The puja was in full swing by the time we returned, exhausted, at eleven o’clock. A trickle of villagers was ambling around the gompa, twirling their beads and muttering mantras, waving at us as we appeared; among them was a teenage girl with a bounding black puppy on a chain, the first pet dog I’d seen here. Above them, coloured prayer flags streamed from the golden pagoda-like roof like bunting at a village fête. Many of the villagers would walk a lucky 108 koras today, but we joined them for just three, pausing on each circuit to touch the pilgrimage rock Dorje had discussed with the road builders.
‘This is only a small bit of the rock,’ said Kabsang, placing his palms on the side of the lumpy black protrusion. ‘Most of it is underground – that’s where the deity has his palace.’
Afterwards we slipped off our muddy boots and went inside the gompa, past two buxom, tipsy old women who were sitting on the floor with mugs of chang, rocking back and forth as they turned an enormous red prayer wheel. They creased with laughter and covered their few teeth with gnarled hands when I asked to take their photographs, but happily agreed.
Inside, Dorje and three other lamas sat wrapped in maroon robes, faces intense and staring, chanting a rapid, insistent mantra while pounding on a hide drum and crashing pairs of cymbals together, the long, low table in front of them laden with sutras, bells, conches and mugs of chang. At intervals they added to this hullabaloo with shrill squalls of gyaling, intricately worked, oboe-like horns whose sound was strongly reminiscent of the instruments used by Indian snake charmers. At the same time, one small gathering of villagers would hold a giant conch shell to their mouths and, with cheeks inflated like puffer fish, emit a long, ear-splitting blast. The whole affair was generously lubricated by chang, served by smiling ladies who appeared every half an hour or so and wouldn’t take no for an answer. If you’d been blindfolded and led in with no idea where you were you’d be forgiven for thinking Dave Grohl, a bunch of Indian snake charmers and the Queen Mary’s horn had somehow ended up in the same room.
Dorje, elevated to the position of head lama for the day following his auspicious arrival in the village, looked every inch the king. He sat with a fixed, faraway look in his eyes, lost in deep meditation. Beside him was his father’s vacant throne upon which his reincarnation would sit once he was born.
Those who weren’t in the gompa or doing koras were in the nearby kitchen hut, stirring vats of rice over the fire, plunging salty tea in a tall bamboo tube and drinking the ubiquitous chang, the air thick with smoke and chatter. One of them was a gnome-like old man with a puckered, weatherworn face and grey hair sticking out from under a red woollen hat. He laughed incessantly, an infectious, Mr Bean-like chortle, which swallowed his eyes in a canyon of laughter lines and revealed his two remaining front teeth. Kabsang sat beside him, linking his arm through his.
‘He’s been deaf since he was a child but he can lip-read very well, and he’s always laughing.’
At this, one of the other men complained that he had a bad stomach.
‘Do you want me to stick some chillies up your bum?’ joked the gnome, erupting into another round of that wickedly contagious chuckle. He was cheerfulness personified.
At lunch everyone sat on tables in the sunshine outside the gompa and ate rice, dhal, potatoes and grisly lumps of mithun skin. I sat with Dorje, looking at the happy scene, struck by how this monthly knees-up was as much about worship as it was about community, mutual help and cementing familial bonds. It was like a village fête and the best aspects of Christmas Day rolled into one.
The weather had been perfect all day – cloudless and sunny with only the lightest breeze. But in the middle of the afternoon, just after the lamas had chanted a mantra for the local protector deities, a storm appeared out of nowhere. It howled around the mountain in angry gusts of wind and a fit of sideways rain, clattering on the roof and dripping through the open windows.
‘It means the protectors are happy,’ assured Kabsang, raising his voice over the din. ‘It’s normal. We’ve seen rainbows appear from the top of the monastery during puja here.’
It vanished half an hour later, as quickly as it had appeared, the sky as clear and blue again as if it had been a dream. As the sun sank behind the mountains and the gompa fell into darkness, the puja reached a horn-blowing, drum-beating, conch-blasting crescendo. We threw rice offerings all over the floor, took (more) swigs of holy chang and were given silver trays piled with prasad, blessed food: popcorn, strips of mithun skin, biscuits, sweets and doughy rice phalluses. By the time we’d finished, the place looked like the aftermath of a children’s party.
The greying, day-old rice phalluses looked singularly unappetizing when Dorje pulled them out of a plastic bag and fried them in oil for the next morning’s breakfast.
‘This prasad blessed by the Guru Rinpoche in Pemako – it very lucky,’ he said, handing me a plate. I looked at them suspiciously; thoughts of food poisoning nudging at my mind, then I remembered that even if I did die in Pemako I’d be fast-tracked to enlightenment. But in spite of my misgivings they were surprisingly tasty, like hot buttered toast. I even had seconds.
I’d learnt by now that the king didn’t do anything fast, and this morning was no exception. He’d said we’d leave Tashigong at 7.30 but, by the time we’d had breakfast, cooked omelettes for our lunch and packed, it was already 8.30. Then, just as we were shouldering our bags to leave, Dorje announced that he hadn’t washed his face. There followed a very thorough, unhurried face-washing ceremony (with pink soap) under the freezing-cold outside tap, then a leisurely application of Nivea face cream. (Aha, so that was the secret of his wrinkle-free skin!) Twenty minutes later we’d said goodbye to Tita Guru and were off, Dorje – Nivea’d and puja-powered – springing down the slope in his trusty gold wellies, humming the Rinpoche’s mantra. After a last look back at the sunlit gompa, we were into the forest again, the last glimpses of Tashigong swallowed by the trees.
It’s easy for an outsider to romanticize life in a place like Tashigong, to be swept away by the beauty of the mountains, the space, the quiet, the rarity of its near-pristine wilderness; to turn it into some rose-tinted paradise where the happy natives skip merrily about their daily tasks. But life wasn’t easy here, and it would be naive to assume so. There was no medical care, or electricity, or schools. Many of the villagers were illiterate. They lived hard, physical lives in an often extreme climate: planting, harvesting, cutting, collecting firewood, milking, cooking. It was an existence that left little room for the luxury of idleness. Most of the young people had either gone to boarding schools in Dharamsala or colleges in Delhi and Assam. The younger generation didn’t want to be subsistence farmers anymore – they wanted mobile phones, labels, the internet, cars. When Dorje was a child here there had been sixty houses but now that number had shrunk to fifteen. Like so many of the rural villages in Arunachal Pradesh (and so much of the world) it was a village in decay, a place that people were draining away from. Perhaps in one sense the road, ironically, might save it, by stopping the younger generation deserting it entirely when their parents and grandparents are no longer.
But in spite of all this, the one thing that struck me most about the people of Tashigong was how happy they seemed. No one was hurrying around, shoulders tensed, faces frowning with worry. Instead their eyes were creased with laughter lines and bright with mirth. They laughed easily and often. There was a lightness of spirit, a deep-seated cheerfulness. People had time for each other, stopped and said hello and shot the breeze. And Tita Guru wasn’t alone in looking astonishingly young for his age. It wasn’t just in Tashigong, either; it was my abiding impression of all the remote tribal villages I visited in Arunachal Pradesh. I’d felt it among the Idu too – their cheerfulness, the affection between people, the sense of community and mutual help. There was a very different feel here to the tribal communities I’d travelled through in southeastern Laos. As one anthropologist put it, life there was ‘brutish, Hobbesian and short’, and many of
the villages reeked of poverty and malnutrition. People were so poor they risked their lives to search for scraps of unexploded ordnance left over from the Vietnam War, selling the metal for a pittance in order to feed their families. But I saw no evidence of hunger here, quite the opposite. People were round-cheeked and well-fed, their gardens overflowing with fruit and vegetables. They might not have owned cars and televisions, those modern barometers of wealth, but it would be wrong to say they lived in poverty.
Despite the hardships, I felt life here to be the antithesis of our fast-paced, mechanized, materialistic, Western existences – a life that’s become so driven by artificial wants. Life in Tashigong was real. It was about food, shelter, family, community, togetherness. It was about need, not greed. It was about living with nature, the seasons and the cycle of night and day. People produced their own naturally organic food, breathed pure mountain air, spent the majority of their time outside and were free from the tyranny of the sedentary, screen-addicted lifestyles so many of us now lead. British children aged between five and sixteen spend an average of six and a half hours a day in front of a screen, a figure that’s doubled in twenty years. The average American adult spends ninety-three per cent of their lives in cars or buildings, while the average American child plays outdoors for only half an hour each week. But here no one spent their days sitting in cars and air-conditioned offices, working in pointless jobs to pay the mortgage and buy more stuff they didn’t need. They weren’t subjected to the same drip-feed of distressing news that filters through our media channels every day. They lived in multi-generational households, looked after their elders, brought up their children together. Theirs was an existence of genuine togetherness, not one lived through the distorting, distancing filters of emails and social media.
Being there for those few precious days swelled in me a sense of loss, of want, of nostalgia. Maybe I’m guilty of putting the villagers’ lives on a pedestal of lost pastoralism, but I saw Tashigong as a paradigm of a disappearing way of life. It made me feel as if we’ve gone wrong somehow, that progress and modernization are taking us away from the essence of what makes us human. We evolved in nature. We’re animals. We need the wild, community, a sense of purpose, emotional connection. Yet we’ve bound ourselves to this speeding missile of progress, and are hurtling away from the things that really matter. As His Holiness the Dalai Lama wrote in ‘The Paradox of our Age’:
We have bigger houses but smaller families;
More conveniences but less time . . .
We’ve been all the way to the moon and back,
But have trouble crossing the street to meet a new neighbour.
And look at the effect it’s having on us. We have more money, more choice, more medicines and more conveniences than ever before, but every year the human race gets fatter and more miserable. Rates of depression among British teenagers alone have increased by seventy per cent in the last twenty-five years. Obesity in Britain has more than doubled in twenty years. The same patterns are true for the United States, Canada, Australia and South Africa, with research showing that people who live in cities experience far higher incidences of anxiety and depression. And it’s only going to become worse. If urbanization continues at its current rate, seventy per cent of humans will be living in cities by 2050. How ironic it is that the richer and more ‘civilized’ we become, the harder we find it to experience happiness, the one thing we strive for above everything else.
I’m not an anthropologist, and my ponderings and impressions of Tashigong are based on a few, precious days spent on that auspicious mountain. I would love to return, to spend months there, to try to understand – as much as an outsider can – whether the villagers really are much happier than us, and why. But to me it felt like a Shangri-La – as much as such a thing can exist in human society, with its grief and passions and transience. Now that the road was coming, my short time there felt even more poignant.
15
GOODBYE TO PEMAKO
Not only was Dorje a restaurateur, lama, politician and artist, he was also an accomplished jungle apothecary. Striding through the forest that morning, down the steep footpath we’d sweated up two days previously, he waved his staff around like a wizard’s wand, pointing out various edible and medicinal plants. There were sprays of wild cardamom, unripe bunches of wild kiwi fruit, vines of wild pepper, a type of green tea, and a magenta flower whose petals Khampa women used to crush up to use as dye for their cheeks. Occasionally he’d pause to rummage around in the shrubbery, coming out with the sweet, fleshy hearts of palm fronds or red, rhubarb-like stems that we sucked on as we walked. At one point he stopped and waved at a clump of ordinary-looking greenery beside the track.
‘All this edible. This good vegetable, and this, and this, but don’t eat this one.’ He tapped an unmemorable-looking plant with broad green leaves. ‘If you do, you dead in an hour. Very painful.’ He grimaced, then waved his wand at a nettle-like plant next to it. ‘That one very poisonous too.’
I decided it was probably best I leave my foraging ambitions to the less fatal fields of Somerset.
Kabsang knew a thing or two as well. ‘My brother once wiped his bottom with one of those leaves after going to the loo,’ he grinned, pointing to another harmless-looking shrub. ‘Afterwards he couldn’t sit down for a week.’
The king was also an amateur birder.
‘That one green bird, long tail. Bad people like to eat it,’ he said, pointing to a flash of green in the treetops. ‘That one red bird. Bad people eat it too.’ He waved his stick towards a trilling coming from somewhere above us.
Later he stopped, cocking his head towards a shrill ‘Pap, Mapap. Pap, Mapap. Pap . . .’ noise piping through the canopy. ‘This one mean rain come.’ But since the first drops were already tip-tapping on my newly put-up umbrella, I pointed out this was cheating. He laughed and patted my shoulder.
By lunchtime we’d reached Yoldong, stopping to eat our omelettes with the tall lama and his jolly wife, Anguk. She clasped my hands affectionately and asked Kabsang if I’d found it difficult, walking in all that rain, then gave me a tshatsha of Guru Rinpoche astride a tiger. We wrapped it in a white khata and cardboard in the hope it would reach England safely. Afterwards she hobbled beside me to their gate, holding my hand all the way, asking me to come back and visit again soon. I dearly hoped I would, I told her truthfully, although I didn’t know when. There are some people you meet in life who, even though the meeting is brief and you don’t share a word of mutual language, make a lasting impression on you. Anguk was one of those – a beacon of warmth and compassion and a shining, wise old soul.
We stayed in the village of Paynigem that night, reaching it on a little-used footpath that wound steeply upwards through thick, dark jungle.
‘This real Pemako track. Maybe bears here,’ said Dorje, sniffing the air. I hoped he was just saying it for effect. For now, though, the only wildlife we could see were leeches waving around on their posterior suckers, sensing fresh blood. When we paused, Kabsang found ten of them shimmying hopefully up his gumboots.
‘They want to get drunk,’ he joked, referring to the several glasses of chang he’d had with lunch.
Dorje picked another one off my cheek, patting me comfortingly on the shoulder when he saw me recoil. ‘Don’t worry, leeches our friends, they take away sin.’
It was 5 p.m. when we were delivered from the trees onto a high grassy plain grazed by fat-bellied Tibetan ponies – descendants of a pair brought here by a lama decades ago. Soon afterwards we were sitting in heaps around the fire of one of Dorje’s relatives, reviving ourselves with rice and chang. It had been a tough fifteen-mile walk up and down a concertina of ridges, and even Kabsang, a stripling of twenty-eight, was exhausted. The Adi porters had taken up their usual position in the corner, silently playing games on their mobile phones.
A few hours later two smiling young Tibetan men burst in from the dark and joined us by the fire. They were polling agents for the Tibetan
government in exile and had walked from Tuting that day with a ballot box, stopping in every village for beer and chang. Tomorrow the Dharamsala-based government’s new prime minister was to be elected, and all Tibetan refugees who lived in India were allowed to vote. This didn’t include ethnic Tibetans like Dorje and Kabsang, who’d been born here in India, but those who’d fled their homeland following the Chinese occupation. Dorje’s wife, whose family had escaped in 1962, was one of these, as were around fifty others from the Yangsang Chu Valley. The men would carry the ballot box to a nearby village in the morning and wait all day for voters to appear. It was a long walk for some of them, and the agents thought only about thirty would show up. I asked them how they made sure there was no cheating.
‘Cheating!’ exclaimed Dorje. ‘No problem. Everyone in India cheats. In some states they just swap in fake ballot boxes.’
‘Is that what you did?’ I asked him, jokingly.
He looked at me with an expression of mock offence. ‘No need.’
It was simple, one of the men explained: all the voters’ names were listed in a green book they carried and each person was ticked off when they arrived. Anyway, they were sure the current candidate, a Harvard-educated Tibetan called Lobsang Sangay, would be re-elected anyway. As it turned out, they were right.
Land of the Dawn-lit Mountains Page 20
