To a Mountain in Tibet(10)
There are familiar shrubs too. Jasmine, syringa and a teeming species of viburnum have fringed our track for two days, and now spread their foliage in the clearings. Sometimes I have the illusion of walking through a ruined English garden. Generations of botanists, after all, brought back the Himalaya to Europe, tenderly crated, and their specimens are all about us. Sunlight opens the papery white flowers of rock roses and potentilla over the hillsides. I locate honeysuckle, mimosa, dogwood; and tortoiseshell butterflies are floating among faded buddleia.
A wonky tin bridge spans the Salle Khola. The stream flows jade green like the Karnali, whose noise is hollow and far away now, bellowing in constricted chasms. Here, for a few hundred yards, the mountains’ upheaval levels out. Some goatherds are corralling their flocks among boulders, and a solitary farmer passes us, cradling two chickens. On the far bank the trees crowd in again–deciduous and evergreen together–and nothing exists but tumbling water and this dense, seamless foliage. Once a voice screams a warning above us and we hear the rumbling start of rocks moving. Two rams are butting along the scarp vertically above, while their goatherd panics. Iswor and I freeze on the path. The rocks come crashing down between us in twos and threes, bounce on the track then spin on like giant flints to the river, while above us the wild goat girl scrambles upwards cursing her charges and hurling stones.
Two hours later, in the waning light, we are ambling alongside the Karnali through broad, smooth grasslands. The river runs strong and undepleted as we approach the village of Yalbang. Our path is littered with horse droppings and discarded harness. From somewhere the two-note song of saturatus (or optatus) follows us along the valley. Our horse drover, Dhabu, is waiting for us here, grazing his stallion Moti, Pearl, on the sudden grass. We sit on rocks to eat, while I wonder aloud if a family in Yalbang will take us in.
Iswor says grimly, in his troubled English: ‘You will die here.’
A faint alarm. ‘Die here? Who will kill me?’
He laughs curtly. ‘Not “die here”. I said “You will diarrhoea.” These people dirty.’
Dhabu laughs too, from habit. His hazel eyes glitter in a swarthy face. Some unspoken divide exists between him and Iswor and Ram, not of caste (for he is Thakuri) but of education. Born in these wild valleys, he never went to school. Now he sits on a rock apart to stare at me, his eyes divided by a twitch of puzzlement. He always eats last and out of sight, and when I offer him anything–a slice of apple or a sweet–he accepts it with surprise and mute confusion, extending both hands to receive it.
Iswor, meanwhile, is rinsing his long hair in the river–he is girlishly proud of it. He comes to sit by me as I scroll back snapshots in my camera. On its monitor a slender woman appears in an Italian garden.
He asks: ‘Who is that?’
‘That is my partner.’
He stares at her. ‘She is great beauty.’
She is smiling beneath the Tivoli waterfall. It had been hard to leave her. In Kathmandu her voice had reached me over the telephone from 8,000 miles away: ‘Don’t think of me.’ The phone in the monastic guest house blurs her sound away. ‘Think of where you are.’
So she gives her imprimatur to the traveller’s cruelty: to the fading of his shared, past life before the rush of the new.
I ask Iswor: ‘You have a girlfriend?’
‘No, I don’t want. In Nepal, if you sleep with one of these village girls’–he gestures at the forest–‘you have to marry her within a year. But I want an educated woman, and my life is too poor. How can I ask her to wait ten years? She wouldn’t trust me. She’d say you’ll go, you’ll leave. And many people go from here–to the Gulf especially. But it’s a bad life there. I tried that once. I planned to go and work as somebody’s bodyguard. I even signed up. But my parents said no, no, you’ll be killed. So I’m here, working as a guide. But there’s no work now. Only you.’
He is smiling, perhaps secretly relieved at his parents’ prohibition. He says: ‘In the city, we are like you in the West now. Men can marry at thirty-five or later. I’ll wait.’
But how can he wait so long, I wonder, without a woman?
‘Oh that is all right,’ he says. ‘I understand about love…I know about it.’ When he thrusts back the damp hair from his forehead, his bland features remind me disquietingly of Mao Zedong.
‘Love?’ I ask. ‘How can you know?’
‘I’ve read the magazines. I’ve seen the films. I’ll have two children, a boy and a girl, and I’ll make sure they’re educated.’ He glances at Dhabu, who is grinning to himself, uneducated, on a rock. ‘I’ve read about it all.’
Ahead of us, from the ridges above Yalbang, a white pinnacle shoots into the sky. It is a Buddhist stupa–a hillside memorial above a perched monastery–and it touches our last hour of walking with a premonition of Tibet. Then a man runs down at us from the cave where he is camped and lifts his hands quivering above his head. He is suffering from headache, begging for medicine. But Dhabu has gone ahead with our baggage, and I can give the man nothing. I curse myself as we leave him. I must remember to carry aspirin at least.
Soon afterwards the river bends under a high promontory, crowned by a rough-stoned tower, and the valley opens round the scattered homes of Yalbang. Two orange triangles fleck the rocks, where Ram has pitched our tents.