Himalaya

by Ruskin Bond

  I saw a silver trumpet in Spituk. It was coated in massy silver, decorated with dragons and peacocks and grotesque animals (one with the head of a lion, another with the harsh eyes and beak of a King Eagle), and worked in lapis and crystal, amethyst, turquoise, and three kinds of red coral. So much disciplined exuberance and fantasy…I held it up against the rock of the mountains and the light of the cloudless sky, and the tails of the lions and the wings of the silver eagles broke into flame.

  On the desk as I write this, a pair of antique Ladakhi chopsticks. I bought them for the son of a friend, but when it came to it I could not part with them, and gave him an old bell instead. The chopsticks are small, made of old, scarred, yellowing, thukpa- and mok-mok-stained ivory, fitted into the back of the sheath of a silver dagger. Food and death, pleasure and wariness, happiness and a proper caution…a happy dance of opposites and paradoxes. If they were to be used in a tantric ceremony, the most elaborate symbolism could be woven around them—the knife for cutting the strings of illusion, the chopsticks for eating the food of contemplation. Their handles are of rough silver and on each there is only one ornament—a fan-tailed, fire-breathing dragon, of such power that I expect each time I pick them up to burn my hands.

  Helena, Hans, and I were talking in Pamposh and Helena said, “I have been here for three weeks and I have not seen anything ugly in Leh.”

  But there is ugliness in Leh. There are the two great rotting green billboards outside the post office; there are the open lavatories in the bus station and along the wall of the Muslim cemetery on the way into town; there are the holes in front of Pamposh’s, filled with potato peelings, slops, and newspaper; there are the mangy flea-ridden dogs nosing for food in the gutters; there are the sheep sprawled crumpled and bloody and stinking under the bridge; there are signs of poverty too—the wall eyes, the shaking hands of half-blind, stumbling old women with spectacles stuck together with sellotape, the old men with only a few black teeth left and open ulcers on their shins.

  We met again that evening in Dreamland, the one half-good restaurant in town. I told them the three anti-Kashmiri expressions I had found in De Vigne. “Many fools in a house will defile it, and many Kashmiris in a city will spoil it.” “If you meet a snake do not put it to death, but do not spare a Kashmiri.” “Do not admit a Kashmiri to your friendship, or you will hang a hatchet over your doorway.”

  Hans laughed. “Actually,” he said, “they are not funny. Since 1947 Ladakh has been under the ‘rule’ of the Kashmiris. That is what being part of the state of Jammu and Kashmir amounts to. The Kashmiris have all the power in this country—all the administrative power. Do you know, there isn’t one Ladakhi minister in the state government in Srinagar? I could tell you the most hair-raising stories about the corruption, the diversion of funds from Ladakhi enterprises. For a long time the Ladakhis were patient. Many of them believed in the assurances that India made to them of a secure future, a progressive future in the Indian Republic. But nearly all Ladakhis are now angry. Angry at the Kashmiri officials who run almost every aspect of their lives and who have no sympathy for their religion and who think their country is a barren wasteland. Angry, too, that Ladakh is progressing very slowly, that there are few of the properly financed farming and irrigation schemes that are so urgently needed, angry at the lack of modern equipment, at the lack of work, at the Kashmiris who have the money to rent the shops up here for the summer season and fleece the tourists. There have been riots on and off for years, bad riots this year in January, and again in June, and there is a Protest Day scheduled later next month which could well turn violent. Many Ladakhis are secretly and illegally armed. Everyone knows that. Everyone knows too that the Ladakhi Scouts, who are here as part of the Indian Border Force, would not allow their people to be shot at by the army, and would fight if the Army were called in.”

  “The Ladakhis seem so friendly…do you really think they would fight?”

  “Of course,” Hans said. “How much passivity can they stand?”

  “And could they win?”

  “I doubt it. Their only hope is that the central government will do something about the Kashmiris. And it just might. This is a very sensitive border area, after all. But it is also true that India wants to keep Kashmir sweet, and so might turn a blind eye to what is being done here. No one can know what will happen.”

  There had been a power cut. The incessant noise of the powerhouse had suddenly subsided, and the restaurant was being lit with candles by the small Tibetan girl who ran it.

  “The Kashmiris have almost totally pushed out Ladakhi as a language in schools,” Hans said. “They only allow it to be taught up to fifth grade. And very little funds have been directed into keeping up the monasteries, or helping out the Buddhist philosophy school. The Ladakhis have already lost so much…”

  We walked out of the restaurant and stood in the starlight. “I hope this people will preserve its identity,” Hans said, “but it is a utopian hope. Besides, it is a hope I can afford; I will not have to pay for it.”

  The Tibetans are everywhere in Leh. They come up for the brief summer tourist season, from June to September, from places as far away as Darjeeling or Mysore. They pay exorbitant rents for rooms with one bare light bulb and a poster of Bruce Lee, or sleep in their own tattered tents in fields or by their open-air stalls. A thin Tibetan girl in faded French jeans runs Dreamland, working sixteen hours a day with her even younger brother, who at fourteen or fifteen already has the starved blank look of an opium addict; a chubby Tibetan woman of about forty, whom everyone calls “Mama,” runs “The Restaurant,” a wooden shack in the center of town where I eat every day. The market, the long straggling open-air market, is almost entirely run by Tibetans, of every kind and age—fat old men and thin young girls learning nervously to smoke, young Casanovas with Brylcreemed hair, American T-shirts (“I LOVE SNOOPY,” “PRINCETON UNIVERSITY,” “MAKE ME HAPPY”), sneakers, fat Japanese wristwatches and cassettes forever blaring out “Saturday Night Fever” or the Stones, middle-aged women selling their beads and haggling in high voices at the same time. And they sit all day with their tough, tanned faces behind heaps of silver bells and scrolls, small ivory scent boxes, waving paper flags of Amitabha or Avalokiteshvara, Buddhas of endless light and compassion, blue and green and red jade necklaces, little piles of square and oblong and circular turquoises, haggling and talking and drinking Tibetan tea and appraising the foreigners that pass like punters eyeing horses in the paddock.

  I have made friends with one of the Casanovas. He loves Bob Hope and Paul McCartney; he wants to live in California. “I have heard the girls are very loving and happy” (closing his eyes and moaning gently). He dreams of doing nothing and driving a long red sports car, which he imagines to be the American Way of Life; he says, “I will be your friend forever if you teach me how to do disco”; he is handsome, dark, eighteen, but already he has crow’s-feet, and a strained look when he doesn’t think he is being watched. “I do not like this country…why should I like it? There are no films here, there are no good coffeehouses, there are no girls. What can I do with a Ladakhi girl? I can’t even hold her hand. Ladakhi girls are not happy” (the moan again). “I like cities, too, very tall cities…What kind of a life is this? I spend all day waiting to cheat some old German woman. Sometimes I wait for two days, three days for the right old German woman to smile at and sell my bells and necklaces to for fifteen times the price I bought them at. I smile a lot. This goes on for three months, and then I have to give the money to my family—to my father who is old, to my mother who is old, to my sister, who is still at school, to my brother, who is in Delhi studying, to my other brother who is in Delhi studying. And I have to spend the winter walking round the villages of Kulu and Spiti—the people are even dirtier than they are here—I have to spend all the winter getting frozen in Kulu trying to cheat the villagers there out of bells and bowls and spoons and turquoise necklaces so I can come a
nd cheat the old German ladies here! No one lives like this in America, do they?”

  “The Tibetans were always a tough people,” Hans said; “they had to be to survive in their high, cold world; and now, in exile, they continue to survive and adapt. Why shouldn’t the boys wear sneakers and want to go to America? It’s a sad dream but to them technology still seems miraculous…”

  He added, “But the old Tibet is still here: it is in some of the monks, some of the families; it is in the children, in the mountains, in the old women…Ladakh holds fragments of it in its old hand.”

  * * *

  A MOUNTAIN RETREAT*10

  Vicki Mackenzie

  Tenzin Palmo, with her small band of companions, began to climb the mountain which stood behind Tayul Gompa in the direction in which they had been told the cave lay. They trudged up and up in a steep ascent, leaving the habitations of human beings far behind. Higher and higher they went, across the sweet-smelling grasses which gave off aromatic scents as they brushed by, climbing more than 1,000 feet beyond the Gompa, their chests bursting with the effort and the altitude. This was not a trek for either the faint-hearted or the short-winded. The way was perilously steep and treacherous. There was no path to follow and the drop beside them was sheer. At various points the way was made more hazardous by wide streams of loose scree—boulders and stones that the mountain rising over them habitually shrugged off as though irritated by their presence. They had to be traversed if the cave was to be found, but one false foothold on those slippery stones meant likely death.

  Undaunted, they carried on. After two hours of climbing they suddenly came across it. It was so well blended in with the mountain, so camouflaged, that until they were almost upon it they had no idea it was there. It was certainly not the archetypal cave of one’s imagination or of Hollywood movies. Here was no deep hollow in the mountainside with a neat round entrance and a smooth dirt floor, offering a cozy, self-contained, if primitive living space. It was less, much less than that. This “cave” was nothing more than an overhang on a natural ledge of the mountain with three sides open to the elements. It had a craggy roof which you had to stoop to stand under, a jagged, slanting back wall, and beyond the ledge outside a sheer drop into the steep V of the Lahouli valley. At best it was a flimsy shelter. At worst a mere indentation in a rock. It was also inconceivably small: a space measuring at most ten feet wide by six feet deep. It was a cupboard of a cave. A cell for solitary confinement.

  Tenzin Palmo stood on the tiny ledge and surveyed the scene. The view was sensational. How could it be otherwise? In front of her, stretching in a 180-degree arc, was a vast range of mountains. She was almost eye to eye with their peaks. Right now, in summer, only the tops were covered with snow but in the long eight-month winter they would constitute a massive wall of whiteness soaring into the pristine, pollution-free, azure-blue sky above. The light was crystalline, imbuing everything with a shimmering luminosity, the air sparkling and crisp. The silence was profound. Only the rushing gray-green waters of the Bhaga river below, the whistle of the wind and the occasional flap of a bird’s wing broke the quietness. To her right was a small juniper forest, which could provide fuel. To her left, about a quarter of a mile away, was a spring, gurgling out from between some rocks, a vital source of fresh, clean water. And behind her was yet more mountain towering over her like a sentinel. For all the awesome power of her surroundings, and the extreme isolation, the cave and its surroundings felt peaceful and benign, as though the mighty mountains offered security by their sheer size and solidity, although this, of course, was an illusion—mountains being as impermanent as everything else made of “compounded phenomena.”

  She was 13,200 feet above sea level—a dizzying height. At this altitude it was like contemplating living just below the peak of Mount Whitney in the Rockies or not far short of the top of Mont Blanc. In comparison Britain’s highest mountain, Ben Nevis, at 4,402 feet, was a pygmy. It would have to be stacked three times on top of itself to approach the spot where Tenzin Palmo now stood. Up here the eye was forced upward and outward, bringing the mind automatically with it, forcing both beyond the confined boundaries of the earthbound mortals below. It was no wonder that the highest peaks had always been the favored haunts of solitary meditators.

  Tenzin Palmo took all this in and, in spite of the minute size and condition of the overhang, was sold. “I knew instantly. This is it,” she said. It had everything she needed. Here, perched like an eagle on the top of the world, she would most definitely not be bothered by the clamor and clutter of human commerce. She would have the absolute silence she yearned for. The silence that was so necessary to her inner search, for she knew, like all meditators, that it was only in the depth of silence that the voice of the Absolute could be heard. She could bury herself in the confines of her cave to pursue her spiritual practices without interruption. She could go out and look at the mountains and the infinite sky. She would see no one. No one would see her.

  There were other attractions. Fortuitously, considering her quest to attain Enlightenment as a woman, she had landed in the midst of a vortex of female spiritual energy. On the summit of the mountain opposite was a curious black rock called by the locals “The Lady of Keylong.” Even in the midst of winter the shape remained inexplicably free of snow. On closer inspection one could make out the silhouette of a kneeling woman draped in a mantle with a baby at her breast and one hand stretched feeding a small bird. To the Western eye it bore an uncanny resemblance to the Madonna and child, although to the Lahoulis she was Tara, the female Buddha of Compassion. High on a precipice nearby could be found a faded blue and gold painting of the same goddess. It had apparently appeared there spontaneously several centuries earlier, having moved itself from the opposite side of the valley, its form still clearly visible to the perceptive eye. And down the way, not far from the cave, was a spot said to be inhabited by the powerful Buddhist protectress Palden Lhamo, traditionally depicted riding on a mule. One day several years later Tenzin Palmo was to see footprints of a mule embedded in the snow at this very spot. Strangely there were no other footprints leading to or from it.

  All in all it was perfect. Here she could finally devote her entire energy and time to profound and prolonged meditation. She could begin to unravel the secrets of the inner world—the world that was said to contain the vastness and the wonder of the entire universe.

  If she was happy at her discovery of the cave, her companions were not. They proceeded to throw at her all the objections and discouragements that had been hurled at women who wanted to engage in serious meditation in total isolation down the ages. Tenzin Palmo deftly fielded each one.

  “It’s too high! Nobody, let alone a woman, can survive at this altitude. You will die,” they chorused.

  “But caves are warmer than houses. They are thermostatically controlled. My house in Tayul is freezing in winter and I survive that. This cave will be better,” she replied.

  “Well, living so far away from any living person you will be a sitting duck for thieves who will break in and rob you,” they retorted.

  “There are no thieves in Lahoul. You can see for yourself how the Lahouli women walk around wearing all their jewelry quite openly and no one tries to rob them,” she argued.

  “Men from the army camp will come up and rape you,” they tried again.

  “By the time they have climbed this high they will be so exhausted all they will want is a cup of tea,” she responded.

  “What about the ghosts? These places are haunted, don’t you know? You will be terrified,” they continued.

  At this point Tenzin Palmo’s Tibetan failed her. Believing they were talking about snakes instead of ghosts (the word being similar in Tibetan), she blithely replied, “Oh I don’t mind them at all.” This nonchalant declaration impressed her detractors almost to silence, but not quite.

  “Well, we’re not going to help you move up here because if we do
we will only be aiding you in your own death. And we are not going to be party to that.” They were adamant.

  “If I get permission from my guru, Khamtrul Rinpoche, will you agree and help?” she asked. They finally nodded their heads. A letter was duly dispatched to Tashi Jong, and after asking her several searching questions about the position and condition of the cave Khamtrul Rinpoche gave his permission. The objections were at last quelled.

  In that one brief argument Tenzin Palmo overturned centuries of tradition, which decreed that women were not capable of doing extensive retreats in totally isolated places in order to advance themselves to higher spiritual levels. In doing so she also became the first Western woman to follow in the footsteps in the Eastern yogis of old and enter a Himalayan cave to seek Enlightenment.

  Before she could begin her great work, however, the cave had to be made habitable. With the help from her Lahouli friends she employed laborers to brick up the front and side of the cave with walls made especially thick to keep out the ferocious cold. A small area inside was partitioned off to use as a storeroom for her supplies of food. It was essential, but reduced her living space still further, to a minuscule area of six feet wide by six feet deep. The floor also had to be scooped out to give her room to stand up, then baked earth was put on top of it, then flagstones, then more earth. They put in a window and a door, which Tshering Dorje insisted open inward—an insight which was to prove invaluable in the drama that was to follow. Then they slapped mud and cow dung on the floor and walls. After that they leveled off the ledge outside, making it into a patio where Tenzin Palmo could sit and bask in that breathtaking view. Finally they constructed a stone wall around the perimeter of the cave to keep the wild animals at bay and to establish a boundary for her retreat area.

  Into the cave Tenzin Palmo put her furniture: a small wood-burning stove (a legacy of the Moravian missionaries who had once tried to convert the Lahoulis) with a flue pipe that thrust out of the front wall; a wooden box for a table covered with a flowery tablecloth; a bucket. On the walls she hung pictures of Buddhist deities in their various manifestations. A handy depression in the wall became her bookshelf holding her precious dharma texts, carefully wrapped in yellow cloth to keep the loose pages together, bookbinding never having made it to Tibet. On a natural ledge she placed her ritual implements of dorje and bell, the mystic thunderbolt signifying compassion, the bell Emptiness or wisdom. These were the two “wings” of Tibetan Buddhism which, when realized, were said to fly you all the way to Enlightenment. And against the back wall was her altar, holding the images of her personal meditational deities, a miniature stupa (representing the Buddha Mind), and a text (representing the Dharma). In front of this she set up seven small offering bowls which she filled with water. They represented the seven gifts offered to any distinguished visitor who graced your house with his or her presence: water for drinking, water for washing the feet, flowers, food, perfume, light, and music.