Coromandel Sea Change

by Rumer Godden

  So we took Subhan and, in spite of his more expensive suggestions, very little camp luggage: two tents for us, a cook tent in which Subhan and the pony men would sleep; three camp beds for us and a roll each of blankets – the men would sleep, as they always slept, on the ground and Sol on the end of my bed; a folding chair each and one folding table; a leather-covered basin between us and a small canvas bath. There were also two kiltas – wicker-lidded baskets covered in leather that held cooking pots, vegetables and enough stores, for we should find nothing, after we left the road, but milk, some eggs, perhaps chickens and honey. Subhan had a try to persuade me not to come. The pass was very high, he said. He was sure I should break down and, ‘Don’t come, Memsahib,’ he begged. ‘It will be much more fun without you.’

  ‘I don’t mind. I am coming.’ I said.

  We left by lorry in the early morning in the middle of June. The vale of Kashmir is a land of rice, fruit and honey; the foothills up to the mountains are cut and terraced with rice fields in jigsaw patterns edged with small mud walls or dykes. That morning the rice was still young, only a few inches high, and showed the water between its roots, reflecting the blue of the sky. Every village we passed had its walled garden of fruit; in some they were picking the apricots and men with flat baskets, covered against the sun with leaves, were carrying the fruit into Srinagar.

  We passed the big golden-orange mosque of Hazrat Bal and the fort, red-walled on its hill, and drove across the vale and past the bridge at Gangabal, with its little lake, so deep that, the legend tells, a man spun rope for ten years, weighted it and dropped it in and it did not reach the bottom.

  The Manasbal lake is larger and further away; the road skirted the dried-up foothills and, on the burnt dun colour of their slopes, the crops showed brilliantly: rice, wheat and ripe oats, blue-flowered flax plentifully mixed with poppies, while, along the road itself, were the vineyards that give the small green Kashmiri grapes. We drove on and on until we turned so steeply into a gap in the hill that it seemed we were driving into the sky itself; the car seemed to hang in the air for a moment and then point downwards and there below us was Manasbal, the lake with its famous kingfisher-blue water, its shores rising in cliffs of cream-rose earth planted with mulberry, poplar and willow trees. Across the lake the Pir Panjal mountains cut off the sky, their crests reflected white in the far water. The near shore with its gentle bank was shaded with chenars, the giant trees, like plane trees, planted long ago by the Moghul Emperors, Abhar and Shah Jehan. In among the tree-reflections in the blue water, lotuses were in bud.

  The road grew wilder after we left Manasbal and had turned into the gorges of the River Sinde, which has rapids all the way so that it runs a peculiar milky blue, broken with spray and falls. As we began to climb, the mountains came down closer to the river on each side and now the trees were spruce and fir, showing here and there a glade of green. We passed Kharghil bridge, where the river widens into pools, good for trout, and a valley of pebbles. It was here that we had our fishing camp when I was a child; then it was three days’ march from the vale by pony caravan; now the road goes far past it and past the villages of Khanghan and Gunde, where we used to spend the night in small wooden rest houses. There were other lesser villages along the road, each with their small orchard of fruit and almond and walnut trees, hedges of wild roses, children in short robes and round caps – boys and girls alike – chickens and goats.

  We met caravans of pack ponies and clans of bakriwars making their way up the valley. The women pulled their dogs off the road as we passed, big and furry dogs not unlike huskies and very fierce. I had to hold Sol to stop him jumping from the car. To me these nomads are romantic, especially their clothes. The women have thin striped trousers, draped and full, and black tunics fluted so that they swing as they walk, embroidered down the front with white buttons. They wear a small round cap in deep blue or scarlet, tilted forward, and over it a black veil stencilled in magenta or yellow or scarlet. All of them have silver jewellery, with chains and scarlet beads, and many carry a baby in a sling. They sound colourful but are unspeakably filthy. Nearly every group of them stopped us and asked me for medicines for stomach and sores, and one poor woman for what I thought must be a tumour. They were miserable while the men were clean, extraordinarily strong and handsome; the men looked biblical with their long coats and turbans; like the Kashmiris, each of them carried a shawl, folded as a plaid on their shoulders, but they carried nothing else – the women were for that – and they had staves and sandal shoes, thonged with turned-up toes, while the women, of course, were barefoot. Their children wore caps embroidered and trimmed with beads, with a flap hanging down behind like an elongated sunbonnet to keep away the flies and sun.

  We met people every day of the march with their ponies, buffaloes and goats, or on their summer-grazing pastures.

  We met Kashmiri villagers too, coming down, carrying silkworms to Srinagar, and once we were held up by a caravan of those endearing but slow-moving beasts, zobos, cross between a cow and bull yak, black and almost square and heavy, driven by Ladakhis. All the while, each side of the road, the gorge grew narrower and narrower while the slate and pumice-coloured mountains seemed to grow taller. We passed our first glacier, ice right down to the river; until I came to Kashmir I had always imagined glaciers to shine with snow and green-blue ice, but this, like most Kashmiri ones I have seen, was brown and dirty, littered with debris and fallen trees.

  Now the villages grew fewer, only an occasional huddle of dark wooden shacks in the solitude of the mountains, with no fruit trees or roses, nothing near but the river and a few fields, still bare and rough, perhaps some sheep grazing, a straggle of chickens and hobbled pony or two.

  ‘What do the people do here in the winter?’ Simon asked Subhan.

  ‘What is there to do? Sit in the house and wait for the spring,’ and spring does not come here until June. After a moment Subhan added, ‘But there is a trouble: ponies, chickens, sheep, children, eat all winter.’

  We left the dark gorges and climbed up and up, into the sun, until we came into the long valley of our old camping ground, Sonamarg.

  Marg in Kashmiri means ‘a meadow’; Sonamarg is the Meadow of Flowers, and it is as beautiful as it sounds. On every side of it, the mountains come down, their peaks ribbed with snow and glaciers; but there is no feeling of narrowness for the valley is wide and rolls for miles with undulations of grass, rocks, fir trees, and hidden pockets grassed with clover, forget-me-nots and geums. Its sounds are quiet except for the streams. It has a village with a serai and post office and from it the road to Baltal now follows the river to the foot of the Zoji-La pass into Leh or Little Tibet. We drove quickly through where once we used to wander and laze. There were only two villages in all the nine miles, rough Ladakhi villages of a few huts. The winter snow-bridges were still standing in the river, but the valley and the slopes of the mountains were already pastoral with flocks and the calls of the herdsmen came down to us.

  Simon and Paula wanted to explore a Ladakhi village so we stopped the car and walked up a bridle path through the fields. The village was in the gully of a mountain stream and, unlike the Kashmiri villages or nomad camps, the houses were not of wood but stone, flat-roofed like forts, with narrow slits of windows and wooden lattices. The people lived on the first floor because of the snow and, like Kashmiris, penned their cattle below. The lanes between the houses were running with filth and calves, hens and chickens were wandering loose. We were invited into one house and climbed into it by a ladder of branches; its room was a blackened hole, the beams scorched to charcoal. There was a cooking fire of stones in the centre, a hole in the roof for the smoke, some iron pots and a bed of stenching sheepskins. We came out very quickly.

  The people were plump and healthy, mongolian-faced with pink cheeks; the men wore robes of grey-cream homespun wool, caps or velvet hats and were surprisingly clean and handsome, but the women looked degraded and unattractive, their clothes black cott
on trousers, tunics and a curious cap with a long neck piece. They had some rough jewellery and each had a brass keyring and a brass spoon hanging from a chain on the breast. If a Ladakhi woman has a sheepskin and a basket on her back, she is married, and we asked to see a baby in a bag but there were none; this custom, of which I had been told, must be dying out – if it ever existed; the baby is alleged to be put into a bag with sheep dung and entrails and tied up to the neck to keep it warm, only being taken out once or twice a month. It seems too horrible to be true.

  We bought eggs, a keyring and spoons. Simon wanted to buy some of the homespun but they had only narrow strips.

  He asked Subhan what these people ate. ‘Atah flour made into chapattis, and makhai,’ which is Indian corn.

  ‘No vegetables?’

  ‘No, only shalgam,’ a kind of turnip.

  ‘But the summer climate is so beautiful,’ Simon argued, ‘They could grow potatoes, green vegetables, corn.’ Subhan shrugged and said that besides the Indian corn only a black coarse grain was grown for horses.

  We went back to the car and soon the road ended, running out beside a low line of wooden houses and a serai, with a guest house on the other side of the river. It was Baltal, the motor-head and we saw our ponies waiting for us, five baggage ponies and two riding ones, Bulbul and Lallah – all ponies in Kashmir seem to be called Bulbul or else Lallah after the flaunting red Kashmiri tulip. With them was Jobara, headman of his village, caretaker of the Sonamarg rest house, and for long years our ponyman and friend, and beside him was his son, Amar, who had known Paula and Simon as children and was remarkable for his aquamarine blue eyes that, with his pale brown skin and his black curly hair, made him look as I have always imagined the young Joseph to look. There was also another ponyman and an old bearded coolie for fetching and cutting wood.

  We made our camp above the river and, while the ponymen put up the tents, the coolie gathered wood, Subhan fried chicken and potatoes on the clay stove Jobhara had built ready for us, he and Amar came and talked, telling us all the news of their village and ponies since last year.

  We put our table by the campfire built in the circle of our tents of whole logs and branches laid across one another loosely so that the fire was fanned gently by the evening wind. After dinner we watched the sun, which had left us long ago and was now slowly leaving the mountains, turning their rock purple and then blue and rose, then snow pink and gold. We listened to the river and the steady sound of the ponies grazing and sniffed a new scent added to the good one of wood smoke, a scent that was pungent and always nostalgic for it brings back my childhood – the smell of the hookah passing from one of the men to another as they sat on their heels outside the cook tent; the gentle sound of the water bubbling in the pipe bowl made an accompaniment to the noisier river.

  We saw the quarter moon go down over the mountains opposite. As soon as the moon had gone the stars grew enormous; if we walked away from the fire we could see the mountain snow-crests shining in their light.

  Jobara came later to talk over plans for tomorrow. He sat companionably down on his heels beside us and spoke in his usual quiet way, but he wanted us to change our plans and go up the Zoji-La towards Leh. June was early, he thought, for the Herbowagan. ‘But Subhan said . . .’ I began.

  ‘Subhan!’ Jobara did not say any more but it was enough. I knew his opinion of the Srinagage boatmen – and I knew that he knew that, from the moment we had decided to come and, as a matter of course, engaged Jobara, Subhan had never ceased to tell us what a rogue Jobara was, how he overcharged for ponies, coolies, milk, eggs, everything, how much better he, Subhan, would have arranged . . . Kashmiris are arch-backbiters and Subhan was only being true to his kind, but in all the time I had known him I had never heard Jobara say as much as he had tonight.

  ‘But we must go over the Herbogawan,’ said Simon, ‘it’s the only chance we have,’ and in the end Jobara agreed we should. ‘But it will not be comfortable,’ and he warned us we must make an early start.

  I was glad. ‘I want to see the sunrise,’ I said.

  ‘I will show it to you,’ said Jobara with his usual courtesy.

  When he had gone I made hot rum and milk – being Mahommedan he could not have shared it. As I moved between the tent and the fire I felt the wind ice-cold on my cheek, but we all had a warm sleepiness after so long a day and there was only a moment in bed to look out and see the stars and hear the river before we were asleep.

  What I always remember most about mornings in Himalayan camps is the dew, the intense silver greenness of it on the grass, and the chill. As the sun slowly came down the mountains to reach the valley, we crept out of our tents to the fire that Subhan had kicked together again and tried to stop ourselves shivering, drink our tea and eat the tough camp toast. Sol refused to get up until the bed was taken down under him. The ponies were being driven in and camp was struck behind us as slowly the sun came nearer and warmed the air, taking the cold from it but leaving it fresh and clear. The mountains had fresh snow, every fir was stainlessly clean and when, leaving the basin for Simon to shave in, Paula and I went to wash in the stream it was like crystal and the flowers by the rocks were shining with dew. We left camp at a quarter-past eight, Sol, now wide awake and warm, circling and skimming the grass.

  Sonamarg is 9,000 feet, Baltal 11,500 feet, and the ascent out of these high valleys is always literally breathtaking. As we rode or walked we were rising up the height of the mountains, meeting their snow, and the valley dropped away until it looked like a valley in the background of an Italian primitive, curiously complete and small, with the pastoral green of the glades, the fir-tree forests, the pale colour of the silver birches, and the limpid blue windings, clear like a ribbon, of the river; and then the track turned, the range was spread out around us, and we saw it opened out in all its size.

  I feel I have not made enough impression of the height of these mountains. My mind has dwelt too much in the valleys and on their smaller, pocket-like alpine valleys, invitingly green in the immensity of the mountains, an immensity of huge clefts forested with fir and spruce and birch until one gets above tree level, when they are rock-veined with glaciers; above, higher still, and overhanging the track so high that they are even out of eagles’ reach, are cliffs and pinnacles of rock in all colours of slate and pumice, grey, purple, dun, rose, perpetually streaked with snow. There are always eagles flying below these pinnacles and to look up to them one has to bend one’s neck far, far back.

  As we climbed it grew quieter and quieter, ‘because we have left the streams behind,’ said Paula. We came to a belt of flowers, some of them almost over in the valley below. We passed a silver-birch wood, its floor covered with small hill iris, and slanted queer staircases of rock and frozen streams that made miniature glaciers. The ponies plodded up, their small hooves sending stones rattling down and sometimes, from a rock or a pile of stones, a marmot, those queer little red-brown animals with round heads and eyes like a happy puppy’s, sat up on their haunches and scolded us. Each time Sol gave chase and had to be retrieved from a wilderness of stones.

  We lunched by the way and all afternoon climbed higher and higher. It became more comfortable to walk than to ride, though our calves ached and our breath seemed to clot in our chests. We longed to stop but Jobara still led us up and up.

  We crossed a large glacier, which is always troublesome at this season; the snow is not quite hard on top and gives at every step. The ponies walked fearfully; sometimes the path was on the edge of a crevasse, ominously blue, and in parts the snow was soft enough to sink through. To our surprise we met a small caravan coming down, a Hindu merchant, his wife, a ponyman and three ponies. Where had they come from? What were they doing? Though we greeted one another, we never knew. The merchant walked but his wife sat perched on a pack pony; wearing a blue robe like a kirtle edged with scarlet, of the graceful kind that Kashmir Hindu women wear and with a white cuff, she looked like a Virgin in a primitive Italian Flight into E
gypt except that she also wore gaiters and sand shoes.

  Soon after four o’clock we began to climb down to the small lake of Her Nag, where we were to camp. It was a merciful relief to walk downhill and Sol began to circle and bark in his usual way. Her Nag already had a big encampment of buffalo and goat people, come back to the cluster of log huts in the rich grass that was their summer pasturage. The unmistakable acrid smell of dung and wood smoke filled the air but the little valley was exquisite with a long waterfall, falling sheer from the rock onto the glacier above us and looking, not like a waterfall, but a plume of mist. The glacier clefts showed a true ice-blue, the air was filled with the bleating of goats and the whole valley was spread with flowers: primulas, geums, gentians, columbines, forget-me-nots and white anemones.

  When we stopped, waiting while the packs were taken off and the tents unrolled, we realized how cold it was and Jobara came to us. ‘Put on your coats at once,’ he commanded. Long ago I learned that it is always wise to do what Jobara says.

  Soon after we left camp next morning we met a flock of goats coming down where we were climbing up. They were not being driven as sheep are but were running independently, quite fearless as they bounded from rock to rock; they were kingly goats, standing as high as a young bullock calf, with coats like silk, beards that looked as if they were combed and fierce yellow eyes. Sol decided he would keep close to us; once long ago he had tried an encounter with a goat and still had a horn scar on his shoulder. A goat boy came up and asked us if we would like a drink of milk, offering it in a wooden bowl. When we had drunk a little for politeness, he and his companion sat down on a rock and drank turn about from the same bowl. One of them had a crimson turban, the other a rose-coloured skullcap of the kind Jobara wears.