To a Mountain in Tibet(25)
He touches his features, as if confirming them. ‘Good.’
I watch him depart, with Moti following. He turns back once and, from this distance, dares to lift his hand and smile. Iswor beside me says: ‘That is a very simple man.’
Now that the horse is gone, we must use Tibetan transport on the far side to carry us to Taklakot, the region’s traditional trading centre, and on to Kailas. But we cannot cross the frontier alone. Chinese suspicion brands the lone traveller here as maverick or spy. His solitude is otherwise inexplicable. Without a group he is too elusive, slips beyond control. But somewhere behind us marches the party of seven British trekkers under whose camouflage I hope to cross. They should be here by evening. Iswor carries a satellite phone by which he might have reached them, but he never turns it on.
We leave the hostel without regret, pitch our tents in rough ground among ruins in Hilsa’s outskirts, and wait. The prospect of the trekkers touches me with foreboding. These past days I have felt a stressless self-diffusion, as if my own culture were growing lighter on my shoulders. I will not welcome its return in others. I have too much imagined these mountains as mine.
Iswor and I wander the derelict settlement alone. Only a few barley fields surround its no-man’s-land, and every other structure is half-built or falling down. A desultory wind whips up the dust. The inhabitants all seem transient, here to exploit the border trade. No one was born in Hilsa. Yet the place is built on a sediment of Chinese waste: Pepsi-Cola cans and split trainers, cigarette cartons, Lhasa beer bottles, old tins of engine oil. Women and children digging foundations burrow among stones and trash together. Everyone is swathed anonymous against the dust. But for the first time in days I set eyes on a wheeled machine: a little Chinese tractor that must have driven over the bridge or through the water. There is even a wonky wheelbarrow.
We stop beside the bridge. On the far side stands the clean stem of a Chinese electricity pylon–there is no electricity in Hilsa–and we hear the growl of earth-moving where the tarmac road is descending to the river. Iswor says quaintly: ‘I am sad for looking.’
‘What is it?’
‘The Chinese…We do not have their future. We are not a developing people like them.’ He keeps his back turned on Hilsa, frowning, as if its hovels parodied his life. ‘Perhaps this place is forgot by us. Kathmandu is far from here. Even Simikot is far.’
Weeks later, when I visited Iswor’s village birthplace high in the hills above Kathmandu valley, I understood a little. Circled by far mountains, its terraced maize and vegetables, cherry and peach trees touched it with an illusion of self-sufficiency. A small Hindu temple and a Buddhist stupa rested side by side. Doors and lintels showed old carving, and dark overlapping roof tiles turned the houses to ancient and precious reptiles nesting in the orchards.
Iswor’s parents had migrated to Kathmandu in his childhood, but returned to the village for leisure and to manage their few fields. But his eldest brother Bishu was a celebrity. Iswor languished in his shadow. Bishu had climbed Everest with an Indian army team, and was dubbed a ‘summiteer’. His job in a Kathmandu travel agency was well-paid, and he owned two houses and some land. When he visited from the city, the young men’s hands clasped together in hero-worship, and the old hurried to greet him. Walking one day in the June-scented pine woods above the village, he told me: ‘Iswor’s job is not so frequent, not so rich. I don’t know what will happen to him. Maybe he will come back here and do farming…’
But Iswor didn’t want to farm. He wanted to succeed in the cruel labyrinth of Kathmandu. ‘The young are bored in the village,’ he said. ‘It’s only two hours by motorbike from the city, so they go in and get jobs as clerks, drivers, anything.’
‘And what happens to the villages?’
He said what I already know: that they become the ghetto of the unenterprising, the sick, the old. It was the same all over Asia. Sometimes the villages were sustained by women. Often they fell to absentee landlords. On their picturesque hillsides they started to go silent.
But you would not have guessed this that night. The young men danced and sang on a hillside by the blaze of a log fire: old Hindu songs, Iswor said, which they had learnt in childhood. A man with Down’s syndrome–his Mongoloid features subsumed among the Tamang faces round him–gyrated alone in his dirty smock, frenzied by the music. Far into the night the youths went on singing and tapping their damphu drums, and if an invisible divide existed between those who had returned from the city on holiday and those who had greeted them, it was blurred by allegiances deeper than success, and by the old remembered music under the village stars.
The women kept away or watched shyly from the dark. The older wore bright saris. But no, Iswor said, he could not marry one, and repeated his refrain: ‘They have no education.’
Only one girl gentled his voice when he spoke of her: his thirteen-year-old youngest sister, back in Kathmandu. ‘I love her. I want to help her continue at school, even if my parents don’t afford it. Her oldest sister will leave the home soon, and then she will be alone.’ He grimaced into the dying firelight. Just as he was to Bishu, perhaps, so the small girl was to her elder sister. He spoke as if she were an orphan, or a shadowy afterthought. ‘She will be very sad…’
His poverty seemed only to exacerbate this brotherly dream. She alone, it appeared, had touched his complicated heart.