There was nothing Blue Peter about the Revivalist church I visited next. Here, in a large bamboo hall near the village of Hong, a packed congregation sat listening to the hellfire of a screeching young virago. She strode back and forth across the stage, Bible in one hand, microphone in the other, belting out the word of God with deafening machine-gun rapidity. Every few minutes her indecipherable rantings would be punctuated with sudden shouts of: ‘He died to set us free: Praise the Lord! Hallelujah!’ To which the audience would respond with fervent cries of ‘Pays da La!’ It was exhausting just watching her.
When she’d finished her sermon, if that’s what it was, she whipped the audience into an evangelical frenzy, conducting them with stabbing fingers and goading shrieks. They wailed and shook and waved their arms above their heads. They moaned and stamped and flapped their hands. Old women rocked back and forth in their chairs like confined lunatics. Young women convulsed as if having fits. The few men just sat there, inscrutable, observing the hysteria. When I left I found a gaggle of children peering in through the open door, as wide-eyed and disturbed as I was. While I might expect to see such scenes in New Orleans or Nigeria, I hadn’t expected to see it here.
I met two recent converts to Christianity that evening, crouched beside the fire in Abraham’s family hut. Chigin Yami didn’t know how old she was. Probably more than a hundred, she guessed. But she looked nearer seventy. A plain, thick-set woman with an orange headscarf and a crucifix around her neck, a single faded blue line ran from the top of her wrinkled forehead to the tip of her distended nose. Another four lines were tattooed between her mouth and bottom of her chin. She’d been ten when she was tattooed, Abraham translated for me, held down by her parents and two others while an old woman inked her face with sharpened bamboo. I asked her why it used to be done.
She shrugged and shuffled her bare, blackened feet. ‘I’ve no idea. I just followed the tradition of the elders.’
Three giggling girls were sitting beside us, listening to our conversation. They must have been about ten years old. ‘Would you like to be tattooed like this?’ I asked them.
‘No!’ they cried, bunching together in shy titters.
Ten years ago Yami’s husband had fallen ill with cancer. Doctors hadn’t been able to help. Nor had the village nyibu, despite Yami spending a fortune sacrificing mithun, dogs, goats, pigs and chickens. After her husband died Yami started suffering from severe headaches, but again the doctors and nyibu were unable to help. When friends suggested trying Christianity she’d resisted at first, but after seven visits to a Catholic church had converted. It had worked, she said; her health was much better now and she only had headaches when she sinned. Another woman, a sad-looking, hunched old shell with nose-plugs the size of fifty-pence pieces, told a similar story of illness and spiritual bargaining. Her back pain was much better since she’d been baptized in the local river, she said: her only worry was that in the afterlife she wouldn’t be able to find her husband, who’d died a follower of the Donyi-Polo faith.
I could see now why some old people were turning to Christianity. Good health is everything when medical facilities are poor and your livelihood depends on being able to work in the paddies. And Christianity was a far simpler, less threatening belief system than Donyi-Polo, whose spirits were both numerous and prone to malevolence. They lurked at crossroads, hid in the wind, whispered through doorways and attacked unwary people in the forest. Be it a nosebleed, headaches or a poor harvest, any illness or misfortune was interpreted as the work of malicious spirits, and sacrificing chickens, dogs, pigs and mithun to keep them happy was expensive. At least with God there was only one of Him, and it didn’t cost valuable livestock to assuage his thirst for vengeance. But these two old women were unquestionably the most miserable people I met in all my travels here – sad, downtrodden individuals whose very souls seemed to have been extinguished. God may have proved a good anaesthetic but He certainly hadn’t brought them happiness.
Another reason for the rise of Christianity was, I later heard, the old Apatani social system of the patrician mite and the plebeian mura classes. In Ursula’s time the mite married only within themselves, creating ‘a network of alliances . . . comparable to that of European royalty in the years before 1914’. The mura, meanwhile, were often kept as slaves. Although slavery had stopped in the 1950s, the class system still persisted and Christianity was seen as a way for the mura to liberate themselves from these age-old bonds. It was a sort of religious communism.
The Ziro I rode away from in the morning was smothered in mist and impending rain, the dusty streets turned to mud by an overnight downpour. There were no longing backward glances as I climbed through dreich pines to the Jorum Top Pass. The Apatani Valley had left me cold. It was my fault really. I’d fallen in love with the cane-armoured warriors of Ursula’s Hidden Land, and it was stupid of me to think I’d still find such a place. The 1940s were a world ago. Look how much England has changed since then; if an Indian read a memoir of a wartime Wiltshire village and went there expecting to find farmhands in hobnail boots leading carthorses up the street, they’d be sorely disappointed. Ursula and Tim felt like they’d landed in one of ‘Edgar Rice Burroughs’ interplanetary romances’, but I felt like I’d glimpsed a fractured society riven by God and Progress. Throughout my travels I’d been asking tribal people if they identified more with their tribe, or with being Indian. The Apatani were the first to answer that they felt Indian first. In another seventy years’ time it’s possible their culture will have vanished altogether.
17
A RISKY BUSINESS
Every journey has its doldrums, and Itanagar was mine. I found Arunachal’s state capital to be a smutty, congested town whose streets were choked with frustrated drivers and foul with exhaust fumes. Rickshaws wove in and out of crawling lines of traffic. Jeeps nearly took off my legs as they barrelled impatiently past. Slums teetered on rooftops above billboards advertising the ‘Ecstasy and Serenity’ of new apartment complexes that spread gaudily across the green hills. Seen through different eyes, on a different day, the blue, pink and yellow buildings might have looked attractive. But not today. I was tired, that particular type of cumulative tiredness that breeds on these long journeys, and I wanted Marley, proper chocolate and a hot bath.
None of which I was going to find in the dive of a hotel I checked into, a mephitic place on the main drag whose rooms overlooked a rubbish tip, a slum and a half-built tower block. Its walls were stained with damp and squashed mosquitoes. Cockroaches as big as golf balls scuttled across the concrete floor. The tiles around the squat loo looked like Jackson Pollock had been experimenting with a palette of excrement, paan and mosquito blood. My sleep there was equally bad. Buried in my sleeping bag, fully clothed, I was woken in the middle of the night by the sound of a young man sobbing and screaming hysterically in a nearby room. Other voices were trying to console him, but the poor man’s despair lasted at least an hour. At six, when the ceiling started to clank and thud with the sound of metal weights being dropped, I realized there was a gym above my room. Blearily emerging from my orange cocoon just afterwards, I saw that something had burrowed its way through my layers of cotton and fleece and left a trail of red, itchy bites across my stomach and back.
My mood wasn’t improved by a morning in Itanagar. I couldn’t find an ATM that worked. The Research Publication Department, where I’d been told I might pick up some interesting books on the area, was closed, and the electricity at the Jawaharlal Nehru State Museum had gone out. Instead I peered around its glass cases in the dark, the stuttering beam of my dying head torch falling on badly labelled textiles and terrifying-looking mannequins.
The best thing about Itanagar was receiving a text from Tapir, the Adi guide I’d briefly met in Roing who’d identified Ata as Dorje Tenzing. It read: ‘Mem, i meet u tomorrow Sagalee.’ It was all set. Tapir and I were heading into the jungle on a thrilling wartime mission.
*
On 7 December 1
941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Jay Vineyard was an ordinary American eighteen-year-old. He was a freshman at college in Arkansas, loved going to picture shows and played French horn in the college band. Two and a half years later the recently qualified pilot was flying his Curtiss C-46 Commando across the high mountains and deep gorges of Japanese-occupied northern Burma, resupplying China over the notoriously lethal ‘Hump’. Stationed at a crude base on a tea estate in Upper Assam, Jay spent eight months flying supplies into western China, risking his life almost daily navigating a series of 5,000-metre ranges in an unheated, unpressurized plane with a nasty reputation for mechanical failure. The twin-engined C-46 wasn’t dubbed the ‘flying coffin’ for nothing. As one Hump pilot said: ‘Let there be no question about it! Flying the Hump was risky business.’ Pilots had to wrestle their planes through 200-mile-per-hour winds, icing, violent storms and severe turbulence, all with a dearth of reliable charts, little weather data and no radio navigation aids. At times the visibility was so poor they may as well have been flying blindfold – but the pressure to deliver enough fuel, weapons, ammunition, rations (and occasionally mules) to China meant taking off in all weathers. As if this wasn’t enough, Japanese fighters prowled the skies over Burma, waiting to pick off the lumbering, unarmed planes whose pilots could do no more to defend themselves than fire a Browning automatic rifle desperately out of the cockpit window.
Crashes were so frequent that the monthly losses sometimes equalled fifty per cent of all the planes flying the route; on the night of 6 January 1945, fourteen planes and forty-two crewmen were lost in a single twelve-hour period. Jay Vineyard was flying the last plane to cross that night.
‘The wind was over 200 miles per hour and there was thunder and extreme turbulence,’ said the disarmingly young voice of the 92-year-old at the other end of the telephone from his home in Texas. ‘We were flying blind – lots of pilots got lost. I didn’t know how lucky I was until afterwards.’
There was never any mention of casualties, though. The only way you knew if a crewman had been killed was if you shared a room with them.
‘It always shook us up a bit,’ Jay told me. ‘You knew any of us could go out and never come back.’ Jay’s own roommate was a brilliant pilot called Danny Edwards. ‘He was the best pilot we ever had – but he died one night trying to land with one engine on fire. The next day the quartermaster came in and took his clothes away.’
Even if you did manage to parachute to ‘safety’, your chances of survival were slim. The downed Allied pilots rescued by Ursula’s Naga ‘Bower Force’ were a lucky minority. Some crewmen were lost for weeks in the jungle. Others suffered cruel deaths at the hands of the Japanese. RAF pilots flying in the China-Burma-India theatre were issued with a survival guide: next to the section about tigers, it simply said, ‘pray’. A US general wasn’t exaggerating when he wrote: ‘It was safer to take a bomber deep into Germany than to fly a transport plane over the Rockpile from one friendly nation to another.’
Life wasn’t much better on the ground. When they weren’t in the air, crews passed the time in mind-numbing inactivity; sitting around on their makeshift bases reading and playing cards. Malaria was rife, the food was disgusting and conditions primitive. Radio operator Private Robert L. Looney summed up his frustrations in a poem.
I am weary of bathing with Lysol
And washing with carbolic soap.
I am tired of itch and spin diseases
Mosquitoes and vermin and flies . . .
Another young pilot, Freddie ‘Buzz Boy Pete’ Raubinger, wrote to his brother back home in Michigan:
It rains almost every night and the humidity is so high that nothing will dry unless it’s put out in the sun. We live in bashas made out of bamboo, with thatched roofs and they’re none too weather proof. I woke up at about 5 a.m. today with water dripping in my face and my right shoe half full of water . . . Ah yes! All the comforts and facilities of home.
Neither man lived to see the end of the war: Looney’s C-87 vanished on 9 April 1943; Raubinger’s C-46 crashed into a mountain north of Itanagar in February 1945.
In total, 594 planes and 1,314 people were lost over the Hump. The grainy photographs of dead crewmen show the boyish, smiling faces of men too young for such an ordeal, let alone for death. Jay Vineyard was one of the lucky ones. He flew 660 hours – 174 missions – over the Hump and made it home unscathed. But despite the human tragedy, the airlift did achieve its purpose. In February 1942 Roosevelt had ordered that ‘the pathway to China be kept open at all costs’. And it was. By July 1945 a plane was crossing the Hump every few minutes. With the Burma Road closed by the Japanese, and the Stilwell Road a failure, it was Jay and the other brave pilots of the Hump who kept China in the war. Without them, the outcome could have been disastrously different.
But like the soldiers who toiled in the mud of the Stilwell Road, the bravery of these men has largely been forgotten. Whereas the US military spends millions of dollars each year recovering remains from the Vietnam War, they’ve done almost nothing to bring home the estimated 400 airmen whose remains still lie in the jungles of Arunachal Pradesh. Written off as unrecoverable after the war, Chinese objections to the US military being in ‘their’ territory of Arunachal Pradesh have hamstrung recovery operations since. When the Indian government finally allowed an American MIA (Missing in Action) team to investigate a site in 2008, complaints from China forced the mission to be pulled after only a few weeks and the Indian government blocked any further recovery efforts by the US military. When this unofficial moratorium was lifted in September 2015, the same happened again: an MIA team investigating the same site in the Upper Siang Valley were booted out after a month. A year later, despite huge pressure from the families of those still missing, there is little sign of change.
There is one American, though, who has investigated the crash sites. Intrigued by the tale of these missing planes, Arizona businessman Clayton Kuhles has, since 2003, undertaken numerous privately funded expeditions to the farthest corners of Arunachal Pradesh, Yunnan and Burma, sometimes spending weeks trekking to extremely remote locations. So far he has found twenty-two planes and the remains of 193 men, documenting all his finds on a meticulously recorded website. One of these planes was the C-46 that Freddie Raubinger, the young pilot who’d written to his brother, had been a passenger on. The circumstances of this crash were particularly poignant. The plane had taken off from Chabua in Upper Assam on 4 February 1945, carrying two crew and thirty-two American airmen home to the USA. But not far out of Chabua the plane developed mechanical problems and caught fire, ploughing into the summit of a 2,000-metre ridge near the Nyishi village of Karoi. Only one man, 22-year-old Technical Sergeant Marvin H. Jacobs, survived. Asleep on a pile of bags at the rear of the plane when it went down, he was flung 600 yards – the length of five football pitches – clear of the wreckage, and later told how he’d woken up in a thicket of bamboo, cut, bruised and with one broken ankle. A few days later he was rescued by amazed ‘natives’.
After talking to Clayton, and reading a collection of Freddie’s letters home, I decided to try to reach the Karoi site myself. But if I wanted to go there and talk to local villagers I’d need a guide. And by pure chance I’d already met the perfect person. In the short time we’d spent together in Roing, Tapir had told me he’d been one of Clayton’s main guides, trekking with him to ten of the sites. Not knowing when I might reach Itanagar, I hadn’t called him until reaching the capital, but fortunately he had a few spare days and immediately agreed to come. Luck, once again, was on my side.
*
Tapir had caught a Sumo from Pasighat and was waiting at a roadside shack in the small, muddy town of Sagalee when I arrived. He bounded into the road waving when he saw me, his small, stocky frame clad almost head to toe in camo. With a tent and a waterproof roll-bag slung across his pack, a camo baseball cap and a karabiner dangling from his belt, he looked like he was ready for some serious adventure.
> Karoi was only fifteen miles away, but somehow Tapir, me, his bag, a tent and all my luggage had to squeeze onto the Hero and wobble along what promised to be a narrow, boggy mountain track. Thank goodness I’d packed duct tape. Digging out a roll I set to work taping my rucksack and sleeping bag onto the lid of my Number One Indian Quality Top Box which, by now, had lost another bolt, rattled horribly and was cracking underneath. Loading it with a wobbling tower of nylon wasn’t going to boost its chances of survival, but we didn’t have much choice. Once it was done I swung my leg over the saddle and shunted forward onto the tank, holding the bike steady while Tapir squeezed himself, the tent and his bag into the gap behind me. Twenty or so Nyishi had by now gathered to watch, including a scraggy old man in a cane hat topped with a fake wooden hornbill’s beak, the environmentally friendly version of the Nyishi’s traditional headwear. They tittered in amusement at Tapir’s efforts to mount.
‘I’m short man!’ Tapir giggled. ‘Your bike too big!’ Tapir, I was soon to learn, laughed at everything.
The track to Karoi was the worst I’d ridden on yet. It clung to the flank of a forested mountain, a slick of orange mud gouged into lakes and boggy ruts by bikes and the odd car. We splashed and slid and splattered our way slowly along, Tapir giggling every time we skidded or veered too close to the edge. At times the only way through it was to balance on a narrow strip of grassy verge, with just inches between the mud-caked tyres and a plunge into the valley below. By the time the first huts of Karoi came into view an hour later, my shoulders and arms felt like they’d done five rounds with Mike Tyson.
We stopped outside the first house in the village, a long bamboo dwelling beside the track, overlooking a valley dense with trees. It belonged to the gambura, said Tapir, bouncing out a few minutes later – we were more than welcome to stay. Inside, the house stretched away in a flame-lit tunnel of homely activity. There were no windows, just doors at either end, and clusters of people were bent over the fires of three centralized hearths. Bosomy, rosy-cheeked women with sarongs and grubby cardigans bustled about cooking and making tea; lean men in jeans and old tracksuits pushed logs into the fires and, at the far end, two teenage boys watched a television. Clothes, daos, cane baskets and calendars hung from the woven bamboo walls. It was the biggest hut I’d seen, and must have been forty metres long.
Land of the Dawn-lit Mountains Page 23
