World War.
As I soon discovered, in April 1944 he had fought at the battle of Kohima in Nagaland, only a few hours’ drive from Guwahati. According to his own vivid description, Charles, along with several hundred Allied troops and local tribesmen, took on the Japanese army and won. During the battle, regarded as one of the most desperate of the war, Charles spent three weeks in a rat-infested trench on the edge of the British Governor’s tennis court. Day after day, and night after night, he defended his position against waves of Japanese infantry. Miraculously, Charles was one of the few lucky enough to make it out alive.
Later letters revealed that after the battle, he spent six months travelling around India, indulging his greatest passion: hunting. Not far from Mysore, in the southern state of Karnataka, he took part in five elephant hunts, bagging himself two pairs of tusks.
‘There’s nothing quite as satisfying as shooting an elephant,’ he wrote to his younger brother Jeffrey in January 1945. ‘The shot – to the heart or the brain – is a tricky one to accomplish, especially when the beast is charging towards you. I cannot put into words the thrill of seeing such a large animal falling to one’s gun. I’m afraid it makes beagling seem rather silly.’
It was clear from Charles’s words that he, like most of his generation, had a different attitude towards hunting. In his time, there had been no such thing as an endangered species list, and even the largest animals were considered little more than vermin. But to someone of my generation the idea of killing such a fine animal was utterly abhorrent.
During his tour of India, Charles had also spent some time in Assam and had visited Guwahati’s Kamakhya temple. ‘A fascinating place,’ he wrote. ‘A centre of the black arts, where the most unspeakable acts have been performed.’
Having finished my lunch and with two hours still left to kill, I headed off in search of this mysterious site. The temple, one of the holiest in India, stands on Nilchal Hill, on the south bank of the Brahmaputra. As I arrived, pilgrims from across the subcontinent, some of whom had travelled for weeks to reach this spot, filed back and forth along the narrow pathway that winds upwards towards the temple complex. The new arrivals wore expressions of expectation and excitement as they took the last few steps towards the goal upon which they had set their hearts. By contrast, the devotees making their way down towards the car park were lost in quiet contemplation, their eyes filled with satisfaction.
Amongst them, I spotted a half-naked sadhu, a Hindu holy man. He was covered from head to toe in grey ash that gave him a deathly look and enhanced the whites of his eyes so that they looked hypnotic. His dreadlocks, which fell to his waist, rivalled those of a Rastafarian, the rope-like strands blackened by years of accumulated dirt and grease. His forehead was marked with three horizontal ochre lines made in holy ash. These proclaimed him to be a follower of Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction.
On my way up to the temple, I stopped at one of the many curio stalls dotted along the way. Neat lines of bronze-cast Hindu
