The auditioning continued, so I struck up conversation with a young Idu man beside me who, unusually for someone of his age, had his long hair cut in the traditional crop-haired fashion. He was trying to keep their culture alive, he said, since too many of his generation were losing their Idu language and values. I told him about my meeting with Sipa and asked him whether he’d ever seen an igu perform magical feats.
‘Oh yes.’ He nodded. ‘I see igu eat hot coals, jump over huge fires and get possessed by spirits and start talking in other languages. And I hear about them flying and crossing wide river by walking on thread. I don’t know what going to happen to igu, though, they disappearing. But they are glue that hold our society together. Without them, how can we survive?’
‘What about the khepa?’ I asked him, intrigued by what Sipa had told me.
‘Yes, khepa exist. In April our people hunt a type of frog which khepa like too. People see his footprints by the river, and the remains of his meals.’
At the mention of the word ‘khepa’, an impish older man on the other side of the fire interjected in rapid Idu. The man, with his glittering eyes and long scar down his right cheek, was hard to forget, and I remembered his face from reh.
‘That Tine’s father, Buge,’ my neighbour said. ‘He says he heard the khepa many times in the forest, and seen his shadow in the trees. But he never see him. No one has. It not possible.’
Aha! The famous Buge (pronounced ‘Boogay’): a man whose reputation galloped before him. He was a famous hunter, I’d been told, a legend among the Idu. I’d heard he had been attacked by a bear once, and lived to tell the tale. I asked him about this through my neighbour and he chuckled, then began to talk. When he was twenty he’d been out checking rat-traps in the jungle when he’d spotted a family of bears. He hid in the undergrowth, hoping they hadn’t seen him, but the mother leapt on him from behind, knocking his rifle out of reach. The enraged beast pinned him down, slashing open his right cheek with her claws and ripping at his arms and chest. But somehow Buge fought back, wrestling the bear with his bare hands until, all of a sudden, it turned tail and ran. He’d healed his cuts using medicinal plants, but bore the scars to this day. I was in awe. It’s not often you meet a man who’s survived a wrestling match with a bear.
He was around sixty now, but had calves like pistons and the lean, muscular physique of a thirty-year-old athlete. He still went hunting alone for a month or more, sleeping in the forest and navigating by the stars. No wonder he’d fathered a girl who’d climbed Everest. But of all his seventeen children, she was one of only two who had survived.
When I left late that evening, Tine presented me with a beautiful embroidered Idu shawl. She was one of many Idu I was extremely sorry to say goodbye to. But tomorrow I’d ride west to Pasighat and the Upper Siang Valley, where a very different land and people awaited.
PART TWO
TOUCHING TIBET
11
SEARCHING FOR SHANGRI-LA
Around the middle of the eighth century, somewhere in what is now Pakistan, an eight-year-old boy called Padmasambhava was miraculously born of a lotus leaf. But this Guru Rinpoche, or ‘precious master’, as he became known, was no ordinary lotus-born prodigy. Credited with establishing the earliest form of Buddhism in Tibet, the thunderbolt-wielding Tantric sorcerer spent much of his life performing miracles, subduing the demons of the old religion of Bon and gadding around on the back of a flying tigress. Amidst these marvellous doings, the Rinpoche found time to write numerous arcane texts revealing the locations of sixteen ‘beyuls’, or hidden lands, secret valleys deep in the Himalayas that would provide sanctuary to believers in future times of difficulty.
These texts – as the author, explorer and Buddhist scholar Ian Baker writes – ‘typically opened with apocalyptic prophecies of war and devastation, but shifted into what read at times like a Fodor’s Guide to a parallel universe’. According to the writings, these hidden lands were said to occupy several planes of existence: at their most basic level they were real, remote valleys visible to normal people, but at the highest plane they were magical realms containing portals to other dimensions, and only visible to enlightened beings.
The most powerful of these beyuls was Pemako. Meaning ‘lotus of great bliss’, this was said to be an earthly paradise whose geography mirrored the supine body of the Tantric goddess Dorje Phagmo. From head to navel she lay in south-eastern Tibet, from navel downwards in the Upper Siang region of today’s Arunachal Pradesh. The Tsangpo, meaning ‘great purifier’, formed her spine. This Pemako, the Rinpoche wrote, was a magical land where rivers flowed with enchanted water, trees grew edible bark, old men became young again and a dazzling pharmacopeia of magical herbs held the key to eternal bliss. Anyone lucky enough to die here gained the fast-track to enlightenment. At its heart lay a place called Chime Yangsang Ne, ‘the innermost secret place of immortality’. If you made it this far you’d live for a thousand years then dissolve into rainbows at the time of your death. Crucially, in a distant age of famine and calamity, Pemako would provide a refuge for the faithful.
But these beyuls couldn’t be stumbled upon by any old Tom, Dick or Harry. In order to stop a stampede towards instant enlightenment, the wily Rinpoche added a few obstacles. Firstly, he wrote his texts on cryptic scrolls and hid them in walls of rock, lakes and monasteries all over Tibet. Known as terma, or treasure, they could only be found by powerful mystics called terton, or treasure seekers, who would be led to them through dreams and visions. Secondly, the Rinpoche made sure Pemako was a perilous place to reach. The beyul, he warned, was guarded by vicious vipers, blood-sucking leeches, witches, demons, man-eating tigers, cannibals armed with poison darts and wrathful protector deities. The latter would bar the way to anyone of impure mind or false intentions by causing nightmares and illness, or by blocking their path with landslides and avalanches. If you wanted to reach Pemako, you had to be worthy of it.
Ever since the Rinpoche concealed these texts Tibetans have struggled across the mountains in search of this sacred land. They fled here from the Mongol hordes in the fourteenth century and, much later, the Chinese. But it was rarely a quest without mishap. An eighteenth-century terton, the Tibetan yogi Lelung Shepe Dorje, vividly described the challenges awaiting pilgrims in The Delightful True Stories of the Supreme Land of Pemako, written in 1729.
In . . . Pemako, the supreme of all hidden lands . . . there is a constant menace from poisonous snakes, leeches, flies, clawed and long-snouted animals with fangs, dangerous wildmen and vicious savages . . . the land is full of mischievous spirits [that] . . . constantly display magic and miracles – those without courage, or those with lingering doubts . . . such people will have difficulty reaching this land and getting through unscathed.
It wasn’t just wild-haired Tibetan ascetics and their followers who went in search of these hidden lands. Along with the Buddhist legend of the kingdom of Shambhala, the Rinpoche’s writings inspired a motley collection of explorers, geographers, fantasists and spies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The oddest of these was Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS, whose conviction that one of these hidden lands was home to a master Aryan race led to seven Nazi-funded expeditions to Tibet in the 1930s. A decade earlier, Gleb Bokii, a Bolshevik cryptographer and one of the heads of the Soviet secret police, led an equally barmy quest, hoping to use Buddhist spiritual techniques to engineer perfect communists. At the same time, that intrepid plant-hunter Frank Kingdon-Ward was traipsing around the eastern Himalayas in search of orchids, Pemako and the still undiscovered ‘Falls of Brahmaputra’.
Accompanied by his benefactor, the young Scottish aristocrat Jack, the 5th Earl of Cawdor, and porters carrying Fortnum & Mason hampers stuffed with the finest pâtés, jams and coffee, Kingdon-Ward set off in 1924 (the same year that Mallory and Irvine were on Everest). But their journey was anything but a picnic. In his 1926 book, The Riddle of the Tsangpo Gorges, Kingdon-Ward laments:
‘Pe
mako . . . from the snowline to the river gorge, is covered with dense forest. Add to this . . . a climate which varied from the sub-tropical to the Arctic, the only thing common to the whole region being perpetual rain; snakes and wild animals, giant stinging nettles and myriads of biting and blood-sucking ticks, hornets, flies and leeches, and you have some idea of what the traveller has to contend with.’
Such conditions didn’t engender harmony between the two men. Kingdon-Ward, by now a hardened explorer, scoffed at the young earl’s insistence on a weekly bath, while Cawdor grew to despise the botanist’s ponderous pace.
‘If I ever travel again I’ll make damn sure it’s not with a botanist. They are always stopping to gape at weeds.’
By the end of the expedition Kingdon-Ward and his grumbling patron had found neither paradise nor the falls, and had resorted to using liberal amounts of morphine for their various bites, stings, aches and pains.
A few years later the English novelist James Hilton published Lost Horizon, a fantastical novel set in the mythical kingdom of Shangri-La, a secret Himalayan valley inhabited by happy peasants and ageless lamas who had apparently discovered the key to eternal youth. Their leader was a wise and extremely ancient Capuchin monk called Father Perrault, who’d come upon the valley hundreds of years previously while searching for lost communities of Nestorian Christians in Central Asia. Similarly to Guru Rinpoche, he predicted that:
The Dark Ages that are to come will cover the whole earth. There will be neither escape nor sanctuary, save such as are too secret to be found or too humble to be noticed. And Shangri-La may hope to be both of these.
The notion of hidden Himalayan utopias had existed in Tibetan scholarship for centuries, but it was Hilton who introduced the idea into the Western mainstream. His timing couldn’t have been better. For a generation who’d experienced the horrors of the Great War and the Depression – and were now sliding towards another cataclysm – Hilton’s imagined paradise ignited a potent nostalgia for a vanished age. Lost Horizon became an instant bestseller. Untarnished as it was by war, suffering and mechanization, the valley was an escape from the grim reality of the pre-war 1930s, and the name he gave it, Shangri-La, meaning ‘snowy mountain pass’, was soon synonymous with the notion of heaven on earth, a dreamlike realm of verdant meadows, celestial mountains and eternal bliss. F. D. Roosevelt named his Maryland retreat ‘Shangri-La’ and now, eight decades on, despite the phrase being flogged to death by hyperbolic tourist boards, grotty hotels and seedy casinos from Bangkok to Bognor, a yen for such an earthly paradise still remains. Now, even more than in the thirties, we dream of such idylls: wildernesses free from the noise and pollution and troubles and wars and people and technology of our overcrowded twenty-first-century world. They don’t need to be the Rinpoche’s spellbound lands of rainbow waterfalls and mind-expanding magical herbs (although that would be a bonus), they just need to be the antithesis of our hectic, technology-driven modern lives.
But such places are fast disappearing, consumed by soaring human populations and our fathomless greed for land and resources: our forests are vanishing, our rivers are being dammed, our deserts are being encroached upon, our wildlife is being poached, mass tourism is fingering its way into all but the most distant parts of the planet. Could the Indian side of Pemako be a surviving, modern-day Shangri-La, a hidden valley free from the ravages of consumer capitalism? There was only one way to find out, and that was to try to travel there myself – even if there were a few snakes, fanged beasts, witches and blood-sucking insects on the way.
I couldn’t go alone, though. Since Pemako is a heavily militarized area on the disputed border with Tibet, I’d have to travel there with a guide. I also wanted to go with someone who knew the Rinpoche’s writings and could take me to the beyul’s remoter realms. But few Westerners have travelled to the Indian side of Pemako – known as Lower Pemako – and almost none since Frank Kingdon-Ward. The only vaguely recent source I could find was an article on an obscure Buddhist website, which told of an American woman’s pilgrimage to a monastery at the heart of Lower Pemako. With her had been a whimsical-sounding local guide called Ata who, with his gold wellington boots, curling moustache and encyclopaedic knowledge of Buddhism and the hidden lands, sounded like just the person I needed.
But finding Ata was easier said than done. The American’s pilgrimage had been a decade earlier, and when I contacted her she had no idea how to reach Ata, or where he lived. Abhra forwarded the article to his numerous contacts in Arunachal Pradesh, but none of them recognized the man in the photographs. Our search was made harder by the lack of mobile and internet reception in Tuting and Yingkiong, the two towns at the top of the Siang Valley he was most likely from. To muddle things even more, it seemed Ata wasn’t his real name, just a way of saying ‘brother’ in a local language. After months of searching, Ata remained no more than a ghost in a ten-year-old article.
*
I was readying to leave Jibi’s the following morning when a muddy white Nissan X-Trail sped into camp and out jumped Jibi, the English fishing guide and another local man. They were back from their fishing trip a day early.
The Englishman, Bee, was a raffish type with piercing blue eyes and short greying hair. ‘Dahling, have you come all this way on that bike?’ he said, shaking my hand.
With his tight black jeans and laid-back drawl he had the louche air of a middle-aged rock star. Jibi chuckled and shook my hand, more Yoda-like than ever.
‘Babe, this is Tapir,’ said Bee, introducing the third man. ‘He’s the best guide in Arunachal Pradesh.’
Tapir, five-feet tall and built like Fort Knox, was an Adi from the neighbouring Siang Valley. Previously known as the Abor, the Adi had been a particularly persistent thorn in the Raj’s side. But Tapir was the clue I’d been waiting for. As we all sat and chatted over tea on a platform overlooking the river, it occurred to me that Tapir just might know Ata. I showed him the photo I’d saved on my phone.
A smile of recognition lit his broad features. ‘Yes, mem! I know this man. His name Dorje Tenzing. He live in Yingkiong. But he old and very ill; he no go trekking now. But maybe his son take you.’
At this he scribbled down the son’s telephone number. Ten minutes later I’d spoken to him and agreed to meet them in Yingkiong in two days’ time. What an extraordinary stroke of luck.
I was less lucky with the weather. After all the warnings of downpours and landslides, there’d barely been a drop of rain in Anini. But now, as I squeezed my laptop, tool kit and diaries into my faithful top box, the first fat sploshes fell from a rapidly darkening sky. Minutes later, it was pouring.
Bee frowned with concern as he watched me pull my black poncho over my head and fasten my helmet. ‘Be careful, babe, it’s easy to get lost on the way to Pasighat.’
‘Oh, I’ll be fine,’ I replied, not entirely convinced of the ability of my substandard navigational skills.
‘Well, good luck and maybe I’ll see you in Pasighat. Tapir lives in a village nearby and we’re going there later.’
Loath as I was to leave my Idu friends it was time to go. I hugged Jibi goodbye and thanked him for all his kindness, then bumped down the rutted main street and out of Roing, turning towards Pasighat just south of town. The rain was falling in torrents now and I sputtered west under charcoal skies, soaked hands gripping the handlebars like claws, poncho flapping and billowing behind me. The tarmac became a smear of orange mud then gave way to a confusing tangle of jungle tracks and the grey, stony Dibang River plain. To the right rose the veiled massif, to the left yawned Assam, but beyond that there was little certainty. There were no signs, almost no other traffic and, in many places, only the faintest indentations in the stones to suggest which way cars had gone.
After an hour I came to a river crossing where a vessel consisting of a few planks and a clattering diesel engine plied a 100-metre stretch of fast-flowing water. A man appeared from a bamboo shack, charged me fifty rupees, and helped push the Hero u
p a wobbly plank. When another motorbike arrived a few minutes later the ferry belched and strained across the water, and I followed them across the rest of the wide river plain, pelting after the hooded rider on slippery, unmarked paths. At Dambuk, a town halfway to Pasighat, the rider slowed and took off his waterproof hood, and I saw that he was a young Assamese. He was stopping here, he said, but to reach Pasighat I must turn right at the iron gate, cross two bamboo bridges, go through the jungle, go left at the first village and then straight on. Repeating this several times, I thanked him and sped off.
The two bridges were crude structures spanning vicious little torrents in the otherwise dry river basin. Skinny, sly-looking young men popped out of tents to tax me 100 rupees for crossing, and I held my breath as my wheels bumped over the slippery, creaking poles. Further on was the dark, dripping jungle, the trees stooped under the weight of rain, and beyond that an Adi village, the stilted huts distinguishable by their ochre, palm-leafed roofs. Soon afterwards I was riding across a wide, modern bridge over the languid waters of the Brahmaputra, calm after its raging descent from Tibet, the town of Pasighat cradled in the lee of the hills beyond. It was 4 p.m. and it had taken me four hours to cover the sixty miles from Roing.
Pasighat, the regional headquarters of the East Siang district, was established by the British in 1911 as a base for both surveying the upper reaches of the Siang River and controlling the troublesome Abors. When Mark Shand visited in the late 1990s he described it as being like a ‘miniature British market town, with leafy promenades and lines of little houses surrounding neat postcard shaped parks’. But it was too dismal to admire parks and promenades, so I rode straight to the Adi homestay I’d been told about, with Pasighat just a passing damp blur.
Land of the Dawn-lit Mountains Page 15
