To a Mountain in Tibet(24)
We clamber down towards the frontier by slopes already fractured and slippery. Torrents of shale oversweep the track. The colours around us are pastel grey and shell pink. Whole valley sides are a confusion of debris sliding between shields of darker rock. Their spurs bulge like flayed bones. Sometimes our way is littered with igneous boulders that glint like beetles’ wings, and once we trudge across virgin snow.
The Karnali winds green beneath us, flowing fast from the gorges where we have not followed it. Take a careless step and you could slide unstoppably 200 feet or more into its ravine. We reach it at last down knee-jarring rocks and gravel, and a few minutes later we are walking into the frontier settlement of Hilsa.
Ten years ago, Iswor says, Hilsa was no more than a huddle of cottages and tents. Now it drifts along the river in a sordid trickle of blue-grey stone, half-built or deserted dwellings, and its tottering wooden gangplank has been replaced by a clanking cable suspension bridge, hung with prayer flags and washing. Cascades of rubbish pour beneath it into the river: Chinese beer bottles and layers-deep plastic. The Tibetan frontier is on the far side, a few hundred yards away. A Chinese road is being stretched down close to the Karnali to the grumble of bulldozers. The traders’ caravans cross the bridge with bovine ease, the yaks and jhaboos indifferent to the thin treads under their hooves and to the river boiling fifty feet below. Flagrantly they carry their contraband timber to the trading post of Sher over the low hill beyond, where they exchange it at knockdown prices for clothes, flour and drink. On our side the police post is busy dealing in alcohol.
We find a hostel for Nepalese merchants. Its dirt-floored rooms are disintegrating around a courtyard piled with yak dung for winter fuel. Our beds are planks propped against the walls. Wooden saddles and rotting harness lie stacked under them. Whenever we doze, the smeared windows darken with the faces of children peering fascinated in. This Thakuri family has moved from poverty downriver, bringing their estate with them–three ponies and a cow–hoping to prosper here. But they have only found poverty again. They are listless and shy. The father wears an England football vest, made in China. He hopes to attract trekkers. And he dreams of merchants bedding down while their beasts slumber in the dung-filled courtyard, as in some Arab caravanserai. But there is nobody but us, and his children playing in the dust.
We sit in their room at evening with a group of silent neighbours, while his wife brews tea and suckles a weak baby under her pullover. Sometimes, the man says, they are allowed to take a sick child to the Tibetan clinic over the river. They have crossed the border often, to trade something in Taklakot. But on this side there is no clinic, no school. ‘We wait for things to get better. The Maoists are gone now. They are in Kathmandu.’ They glance uncertainly at one another. ‘We have never been to Kathmandu.’
Soon afterwards the flue from their stove, which zigzags in rusty segments to the roof, turns red hot and sparks the timber ceiling into flames. The men gaze at it unmoving, as if at their fate, while the woman plucks the baby from her breast and scrambles on to the roof with a jug of water.
Their depression starts to affect us. We hand out medicine for their chest coughs and headaches–they accept it without a word–then trail away to sleep. Iswor does not trust this place, and Ram jams the door shut with trekking poles. For a long time I lie on the plank bed, unsleeping. The light of a gibbous moon trickles through the grimed window and on to the mud floor. I watch it moving like a promise. In a week’s time this moon will have filled out to mark the Buddhist holy month of Saga Dawa, and pilgrims will be gathering under Mount Kailas.
CHAPTER EIGHT
In the restless night–the village dogs howling from the rubbish heaps–I have a dream whose memory fades on waking, leaving an aftermath of celebration, so that I try to re-enter it but can barely retrieve its last, faltering images. In the blackness of the room a sliver of dawn opens from the doorway. Dhabu the horse drover is going home. We crawl like caterpillars from our sleeping bags, and Ram cooks up a breakfast of chapati and eggs. Dhabu receives his wages with cupped hands, and is bright with thoughts of his village. This is in the mountains by Dharapuri, a few miles short of Simikot, and he will reach it in three days on a journey that has taken us a week. In his shy response to my farewell (in Iswor’s lapidary translation) he is already homesick.
‘My parents are there, and my wife. I want to get back to her, to see her again. She is my friend.’ He nibbles at his chapati, as if he should not be with us.
‘And your children?’
‘I have four. Two died.’
I ask: ‘How was that?’
‘I don’t know. One was five, another seven. I don’t know why.’
Iswor says gently: ‘He has no education, you see.’
‘The nearest clinic is over the mountains, many miles away,’ Dhabu says. He looks less sad than bemused, as if at some inexplicable order. ‘My village is poor, peaceful. We own one field, which is not enough. So I work like this, with my horse Moti-moti…’
I wonder aloud how long he can sustain it.
‘I will finish when the journey of my life is over, that is when I will end.’
I touch his hand, wondering how many peoples conceive life as a journey, time as a road.
But he says: ‘I am happy. My life is good.’
I say laughing: ‘You have a happy face.’ It is long and humorous (although he does not smile), framed in bats’ ears and a tent of rumpled hair.