Himalaya

by Ruskin Bond

  * * *

  By the time I visited the Chhoedhe Gomba, word had gotten around that some Rongba woman was in Lo Monthang to give money for the repair of Thugchen and Jamba Lakhang. For that reason I was treated with an embarrassing amount of respect; after they showed me around, the monks insisted I have some tea.

  The monks’ mess was a smoky earthen room with an open roof. Novice monks—little boys who pulled impatiently at their robes—kindled a fire at the hearth. Through the smoke, I saw some older monks on the mud benches across the room. They motioned for me to sit on the tallest bench. I hesitated because that seat was reserved for the most powerful. But they insisted, and when I still showed reluctance one monk almost pushed me down on the bench. The young monks who had guided me brought me a cup of butter tea and a cup of sweet tea, and plates full of biscuits and Chinese candy. I wished I could leave.

  A pimply-faced monk with a flashy silver watch translated for the older monks, who had apparently been waiting to talk to me.

  “We’ve got a bikas,”—tree plantations were called bikas, or development, because the idea was introduced by a foreign development agency—“and we’ve got fields down by the river. But what we have is hardly enough to feed us all. That’s why Lama Tashi Tenzing must go to Tibet to hold prayers. They give him offerings of butter, which he brings back here. He’s there right now on the invitation of a gomba.”

  The older monks smiled. One pushed the plate of biscuits toward me. Then he stood up and poured more butter tea into my cup. As soon as I sipped it he refilled the cup.

  “Have the biscuits. They’re Chinese,” the young monk translated for him. “Drink your tea. It’ll get cold. Why aren’t you drinking your sugar tea? It’s not as good as the tea down south, but please do have some.”

  * * *

  The day after I visited Chhoedhe Gomba, a revered Sakya Rinpoche, who was also the Rani’s uncle, flew off to Kathmandu in a chartered helicopter paid for by some Japanese Buddhists in Kathmandu.

  When the helicopter arrived in the morning, the entire village poured out of the city gate and watched it land in a cloud of dust on a plateau outside the walls. Its blades slowed down and the dust settled. The pilot stepped out in a glitter of dark glasses and neon windbreaker. The co-pilot had plainer clothes but he sported the same movie-star moustache. The local children stared at the men in awe and stole behind the helicopter to finger the sleek machine. Men, women, monks, and Rongba employees milled around, peeked inside the helicopter, and commented on the pilots. The neon pilot responded by striding to the edge of the plateau, where he lit an imported cigarette and took in the vista. The other, who agreed to take a message to my family in Kathmandu, spoke only English with me. Rabindra Bista and a schoolteacher asked me to take a snap of themselves in front of the helicopter. Gyaltsen crept up behind them and hammed a sporting smile.

  From the Chhoedhe Gomba, there was a low blare of horns. Then a crowd of Bistas dressed in traditional and modern fineries came through the city gates. The old Sakya Rinpoche, dressed in orange robes and a ceremonial yellow hat, sat on top of a slow-moving horse. He dismounted near the helicopter, and the Raja escorted him to his seat. The Bistas crowded around the helicopter to offer the rinpoche khata and chhurpi—hard cheese—and colorful Chinese candy. Some people pushed and shoved to get near the Rinpoche while others chanted and prayed from afar.

  Then the pilots stepped into the clear glass front of the helicopter. The doors closed, the blades swished, and the crowd scattered with laughter and shrieks. The neon pilot, smug and otherworldly with earphones clamped to his head, steered the helicopter away in a storm of dust.

  * * *

  Lo Monthang was like that: in the middle of hardship appeared a spark of stunning wealth; in the middle of tradition, change. The society was ruptured by objects and values from all over the world. I couldn’t understand everything, but I could see the evidence of change. I read what I saw like a book in a language I only partially understood; I deciphered familiar signs in a jumble of others:

  A woman wore glass bracelets like a Hindu woman. A trader wore a Swatch. A man wore a baseball cap with the English word “Friend” stitched on it. A woman weeding her buckwheat field heard I had visited Kaar Gomba in Marang, and presumed I was an infertile pilgrim. So she offered me her son for adoption. “Take, take,” she said, pushing the toddler toward me. “You can bring him back when he’s educated.”

  An eight-year-old girl from Tsarang walked alone half a day to fetch a letter.

  When speaking Nepali, monks called themselves “lama,” though in Tibetan a lama was not a monk, but a priest.

  A young monk hesitated to walk with me outside the gomba grounds. “You know how it is,” he said apologetically. “People talk.”

  A man said he believed in the Dalai Lama as a religious leader, though not as a king.

  A boy said he had seen a cinema in Pokhara.

  A woman blushed when I asked her about the custom of polyandry, in which one woman marries several men, usually brothers. She said it wasn’t as prevalent as it used to be. “Nowadays our men all want a wife of their own.”

  Another woman, whose father had two wives, told me I should make speeches at every village telling women to be more assertive. She said, “I’d kill any man who has two wives.”

  There were six batteries on a window ledge.

  Women in the fields hummed songs from Indian movies.

  A young man mistook me for a foreigner and said hello to me with the overly virile lilt of an Indian film star.

  In keeping with custom, the second sons of most families became monks and the second daughters, nuns. Other customs that were observed: the Kudak—now Bista—still married Tibetan nobility; travelers threw stones on top of cairns and shouted “Lha gyal lo!”; people paid up to eight hundred rupees to cap their teeth in gold.

  An old man told us incorrectly that the two-story statue in Jamba Lakhang was made in Kathmandu.

  A man from Chhosher said the displaced families in his village had asked the government to resettle them south of the Himalaya.

  A man said he voted for the communist party because even a nomad in Tibet had more yaks than the Raja of Mustang.

  A new school was built in the southern style, with stone for the walls and tin for the roof. The children inside recited Nepali poems by Bhanubhakta Acharya, a nineteenth-century Nepali poet credited for having founded Nepali poetry.

  A girl named Chimi Dokka’s Hindu name was Rajani.

  Mustang’s Raja’s son was named Ashok Kumar, though his Bhotia name was Jigme Singi.

  A woman said she earned forty thousand rupees each winter in India selling acrylic sweaters.

  Two women stopped on their journey to Lo Monthang, pulled out packets of Rara Noodles from the folds of their shirt, and snacked on the pre-cooked noodles.

  A lama wanted to use his battery-powered loudspeaker at the prayers, but it was broken.

  Some women wore Chinese Army–issue shoes.

  I saw, from these disjunctions, that the policy of restriction had not kept upper Mustang beyond the reach of the modern world. Instead it had forced people out. No new sources of income had entered the area, nor had traditional occupations found means to grow. The history-book economic cycle—of farming in the spring, tending to the animals in the summer, and trading in the winter—had remained the same for centuries; it had stagnated.

  So seasonal migration, the only lucrative option left, had become more of a necessity than a choice. Almost every able-bodied person went south in the winter—either to the mid-hills of Nepal or to cities like Pokhara and Kathmandu, or to India, and some on to Hong Kong or Taiwan. In southern Nepal they sold jimbu, an herb used for cooking, and wool and Chinese consumer goods to Rongba. They also sold little somethings—trinkets and crafts—to tourists, and operated restaurants along well-traveled routes. In India, they bought a
nd sold acrylic sweaters. Those who journeyed to the Far East traded in radios, televisions, kitchen appliances, ready-made clothes.

  People had gone the way of money, and whether that Hinduized them or Westernized them or Nepalized them didn’t matter much. Their exposure brought back into the restricted area fragments of the world: transistor radios, smokeless stoves, electricity, running shoes, windbreakers, and new languages—Nepali, Hindi, some English. And through these imports, even those who remained in Mustang all year long took leave of their impossible, traditional way of life.

  I understood this impulse to venture out. This was the path all of Nepal took in the 1950s: the one leading out, to prosperity. This was the path my own family took, generations ago.

  * * *

  Back at the lodge after the Sakya Rinpoche’s departure, Dolma, Bikas, and I shared Chinese Army rations of preserved whole oranges that came from across the border in an unmarked aluminium can. Bikas had bought it for fifty-five rupees along with a twenty-rupee jar of Chinese Butterfly Cream.

  “He’s a very important lama,” Dolma said, feeding her baby an orange. The girl was wrapped in a smart pink wool suit from Hong Kong. “I asked for his blessing. I don’t know when I’ll be in Kathmandu to see him again.”

  “Is he going to live there?” I asked.

  Dolma said, “He spends most of his time in the Raja’s gomba in Lumbini. I saw him there once. But from now on he’ll stay at the Raja’s gomba in Kathmandu. I don’t know when I’ll be there, though.”

  “Where will you be this winter?”

  “Kalimpong. My older daughter’s studying there. I want to visit her.”

  3

  I went to the Nepal-Tibet border the second year with the friend from Kathmandu who had accompanied Bikas and me. A local man acted as our guide. We set out on horses at dawn so that we could return before late afternoon, when the rivers would be too high to cross.

  Around Lo Monthang, on the same flat plain, were other peaks with ruins of fortresses that belonged to a time before Lo. West of the city was Namgyal, a nestled hillside with a large hilltop gomba. Beyond was Thingkar, where the Raja had his house and all his animals. Thingkar, along with Fuwa and Kimling, was electrified by a common scheme in Chhonhup. To the northeast was Chhoser, a settlement with a hillside dotted with caves that housed people, and a bed of rocks where the river had swept away the fields. The Nepali customs checkpost beyond, near Nhenyol, was a square building that stood alone on a plain, a timid reminder of government presence.

  We forded the ice-cold Mustang River, rode beyond all the villages, and climbed up a steady slope. When we reached the top, the Tibetan plateau unfolded in front of us as a thin strip of land that extended over hundreds of miles to a mountain range on the low horizon. The domed sky was crisscrossed by white whirling clouds. A cold wind swept away our words. The Himalaya was visible to the distant south.

  The border pillar no. 32 was a cement block with “Nepal” written in the Devanagari script on the Nepali side and Chinese characters on the Tibetan side. It stood absurdly alone in the middle of the wilderness. The Chinese checkpost—where, I had been told, Chinese border guards used diesel-generated electricity to watch TV on the largest television set in the world—was just a speck in the distance, as were the hundreds of yaks grazing on the scant grass of the plateau.

  We rode around aimlessly. Every now and then we passed a black tent that belonged to drogpa, nomadic herdsmen. The one we made the mistake of approaching was guarded by two Tibetan mastiffs so fierce that they leapt and lunged toward us even though their front legs were strapped to their chest. Two girls—maybe of ten or twelve—peeked out of the tent and told our guide, in Tibetan, that their parents were with the yaks way over there—where those black dots moved.

  We passed other drogpa who were walking through the plains. One man with a horse and a mastiff, another with five yaks. Three women, who had intricately looped and braided hair, were walking to their tents far away. None of them spoke Nepali, none looked a bit Nepali, but they were.

  *1 This essay, which first appeared on the writer’s personal blog, was written after an avalanche in the Khumbu Icefall on Mount Everest killed sixteen local guides and porters.

  *2 Snapshots of life in Kangra, Himachal Pradesh, from the 1970s to the early 2000s.

  *3 V. Verma, Gaddis of Dhauladhar: A Transhumant Tribe of the Himalayas (New Delhi: Indus Publishing Company, 1996), pp. 97–98.

  *4 A poignant excerpt from Toward Freedom: The Autobiography of Jawaharlal Nehru (1941).

  *5 A fond childhood memory, recounted by the poet in his memoirs.

  *6 This essay has been excerpted from Tibetan Caravans (1997).

  *7 A lyrical, evocative description of one of the many villages in the region of Garhwal where Corbett lived, worked, and hunted.

  *8 Wanderings in the “land of the gods.” Excerpted from Footloose in the Himalaya (2003).

  *9 In 1998, after India tested five nuclear devices in Pokaran and Pakistan tested nuclear devices of its own soon after, Amitav Ghosh visited Siachen Glacier, among other places, to understand the motivations behind the tests. This essay, excerpted from Countdown (2008), describes his visit to the glacier.

  *10 The Mandakini river rose catastrophically on June 17, 2013 and killed thousands in Kedarnath. Many among those who perished were pilgrims from the plains. The river also devastated entire communities along its banks. Journalist Hridayesh Joshi and his team were among the first to report from ground zero, a harrowing experience which he chronicles in Rage of the River (Vandana R. Singh, trans., 2016).

  *11 In the late fifties, poet Dom Moraes traveled to Sikkim—then still a monarchy—with a photographer. This essay is a hilarious recounting of a misadventure, involving liquor and the Chinese military, on the Nathu La pass.

  *12 An account of travels in Mustang, formerly the Kingdom of Lo, a remote Himalayan region on the Nepal-Tibet border. Excerpted from Mustang Bhot in Fragments (2008).

  NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS

  BILL AITKEN is an Indian travel writer and mountain lover. His books include The Nanda Devi Affair, The Seven Sacred Rivers, Divining the Deccan, and Exploring Indian Railways. He lives in Mussoorie and Delhi.

  DHARAMVIR BHARATI was a poet, author, playwright, social thinker, and one of the tallest figures in Hindi literature. His works include Gunaho ka Devta, Andha Yug, Suraj ka Satwan Ghoda, Kanupriya, and Thele Par Himalaya. He was chief editor of the popular Hindi magazine Dharmayug for close to three decades. Dharamvir Bharati received the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1988 and the Padma Shri in 1972.

  RUSKIN BOND is the author of numerous novellas, short-story collections, and non-fiction books, many of them classics and several of them set in the villages and towns of the Himalayan region. Among his books are The Room on the Roof, A Flight of Pigeons, The Night Train at Deoli, Time Stops at Shamli, Rain in the Mountains, A Book of Simple Living, and Friends in Wild Places. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1993, the Padma Shri in 1999, and the Padma Bhushan in 2014. He lives in Landour, Mussoorie, with his extended family.

  JIM CORBETT was an Anglo-Indian hunter and tracker-turned-conservationist, author, and naturalist. After giving up hunting, Corbett played a key role in protecting India’s wildlife, especially the endangered Bengal tiger, and used his influence in the provincial government to establish a national reserve for wildlife. In 1957, the reserve was renamed Jim Corbett National Park in his honor. His books, perennial bestsellers, include Man-Eaters of Kumaon, The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag, Jungle Lore, and The Temple Tiger and More Man-Eaters of Kumaon.

  ALEISTER CROWLEY, poet, painter, novelist, mountaineer, ceremonial magician, occultist, and founder of the philosophy and religion of Thelema, was author of several books, including The Book of Lies, Clouds without Water, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography, and D
iary of a Drug Fiend.

  SARAT CHANDRA DAS went on two clandestine explorations of Tibet in 1879 and 1881 at a time when the country was out of bounds to outsiders. He returned with numerous Sanskrit and Tibetan texts, based on which he became a formidable scholar on the country and its religion and culture. In 1884 he returned to Tibet as a spy for the British.

  FA-HIEN, a Chinese Buddhist monk, traveled from China to India, Sri Lanka, and back between 399 and 412 C.E. His travels have been chronicled in the Travels of Fa-Hsien, or, Record of the Buddhistic Kingdoms, translated by the scholar H. A. Giles and published in 1923.

  AMITAV GHOSH was born in Calcutta and grew up in India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. He is the author of The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In an Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide and The Ibis Trilogy (Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire).

  His books have received wide commercial and critical acclaim and many awards, including the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Ananda Puraskar, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the International e-Book Award at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Sea of Poppies was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2008 and was awarded the Crossword Book Prize and the India Plaza Golden Quill Award.

  In January 2007 Ghosh was awarded the Padma Shri, one of India’s highest honors, by the president of India. In 2010, he was awarded honorary doctorates by Queens College in New York and the Sorbonne in Paris. Along with Margaret Atwood, he was also a joint winner of a Dan David Award for 2010. In 2011 he was awarded the International Grand Prix of the Blue Metropolis Festival in Montreal.