The End of the River: A Bengali Wanderer in Bourne End
Part 1
It was evening.
A woman was standing alone at a bus stand. A local police officer arrived and stood nearby. “Miss, there’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said. “I’ll stay here till your bus comes.” The woman, quite composed, told him not to bother. The officer hesitated, then confessed: “This is my first day in this area. I’ve heard it isn’t very safe, and honestly, I’m scared to be out on patrol at night — but the job market being what it is, I can’t afford to lose this job. So, when I saw you standing here, I thought I’d come and stand nearby too.”
Beyond the stop, only thickets. Without a signboard or a stranger to tell you where you are. This patch of road could have been England, or Ghana — I have never been to Ghana, I don’t know why the name came to me — or it could have been Rishra, my own town in Hooghly district.
I had read this joke, long ago, in a book of anecdotes about London’s Bobbies. Standing at a bus stop in the Buckinghamshire dark, it came back to me at exactly the right, or the wrong, moment. I found myself wishing for someone to appear. A woman, a nervous Bobby, anyone. I was alone in a foreign land, at what felt like the last stop on earth. How long can a person simply stand and wait?
Let me back up a little.
I had landed at Heathrow from Kolkata that afternoon. End of February. The cold biting, a fine drizzle falling, exactly as promised. My plan had been simple: catch the National Express coach from the airport and reach Bourne End, my first destination, within the hour.
But travel plans, like life, have a habit of laughing at us.
The app on my phone refused to cooperate with the network of the new SIM I had bought at Heathrow. I could not book my coach.
A terminal worker, seeing me stranded, pointed me towards a lane. “A public bus goes in forty minutes. Get down at High Wycombe, change there, fifteen minutes more to Bourne End.” I had no better plan, so I stood where I was told to stand.
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By the time the bus rolled in, daylight had already given up. It was properly dark as we neared Bourne End. I checked the map on my phone and realised I didn’t need to go all the way to High Wycombe after all — the next stop would do, with a short bus back.
My destination, in any case, was a monastery, the Ramakrishna Vedanta Centre, and arriving there latenight with a large suitcase did not seem particularly appropriate. So, I thanked the driver and got off at the next stop.
Got off — and then what?
A moving bus tells you nothing about a place. I had clearly landed somewhere between two settlements, a mistaken bus-shed where cars occasionally hiss past and the streetlights have given up trying. Beyond the stop, only thickets. Without a signboard or a stranger to tell you where you are. This patch of road could have been England, or Ghana — I have never been to Ghana, I don’t know why the name came to me — or it could have been Rishra, my own town in Hooghly district.
My first encounter with the place had not exactly been a bed of roses. But that morning, looking out at the peaceful landscape, I began to suspect that the village might eventually win me over.
As a boy I used to cycle with my father from Rishra to his colleague Haripada-uncle’s house, in the afternoon, home again at dusk. I remembered the road from Nabagram towards Rishra — bamboo groves on both sides, a thin strip of asphalt in the middle, darkness, crickets. That was thirty-five years ago.
The one difference: back then, the sound of the evening conch would drift in from some distant house. Here, nothing. A small unease crept in, though the Bobby joke kept me from taking it too seriously. I have travelled enough as a backpacker to know when to simply look around instead of panicking.
There — wasn’t that a building, just behind the stop? An office, perhaps, though unlit. I left my bag at the stop and walked closer to read the sign.
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I should not have gone closer. The board said: Undertaker Service.
That was enough! No more waiting for buses. I opened an app-cab service instead, and within minutes had a car. The driver’s name was Mohammad Nasir — a small mercy, someone from the subcontinent. In Kolkata, when I book a cab, and in hurry, I always ask a nervous question —”Dada, apni ki aschen?”
I asked Nasir the same thing, not in English but in the Hindi that comes more naturally to the tongue in that moment. He assured he’d be there shortly. He arrived, opened the door, said “Baithiye” — please sit — and I did not need to be told twice. I put my luggage in the boot and slipped into the car. I was more than happy to leave the undertakers behind.
A little later we reached the Vedanta Centre. A long drive-way ran from the gate through the trees. Nasir drove me all the way to the door. A light was on, the door open.
I walked the last stretch up the gravel path with my luggage and saw Swami Sarvasthananda, the head of the Centre, coming out to receive me.
He smiled and welcomed me.
I was exhausted. I found my room and slept the sleep of the truly relieved.
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The next morning, I opened the curtains. Blue sky, a green field, a scatter of pigeons, and — some distance off — two deer, unbothered by my staring.
My first encounter with the place had not exactly been a bed of roses. But that morning, looking out at the peaceful landscape, I began to suspect that the village might eventually win me over.
It did. And that is the story I want to tell.
It helps to know how a centre carrying a spiritual tradition born in Bengal came to sit at the end of a lane in rural Buckinghamshire.
The story goes back to 1895, when Swami Vivekananda first set foot in England and stayed nearly eleven weeks, convinced that if Sri Ramakrishna’s message could take root here — at the heart of the British Empire — it would spread everywhere. Decades later, in 1948, a monk named Swami Ghanananda arrived in London on his way home to India, meant to stay only a few weeks.
The crime writer Edgar Wallace lived down the road too, in a house called Chalklands. And the branch railway line that once ran to Marlow was affectionately called the Marlow Donkey, so slow, the locals say, that you could get off for a pork pie and still catch it up again.
Devotees asked him to stay longer. He did — for twenty years, moving the fledgling Centre from one borrowed room to another, from Belsize Park to Holland Park, building it lecture by lecture, magazine issue by magazine issue, until it had a real home. It was only in 1977, eight years after Ghanananda’s demise, that the Centre — under his successor, Swami Bhavyananda — sold its London property and moved out here, to Bourne End, to a lane called, of all things, Blind Lane.
I find something quietly moving in that name. A blind lane, I later learned, simply means a dead end — a lane that goes nowhere further. Fitting, perhaps, for a place where people come precisely to stop going anywhere and sit still instead. Diggers once found a Roman burial ground nearby, lead coffins under the soil — so the lane has been receiving travellers, in one way or another, for a very long time.
One afternoon, in the Centre’s library, taking notes as I usually do, I came across an old letterpress edition of Sister Nivedita’s The Master As I Saw Him — the cover long out of print, nothing like the editions sold today. I picked it up out of curiosity. When I set it down again, I noticed a signature on the first page: Marie Louise Burke. For anyone who has spent time with Vivekananda’s years in the West, that name needs no introduction.
Her research is the ground the rest of us stand on. To hold a book she had once held, signed in her own hand, in a small library at the end of a blind lane in Buckinghamshire — I cannot explain why such a small thing should move a person so much. But it did, and it has stayed with me since.
The rest of my days in Bourne End were spent, in the gentlest possible way, wandering. The village itself turned out to be stranger and more literary than its quiet face suggests. Enid Blyton lived here for almost a decade, at a thatched cottage called Old Thatch, writing some of her most-loved books in a garden picture-book pretty.
The crime writer Edgar Wallace lived down the road too, in a house called Chalklands. And the branch railway line that once ran to Marlow was affectionately called the Marlow Donkey, so slow, the locals say, that you could get off for a pork pie and still catch it up again. Even the village’s own name has a small poetry to it — Bourne End, the end of the river, the point where the little Wye gives itself up to the Thames.
If you wander around the area, especially in search of the river, you will spot the ‘Thames Path’ signpost probably on the very first day. Even before catching sight of the river water itself, you will see the masts of yachts, both large and small.
A place, in other words, where a great many things quietly come to an end and quietly begin again. I was one more of them.
But my time there was only the first stop. A short residency awaited me further south, at a college with its own unlikely thread back to Vedanta — though I did not know fully yet when I boarded the train.
To be continued…
Image Courtesy: Author
Pijus Ash is a freelance journalist with over two decades of experience. An avid reader by nature, he likes to pursue independent research. In addition to his passion for reading, Pijus enjoys traveling and frequently embarks on backpacking.
