The Final Curtsey

by Margaret Rhodes

  That night we were put up at the palace. We had an en-suite bathroom, which was a great luxury. Denys decided that his hair needed attention and having forgotten to pack his Mr Trumper’s hair lotion, in desperation he used my anti-perspirant lotion to smooth his locks. At first the results were quite pleasing, but after a while it set like concrete and he looked like something out of Madame Tussauds. We had dinner at little individual tables and were given chopsticks. Our hopelessness in using them reduced the waiting Sikkimise servants to giggles.

  Our trek at last started. We drove to a small guest house where the road stopped. It was pouring with rain and the windscreen wipers didn’t work – it got dark and we got lost. Eventually we arrived, quite late in the evening. We ate something out of a tin and crept into our sleeping bags, only to be woken by the arrival of some Indian soldiers, whom, we discovered, had swiped our bottle of whisky; Denys was not pleased. After some porters were found to carry our tents and provisions, which included a live goat, we set off on foot. We soon came upon a small Gumpa – a chapel, where we were greeted by a venerable monk, who led us in and seated us, offering us dirty glasses of what looked like water.

  An old crone appeared and pointing at our glasses, she whirled around, laughing madly and pretending to be drunk. A sip confirmed that it would be safer to abstain. That night was spent at Yuksom, a tiny community, where the first King of Sikkim had been crowned. The village headman came to meet us and invite us to his house for the evening. It was dark when we got there and we came to a small room filled with people. In the flickering light we could just make out the ochre-robed figure of the village monk in the corner. We were given Chang to drink, which is made from millet seed. We drank from hollowed out bamboo cups, which were filled up from an old black kettle. The women started to dance and invited me to join them – it was a memorable evening.

  We spent a total of four nights camping, the last at 14,000 feet. Denys began to feel ill with mountain sickness – luckily I was all right and decided to walk on up to 15,000 feet where there were some rows of prayer flags. The view was spell-binding. We had achieved our objective and had walked in the region of 70 miles in four days.

  After our return, we were glad of a few days of complete idleness in the palace at Gangtok. There were endless lunch and dinner parties and it soon became clear that there was some difficulty in getting us passes for Bhutan. It also appeared that we were becoming unpopular with the Indian officials in Gangtok. Denys was also accused, falsely, of trying to infiltrate the almost non-existent mining operations in the country, all because of some conversation he had had about his uranium expedition to Tanzania in the copper belt. Eventually our passes arrived and at last on 8 November we started the long-awaited expedition to Bhutan, which unbeknown to us, was on the brink of another plot-ridden political crisis. Thondup lent us one of his ADCs, a good-natured young man whose job it was to ease us along the way. He was very useful since we did not speak a word of Sikkimese or Hindi.

  The first lap of our journey took ten hours, instead of half that time that had been optimistically forecast, because of a broken bridge. When at last we arrived at the guest house at Phuntsoling we were a bit shaken to find that this was where our host, Jigme Dorji, had been assassinated. The next morning we transferred from the royal Jeep to another vehicle with a local driver. It was a fascinating drive with breath-taking views but the roads were appalling and under repair every inch of the way. Sometimes it was necessary to shut one’s eyes and involuntarily hit the floor in a braking fashion. Our driver was a carefree fellow who put his foot down whenever the opportunity occurred, regardless of the thousand-foot drop on one side of the road.

  After another nine and a half hours of bone-shaking travel our driver suddenly braked to a halt. It was dusk, but we could make out a large vehicle parked by the side of the road. It was our welcoming party, a charming girl who introduced herself as Mary Macdonald, the Prime Minister’s social secretary. She was of Scottish, Tibetan, and Indian blood, and related to the celebrated Macdonald family who for generations owned the Himalayan Hotel in Kalimpong, once part of Bhutan but now in the present Indian state of West Bengal. She was accompanied by an Indian gentleman exquisitely dressed in a pearl grey suit, topped off with a Homburg hat in the style favoured by King Edward VII. He said he was the Quartermaster General, i/c guest houses, and offered us sweet tea and biscuits.

  We slept that night in a house in Paro. We now entered a period of considerable confusion. It was pointless to plan ahead as our future movements depended on the arrival of our host, the Prime Minister, and there was no sign of him. It was then arbitrarily decided by our minders to move us to Thimbu. Whatever she had heard on the grapevine at the royal guest house there made Mary Macdonald jittery and so we began to feel jittery too. Nobody wanted to take responsibility for us. Mary did not trust the servants, but refused to explain why. Perhaps she knew something we didn’t. The Quartermaster General — he of the Homburg hat — said that all his colleagues had gone off to Kalimpong to meet the Prime Minister who was due to attend a very important ceremony at a place called Har where every year the Oracle spoke a prophecy for the fortunes of all in the coming year. The ceremony was of great religious and political importance.

  The next day, to pass the time and to allay our growing disquiet, we were taken to a monastery, riding there on small donkeys with two young attendants called Jo and Pemba, who enlivened our two-hour climb by blowing on llama horns and clashing cymbals. In other circumstances it might have been fun, but I could not rid myself of the feeling of being in a Bhutanese limbo, with sinister undertones. We were now told that the Prime Minister was definitely not going to Har. He had received intelligence reports of a plot to shoot him during the ceremony and therefore he was not coming to see us either. A senior army officer was, however, on his way with orders. ‘Curiouser and curiouser’, as Alice in Wonderland said.

  The next morning a Brigadier did indeed turn up and organised the mules and ponies for our expedition to Har. We formed an extraordinary procession, a long straggling four-footed line, with bells jingling and the Bhutanese escort giving out strange, high-pitched yells. There was a mixed assortment of tack. Our saddles were made of wood and the stirrups were of fixed length, which made riding incredibly uncomfortable. Some of the animals had only one rein and none of them had bits, which made steering problematical. The horses chose in which order we were to ride and it was useless to argue with them. It was actually a wonderful ride. We climbed slowly to the top of the immediate mountain. We crossed over grassland with scattered pines and birches and then deeper into thicker forest. We had been late in starting the expedition and so found darkness creeping up on us. The moon was full and it cast silver streaks of light through the black trunks of the pines. The going was very rough and so we decided to dismount and walk the last few miles in complete darkness until at last we came upon the faint lights of the encampment at Har.

  Our journey had taken eight hours and we were stiff and weary. On our way we had encountered a small party travelling in the opposite direction. It turned out to be the widow of the murdered Prime Minister. She was enraged that the Oracle ceremony was going ahead so soon after his death. ‘First they shoot him and now they do this — it’s so hypocritical,’ she said angrily, before retreating down the slope. Har had been a personal estate of the Dorji family and they had voluntarily given it over to the military. We were put up in the Brigadier’s personal quarters and were woken early the next morning to prepare for the long ride to the site of the ceremony. We were both lent some local clothing, which in my case consisted of a long brocade dress, worn over a silk shirt. Denys was given a very smart black brocade coat which was knee length and under this he insisted on wearing grey flannel trousers. It was apparently unthinkable that a Bhutanese gentleman would be seen in public without a sword. Denys was thus accoutred with an enormously long weapon, which when he was astride a pony, clanked ominously against his leg.

  We
finally set out in a small procession, riding up a grassy valley with a little stream running through it. There were stops at various moments on the way at which small canons would be approached warily by a helmeted warrior carrying a lighted taper. Having lit the fuse, he ran like hell to take cover, before the expected explosion occurred. It was a deliciously medieval sight. At last, after riding for over two hours, we came to the natural end of the valley which spread out into a wide open expanse, filled with a bustling noisy crowd. There was no one in European clothes. Instead, they were clad in a colourful mixture of brocade dresses and fur hats, beneath which glowed happy Mongol faces. Mixing in with all these were the ochre coloured figures of Buddhist monks. The ceremony included many things that were not at all akin to Buddhist teaching. The first was a sudden appearance of a yak, which was paraded around and garlanded with golden marigolds. It was then taken away and slaughtered (not very Buddhist). Later a group of village elders danced in a slow circle, brandishing their swords.

  The main object of the whole festival was a pronouncement by the Oracle, which was deemed to foretell what the coming year would bring. To assist his pronouncement, the Oracle was generously supplied with liquor from dawn onwards, with the purpose of making him so inebriated that he could not speak his own words, but only those of the God who presided over the whole festival. An altar had been built and little butter lamps twinkled around it. Then suddenly the Oracle appeared. He wore a crimson garment and a spiky crimson hat. He started dancing around the altar, weaving a drunken circle. Then he got angry. He was shouting and started destroying the altar. The crowd was hushed. One felt the tension. They all needed a good omen. The Oracle disappeared and there was total silence. Then he suddenly reappeared. He looked different and his anger was gone. He danced again, but more soberly and then he spoke a few words, which were of course incomprehensible to us, but apparently it was deemed sufficient to keep the crowd satisfied.

  It hardly seemed possible that we had witnessed an ancient ceremony deep in the Himalayas in a small kingdom with an absolute monarch. We later discovered that the Oracle had denounced the modernisation of the country and had demanded that more attention be paid to the Buddhist religion. The people were happy with these sentiments and were just glad that there had not been a prophesy of foreboding as there had been the previous year — the year in which the Prime Minister had been assassinated.

  The whole episode was surreal. Was this, I wondered, truly representative of mid-twentieth-century Bhutan? Finally we climbed back on to our wooden saddles and bumped our weary way back to the Har guest house where we heard the news that Shirley MacLaine, who was also exploring in Bhutan as a guest of the Prime Minister, was about to arrive in Paro. We rode back there the next day, through driving snow, and found Shirley waiting for us in the guest house with another of the Prime Minister’s aides called Bhalla. We soon made friends. Shirley turned out to be nice and easy and not the least bit like I imagined a film star to be. We were due to leave Bhutan within the next couple of days. Everything seemed to be going to plan, but then we noticed that Mary Macdonald and Bhalla were spending a great deal of time whispering in corners and looking tense. We began to have our first inklings of serious trouble ahead when they suggested that we should make straight for the frontier with India.

  There had been a plot to oust the new Prime Minister, our host, and all the pro-Dorji factions were under suspicion, if not lock and key. The Prime Minister was bitterly resented by the old guard religious diehards, because of his attempts to open up the country to the west, and drag it into the twentieth century. He was thought by his opponents to be too powerful. It occurred to me that we were representatives of this opening-up process. Mary told us that our Quartermaster friend had been arrested, together with several other officials in the Prime Minister’s entourage, including Shirley’s other aide Larry; and that the two most senior officers in the army had fled across the border with their wives and children. Mary and Bhalla were making remarks like: ‘The Quartermaster will only last three days under torture.’ We began to learn something of the sinister side of Bhutanese life and Mary told us bedtime stories of how women condemned of witchcraft were still being punished by being stitched up in a fresh yak skin and then left out in the sun to suffocate as the skin contracted. There was also a savage army routine which involved offenders being made to run round the parade ground with large stones attached to their genitalia. Aldershot at its most brutal was never like that!

  The situation was unnerving. We were in remote and unknown territory and knew no one to turn to for advice. Bhutan was an absolute monarchy, with a royal family who were all at odds with each other. They were like something out of The Prisoner of Zenda and we could envisage no help from that quarter. We wanted to send a message to Sikkim so that transport would meet us at the border to take us back to Gangtok, but this plan stalled because any messages to the outside world had to be countersigned by the King’s brother which was impossible to achieve. We were cut off and, apart from poor Mary and Bhalla, who were far more at risk than us, we were friendless. We decided to hot foot it to the frontier at Phuntsoling and then cross into India. As we were leaving, Mary was slipped a letter. It was from Larry, saying that the crisis was deepening and that the situation was becoming increasingly dangerous. Several more people had been arrested.

  Our group left Paro at the crack of dawn squashed into two small Jeeps with inadequate suspension systems. It was another nightmare journey of hairpin bends and sheer drops, made even more frightening by the road blocks manned by surly gun-toting Bhutanese soldiers who were very reluctant to let us through. It was a ten-hour drive, but at Phuntsoling we decided to press on and get the hell out of Bhutan that very evening, to avoid the arrest of Mary and Bhalla, which, in our fraught state of mind, seemed a strong possibility.

  A minor official told us we couldn’t cross the frontier without exit permits, but then Denys located the only senior officer left on station and spun him a story that we had just received news that we were urgently required in Sikkim. The officer said he would have to refer the request up the line, and that if we returned to the guest house and had something to eat the permits would be issued before we had finished our meal. We could barely get through a mouthful, and Shirley was convinced that the food was poisoned. Then we heard the sound of barked orders and the crunch of marching feet outside the door. This certainly did not betoken the delivery of our permits, and we looked out of the window to see a troop of soldiers surrounding the house, with their rifles pointing inwards at the windows and doors. We were conclusively under house arrest.

  The next fright was a banging on the door. It was yet another jobsworth, but miraculously with our exit permits, minus one. Bhalla was to be left behind, under detention, to face possible torture and execution. We couldn’t desert him, and our first ploy was to try and disguise him as one of our Bhutanese drivers, who we stripped of his clothes despite his vociferous protests. We were all geared up to leave, but after checking, with a last look through the window, Bhalla saw that the officer at the gate was someone he knew and was bound to recognise him. Our first plan was obviously doomed to failure, so then we decided that our only chance was to conceal him under the pile of luggage in the back of our Jeep. Luck seemed to be with us and after several nail biting minutes we were waved on by the guard and drove on into the night. But some distance on we saw bright lights and a barrier across the road: it was a ‘Checkpoint Charlie’. In the illuminations we could detect a platoon of soldiers, although they couldn’t see us as we were still in an unlit area. We switched our lights off and called a crisis conference. If Bhalla was found it would be very dangerous for us, and rather than cause a diplomatic incident we turned round in the direction of the guest house. At a very black spot on the road we stopped and told Bhalla to run for India, which was only two miles away. We would wait for a while and then pick him up on the Indian side.

  Clipping from the Gazette, December 15th 1964 about the ord
eal experienced by Shirley MacLaine and us

  He disappeared into the dark and we returned to the guest house, pretending to have left something vital behind. But we soon became acutely aware that the Chief Liaison Officer knew that Bhalla had escaped. The soldiers were furiously searching for him and in a rage the CLO shouted that he would not let any of us go until he had his man. By now it was after midnight and we sat around hoping that Bhalla would have had time to reach Indian territory. Despite the CLO’s protests we were allowed to leave, but as we approached the checkpoint we met an army vehicle coming in the opposite direction, and could clearly see the hunched figure of Bhalla sitting in back under guard.

  We jammed on our brakes; turned and followed. When the military vehicle stopped we tumbled out and ran towards Bhalla. He was handcuffed and had been badly beaten up. We learnt later that he had managed to get within a few yards of the border and then came upon a Jeep which he thought was ours. It was a disastrous misjudgement. It was a Bhutanese army vehicle and he was immediately taken prisoner and knocked about. Our plan was now in tatters and we had no choice but to swing around and follow the army Jeep down to the CLO’s office. We threw our weight around, such as it was, and managed to get the handcuffs off Bhalla. By now the CLO was raging. He tore up our exit permits and placed us under arrest, forbidden to leave the country until the pleasure of His Bhutanese Majesty was known. In desperation I invoked the name of the Queen of England, shouting that she was my first cousin, while Shirley declaimed that she was a famous American actress, and that the whole firmament of Hollywood would rise up in protest, led by her brother Warren Beatty, at the way she was being treated.

  But it was no good. The names of Queen Elizabeth II, Warner Brothers and MGM failed to impress our captors. We then demanded a telephone to speak to Thondup in Gangtok but were told that the lines were down. We were, however, surprisingly taken to an office near the checkpoint where there was an antiquated radio telephone. We spent two and a half hours trying to get through to Sikkim, but it was in the middle of the night and all the exchanges appeared shut down. We relayed messages through a signal’s officer to the Bhutanese higher command, and eventually received the frightening reply that Mary Macdonald and Bhalla were to be kept prisoner, and that there was no chance of us leaving the country. Denys and I then stage-managed a row with the CLO outside the office, as cover for Mary while she tried to get through to somebody — anybody — to alert them to our predicament. But after only a few minutes of Mary’s angry telephonic shouting, the CLO realised what was going on and rushed into the radio telephone room to rip out the connections.