For the second time on this journey I was in the presence of an extremely holy vagina – although I’d never have guessed it. Strings of damp, faded Buddhist prayer flags hung over wooden Tibetan-style houses and groups of soldiers walked along the muddy, potholed streets. An Adi man rode past on a motorbike, a gun across his back. Half the houses looked empty and the signs outside the various government bungalows were stained with rust and peeling. By the looks of it, neither the ‘Assistant Engineer, Electrical Sub-Division, Dept. of Power, Upper Siang Dist, Tuting’, nor the ‘Block Dev, officer, CD-Block, Tuting, Upper Siang Dist (AP)’ had visited their offices for quite a while. On the main street, if you could call it that, a group of Adi youth loitered around a shop. The views towards the snows of Tibet and the surrounding mountains must have been beautiful on a clear day, but now the whole place was draped in fog and ennui. It didn’t matter, though; I was in Pemako with Dorje and Kabsang and, in one day’s time, we’d be walking east.
We stayed at a house belonging to Dorje, a large wooden building on a patch of fenced, overgrown land in the centre of the village. Ducky was released immediately, and we watched as he shook his tail, stretched his wings and dabbled among the weeds. Dorje still needed to finish the house, he said, dropping our bags in an empty room, but this was a ‘black year’ in the Tibetan calendar, and hence inauspicious for building. For now it was little more than a shell consisting of a simple kitchen, two bedrooms and a shrine room – ubiquitous in Tibetan houses – whose altar was laden with candles, incense, silk-bound sutras and images and icons of the Buddha. In the middle was a framed photograph of an old lama.
‘That my father,’ Dorje said reverently. ‘He was very powerful Pemako lama.’
Dorje, it was becoming clear, was far more than just a simple restaurateur. Like many Khampa – a Tibetan people who’d famously led the resistance against the Chinese from 1959 until 1974, their arms, food and training funded by the CIA – he was a Nyingmapa. Meaning ‘ancient ones’, they were followers of the oldest form of Tibetan Buddhism, the Tantric school established by Guru Rinpoche. Rooted in Bon, the old religion of Tibet, theirs was a faith of magic and mysticism, of rainbow deaths, reincarnation and esoteric rites. The Khampa have been coming to Lower Pemako for about two hundred years and there were now around a thousand of them in the Upper Siang Valley, all descendants of pilgrims who’d come here in search of the Rinpoche’s ‘lotus of great bliss’. Dorje’s own family had travelled here, via Bhutan, around the 1870s, and settled in Tashigong, a village in the Yangsang Chu Valley. It was there that Dorje had grown up.
Dorje had never become a monk, but much of his life had been lived like one. He’d studied Buddhism in Mysore and Kalimpong and had spent years meditating alone in mountain huts. Even now, much of his time was lived in a dreamy, trance-like state, his lips moving silently as he rolled the beads of his rosary and stared into space. Yet, in a strange contradiction that I soon came to know as typical of his nature, he’d also been an Indian National Congress politician.
‘I politician for eight years,’ he told me, as we ate bowls of tsampa, roasted barley flour, on the veranda that evening. ‘It my dharma path.’
‘Dad’s really a lama,’ added Kabsang. ‘He’s more than that, actually – he’s the reincarnation of a powerful terton. When he was a politician he used it to help Pemako. He built monasteries, opened pilgrim routes and arranged for the Dalai Lama to come to Tuting.’
‘So he’s the King of Pemako,’ I said, half-jokingly.
Dorje chuckled. ‘Yes! I from Tibetan royal family.’
His ancestor, it transpired, had been the brother of the ninth-century Tibetan emperor, Langdarma. The revelation didn’t surprise me in the slightest; I could quite imagine him seated on a tiger-skin throne, a thunderbolt in one hand, a ritual dagger in the other.
Walking with him to Tuting’s monastery the following day, I could envision this even more lucidly. It should have taken ten minutes to walk there but, by the time we’d beaten a path through his admiring subjects, it had taken more than an hour. Smiling Tibetans rushed up to greet him, clasping his hands and bowing their heads in respect.
Like the Idu, many of the Khampa were aware of their extended familial connections. ‘This my cousin brother . . .t his my cousin sister,’ Dorje frequently declared, taking his small, rather un-kingly, spotted rucksack off his back to hand them holy sachets of salt he’d bought in Kathmandu. I stood invisibly behind him, waiting for the king to dispense his beneficence before our royal procession inched on.
‘I not been here for long time. I have to talk to my people,’ he said with childlike immodesty, splashing on through the puddles in his gold wellington boots.
The newly built monastery, when we at last arrived, glimmered like a jewel in the fog, its opulence at odds with the surrounding gloom. Dragons snarled above richly carved doorways, nesting sparrows twittered behind great golden heads and wrathful deities glared down from elaborately painted walls. Among them was a goddess with a thousand arms and sixteen heads, and a recently deceased guru in fashionable dark glasses. His favourite car, a grey Ambassador, was parked in a glass pavilion nearby. Outside, robed monks hurried across the tiled courtyards like flocks of maroon birds. One of these shaven-headed mendicants was Dorje’s third son, a tall, willowy eighteen-year-old who’d come here, aged thirteen, of his own accord.
All so different to the Mishmi Hills, it was hard to believe the Idu’s lands began only fifty miles to the east of here. Not for the first time on the journey I had the distinct feeling of having crossed an invisible border to another country.
We left the next day at 6.30 a.m., walking through the mist under the ever-present streams of prayer flags. Known as lung-ta, or wind horses, they are believed to carry prayers on the wind, but there wasn’t a whisper of a breeze today. Ahead of us wefts of cloud obscured the mountains, drifting across their green flanks like smoke. Dorje, nattily attired in khaki, gold wellingtons and his spotted rucksack, ambled through the village, swinging a walking stick and chanting as we went. He was nervous about his heart, he’d admitted, as he swallowed his pills before we left: if anything happened up here, we were a long way from hospital. Kabsang walked beside us and in front were our porters, two wiry Adi teenagers in dirty tracksuits and gumboots, their bamboo baskets packed with food supplies. They were silent and somewhat sullen, but we were lucky to have any at all; most of the men around Tuting were hired by the army for their patrols, and it had taken Kabsang much of the previous day to find anyone. It all felt rather regal, going trekking with a king, a cook and two porters. All that was missing was a gramophone, a case of Gordon’s, some table linen and a butterfly net.
On the edge of the village we picked our way over a bank of debris onto a huge, half-built military runway, where Indian construction workers stood around standpipes splashing and gargling, staring unabashedly as we passed. Only ten miles south of the disputed McMahon Line, Tuting had been attacked by a column of invading Chinese in the brief war of 1962. They’d crossed the Kepang La pass and burnt a few villages, then retreated after several weeks. The ease with which they’d crossed the pass had made the Indians twitchy.
‘There are six thousand army stationed around here,’ said Kabsang, as we walked across the strip of newly laid tarmac. ‘The hills around here are full of bunkers. Now Modi wants to match Chinese infrastructure on the other side of the border and this runway is going to take jet fighters and cargo planes.’
The runway was a classic example of how the relationship with China is, and always has been, the driving force behind development in this fragile state. The road here was atrocious and it took two days for seriously ill villagers to reach a decent hospital in Assam, but soon there would be multimillion-dollar fighter jets landing on their doorstep.
Beyond the runway we swayed over a slightly less treacherous suspension bridge, the silken waters of the Siang slipping south below. But I was surprised when we came to a muddy track wide enough f
or cars. It was the beginnings of a new road that would cut through the heart of Lower Pemako, Kabsang told me, and when it was finished it would link Tuting with all the villages of the Yangsang Chu Valley.
I was shocked. A road? Here? Through the heart of this sacred valley? I was even more surprised when a tractor rumbled around the corner, its trailer weighed down by sacks of cement and three Khampa men who dangled their legs over the edge. A few minutes later we were throwing our rucksacks onto the trailer and clambering on board too. A suspension bridge over the Yangsang Chu had broken, the Nepali driver had told Dorje – we’d have to take the road.
Dorje hauled himself over the edge of the trailer and sat cross-legged on the hard sacks. ‘We very lucky tractor come. It Pemako bus.’
I’d imagined a day strolling through the jungle on an ancient, winding footpath. But instead it was spent lurching and clanking along the open wound of the new road, our bottoms grinding like pestles on a mortar of cement sacks. Every so often we’d climb down from our jolting throne to push the sliding, straining tractor through mud whipped by the rains into a cloying orange mousse. Around us, the forest brooded silently. Several times we crawled through small Adi villages where Donyi-Polo flags hung above the stilted huts and squealing piglets and filthy children scampered through the sludge.
Who was I, an outsider, to say that the new road was a Bad Thing, that the people of this valley shouldn’t have access to the outside world and medical care? But I couldn’t help feeling a certain sadness about it. A road seemed so final, somehow, as if a blade was being thrust through the heart of this Shangri-La. Whether you believed in the Rinpoche’s prophecies or not, the valley had remained a rare wilderness, too remote and mountainous to be despoiled by humans. But the road would change things irrevocably. It would bring traffic, and noise, and people, and rubbish. It would bring technology, temptation, poachers. It would be the vein through which the poison of our warped Western ideals would flow into this hidden land. It brought to mind something Wilfred Thesiger had said soon before his death in 2003, when asked by the author Jonathan Glancey where ‘the wild places’ were. In response, the great explorer had replied: ‘Wherever there are no motor cars. . . wherever people still walk.’
Dorje and Kabsang’s opinions of the road mirrored the generational divide. It was a good thing, thought Kabsang, who’d studied and lived in Delhi for seven years; the people of Pemako needed progress and electricity. Dorje was more reserved.
‘Pemako not secret place anymore. It too easy to reach,’ he said sadly, as the trailer rattled over another bump.
He went on to tell me that in the nineteenth century there had been a famous Pemako terton called Nang Gay, a dreadlocked yogi guided by visions of Guru Rinpoche. A reincarnation of one of the Guru’s twenty-five disciples, he’d revealed many of the treasures of Pemako, including Devakotta, and predicted that one day a road would be built through this valley. When that happened, he’d said, Pemako would be like a leaking glass, its power slowly seeping out. His prediction felt eerily prescient.
For now, though, Pemako still had its challenges. At lunchtime the tractor stopped and we sat on smooth, grey boulders beside a gurgling river eating bread and cold omelette. It would have been an idyllic spot for a picnic were it not for the accursed dam dum flies that swarmed about us like devilish auras, feasting on any exposed skin.
Dorje waved them away half-heartedly. ‘It’s a sacrifice for Pemako,’ he said seriously. ‘Even if you don’t want to give blood, you must.’
I’d noticed the faces, necks and hands of the other passengers on the tractor dotted with red bites. By the end of lunch, we were the same.
That night we stayed with a Khampa family in Nyering, a small Tibetan village about ten miles from Tuting. Around twenty wooden houses were scattered over a ridge above the river, simple places behind rough fences with faded prayer flags strung above the roofs. Vegetable patches sprouted green behind each one and stout old women with long black plaits, rosaries and rolling gaits led mithun along the muddy paths. Above the village was a bijou gompa, its gilded roof and fantastically ornate interior at odds with the simplicity of this rural life. From its bluff I could just make out a procession of ridges parading along the valley, each of them tapering to a point near the river’s edge. Although beautiful now, on a clear day, with the hills glistening in sunshine and the river sparkling in the valley below, it must have been magical.
Our homestay was typical of these houses. Inside, life centred on the jathaap, or fire, not the centralized fireplace of the Idu and Adi, but a low, wood-fired earthen oven moulded onto the back wall. Ingeniously simple, logs were fed into an arch at the front and pans heated over hob-like holes on the top. From here the matriarch, in this case an amazingly youthful forty-year-old mother of ten, ruled her ruddy-cheeked clan; ladling, stirring, chiding and feeding with long-practised efficiency. On the shelves beside her, metal pails glimmered silver against the dark wood. One of these pails was always filled with chang, fermented millet beer, a drink as ubiquitous among Tibetans as the dreaded salty tea.
It was always the women who would serve this, ladling it into your mug then standing beside you until you’d had a few sips, then ladling in a bit more, and so on, until you indicated you’d had enough. Often the woman would stand patiently beside someone for minutes, full ladle in hand, waiting for the signal to refill their mug. It was a method, I soon deduced, that was designed to make you quickly and ferociously pissed. Even when you weren’t drinking chang you could smell the stuff; its yeasty aroma pervaded every house in Pemako.
Slightly worryingly I’d read that chang was the preferred weapon of certain ‘poisoning cults’ in Pemako. Female witches – usually from the Monpa tribe – allegedly made a toxin from snake venom, aconite and poisonous mushrooms, put a tiny bit under their fingernail and tapped it into the mug of unwary visitors. As it was believed the poisoner would inherit the good luck of their victim, the higher the status of the visitor, the more desirable their death. Such a fate had apparently befallen the wife of the climber Tenzing Norgay during a pilgrimage to Pemako. After reading this I made a mental note to look out for any suspicious-looking ladies with long witchy fingernails. Being a foreigner, I suspected I’d be seen as a pretty good catch.
But I could see no deviant-looking fingernails in this household. Quite the opposite.
‘One of her children is the reincarnation of a famous Pemako lama,’ said Kabsang, as the mother ladled us warming mugs of chang by the fire. ‘As soon as the child learnt to speak he talked about his past life and family. To confirm his identity he was presented with a selection of rosaries, bells and drums belonging to different lamas. He immediately picked out the ones belonging to the old lama, recognizing them as his own.’
This was a classic technique for recognizing the reincarnations of revered lamas, and had been used to identify His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama.
‘Now the boy is twelve and studying at a monastery in Mysore. Three other children are at a boarding school in Dharamsala, funded by the Dalai Lama.’
Through Kabsang, I asked the mother how she felt about her son being reincarnate.
She shrugged as nonchalantly as if I’d asked her the time. ‘It’s normal here.’
In England it would be headlines and a documentary, but here it was part of everyday life.
Later I asked Dorje about Pemako’s alleged cornucopia of bliss-bestowing herbs. He’d been sitting in the lotus position since we arrived, chanting gently and slipping in and out of meditation, but now his eyes were open. He reminded me of a sleepy owl, the way his eyes drifted open into alertness, aloof yet intensely present.
‘Yes, Pemako full of magic plants. For example, very powerful grass grow here called tsakundu sangpo. If you eat it, you fly.’
‘No need to trek,’ laughed Kabsang.
During the time of the terton Nang Gay, there was a goat who ate this grass, Dorje went on to tell me. It spent the rest of its life in deep me
ditation, producing ringsel – crystal-like pellets said to appear in the cremated ashes of great spiritual masters – when it died. I’d never heard of this phenomenon until now, and certainly not from a meditating ungulate. But it wasn’t only goats that ate the grass. People had tried it too. One man had eaten it while going to the loo in the forest, with miraculous results.
‘After he shit, he fly,’ chuckled Dorje.
Another man who’d attempted to find it had accidentally eaten a fatal dose of aconite instead. Dorje had sampled it once himself. ‘But I didn’t fly,’ he said seriously.
We went to sleep in lumpy piles on the floor, the light of the last embers catching on the glossy backs of cockroaches scuttling above the fire. But the night was cruelly cut short at 3 a.m. by a cockerel’s premature morning reveille. There was always something to wake you in India, I thought, imagining the very non-vegetarian scenario of wringing the offending cock’s neck. If it wasn’t cockerels, it was dogs barking, children yelling, cows mooing, pigs oinking, men hoicking, or a sudden, unwelcome blast of Hindi pop. By six, everyone was up, the children sitting obediently on the floor slurping mugs of chai, Kabsang busy making trakzen, flat discs of unleavened bread.
I watched as he kneaded the barley flour and water into flat discs of dough, cooked them on a dry pan over the fire, then buried them in the hot ashes. After a few minutes he removed the scalding-hot loaves, beating off the ash by slapping them vigorously between his palms. We ate them warm with rancid mithun butter (there were no fridges here), rice, boiled greens and salty tea. Ah, salty tea, the gift of the Tibetan lands. The writer Charles Allen once described it as tasting like a beggar’s armpit, and I have to say I agree. The Tibetans drink it in copious quantities, plunging it in long bamboo tubes with salt and butter then guzzling it down with glee, but I always had to hold my breath and gulp it down politely, hoping it wouldn’t reappear. The explorer Benedict Allen (a cousin of Charles) once advised me to pretend it was soup, but it didn’t seem to help.
Land of the Dawn-lit Mountains Page 17
