We stroll self-consciously through the seemingly deserted village, its fabulous construction of connecting houses, a medieval warren of narrow alleys twisting into courtyards, tunneling below second-story spans, dark passageways into darker interiors stabling livestock, notched logs propped as ladders into haylofts, a miniature urban skyline of flat rooftops shaggy with eaves of cut brambles capped by firewood. Made of mud and stone and hand-hewn timber, Tange as a human creation mirrored its natural environment with an eerie, breathtaking perfection, its colors the land’s colors, its solitary mood the land’s mood, a coarse harmony that seemed the very essence of a permanent peace forged from permanent oppression.
Drifting into a tiny square at the heart of town, we shock the five women and self-amused gang of their ragamuffin children sitting in its dirt. We sit too, uninvited; greetings are exchanged, the silence slowly broken. One woman returns to combing out the braids of the woman in front of her; two more sitting nearby resume spinning sheep’s wool with drop spindles. The fifth is off by herself in a corner of the walls, cross-legged at the end of a long hand loom, weaving a striped bolt of woolen cloth. Like bees, the children swarm to my wife’s honey-colored hair and, after some preliminary tickling, arranged themselves in rows for English lessons.
“Hello.”
“Hello,” they sing.
“How are you?”
“How are—” and then a cascade of giggles. They are the filthiest and merriest children in the universe.
The cutup of the group, a boy no older than six whose obsidian eyes contain a mischievous charm, struts over to one of the big grinding stones in the plaza, pulls down his pants, and sits atop the mortar, his bare bottom a perfect fit into the bore. Aghast, we assume he’s going to take a crap here where the village grain is pestled into flour, but what he does—he thinks it’s hilarious and it is—is make air farts, suctioning his ass up and down in the bowl. The women laugh, we laugh, the other kids cheer. This goes on long enough for his mother, one of the younger women, to put a stop to it, hopping over on one leg to drag him off the stone. When she sits back down, from the way she arranges the skirt of her navy-blue dress, I can see she’s missing the other leg. Oh, she says, she injured it and it wouldn’t heal and so after a while her family carried her down to Jomsom where she was sent to Kathmandu and the doctors amputated her leg. Gangrene, says Laird. Fucking agony. This tale of woe inspires the ama of the group to declare that she gave birth to twelve children but seven died.
An elderly man turns a corner into the square and straightens up, blinking through mended eyeglasses at this apparition of queri in the middle of town. His name is Temba Lama; he’s sixty years old, the village headman, and now a hostage of our curiosity. No, he says, when we wonder if life in Tange has changed much since the opening of Mustang—the village is ten people smaller than a decade ago, but everything else is the same. A lot of foreigners have come, but they haven’t changed anything. Ten years ago the villagers had to go to the big towns for medicine and they still have to go there today, but if you’re really sick, he says, you stay here and die.
“Some people feed the body to the vultures,” says Temba Lama, “some people throw it into the river, some people burn it but not many, because there’s not much wood. There’s a ritual to call the birds [for the sky burial] and if you don’t do the puja the birds won’t come.
“No, nothing’s changed. Drinking water would be nice, but electricity we only see in our dreams, so why talk about it? Nobody’s done anything for us up here. But we’re happy. The foreigners come, we get to see strange things, things we’ve never seen before, and we like that. We’re just raising our food and tending our goats just like before.” Before, I guess, would be the year 1500.
But the length of polyurethane irrigation hose we follow to the backside of town, and the empty Chinese beer bottle on the path to the ruins of a fort above town, whisper of the arrival of the world. The ancient fort’s history is as decayed as its walls; like bloody Ireland, Mustang can boast abandoned fortresses and castles everywhere, melting back into the landscape, taking with them a dim epoch of forgotten wars, nomadic invasions come and gone, and a past that barely survives in legends. But the view from the ruins is a panorama of magnificence. Tange, built atop a promontory above the floodplain, faces out across the canyon to an opposite wall carved top to bottom with the most exquisite fluting, rumpled stone drapery tall as skyscrapers. Beyond that, the horizon accordions upward, peak after peak, into the snow line, where angry clouds smother the Himalayas. On its western flank, the headland drops into a ravine made beautiful by a mint-blue river, the Tange Khola, gushing through it, and across the ravine a coal-black mountain of loose soil that Laird believes to be the sedimentary layer of thrust-up-sideways seabed running from up north to here, where saligrams erode from the deposit, and farther south to Muktinath, where it leaks natural gas to the surface.
The wind reverses itself, blowing out of Inner Asia and into our bones. Cold and tired, we make our way downhill, past a lone woman herding hundreds of baby goats along the base of the scree into the high pasture. Where the slope flattens below us, an assortment of lovely chortens, perched above the barley fields, striped with the pigments of the Tibetan plateau—ocher, gray, skeleton-white—speak of Tange’s ageless piety. At a manger back near camp, we stop to admire a mare and her week-old foal—it’s birthing season, babies everywhere—and our conversation with the village continues. Tashi, the owner of the horses, comes to lean on the stone wall of the pen with us and watch the foal dance and wobble on its matchstick legs. Unlike the village women in their wraparound wool bukkhoos, Tashi dresses like a Westerner in chinos, a collared shirt, cheap running shoes, and he wears a marine flight jacket from the USS Saratoga, a gift from a trekker. Laird, who had just completed a book chronicling CIA involvement in Tibet’s loss of sovereignty to the Chinese, asks Tashi about the Khampas.
“Ah, yes, there was a Khampa camp above Tange,” he says. “If you leave now you’ll get there tomorrow night, but be careful. Nobody has gotten hurt yet by the weapons up there, although across the valley at other Khampa camps people have had their hands and faces blown off by the caches of explosives left behind. At night we could see the American planes dropping weapons to the Khampas on the mesa top north of here. They lit fires and the planes came over. We had never seen planes before and the animals went crazy; all night the cows were crying. I was a small child and went up the next day with my father and saw all the boxes full of guns. The Khampas lived good, with yaks, sheep, mules. Then they all left and went to live in Kathmandu and Pokhara.” Here for Laird at last is confirmation of the long-suspected fact that Americans were supplying the Khampas inside Nepal’s border, an officially forbidden activity. Tashi asks for a cigarette and I give him a pack and his expression turns warm and playful.
“The guys who work for you,” he teases, “say you foreigners have it easy.” Behind Tashi, the sunset pries open the skies, and the snow peaks in the Dolpo shine like a row of wolf’s teeth.
“In my idea,” Tashi continues, becoming serious, “the life before tourists came was better. In your accounting, we are poor. Because you come, things are more expensive for us. People aren’t more expensive, things are more expensive. The rich people make money from tourism but we don’t. We don’t have houses or horses to rent. You guys came up here and ate all the eggs so the price of eggs went up. You guys came up with more horses eating more corn and the price of corn went up.”
But the problem’s complex. Although the price of wheat has more than tripled in ten years, the trucks now coming from China to Lo Manthang—about thirty last year—bring lumber and kitchen utensils, stoves and beer, but mostly they bring rice. Chinese rice has become so cheap—half the price of Kathmandu’s—that Lobas are eating two meals of it a day. Mahendra had already told us that the people of Lo Manthang don’t buy anything from below, from Nepal, anymore. Still, no Chinese are al
lowed in, and you have to be ethnically Tibetan, and well-known in Lo Manthang, before you can drive one of the trucks. Yes, it looks good now, the Lobas say, but what will become of this? Grain, in fact, has become so inexpensive that many of the fields on Lo Manthang’s Plain of Prayer lay fallow and abandoned; it made more sense to buy from China. Thus a difficult but centuries-old way of life slowly passes into obscurity.
More villagers have wandered up. It’s a fine horse, we all agree, pleased to have something to agree on, and then everybody turns to Tashi to see what he’ll say.
“You guys have toilet paper—that’s what money is now,” says Tashi, never less than amiable despite his jeremiad. “People who have it treat it like toilet paper, but for us one hundred rupees is a big thing. You just gave me cigarettes that cost thirty rupees, so I’m obeying you big-time.”
My sudden ownership of this good man causes mirth among the growing crowd, but I’m at a loss for how to respond, and all I really have to give him is my attention, which he guzzles. In a strange way, in a way that’s not pathetic but is indeed sad, Tashi’s having fun.
“Your money is very big,” he says without bitterness, and not to cause shame, I think, or beg pity. He says it to be real. “That’s why you can come here and roam around. We can’t even think about going to your country with our weak money. That money that you give to the government to come here—where does it go? Where does it go? I don’t know, and I don’t think anybody does. Look at our clothes—they’re torn and dirty. We’re poor people working really hard here, and I look really old.”
“How old are you?”
“I’m forty-four.”
“You look forty-five,” I say, because it must end this way, with a joke, with everybody entertained and laughing, with good-natured back slapping and handshakes of gratitude for the moment, however brief, when we connected, because we must go back to our camp, our lives, and ride away forever in the morning, and Tashi must go back to his house and his life, and nothing here can be exchanged honestly, or permanently, except memories and goodwill.
Tsarang
There’s these kids, a pack of excited children, their faces freckled with dirt and unstoppable green snot flowing from their noses, who seem to be ours now. Back at our bivouac, the cranks among us grumble at this noisy intrusion onto our turf, quickly forgetting who exactly is doing the intruding here, but Cat and Mark rise to the occasion and the corral fills with the singsong of games, the same games children play all over the world, Ring Around the Rosy, Red Rover, everybody loves to fall down, everybody loves to be sent over. Mark has the odd notion that he will teach the kids calisthenics. Now we’re doing jumping jacks, now we’re touching our toes. The exercise quickly devolves. We’re roughhousing, we’re wrestling. Now the big kids, as big kids will, are beating up on little ones, the victims wailing, and the cranks are inflicted with a case of the nerves. The party comes to a screeching halt when a woman rushes past our gate, headed toward the pond with a chaffing basket piled with . . . what? Fetishes? Guts? The children shriek in unison and hurry after her, spitting furiously, hollering at the woman whom it seems they might attack, but she pays them no regard. At the edge of the pond, she stops and flings the grotesque contents of the basket into the water—painted cones of soft clay and barley flour, tiny butter sculptures, red chilies, animal skin, something made of string, sticks with calligraphic markings, something grisly, perhaps an animal organ, which a dog slinks out of the reeds to eat. Onshore the children clap and spit; the woman wipes her hands on her hips, satisfied, everybody goes home, and we realize we have just witnessed a spontaneous cleansing of the village, a version of Tange’s, or one of its families’, annual Tiji ceremony that will take place a few days hence in front of the royal palace in Lo Manthang. What the woman carried in her basket were sins, demons, transgressions, illnesses, bad spirits, all the troubles visited upon Tange the past year, and now the village is rid of them.
The second controversy of the day arrives with dinner, when I am delighted by the appearance of an entrepreneur at the flap of our dining tent, a young woman toting a pail of river-chilled beer and soda. Back in Pokhara, Laird had pulled me aside and asked me not to drink on the expedition, in deference to the Bangkok Bachelors, especially the alcoholic captain, who were using the trip to crawl on the wagon, dry out, straighten up, kick the habit or habits, and otherwise renovate themselves as clearheaded, upstanding citizens. To ensure the no-booze policy, Laird doses himself and the Bachelors with Diamox, which prevents altitude sickness, because when you mix Diamox with liquor, it makes you piss all the time, a potential deterrent to drinking. Mark and Cat and I have chosen to ignore this protocol because we were already well acclimated to Mustang’s relatively low elevations—9,500 feet at Kagbeni, 10,600 at Tange, 12,600 at Lo Manthang—and we rather enjoyed our moderate routine: a cocktail at the end of the day, perhaps a beer or glass of wine with dinner, and good night.
You must be joking, I had told Laird. If the captain was trying to lose weight, would I have to diet too? It was nice that Tom felt compassion for his wasted friends, but what’s he doing, running a medical tour? The Mustang Detox Trek? No, I had begun to warm to the self-indulgent charm of the captain, who had become more droll and clever in his endless monologues of Asian girls and Asian wars, the same material repeated as fatuous tales in a slurring loop until he sobered up, but Jack was still responsible for his own problems, certainly not me, certainly not anybody else.
All to say before Laird can shoo her away, Mark and I happily purchase the woman’s inventory of four San Miguels, four Sprites, and a Coke. Laird narrows his eyes at me, expecting, I suppose, intemperance, maybe brawling or sobbing, but adulthood prevails upon us all. Mark and I uncap bottles of beer, which we sip throughout dinner. Michael farts a steady stream of indifference into the enclosed tent, causing my wife to change seats. If the Bangkokers are tempted, they don’t let on, and in two days they’ll have swan dived off the wagon anyway in the rakshi emporiums of Lo Manthang. The captain leans back in his chair and begins a discourse about porno on the Internet. Michael, digging an index finger deep into his nose, allows that the Japanese have as many different names for cum shots as the Eskimos have for snow. With modest fanfare, Mark shits in his pants and must leave to hover outside over the squat hole, holding a packet of Huggies Wipes like a prayer book in his clammy hands. Sensing the advent of a headache, Cat excuses herself to bed.
Here in the badlands of the Tibetan plateau, among ourselves we are an exceedingly ill-mannered, immoderate, irreverent, bawdy, smart-alecky, half-decadent–half-prissy overmedicated collection of white people glued together for a whiff of adventure, but we keep our teeth brushed, our faces washed, and our egos loaded but holstered, doing our best to get along and somehow be kind to if not love each other while storm clouds gather over Annapurna and Kathmandu sinks into its own darkness. As the rest of us are about to clear the dinner tent, a tribe of women appear out of the depths of the night, wanting to dance for us, the one thing they could proudly sell, but we have finally accepted our fatigue and only want our tents. The women are crestfallen. An old hag shoves a filthy red plastic pitcher of chhang toward my mouth, trying to sell us a drink, but two good bottles of beer sit untouched on the table.
Mahendra gives them a little money—these are his people, Bhotias, the king’s people. I give Mahendra a little more to give to them, fifty rupees, less than a dollar, and they clap with thanks and bid us a respectful good night. “It’s only by seeing the cash economy in the last ten years that they think of themselves as poor,” says Laird, but they’re not poor of spirit, he adds, like so many other people in other places are. Tomorrow he will tell me that the more he talks with people like Tashi, the more he realizes civilization is a description of technology, not of humanity, and I am reminded once again not to stay mad at Tom for too long, because he indeed has a heart, difficult to preserve and nourish in the Third World or I suppose anywhere
, and always manages to find his way back to it.
In our tent, my wife lays groaning, her head split open with pain made worse by a pulled shoulder muscle from her heavy day pack. Even inside her down bag and its felt liner, she’s quaking with cold and I hug myself around her until her chill is gone and then crawl into my own sleeping bag, worried and guilty, because I won’t let her take her medication. As long as I’ve known Cat she’s been susceptible to regular migraines, which only in the last few years she’s been able to overcome, thanks to a new drug called Imitrex, but it’s not possible to determine if what she’s experiencing is the result of altitude sickness, or the stress-and-hormone kick of a migraine, or how the Imitrex might complicate either condition here in the high country.
She lapses into fitful sleep but wakes up nauseous shortly after midnight and vomits in the vestibule of the tent. Throughout the night she writhes and moans and at dawn I slip over to Tom and Jann’s tent for consultation. Migraines are not on the long list of problems the Lairds have dealt with in the mountains, nor does the thick high-altitude medical textbook Jann carries with her on treks say anything about this particular affliction. We decide to let Cat take the Imitrex and see what happens. Meanwhile, Laird and I sit down with Ang Tsering and Mahendra to discuss our options. Initially we agree to let the group go ahead, Mark and my wife and I to follow with a Sherpa—who will carry her across the river if she can’t ride—and one of the horsemen at midmorning. Reconsidering this plan, Mahendra objects to breaking up the expedition—Tomay doesn’t know the river crossings well enough—and Ang Tsering agrees it would be best for everyone to wait until my wife recovers. “A group moves forward only as fast as its weakest link,” says the sardar, who has been on Everest three times, summited once, and turned back a second time five hundred feet from the top. His own wife has forbidden him from a fourth attempt, but I know he lies awake at night dreaming of the North Col.
Kingdoms in the Air Page 8
