The Waiting Land

by Dervla Murphy

  16 JULY

  Tashi is proving to be a true Tiblet. On the third day of our joint life I decided to test her powers of self-propulsion and she followed to heel perfectly, proceeding in a series of absurd rubbery bounces.

  A week ago she had her first swim, in the lake. I hadn’t meant her to join me but when the poor little mite saw me swimming away from the shore she gave a scream of horror and, after a moment’s terrified dithering on the bank, plunged gallantly into this new element. Her silly up-curling tail remained high and dry, and began to wag ridiculously above the water as I turned back to express appropriate appreciation of her loyalty.

  By now the writing is on the wall. I can no longer delude myself that when leaving Pokhara it will be simple to find a kind home for Tashi and say a fond farewell. Obviously my future career, for the life-span of one dog, is going to be hideously complicated by Quarantine Regulations, International Canine Vaccination Certificates, By-laws governing the Import and Export of Livestock and Rules affecting the Transport of Domestic Pets by Land, Sea and Air. In a word, I’ve bought it – and all for ten-and-sixpence!

  Even now there are complications, for Tashi has strong views about squatting only on grass, and she consistently spurns the statutory box of clay. Therefore, small pups being very lavish of urine in tiny instalments, much of my time now goes climbing down and up the ladder answering her calls of Nature. Even at night, when she awakens me by nipping my nose, she insists on bouncing across to the grass on the opposite side of the road instead of squatting sensibly in the shelter of the verandah – a fetish which means that at this season I spend half the night towelling her.

  Her capacity for destruction is tremendous and, as my room affords nothing which is both destructible and within reach, she much enjoys visiting Kay’s room. There she wreaks havoc on precious Kleenex sent from London, on beloved pots of cacti which have been driven all the way from Mysore, on vitally important documents and on priceless plastic bags irreplaceable within a radius of a thousand miles. Kay’s forbearance is endless and she merely remarks that ‘pups will be pups’, but as I take the old-fashioned view that a certain amount of repression benefits the young of all species Tashi is regularly beaten on these occasions. However, she imagines that my hidings are a sort of pre-bedtime game, and one’s austere disciplinary mood receives a severe shaking when she rolls over on her back, ogles expertly, and holds her right forepaw in her mouth – this being a trick calculated to disarm the most unfeeling of dog-trainers.

  Yet on the whole Tashi is obedient, and today was the first time she disgraced me in public, forcing me to pretend cravenly that we were total strangers. One of her obsessions concerns shoe-laces, which she believes to have been tied in every case so that she may enjoy the satisfaction of untying them. But outlets for such a mania are few in this region of bare feet and therefore she rejoiced at today’s appearance on the airstrip of a very correctly attired Chinese Communist Delegation. (What they were delegated to or from I never discovered.) When the plane landed and the twelve comrades emerged many of Pokhara’s VIPs were there to greet them, most of Pokhara’s armed police were there to protect them (from Tibetans?), and immediately several Kathmandu and Peking press-photographers came scuttling around to arrange groups to prove how dearly the Chinese and Nepalese love one another.

  During these preliminaries Tashi had been calling on friends nearby – one of whom habitually wears shoes – but now she came bouncing along to make sure I wasn’t going too far astray. The photographers had just attained perfection – Chinese arms around Nepalese shoulders, solidarity smiles on all faces – when Tashi suddenly realised that she had a whole row of stationary shoes at her disposal. Ecstatically she raced up and down the line before deciding to be formal and begin on the leader of the Delegation – so that as camera shutters clicked an irritated frown replaced a solidarity smile on the most important Chinese face.

  A very curious feature of this Chinese ‘courtesy call’ was its length. After precisely seventeen minutes the Delegates re-entered their plane – never having left the airstrip – and headed back to Kathmandu. Perhaps the Nepalese authorities felt that it could be dangerous to allow them through the bazaar, where armed Khamba guerilla-fighters, on leave from the frontier area, are always to be found. And undoubtedly these Tibetan soldiers would enjoy nothing more than a busman’s holiday.

  As I was writing this last paragraph a head appeared through my trap-door and I recognised a pleasant young man who lives nearby and whose dysentery I treated successfully last week. A moment later he was in the room, followed by his mother, who complained of a violent pain in the right breast. Even by lamplight it was obvious at a glance that she had a very neglected abscess: but in case I didn’t get the message she shot a stream of pus from the nipple right into my face – a proof of infection I could have well done without. Dispensing three aspirins, I strongly advised her to go to the Shining Hospital tomorrow and explained that I could do nothing to help. Unfortunately most Nepalese and Tibetans believe that just because you have a white skin (or had before you came to Pokhara) you can perform medical miracles.

  This morning Krishna, my landlord, told me that soon I must move to the room next door, which has now been vacated by Thupten Tashi. These two rooms are to be let to Krishna’s newly-married brother-in-law, who will set up his own minute shop downstairs – doubtless stocking cigarettes, matches, rice, soap and biscuits, like all the other minute Pardi shops.

  24 JULY

  Last night in the small hours I was awakened by the most blood-curdling wails, sobs and shouts. They seemed to be coming from the lean-to at one side of the house – a shack which shelters a tailor’s family of five, though it consists only of a grass roof, two bamboo-matting walls and an earth floor. Evidently someone was either being murdered or going mad – both common fates around here – but as in neither event could my intervention help I promptly went asleep again. A couple of hours later the eerie sounds recurred, while I was breakfasting, and by then a group of expressionless villagers was standing on the street staring into the shack. Joining it, I saw that the tailor’s old mother had indeed gone mad and was being held down with difficulty by her son and daughter-in-law, while their baby lay screaming unheeded on a pile of filthy rags in a corner. Then suddenly the seizure was over, the old woman lay panting but still and the neighbours drifted silently away.

  Many events which would be regarded as crises at home are witnessed with indifference here. A few days ago I saw a man attacking his wife outside their house; as his rage increased he tried to pick up a heavy stone for quicker results, but his son, aged about twelve, struggled desperately to restrain him, and eventually mother and son were victorious. That afternoon I again went up the street and saw husband and wife sitting in their doorway amicably stripping corn-cobs together. Yet in our countries a likely result of this fracas would have been the husband’s arrest, the wife’s removal to hospital for shock treatment and the son’s removal from his unsuitable home to an institution.

  Initially I had been ashamed of my own placid lack of reaction to such scenes: it seemed my duty at least to feel alarmed or upset. But it appears that we unconsciously and very quickly take our cues from our environment, and in Asia there is felt neither the need to evade life’s grimmer aspects nor the obligation to become involved in the misfortunes of others.

  Last week I had my own little experience of how close physical violence lies to the surface of Nepalese life. I had gone to the bazaar, taking with me as porter a gentle fourteen-year-old boy named Pema, and as I was haggling about the price of dahl for the Tiblets’ Lifeline-subsidised midday meal I heard jeering shouts and looked out to see Pema being attacked by about twenty small Nepalese boys. At first I paid no attention, thinking ‘boys will be boys’, but when Pema was thrown on his back in the gutter and the gang began to stone him I realised that this was in fact a minor race riot. (Tibetans are understandably very unpopular in the valley.) Leaping down from the shop I we
nt round an intervening house to surprise the gang from the rear, grabbed their leader and was about to thrash him when a screaming fury of a woman frantically attacked me. With one hand she tried to loosen my grip on her terrified son while with the other she beat me over the head, using her empty dokar as a weapon. At once a dense crowd gathered round us – amused, curious and, as far as one could judge, quite neutral; the main thing seemed to be that a free entertainment was being staged. I soon wrested the dokar away and hurled it into the crowd but Mamma, though unarmed, was not deterred (more power to her) and she continued to shriek abuse at me and to pull and scrape at my arm, which now has a deep four-inch scratch as souvenir. Yet despite her ‘tigress-in-defence’ efforts I managed to give the little bully four hard ones with my cycle pump before releasing him.

  Unfortunately there was no interpreter to explain that had twenty Tiblets attacked one Nepalese boy I would have been equally angry with the Tibetans; so the incident was bad for Irish–Nepalese relations. It was also bad for the reputation of the local missionaries. Bazaar gossip is such that before leaving Pokhara, an hour later, I was told that one of the Shining Hospital nurses had just beaten up (almost unto death!) a helpless little boy who annoyed her by begging for money. Somehow I wouldn’t have thought that even a Nepalese crowd could possibly mistake me for a missionary.

  Yesterday I moved house, which took me all of fifteen minutes. The move should have happened four days ago, but this being the rice-planting season Krishna hasn’t once opened his shop during the past week, and he only appeared yesterday morning for long enough to hand me my new key.

  The three differences in this room are: (1) a red mud floor (freshly plastered by Krishna’s mother since Thupten left), (2) a tiny back window that does open, and (3) eight leaks in the tin roof instead of four. But (1) and (2) more than compensate for (3). Two open windows lower the temperature and smooth mud provides a much more comfortable bed than unsymmetrical boards – though it also raises the floor level by about a foot, so that my head almost touches the roof. Today I plugged the leaks with candle-grease and so far this device is working quite well.

  Inevitably Tashi fancies that the mud floor was laid specially for her to dig up, which she did with great gusto when briefly left alone yesterday. This would be bearable if I were a Nepalese housewife – the local women lay a new floor weekly – but in my case excavations have to be severely discouraged or we’d soon be living amidst a heap of rubble.

  Clothing is the one essential obtainable here at a reasonable price. Recently I bought seven yards of brown cotton for nine and fourpence and now my tailor neighbour has made me a pair of shorts and two shirts for five shillings, so I’ve acquired three new garments at a total cost of fourteen and fourpence. Kay says that wearing shorts and shirt of the same drab material makes me look like a convict – but who cares?

  31 JULY

  Yesterday I developed acute dysentery and retired to bed early; but as my new neighbours had just moved in this didn’t do me much good. I haven’t yet got round to taking a census, but going on aural evidence the family includes an aged bronchitic grandparent of uncertain sex, a discontented infant with a rasping, penetrating wail and several adults who disagree peevishly about most subjects that come up for discussion. To add to it all Tashi insisted on yapping shrilly at regular intervals. I tried to explain that we were no longer paying rent for the next-door room, but she didn’t even begin to get the point and her hackles never subsided the whole night through. However, the rain was so heavy and continuous today that no work could be done and I slept for most of the time; at this relentless phase of the monsoon ordinary life here comes to a standstill.

  7

  Conflicting Views

  21 AUGUST – POKHARA

  The past three weeks have been dominated by illness and wetness. I had planned to go to Kathmandu on the 7th of August but for ten days, from the 6th, Pokhara reverted to its pre-aeroplane isolation – perhaps fortunately, since I was then being victimised by a particularly debilitating belly-bug.

  Had one known that no plane could come for ten days this isolation would have been quite pleasant; but when one is due to leave on the first available plane and has to keep a constant watch on the sky, lest an unexpected flight should arrive, the prolonged uncertainty becomes decidedly wearing. Yet I was in a favoured position – living beside the airstrip – compared with those would-be passengers who were enduring a damp, aimless existence at The Annapurna, where the seasonal shortage of supplies was defeating even Kessang’s ingenuity.

  By the 8th of August no less than nine foreigners were awaiting the Kathmandu plane. Alan MacWilliam sat there champing to get to Delhi for urgent consultations; Peter Johnson lounged disconsolately in a corner ticking off the wasted days of his fortnight’s leave which, after eighteen months’ Peace Corps work in a remote hill village, was to have been spent under Calcutta’s bright lights; a diabetic Indian engineer lay on his charpoy predicting – correctly – that his insulin supply would never hold out; a visiting American female missionary paced up and down the verandah insisting that the deficient diet was sapping all her energy – though her perpetual motion contradicted this – and, to refine the tension, a German couple who had been doing soil research near by were accompanied by three bored and petulant children – and were themselves un-soothing because they persistently ascribed the absence of planes to Nepalese inefficiency. By the end of these ten days The Annapurna’s atmosphere had become so charged with frustrated animosity that it was dangerous even to look at any of the would-be passengers, much less address them, and only a Tibetan proprietor could have retained his poise as did Kessang.

  During this period the whole valley lay inert beneath water, providing an extraordinary contrast to the usual noisy ‘to-ing and froing’ that starts daily at dawn. For most of the time our Pardi ‘street’ was knee-deep in brown floods and soon grass began to grow freely on the mud floor of my little hallway – luckily for Tashi, who was thus spared frequent swims to her customary squatting site.

  My first action on arriving in Kathmandu on the sixteenth of August was to book a return seat for the twentieth; but no RNAC flights took off either yesterday or today and it was only through Swiss kindness that I got home this afternoon in a microscopic Pilatus Porter.

  When the three Swiss and I reached Gaucher Airport at 9 a.m. we were told that the forecast seemed doubtful and we spent the next four hours waiting in the so-called restaurant, from whence the pilot made periodic excursions to survey the sky. At 1.30 p.m. a favourable radio report came through from Pokhara but, since Kathmandu remained completely cloud-obscured, my private opinion was that tomorrow should be regarded as another day. Yet the pilot declared cheerfully that it was worth having a bash at it, meaning that we could turn back if conditions worsened.

  Flying in a Pilatus Porter is rather like being in a winged motor car; there is room for a passenger on the front seat, and one literally does get a bird’s eye view of people working or walking on the hills below. Yet for me this trip was a most ghastly experience. As we climbed over the city I was unable to distinguish that narrow gap in the mountains which is the only exit for Pokhara flights and I badly needed the fifteen-minute respite of clear weather that followed our escape from this inferno of vapour. Then another menacing wall of cloud loomed up directly across our route and as we went into the middle of it I thought of my dear ones while the pilot yelled to Kathmandu, ‘We may be turning back, stop. Just seeing how far it goes, stop. Hold on for two minutes, stop. Am warning Pokhara, stop.’ All of which sounded to me remarkably like Famous Last Words – stop! Yet oddly enough, after those two (very long) minutes the vapour did begin to thin, and Kathmandu was told that everything looked lovely in the garden. Next Pokhara was advised that now they could safely send a plane back – which meant that when we plunged into another cloud ten minutes later I suffered the extra terror of imagining a collision with the returning Dakota. But mercifully the Pokhara Valley itself was u
nclouded and we landed here at 2.30 in bright sunshine.

  I received an astonishingly warm welcome from my Pardi neighbours. Obviously they have at last accepted me, on much the same basis as they accept the serenely smiling blind beggar-boy who wanders alone round the valley, or the ragged Indian lunatic who speaks Oxford English and sits in tea-houses for hours on end, holding heated discussions with himself about the relative merits of Hinduism and Christianity.

  31 AUGUST

  Last month I discovered that Bhupi Sherchan – a young Pokhara friend of mine who is Nepal’s best-known poet – possesses a copy of Ekai Kawakuchi’s Three Years in Tibet. This is the rarest of all books on Tibet and I have long been scouring the bookshops of Britain and India for a copy of the English translation, published by the Theosophical Society of Madras in 1906. At first it seemed as inexplicable as it was thrilling that the valley’s meagre stock of English volumes should happen to include a Kawakuchi; but then Bhupi told me that this copy was presented to his grandfather by the author who, on his way to Tibet, had received much kind assistance from the powerful Sherchan clan – one of the richest merchant families in Nepal.

  During the earlier part of this month, while animation was suspended, I spent much of my time reading Kawakuchi and came really to love this brave, eccentric and very devout Japanese Buddhist monk, who combined profound learning with the most engagingly childish foibles. In 1900, having mastered the Tibetan language, he disguised himself as a lama and risked his life by illicitly entering Tibet to study the country’s religion. Then, having serenely survived many arduous and varied adventures he went home to write this unsurpassed account of life in Tibet at the turn of the century. And his book so enchants me that I must quote a few relevant extracts before reluctantly returning it to Bhupi.