Himalaya (2004)

by Michael Palin

  In the heart of the house, the chief sits at the centre of a semicircle of elders, an impressive number of brass heads hanging on their chests. A fire blazes. Above it hang various trophies, animal skulls and horns, and a number of ceremonial gongs.

  The chief doesn’t look like a man who needs another bottle of rum at the moment. As I hand it over, his wide, bloodshot eyes meet mine for a moment, and I feel like someone who’s arrived very late at a party.

  He has been the Ang, as they call the local headman here, for 25 years. It is an hereditary title, and will pass to his son, provided that son is by the daughter of a fellow Ang, and not by one of the chief’s concubines. I ask how many concubines he has. Ten, comes the answer, after a longish pause for calculation.

  He will probably be the last Ang for whom head-hunting was a condition of office. He has taken five heads, he claims. He is now a Christian and was baptized, by total immersion, in a nearby stream. When he was young, he says, the village was ruled by fear; now it’s ruled by the fear of God.

  I still can’t get used to hearing such Sunday School sentiments from a group of people who, with their bleary eyes, boar-tusk head-dresses and monkey-fur decorations, look like every missionary’s idea of the unapologetic heathen.

  Tonight a huge thunderstorm breaks over Longwa. Torrential rain rakes the tin roof like machine-gun fire and a mighty rushing wind sets doors banging, dogs howling and curtains blowing. Good weather to lie in bed to.

  Day Ninety Two : Longwa to Digboi

  After the rains, the dirt road out of Longwa is heavy-going. We’re in reconditioned Second World War jeeps. Comfort is sacrificed for nimbleness and they’re alarming but agile on the slippery stuff. Our driver puts on a dusty cassette of Beatles hits. ‘Help!’ could have been written for this trip.

  Shingwong’s daughter, Pang Nou, shares the car with me. She’s just completed a Master’s degree in English Literature at Delhi. Her theses were on Plato’s Concept of Love and the Book of Job. She tells me that, though in Delhi she felt her homeland seemed unbelievably far away, the Indian government is taking Nagaland very seriously. The roads are free, they pay no tax and the benign attitude to local culture is all part of the greater worry that Nagaland might fall into the clutches of the hated enemy on the other side of the border. Not Myanmar, but China.

  After some 40 miles, the town of Mon appears like the new Jerusalem on a hill ahead of us, its Baptist church perhaps the largest and longest of the great white mini-cathedrals that rise above the palm and thatched terraces of the Naga Hills.

  Our jeep, which has skated through the mud so athletically up to now, slithers to a halt at the last quagmire and we take a while to get started again. Our driver, chewing on the betel with grim determination, does his best to make up time, narrowly avoiding an ‘After Whiskey Driving Risky’ sign, but by the time we reach the church, the service we’ve come to film has long begun.

  The Konyak Baptist Church is as big as an aircraft hangar, and every seat in the gallery and the body of the church is taken. Shing-wong estimates there are 2500 worshippers here. The church was built in 1952 and the services are invariably packed.

  The preacher is a Konyak who has been working as a Baptist missionary in Bhutan for the last nine years. In that time he’s made fewer than 100 converts, which, I must say, makes me want to go to Bhutan right away. He speaks at great length on this and related matters, then everyone stands to sing ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ in Konyak, after which the congregation, largely passive up till now, is exhorted by the pastor to speak their minds and give thanks to the Lord.

  A sedate, middle-aged lady next to me is transformed into a wailing ecstatic. As the prayers flow, her voice rises to a near scream. Stretching out her arm, she begins to rub her hand up and down my back.

  ‘Hallelujah, Praise the Lord!’ she screams.

  The pressure from her hand increases and it moves up to my head, ruffling my hair one way and then the other.

  ‘Halle-LU-JAH,’ she crescendoes, leaping to her feet, arms flung wide above me, eyes tight shut.

  ‘PRAISE…THE…LORD!’

  Day Ninety Three : Digboi, Assam

  Another night in a government guesthouse, this time on the plains of Northeastern Assam, a fertile salient pushing up into the tail of the Himalaya. The tropical lushness of these gently rolling hills is the work of the heavy monsoon rains that are channelled up the Brahmaputra valley. Overflowing flower beds almost reach up to the door and the guesthouse boasts the only 18-hole golf course in Assam.

  The money in Digboi comes from oil, discovered here in 1889 and commemorated at the Digboi Centenary Museum of Oil, at which it is obligatory to remove your shoes before entering.

  Also commemorated a few miles northeast of Digboi is the Indian end of the wartime Burma Road. Having so recently stood at the Chinese end, in Kunming, I’m interested to see what’s left here.

  There is very little. A strip of the old tarmac, which soon gets lost in the undergrowth, is all that remains of the road itself, and beside it is a patch of garden, complete with concrete furniture, that’s called the Stilwell Information Park. The main feature of this display is a 20-foot-high hoarding with a painted map of a section of the route, named after the American General ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell, who pushed this supply line through.

  On top of the map, an unequivocally modern message is delivered. ‘Rejuvenate our Life Line, Revitalize our Relationship, Reach out Beyond the Borders,’ it reads. A reminder that if you look at the geography of Assam you will see that its border with the rest of India is only a few miles wide, but its borders with China, Tibet, Burma, Bangladesh and Thailand run for 3700 miles (5900 km), and Beijing is as close to Assam as Delhi. But nothing much seems to be happening out to the east today. For now, it looks pretty much as if everything stops here.

  An hour’s drive from the oil town of Digboi there is a coal mine. This isn’t itself surprising, given this fossil-rich little corner of India, but Tipong Mine is a singular place indeed. A red-brick Nottinghamshire pit village in the middle of a jungle.

  It’s a still morning and shreds of mist have not yet dispersed. A smell of sulphur hangs in the air and the jungle gently steams. Miners are arriving on Hercules and Hero bicycles for the first shift of the day. I join a group of them on a narrow, cable bridge, which bounces like a trampoline as we cross. Below is a 40-foot drop into a sluggish river, transformed from a mountain stream into an industrial sump, stained with oil streaks and oxides.

  The men have lamps and hard hats but the rest of their clothes and equipment are flimsy. Sandals, flip-flops, old gym shoes, vests and torn trousers are the order of the day. Before going underground they gather round a brazier made from pipes and old railway parts. There seems no sense of urgency.

  A priest in dhoti and thick, knitted sweater moves among them, offering a plate of sweets and a prayer. He gives me a tika mark on my forehead. I want to tell him that the last one I had was put on by the King of Nepal, but he’d only think I was mad.

  The protection of the gods is taken very seriously. Built above one of the mine entrances is a small, pink temple to the goddess Kali (alias Parvati, Sati, Uma and Durga), and as she is the consort of Siva the destroyer, she must be constantly propitiated. When the motley group of miners does eventually enter the mine shaft, I notice each one first touch the tunnel entrance, then his forehead and then his heart.

  No sooner have they gone down than a greasy cable stiffens and begins to turn. Out of a second tunnel emerges a line of wagons filled with slack. As they reach the top of a low rise they’re grabbed and pushed on by a work gang largely composed of elderly women in grimy saris. These ladies roll the narrow, coffin-like wagons down a short slope and assemble them into a train. When enough are ready they are collected by a very old saddle-tank steam engine called ‘David’, built in Lancashire in 1864. Its boiler is now so caked and encrusted with deposits that it resembles a moving fossil.

  Our host, Mr Das from
Coal India Ltd, won’t allow us to film any of this until we have an armed police escort, and they haven’t turned up yet.

  We suggest doing a discreet wide shot while we’re waiting but Mr Das shakes his head.

  ‘This is a very disturbed place.’

  He smiles tolerantly, like a teacher dealing with hyperactive pupils.

  ‘It is our headache to look after you.’

  He seems a decent man, around 40, a Bengali, with intense dark eyes, a thick moustache, brown bobble hat, a windcheater with ‘Herod Active’ written across it and an uncle who’s an accountant in Guildford.

  He invites us to his office. It’s a low, brick building, painted pistachio green, inside and out. There is a concrete floor and a board on the wall with three columns marked ‘Production Totals’, ‘Targets’, ‘Achievements’. A one-bar electric fire glows and two or three of his colleagues are introduced and sit at the table with us. Our two armed guards, thin men wrapped in headscarves, walk by outside the window.

  Sidestepping any further questions about security with a brisk ‘there is some insurgency’, Mr Das clambers onto the safer ground of statistics. In quick succession, I learn that India is the fourth largest producer of coal in the world (after the USA, Russia and Australia) but the biggest employer (600,000 people), that Tipong produces a particularly valuable high calorie coal, that they have had no fatal injuries of any kind since 1994, when nine were killed after an electrician tried to mend an electrical motor without turning the current off, that, instead of shafts and lifts, the miners here walk to work down inclined passageways that reach 1150 feet (350 m) below the surface. The only shadow over Tipong is that they only have technology to bring out 40 per cent of the coal deposits. The rest they have to leave in the ground.

  What really animates him is an obvious and glowing pride in his labour relations. Tipong has a cosmopolitan work force, from South India, Nepal, Orissa, Bihar, comprising Muslims, Christians and Hindus, but everyone looks after everyone else and they provide schools and communal activities for everyone equally. Women who are widows of company employees are offered surface jobs.

  David’s wheezy whistle announces that the 140-year-old tank engine is coupled up and ready to leave for the depot two miles down the line. I’m privileged to ride the footplate as we bowl gamely down the hill past lineside exhortations like ‘All Time is Safety Time’ and ‘There is no Substitute for Hard Work and Sincerity’.

  We cross the river on a girder bridge with elegantly functional red-brick piers bearing a construction date of 1923. The line levels out. Bicycles overtake us easily. Goats and chickens stroll by. The fireman doesn’t so much toss coal into the boiler but places it there by hand, positioning each piece carefully before ramming it home with a metal rod. Once away from the cleared area of the mine, the jungle closes in and David has his work cut out to push us past overhanging branches and bushes. It’s an enchanting run, a blend of Thomas the Tank Engine and The Jungle Book.

  After lunch at the Tipong Mine Guest House, a once elegant, plantation-style building, now surrounded on all sides by coal heaps, Mr Das takes us up onto one of the hills overlooking the river to hear a selection of Safety Songs, specially written for Tipong. A five-man choir, accompanied by a harmonium and a tabla, a pain of small hand-drums is set up in the garden of a red-brick terraced house overlooking a hillside of mango, pineapple, jackfruit, guava, betel and banana trees. Across the river a slowly moving plume of white smoke rises above the trees, tracing the progress of David back up the valley again. Against this background of an industrial Arcadia, Hahmid Rachmar and his group, all sweatered up like a glee club, perform the safety song they’ve written themselves. It’s a catchy song, beautifully performed, and in the abundant goodwill afterwards Mr Das shyly reveals that he’s learning the violin at home.

  ‘Does your wife mind?’ I joke.

  His brow furrows. ‘No, she is very helpful.’

  I leave Tipong with some doubts as to whether there really is a mine here at all and thoughts that this grubby Garden of Eden might simply be kept going by Mr Das and his friends so that they can learn music and write hit songs.

  The last thing I do is ask him to write down the words of the catchy Safety Song.

  I try them at the guesthouse, in the bath.

  ‘Safety First, Safety First

  In every step of work, be it the rule,

  It is for us to remain awake all the time, There’s danger in every move.

  If we obey the rules

  There will be no sorrow for us,

  Safety First, Safety First.’

  Perhaps we should adopt it as the crew’s anthem. On second thoughts, it’s too late now.

  Day Ninety Four : Digboi to Dibrugah

  A pack of pye-dogs circles the entrance to Digboi station, backing away with wary reluctance at the approach of my cycle-rickshaw. I buy a ticket for Dibrugah, 52 miles (80 km) down the line, for 18 rupees, about 25 pence. I notice that a ticket on the sleeper service to Delhi, over 1000 miles (1600 km) away, would set me back PS8.

  That the railway extends here at all has everything to do with oil, tea and coal and very little to do with passengers. The wooden bench seats are functional rather than comfortable and progress is slow and punctuated every few hundred yards by a blast of the engine’s horn to clear the railway line of all those who use it as a highway, meeting place, or just for grazing.

  Fortunately, I have some good companions. Sitting opposite me are two women, one tall and slim with classic English features, the other a short, stout, bespectacled Indian lady whose face wears an expression of such serene good nature that it’s impossible not to want to talk to her. The reason why they’re travelling together is a remarkable story that unfolds as the train shrieks its way westwards.

  Anne, the older of the two, is the daughter of an illicit relationship between an English tea-planter and one of the women from ‘the lines’ (i.e. a tea picker). Such liaisons were strictly forbidden and Anne’s father could never publicly acknowledge his child. He went off to the Second World War and died in Singapore in 1942. Anne’s mother, poor, uneducated and illiterate, had no idea how to find information about him. She didn’t even know how he spelt his name.

  Anne, neither English nor Indian, never really fitted in with the tea-planters, who, embarrassed at such situations, were unapproachable and unhelpful. Enquiries about her father were stonewalled.

  Anne was sent to a convent school and later met and fell in love with an Indian fighter pilot, who wrote to her every day, and even once dropped a letter to her from his plane. They had a daughter together, but he was a married man and, in a mirror image of her mother’s situation, they kept their relationship secret. He eventually returned to his wife. Anne got a job as a secretary in a tea company, where she saw a copy of the London Daily Telegraph in her office. She noted down the name of their defence correspondent and, on a whim, wrote and asked him how she might find out about a tea-planter called Stuart who went missing in 1942.

  Thanks to his help, she eventually learnt her father’s name, one of many on the wall of a mass grave in Singapore. Armed with this lead, and with some help from one of the tea company’s directors, she finally made contact with her father’s family in England, 47 years after his death. His sister Mary was still alive and asked to meet Anne. Mary’s granddaughter Sarah is the girl travelling with Anne today.

  The two women derive so much pleasure from each other’s company, that one can only wonder what things might have been like if they’d known of each other’s existence years earlier.

  It seems years have passed since leaving Digboi when the train finally pulls into Tinsoukia, less than 30 miles down the track. As we approach Tinsoukia station the view on both sides is of decommissioned steam locomotives, row upon row of them in overgrown sidings. Some lie on their sides, some are hung around with vines and creeper and, as there seems to have been no attempt to strip them down, they remain intact, as if a spell had been put on them.


  We move out of Tinsoukia at a pace that would make a snail seem nippy. Seeing our impatience, a jolly, bespectacled lady in a gold-trimmed sari smiles broadly across at us.

  ‘This is a train for people who have no work.’

  We talk about local things. She’s a professor at Dibrugah University and has strong views on the need for India to look east. She is a firm believer in an economic development initiative, ungracefully mnemonicized as BIMSTEC, to encourage co-operation between Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand and China. A recent meeting, however, was hobbled by the Indian government refusing visas to the Chinese delegation until the night before the conference. Understandably, they cancelled.

  ‘The Indians don’t really empathize with the Chinese then?’ I ask.

  ‘I don’t think our mind-set is still yet fully open to Chinese cooperation,’ she replies.

  I take that as a no.

  She agrees with Mr Das the coal-mine manager’s point about the cosmopolitan make-up of Assam, but has a different explanation for it. In 1823 a Scotsman called Robert Bruce first noted the commercial potential of the wild tea plant and within 20 years it had become a major and highly labour-intensive crop. The Assamese, being partial to opium at the time, were not good at hard labour, so it became necessary to look further afield for the work force, hence the widening of the gene pool in Northeast India.

  We stay tonight at a tea plantation house called a changa, which is in effect a bungalow on stilts. Beneath the extensive boughs and trailing tentacles of an old rain tree, we sit round a fire and watch a delicately energetic dance performed by girls who look more Thai or Burmese than Indian. Assamese specialities are brought round. Long, rolled rice-cakes called bithas, made with molasses and sesame seeds, a grilled root with tomato and aubergine dip, feather-light pooris, chicken and fish from the Brahmaputra.