Hunting with Dolphins

An extraordinary encounter reveals how environmental neglect endangers more than just our non-human neighbours

- Arati Kumar-Rao

It is the final week of February 2017, the last of the dark nights in the hunting season on the Brahmaputra. The sun is down, leaving behind a rose-pink sky that fades to purple, then indigo, which ultimately turns an inky black. We can't see a thing. Not the horizon, nor the moon, the stars, not even a hand held in front of our faces. It is as if the world were doused in Japanese ink.

My friend and I are inching up the massive river with two fishermen, Lekhu and Ranjan, in their long, low-slung dinghy. It is the dry season; the river's shallow course here is braided with sandy shoals.

Lekhu and Ranjan are among the last of their tribe in Assam-handheld harpoon fishermen who fish on the blackest nights of the dry season, when the river runs clear and low. What makes them special is that they fish alongside the Gangetic dolphins.

Now the boat bumps up against something and runs aground. We step onto a silt island-a chapori. It is neither land nor water, neither predictable nor permanent. It rises as the silt piles up and submerges as the river current erodes it, carrying the silt away; it gives, it takes back.

These fertile chaporis come in varying degrees of robustness, depending on the amount of silt accreted and the vegetation anchoring the outcropping to the bed. Adventurous risk-takers settle on the larger, more robust ones. A chapori belongs to no government or individual; it exists on no map. Google, in fact, tells us we are in the middle of the main stem of the Brahmaputra. The chapori we are on will, in all likelihood, disappear in a few months, as the river swells during the next monsoon.