A sense of great possibilities, a space to explore and discover, and a world that wins a place in a reader’s world can be transformative enough to not just give us a massive adrenaline rush but also add life to our life. This is how my mind perceives a thriller and this is way better than a mindless blitz of armed characters rushing around and killing each other to reach an end that is made out to be plausible enough. Birdwatching by Stephen Alter is one book that aims to powerfully reset the way publishers in India have been thrusting down our throat a mundane treatment of adrenaline rush.

Book review - Birdwatching - Stephen Alter - Aleph Book Company
Book review – Birdwatching – Stephen Alter – Aleph Book Company

The story and the plot move fast for Guy Fletcher, an ornithologist or a birdwatcher who finds his life zoom from where ‘ducks were chuckling to themselves’ and wondering if ‘Delhi has lost its innocence’ straight into the heart of the intrigue that surrounded the buzz of action in the regions that interested China in the early sixties. We find a thoughtful Fletcher ‘puzzled why he had been chosen for this mission. Other than his experience in ornithology, he had little or no experience in the Himalayas’ when he lands in Kalimpong, known to be ‘a nest of spies’ and was then just a quaint hill station with ‘a rich legacy of intrigue and skullduggery’. The writer has the India in the sixties captured well as the narrative moves from Bharatpur and Delhi to Kashmir and then the Northeast. Any travel enthusiast will find the narrative as interesting as would a political analyst… well, even those who think thrillers must have a fair bit of action and sensuality sweating it out together will not be disappointed. The charm of the investigative postures zip upwards when it embraces the intricacies of folklore and weaves them into the narrative. For instance, the inclusion of Rock bees or Apis dorsata laboriosa, the Himalayan giant honeybee joins in the action as we are told that this honey is poisonous but valuable as a medicine and that the bees gather the nectar from toxic flowers like rhododendrons. Even a small drop on your tongue makes your mouth go numb. It can cause hallucinations! This is just as thrilling as the time when Fletcher treks through the rhododendron forests of Yumthang and sees a tragopan and recollects his discussion with Thupten who had said that ‘the call spooked me. There’s a folk tale that says it’s the spirit of a stillborn child crying out for its mother’.

The book is about the tenets of intelligence operatives like Guy Fletcher who ‘felt an uneasy sense of indecision, but also some excitement and anticipation’ as he discovers that ‘truth is never black and white but always shades of grey’ and yet takes us into the heart of natural history, mountaineering, birdwatching, and insights into politics, folklore and cultures that aren’t talked about so frequently. Rhyming with the muted sniggering of ducks is Fletcher’s own feeling that he was being used as a decoy to lure the Khampas out of hiding, or to recruit Afridi, or to undercut India’s political machinations in Sikkim. Fletcher then ‘felt like a pawn that had escaped from the predictable grid of squares on a chessboard’ but plods on nevertheless to find something meaningful in all the intriguing references to terma which, in Tibetan Buddhism, suggests that the Himalayas contain valuable treasure. We as readers go along with Fletcher as he finds out that Kanchenjunga means the five treasures of the great snow and that to search for terma is a noble quest. We believe, as he believes, that the CIA is simply attempting to lay its hands on this treasure of immense value that will be sold to support the Chushi Gangdruk guerrillas. The Chinese too are searching for it as are the sleuths from IB. You can imagine the sort of intrigue playing out in places like Kalimpong where the local royalty and other bigwigs meet often but with smiles that mask the truth. It isn’t easy to spot the truth in such circumstances.

To break the tedium of all these humint machinations are charming references to Whistling thrush waking up all other species before dawn and how the Lepcha folklore says the bird performs auspicious rituals by cleaning sacred lakes in the mountains, removing twigs and leaves floating on the surface. There are in the forests of Lachen ‘the monal or impeyan pheasant a flamboyant bird with iridescent blue, violet, green, and russet plumage. The monals crowed loudly at dawn just above the forest rest house and, when he went in search of them, exploded from the bushes with shrill cries of alarm before sailing down the hill on fixed wings.’ We discover that Wren babblers are the hardest to spot and that the ‘kaala teetar or Black partridge sounds like vendors on a railway platform shouting, ‘Paan-bidi-cigarette’, though fletcher thought it sounded ‘more like Morse Code.’ Fletcher who is officially on a Fulbright research assignment in Kalimpong to know more about the Himalayan pheasant finds Thupten, the DFO, and his contact helping him with his research full of tales that fascinate and among them is the one about ‘a vicious demon that used to live in these mountains… he was finally killed and chopped up into tiny pieces and thrown into the forest. Lepchas believe leeches are the fragments of that demon.’ The book makes a reader want to go ahead and investigate the world of nature and culture… however this does not mean that the thriller elements in the book are subdued. Not at all because along with birdcalls are the usual stuff that makes espionage so powerfully magnetic.

Along with Fletcher, we glissade through the loose scree of the politics of that period, watch the alpenglow of the start of the Chinese incursions, use our carbiners and pitons to reach summit ridges of relationships, and we do all this as we read a Lepcha story about the Teesta coming down from the north and the Rangit from the south being two lovers who meet here at the confluence and are joined together forever. We trudge along couloirs with the Khampas studying the topography of treacherous mountain slopes as they carefully cross the border from Tibet to Sikkim with a ‘boy who was a tulku, a reincarnation of the Rinpoche from Yanchen Gompa monastery’ and are introduced to the story of a sixteenth Karmapa who came to Sikkim in 1959 and he chose the Rumtek monastery as his base, in ruins then, but one that was occupied by the Karma Kagyu sect and so he decides to rebuild and restore it as his seat of spiritual authority. This leads us to the as yet unknown location and mystery of the elusive terma that everyone in the story seem to be intently trying to unravel.

Those interested in military history will appreciate some of the observations made in the book and among them is the reason for the Chinese having decided to strike Tawang that has a lot to do with the route that the Dalai lama used when he escaped from Tibet in 1959. There is this bit of political symbolism there besides the strategic ones… and Afridi tells us that we were lucky that the Chinese left Sikkim alone though the reasons were harder to decipher as crossing over Nathu La would have caused a harsher blow to India in more than one way. These are the sort of opinions that makes the book interesting to the political analyst within a lay reader who does not know much about either politics or the military.

This story by any other writer might have ended being no better than a spindrift but Stephen Alter has given it a prose that beats poetry hands down… and by the time one reaches the end one stares at how the tale begins 350 pages ago with an American ornithologist stumbling upon a dead body near Chanakyapuri in New Delhi that gets him into the fold of CIA and a strong friendly bond with captain Imtiaz Afridi from military intelligence. This is a tale where missions and emotions ‘uncover what lies beneath the dazzling Himalayan snow’ against the backdrop of the Sino-Indian war of 1962, just as the inside cover of the book faithfully recounts. Like Salim Ali, the legendary birdman of India, who ‘believed that you can never understand a bird completely until you know what it tastes like’, the book leads right into the spiritual chamber of creative expression that gives unfathomable joy and this realization comes only once the eyes have glided past each word.

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Book details:

Title: Birdwatching
Author: Stephen Alter
Publisher: Aleph Book Company
ISBN: 978-93-91047-40-5

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Arvind Passey
11 March 2022