To a Mountain in Tibet(28)
As the hours drag by, my expectation starts to wane. Only the anticipation of change has tempered the squalid rootlessness of Hilsa, but this is now seeping away. The sun scorches down. Beside us the Karnali runs dark with the blown dust of the night. I start to fear that the border is closing, as suddenly as it did last year during the riots before the Beijing Olympics. The jittery fiftieth anniversary of the Dalai Lama’s flight has only just passed.
By noon there is still no sight of police or medical orderlies. Then we hear that an Indian pilgrim has died on Kailas. They are bringing his body down. Sobered, we go on waiting. An Indian woman, arrived by helicopter the day before, sits with us on the rocks, her breast heaving. She has been to Kailas five times, she says, but her lungs are weak and she cannot climb much more. This last time she has brought her ex-husband with her: a silent man retracted behind dark glasses and a greying mass of beard. I sense she wants to teach him something.
A squad of porters trudges into sight, bearing the corpse on an old army stretcher. Three Indian elders walk alongside, but no one seems moved. The man, apparently, died alone. Other porters spread out one of the plastic canvases the Chinese use for baggage, and spray it with disinfectant, while a group of Tibetan women squat nearby, arranging each other’s hair. Casually the body is tipped on to the canvas, the face covered by a brown cloth. A plump hand dangles loose, its wrist circled by a golden watch. One of the Indians produces a roll of sticking-tape and the porters entwine the corpse until it is half sitting up, while a gang of road workers lumber to and fro and the Tibetan girls go on primping their hair. Then the body is carried away across the bridge.
The Indian woman says sourly that this happens often. Her government runs small tour groups whose members are chosen by lottery. They enter Tibet through the northern province of Uttarakhand, acclimatising slowly, and are medically checked for fitness. Many are refused.
‘But the private tour agents are different,’ she says. ‘They often make no medical checks at all. They’ll enrol anyone. They just want the money.’ Her gaze moves bitterly to the far bank, where the cortège is stumbling towards the helicopter. ‘The people who sign up don’t know how hard it will be. Kailas is holy to Lord Shiva, and many pilgrims are Shaivites from the south, from lowland cities like Bangalore and Mumbai. They’ve never climbed anything except their own stairs. Sometimes they’re old.’ She glances towards her ex-husband, who looks angry. ‘We’ve come up too fast ourselves–twelve thousand feet in a few hours.’
Three medical orderlies with police and immigration officers arrive together. They are all Chinese, and scrupulously polite. We are lined up outside their tent, exhausted by the sun–I stand with the trekking group–and called in one by one to fill out quaint health questionnaires. Are you carrying live animal other than dog and cat?…Have you had close connection with pig during one week?… They take our temperatures from thermometers thrust under our armpits. Their smiles are clipped. Perhaps the rough warmth of native life around them has steeled this prim correctitude. They are part of China’s gift to Tibet, after all: health, education, infrastructure. They are uniting the motherland. In these life-threatening heights they work among an ungrateful people. Before they came, they’ve been told, the country was a sink of feudal serfs, with a life expectation of thirty-six, and its people are still insanitary, drunk, illiterate. They surely need to be taught. The orderlies have smart black briefcases, where the data on our health is filed away.
The police too are reticent, even as they empty our backpacks. Their olive uniforms and crimson shoulder flashes look chaste and vaguely unnerving in the surrounding squalor. As the detritus of the past days is spilled out ignominiously on to a bench–old socks, notes, medicine, thermal underwear, trinkets for children–I grow anxious for my densely scribbled diary. A rosy-cheeked captain goes through item by item wearing surgical gloves. But he can barely read English, let alone the ant-like trickle of my handwriting. Only the pamphlet from a Buddhist monastery arrests him, with its photographs of monks. He is hunting for pictures of the Dalai Lama, whose face spreads paranoia along the whole frontier. His fingers fidget along the leaflet’s portraits of old, smiling faces: Lama Zopa Rinpoche…Lama Lhundrup…Once he consults with another officer, and together they scrutinise the picture of an altar where a tiny snapshot is propped. Photo of a photo, can it be he? Impossible to be sure. It’s merely a smile under a pair of spectacles.
A wolf in monks’ clothing, the Chinese call him. But to Tibetans he is the incarnation of Avalokitesvara, the bodhisattva of compassion. His religious devotions occupy four hours of his day. Yet he rejects the mystification of his person and his image as the spirit of Tibet. He is a man, and transient. His apostleship of peace has brought his country a refracted holiness, but no Chinese concession. The West fetes and wonders at him. As for China, his distrust of material institutions, even of his own office, renders him all but incomprehensible.
But the leaflet of smiling monks is at last returned to me, and an hour later we reach the waiting Land Cruisers, where a Tibetan guide drapes us with the white scarves of his people’s welcome, and we start up the half-metalled road towards Taklakot. Behind us the ebbing waves of the Himalaya hang the sky with spires, while ahead the land smoothes into an ancient silence. In this thinned air everything inessential has been burnt away. We are crossing a wind-scorched tableland under a vacant sky. Its treeless hills roll caramel brown to the horizon. No one else is on the road. We pass two police posts and a ruined fort, and traverse some depleted tributaries of the Karnali. The ochre walls of the Khojarnath monastery fade behind us. Since last year’s pre-Olympics riots, the Chinese distrust of monks has deepened, and we are forbidden to enter.