A Week With A Bamboo Raft

Observations on spending a week at the Dampa Tiger Reserve in Mizoram, away from it all

- Nimesh Ved

So little do we city bred know of a river! This stuck me on the first day of our trip and would re-visit me each day of the trip. Colours where the happy streams came down to join the river we were akin to a nature’s flowing palette; a poetic reality! Insects came out in no small numbers when our rafts bumped into vegetation along the banks. They, as if, checked us out and troubled no further. The only bridge we passed under still carried the weight of the last season’s flood. It was neither easy nor very pleasant to imagine ourselves on the rafts with that form of the river. Within the 60 km stretch the river’s width varied from 4 to 40 meters and it had different sounds, sounds I could not comprehend. The water is in ripples where it is too shallow, the person guiding the raft once said, taking cue from the silly look on my face! Rains during the week made the Sazai river and the trip all the more fun. On occasions they increased the water flow and on others created stunning patterns on the flowing water. So very different from the snow-capped tops of the Western Himalayas which appear frozen in time. Yet, no less stunning and beautiful, as the river changed form in front of one’s eyes.

Langston Hughes in his, The Negro speaks of rivers, writes ‘I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I have known rivers: ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.’