Where the Indus is Young

by Dervla Murphy

  Our young host introduced himself as Khapalu’s ‘animal dispenser’ and despite limited English managed to tell us the sad story of three New Zealand rams which he progressively acquired five years ago. For some reason they did not get the Balti ewes in lamb and last week all three died of a mysterious fever. It seems that yak and dzo are immune to TB but very prone to brucellosis, and almost all the local animals harbour a variety of worms. Our chai, when at last it came, was unwontedly elegant – Chinese jasmine tea (which costs Rs.24 per pound in Gilgit), served in Pyrex cups made in France.

  After lunch we paid our respects to the Raja; on the way it began to snow and it hasn’t stopped since. By giving Hallam his head we were shown how to enter the Palace courtyard through a wooden double-door – fifteen feet high and beautifully carved – in a twenty-five-foot-high stone wall. A wide passageway between two-storeyed stables and granaries leads under an archway to a secluded quadrangle, and on the far side stands the many-storeyed Palace, built about 140 years ago by the present Raja’s great-grandfather. The off-white, fortress-like façade is broken at irregular intervals by ten windows of very unequal size. In the centre, built on to the main structure like enormous bay windows, and now in a sad state of disrepair, is a handsome set of four wooden balconies. As the main entrance is no longer in use we climbed a flight of broken, ice-encased steps to a side door where two lovely-looking but very shy young women were obviously awaiting us. The Raja’s daughters, I assumed, though they spoke no English. Smilingly but in silence they guided us along interminable twilit corridors with mud floors and mud walls no different from any peasant’s hovel. Then a low doorway led into almost total darkness and we both stumbled frequently while groping our way through further low doorways, with invisible raised thresholds. When a startled hen squawked and fluttered beside us in the darkness, Rachel emitted an understandable yelp of alarm and gripped harder on my hand. At last we saw a glimmer of light ahead and stepped into a small, low-ceilinged room with a tiny window near the floor. The temperature was around freezing point and the only furniture was a charpoy, a threadbare Bokhara rug and a much-dented tin stove. Two rifles stood against the wall in one corner and a razor and shaving brush lay on the window ledge. The young women gestured towards the charpoy, on which we duly sat. Then they seated themselves on the rug – still silent – and a beaming, excited-looking maidservant hurried in to light the stove. Despite our companions’ resolute silence I felt bound to attempt some bright social chit-chat, in my best hybrid English/Urdu/Balti, but mercifully the Raja soon arrived.

  Stud Yabgo Fateh Ali Khan is a tallish, well-built man in the mid-sixties who wears dark glasses and a home-spun gown. He looks completely European, though one of his grandmothers was a member of the Ladaki royal family, and when we had introduced ourselves he sat on the floor near the stove, leaning against the mud wall, and launched into a spellbinding dissertation on his ancestors. I already knew that for generations this family has been producing most of Baltistan’s few scholars and he is certainly keeping up the tradition. He was educated at a Srinagar college – where the headmaster was an Irishman, one Mr MacDermot – and before Partition he represented Kashmir in India’s embryo parliament. He is descended from a branch of the Seljuk Turks that settled in Baltistan just before their more ambitious fellow-tribesmen pushed west into Persia and Turkey, and he emphasised that his family has never intermarried with the Baltis. Yet throughout the centuries there have been many marriages between the men of his family and Buddhist women of the Ladaki ruling family, though never vice-versa. (A good example of class mattering more than creed.) The wives usually remained Buddhists, while their children were brought up as Muslims. The Raja’s family, like the vast majority of the people of Khapalu, are Nurbashis – the most liberal and unorthodox sect of Islam. So it was easy for them to ignore the Islamic ban on marriage with those outside the Peoples of the Book. Nurbashi tolerance also explains Khapalu’s natural ratio of unveiled women to men, which comes as quite a shock after the exclusively male-populated streets of Gilgit and Skardu.

  The Raja’s deposition is too recent to have made the slightest impression on his subjects. To the people of Khapalu he is still their beloved ‘Raja Sahib’, a man very nearly as poor as themselves in material possessions, but full of wisdom, and of concern for their well-being, and surrounded by the irreplaceable aura of some seven centuries of inherited authority. He himself is altogether without bitterness towards the Pakistani government; he is too dignified and profoundly self-assured for petty resentment, and too intelligent to imagine that any inhabited corner of the world can escape ‘Progress’ in the 1970s. But he does not disguise his personal antipathy to the trappings of Progress and it delighted me to hear him referring to jeeps and aeroplanes in a tone that put them on a level with disease-carrying insects. I laughingly remarked on this and he promptly pointed out that such machines are disease-carriers. Thirty years ago, when it took three weeks to walk in from down-country, smallpox, typhoid, TB and measles were virtually unknown here: now they are common.

  As we talked, the two beautiful daughters and a selection of ragged servants and retainers sat cross-legged around the stove and for their benefit the Raja often paused to translate. There was a distinctly medieval quality about the atmosphere, created by the extreme discomfort of this ‘Palace’, the numbers of under-employed but cherished retainers and the autocracy-cum-informality of Raja-subject relationships. I found the whole scene wonderfully congenial.

  At four o’clock tea was served in a monumental teapot of solid silver. The eldest unmarried daughter now appeared, her beauty enhanced by a delicate flush because she had been busy cooking delectable savoury and sweet titbits. Only when I tasted them did I realise that since leaving Islamabad we have not eaten anything else cooked in a civilised manner.

  Khapalu – 13 February

  It snowed all night and was still snowing when we woke. After breakfast Rachel went off to make merry in the chowkidar’s quarters while I baked, greased boots and tack, broke apricot kernels, crushed rock-salt and attended to other trivial but time-consuming domestic chores.

  At noon, when we went egg-hunting, the beauty of the snow-laden valley was dream-like. There was no one to be seen and on reaching the first straggle of bazaar booths we found them all locked; evidently most denizens of Khapalu simply stay in bed on such days as this. However, at the far end of the Sadar Bazaar the ‘Karakarom [sic] General Stores’ was open. Khapalu’s most ambitious shop is run by Haji Abdul Rehman and his son Ghulam, a burly young man with light brown hair, hazel eyes and such a flair for languages that he managed to acquire intelligible English at the local school. Ghulam befriended us within hours of our arrival and today invited us to sit on the shop verandah, where a tiny fire of wood-chips was burning in half an old kerosene tin. Five passers-by who had happened to notice this hint of warmth were crouching around it, their blankets covering everything but their dark eyes, which rested on us with varying degrees of wondering friendliness. Unsteady stools were provided for us and as snow continued to swirl down Ghulam questioned me yet again about Ireland and Europe and Pakistan, which last country seems to him almost as remote as Ireland, despite its being only an hour’s flight from Skardu.

  On the way home we were invited to drink tea in the Post Office, which consists of one room about eight feet by six. The Postmaster, a middle-aged Punjabi named Akbar, is remarkable for the fact that he likes Baltistan. Khapalu acquired a Post Office just two years ago and Akbar begged me to use it; with no local tradition of letter-writing through public scribes, business is very slow. So I bought three aerogrammes and spent the rest of the snowy afternoon using them.

  Khapalu – 14 February

  A sunny morning, though fat clouds were still sitting on the surrounding mountains. We set off early to visit our Bara host, as we had promised, but were side-tracked on the edge of that widespread settlement. An agitated young man with severe conjunctivitis begged me urgently to look at his ailin
g son and though I am well aware of the futility of amateur medical intervention I hadn’t the heart to refuse. So Hallam was tethered and we followed the distraught father far up a steep, snow-slippy path. Just above an old mosque with an elaborately carved portico stood a cluster of wretched hovels, and in a cold, shadowed yard a young woman was nursing an emaciated two-year-old boy who wore only a short ragged shift. He had so many infected open sores on his face that it seemed just one big sore and his meagre buttocks were similarly afflicted; yet the rest of his body was clear and he had sound teeth set firmly in his gums. When next the father is in Khapalu he is to call at the Rest House for a tube of penicillin ointment, which can do no harm (unless the unhappy child chances to be allergic to it, as I am) and may do some good.

  As we were admiring the mosque a tall young man came around the mountain and introduced himself as Ghulam Hussain, a teacher in Khapalu’s High School. He invited us to drink tea with his wife and outside his brand new house we climbed a steep and shaky ladder to a stable roof, off which were three rooms. In a corner of the smallest an eighteen-year-old girl sat on a quilt nursing a seven-week-old infant the size of a premature baby. The mother herself looked ill and worried and dispirited but managed a wan smile of welcome. While our host was absent another young woman came in, cheerful and rosy-cheeked, with a toddler on her back and a spindle in her hand. She was quickly followed by four young men and three boys; then the door had to be bolted to keep out the curious, laughing, shouting mob who longed to examine us.

  We sat on a charpoy – the room’s only piece of furniture – opposite a large photograph of Mr Bhutto – the room’s only decoration. After twenty minutes Ghulam Hussain reappeared carrying a shiny new tin tray on which were two cups of ginger tea (a most warming and refreshing concoction) and two boiled eggs on a saucer with two teaspoons. Rachel found the tea too spicy so she ate both eggs and I drank both teas while a stream of village sufferers came to the door to beg for medicines. It was hard to explain that although I happened to have something which might help one child I could do nothing for all the rest.

  Khapalu – 15 February

  We spent most of this bleak grey day at the Palace, where Rachel was entertained by the three lovely daughters while I talked to the Raja, his younger brother, the Headmaster of the High School and various other callers who wandered in and out. As we were leaving, Raja Sahib unlocked the massive door of the guest-bungalow to show us around. On our first visit he had apologised profusely for not being in a position to offer hospitality during winter and now I saw exactly what he meant. The numerous, sparsely-furnished rooms seem half a mile long and quarter of a mile high and could not possibly be made habitable at this season.

  As we had already deduced from internal evidence, Hallam is a native of Khapalu. He belonged to the Raja’s brother until three years ago, when he was presented to our Thowar friend. He was not a very good polo pony, being well above the ideal height and with a tendency to cross his forelegs. Moreover, he has only two white feet, which is rather inauspicious; none or four are much preferred. Incidentally, Raja Sahib says that ‘polo’ is a Balti word meaning ‘ball’. He also informed me that during the Raj, English and Swiss Protestant missionaries operated in Khapalu for many years without ever making a convert.

  Khapalu – 16 February

  One of the advantages of growing old is that I appreciate a day such as this much more keenly than I would have done ten years ago, when it seemed that the future held an infinite number of days. Now the future is felt to be finite and every flawless experience is valued all the more.

  There was spring in the air as we set off to explore that high plateau visited too briefly five days ago. Suddenly the trees are budding, and a few small patches of earth, covered with short dead yellow grass, are appearing through the whiteness. On the climb out of the valley the track was a mixture of frozen snow, running water and greasy mud; but on the level ‘highland’, as the locals call it, we only had to contend with deep dry snow.

  The surrounding mountains were dazzling after the new fall and, as we continued east, a long line of high, jagged, gleaming rock-spires came into view only a few miles away, contrasting dramatically with the curved summits directly ahead. From the edge of the plateau we could see, far below, the unfamiliar Surmo section of the Shyok Valley, where that river meets the Hushe. The descent towards Surmo was easy enough, though snow lay two feet deep. That spectacular row of rock-spires rises straight up from the opposite side of the valley – a tremendous sight – and the track was visible for miles ahead, dropping almost to river level before spiralling up to disappear around a bulky brown mountain. Three-quarters of the way down, we stopped for lunch. Behind us rose a sheer red-brown wall, from which a magnificent pair of eagles came sailing out over the glittering solitude of the valley. The distant Shyok gleamed green in its various meandering channels, which soon will have become one wide racing torrent, and on our right was the amphitheatre slope we had just descended – a wonderful sweep of smooth snow, like one half of a gigantic broken bowl. The bowl’s even rim extended for about two miles against a sky where silver shreds of cloud floated in that peculiar high-altitude blueness which to me is the loveliest of all colours. (For some odd reason, just looking up at this sky makes me feel deliriously happy.) Beyond the rim rose curved mountains, backed by a medley of still higher peaks of every conceivable shape; and on our left, behind the spires, was an endless desolate confusion of gaunt, white-streaked summits – the heart of the Karakoram, beyond which lies China.

  During the homewards climb up the side of the ‘broken bowl’ we saw a magical ‘rainbow cloud’ and back on the plateau the afternoon sun was dazzling. Here I dawdled, reluctant to leave the beauty of this ‘highland’, while Hallam took Rachel far ahead. Theirs was the only movement on all that brilliant expanse, which stretched away to the south until it merged with snowy, rock-flecked mountain flanks below stern grey peaks. To the north was a long wall of brown rock – so regular it seemed artificial – beyond which rose the ‘spires’. And ahead were all those radiant peaks and gloomy precipices which overlook Khapalu from the west.

  The descent was treacherous after hours of hot sunshine, but in the bazaars we found the evening’s new ice already forming over fetlock-deep mud.

  Khapalu – 17 February

  Today’s first task was to have a broken girth strap repaired. No problem: an ancient cobbler did the job in five minutes and refused payment. Like many local craftsmen he operates in the open air with the few primitive tools of his trade on the ground beside him. Khapalu’s scribe, jeweller, tinsmith, welder and tanner all have their sites near merchants’ stalls, into which they retreat to thaw when business is slack. The same applies to two barbers and several tailors. One of the tailors – a wizened old man who wears only cotton rags under his blanket – sits on an exceptionally exposed ledge of ground, where he keeps a small patch clear of snow, and works away with his machine as happily as though he were on Mediterranean shores.

  I cannot understand the Baltis’ lack of adequate clothing. Even with the limited resources at their disposal, every Balti could be as warmly clad as the poorest Tibetans traditionally were. But Raja Sahib tells me there has never been any sensible Balti national dress.

  We lunched at the Palace, where a most engaging four-year-old boy was successfully provided for Rachel’s entertainment. The meal consisted of omelette, a few bits of very tough curried mutton, delicious pickled cabbage and chapattis. When I commented on the lack of dogs in Khapalu Raja Sahib explained that many years ago they were all wiped out by some epidemic (rabies?) and never reintroduced. Certainly there is no need for watchdogs, local standards of honesty being so high. But this situation may soon change, now that the region is about to be invaded by Pakistani government officials who will import the inferior moral standards of the plains. As I myself saw when working with the Tibetans, unsophisticated people are very easily corrupted, just as their bodies have no resistance to alien bacte
ria.

  On the way home we stopped to buy new bootlaces when I saw some hanging from a nail in a tiny stall standing by itself near the track. There was no merchant in sight, but I reckoned he would soon appear, alerted by the crowd we had attracted. When he did not, I asked the crowd how much bootlaces cost and was told fifty paise; but I had no coins, so a ragged young man pointed to a tin box at the back of the stall and told me to get my own change. That box contained at least Rs.500. And when we went on our way the crowd dispersed, leaving box and stall unguarded. It is regenerating to be in a land of such innocence.

  Khapalu – 18 February

  Today Hallam had a rest while we explored a short-cut footpath to my beloved highland. An advantage of having Rachel on foot is that she has less breath for talking. Today’s walk took us to 11,500 feet and though the climb was gradual enough most of it was blessed by silence.

  After an hour on slippy pathlets, we came to a long stretch of treeless, uncultivable, boulder-strewn land, fissured by many gullies. We stopped often, for Rachel to rest and me to be ecstatic, and as we sat on one boulder, sweating in hot sun, a frail, sweet sound suddenly came to us through the intense stillness of the heights. Immediately that song swept me back to the Tibetans on a wave of nostalgia, but for some moments we could not locate the singer. Then my eye was caught by the movement of distant goats, beyond a snow-filled gully, and at last we saw the goathered sitting on a rock, wrapped in his rock-coloured blanket and singing his timeless song. It seemed at once robust and plaintive, merry and poignant, and each note came to us distinctly through the thin, pure air.