by The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World;the Way We Live Today
Most Zanskaris seemed to favor the road. One of the reasons was politics: at present, Zanskar’s affairs were administered not by Leh, the closest city and the most Buddhist, but by Kargil. And Kargil was Muslim. As one Zanskari observed to me, in Kargil, when a soccer team from India was playing a soccer team from Pakistan, the crowd watching on television normally cheered for Pakistan. (I did not have to ask whom the Zanskaris would cheer for if Tibet fielded a team.) A direct all-season road to Leh would consolidate Buddhist political power.
Another reason was business. Locals expected growth as roads brought more visitors into Zanskar, and major players were already jostling for position. The developer of a new commercial building in “downtown” Padum was none other than Phugtal monastery. A monk was the general contractor.
But other religious people—and almost everybody I met in Zanskar seemed pretty religious—had their doubts. The aging headman of Stongde, a village between Padum and the chaddar that was benefiting from road construction employment, said he felt sure that the road would make people less religious. As life sped up, he said, people would have less time to pray. And strangers would arrive, people with different beliefs. Urgan Tundup, the monk who ran the Bardan monastery, was also skeptical. Bardan was directly on a dirt road to Reru, and already the blasting by road crews had shattered several of their windows, he said. The ruckus was not conducive to worship.
The price of an all-season road into Zanskar would also be high in rupees. And it would take a toll on the environment: the chosen route would lead right into the pristine Zanskar River canyon, home of the chaddar, a corridor people couldn’t even get into most of the year. Still, local enthusiasm for the idea of a year-round connection to the outside world was overwhelming. And it felt strange to notice myself nodding in agreement with those conservative, religious few who were most worried; you didn’t need to be terribly worldly to appreciate that the cost of a new road might be considerable in terms of lost serenity, lost culture, lost paradise.
A note from the monk arrived for Lobzang Tashi. It said Saturday, February 5, was auspicious. The Reru village headman immediately spread the word.
But word came back that people in the outlying villages needed one more day to get ready. So Lobzang compromised in the traditional way: on the auspicious day, he staged a mock departure.
Seven of the nine students from Reru participated, along with a small number of spectators, mostly kids. They gathered in the center of town—an open, snow-packed area with a community center on one side, a stone outcropping on another, and in the middle (nobody could tell me why) a large, unused fuel tank upon which a few children sat. Lobzang chanted from a prayer book held in one hand; with the other, he swung a censer filled with burning juniper twigs, a common element of many Buddhist pujas, or prayer rituals. The teenage boys, meanwhile, put out the cigarettes they had been smoking, shouldered their rucksacks—mostly empty—and, joined by the girls, walked single file through the snow away from town and down the valley, until they were out of sight. Five minutes later, they turned around and came back.
Final preparations now began in earnest. In a room on the lower level of Lobzang’s house, a group of men put finishing touches on a small sled made of bent branches of wild rose with strips of black plastic tubing nailed on as runners. This Lobzang could pull with a rope that he either tugged or tied around his waist—it was an ice trailer. And when it wasn’t on ice, Lobzang demonstrated, the framework could easily be fitted with straps to allow it to be carried as a backpack. In other houses, bread was baked, tsampa mixed, amulets wrapped, clothing mended and laid out. Siblings watched, mothers feared, and everyone was worried and excited.
Early on departure day, the whole village came out into the chilly, overcast morning. Mothers were clustered in the middle of the action, many of them sobbing; some younger sisters were among them. Lobzang stood with a tall, stiff, elderly man and tied pieces of katak— flowing white cloth—to the branches of a rose bush that grew from underneath the large snow-covered stone outcropping that overlooked the village “common.” The rock was a village deity; though fervently Buddhist, the villagers retained animist beliefs in protective spirits that could inhabit rocks and trees. These were a feature of the Bon religion, which had preceded Buddhism by hundreds of years. By tying on the piece of katak, the elders were aiming to please the deity and thereby ensure a safe journey on the river. Lobzang lit more juniper twigs in his censer as the crowd grew. Now I saw his daughter and two of the other girls in the group with tears streaming down their faces.
Nobody blew a whistle, nobody shouted out that now it was time to leave … but suddenly departure began. Girls took the lead, the five from Reru in front. The line moved not toward the roadbed, which was deep in snow, but over a rise and then down toward the frozen river. I scrambled to get into the file close after them, and was glad I did: in that monochromatic tableau, with everything else snow or rock, the vibrantly clad teenagers were a string of bright energy. The boys wore knit hats, dungarees, and modern (if not new) parkas and fleece of dark green, red, and tan; the girls added many other colors to the picture with their more varied attire. Each wore a silk scarf that covered her hair and made its way around her neck before hanging loose in back; it could be wrapped over her face in case of extra cold or wind or desire for modesty. Under their jackets they also wore the loose-fitting, pajama-type garment called a salwar kameez in purple, orange, royal, and emerald green, often with bright patterns. And beneath that, there were certainly layers we couldn’t see: Seb commented that, since their rucksacks were relatively small, the group was probably transporting much of their wardrobes by wearing them. The girls wore thin knit gloves; the boys did not.
Then, just as the leaders started to descend from a flat stretch—at the moment the town would disappear from sight—they all stopped, took seven steps backward, and each tossed a pebble toward home. No one could tell me what their cue had been, nor could anyone really explain what it meant. But it seemed part of the family of gestures that includes Braulio’s crossing himself before beginning a truck journey and my own muttering of “Praise God, from whom all blessings flow” (sung in many churches as the doxology, and by my non-devout father as a goodnight prayer to me when I was a boy) when I’m in a plane taking off—rituals of departure, prayers that ask for safe arrival and safe return.
The girls were still at the head of the file of forty travelers, and I have never seen such a large group move so fast. We descended the steep hillside to the river on a trail with a couple of switchbacks, and paused once we got there to deal with some matters of equipment and route—the river surface wasn’t completely frozen, and a couple of the grown men, seasoned chaddar-walkers, went first, using five-foot-long walking sticks to tap-tap-tap the ice surface before taking a step, sussing out a good route. Once the ice seemed more solid, the men carrying the homemade rosewood sleds took them off their backs and began pulling them on the slick surface, the ropes tied around their waists so their hands would be free. Most did not wear gloves.
The Zanskaris’ everyday walking style seemed well suited to a trip across the ice. They tended to take short, quick steps. In part this was a function of stature—few of them were tall people—but it was also a question of method: no footfall was emphatic, each was as light as possible. For many the passage across ice became a rapid shuffle; this seemed good for not breaking through. The style seemed to me the opposite of, say, that of a Texan clomping around his ranch in boots, or a businessperson assertively crossing a bare floor in hard-soled shoes.
I am not tall, but Seb is six-foot-three and strong. Keeping up with the group on the ice was not hard for him, but after a couple of hours, as the line began to climb out of the riverbed, he had his work cut out for him. Where the snow was deep, each walker stepped in the track of the person directly in front. The problem for Seb was that these holes were very close together. “It’s like walking in a really tight skirt,” he said as he minced his way through
the deep snow, up the steep hill.
Girls from Reru climbing out of the chaddar on their way to Bardan monastery
The day’s objective was Padum, and to get there we’d been walking what was essentially a mini-chaddar on the Lungnak River. The Reru-Padum road was deep in snow, and most of the way it was easier to walk on the frozen Lungnak. But at a certain point the road represented a shortcut to Padum and so, leaving behind the mini-chaddar, the group broke a path up the steep, snowy hillside to the roadbed. Soon we arrived at Bardan monastery, an ancient redoubt, famous for its huge prayer wheel, that overlooked the Lungnak. A few minutes at Bardan’s gate would be our only rest until Padum, where most of the travelers had friends or relatives. There, after a night’s rest, a bus or truck that had yet to be arranged would take us across the wide Zanskar Valley to the head of the great gorge into which the Zanskar River flowed. Where that road ended, the real chaddar trek would begin.
As the sun set that day and the air became especially frigid, I thought a few months back to summer in Zanskar, that enchanted season, all the more precious for being brief. The only snow had been on mountaintops, and every day it seemed to shrink. But now the cold was ascendant, and I wondered how bad it would get. Afraid of the cold, I’d packed too many clothes and had been slowed down on the day’s walk by the weight of my backpack and by all the extra layers I’d worn. The maladjusted, overheated, out-of-my-element feeling put me in mind of a man I had met during the summer, Engineer Gupta.
Accompanied by Seb and Dorjey, I had walked to the office of Gupta, who was in charge of local road construction. The road-building headquarters was a half-hour walk from Padum. While parts of Padum feel like a medieval village, this base of operations was up-to-date industrial barren: a large, fenced-in lot containing big trucks, metal sheds, outdoor storage of things in barrels, and piles of rock and gravel. In the middle, though, was a homely touch: a small white house with a little picket fence in front—the office and quarters of Engineer Gupta.
It was very hot inside, and this was because Engineer Gupta missed Calcutta. Like so many people who came to Zanskar from more developed parts of India (including army officers, teachers, and doctors), he felt he had been shunted to one of the ends of the earth. His dark skin tagged him as an outsider from the south. Yes, he said, it was much warmer down there; keeping the heat cranked up inside made him feel more at home. He thought about home all the time—he had only five more months to endure of this two-year posting. On his desk were photos of his wife and children, whom he missed a lot. No, he said, they had not visited, nor had he ever entertained the idea (he looked at me with shock when I asked about it, as though to say, Are you kidding?). He wore big round glasses and a loose-fitting salwar kameez; near his breast was a logo with flying birds and the words Home Sweet.
He was pushing to extend the road at both ends, one up beyond Reru and another at the head of the canyon that contained the chaddar. Because most Zanskaris were busy with their crops during the short harvest season, he had imported hundreds of workers from Bihar, one of India’s poorest provinces, most of whom lived in tent camps out on the plains. They had very little machinery; the road was mostly being built one rock at a time, as the Biharis, for pennies a day, broke big rocks down into smaller ones and fitted them into the roadway foundation, bridge buttresses, and drainage ditches. The road was coming together, but with the construction season nearly as brief as the growing season, it was coming together slowly.
We had met some Biharis one day on a summer drive up to Reru when, rounding a corner, we came upon a group of them who waved down our driver. They could get us a really good deal on cement, they said (and indeed, one of our party later took them up on the offer for a project involving a monastery). As everyone knew, the cement was stolen from the road project—road projects in India, and many, many other places, were notorious sources of graft, corruption, and contraband.
Engineer Gupta said he was too busy to join us on a visit to any of the construction sites, but what happened next suggested that some of the most interesting aspects of the road-building business took place right there in the bungalow.
Gupta’s aide-de-camp arrived carrying a big stack of forms with carbon paper to be signed and initialed; Gupta begged for a moment of our forbearance. He began signing while the aide flipped the pages, but partway through he paused and angrily rejected one of them, to the aide’s consternation. Grabbing a calculator, he furiously punched in some numbers and showed them to the aide: he was really steamed. The aide backed out of the room and returned with a local man, the contractor whose bill was under dispute. (I was amazed they let us see all of this.) While they argued, Dorjey explained: The contractor, bringing in twenty-five barrels of diesel fuel, each meant to be holding 200 liters, had been caught delivering several of them with only 135 liters. Gupta eventually dismissed the man, signed the paper, and turned to us. The problem, he explained, was that the bad roads leading to Padum had caused barrels to leak; some of the diesel spilled. If he didn’t pay for it, the poor contractor would have to. But it was clear to us that he was only covering for a scam, which perhaps it was easier for him to go along with—or participate in—than to battle.
Engineer Gupta was only a small player. In Leh that summer, having been unable to arrange to speak with the chief engineer of the project, Seb and I talked our way onto the military base where he was quartered. After almost stumbling into his actual office, Seb and I were more properly ushered in by his secretary, and were warmly received.
Brigadier M. A. Naik was a tall and handsome man with the well-trimmed mustache that one might reasonably suspect, from its ubiquity, is required for male members of the Indian armed forces. His office was full of maps and plaques. He buzzed in an assistant baroquely uniformed in epaulets and feathered hat to take our tea orders. The specific organization of which he was a high functionary, HIMANK (formerly the Border Roads Organisation), crowed its successes in large signs all over the border region: HIMANK, they said, often with a picture of a ferocious tiger, The Mountain Tamers, the Tough and the Free. In addition to his career as a roads engineer, Naik told us, he was an athlete and mountain climber, and was just back from a special assignment: helping train the Indian athletes who would compete in shooting later that summer at the Olympic games in Athens. (The country would bring home a silver.)
He welcomed his current posting, said Naik, even though there were extreme challenges in building a road through the gorge where the chaddar formed. He ticked them off for us. First was the very short season in which work could be performed: only 126 days. From October to May there could be no blasting, concrete pouring, or paving. “You cannot do concrete work in the cold—it will turn out brittle, and crumble off.” The same with bituminous paving. “The water goes under, and creates cracks.”
Another problem was that you could not have multiple construction sites—teams working simultaneously at different points—because in the gorge there was no place for a crew to live. Nor was there any way to drop in a bulldozer. “Often we drop dozers [with helicopters], but at this altitude the helicopter can only lift one ton, and the dozer weighs twenty-two tons. So we have only two cutting edges”—by which he meant one team at either end of the gorge.
Naik said he had studied European road-building methods in the Alps for this project, including “attaching” the roadway to the cliff face, cantilevering it out, by supporting it from beneath. But he said this would be too expensive. Instead, he anticipated more than twelve miles of “U-cut,” blasting a U-shaped indent into the wall and putting the road in there—a technique used by Bolivia in some of its most challenging Andes passes. But Naik was not enthusiastic about the prospect. Though the chaddar canyon had a lot of hard rock, he explained, it also had a lot of “fissured or disintegrated rock—not very good rock,” which was a challenge because “it keeps falling. The more you have a disruption [e.g., blasting], the more rock falls down.” The likelihood of a ceiling collapse along the way, with
“heavy human casualties,” was therefore quite high.
The other extraordinary method that might be employed was bringing in a “jumbo drill.” Normally used for tunnels, this had a single drill bit with several cutting heads for a 20-to 35-meter (65-to 115-foot) cut. But that would slow the project down a lot because the drill they had in mind was already spoken for, employed in the larger project of which the chaddar road was a part—the “alternate route to Ladakh,” which included the 5.5-mile-long Rohtang Tunnel, under construction, as well as a new route, with tunnels, over the 16,500-foot Shingo La pass.
The construction difficulties didn’t even include another set of concerns that were key to the project’s success, namely maintenance, and how to keep the road clear of snow year-round. Of the 11,000 people hired for the larger project, between 2,500 and 3,000 were local. They would be useful doing maintenance near their villages once the road was finished, but what to do about the stretches between villages, Naik conceded, was “a major problem.” Snowplowing would be necessary, as well as repairs after the inevitable washouts, and there just weren’t enough people around to cope.
For HIMANK, he said, “it is definitely the hardest project so far, definitely the worst of all. The conditions are extreme, they are adverse climatically, geologically, and logistically. I have worked in a number of countries, and never seen conditions like this. Where a human cannot go, it is always difficult.”
Of course, we reminded him, humans did go through there during the winter, on the frozen river. Yes, he said, and he wanted to try it himself. He was also interested in exploring the idea of a summer rafting trip down through the gorge. He thought that local outfitters had tried this a few times for tourists, but with the logistical support of the army, you could make a real expedition of it. Seb mentioned that he and his girlfriend had been hoping to put together just such an expedition that summer; Naik promptly invited them to join his. A road through the canyon was a prodigious undertaking that would take years and years, much longer than the twenty-two months Naik was assigned to the posting. But a float trip: that they could do.
