‘What’s she saying?’ Marc said, taking off his headphones.
‘I have absolutely no idea, but she seems to be in a good mood.’
‘Is she a nun?’
Looking at the lady, whose soft brown scalp was showing through her shorn hair, I saw that she was wearing burgundy robes beneath her mustard overcoat and concluded that she was indeed a Tibetan nun. She was still talking, clutching a flask of tea in one hand, and gesturing towards me, breaking into giggles and evidently asking me some sort of question. Slapping her thigh and laughing in frustration, she turned to Jem and Marc for help, asking again the same question until I caught the word ‘Indian’.
‘Yes, Indian!’ I said, pointing to my chest. ‘And he’s half Indian,’ I added, pointing to Marc.
The nun grabbed my finger, erupting with joy. Waving her hands and chattering, she pushed Marc’s pillow to one side and sat down. The revelation had inspired another monologue.
‘What on earth is she saying?’ Marc asked, sitting up and trying to slow her down.
Jem had disappeared to the next compartment and returned with a nervous-looking, heavily pregnant young woman – the trains were full of heavily pregnant women, and I realised now it was because it wasn’t advisable to fly after a certain point. ‘She speaks English,’ Jem said, ‘she’s offered to translate.’
Perching warily on the edge of the berth, the young woman listened for a few moments then turned to me.
‘She wants to know if you are from India.’
‘Yes I am,’ I said, deciding that it was safer not to complicate matters by throwing English into the mix and disappointing the nun, who I could see wanted more than anything in life for me to be from India. Translating, the young woman started to laugh as the nun bounced on the seat, threw her hands in the air and then lurched forward to grab my arms.
‘She is very pleased you are from India. India is kind to Dalai Lama. You are the first Indian she meets. You are special, she says.’
‘We’ve just been to Tibet,’ said Jem, showing her a photo on his phone.
This was too much for the nun who broke into infectious laughter, her eyes disappearing into creases. Marc opened up his computer to show her the rest of the photographs of the Potala Palace as she sat on her hands and chuckled like a child, pointing at the screen with delight.
‘I love how happy this woman is,’ Marc said. ‘It’s amazing. She’s only got happiness.’
From the time the nun had poked her head in through the door, the compartment had radiated with warmth and laughter. We had no idea what she was saying, and she had no idea what we were saying, and the poor pregnant woman was struggling with all of us, but through gesture, facial expression and touch, we had managed to establish a mutual understanding. The nun took out her iPhone 6 Plus and began scrolling through photographs of young monks in training, and elderly monks taking selfies outside the Drigung Til monastery in Lhasa. Marc leant forward to look at the screen.
‘She’s on WeChat! I love it, Tibetan nuns on WeChat, having a conversation with another nun.’
WeChat was the most popular Chinese messaging service, and the three of us had been using it instead of WhatsApp since our arrival. Picking up my phone, the nun signalled for me to add her as a contact. Unsure how to search for her username, which was in Chinese script, I handed her my phone and she instantly opened up the settings and showed me how to scan the QR code, before handing it back to me with a nod and a laugh. She pointed at my phone, and I looked down to find she had already sent me a message – an emoji of a golden Buddha that exploded with light – turning everything I knew on its head. If I had to rely on a Tibetan nun to show me how to use my iPhone, nothing could ever surprise me again.
Before getting off at the next stop, the nun gestured for us to follow her to her compartment. There she rummaged through her bags, pulling out three red threads strung with gold amulets. Tying one to each of our wrists, she then placed a little black seed in our palms, indicating for us to eat it. Normally, I would have questioned ingesting strange black seeds from strangers, but I had moments of blind trust when travelling, and crunched down on its smoky sweetness, hoping it was the source of all her joy. Wrapping her shawl around her shoulders, the nun hurried to the door as we drew into the station, leaning in to give me a hug before she got off. As she let go of me, Jem reached out to hug her and she recoiled with shock, ducking like a boxer.
‘Mate, you can’t hug a nun!’ Marc exclaimed. ‘They’ve taken vows against that sort of thing.’
Sweetly patting Jem on the shoulder, the nun was still all smiles as she turned and got off the train, waving from the window as a group of her fellow nuns came to greet her on the platform.
After another thirty- or forty-hour journey – five hours here and there no longer registered on my radar – we arrived in Turfan, a sandy expanse that smelt like a spice market, owing to the enormous spice market just behind the station. Emerging from the exit, we were immediately encircled by taxi drivers wearing suits over jumpers, and embroidered felt skullcaps, colourful and flat on top, instead of fitted round white ones. Knowing our rucksacks made each one of us look like a mobile ATM, we strode off, fanning away the drivers until I checked the map on my phone and realised we needed a taxi. The station was not actually in Turfan, but thirty miles outside the city in a town called Daheyan, so I slowed down, trying not to look too keen as I haggled with the one driver who’d had the persistence to tail me into the middle of the street. The others had gone back to standing around. Knowing he’d got me as soon as I stopped, the driver took out his keys and pointed up the street to his car.
At the side of the road, a baker was shovelling frisbees of speckled cumin bread out of a kiln, which smelt too good to ignore. Buying a couple twisted into a brown paper bag, I climbed into the back of the taxi, warming my hands on the soft, sweet dough. Jem and Marc were trying to load our bags into the boot, which was full of gas canisters, when a chubby man wearing a sweater vest and sandals got into the back and closed the door. I looked at him, confused.
‘Friend,’ said our driver.
‘Wait, hang on,’ said Marc, sliding in next to us, ‘what’s this guy doing in here?’
‘Friend, Turfan.’
‘He’s your friend? Is he getting a free lift with us to Turfan?’
The chubby man sighed and scratched his face, tightening his grip on the grab handle.
‘I’m sorry, are we delaying your journey?’ said Marc. Tapping the driver on the shoulder he leant forward. ‘Mate, we can’t all fit in the car if your friend is coming with us. There are three of us, and there’s no room in the boot for our bags.’
‘We’ve got to keep at least two of the rucksacks in the front,’ said Jem, doing his best to squash them down.
The driver was now on his mobile, calling a friend who could speak English, and he handed the phone to me.
‘Hello?’
‘Hello, you go Turfan?’ said a voice.
‘Yes, but there are three of us. Three. No room for bags.’
‘Yes, room.’
‘No, no room.’
‘You pay small fee.’
‘For what?’
‘You pay 30 RMB.’
‘For what?’
‘You give phone to driver.’
Passing the phone back, I tore my bread into three parts, handing one each to Marc and Jem as I realised that we could be here for a while. So as not to appear ruder – we were already trying to throw him out of the car – I offered my third piece to the chubby man, who had settled himself in. He nodded and took a bite, his green eyes darting back to the driver on the phone. Marc was barely visible behind his camera bag, nibbling at his bread, and Jem was standing by the car waiting for the chubby man to move. More than twenty minutes had passsed when Marc lost his patience.
‘This is ridiculous,’ he said, ‘let’s just get out and get another cab.’
Realising he was about to lose his customers, the driver op
ened the back door and removed his friend, who sighed as he heaved himself up, crumbs all over his sweater vest. Calling his interpreter back, the driver passed the phone to me for a second time.
‘Hello?’
‘Hello, extra 20 RMB, you go, you three.’
‘Twenty RMB? For an extra twenty he’ll leave his friend here?’
‘Tell him we’re going to pay it,’ Marc said. ‘But relay to the driver that we’re very disappointed and that we’re not going to haggle because we can’t be bothered.’
The chubby man, who hadn’t said a word since he got into the car, now sauntered off into a tea shop as the car started up, and we drove through the town and out into the countryside.
‘Consider it a comfort tax,’ said Marc. ‘We’ve just paid not to have the big guy in the back with us.’
After this initial tussle, no one tried to extract money from us in Turfan. No one tried to stop us, arrest us or knife us as we walked around the city eating freshly grilled kebabs and looking at mosques – none of which were sounding out the call to prayer. It was one of the few elements of AJ’s scaremongering that proved to be true. Originally a nomadic tribe who’d ruled in eighth-century Mongolia, the Turkic-speaking Uighurs were at one time the dominant ethnic group in Xinjiang province, which had long encountered bloodshed during China’s civil war. Backed by Russia, the Uighur population had briefly declared the region the independent state of East Turkestan in 1949, but lost control a few months later after the communist takeover brought it into the firm grip of the central government. Although deemed an ‘autonomous region’, Xinjiang province had remained under Beijing’s control, sagging beneath the weight of Han Chinese flooding into the region, taking over jobs and diluting the Muslim culture. After 2001, the discovery of Uighurs in al-Qaeda camps, and a spate of horrific knife and bomb attacks on civilians, had spurred the government to clamp down on Islamic practices, blaming the population for fomenting unrest. However, human rights groups and analysts of China’s ethnic politics had accused Beijing of exaggerating the number of attacks, and explained the surge of violence as a response to China’s unprecedented actions to subjugate the Muslim minority: allegedly forcing women to remove headscarves; prohibiting beards; banning young people from going to mosques; restricting their employment prospects; replacing Uighur with Mandarin at schools; outlawing Muslim names; and offering cash subsidies for marriages between Uighurs and Han Chinese in an attempt to annihilate the culture. A number of critics had gone so far as to draw parallels with the Tibetan plight, but it was impossible to know where the truth lay. Almost every report of violence originated from China’s state-run Xinhua news agency, while witness accounts on Weibo, the social media platform, were rapidly removed. Local people were unwilling to speak on record to foreign journalists who were increasingly restricted from moving through the region.
With our Chinese visas on the brink of expiring, we had barely a few days to stroll around the oasis town’s covered markets and open bazaars stockpiled with melons, dried apricots and raisins, the atmosphere cloying with the smell of open pomegranates. Under the glow of a single bulb, slender chickens were being smoked and turned on spits, elderly Uighurs beckoned us over to sit with their young customers who shuffled up to make room, carrying on with their tea and gossip, unbothered by our presence. With the help of an English-speaking guide, we managed to spark up conversations with some of the young people, who initially avoided our questions, then warmed up over tea and bowls of mutton dumplings. It helped that we looked like nothing more than a trio of hapless tourists buying tat and eating noodles, which allowed us to coax out a number of depressing stories that aligned with many of the allegations of government suppression. The young Uighurs were regularly stopped and asked to hand over their phones for examination, and CCTV cameras above mosques ensured they didn’t try to enter to pray. Most Uighur men had pencil-thin moustaches, but no beards, and the women covered their hair with nothing more than small silk scarves, which was as far as they could go without reprisal.
One afternoon, we drove across the Taklamakan desert to see the Flaming Mountains, trudging for hours across the spectacular red dunes, not another soul in sight. From the outside looking in, this region was usually deemed exotic and arcane, rarely visited and often feared, when it was once the centre of the world, channelling civilisation out to the west and east. This northern branch of the old Silk Road route was rich with indicators of the origins of modern-day food, art and infrastructure – from the locals deep-frying triangular samsas stuffed with fatty meat, to the karez, a subterranean irrigation system hand-built more than 2,000 years ago that continued to sustain Turfan’s vineyards. Over the past seven months, I’d come to appreciate the depth of Britain’s diversity, and the way in which we took for granted the spectrum of colours and creeds who lived in relative harmony. With the exception of New York, most of the world’s major cities were visibly dominated by their own ethnic majorities, leaving us to wander around feeling exposed and sometimes vulnerable. But here in Turfan, we moved freely among local people whose slim eyes were hazel, green, and even blue; black and blond hair sticking out from under skullcaps. The fluidity of their features implied how we all might look one day, once we’d pooled and diluted our genes.
Just as Turfan had begun to settle in under my skin, we had to leave, driving in a haze of disappointment through the desert to the brand-new high-speed railway station. Like the ghost cities, the station soared out of the middle of the desert, having been built with the same optimism: less than a year old, the mega-station looked as though it was expecting thousands of travellers – or soon-to-be new residents – to pass through every day. And perhaps it had already started. A shiny white bullet train was waiting for us on the platform, one of fifteen departures a day, and in just over an hour a packed train pulled into Urumqi.
Unlike air travel, which eases you into a city, weaning you from the plane through the airport, and eventually onto the street, train travel parachutes you in. And from the moment I stepped off the train, I had a sense of foreboding. In the absence of the usual flurry of meeting and greeting, nothing but footsteps echoed through the building. People moved with care, their heads low, their eyes averted. No one spoke as we made our way to the exit where we were met by the ominous sight of soldiers and tanks in the forecourt. As though in the throes of a military coup, the immediate area was lined with barricades and police behind shields. Scanners beeped, boots trudged too close for comfort, and red lights spun panicked beams around the station’s perimeter. This was not like Turfan – which was a Garden of Eden by comparison.
‘Has something just happened?’ Jem wondered, as we joined the line waiting for taxis to draw up to the kerb.
‘Maybe, though I’m not sure I want to hang around too long to find out,’ I replied.
In silence, we drove through the city, taking in the armoured vehicles, riot police, and cameras bunched on lamp posts.
‘This is really sinister,’ said Marc peering out of the window and turning his camera onto a parked tank. Through the top, a single army officer held aloft a machine gun. As we’d witnessed in Tibet, open-backed lorries packed with troops rolled down the streets, pumping black diesel fumes into the traffic. Local militia carrying metal rods roamed in front of mosques as pedestrians crossed the roads to avoid them. What should have taken less than twenty minutes took more than an hour, as our taxi faced roadblocks and barricades, reversing down streets, circling newly devised one-way routes. Resigned to what was evidently a daily but relatively new situation, the driver finally deposited us at our hotel.
Determined not to feel threatened, but struggling to resist the urge to hide in our rooms, we spent the next few days venturing no further than a one-mile radius of the hotel, depressed by the military presence, and seeking comfort in nearby restaurants. Gravitating to the same place every day, we set up camp in a warm front room with an open kitchen run by a family of Uighurs. Much like a local pub, we began to recognise th
e same customers who came in to eat fried mutton noodles, and watch soaps on the overhead TVs, kissing each other’s cheeks and drinking tea. Bringing us free bowls of bone broth and bread, the owner saved us the same table every morning; his kids kneeling up with colouring books, occasionally trusted to serve small plates of kebabs. Out on the pavement, sheep carcasses hung from the trees. The temperature was below zero, and the air served well in the absence of freezers as the owner’s brothers grilled cumin-scented kebabs on coals, the men rubbing their fingerless-gloved hands and waving through the window when our food was ready.
‘Are we supposed to be scared of these people?’ Marc asked, winding his noodles around his chopsticks. ‘They’re so lovely.’
‘The only thing I’m scared of is the tanks and machine guns,’ said Jem, turning around and tapping on the glass for another round of kebabs.
Between here, Turfan, and on the trains, the Uighurs we had encountered had come across as peaceful, softly spoken people with a warm and welcoming manner. They didn’t seem to want for anything more than to be allowed to live among themselves, practise their faith, and earn their livelihood. And the Han Chinese were the same. Two doors along was a Sichuan hotpot restaurant where the young staff were as helpful and kind as any we’d come across. It was too simplistic to wonder why the two couldn’t live side by side, the idea reminding me of Sir Harold Atcherley’s words that equal proportions of good, indifferent and lousy people existed in any group, and any country. But collectively labelling Uighurs as one oppressed minority was naive. No doubt there were a number who did subscribe to extremism, and it was a tragedy that the entire community was suffering as a result. The extent of the military presence was evidence that the government was not going to allow the Uighur community to exist in peace until they conformed and came round to the Han Chinese way of life.
Around the World in 80 Trains Page 30