The Search for the Pink-Headed Duck Read online

  The Search for the Pink-Headed Duck

  Rory Nugent

  To William F. Gunkel and his crew aboard the Air Force plane that located me shipwrecked in the mid-Atlantic. Thank you, gentlemen, and thank you, Jim Angell, for laboring on the manuscript, acting as guide, editor, craftsman, and, above all, friend.

  Contents

  Introduction

  1 / The Calcutta Fowl Market

  2 / Red Tape in New Delhi

  3 / The Best Driver in All of Sikkim

  4 / On Lama’s Business

  5 / Into the Valley of Bliss

  6 / The Grand Life Hotel

  7 / Gurkhaland or Death

  8 / Mountains of Trouble

  9 / Hindi by Yourself

  10 / Lahey-Lahey

  11 / Down the Brahmaputra

  12 / Kali’s Left Breast

  13 / Treasure of Kamali-Kunwari

  Afterword

  Images

  Introduction

  The five of us were talking about lost treasures that night, sitting around and trading stories. What’s still out there to find?

  “India is the place,” Jim suggested. “One of us should go after the pink-headed duck. It hasn’t been sighted in years. Extremely rare … the most elusive bird in the world.”

  The next day I went to the library and found several books that mentioned the bird, last seen fifty years ago in India. One book had a picture of the duck, and I stared at it for quite some time, dreaming, imagining myself learning its song. The image stayed in my mind; no matter where I was or what I was doing, the notion of searching for the lost duck was more interesting.

  Two months later, my apartment sold and everything else in storage, I took a cab to Kennedy Airport and flew to India. What follows is the story of my search for the pink-headed duck as I recall it. I took notes throughout the journey, but I soon learned that imagination was the key to finding the prize.

  1

  The Calcutta Fowl Market

  In this city where street signs are as rare as trees, I need some information. I’ve been wandering about Calcutta for a day and a half looking for a pink-headed duck, but the only people who will talk to me are shop owners and hucksters trying to sell me something. Then, by chance, I happen upon the Calcutta Tourist Office.

  Inside a kettle boils atop a stove, and the smell of Darjeeling tea scents the air. Three men in dhotis shuffle behind brooms, whisking them in a tired rhythm. The officials behind the reception desk appear preoccupied as they thumb through stacks of paper. As I touch a guidebook, a large man lifts his gaze to my face. His drooping jowls and double chin bury the knot of his tie.

  “Do you need help?” he asks in an indifferent voice.

  “I sure do.”

  He nods, reaches into his coat pocket, and hands me a business card. His name is printed in Hindi and English but appears impossible to pronounce. I decide to call him “Sir.”

  He motions for me to sit as I unfold a city map, the best one I could find. Yesterday, while searching bookstores, I discovered that maps of Calcutta are surprisingly inaccurate, missing streets, out of scale, and improperly oriented. Locals joke that the maps are a strategic ploy engineered by the army to confuse invading Pakistani generals.

  “Ah, here we are,” the official says, puncturing the map, obliterating lower Park Street with the tip of his pencil.

  He proceeds to point out the usual tourist attractions, which are all clearly marked: the Botanical Gardens, Howrah Bridge, Victoria Memorial, Calcutta Museum, and other places that hold little appeal for me. Finally he asks where I want to go.

  “Well, Sir, I’m trying to find the fowl market.”

  He swallows hard and tugs a jacket button.

  I repeat my request. He looks even more surprised. Shaking his head disapprovingly, he grabs a legal pad.

  “Name,” he demands, narrowing his jet-black eyes.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Name and passport.” He’s breathing heavily now. I hand over the document.

  “Why do you want to go there?” he asks. “The market is not—umm, how shall I say—it is not very clean.”

  I have to smile. Calcutta is anything and everything but clean. Built atop a swamp the Mogul emperor Aurangzeb gladly rented to the English in the seventeenth century, it may be the dirtiest metropolis on earth. Several feet of backfill have not been enough to bury all the muck on which Britain floated its empire.

  The 1981 census lists the city population at nine million, but an official at the West Bengal Welfare Department laughs at that figure, considering it absurdly low. For every person living in a building, at least two people live on the streets. If he’s right, Calcutta qualifies as the most populous city in the world.

  The official finishes jotting down information from my passport and resumes his warning. “What I meant to say is that the fowl market is not a safe place. I cannot recommend it.”

  I say nothing, which makes him nervous and even more suspicious. As I soon learn, people sitting behind state desks interpret reticence as disagreement.

  “You must answer me. Why do you want to go to the fowl market?” he says loudly, glancing about the room to make sure his colleagues are watching. If I’m arrested, he wants the others to know that he tried to discourage me.

  “I’m looking for the pink-headed duck, Sir … a very rare bird.”

  He scribbles something and begins tapping his head with the pencil. “Who? Do you have an address?”

  I explain that the pink-headed duck has no address, at least not a permanent one. Though a half dozen or so appeared each year in the Calcutta fowl market when Victoria ruled as empress, the bird hasn’t been sighted for fifty years. And Calcutta, hub of the raj, once the center of the pink duck trade, is the logical place to begin my search. I hope I’ll find an old-timer in the fowl market who is familiar with the duck and can point me in the right direction.

  The official covers his face with his meaty hands, muttering something I can’t understand. I imagine him imploring Vishnu, the Hindu god of preservation, for protection. To calm him I pull out a 1979 edition of Salim Ali’s The Book of Indian Birds. The author is well known throughout India, and the book is published by the Bombay Natural History Society, keeper of all records concerning the pink-headed duck. I try to pass it to him, but he jerks his hand away and purses his lips. On page nineteen is a color illustration of the duck. Pointing to it, I explain that the pink-headed duck is one of India’s greatest treasures, a spectacularly plumed bird, and the rarest, most elusive duck in the world. This intrigues him, and he scrutinizes the plate. The bird’s Hindi name is gūlāb-sīr, but ornithologists refer to it as Rhodonessa caryophyllacea. The last confirmed sighting was in 1935 by a sportsman hunting in the Darbhanga area of Bihar. Unfortunately, he recognized the prize only after wresting it from the mouth of his retriever. Every attempt to breed the duck in captivity failed; in fact, within days of being caged, the birds appeared listless and refused food, defying the intentions of their captors. Without their freedom, pink-headed ducks, it seems, would rather be dead.

  I explain that most naturalists believe the pink-headed duck is extinct, but my theory is that it’s actually in hiding, having learned, for good reasons, to remain scarce. Although most of its natural habitat around Calcutta has been destroyed, there are still some isolated pockets of undisturbed marshland in the Bengal plain and suitable nesting spots in remote northeast India.

  The official remains silent but no longer appears alarmed. I keep up my chatter, hoping that he, too, will appreciate the magic of this beautiful bird. The words tumble from my mouth. At last my fantasy takes shape for him and elicits a laugh.

  “You’re putting me on, aren’t you?”

  “No more than I do myself, Sir.”

  He returns to the map and traces an outline of the game–fowl market, which he refers to now as the easiest place to buy a bird in Calcutta. Handing the map back to me, he grins and says, “At first, I thought you were a drug addict or a smuggler.”

  “Heaven forbid!”

  “Good luck,” he says, pushing back his chair and rising. He’s taller and fatter than I suspected. He hands me another business card. “Call me if you find it.”

  With ice a luxury, and refrigeration a symbol of wealth, Calcutta is a city of noxious odors. The fowl market is aptly named: I smell it long before sighting it. I wander along its perimeter, surveying the countless small shops and street vendors hawking birds. Most of the birds are tied at the feet and dangle upside down, suspended from door frames, street posts, or the hands of children; pigeons are cooped ten to a cage; geese, throttled by short lengths of twine, are muted with rubber bands.

  I’m uncertain where to begin my search until I spot a parked van and join the queue leading to it. Inside the vehicle an unmuffled generator jiggers loudly; a young man wearing a grease-stained lungi is hunched over a copy machine, tweaking knobs and feeding it documents. His two associates lean out a window, conducting business under the sloppy red letters advertising “The Copy Shop.”

  Hastily I compose a poster of sorts, ripping a color plate from the book and taping the picture of the duck over the caption “LOST! Pink-Headed Duck.” In smaller print is the name of my hotel and a request for any information about the bird. The blasting radio and noisy generator render speech useless, so I flash my order for twenty-five copies with my fingers. Acting like an anxious parent looking for a runaway child, I hastily
post them around the district.

  During my first couple of days in the fowl market, I feel dispirited and out of place. People on the street seem to keep their distance. Perhaps I do look odd: I’m the only westerner walking the area, and because of my height, pale complexion, and baldness, I look a bit like a walking floor lamp, a Gyro Gearloose invention ambling the darker streets of Calcutta.

  I develop a routine, awakening before dawn to meet the boats floating down the Hooghly River. Usually they are filled with fresh produce and laborers from the north. I inspect each cargo, hoping to find my duck, constantly showing skippers and crews a picture of the missing bird. By the time the sun slices through the haze coughed up by millions of cook fires, I head away from the river to a teahouse in the center of the fowl market.

  Gradually I become more comfortable, and the workers of the district begin to accept me. Inquisitiveness replaces suspicion once they’ve decided that I’m not a policeman. A cardinal rule of the neighborhood is to avoid the police. “They mean trouble,” one vendor informs me, “and who needs more of that?”

  On the fourth day everything changes: I’m invited to share a meal, street hawkers start greeting me as the Duck Man, and a few even seek me out before slaughtering their ducks. Soon captains of river boats are inviting me aboard, insisting on taking me for complimentary rides. On a Tuesday I cross the Hooghly sixteen times.

  One day toward the end of the week, I finish my waterfront inspections early. The teahouse won’t open for another hour, so I walk downstream to a bathing ghat next to the flower market. Nearby, in the shadow of Howrah Bridge, four men stand in water up to their waists. Each is praying in a loud voice while splashing himself.

  I strip and dive into the supposedly cleansing water of the Hooghly, a branch of the Ganges and a sacred channel flowing to the home of the gods. For a Hindu, the holiest way to leave this world is to have one’s ashes scattered on the Ganges. I swim out toward the middle of the channel, diving for the bottom about fifty yards from shore. As I surface, something bumps the back of my head. Thinking it a stick, I thrust my hand out to fend it off. To my horror, my fingers sink into the spongy remains of a bloated, partially burned corpse. Seconds later my feet are on dry land.

  Firewood is scarce in Calcutta because all of it must be transported from the dwindling forests to the north. The price is high everywhere but highest at the funeral ghats. Since the average family in Calcutta earns barely enough to subsist on, the bereaved can seldom afford enough wood to cremate an entire body. When the fires diminish, the remains are simply heaved into the river to be carried out to sea, beyond the beaches of Janput, nearly forty miles away.

  Shaken, I rest for several minutes on the stone ramp, staring at my hand. An old man sitting nearby is watching me intently, so I wave and greet him in the traditional fashion, bowing with my hands outstretched, palms together. Ashes are smeared over much of his nearly naked body. He’s wearing boxer shorts, and a bell hangs from his neck. Pulling on his beard, he shouts to me: “What did you say? Can’t you speak English? Your Bengali is awful… Come here and sit by me.”

  We spend the next several minutes talking about Albany, New York, where he worked as a cook in the early 1960s. He tells me his pigeon pie was famous, the best in the Empire State.

  “The governor, that Rockyman, ate my pigeons all the time,” he says, picking at his toes.

  Upon hearing that Nelson Rockefeller is dead, he muses, “Hmmm … must have missed my cooking.”

  The old man has been watching me for days and wants to know what I’m doing in the district, which he refers to as his “kingdom.” I produce the illustration of the pink-headed duck and explain my search. As I talk, he nods in a knowing way, waiting for me to finish before holding out his hand and introducing himself: “Call me Babba, for I am without enemies.”

  Babba takes the picture of the duck and stares at it for some time. Then he starts to ring the bell around his neck and presses the picture to his forehead.

  “Yes,” he confides, leaning on my shoulder, ringing the bell louder. “Yes, I know this bird. I know where one lives.”

  “Let’s go!” I exclaim, jumping to my feet. My enthusiasm is not contagious. He motions with his grimy hands for me to sit. Complaining that he’s old and infirm, he tells me to calm myself. I continue to beg for directions until finally it occurs to me that money might be able to cure his painful condition. Yes, he will lead me for a price, assuring me that fifty rupees (about four dollars) is the proper balm for his aching body. Babba, friend for life, is able to spot a meal ticket a hundred yards away.

  I follow him as he hobbles along the narrow streets. People are selling goods and services of all types. “Sahib need girl? Yank. Yank. Feel good. Suck… Ah! Sahib want boy?” But my thoughts are fixated on the pink-headed duck with its cotton-candy feathers and electric-pink bill; not even the alluring smell of opium persuades me to tarry.

  The streets deteriorate into alleys awash in green piss as we distance ourselves from the Hooghly and head ever deeper into one of the poorer, tougher parts of town. The decrepit, two-story tenements have dun-colored facades and stockyard odors. Water drips from hand pumps at every other corner. There are no cars and only a few pedal rickshaws, which, like the pedestrians, follow the English tradition of keeping the curb to the left. Groups of men squat near doorways. Whenever I get close, they stop talking and hurriedly fling shawls over items at their feet. Their scowls tell me to keep moving.

  “Black market,” Babba explains. “Do you need cigarettes? Ivory? Silver?”

  Along the curb, rising like giant termite hills, are mounds of trash encircled by human scavengers. Babba explains that recycling is the only legal industry in the area. For the trash pickers, still considered untouchable by many Brahmins, all bits of creation have value, anything can be reborn. Most garbage collection is a family affair, with children stalking the city, returning in the evening to their hovels with burlap bags of discarded treasures. Parents cull the heaps of trash, rearranging them into smaller piles. Cardboard is sold to one broker, tin to another; one buyer even specializes in pull rings from soda cans, paying a penny for every three gross.

  “What’s the name of this neighborhood?” I ask.

  “Heaven’s Gate!”

  At last my guide stops and waves his arthritic hand toward a small shop. “There, inside that place, you will find your duck,” Babba declares as he turns to leave.

  I grab his arm and remind him of his promise to show me the pink-headed duck. Steering him back on course, I make a mental note never again to pay in advance for guide services.

  Four holy cows, painted with indigo and wearing garlands of marigolds, laze in front of the shop. Flies swarm in tight circles around a row of plucked chickens suspended in the open window. We walk inside slowly, allowing our eyes to adjust to the dimness. The pungent odors of the street mingle with the dank air of the shop. A cleaver lies on a blood-splattered newspaper near the pile of chicken heads oozing at one end of a butcher block. The dirt floor is littered with feathers and entrails.

  An obese man emerges from the shadows. With each step, his body shakes, especially his gelatinous face, the color and texture of meat aspic. He talks hurriedly to Babba, far too fast for me to understand. Occasionally he stares at me, running his eyes over my body as if he’s sizing up a flank of lamb. I retreat several paces, making sure Babba is between us.

  Babba thanks the butcher and moves close to me, saying, “Follow him to the back yard.”

  “You first.”

  We walk down a corridor too narrow for the fat man, who has to turn sideways to squeeze through. The light fades with every step, and shortly we’re in total blackness. Alarmed, I pull out my flashlight and lag behind, ready to bolt. My apprehension is somewhat dispelled when I hear a muffled but unmistakable quack. Ten steps farther on, we enter a shrouded courtyard. Stacks of bamboo cages rise up the walls; most of them are empty, but some contain chickens, none of which are moving. Feathers of all kinds cling to the wooden latticework. An industrial drum full of inky water sits in a corner by the entrance.

  The butcher shuffles to the other end of the courtyard and grunts for me to follow. I stay put, shining the beam of my flashlight toward him. So far I’ve seen no ducks, only chickens.