To a Mountain in Tibet(20)
In the hospital ward, beyond the curtains closing off the bed, the voices of other patients ring out normal, ugly. A woman upbraids her daughter for visiting her late. Another says she wants to go back to East Grinstead, where her sister can nurse her. A visiting husband recounts a failed burglary at his office. Somebody says: ‘I know I’m self-pitying, but I can’t help it…’
But she hears nothing. Only sometimes her hand clasps mine.
In the ward at night: the wheezing of oxygen, moans and dreams. Winking lights. Who or what is she clasping? Am I still there? The nurses know less than I do. Somebody cries out in another ward.
Morning voices outside our curtains again. I am angry that they will live on.
She lies at last in silence, turned to the window, and her face is young again.
At evening we near the foot of the Torea pass. I hear my breathing with remote amazement. I remember ancient juniper trees along the way, shedding their bark in swathes, like the remains of some long-discarded incarnation. Ram has set up our tents on a plateau above the track. I fall into mine without eating or undressing, and sleep for nine hours.
CHAPTER SIX
In his monastery’s garden in Kathmandu, Tashi talked of the retreat from secular life not only as a deliverance from hardship but as the path to a kind of purity. He imagines his native Bhutan to be the heir and guardian of Tibetan Buddhism.
‘They say we are like Tibet used to be. In my village the moment you step out of doors you sense people’s faith. In the marketplace, on the street. It’s not like here in Kathmandu. Here, the moment I’m beyond the monastery gates the beggars come crowding in and people are harassing you to buy things. And so you feel pity. You want to please them, you want to give, but you cannot. In my village there’s nothing like that. We were a family of ten, and we were happy. But I haven’t been back for four years. When the winter holidays come, only I am missing.’
‘Is it so far?’
‘Yes, it’s far. Once a year I speak to my mother on the phone, just to hear her voice.’ He smiled. ‘I miss them.’
‘Why did you leave?’
‘Our lives were very poor. When I saw how my parents worked in the fields, and how they had to take my eldest sister out of school to join them, I knew I didn’t want that life. I don’t know how much my father had to cheat and lie in order to feed us–eight children. He had a job looking after the company armoury, but would leave it to catch fish whenever he could. He must have caused suffering to many fish, to feed us…What do Christians say about things like that?’
I rummaged in my memory. But Jesus’s apostles left the lake of Galilee not out of pity for fish, but concern for humans. Tashi’s face had an almost contrite gentleness. When I looked at him, I wondered how compassion formed. But he answered that Buddhism was a science, that compassion could be taught, that you could train for it. Just as you could steer yourself away from sex, if you had the will.
I asked: ‘Have you never wanted to marry?’
‘In the village I have married friends, happy with their children. But it’s not for me. Marriage means trouble. I couldn’t cope with it.’
He laughed without embarrassment. I could not tell what, if anything, this artless reply concealed, from me or from himself. He folded his robes more closely round his shoulders. ‘I was fifteen when I thought: I want to be a monk.’
The poverty from which Tashi fled is printed on all these villages of the high Himalaya, whose idyll is a mirage. Beyond 11,000 feet, erosion gashes half the slopes, and stains them with arteries of drifting scree. My group goes in happy disorder, Ram swinging a can of paraffin, Dhabu clutching the ludicrously awkward stove before him like a totem, Pearl his horse sauntering in front, piled with the tents. In this stripped land I soon see them moving effortlessly a mile or more ahead of us.
We are ascending an empty valley. On either side the snow ranges no longer shine beyond dark-wooded foothills in a dimension of their own, but barge straight down in naked spurs into the abyss where their snowmelt joins the river. As the sun clouds, the air grows cold. Iswor has exchanged his shorts for army fatigues, and is worrying about his hair (‘It looks like a yak’s coat’). When we cross the 12,000-foot Torea pass, my earlier breathlessness is only a memory. The land is starkly beautiful. The clouds that push from the side valleys hang almost at eye level. The high snows, closing off our passage at either end, reassemble as we walk, sliding aside to reveal mountains higher still. The valley is tightening round us. In the stunted scrub the birdsong thins to plaintive clicks and cheeps, and then to silence.
Into this stillness the traders come swinging round the mountainsides behind their files of mules and horses. We follow their trail for hours–the soles of discarded shoes, excrement, dribbles in the dust (the animals urinate on the move), scraps of faded cloth and broken harness. They are all Bhotias and local Tibetans now, swarthy, wild-faced men whose backs are sheathed in fleeces and yak pelts and foreheads rumpled by headbands to steady their toppling loads. They camp where they can, in caves and abandoned sheep pens. One of them stops dead on the path before me (‘He hasn’t seen a Westerner before,’ says Iswor) and fixes me unbudging with a black, fascinated stare, while his shaggy train of jhaboos–a hybrid of the sleepy Indian cow and the recalcitrant yak–wanders on untended.