by Bruce Kirkby
A stain spread across the pool, purple fingers slowly reaching downstream. Crouching on the banks, the lamas sipped the murky water with cupped hands, then splashed it over shaven heads. Wang Chuk dabbed a wet finger to my forehead, then held cupped hands to my lips—and in that water I tasted the mountains.
A passing shepherd raced to retrieve an empty soda pop bottle from his rucksack, and quickly filled it from the stream as the symbolic universe, built over the course of an exhausting week, washed away.
I. Zanskaris don’t differentiate between sheep and goats, keeping the animals in the same herd and referring to them to by the same name: ra luk, which literally means “goat sheep” in Tibetan.
16 LIFE IS THE CEREMONY
We had been at the monastery for two months when Lama Wangyal hurried into our room one evening. Christine and I were reading by headlamp.
“Packing! Packing!”
A jeep would arrive at first light, he explained, to carry him and us to his sister’s homestead, in the village of Tungri. How long would we be away, I asked? What about teaching? But I got no answer; Lama Wangyal’s footsteps were already fading down the earthen passageway.
It was pitch-black when he pounded on our door the next morning.
“Oh, Mortub! Going now!”
I glanced at my watch. It was 5:45 A.M. The jeep had arrived early. Leaping up, Christine and I shook the boys and began stuffing sleeping bags into duffel bags. Taj refused to get out of his pyjamas. Bodi was in tears, searching fruitlessly for a lost piece of Lego.
“Hurrying!” Lama Wangyal yelled from the hall. His footsteps faded and the hobbit door slammed. We stumbled after him, Taj in pyjamas, Bodi sobbing.
A dilapidated Toyota pickup waited at the monastery gates. Tossing our duffel into the back, our family crammed into the rear of the cab: Bodi on my knee, Taj on Christine’s. Lama Wangyal took the front seat. The vehicle lurched away into a crimson dawn.
Instead of following the main road south toward Padum, our driver veered west, bouncing along a dirt track in the shadow of the Zanskar Range. Soon we left Zanskar’s central plains and entered a narrowing valley leading toward the headwaters of the Stod. The land grew increasingly rugged, the steep mountainsides dotted with shattered boulders the size of cars. Amid the rubble, I spotted an eagle hunting.
An hour later, the green fields of a village appeared. The pickup jolted to a stop beside a whitewashed chorten. Lama Wangyal leapt out, grabbed his bag and set off, maroon robes vanishing down a narrow trail. I shrugged, and the driver shrugged back. Dragging our duffel from the back, we took the boys in hand and raced after the monk, following muddy paths along the edge of irrigation canals.
We found Lama Wangyal outside a two-storey whitewashed homestead with traditional ochre-trimmed windows and a flat roof. A flagpole, draped with sun-bleached prayer flags and topped with a yak tail, signalled that all sixteen basic volumes of Kangyur were housed within. A humble garden held carrots, radishes, onions, cardamom, potatoes and peas. Lama Wangyal pounded on the door, but no one answered. Pressing his ear to the wood and hearing nothing, he retrieved a key from underneath a wash basin.
Beyond a pungent stable, concrete stairs led up to the family quarters: four empty bedrooms, a cold storage room (crammed with sacks of grain, barrels of barley beer and buckets of yogurt) and a windowless kitchen, where kettles and cauldrons hung from hooks above a dung-burning stove.
Lama Wangyal immediately began cooking dal in a pressure cooker, while our boys amused themselves by spinning a pair of squat prayer wheels, neon in color and the size of turntables. When the food was ready, the old monk packed it into a wicker basket. Then together we set off in search of his sister.
The pathways were bustling, and everyone bowed to Lama Wangyal. He questioned a few, and all pointed north, toward the outer village fields. Twenty minutes later we arrived at a small plot of golden barley, roughly the size of a suburban lawn. Crouched, and pulling grain by hand, were Lama Wangyal’s sister, Lamo, and her husband, Dorjey.
Lamo squealed upon spotting our boys. Her brow was streaked with mud, and two greying braids emerged from beneath a knit beanie. Wearing a purple jumper and baggy harem pants, she chased the giggling pair with her tongue sticking out.
Dorjey, her husband, rose more wearily. Wearing soiled jeans and a red polo shirt, he was a lithe man. Veins snaked across his taut biceps. A tightly cropped moustache was the only sign that he was a havildar, or sergeant, in the Indian Army—currently on leave to help with harvest.
Two elderly women emerged from the field of barley, both wearing homespun robes and necklaces of turquoise. One was Dorjey’s mother. (Dorjey’s father, we were told, was in a nearby field, peeling logs.) The other woman, introduced as Doda, stared at us blankly, toothless and mute. Sewn to the brim of her floppy orange hat were a silver pendant, a picture of the Dalai Lama and a child’s plastic sea star. She evidently was developmentally delayed in some way, but here she was in the fields, working alongside everyone else, contributing to the community.
All of them—Lamo, Dorjey, his mother and father and Doda—were members of the same paspun, a tightly bound group of households who supported each other at times of birth, marriage and death, and who worked co-operatively during the busy seasons of harvest and planting. As a social institution, the paspun is unique to Zanskar, and every family, in every village across the entire valley, belongs to one.
It now became clear why Lama Wangyal had dragged us here. Our family had been recruited, at least temporarily, to join Lamo’s paspun—which suited Christine and me just fine.
Work paused while we unpacked the wicker basket in the shade of sea buckthorn bushes. Bowls of steaming dal and rice were quickly dispatched. Flatbread was washed down with a jug of chang.
Chang, or fermented barley beer, is a collegial, congenial drink I was familiar with from my time among the Sherpas. Milky and mildly alcoholic, it confers a glowing cheerfulness unlike any other libation I have known. Best of all, being rich in vitamin B, it rarely induces a hangover, which is a good thing, for chang is impossible to refuse and is often consumed in vast quantities. Dorjey used yarrow to flavor his brew, and the result was pleasantly crisp, not unlike hops in an ale. Under a warm sun, Lamo filled our cups again and again. I was soon dizzy, and lay back in the grass, idly chewing fragments of bloated barley that floated atop the opaque liquid.
Eventually Dorjey rose and stretched arms skyward; it was time to return to harvest. Lamo was reticent to accept our help—she urged us to return to her home and relax—but Lama Wangyal insisted she demonstrate the process of pulling barley. Crouched on her haunches at the edge of the golden crop, she gathered a handful of stalks—about the thickness of a shovel handle—and with a jerk, yanked them free of the ground. After shaking precious topsoil from spidery roots, she methodically stacked the sheaves in a thatched pattern behind her, meant to protect the ripening ears from scavenging birds.
Christine and I set to work beside her, shuffling sluggishly forward as we wrenched barley out, one handful at a time. Within minutes, my knees were throbbing, so I sat directly down in the dirt and scooched along on my bum. My hands soon ached. Christine quietly chanted as she worked—Om mani padme hum, om mani padme hum—which thrilled Lamo.
“Good, Angmo! Good!” she clapped.
Bodi and Taj floated twigs down irrigation ditches, and later chased a pair of lambs. When Taj found a dead bird, he proudly carried it over to show us, not yet tainted by the grown-up dread of touching dead things.
An hour passed, and our progress felt indiscernible. An eternity of golden barley stretched ahead. And this was only one of Lamo and Dorjey’s seventeen fields.
After another round of flatbread and chang, Christine took the boys back to the house, while I began a job that would consume me for days: carrying load after load of pungent alfalfa to the roof of Lamo’s homestead—the very task I had assisted the elderly woman in Karsha with.
Alfalfa, considered
a secondary crop and used as winter fodder, is grown around the periphery of the barley fields, tucked into a thin strip of arable land. The green leafy plant had been cut days earlier by scythe and rolled into crude bales, roughly three feet long and a foot in diameter. Now dried in the sun, these bales could be picked up and moved without falling apart, an ingenious technique that circumvented the need for twine.
Using a pair of rope lassos, Dorjey bound six such bales together. I lay back on the pile, slipped one arm through each rope, and then struggled to my feet. Although the alfalfa on my back was not crushingly heavy, perhaps thirty kilograms, it was physically immense, almost the size of a refrigerator. The bottom of the bundle hit me in the calves and the top wobbled overhead. Dorjey gave a thumbs-up, and I set off toward his home.
The narrow pathways were crowded with livestock: donkeys, cows, yaks, sheep and dzo all grazing on a dusting of husks and chaff.I As I squeezed past these animals, their warm flanks pressed against my thighs. Many attempted to steal nibbles from my load, and I was forced to spin this way and that to protect my cargo.
It took fifteen minutes to reach Lamo’s homestead, where a wobbly ladder led to a barren mud roof, about the size of a tennis court. After dropping the alfalfa beside an outhouse-shaped structure in a distant corner—the family chapel—I headed back to the fields.
Dorjey was nowhere in sight, so I gathered a second load myself, lashing together seven bundles. The next trip I took eight. And then nine, which proved to be my limit, for the load must have been approaching fifty kilograms and threatened to burst from the lassos with every step.
One hour of exertion faded into the next. Thistle fluff floated on the afternoon air and clouds of locusts rose from my feet. Others wriggled against the small of my back, emerging from the load I carried. A flock of small birds took flight with a frantic beating of wings, flying away in unison like a spill of ink crossing the fields.
I slipped into a trance-like state, taking delight in the simplest of details: the weathered face of an elder, slumping fence lines, a young boy’s hand stroking the flanks of a horse, glittering sunlight upon an irrigation ditch.
A line of reapers sang as they swung sickles, the freshly cut alfalfa at their feet the iridescent green of a jungle snake. A man in a tweed jacket drove two yaks, a rudimentary plough tilling rich loam behind. Then toothless Doda appeared, shuffling along beneath a load of peas, dragging a skinny horse with her.
It seemed every person I passed was either muttering mantras or running mala beads through their fingers. A few elders spun prayer wheels, balanced against hips. At lunch I’d even noted Dorjey reciting snatches of scripture amid lulls in our conversation. Every activity held the opportunity for devotion. And all of these actions—the mantras, the prayer beads and spinning prayer wheels—were really just meant as anchors to the present moment, as a reminder: I’m right here, right now, doing this. There seemed to be no separation between life and religion in these fields. Life was the ceremony.
Outside Lamo’s home, Bodi and Taj were sword fighting with walking sticks. On my next trip, I spotted them beside the communal water pump, helping an elderly woman draw water. I waved from beneath my load, and they waved back.
As the final vestiges of light seeped from the western sky, Dorjey met me on the roof, holding up a weary hand—we were done for the day. I felt shattered, and absolutely filthy, my body caked with dust and grass.
In the dim kitchen, Lamo prepared momos by candlelight. Beside her, Bodi and Taj spun the colorful prayer wheels. Dorjey demonstrated how the wheels could be accelerated to a fantastic rate by placing a single finger near the middle of each. The boys were thrilled and kept the bright platters spinning for hours. But whenever their attention faded, as it invariably did, someone else would rise from the carpets, despite bone-weary exhaustion, and start the prayer wheels going.
Lama Wangyal studied a worn pamphlet he had received at a Kalachakra initiation, covered with annotations and highlights. Lamo peered over her brother’s shoulder. Noticing my gaze, she patted his shoulder. “My teacher for Buddha.”
Dorjey leaned against a wall with a glass of what looked like black tea in hand, listening to news from Delhi on a transistor radio. His mother sat cross-legged nearby, spinning wool on a bobbin. Dorjey’s father, wearing camouflage fatigues and a purple fedora, rested beside her, log-peeling machete sheathed on his belt. Doda slept on a carpet near the stove.
Elders in Zanskar are accorded great respect, participating in all spheres of life, continuing to live alongside their family throughout their lives. When no longer able to perform physical labor, they still contribute meaningfully, watching grandchildren and telling stories, sharing their vast repositories of information and history.
“Zo! Zo!” Lamo commanded when the meal was ready.
She proceeded to feed us as if we might be leaving at any moment, on a long journey over high mountain passes, possibly not eating again for days. Perhaps it was an impulse seared in the collective Zanskari unconscious.
“Thukpa! Thukpa!”
Dorjey encouraged the boys to slurp the soup greedily, and they were so eager to engage in this noisy behavior that they overlooked the pervasive yak taste and happily complied. Afterward, Lamo prepared butter tea using a traditional gurgur, in which she churned tea, butter and salt, creating a purplish infusion the thickness of mushroom soup.
“Cha! Cha!”
Much later, Dorjey placed a glass of clear black tea before me. Feeling parched, I took an enormous gulp, only to discover it was rum.
“Army liquid!” he beamed, pleased to have someone to share in his scorching drink.
* * *
Zanskaris describe the size of their farmland by the number of days it takes to plough. A large field might be a “two-day field,” and a small one a “half-day field.”
By this measure, Lamo and Dorjey owned—or more accurately, were guardians of—a ten-day farm, which by Western measure covered roughly five acres. This was typical: approximately one acre per working member of the household, for beyond that, land was of diminishing return. And until recently, Lamo and Dorjey’s four children had provided critical assistance during the intensive seasons of planting and harvest.
But two years before, their eldest daughter had married and moved to Stongde village, some thirty kilometers distant, where she was now busy raising an infant son of her own. And earlier that fall, their other three children had left home to attend school—two middle daughters studying nursing in distant Jammu and a twelve-year-old son attending private school near Padum. While this was good news for the family, it left Lamo and Dorjey facing a crisis: could they manage the demands of harvest?
Their neighbors—a middle-aged couple whose children had also recently left home—had given up farming and sold their fields to an Indian multinational corporation, something unthinkable just a decade before. Those fields were now tended by migrant workers, who didn’t contribute to any paspun. Meanwhile, the parents had built a roadside shack and were struggling to make a living hawking soda pop and deep-fried snack packs to passing truck drivers from Srinagar.
It was a familiar pattern seen across Zanskar, where more and more children were moving on from rural life, and a society that had existed for thousands of years was dissolving within the space of a generation.
For now, Lamo and Dorjey clung to the past, which was the reason Lama Wangyal had brought us to lend a much-needed hand. The pair had been working non-stop for three weeks already, and an enormous amount of work still remained. Six fields of barley had yet to be pulled. Ten tons of barley and peas needed to be carried to threshing circles. (Pea flour is routinely added to tsampa to stretch supplies.) An equivalent weight of alfalfa was required on their roof. There were carrots, potatoes and radishes to be dug, and piles of yak dung to be collected.
Despite the enormity of the task, neither Lamo nor Dorjey appeared rushed or stressed. They worked at a pleasant pace, pausing frequently to talk to neighbors
, enjoying unhurried meals together.
* * *
Our family slept in a small, carpeted room across from the kitchen, beneath shelves of copper pots, brass kettles and pressure cookers. A framed picture showed Dorjey’s father in military regalia, commemorating his participation in three wars as a member of the famed Ladakh Scouts.II
After reading to the boys, I crawled into my sleeping bag, exhausted. A waning moon cast ghostly light across the room, and from beneath us came the rustling of livestock. I was drifting toward sleep when Christine mentioned she had a headache.
Hours later, I awoke to the sounds of violent retching. In the darkness, I could see Christine hunched over a pot that she’d pulled from the wall overhead.
At dawn, she puked again. Afterward, we lay together, discussing what to do.
I suggested I spend the day watching the boys, giving Christine time to recover. But that would mean I couldn’t help with harvesting. And we both knew Lama Wangyal would be profoundly disappointed, because, as we had observed, Zanskari monks don’t muster much sympathy for the sick and expect children to fend for themselves. Christine urged me to continue working and leave the boys with her. I said I’d carry a few loads and then check back.
In the earthen hallway outside, Dorjey was sprinkling the earthen floors with a watering can to control dust. Lamo followed, swinging a pewter incense box billowing with blue smoke, spiritually cleansing the home. Soon after, both hustled out the front door without a word, and I chased after the pair, grabbing a piece of fried bread as I went, concerned I wouldn’t last long on an empty stomach.
I shouldn’t have worried. I had only just settled into the routine of carrying alfalfa when the sun crested the peaks, and the crowded pathways emptied. Zanskaris like to perform the hardest physical labor during the blessedly cool hours near dawn and dusk. And then they eat.