ii.          Burdwan to Barisal

An outing had been arranged in 1937 in my boarding school (Victoria) in Kurseong, for a party of boys in the charge of a teacher, Mr Verni Prins who also the scoutmaster, to visit a friend of the school at the Oxford Mission in Barisal. The trip gave me some idea of the immensity, variety and beauty of the old Bengal. I had come down from the foothills of the Himalayas, snowy summits dominating the skyline, through the dense Terai forest, to the plains and paddy fields of West Bengal, to the green vegetation and silver stretches of rivers and inlets of East Bengal. Throw in monsoon storms and rains. No wonder the Bengalis are a people of poetry and music and have such rich sounds in their spoken language.

The first leg of the trip for me was the run by train from Burdwan to Howrah. This was familiar territory, one that I had often traversed, usually when my dad was the driver of one of the "locals", trains which stopped at almost every one of the stations at which countless Bengalis boarded to take them to work in Calcutta in the morning and return them home after work.

I spent the day with a family friend in Calcutta and that evening he and I made our way to a ghat near the old Howrah Bridge and joined the school party already on the flat- bottomed boat that was to take us to Barisal. It would be a journey of some days, through the Sundarbans. This was a steam-driven, side paddle boat. Past Diamond Harbour and the tricky shifting sands and shoals of the Hooghly River, the boat turned into the huge expanse of water channels and mangrove swamps of the Sundarbans. Porpoises in schools rolled their backs beside the boat. At night the brilliant beam of the boat's searchlight scanned the shorelines, searching out the buoys that marked the passages through the delta. Sometimes we would anchor and wait for the tide. Occasionally we would cross other boats like ours, carrying bales of jute, which formed most of the visible cargo traffic.

Life on the water and in ports was entirely new to us and we were fascinated by it. Something as simple as a man taking a bath on a passing boat became a spectacle, a bucket splashing into flowing water and the contents cascading onto the man's head. We were taken on a visit to the engine room and watched the piston rods working like giant knees and elbows. The boys did the cooking and cleaning up under the expert supervision of the scoutmaster. We had the first-class cabins and the dining room to ourselves. Windows all round gave us all-round views, but for even better views we took turns to sit beside the small cabin at the very top which housed the steersman and the master of the boat. The boat tied up at various docks to put off or take on cargo.

In Barisal the school group was put up at the Oxford Mission. We swam, paddled small boats, tried to throw a fish net off the shoulder, but without achieving the perfect circle which the native boys did so easily, and we played the Mission School in football (soccer) The Mission let us have two of their boats, the "St. Mark" and the "Epiphany", as well as the crew who rowed and set up the single sail, and did the cooking and general tidying. In these boats we visited outlying villages, where we were fed royally, mostly on fish. One of our group was left-handed and this called for explanations. We ate with our hands of course from sections of banana leaf, on which food was served as on a thali (a dish with a number of scooped out areas around a space in the middle). Rice was placed in the middle and a variety of helpings in a circle surrounding the rice. It is taboo to eat left-handed, which is why it had to be explained to our generous hosts why one of us, Tommy Newbould, was eating with his left hand. In India the left hand is used for toilet purposes.

At one village we joined in games of tag. In one game a circle about eight metres in diameter was drawn on the ground and the line of the diameter marked. Two teams entered the circle, one team on each side of the diameter line. The game was called "choo". A member of one team crossed the line, sounding out an audible "choo". His aim was to tag one of the players and get back to his side of the line while still "chooing". If he succeeded, the player touched would be out of the game. The defending team tried to grab the invader and hold him until his "choo" ran out - only one breath allowed. If the player caught did not make it back across the line still breathing “choo", he left the game. The winner was the team with the most persons still in the game when the game ended.

The second game was more complicated. A rectangle about 40 metres long and 12 metres wide was marked on the ground. At the top and bottom were safe areas, where players could rest and plot strategy. At five metre intervals between the safe areas were marked parallel tracks, about a half-metre apart. The attacking team lined up in the top safe area, while the defending team posted one player in each set of tracks, about five horizontal and one vertical. The player in the vertical lane could run the length between the safe areas. The other defenders had to keep within their horizontal zones. On the given word, the attacking team sprinted towards the first horizontal tracks, doing their best to avoid being touched. Those attackers touched were out of the game. The strategy of the attackers was to lure a defender to one side either by a feint or by sacrificing one player, and those that got through tried again at the next horizontal track, and so on down to the safe zone. Those that reached the safe zone turned round and had to do it back to the top. The leader of the defending team was the player in the vertical lane. He chose which horizontal lane to work with, trapping as many attackers as possible in the space guarded by the vertical defender and one of the horizontal defenders. The winning team was the one that got most untouched players through.

We took an overnight train on the return journey to Calcutta, nodding off in a sitting position all the way. The Sundarbans trip, as we called it, was an experience which none of the boys who took it ever forgot. It was an inevitable topic of conversation in later years between the boys who made that trip.