Brian on the Brahmaputra by David Fletcher

Author:David Fletcher [FLETCHER, DAVID]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd

10.

It was morning. Brian had eaten breakfast to the accompaniment of more coughing and was back in his cabin waiting for Sandra to ready herself for the day. As he waited he looked through the cabin’s rear window. The Sukapha was now a few hundred yards further down the river. From its new mooring Brian could no longer see a jumble of rust buckets but just a nondescript bank edged with nondescript buildings – and some people. He could see a number of Guhawati’s poorer residents going about their early-morning ablutions in the river. After scrambling down its muddy banks they would stand in the water, soap themselves, rinse themselves and then clean their teeth and finally wash out their mouths with a mouthful of the river itself. Then they would scramble back up the bank, dress themselves and amble away with their towel and the remains of their soap.

As he watched he began to feel like a voyeur. But he couldn’t help himself. Everything about this communal washing scene was just so fascinating. Here were men and women bathing together, and not for any other reason than necessity; there were clearly a limited number of accessible and suitable bathing sites within the city itself and this was one such site. They had very little choice. But they were bathing discreetly; there was the minimum amount of flesh on display, and how the women bathed themselves thoroughly whilst still modestly clothed was a revelation in itself. So there was good here: men and women sharing a common space for the conduct of a fairly intimate task without any embarrassment or discomfort and without any of them being overcome with lust. Men in Guhawati, it appeared, weren’t inevitably roused into passion by the sight of a woman rubbing herself, and the women didn’t need to be protected from their gaze. Indeed everybody seemed simply to ignore each other, and a man only looked at a woman when he was looking to avoid her as he left the river. All in all it was a very instructive display of people’s desire to behave decently and, of course, of their desire to keep themselves clean.

However, as well as these encouragingly positive aspects, there was what in Brian’s eyes was a ruddy great negative: these people were bathing in (and cleaning their teeth in) a body of water that was quite obviously filthy. This was in the middle of a city. The river was abused. It had things floating on it. It inevitably had a great many more things floating in it, things that one couldn’t see but things that would make sick or even kill a western softy such as himself. But these people had to endure this. To keep clean, each day they not only had to expose themselves to public view while they bathed, but they also had to expose themselves to the dangers of any number of waterborne diseases. Brian began to wonder how any of them survived into old age.

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