‘This the dakinis’ cave,’ announced Kabsang, sitting on a rock in the gloom. He rubbed his fingers on the wall and pasted a streak of red mud down both our foreheads. ‘It’s good luck from the goddess.’
Afterwards we climbed up to the monastery itself, a squat building perched like a stone crown on the bald pate of the mountain. Built after terton Nang Gay’s original structure was destroyed by the 1950 earthquake, it was a simple affair with three golden finials on its red metal roof and large arched windows on either side of a grand red door. Prayer flags streamed from the corners of its roof and red, hand-painted prayer wheels lined the side walls. Outside it was a stone throne said to have belonged to Guru Rinpoche, the earth around it littered with offerings – rings, coins, bracelets. An oval rock beside it allegedly aided fertility, its black surface polished smooth by the hands of numberless hopeful women.
‘If you carry it around the monastery maybe Guru Rinpoche will make you pregnant,’ joked Kabsang.
Stranger things have happened in Pemako, I thought, keeping well clear of the stone.
Beyond the red doors of the monastery its twilight interior glittered in a haze of psychedelia. Apart from the plain wooden floorboards, not an inch had been left undecorated: pearly white deities floated across the walls on lotus leaves, shooting rainbows into the cosmos; clouds swarmed with multi-coloured gods and goddesses; blue horses snorted beside charging white elephants wreathed in flames; meditating Buddhas emanated golden light; gods flew through space astride rainbow-powered lotus leaves. Above an altar lined with water bowls, conches and butter lamps, the carved golden figures of Guru Rinpoche, his consort, Yeshe Tsogyal, and the terton Nang Gay sat on thrones of lotus leaves, glaring into space with fearsomely bulging eyes. I later learnt that these delicately carved figures were not only modelled from mud, but that they’d been made by Dorje. There seemed no end to the king’s talents. Dressed in beautifully painted robes, they wore gilt crowns and held bells and double-headed thunderbolts, their scarlet lips pursed into expressions of mild disdain. They didn’t look like the sort of gods you’d want to annoy, even if the Rinpoche’s rosebud mouth was framed by a curling, dandyish blue moustache. On either side of them brightly painted cupboards were stuffed with dusty, silk-bound sutras and bronze Buddhist icons.
The ceiling – carved and painted into a series of geometric patterns and hung with silk banners – was no less extravagant. It was like walking into a tiny parallel universe and being injected with LSD on the way in. If years of meditation could induce the phantasmagorical visions that sprawled across these walls, I vowed to do more of it from now on.
I sat at the front, alone, below the fat golden toes of the Rinpoche, the late-afternoon light falling in weak pools through the windows. I felt charged with emotion and elated to be there, of that there was no doubt. It had been a long journey to reach Devakotta, physically and emotionally, and one that nearly hadn’t happened at all. But there was something else too. An odd light-headedness. A sense that the thickened air vibrated with an unknowable energy. Maybe I was just imagining it, transposing the emotions of my own journey onto the place. Or maybe not. I’d felt it at Kamakhya too, but it was even stronger here, the energy almost tangible, as if I could somehow scoop it from the air and hold it in the palm of my hand, a golden, pulsing orb. To my disappointment, I’ve never been one of those cosmic types who can ‘feel the energy’ in stone circles or the like. But here, well, there was something. Lamas and pilgrims had been meditating here for decades; who knows what invisible energies the space had absorbed.
We left as darkness fell, stumbling around the rest of the mountain in the rapidly fading light. Kabsang paused to slurp from a natural spring in the rock.
‘This is holy water – it will give you long life.’
‘I hope it’s not holy shit water,’ I added, risking a palmful. At this rate (if the water didn’t kill me) I’d still be alive in 2150.
Further on, Kabsang dived behind a crumbling white stupa and pulled out a pile of musty dreadlocks from the offerings around its base, holding them up like a dead rat. ‘I cut these off six months ago and left them as an offering to Guru Rinpoche.’
I wondered if the Guru appreciated such an offering, or if he’d have preferred something less noisome. I suppose it’s the thought that counts.
By the time we’d squelched back up the hill to the village, it was dark and we were soaked and dirty, but extremely happy.
‘There tiger prints outside the monastery last year,’ said a worried Dorje, putting an avuncular hand on my knee. ‘It not good to be there at night.’
When I asked him for more tiger stories he told me that six Idu Mishmi had been killed near here ten years previously.
‘It was karma,’ said Kabsang. ‘The Idu had gone into a monastery and made fun of our rituals – beating the drums and breaking things. Those same people were collecting medicinal plants in the forest soon after when a tiger killed them all. The strange thing was, it didn’t eat them – it just killed them and went.’
We spent the night huddled around the family’s fire drinking quantities of chang, a beverage I was developing quite a taste for (and hadn’t yet been poisoned by). Next to me, alone among the Khampa, was an exceptionally sozzled Assamese, a labourer from the village. He sat in a crumpled heap, a dirty woollen hat on his head, mumbling to himself and letting out the occasional fulsome burp. Lulled by the chang and the chatter of the Khampa, I stared into the orange embers, lost in happy thought. I reflected how completely at ease I felt among these people, as I had on every evening around the fire with strangers in this land. At home, in our own society, we spend so much time pretending, covering up, trying to be the most interesting, wittiest versions of ourselves, striving to live up to some imagined ideal. But here, with these alien strangers, I felt unmoored from the expectations of society, of myself, of my peers, and liberated from the pressures of being something, or someone. There was no pretence. It was entirely uncomplicated. It was as if we met on an equal level, just as humans, curious to learn of each other’s very different worlds. The longer I was away, the more I noticed a bubbling lightness of spirit, as if the journey was freeing me from a corset of expectations, allowing happiness to rise like a sap. It’s why solo travel can be like a drug.
I was jolted out of my reverie when a cloud of smoke billowed from the fire and filled the room, stinging our eyes. ‘That means the weather will change tomorrow,’ said Dorje. I hoped he was right.
But the weather hadn’t changed when we woke up, despite the king’s prophecy, and it was the wettest, most dismal day of all. When Kabsang, Dorje and I made a second kora of the mountain I felt cold, wet and irritated, whereas yesterday I’d felt so joyous. Dorje, the only one sensible enough to have his umbrella, was in no hurry though, stopping frequently to explain the nuances of Buddhist belief while I stood there bedraggled, rain dripping down my nose, sleeves and neck. I felt like Lord Cawdor had in November 1924, when he’d written in his diary: ‘I’d sell my soul to see some honest weather again.’ A few days previously he’d referred to Pemako as ‘this infernal country’ and sworn he never wished to lay his eyes on another damned rhododendron. The young laird clearly wasn’t cut out for a life of Himalayan plant-hunting.
Since it was too wet to go anywhere, we spent the day huddled around the fire in an absent lama’s house near the monastery, drinking chang and listening to the infernal clatter of rain on the roof. It hissed down in cataracts so loud we had to raise our voices to make ourselves heard. During the afternoon Dorje and Kabsang spoke about the difficulties of being a Khampa in India, and how they often felt like outsiders in their own country. Mainland Indians treated them badly, calling them ‘Chinky’, asking if they were Chinese and charging them more at the market.
‘It makes me so angry,’ said Dorje, ‘but what can we do?’
The pejorative way they were treated by their own countrymen sounded depressingly similar to the patronizing attitudes of British
colonials. The Khampa even refer to non-tribal India, the India that begins at the foot of the hills, as Jagar, meaning ‘white land’, a reference to the fact Indians there eat white food (curds) and wear white clothes (dhotis). It reminded me of something I’d often thought here, that, although the political boundary between China and India is drawn along the ridge of the Himalayas, the cultural divide runs along the base of Arunachal’s hills. For while none of the tribal people I met expressed any desire to belong to China, culturally they leant far more towards the Tibetan peoples of the north. In so many ways this mountainous, tribal land was another country entirely.
14
THE CHEERFUL MOUNTAIN
Pemako had proved itself full of magical happenings, but none were more so than the clear, sunlit sky we awoke to the following morning. After a week of rain the heavens must have finally exhausted themselves, and now the land sparkled under a perfect dome of blue. For the first time I could see the lustrous hills we’d walked through and the snow peaks that framed the valley, their freshly dusted ridges shining like mercury in the morning light. And there was Yoldong’s gompa, winking in the sunshine on its distant ridge. After days of turbid weather, it was like waking up to a new world, as if the old, grey one had been soaked in colour overnight.
The dam dum flies were equally delighted and had come out in their thousands, swarming around our heads in nefarious black clouds.
Dorje caught me swatting one away. ‘You mustn’t kill any living thing here – even dam dum fly.’
Later, when I absent-mindedly squashed one that landed on my hand, I guiltily looked around to see if my sin had been witnessed. It hadn’t.
Buoyed by the change in the weather, Kabsang and I trotted our third kora around the hill then joined Dorje at the monastery for a fire puja, an offering to Devakotta’s protector deities that was enmeshed in the old ways of Bon. He was preparing the fire outside when we arrived, chanting mantras as he piled a clay platform with juniper branches and nine different types of edible, flowering plants. He was a lama now, intense, aloof, chanting, his eyes staring into space as he called on the protectors. Once the fire was lit he sat inside, behind a large suspended drum whose edges seethed with golden dragons, beating out a galloping rhythm that thundered through the monastery like an emperor’s call to arms. I sat watching him, the primal pounding of the drum pulsating through the floor and my whole body, mesmerized by the noise, his voice, the place. Butter candles burnt on the altar and incense wafted through the air like dragon’s breath. At the end, Dorje fixed Kabsang and me with a schoolmasterly look and asked us to internally apologize for any wrong we’d done in Pemako. I racked my mind for any significant misdemeanours but, apart from the death of the odd dam dum fly, couldn’t think of any.
Since Dorje’s health was holding up (thank goodness), and the weather had made such a spectacular reversal, we decided to go on to Tashigong, half a day’s walk from here. Dorje still had a house in his old village, and family, and hadn’t been there since before he fell ill. It was a steep uphill climb from Devakotta, on a narrow, winding footpath that would soon be superseded by the new road. It was exhilarating to be away from that blasted mud, walking through the forest under a blissfully unblemished sky. Stopping to catch my breath, I looked back at the vanishing roof of the monastery and wondered what changes the road would bring to this fantastically remote and beautiful place. Only last night a group of Adi teenagers had stayed at the simple pilgrims’ guesthouse near the monastery, leaving behind all their rubbish and dirty pots and pans.
‘Everyone used to cook with stone pots and use just leaves and bamboo. Rubbish only come here fifteen years ago – it like a sickness,’ sighed Dorje, looking at their mess.
How many more like this would the road bring? How much longer would the monastery, with all its treasures, be able to remain unlocked? What’s sacrosanct to one people means nothing to the next.
For now, though, the only major blight on the landscape was a line of sagging electricity wires marching up the hill beside us. An Assamese contractor had been paid to run power to Tashigong, but had put up the wires and pylons without installing the electricity, bribing a local politician to sign the job off as done. So now the village had the eyesore of the wires, but no power to go with it.
‘It’s one hundred per cent corruption,’ said Kabsang.
Maybe it was the transformative effects of sunshine, or my own elevated state of mind, but to me Tashigong was a place of heart-bursting beauty. Dorje’s great-grandfather had been among the village’s founders, instructed to build a settlement here by the terton Nang Gay. They’d hacked their way through the forests and hewn a life out of the wild, their mithun killed by tigers and their crops eaten by bears. But in spite of the hardships they’d named the new settlement Tashigong, meaning ‘auspicious mountain’, and I could well see why. From its lofty hillside perch above the Yangsang Chu, its few houses looked out across hills that creased and soared and rippled beneath forest as thick as an emerald fleece. Beyond them was an encircling shield of mountains, their jagged white crowns carved by the bright sunlight into sharp fields of light and shadow. They looked crisp and preternaturally perfect, as if painted onto the sky by the hand of a god. I could see the line of the river, the gleaming ridges of Padma Shri and Riwo Tula – sacred peaks only reachable in the summer months – and, to the north, Tibet, the homeland. Although we were still at only 1,600 metres above sea level, it felt like we were much higher. Guru Rinpoche had chosen his beyul well. In the village, clumps of tall white flags whipped in the breeze, bovines grazed contentedly and peach trees blossomed pink. The only sounds were birdsong, the tinkle of mountain streams, the breeze whispering through the trees and the melodic chirping of crickets. It was tranquillity itself, and I fell in love with it at once.
There was nothing grand about Dorje’s house; it was a typical village dwelling – stilted, wooden, slightly ramshackle, the earth around it churned to mud by the hooves of two skittish black cows. A mallard and his doting wife quacked and dabbled in the mud outside, waddling away in stately alarm as we arrived. Below it, a fenced vegetable patch burst with yellow mustard flowers, radishes, cabbages, carrots, ginger, garlic, chillies, potatoes, onions, cabbages. But the house’s position was spectacular. It sat, a fittingly regal eyrie, on top of a hill overlooking the jewel of a gompa the king had recently built. Below it, on a slope so steep it almost necessitated crawling, orange trees were hung with fruit and the grass was thick with wild mint and tiny strawberries. And all around it was that view, rippling away to the snows.
Dorje had grown up here, and the shrine room was still full of his father’s belongings.
‘My father very powerful lama. When I was child here people never get ill. If they did, they just make a few kora of the gompa and they better, or they went to my father and he did puja for them.’ He picked up a smooth brown bowl from the altar. ‘He use this in puja – it made from human skull, to show non-attachment to our human body. And this—’ he pointed to a yellowed bone beside it, ‘is drumstick made from human thighbone.’ He stared silently at the altar for a minute, remembering. ‘You know, when Chinese invade in 1962 everyone very afraid. Whole village want to run away. But my father tell everyone to stay, that Chinese not come here; Pemako too powerful for them. He was right. They not come here.’
His brother-in-law, Tita Guru, lived in the house now. He was a quiet man of sixty whose toned body, mop of black hair and line-free face gave him the appearance of someone twenty years younger. His wife, Dorje’s sister, suffered from a serious illness and now lived near a hospital in the south of India. Their children had long moved away. So now it was just him, the cows, the ducks and a semi-resident cat – a matted, bony, madly affectionate old girl who wound around us, purring like a tractor and kneading our legs with pin-like claws.
We couldn’t have timed our arrival better. The next day, 18 March, was Guru Rinpoche Day, an all-day puja that took place on the tenth day of each month in
the Tibetan calendar. It was a day of feasting and worship, and no one was allowed to work in the fields or commit any sin. Each month a different family from the village would ‘sponsor’ the puja by providing food and chang, and tomorrow, by pure chance, was Tita Guru’s turn. Given Dorje’s return to his ancestral village after serious illness and a three-year absence, the luck of our timing felt strangely preordained.
Supper was a warming meal of barley flour noodles and green vegetable broth tangy with Szechuan pepper, and chang, lots of it, sucked through bamboo straws from a red jug. Afterwards I unrolled my sleeping bag on the veranda and fell asleep listening to the guttural calls of some forest bird and the roar of the Yangsang Chu, the sky twinkling cold and clear above. I briefly entertained the thought of a tiger gobbling me up from the veranda as I slept, then reprimanded myself for being such a wimp. At five, when I woke up, there’d been no feline intrusions and dawn was soaking the snowy heights a delicate wash of pink.
Tashigong was the last Buddhist village in the valley. Beyond were three Idu Mishmi settlements and then the Abroka Pass, where the Yangsang Chu rose and the Dibang Valley began. Curious to see the first Idu village before we headed back to Tuting tomorrow, Kabsang and I set off at 6 a.m., marching briskly through the dew-drenched forest in the bright morning light. Two hours later, after a lung-heaving five-mile walk, we reached Silipo, an Idu hamlet of no more than seven houses. Finding no one around, we sat on the nearest porch and devoured a packet of biscuits, sharing them with a family of chickens who dashed over hopefully. The cockerel, a gouty old duke with a fountain of glossy black tail feathers and a joggling comb, hobbled around on gnarled feet, clucking and pecking the biscuits into edible crumbs for his wives and children without touching a morsel himself.
As we admired the cockerel’s chivalry, the front door behind us creaked open and a boy’s face appeared from the darkness within. He dragged himself into the doorway on his bottom, his legs thin and crippled, and stared at us with a dim, uncomprehending look. He could have been twelve or eighteen, it was hard to tell, and was obviously severely physically and mentally disabled, left here alone in the dark house while his parents worked in the fields. When we gave him our remaining packet of biscuits he clutched them to his chest and stared into space, not uttering a word. I tried to talk to him in the few words of Idu I knew, but he just stared through us, as if we weren’t there. What a life out here, so far from medical help, or even something as simple as a wheelchair. Amidst all this beauty, seeing him was a pertinent reminder of how difficult and unfair life could be.
Land of the Dawn-lit Mountains Page 19
