To a Mountain in Tibet(3)

‘Yes. We had to go. We Tamangs look for jobs. For education. But my family have a cottage in the village still. It is very quiet, very beautiful. My mother goes there to rent our land to other farmers. It’s corn land, but it’s too small.’

This was the plight of all Asia: the flight from the land. He loved and despised his village. There was no future there. He says: ‘Everyone leaves for somewhere else. Not just for Kathmandu but India, the Gulf, even farther.’

Yet he half belongs to the village still. Like the cook and the horseman, he can shoulder the load of a mule. But he is touched by an urban gloss. His hair starts far back on a high forehead, tied in a ponytail, and his face has the lemony blandness of a sumo wrestler’s, faintly androgynous.

He says: ‘The village is full of old people now.’

On a path below us a woman is striding fast above the river. On her back a sick baby is bundled like a sad, balding toy. Iswor calls out to her. She is walking to Simikot to find medicine, she cries. She is quickly gone.

He stops for a moment. ‘This is not like England.’

Here fifty babies die to every thousand born. I ask: ‘You have children?’

He seems to wince. ‘I’m not married. I’ll wait ten years before I marry. Yes, there are girls I like, but I’ll wait. In the village, men marry at eighteen or twenty. But I’ve left that life behind.’ Then, as if licensed at last to voice a pent-up question, he asks: ‘And you? Why are you doing this, travelling alone?’



I cannot answer.

I am doing this on account of the dead.

Sometimes journeys begin long before their first step is taken. Mine, without my knowing, starts not long ago, in a hospital ward, as the last of my family dies. There is nothing strange in this, the state of being alone. The death of parents may bring resigned sadness, even a guilty freedom. Instead I need to leave a sign of their passage. My mother died just now, it seems, not in the way she wished; my father before her; my sister before that, at the age of twenty-one.

Time is unsteady here. Sometimes I am a boy again, trying to grasp the words Never, never again. Humans, it is said, cannot comprehend eternity, in time or space. We are better equipped to register the distance spanned by a village drumbeat. The sheerness of never is beyond us.

The sherpa’s eyes stay mute on me, puzzled. Solitude here is an unsought peril. I joke: ‘Nobody’s fool enough to travel with me!’

It is already evening. Our feet grate over the stones. You cannot walk out your grief, I know, or absolve yourself of your survival, or bring anyone back. You are left with the desire only that things not be as they are. So you choose somewhere meaningful on the earth’s surface, as if planning a secular pilgrimage. Yet the meaning is not your own. Then you go on a journey (it’s my profession, after all), walking to a place beyond your own history, to the sound of the river flowing the other way. In the end you come to rest at a mountain that is holy to others.

The reason for this is beyond articulation. A journey is not a cure. It brings an illusion, only, of change, and becomes at best a spartan comfort.

Iswor looks robust, but he stops to complain quaintly of a mosquito bite on his hand, splaying his fingers for my inspection. They are chubby as a baby’s, I tell him. We laugh and go on.

To ask of a journey Why? is to hear only my own silence. It is the wrong question (although there seems no other). Am I harrowing myself because the world is mortal? Whose pain am I purging? Not theirs. An old Tibetan monk tells me the soul has no memory. The dead do not feel their past.

Meanwhile the sun is setting with a perverse radiance behind us.



In the village of Tuling, at dusk, a family takes us in. Among the huddled houses, mud-roofed and half-plastered, theirs is one of the poorest, reached by a notched log ladder against the hillside. They live–a family of nine–in three narrow rooms. The walls are stucco and loose stones, built thick against the winter, pierced by a single window: a deep rectangle, closed by cracked cellophane. They have no furniture, no water. Their lavatory is a patch of ground scattered with rags.

Awkwardly we hunker on the mud floor: Iswor, the cook and I, feeling suddenly outsize. Our travelling kit–more than everything the family owns–is stacked against one wall. Everything we have looks excessive. Their possessions hang in a few bags from the beam ends poking through the plaster. A glaze of black flies shifts over the ceilings.

Lauri, the householder, sits with us, fervid and garrulous. He has moist, coal-black eyes. His ancient father and mother, his wife and five children come and go, or crouch round a rusty stove whose flue pokes through the ceiling. They are dressed almost in rags, ingrained with dirt, gaping at the elbow, shoulder, knee. The women walk on blackened feet–the children too, their skin striped harsh where sandals have once been. Three of the girls are pretty, but already knots of worry are puckering between their eyes.

At the other end of life, the two old people move oblivious among us: she like a tempest, he a wraith. She is hard-bodied, stick-thin. In the pitch-dark room beside us she is churning butter in a wooden trough, and barks to herself in angry phrases that Iswor doesn’t translate. From time to time she emerges and lurches for the door beyond us, blind to our stares. Her head is twisted piratically in rags, but her ear lobes and nostrils are loaded with gold rings and pendants, still flaunting bridal wealth, and her ankles are bangled in brass.

Her husband sits outside in the last of the twilight. He has misted, dreaming eyes. He is dressed in what had once been white, with old-fashioned leggings and a long, tattered smock whose back is labelled enigmatically ‘Cut Short’. He never speaks. His sacerdotal dress makes me wonder if he is not a leftover shaman–they survive alongside Buddhism in these hills. Only when the neighbours’ children crowd to the door to gaze at the foreigner does he get to his feet and shoos them away with a tiny stick.