by Ruskin Bond
Young Bharat Sundaram was then on a trek in the Northeast, accompanied by porters laden with provisions and tents. He was tracking footprints and sampling elephant dung to determine their numbers. A nationwide elephant census was underway. The Northeast is a special zone where the very existence of elephants is under threat in many areas; many of their old stomping grounds and corridors of passage have been wiped out. However, it was the hornbill that Bharat was most interested in because of those traits in the bird which are expected only of humans. Bharat had photographed a rufous-headed Hornbill in Namdapha. This species of hornbill had never been spotted in India and the event was being treated as a new find.
The hornbill is a colorful, beautiful bird with an extraordinarily large beak. When the female lays eggs, she goes on a four-month-long maternity leave. The young emerge from the nest only once they have fully fledged. During this time the male guards the nest. He brings food for his wife and children. Some species of hornbill form cooperative societies. Many pairs get together to hatch eggs and to look after the brooding mothers. Pairs mate for life, and remain faithful to each other.
The beauty of the hornbill is also its curse. Nagas use their feathers to adorn their headdresses. Many tribes of Arunachal Pradesh, including the Nyishi, use hornbill beaks as ornaments on their crowns. They lie and wait for the male; when it returns to the nest with food for its brooding mate, they kill it. The flesh of the hornbill and oil extracted from its fat are considered an aphrodisiac. Unani hakims, wandering ayurvedic vaids who examine people on roadsides in full view of curious gawkers, and quacks of all varieties possess hornbill beaks with which they lure the loveless and the superstitious. This bird is rapidly dwindling in numbers; it is a rare sight even in dense forests.
Forest officers and the World Wildlife Trust of India jointly came up with the idea of replicas after a great deal of thought. The beaks distributed in the Nyishi villages had been manufactured in Delhi on order. Each had cost fifteen rupees to make. Since one can’t make money off hornbills, they were being distributed gratis. The officers and the NGOs were certain that the tribals would reconcile these plastic toys with their religious beliefs and stop hunting the bird. There were some organizations, too, which held that plastic is harmful to the environment and the tribals should be given wooden beaks. Even better, they should be trained to carve beaks so that they could find employment.
Some people in the villages had accepted the plastic beaks, but the ones with the original article made fun of them. Now the danger was that the remaining hornbills in the forest would also be wiped out due to this conflict between the villagers. This was why Lat Gam Singpho wanted to pose his question to Bharat Sundaram.
Bharat had also visited Gandhi Gram, the furthest village on India’s frontier, in the far south of Namdapha. Lisu refugees from Burma have been settled there. Anyone who visits carrying kerosene and sugar is welcomed in the village as an honored guest. The nearest weekly market is a three-day walk each way. They barter goods with local fish which they hunt with an anesthetic. The Lisu examine the moss which grows on the rocks standing mid-river. From the marks made on the moss by the fishes’ mouths as they graze upon them, they gauge the size of the fish. They then take the leaves of a particular tree which has narcotic properties, grind them up, and stir the paste into the water. The drugged fish belly-up on the surface. The fish are not for sale but, yes, they can be bartered for kerosene.
* * *
The Apatani tribe was yet to come across that important invention known as the wheel in the year Kuru Hasang was born in the Ziro valley. Still, the Apatani are considered the most modern among the tribes of Arunachal for having innovated the concepts of fixed—non-jhum—cultivation and irrigation. When Hasang was admitted to the Army School, Bhubaneshwar, in 1963, his father ritually sacrificed an egg on the village border before letting him go out into the limitless, unknown world. Within five years of leaving his village, Hasang was commissioned into the Air Force, became a fighter pilot, and flew MIGs. He came back to his village in Arunachal in 1978—once the state was formally formed—having retired as flight lieutenant, to try his hand at politics. When I was traveling in the area, the middle-aged Kuru Hasang, after having lost multiple elections, was the chief secretary of the Arunachal Pradesh Congress Committee. His wife ran a medical store in the Hapoli neighborhood of Ziro.
Many tribes of Arunachal Pradesh, including the Nocte, the Khampti, the Nyishi, and the Tagin, have their own fading heroes who, because of coincidences, have managed to cram many lives into one. They have vaulted distances which takes the rest of humanity many thousands of years to trudge over. More than sixty tribes live in Arunachal and the state has more than fifty known languages. Yet the written history of the area is merely three hundred years old. Every old officer who has served in the area has a story which begins: “When we first came here, accustomed as we were to the sensations which nudity arouses, we wouldn’t even look at the tribals. And, when we began to look at them, what happened was…”
The state of Arunachal has itself similarly launched headlong into democracy. Before independence, the region was officially known as a “Tribal Area.” A few British surveyors would travel in the area accompanied by armed battalions, scouting for opportunities to build roads and lay down railway lines. They wanted to extend trade possibilities for the East India Company further into countries in the east. In 1954 the Kameng, Siang, Subansiri, Lohit, Tirap, and Tuensang divisions were combined into the North East Frontier Agency (NEFA) which was administered by the Foreign Ministry for a long time. After 1972 Tuensang went to Nagaland and the rest of the divisions coalesced into Arunachal Pradesh. Post-1962, after the debacle with China, the central government invested blindly in roads and communication networks, and the investment shows. A population of merely nine lakh lives in an area of 78,000 square kilometers but telephone poles stand tall in every jungle. The army regularly flies sorties from bases in Siliguri and Dibrugarh, ferrying rations, political leaders, officers, and soldiers—an exercise that costs an average of four crore rupees per day. There are close to one hundred helipads in the state. In all of India, the maximum number of mishaps—mainly due to helicopters losing their way in fog and crashing—in which ministers, chief ministers, and pilots have lost their lives have occurred in Arunachal.
I wanted to visit Hapoli and meet Kuru Hasang and his wife. The idea was to conduct a long interview on his memories of the time when he came back to Ziro on his first furlough from the Air Force. But I got distracted and reached Tawang instead.
It happened in this manner. One day in Bhalukpong, the remains of a poet interred within the soul of a Buddhist monk of the Mahayana order decided to draw breath. And all he said was “Tawang will have played for two hours in the light of the new sun by the time dawn breaks over the rest of the world.” More prosaically, friends in Benares had given me the names of lamas who had gone to Sarnath to study theology and who now lived in monasteries in Arunachal. So, naturally, I set out on a very long, serpentine road shrouded in fog which threaded through a desert of snow and ice. I have never seen more shades of blue in the sky since.
Before I reached Bomdila, I could never have imagined that a Tata Sumo, grinding along in the first and second gears, is like a faithful horse which responds to its rider’s most urgent wishes, his most fleeting whims. It takes a special set of ears to drive on these remote mountains—ears which can discern the whispers, wails, and sobs of an engine underneath its overpowering roar. And it takes a special kind of sensitivity which detaches the accelerator and the brake from the vehicle, makes them part of the driver’s being, and instantaneously transmutes the smallest tremor, the least vibration, into crystal-clear thought. It is not without reason that in the couplets and verses inscribed on windscreens and bumpers—usually dismissed as slight and even cheap—the vehicle is often cast in the role of lover or mistress. At their base is the living, breathing relationship between man and machi
ne, and their pact to live and die as one.
Descending from the 6,000-foot-high Nechi Phu pass, I would occasionally visualize the Tata Sumo drifting down the gorge like an unmoored kite and children standing at the bottom of the valley, waving, imagining it to be a helicopter. At each instance I would stare hard at the driver and think: Was I projecting my innermost fear and influencing him in any way? But he was in a deep trance. He was lost in a time and space where his passengers had no existence any longer.
From Bomdila (8,500 feet) an infinite variety of clouds billow and play. Fog descends without warning and obscures the world; when it parts the dazzling Himalaya stands tall and close. Bomdila is the district headquarters of the West Kameng district, home to the Monpa, Sherdukpen, Aka, Mijia, and Bugun tribes. The dogs of Bomdila are infamous—they prowl the streets on sub-zero nights and can easily take down a man and feed on his flesh. There is an abundance of flora. Some quite lucrative. A truckload of Taxus baccata—from which the anti-cancer chemical Taxol is extracted and exported to Europe—delivered to Guwahati can fetch enough money to buy a brand-new truck chassis.
There was an old man in Bomdila market who said to me in the manner of one demonstrating an invisible monument, “The Chinese had marched down to here during the war.”
I found a place to bed down in a slate-roofed dhaba in the Dirang valley. A wild wind sprang up and whistled as night descended; the temperature dropped sharply and it was difficult to keep one’s feet in that gale outside. I piled two quilts over my sleeping bag but the cold bore into my bones. The mistress of the dhaba allowed me to move my sleeping bag close to the fireplace but before going to bed issued strict instructions to her terrifying mastiff: “Keep sharp; no one should go outside!” I’d make a move to walk out, driven by the desire to view the silvery Himalaya in moonlight, but the dog would bristle, bare its teeth, and growl imperiously: “A fleeting glimpse, cooling balm to the eyes, or your life. Make up your mind about what you want.” I’d resign myself and come back to my sleeping bag.
In the morning I made my way to a gompa—established by the Buddhist guru Padmasambhava in the eighth century inside the Dirang dzong, an ancient fort—to look for Lama Nawang Lamsang. In this area, which seems more Tibet than India, Padmasambhava is known as Lopon Rinpoche. Young novice monks were seated in the sanctum sanctorum of that small gompa, reading from ancient scriptures. An elderly monk informed me that monk Lamsang was traveling outside the Dirang valley. After a moment’s thought he opened a battered tin box, took out a very old piece of stone, and, placing it on my palm, said, “This is the heart of a demon which was killed here. After it was killed, the Mon people converted to Buddhism.”
“How did its heart turn to stone?”
“What then, if not a stone…it was a demon!”
With that piece of irrefutable logic, he left no reason for me to doubt that symbol of the victory of Buddhism.
As one climbs up the Dirang valley toward the Sela Pass, the vegetation thins out, disappears, and is replaced by snow-topped granite mountains and, in a very few places, by densely growing grass which appear as soft as mattresses. Hidden by dense fog, army trucks scream and wail their way up in an ant-crawl; grazing yaks occasionally heave into view; the thin oxygen makes breathing difficult. The Sela (14,000 feet) is the second-highest motorable pass in the world. These winding high roads, made possible by the prowess of the Border Roads Organization, resemble tangled kite cord wound around one’s fingers and then carelessly tossed aside. To the left, immediately after the Sela gate, was a lake which had frozen inward from its shores. In the middle was clear blue water which seemed to reflect the universe itself. Some new army recruits were playing with snowballs and taking pictures. From the window of a small tea shop in a stone hut near the gate I could see valleys shimmering through gaps in the layers of cloud which covered them. The tea shop was run by a family which made a living selling tea to tourists and soldiers. Looking out at the soldiers, the tea maker said sagely even as vapor billowed from his mouth, “The more difficult a place is to reach, the more its beauty is enhanced…But for how long?”
The most reassuring sight in this bleak mountain desert were the white flags which flapped restlessly in the icy wind. This is a custom in these parts: whenever one asks for something from the gods he erects a white flag. Perhaps he lives with the conviction that his prayer will someday ride the winds to its intended address.
The driver slipped into a trance once more as the descent commenced. It had rained recently. The water dripping off the rocks and boulders on the sides of the road had pooled in the middle and frozen over, creating strange shapes—mostly in the shape of daggers. Greenery made an appearance after Jaswantgarh. In Jang we stopped in an old Monpa house where a bottle of rum stood next to a kettle of water bubbling on a wood fire. A cat was perched on a stool next to the stove to keep count of the pegs consumed. The valleys spread out around us sighed and moaned as they endured the relentless assaults of the wind. The owner of the establishment sat outside; she was convinced that life-threatening cold is enough to ensure honesty.
We caught occasional glimpses of the golden roofs of the Tawang Monastery—one of the most important and famous centers of Mahayana Buddhism—in the falling twilight as our vehicle rounded corners; the collector had already been contacted and a grand suite booked in the Circuit House.
* * *
Gulping down pure mountain air in the pauses afforded to me by my lungs which struggled in the thin air, I reached the monastery in the afternoon, looking for a Sarnath-returned lama. The prayer wheel mounted on the front gate was freezing. Teenage monks were sitting in the lawn in front of the prayer hall, eating porridge. The prayer flag towering above them was straining in the wind, blowing with sufficient force to sway the sixty-foot pole to which the flag was attached. Behind them was the Tawang Monastery museum. Among the exhibits were an enormous elephant tusk, ancient musical instruments, monks’ belongings, and human skulls covered over with gold and silver leaf and exquisitely carved. There was also a library which included silk-wrapped religious manuscripts seven centuries old. The prayer hall was awash in the glow of a statue of Buddha that had been brought from Tibet three hundred years earlier. On the walls were murals depicting tantric scenes.
There used to be many legends about how such a massive statue reached Tawang. About half a century earlier, when a strong earthquake jolted the region, the statue split and even more stories were added to the legends and fed them. In 1997, His Holiness the Dalai Lama visited Tawang Monastery; under his orders, skilled sculptors were invited from Nepal to restore the Buddha statue. During the restoration, certain documents were recovered from the belly of the statue; from them it was learnt that different parts of Buddha’s body were interred separately in southern Tibet by followers of the Gelugpa sect, which had been brought there on horseback.
I asked the lama in charge of the museum why so many skulls were displayed. He pointed out Panden Lhamo, the guardian deity and protectress of Tibet, in a mural and said, “Earlier, lamas used them to offer liquor to the deities during tantric worship; but Pepsi or Coke is offered nowadays.”
“Where do you get that from?”
“From the general store in the bazaar, of course!” the lama said, staring at me in astonishment.
After the Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tawang is the oldest monastery in the Mahayana tradition. It was established in the seventeenth century by Merag Lama Lodre Gyatso. He is said to have been inspired and guided by his horse to do so. In the Tibetan language, Tawang means “chosen by a horse.” Tawang is famous all over the world as a center of tantric worship; seventeen monasteries fall under its direct administration. Until not very long ago, collectors from Tibet would come to villages in Tawang to collect land tax. As far as China is concerned, Tawang is northern Tibet. Based on this claim, when Arunachal Pradesh became a state in the Indian union, China registered an official protest about Indi
a’s claim on certain parts of the area.
That evening in the bazaar I met a red-robed monk astride a motorcycle. He told me that Jaspinder Narula, a Bollywood playback singer of Punjabi origin, would be performing at the Buddha Purnima festival. Udit Narayan—another Bollywood playback singer—had already performed once. He also told me that the actors Shahrukh Khan and Madhuri Dixit had shot scenes for the movie Koyla here.
I asked the monk, “Why is multinational Pepsi offered to the gods instead of homebrew?”
He winked and, with the look of a man enjoying himself, replied, “Buddhism is also a multinational religion, where’s the problem!”
*1 Between 399 and 412 C.E., the Chinese Buddhist monk traveled from China to India, Sri Lanka and back. This extract from his travel accounts describes his journey through Buddhist sites and kingdoms in the Hindukush and western Himalaya region.
*2 An autobiography of Jahangir and a history of his reign, the Jahangirnama (1609) is also a vivid record of the many diversions of the royal court. In this short essay, Jahangir describes a jaunt with his entourage.
*3 Explorer, scholar, and spy, Sarat Chandra Das made three trips into Tibet, a forbidden land, between 1879 and 1884, each time returning with Tibetan and Sanskrit texts. He went on to become a noted expert on Tibetan language, culture, and politics. His adventures are recorded in Journey to Lhasa and Central Tibet (1902).