Land of the Dawn-lit Mountains

by Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent

  I was surprised, then, when Sadhu told me he approved of the dam that was to be built just a mile from his village. The construction company had been busy with their propaganda, promising compensation for all affected peoples: pensions for life, new schools and health services, free electricity and skill-development programmes. The glossy brochure he showed me even promised a ‘sports complex and gymnasium’, as well as streetlights and a bus shelter. (I’d heard that a dam company in Arunachal’s Siang Valley was giving opium to the local Adi people in the hope it would quieten any protest.) As far as Sadhu was concerned, the dam would bring the development that the government never had. The road from Roing to Anini only opened in 1990, the one to Atunli in 2006 – and only then because the Indian Army needed a road to their Indo-Tibetan Border Police Force post at Malini, the last village in the valley before the Tibetan border. In 2010 flooding had washed away a bridge on the road and Atunli had been cut off for five months. Electricity only arrived in 2013, although, like the rest of Arunachal, it was patchy and usually went off around 6.30 p.m., when demand in Assam peaked. Sadhu wanted progress and a different life for his children, not the isolated childhood he’d had in a now-abandoned village near Atunli, when it had taken two days for them just to walk to Etalin.

  At this, I asked him about his childhood and how different things were now.

  ‘Before the nineteen-eighties our people were very ferocious,’ he said seriously, navigating his truck around a sharp corner.

  Killings over land and women were common, he told me, but as there were no roads and very little outside influence the police didn’t get involved.

  ‘How could a policeman arrest the culprit? They’d have to foot march five days to reach the village,’ he added.

  Instead the Idu had their own form of governance, a system called abela, whereby a respected individual would negotiate a solution between the affected parties. This still took place, said Sadhu: he’d recently settled a dispute between two men in Atunli, one of whom had been having an extra-marital affair with the other’s married daughter. The girl’s father was given one pig and one lakh rupees, roughly £1,000, by the transgressor and the case was settled. It was typical of how Sadhu’s generation of Idu were caught between worlds. Sadhu had a truck, a motorbike, a large cardamom plantation and houses in Roing and Atunli. He played computer games on his mobile to ‘time pass’. But he’d had to give his father-in-law a mithun and two pigs to seal his arranged marriage and had settled a village dispute with pigs and money. It’s no surprise suicide is becoming increasingly common among young Idu torn between the taboo-laden world of their ancestral society and the tsunami of globalization.

  ‘Madam, I am going to miss you when you leave,’ said Sadhu, as he left me in Etalin to wait for a passing Sumo. I’d miss him too. Reh had been the hinge on which my journey had turned, and Sadhu had been a part of that. How fortunate I was to have been there.

  9

  SECRETS OF THE TSANGPO

  Ringed by a stadium of snow-streaked peaks, Anini lies scattered across a bluff at the confluence of the Dri and Mathun rivers. Below it the waters gouge deep corridors through the mountains, and on all sides stretch a rumpus of steep, forested slopes. Only a few thousand people live in this remote town and houses are barnacled across the saddle of the bluff in unruly clusters: some concrete, some bamboo, some scratched together from reeds, polythene and scrap metal. Among them are army barracks and the grey stamp of a helipad, reminders that Anini lies just thirty miles from the border with Tibet. Bored squaddies play cricket in dusty fields and army trucks rumble along winding, broken roads. On the edge of town small boys wander by the roadside, catapults in hand, scanning the trees for small birds to kill.

  My plans for Anini were vague. I had nowhere to stay, no contacts and no motorbike, just a notion to trace Colonel Frederick Marshman Bailey’s century-old footsteps north from here towards the Tibetan border. In early 1913 Bailey – soldier, spy, explorer, linguist, naturalist and butterfly collector – had oiled his hair, clipped his fine slug of a moustache and set off up the Dibang Valley on an expedition to solve a geographical enigma that had remained a mystery throughout the Victorian era. With him was the surveyor Captain Henry Morshead and a train of reluctant porters, their cane baskets weighed down with specimen cases, canvas tents, theodolites, sacks of coins and bottles of Trumper cologne. In No Passport to Tibet, his brilliant account of the expedition, Bailey outlines the mission as follows:

  For many years geographers were puzzled to know where the waters of the Tsangpo eventually flowed . . . The only way to find out was for someone to follow the Tsangpo River down its course until it became some other recognisable river; but . . . the Tsangpo flowed through some of the most mountainous, difficult and inhospitable country in the world. The political obstacles were even more difficult to surmount. The Chinese, having won a precarious hold over Tibet, were keen to prevent any other foreigners from what they regarded as their private preserve . . . To the traveller approaching from the direction of India there was a further hazard. In the foothills between the plains of India and the mountain ranges of Tibet lived a number of primitive and savage tribes. Quarrelsome, treacherous and riddled with suspicion, they were continually at war with one another. They regarded strangers as welcome only as possible victims of extortion by pacific or violent means, or as allies from whom they might obtain weapons with which they could massacre their neighbours more efficiently . . .

  Thwarted by Tibet’s isolationism and India’s ‘savage’ tribes and terrain, early British efforts to solve this mystery had often ended in a hail of poisoned arrows. But there was another question that the British were desperate to solve: a mystery that had dogged geographers for much of the previous century. If the Tsangpo and the Brahmaputra were indeed one, then by what fantastic means did the river plunge almost 3,000 metres from where it disappeared off the map in southeastern Tibet, to where it flowed languidly into Assam only 150 miles later? The only answer seemed to be that somewhere in the unmapped borderlands between the two countries was a stupendous falls to rival Livingstone’s Victoria. The sooner the British staked their claim to it, the better.

  Determined to solve these secrets of the Tsangpo, in 1863 the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India began training a group of local surveyor-spies at their headquarters in Dehra Dun. The Pundits, as they were called, would travel into Tibet disguised as pilgrims and traders, hiding their notes and surveying equipment inside ingeniously adapted Buddhist prayer wheels, caskets and clothing. They were taught to remember information as verses and mantras and to measure distance using rosaries made from one hundred – rather than the usual 108 – prayer beads. Of these brave pioneers, it is the story of Kinthup, an illiterate Sikkimese Pundit’s assistant, which is the most remarkable.

  Poor old Kinthup; he didn’t have much luck. After several unnoteworthy missions he set off again in 1880 as an assistant to a Chinese lama. Their mission, as given to them by Captain Henry Harman of the British Survey of India, was to enter Tibet, travel as far east along the Tsangpo as possible then, on an agreed date, throw 500 marked logs, each a foot long, into the river. If the logs appeared where Captain Harman’s men were waiting downstream on the banks of the Brahmaputra, it would establish with certainty that the two rivers were one. It was a simple, but genius, plan.

  Sadly the Chinese lama turned out to be a dastardly fellow, a philandering gambler with little dedication to the cause. After a year of travelling, he sold Kinthup to the headman of a remote Tibetan village and fled home to China. But over the course of the following three years Kinthup showed remarkable loyalty and resilience. Escaping from the village, he found refuge in a monastery further east along the Tsangpo and doggedly pursued Harman’s mission. He cut, marked and hid the logs in a cave, then found a way to travel to Lhasa to send a message to Harman. In a typically stoic manner it said:

  ‘Sir, the Chinese Lama who was sent with me sold me . . . as a slave and himself fled aw
ay . . . On account of this, the journey proved a bad one. However, I, Kinthup, have prepared 500 logs according to the order of Captain Harman and am prepared to throw 50 logs per day into the Tsang-po river . . . from the 5th to the 15th of the tenth Tibetan month of the year called Chhuluk.’

  Months later, when the appointed date approached, Kinthup returned to where he’d hidden the marked logs, threw them in the river over the course of the ten agreed days then, finally, after four unbelievably difficult years, returned home to Sikkim.

  But he didn’t receive the hero’s welcome he deserved. Captain Harman had died from frostbitten lungs during a surveying expedition to Kanchenjunga, so the letter had never reached him: after all Kinthup’s heroism and hardship, the logs had floated unnoticed down the river and out into the Bay of Bengal. Even worse, having dictated his extraordinary story to a scribe at the Survey of India offices, many doubted him, and he eked out the rest of his days as a tailor in Darjeeling, unrecognized for his efforts.

  Kinthup’s account had mentioned a falls, but it certainly wasn’t the colossal cascade of Victorian fantasy. Mystery, romance, adventure, danger, Empire – the idea of such a waterfall lit the tightly corseted Victorian imagination, and by the turn of the century the elusive falls had become the stuff of fantasy, a geographical Holy Grail that the British were jolly well going to find before the Chinese. And when they did plant a Union Jack at the top of these vast falls, they’d build a ‘spacious hotel for sightseers and sportsmen’ – or so wrote Sir Thomas Holdich, the then president of London’s Royal Geographical Society, in 1906. In 1910, after the Chinese invasion of Tibet, the quest took on a renewed intensity. With Chinese flags and troops popping up around Walong and the fringes of the Mishmi Hills, the British dispatched several surveying parties into the uncharted frontier zones. Among these were Bailey and Morshead, the former writing:

  As far as the Western world was concerned, [we] were exploring country of which nothing was known, but much was speculated; one of the last remaining secret places of the earth, which might conceal a fall rivalling the Niagra [sic] or Victoria Falls in grandeur.

  The indefatigable pair spent ten gruelling months marching 1,680 miles through mountains populated by warring tribes, tigers and a great deal of leeches, the latter so numerous, Bailey writes, that Morshead once counted 150 on his clothes. Morshead, by all accounts an extraordinarily fearless man, stood there ‘covered with leeches and with blood oozing out of his boots as oblivious as a small child whose face is smeared with jam’. They were arrested in Tibet, suffered bouts of fever, were abandoned by their porters and were frequently having to convince wary Tibetan villagers that they weren’t Chinese, yet remained models of Edwardian stoicism throughout.

  By the time they returned to the plains of Assam, the usually immaculate pair weren’t quite so well presented. Bailey writes:

  I was forced to admit that sartorially Morshead did not look impressive. He looked a tramp, and a rather unsuccessful tramp at that.

  But their dishevelment was worthwhile. They hadn’t discovered the mythical falls, but their efforts had established that Tibet’s Tsangpo and India’s Brahmaputra were indeed one river, and they’d closed the unexplored gap to less than fifty miles. As Sir Thomas Holdich said upon their return:

  They have succeeded in unravelling a geographical knot which we geographers in India had looked at with longing eyes for many a long year.

  Both men went on to excel in the First World War, Bailey surviving the Western Front and Gallipoli, Morshead distinguishing himself at the Somme and Passchendaele. Sadly Morshead was murdered in Burma in 1931, although to this day no one knows by whom, or why.

  Having covered much of the same territory as Kinthup, thirty years earlier, Bailey realized the veracity of the illiterate assistant spy’s account. Tracking him down to Darjeeling, where he was still living in poverty as a tailor, he lobbied the British government to provide him with a pension. But by the time they reluctantly agreed to a one-off reward of 1,000 rupees, Kinthup died not long afterwards.

  Incredibly it wasn’t until 1998, after multiple efforts, that a team led by British Buddhist scholar and explorer Ian Baker discovered a 105-foot waterfall in the innermost, unexplored gorges of the Tsangpo. While the falls weren’t as impressive as their legend had suggested, their discovery did, as Baker writes, ‘put the centuries old question of its existence to rest’.

  My Sumo jolted up the hill into Anini as day faded to another clear, stelliferous night – at 1,968 metres above sea level, the air noticeably chillier. The only two ‘hotels’ were the Circuit House and the Inspection Bungalow, both technically reserved for government staff. The woman at the Circuit House turned me away, even though they had rooms: I hadn’t booked and wasn’t a government employee, she said, not even bothering to open the metal gate. The Inspection Bungalow, a mouldering yellow building surrounded by rubbish and weeds, had one room left and, after some persuasion from a motherly fellow passenger in the Sumo, they allowed me to have it. For 300 rupees I had two single wooden beds, a cold concrete floor, curtains as thin as rice paper and a patient congregation of fat, black spiders. A tiny bathroom had a cold tap, a bucket, a squat loo and two more resident spiders, the largest of which lived at eyeball level on the wall beside the loo. It was enough to give one stage fright.

  Beside the open fireplace in the gloomy kitchen I found a sulky young Idu man with tattoos and an undercut. He was flinging orders at the cook, not even bothering to look at her, as he flicked his cigarette ash into the flames. The cook, like every domestic help I’d seen in Arunachal Pradesh, was an outsider, a frail-looking girl of no more than fifteen. With her was her younger sister, a waif of about six. The man was the caretaker’s son and was studying botany at Guwahati University, he told me in good English, lighting another cigarette. When I asked him if he wanted to be a botanist he just laughed and carried on staring at the flames, my question apparently too stupid to answer. He hardly spoke any Idu; they were an ‘extinct’ tribe, he sneered. Of all the Idu I’d met, he was the only one I disliked.

  Not wishing to linger in his company I ate a few incineratingly spicy mouthfuls of rice and dhal and went to my room to call Jibi in Roing. Using Bailey’s account and Google Earth I’d plotted his 1913 route north from Anini up the Mathun Valley towards Tibet, and wanted to see how far I could follow it before the mountains or the military turned me back. To do this I’d need a guide, not only to show me the way but also because the Indian Army wouldn’t tolerate a lone foreigner wandering around so close to the border. Who this guide would be, and how I’d find them, I wasn’t yet sure. But if anyone could help me find the right person, my friend Jibi could. Half an hour later he called back.

  ‘I find someone,’ said the distant voice at the other end of the line with a characteristic chuckle. ‘His name Edi Rondo and he young, handsome man. He come Inspection Bungalow seven-thirty tomorrow morning.’

  Thanking Jibi profusely, I checked the positions of the largest spiders with my head torch, had a turbo pee, zipped myself into my sleeping bag and pulled it over my head. In the morning the beast beside the loo had vanished but the others hadn’t moved a leg.

  Edi arrived at 8.30 a.m. which, in the mystifying world of IST, Indian Stretchable Time, almost counts as punctual. A lanky, unusually tall Idu whose short hair was tinted red and shiny with wax, he leapt off his motorbike in a waft of aftershave, greeting me with an enthusiastic handshake and a formal ‘Good morning, Ma’am’. At once we sat beside the kitchen fire and set to making plans, Edi speaking in an eager, breathless manner, suffixing each sentence with a typically Indian ‘na’. The same age as the caretaker’s sullen son, he couldn’t have been more different; within no time he’d made a few phone calls, borrowed a motorbike for me and agreed that we’d ride up the Mathun Valley to the end of the tarmac road and see what happened then. Not knowing if we’d be away for one day or five, I put on my thick down jacket and trekking gear and packed my rucksack with the esse
ntials: sleeping bag, toothbrush, water filter bottle, head torch, medical kit, teddy bear, diary, camera and spare pants. The rest I locked into my room at the Inspection Bungalow.

  Edi stood watching me as I stalled and juddered down the slope from the bungalow. ‘Ma’am, I think we need test drive first, na,’ he shouted anxiously after me.

  Accustomed to the feel of the Hero, I was having difficulty adjusting to the red 150cc crotch-rocket Edi had borrowed for me. The gears were sticky, the clutch hardly worked and I had to lean over the tank to reach the bars like some poor imitation of Valentino Rossi.

  ‘Oh, I’ll be fine,’ I shouted back breezily, bunny-hopping out of the gate.

  By the time we stopped for a late breakfast at a restaurant next to the army helipad I was vaguely in control, and Edi was too polite to say otherwise.