To a Mountain in Tibet(11)
CHAPTER FOUR
Black crows are picking over the campsite. The dawn sky is split violently in two. Rain clouds are pouring through the valleys beneath us, fading the foothills into one another and blurring the crests of Sisne Hind fifty miles beyond. But to the north-east the sky is blue over Tibet. Just above us the monastery is stirring into prayer, and beyond it a long, snow-glazed skyline has caught the first light.
The boulder-thickened hillside beside me is swarming with tiny children. The labyrinthine rocks echo with their laughter and screaming. A tribe of leprechauns might be running amok there. But they are dressed in pink jumpsuits stamped with Mickey Mouse or blazoned ‘Going It’ or ‘The Vogue Current’. Under their bobble hats their cheeks are flushed crimson and their hair coerced into pigtails or page-boy crops. They seem insanely happy.
The school that has sprouted in this desolation, I discover, is so far from its pupils’ homes that most remain here for nine months of the year, sleeping in bunk dormitories. Their headmaster is a gentle Bhotia, who shows me proudly round the mud-floored and stone-walled classrooms. Until three years ago the place was occupied by Maoists, who periodically fought the Nepalese army here while the children tried to go to school. Now the little assembly hall doubles as a Buddhist temple, on whose makeshift altar the teacher lifts a cloth from a picture of Padmasambhava, the great magician-saint revered of Tibet. We sit at last in a corner of the kitchen, resting under suspended ranks of bloodied yak sinews, while two Tibetan servant women brew up something on a stove at our feet.
I wonder how this middle-aged teacher, with his quiet, easy English, had ended up here, three days’ walk from Simikot, the roadless village capital of the poorest district in the country. But he laughs this away. He was born here in Humla province, he says, and distances are not the same for him as for me. He has the deep lungs of his people; he can walk to Simikot in a single day; his wife takes two.
‘I once worked in Kathmandu, in better times. I started a carpet factory using Tibetan wool and Tibetan weavers. That wool is beautiful, very strong, and Westerners loved it. But then the Maoists came. I had to increase wages. The cost of everything went up, and we collapsed. So I came here.’
The weaving of the small, high-coloured Tibetan rugs, I knew, had withered also under the impact of a different Western taste, then died with the global recession. Had he, I wondered, used child labour? He might have thought it kind. And in the last few years Maoist militias and corrupt police descended like vultures on the beleaguered factories.
‘But it is not bad here,’ he says. ‘The children are poor, and need us.’ Education obsesses these villages. Only one in five people is literate. ‘In the winter snows we have to close, and everyone goes home.’
‘Where is your home?’
‘My family has scattered. My wife is sometimes here with me. But my son is a monk in India.’ He adds with an odd, anxious pride: ‘My daughter is a student.’
‘Where is she?’ I wonder if she attends the secondary school in Simikot, or is even in Kathmandu.
But he says: ‘She’s in Alabama, at college. She got a scholarship. She says it’s a lovely place, but she can’t find work to pay her tuition fees. And the exams are hard.’
So she is 9,000 miles away, and he cannot sustain her. He is afraid, I sense, that something will pull her away, and that he will lose her. So he talks on unhappily in this rough-walled dungeon, under the dripping yak sinews, while his daughter sits in her sorority in Alabama, fretting about her grades.
He says: ‘She cannot afford to come home.’
A low wall surrounds the monastery. Under its gateway, topped by the Wheel of the Law, a woman is leading her little son round an enormous cylindrical prayer wheel. It creaks into motion only when he adds his tiny force to hers, and their laughter ripples out. Beyond the gate a big courtyard opens up, ringed by a two-storey arcade of derelict or half-built rooms. At its centre the temple comes as a vivid shock, huge and enigmatic in this solitude. Its bright-painted porch and double tier of casement windows, ochre and scarlet, and its roof of orange-coated iron seem daubed like make-up on a more ancient structure. But in fact the temple is barely twenty-five years old, raised in Tibetan exile.
I wander the arcades, past flaking plaster and smashed windows. A chill wind has got up. All around, the tree-hung mountains seem to be pouring against the walls. Across the courtyard a sagging cable, where crows perch, brings weak electricity from a village upriver. I press my nose to a grimed window and see a blanket and a coarse table and a child’s face rising to meet mine through the glass, grinning: a boy novice surprised at study.
Meanwhile, from inside the temple throbs a deep, murmurous chant, as if a huge beehive were stirring. Through these thick walls it resounds like cosmic muttering, its rhythm quick but subdued. Some hundred monks are praying there. The temple seems built in sad memory of their homeland. The inward slope of its white-plastered walls, the bright eaves and window frames, the stucco medallions lifting off orange friezes, all echo the lost country to the north.
The abbot who emerges from the prayer hall carries more authority than his thirty years. When I wonder at such a monastery in this isolation–there are 150 monks and novices here–he answers with a strange sacred history. Over a century ago, he says, a revered teacher passed away near Mount Kailas–he ‘took rainbow body’, becoming pure light–leaving behind a disciple who built a famous monastery there. Such vanishments into astral bodies were more common in the old days, he says. Lamas and ascetics simply disappeared, leaving behind only their hair or fingernails. But in time the disciple died, and after a few years he was reincarnated as a monk who fled Tibet during the Chinese invasion, settling a few miles from where we stand. These reincarnations, or tulkus, are common still. Enlightened lamas, they return to earth by their own will to guide the Buddhist faithful.