We drive in past the airport, so neat, tidy and largely uncontaminated by aircraft that it looks like a toy lay-out. Northeast of the airport and commanding the valley are the imposing white walls of the Paro dzong. Like the fortress at Drukyel, where we ended our trek from Jomolhari, it was built in the 1640s, in the flush of national victory over the Tibetans. By coincidence, it also suffered a serious fire, being virtually razed to the ground in 1915. Unlike the Drukyel dzong, it was restored to its former glory after a special tax was levied throughout the country. Its two longest walls extend for some 500 feet (150 m) and taper gracefully upwards in the Tibetan style. The uppermost of its five storeys have long windows, the main ones projecting out from the wall, and all surrounded by finely carved frames and lintels. A band of ochre paint connects them all up and marks it out as a religious as well as administrative building.
At the main gate stalls are already set up and at one of them a bearded old lay monk, or gomchen, stands beside a small table, on which is a brass and silver miniature temple, with drawers that open to reveal various gilt figures of the gods. As people go by, they tuck the odd ngultrum note into his temple. He makes no acknowledgement of the contribution, but stares ahead, keeping up a low, monotonous, gurgling chant. He’s not the slightest bit fazed when a sudden yowling and barking breaks out beside him, as two packs of Bhutan’s ubiquitous stray dogs (which, of course, no-one is allowed to cull) fight for territory at the bottom of the entrance steps. After some vicious teeth baring, they’re seen off and we climb up to the grand, carved doorway. The dzong is as impressive inside as out. There are two main stone-flagged courtyards on either side of a massive central tower. Timber-frame galleries run above the squares, connecting up the accommodation.
The opening ceremony takes place in the smaller, lower courtyard, which is hung with swathes of yellow silk, billowing out from a beamed loggia.
Out of 6000 monks supported by the government of Bhutan (there are 3000 others who live off private patronage), 200 live and work in this dzong, and before the crowds gather, I take a peek inside their rooms. The atmosphere seems very much like that of a Victorian public school. There are wood-panelled partitions, pegs on walls, dormitories with bare wood floors and rows of shoes at one end. I almost expect to see Dr Arnold striding round the corner of one of the dim and dusty corridors, heels clicking on the stone floor.
The courtyard is filling up. In the buildings on the far side boys’ faces peep out and figures in maroon robes flit across the windows, their shaved heads catching the sunbeams.
There are a few tourists, but they’re heavily outnumbered by local people, and heavily out-dressed as well. Not for the Bhutanese the polyester or the Gore-Tex. For them it’s fine cotton and silk brocade, or hand-woven wool, individually patterned. Colours and designs are bold but never brash. I’ve rarely seen showing-off done with such subtlety.
There are no rows of seats, no tickets, no security staff bristling with head-sets. Spectators are left to sort themselves out, though there is a jolly, smiling actor brandishing what looks like a cat o’nine tails, who occasionally intervenes to help little children and performers get to the front.
First in the arena are the atsaras, clowns with bright red costumes and face masks dominated by exaggerated, beaky noses. They look like Mr Punch. Some carry painted wooden phalluses, which they use for crowd control. In their half-frightening, half-funny masks they are extremely effective at everything, from keeping the crowd back to chasing off stray dogs who want to take part. They also keep the crowd’s spirits up with slapstick routines. Doje tells me that the atsaras, like court jesters, have licence to mock anyone involved in the tsechu, including the monks. This is quite necessary, as the long dances can become a bit tedious and are notably short on laughs.
They are, however, astonishingly rich in costume. From the very first number, described in the programme as Dance of the Lord of Death and His Consort, the profusion of colour and design, the sheer quantity of brocaded silk on display, the exuberance of the ankle-length robes with their wide, swirling sleeves, is marvellous to behold.
Big, expressive, brilliantly coloured masks complement the sumptuous costumes. If the deities are to be portrayed then they must be portrayed in all their terrible, magnificent glory. The music that accompanies the dance is played on eye-catching instruments ranging from the seven-foot-long Tibetan trumpets they call dungchen to painted and tasselled double-sided drums that look like cushions. Oboes, bells, cymbals, conch shells and a small horn made from a shin bone contribute to the clashing, tinkling, plangent sound.
As the morning goes on, the crowd swells, more and more people squeezing into the limited space around the perimeter until it’s barely possible to avoid being pushed forward. It gets hotter, the high bright sun slicing the courtyard in two, reminding me of the sol y sombra of a Spanish bullring.
The Dance of the Lord of the Cremation Grounds is followed by the Dance of the Black Hats. I don’t know the significance of these dances and the English translations are not always enlightening: ‘on the external edges of a symbolic mandala where the assembly of the secret tantric deities are residing.’ What is impressive is the poise of the dancers, often carrying enormously heavy costumes and headdresses, as they trip, turn, whirl and pirouette on the hard stone flags. In the last dance I see, the Dance of the Drum From Dramitse, the Black Demons are vanquished by the splendour of the White Gods, who swirl round in golden silk skirts hung with precious jewels. It is outlandish, frequently inexplicable and very wonderful.
Day One Hundred and Fourteen : Paro
After two days at the tsechu I take back all I said about Bhutan being an empty country. It feels as if, apart from two or three people left up in the mountains to look after the yaks, the entire nation is here in Paro. At certain times of the day, it’s queuing only on the elegant covered footbridge leading across the river and up to the dzong.I’ve heard rumours of over-booked hotels with tourists having to camp out in the grounds.
Dust rises from the crowds wandering through the temporary market, which has spread between the dzong itself and the out-buildings nearby, where much of the dancing now takes place. There are makeshift cinemas and fairground games like hoop-la and even bingo. I pass a packed tent where a Bhutanese man calls the numbers in a remarkably plummy English accent.
‘How do you do? Three and Two.’
Nearer the dancing, every inch of grass is taken up by picnicking families, many of whom look as if they have come down from the mountains. They unroll portions of seasoned pork and chilli, mushrooms and eggs and drink butter tea from thermoses. For them, tsechu is both pilgrimage and party.
Having devoted most of this morning to the Dance of the Judgement of the Dead, I feel in urgent need of some light relief and take up Khendum’s invitation to join her for an archery match.
For her, this means watching only. In one of the rare examples of sex discrimination in Bhutan, women are not allowed to take part in traditional archery competitions. Two other reasons why I’m relieved to be, like her, a spectator, are that it looks pretty difficult and most of the participants are roaring drunk.
The hospitality tent, set on a pretty, willow-strewn meadow, is full of bonhomie. Long, rambling stories are told, one man sings ‘Waltzing Matilda’ at full volume, another lurches by with a whisky and loud yell, another becomes droolingly amorous. Khendum introduces me to them.
One is the Secretary of Employment, another the Managing Director of the National Bank. Others are chairmen of this and that. I realize this is no ordinary hospitality tent. These are the movers and shakers of Bhutan, letting their hair down. And why not?
Well, I suppose one reason why not is that they will shortly be loosing off arrows at enormous speed in a field that contains not just the target but also women, dogs and small children.
The national game, they keep trying to tell me, is taken extremely seriously and any young Bhutanese boy, in a village or a palace, learns the skills early on.
However, it’s clearly not a solemn sport. Though women are not allowed to play, they have an important role as vocal supporters.
Khendum tells me, with much amusement, that the night before a match the men sleep together in a dormitory with the door locked, as sex before a big game is considered bad luck.
She shakes her head in some disbelief.
‘So the women are integral to the game, but the night before they don’t want anything to do with them.’
Taunting is also an integral part of the game. Before a man shoots, it is the duty of his opponents to put him off by any means short of physical contact. Personal comments demeaning his appearance, physical irregularities, masculinity and the disloyalty of his wife are not only permitted but encouraged.
When the time comes, the team stagger out of the tent, exchange their drinks for huge, deadly, metal alloy bows, do a little dance, then line up to fire at a target 30 inches high, and 150 yards away. The extraordinary thing is that most of them either hit it or come damn close. I suppose that’s the ultimate macho achievement. To be able to drink yourself silly and deliver a bull’s eye while being told by your opponents that they’ve been shagging your wife for the last three weeks.
End up the day on a very different note. In the Queen Mother’s Temple, a ceremony has been laid on to wish us good fortune for the rest of the journey. In a room, covered in beautifully detailed paintings of the various stages of the Buddha’s life and incarnations, a group of eight monks has assembled for music and prayers. The chantmaster, or udze, sits on a dais and leads a chant in Cholkay, a variation of the Sanskrit in which Buddha himself wrote. The other monks chant with him or play oboes, drums, cymbals and the dungchen, the long trumpet that rests on the floor and makes a deeply mournful sound.
It’s a serene and rather moving ceremony, quite unexpectedly interrupted by the sound of a mobile phone. An elderly monk, next to the chantmaster, fishes around inside his habit and switches it off.
Day One Hundred and Fifteen : Paro
The highlight of the last day of tsechu, and, indeed, the highlight of the festival itself, is the unfurling of the greatest treasure of the Paro dzong. It’s a thangka measuring almost 100 feet (30 m) by 150 feet (45 m), and is known as a thongdrol. The survival of this huge tapestry when the dzong burnt down in 1915 only added to its reputation and merely to look on it conveys the very highest merit. Thongdrol means ‘liberation by sight’.
To avoid such a precious object being damaged by the direct sunlight, it is unrolled at dawn, so our last full day in the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon begins at 3 am.
When our bus pulls out onto the main Thimpu to Paro road, the valley seems to be already awake, if indeed it ever slept. Lights are on in the houses, buses and taxis are picking up people along the roadside. To add to the sense of great events, a full moon stares down from a cloudless sky.
Pilgrims are pouring over the covered bridge, fingers telling prayer beads and lips moving as they join a candle-lit procession winding its way up the hill. It’s a quiet crowd. Buddhism is celebrated in song and chanting, but prayers are never shouted or hymns bellowed, and this morning the great throng, which must number several thousand, is almost silent.
In front of the five-storey building that will be completely covered when the thongdrol is unfurled, a line of butter lamps is lit. The men wear khos, of course, but today they also have white scarves across their shoulders and some wear them over their heads, lending an incongruous touch of the mosque.
To the sound of drum and bell, monks in procession emerge onto the forecourt and, dividing into two lines at right angles to the building, sit on the ground while the abbot, in a gold silk robe, takes his place on a raised dais between them.
Once this glittering scene is settled, the thangka is rolled out, up from the ground to the roof. At its centre is the figure of Padmasambhava, 20 feet high, flanked by his two consorts. In a circle around him are depictions of his eight manifestations.
The pilgrims press forward and, one after the other, pass along the base of the thangka, touching it, saying a prayer, and, in some cases, covering their heads with it.
Dancers come out now and some particularly intrusive, flash-popping tourists meet their match. As they push forward for their trophy close-ups, a couple of them are sent flying by a whirling dancer.
The dawn light slowly fills the sky, and as the time draws near for the thongdrol to be put away for another year, the line of pilgrims wanting to touch it surges forward. Not for the first time at tsechu I fear for the children and the frail older people who get caught up in this religious fervour. I count only six police at the front to deal with any emergency. But somehow, it never gets nasty or aggressive. The joy on the faces of those close to the thongdrol speaks of fulfilment not frustration.
The chill of the night softens and the sun begins to climb, revealing the full glory of this immense tapestry and the size of the crowd, banked right up the hill on both sides, that has been drawn here to see it. I turn away and look out over the shining walls and towers of the fortress to the mountains rolling away towards the looming Himalaya. This is a ceremony to match the landscape. A collective act of belief, bringing together the mountains and the faith that people need to survive them.
Bangladesh
Day One Hundred and Seventeen : Near Sylhet, Bangladesh
At their closest point Bhutan and Bangladesh are some 25 miles (40 km) apart, yet they could scarcely be more different. One is entirely composed of mountains, the other flat as a pancake. One is among the least crowded countries in the world, the other the most densely packed. One is an absolute monarchy with a stable government, the other a people’s republic that has just topped the list of the world’s most corrupt countries. But there is something that unites them: the Himalaya.
Bhutan’s seclusion and stability is due largely to the physical inaccessibility of the Himalayan mountains. Bangladesh’s survival is due to the water that pours off them.
Bangladesh, three times as big as Bhutan, with 75 times the number of people, has a population of around 135 million, and the only reason it can support so many is because two of the greatest mountain rivers, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, funnel down through the country on their way to the sea, depositing billions of tonnes of rich, recycled Himalaya.
Combined with the heavy monsoons that are the blessing and the bane of Bangladesh, this gives the country some of the most productive land in Asia. The price they pay is frequent and frighteningly destructive. The most recent serious flood, in 1998, inundated two-thirds of the country and left 22 million people homeless.
The River Pijain, in the northeast of the country, falls, not strictly from the Himalaya, but from that older rock on which Nagaland and much of western Myanmar rests. As soon as it enters Bangladesh it is harvested. Not so much for fish or crop cultivation but for stones. The country is strong on mud but very short on stone and the river bed at Jaflang, just across the border from India, is like an open-cast quarry, combed by several hundred freelance quarriers. Men, women and children, in narrow flat-bottomed skiffs, put out onto the lazy, meandering waters and dredge for stones and gravel, which they take ashore to be carried by trucks to the crushing plants that line the road for many miles.
In the West all this would be done by machines and conveyor belts: in Bangladesh, human labour is abundant and cheap. For a day’s work collecting stones, unskilled workers earn the equivalent of 70 pence.
To survive in such unregulated conditions you need an eye for the main chance and while the boatmen are arguing over who gets the BBC’s custom, a bright-eyed, obliging young man seizes his opportunity and offers me a ride out onto the river. It’s only after the smoke-belching little outboard has kicked in and we’re heading towards a very low, makeshift bridge with ten-tonne trucks rolling across it that I first take a good look at my crew. The captain is probably no more than 14 and his first officer 8 at the most.
None of the boats on the river look like the
sort you’d find at Henley Regatta, but ours is easily the scruffiest tub on the Pijain. The metal hull is leaking quite spectacularly. A series of small fountains erupt from the bottom of the boat as if it had been raked by tracer fire. The eight-year-old picks up a plastic bottle and bails out enthusiastically, stopping every now and then to flash me a big, reassuring smile.
By the time we reach the furthest of a succession of gravel bars I’ve developed considerable respect for my under-age crew.
All around us there are people sieving, sorting and sifting alluvia. Pencil-thin wooden punts are packed with boulders and gravel until they are so low in the water that it seems one extra pebble might be enough to sink them. This low-tech quarrying looks to be a family activity largely undertaken by the very poor. Out in mid-stream young boys dive for stones. From the bank a line of elderly men toss roped buckets into the water and slowly draw them in. Wives and sisters are sizing the stones and putting them in piles.
Wandering in the middle of all this are relatively affluent daytrippers, who obviously see this stretch of the Pijain as something of a beauty spot. They sit in chairs, buy soft drinks off the heads of itinerant salesmen and have their photos taken. A group of boys and girls walk arm in arm, suddenly breaking apart to splash water at each other. Bearing in mind that Bangladesh is 90 per cent Muslim, it’s interesting to see girls, unveiled, hand in hand with boys in public. It’s a reminder that, unlike Pakistan, Bangladesh is not an Islamic republic, it’s a secular democracy.
Himalaya (2004) Page 31