To a Mountain in Tibet(16)
Their village shares the dilemma of all this region, he says. Their land yields a single crop of barley each year, and it’s not enough to feed them. So every spring and autumn he loads illicitly felled pine trees on to his three yaks and leads them north over the border into timber-starved Tibet. The town of Taklakot, he says, is the centre for this common contraband. Then he returns south carrying Chinese clothes for sale, with shoes, beer and flour.
I think of the poverty-stricken Thakuri villages far down the valley–of Lauri and his ragged children–and wonder where Dendu’s children are. At first I imagine he has none. His wife, in their arranged marriage, is six years older than him. But Dendu is a fixer. His clever daughters have entered the rumbustious boarding school downriver, then gone on to a charity school in Dharamsala, home in exile of the Dalai Lama. And his cherished son has won assistance to a college in Kathmandu, from which he will return to them. These despised Bhotia, it seems, are turning their isolation to account in trade–‘China is nearer to us than Kathmandu,’ Dendu says–while exploiting their Tibetan heritage. ‘Things are all right for us.’ He offers us tea mixed with salt and yak butter. ‘Things are good.’
But what happens, I wonder, to families denied a son?
Dendu says: ‘Then their daughter must bring her husband from his village to live with them. It may be far away–nobody marries within the village. But nobody marries outside their caste either. Unless it is for love.’
Love. It is not much spoken of. A bride must leave her childhood home without this tenderness. Years ago I had come upon the corpse of a young woman floating in the Cauvery river in India. The police had shrugged her away. It was only a woman, they said. She had probably been broken by her husband’s home.
Tentatively I ask Dendu’s wife about this ordeal. What had she felt?
Dendu answers for her at once, but kindly: ‘That is our way in this country.’
But I ask her again, tactlessly. She shrinks behind the stove and her face disappears into her hands. At last she whispers: ‘The first three years were very hard. My village is far away. I thought about my parents all the time.’ Then a high, smothered tinkling sounds through her splayed fingers. I am afraid that she is crying, but it is laughter. She looks up. ‘Then my love for my husband came, and there were children.’ She smiles, as if with remembered relief. He is smiling too, suddenly embarrassed. She starts slapping the dough between her palms again, while he pokes sticks into the stove.
Sometimes silence falls: not the awkward Western hiatus, but a comfortable interval festive with burps and chomping, among people to whom eating is not taken for granted. Immured in the dark comfort of their home, in this scarred magnificence of wood, I momentarily forget Dendu’s tree-felling, and lapse into drowsy well-being. Their welcome is warm and modest. She shows little jewellery, but wears the striped apron and long skirts of Tibet. Their larder is stored with rice and gas canisters. They share the same wide, calm face.
Their faith is far removed from the monastery downriver. Two temples–male and female–hang in the crags above the village, but Dendu does not know why they were gendered. ‘That’s just what we call them.’ A few times a year the villagers assemble to pray in one or other. They speak to no god or Buddha in particular, he says. They just pray for their good fortune. And on a plateau further upriver, their bodies after death are cut in pieces. ‘We used to tip bodies into the river,’ he says, ‘but not now. Now it is cleaner. The birds come.’
From their rooftop in the starlight the temples appear only as high, empty spaces pale with prayer flags. After Dendu retires for the night in their storeroom, and Dhabu to his horse, Iswor, Ram and I lie in our chrysalid sleeping bags along the floor, lit by a naked bulb. Outside is silence. But Ram has nightmares beside me, his teeth grinding, his scooped-out cheeks turned to mahogany, so that I wonder whether to wake him, but do not, and he moans at last into quiet.
CHAPTER FIVE
From far up our path, Yangar remains in sight, and stirring with the dawn. Momentarily we stop and look back on the illusion of a golden valley. For a mile the cliff walls ease apart on its enclosed peace, and the first sunlight is trickling through the fields. A tributary stream glitters down across our way, and birds are shifting in the wild apricot trees.
Then we turn and move on high above the river. Far ahead, beyond its long, constricted passage, the white palisade of mountains bars our skyline, and a few clouds rise like smoke signals from its peaks. But the fluting of the optatus (or saturatus) cuckoo still echoes down the valley, and a handsome fox saunters blithely across our path. It is hard to remember that the fields of Yangar, spread like magic in the young light, are too poor to support their farmers’ lives. Somewhere far off, faint in the stillness, sounds the ring of an axe.
The valley is closing in. Below us outsize trees still crowd along the river–sometimes the spruces rise 150 feet from its banks–but we are tramping high up through thinning scrub and rock. Cistus and cream-coloured potentilla flower everywhere; flights of yellow-breasted wagtails are about, and a startling trogon precedes us from branch to branch in flashes of crimson and black. But now we are crossing the ever-wider track of avalanches, whose torn-up rocks have stilled to minefields of razor scree. The few trees are dwindling from our trail. Often the pines stand erect, but blackened and long dead, as if burnt from within, and sometimes the cliffs of the river bank opposite descend near vertically for 500 feet.