A neat little place set in a garden lush with flowers, the homestay was half-traditional Adi hut and half-concrete bungalow. Its owners had recently been trained in hospitality as part of a state tourism initiative – training, I suspected, that had been taken straight from an Edwardian book on etiquette. Kalin, the kind but sombre husband, addressed me with the sort of restrained formality one might reserve for a visiting Royal, while his wife – a homely figure aptly called Mum – bustled about the hut in a whirr of culinary activity. And what a cook Mum was! That evening I sat beside the merum, a square hearth identical to the Idu’s engoko, digging my hands into leaves full of nutty rice, spicy dhal, banana flowers and tender white river fish. Despite my protestations my hosts refused to eat until I’d finished, Mum hovering in the shadows, anxious for my appreciation. Even more delicious was Mum’s homemade apong – a sweet, viscous, amber nectar distilled from rice and husks.
‘Madam, I would like to tell you something,’ announced Kalin at one point during the evening, so solemnly I wondered what was coming next. ‘We hill people are very grateful to you Britishers. If your people hadn’t introduced the Inner Line Permit in 1873 you probably wouldn’t be sitting here now in this traditional Adi house. Our culture would have been dominated by mainland Indians a long time ago.
‘Look at Meghalaya and Mizoram,’ he continued. ‘Now they are campaigning to have the Inner Line Permit system too, but it’s too late, their tribal cultures are almost lost.’
The Adi weren’t always so well disposed towards the British. Meaning ‘unruly’ or ‘disobedient’, these Sino-Tibetan animists were understandably loath to bend to the rule of meddling white men: many a Raj soldier, sepoy and coolie was hacked to death by an Abor dao or spent their last hours writhing in agony after being hit by an aconite-tipped arrow. The British, in turn, deplored their uppity subjects. Our dear friend Butler described the Abor as ‘large, uncouth, athletic, fierce-looking, dirty fellows’, who were ‘as void of delicacy as they are of cleanliness’. Similarly, Sir Alexander Mackenzie, in his lengthily titled 1884 History of the Relations of the Government with the Hill Tribes of the North-East Frontier of Bengal, labelled them savage, intractable and barbarous. ‘They are,’ he concluded, ‘in all manner insolent and rude beyond all other tribes of this frontier.’ But after decades of intermittent raids, counter-raids and squabbling, it was an incident in 1911 that really lit the tinderbox.
In March of that year the British Political Officer Noel Williamson, accompanied by a doctor called Gregorson and forty-seven coolies, marched north from Pasighat on a peaceful mission to trace the course of the Brahmaputra. The two men were dressed in the sort of tweed and puttees one might wear for a day’s pheasant shooting in Norfolk, and carried a gramophone, a magic lantern and a medicine chest. But their expedition was scuppered when Abor tribesmen intercepted one of their mail messengers carrying letters back to Pasighat. Being illiterate, the Abor placed great importance on colours and symbols, and when they saw the letters – white envelopes edged in black as a mark of mourning for the recently deceased King Edward VII, and sealed with red wax – they leapt to a fatally wrong conclusion. The envelopes, they concluded, signified the white man, the black edging their soldiers, and the red the government’s anger. Assuming Williamson’s peaceful mission to be a trap, the Abor gathered a war party, and within two days Williamson, Gregorson and all but five of the coolies had been hacked and speared to death.
The British were incensed. Six months later a mighty punitive force consisting of 3,000 Ghurkha, Sikh and Assamese troops and 3,500 Naga coolies marched up the Siang, the Naga carrying spears and striding in columns six abreast, their unique two-tone ‘he-ha, he-ho’ war chant putting the fear of God into the Abor. The expedition also included a botanist, zoologist and surveyor, and the instructions to ‘explore and survey as much of the country as possible, visiting, if practicable, the “Pemakoi Falls” and settling the question of the identity of the Tsangpo and Brahmaputra rivers’. (I was tickled to read in a 1912 account of the expedition, In Abor Jungles, that the troops’ packing list included: ‘1 pair pyjamas, 1 pair breeches, 6 handkerchief, 1 pillow, or suit of Burberry’s Gabardine and a Brandy flask’.)
The Abor loved a good dust-up and had spent months preparing for the British attack they knew was coming. They’d destroyed cane bridges, stockaded their villages with felled trees and moats and booby-trapped the jungle with concealed pits lined with aconite-tipped stakes. But against the British arsenal of hand grenades, light infantry, Maxim machine guns and elephant-drawn Howitzers, they never stood a chance. In late 1912, after a protracted campaign, the Abor chiefs surrendered, waving copies of The Calcutta Statesman on a ridge above the Siang as a sign of truce. In the 1940s the Abor renamed themselves the Adi, meaning ‘hill men’, and, like their old enemies the Naga, proved valuable allies against the Japanese during the Second World War. Considering the Williamson incident had been only thirty years previously, it was a remarkable change of heart.
All night the rain hammered on the roof like a thousand tiny fists. In the morning, when the leaden sky showed no signs of relenting, I decided to wait in Pasighat and hope conditions were better the next day. Kalin was less optimistic. As Mum served me gooey rice chapatti in banana leaves for breakfast, he dolefully predicted the worst.
‘Madam, it has been raining in Yingkiong for more than a week.’ He frowned in the manner of someone predicting a dire tragedy. ‘It will rain tomorrow too.’
When this didn’t put me off he tried again. ‘Madam, please, the road is very dangerous – take a Sumo instead.’
Bee, the raffish Englishman, was similarly concerned when, lured by my telephone reports of Mum’s apong, he came for dinner that evening.
‘Darling, I think you need to take alternative transport,’ he drawled, sitting on a low stool beside the fire, his long legs folded under him like a grasshopper. ‘It’s too dangerous for you to ride up there alone in these conditions.’
But my mind was set. I didn’t want to leave my Hero behind again and, besides, perhaps Guru Rinpoche was already testing my resolve.
‘Everything’s difficult in Arunachal Pradesh,’ Bee conceded, ‘whether you’re driving to Yingkiong or trying to have a crap.’
He was right; travel was difficult here, but I’d never expected otherwise. Whatever the weather in the morning, I’d clad myself from head to toe in Gore-Tex and polythene and ride into those mountains.
At dawn the deluge had at last subsided but the sky still lay like a wadded lid upon the land and further rain looked imminent. Mum handed me a leaf-wrapped packed lunch and bade me an anxious goodbye – then I rode back over the Brahmaputra towards the wall of mountains. They reared ahead of me, a fortress of rock, the formidable outline of their ridges blue against the pewter sky, clouds clinging to their shoulders like ghostly bridal shawls. I was alone, a tiny, insignificant speck, riding towards the serried ranks of an almighty force armed with no more than a 150cc engine and a couple of spanners. Minutes later I was into the maw of the mountains, winding into the mist on a ribbon of new black tarmac.
The tarmac was short-lived, soon giving way to a morass of mud and a turmoil of road construction. Caterpillars clawed at banks of earth and lorries rumbled through the mud, their black-skinned drivers staring down at me from high cabs. Gangs of women shifted piles of soil and, by the roadside, groups of Adi men, women and children picked their way through the sludge, curly-tailed hunting dogs trotting at their heels, all of them turning to stare as I waved and rode past. Slowed to a crawl, I wove between men and machines, struggling to control the fishtailing bike on a surface that was as slippery as an ice rink. A river dashed through a gorge below and the odd thatched village poked between fans of palms and tufts of pink blossom, but I was so intent on keeping upright there was little chance for gawping. I could have stopped more often than I did, but the threat of more rain had given me a bad case of destination fixation, and I was intent on reaching Yingkiong.<
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When I did pause, it was to admire the villages’ terraced paddies, greening with the new season’s crop. They flowed down the lower slopes like a giant’s steps, their curving, harmonious lines as perfect as if they’d been modelled by a potter’s thumb. Amidst the tumult of the hills they brought an unexpected order to the landscape.
At noon, in need of a rest and petrol, I stopped at a roadside shack in Damroh, a large Adi village on a ridge more than halfway to Yingkiong. A white flag with a red sun in the middle fluttered above, the mark of the Adi’s sun- and moon-worshipping Donyi-Polo religion and, outside, about ten men were crowded around a carrom board, gambling, the ground at their feet littered with empty cans of beer. Sharp-faced and unsmiling, they ignored my hellos, staring as I poured two bottles of dirty petrol into the bike and sat on a bench to eat Mum’s packed lunch of fried rice and sweet potato. Eventually one of them addressed me.
‘Where your friends?’ He said it in a cold, accusatory manner, as if being alone was somehow sinful and untrustworthy.
‘Waiting in Yingkiong,’ I lied.
In 1912 Damroh had been a key centre of defence against the British, commanding a fighting force ‘five to six thousand strong’. Things were very different now, of course, but it was the only place in Arunachal Pradesh that I felt the slightest twinge of hostility. For a while, as I rode on, I missed my friends the Idu.
After Damroh the road deteriorated again, churned into an inexecrable, slippery bog by the digging and blasting of more road-building activity. I slid, swore and paddled through the mud at ten miles per hour, barely managing to keep the bike vertical, my hands and arms aching from the strain. By now the mud had almost conquered me: my boots and lower legs were coated brown; the Hero looked as if it had been rolled in a swamp; my luggage was caked and splattered. Perhaps the mud would soon overtake me altogether and drag me down into some fathomless, chthonic mire. But then, at around 3 p.m., I hit tarmac again, and was so overjoyed to be out of the mud that I swung around the corners whooping and waggling my legs in glee. Yingkiong finally appeared in a lush basin in the hills, its huts and buildings scattered amidst ripples of greenery on the edge of the serpentine Siang.
This time I was lucky with the weather. It was only as I parked the bike outside the town’s one hotel – a nondescript place with cell-like rooms and intermittent electricity – that the clouds eventually burst.
12
THE KING
The first thing that struck me was his height. I was accustomed to being a head and shoulders taller than people in Arunachal Pradesh, but Dorje Tenzing was a regal-looking Khampa of almost six feet. Undeniably handsome, his high, arched brows sat above searching eyes, an elegant nose and a wide, sculpted mouth. Although visibly older than the Ata of the American’s decade-old photos, his short hair was still jet black, his skin unlined and his closely clipped moustache – half-Japanese emperor, half-Victorian explorer – only slightly peppered with grey. A rosary of dark-brown prayer beads hung around his neck, its silver drilbu, bells, and namesake dorje, double-headed thunderbolt, resting on a neat pot belly.
He spoke in thickly accented English, his voice quiet but commanding. ‘I not been Pemako three years,’ he sighed, as his apple-cheeked wife served us tea on the half-constructed balcony of his family’s Tibetan restaurant. His two sons sat nearby, listening, and beside us a mallard was tied by its leg to a concrete pillar. ‘I sixty-two. Last year I nearly dead from heart attack. I have operation in Delhi five months ago to put three stent in my heart.’
‘What about now? Would you consider coming with me to Pemako?’ I didn’t want to give up quite yet.
He sat back in his chair and looked at me sagely, rolling the beads of his rosary between thumb and forefinger. I had the feeling he wasn’t sure what to make of me – this lone Englishwoman who’d appeared from nowhere, so keen to find him. ‘You want to go trekking or pilgrimage?’
‘Pilgrimage,’ I replied, after a brief pause. I wanted to find out more about Guru Rinpoche and his hidden land, I explained, and was far more interested in this than simply striding up distant hills.
At this his eyes widened in glad recognition. ‘Ah, you know about Guru Rinpoche!’ He muttered something and rolled a few more beads, then looked out across the cloud-wreathed hills that encircle Yingkiong. The mallard waggled its tail and pecked at the concrete, and somewhere in the alley below a dog barked.
‘OK, I come with you,’ he said, turning to me a minute later. ‘My son Kabsang too.’ He nodded towards one of the sons, a boyish twenty-something with a wispy moustache, short wavy hair and a tattooed dragon poking out of one T-shirt sleeve. ‘His English better than me and he good cook.’
Guru Rinpoche must have been on my side. Not only had I found Dorje through a glancing stroke of luck but, against the odds, he’d agreed to be my guide. We made a plan to take a Sumo the 100 miles to Tuting the next morning, pick up porters and provisions there and walk southeast along the Yangsang Chu River Valley, the heart of Lower Pemako, staying in Tibetan villages on the way. It was too early in the year to trek to the higher passes, but we’d aim to reach Devakotta, a sacred mountain on the river that was said to be the dwelling place of the dakinis, or female spirits. In his Guidebook to Pemako, Guru Rinpoche had written that, ‘Those of fortune who merely come to this place will experience spontaneous realization. By practising meditation here one can in this lifetime attain perfect Buddhahood.’ It sounded worth a visit.
‘One more thing,’ said Dorje, as I was about to leave. ‘You have permit for Tuting?’ I showed him my Protected Area Permit, which listed Tuting as one of the places I was allowed to visit.
‘Mmm, maybe problem,’ he said, pursing his lips. ‘Your permit just say Tuting. For Pemako you need Tuting Sub-Division. Could be problem with army. If anyone ask, you not tourist, you Buddhist pilgrim.’
I walked down the alleyway from the restaurant, fingering the red scrap of cotton that had lived in my pocket since the puja at Kamakhya. There was a magic in this journey, I thought, as there so often is when you cast yourself into the winds of fate far away from home: Kamakhya, the boy appearing in the rain on the road from Khupa, the reh festival, meeting Sipa the shaman again, finding the mysterious Ata. Was it coincidence, fate, or something else? I couldn’t tell. But I could feel it. I hoped the magic would allow me to reach Pemako.
*
It was one of those dawns when the liminal state seems suggestive of a quantum gap, as if, for a fleeting moment, one might glimpse the shadows of another realm. Luminous wisps of cloud lingered above the town, and earth and sky had spilt their boundaries: hills were half-sunk in white drifts of cloud and roofs appeared to float in the mist. The illusory nature of it all felt like an allegory of Pemako itself. Below this shifting veil, Yingkiong was waking up. Women in saris swept the spittle-stained pavements outside their paan stalls. (I noticed one carefully sweep around a cow pat, not wanting to offend the resident deity, Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth.) Men brushed their teeth in doorways, hoicking and spitting into the rubbish-clogged gutter. Tibetan and Adi women laid out mounds of garlic, ginger, chillies, aubergines and bananas on squares of cloth in the market.
At the restaurant, where I left the Hero, my helmet and half my luggage, Dorje was taking his heart pills and Kabsang was lifting the quacking mallard into a bamboo basket.
I bent down to look at him, his beady black eyes staring back through the mesh. ‘We’re not going to eat him, are we?’
‘No!’ laughed Kabsang. ‘I buy him from the market and we make giving-of-life puja with him – meaning he can never be eaten. We’re taking him to Tuting to release him there.’
The journey began with the unlikely combination of the mallard, the Siang and a wildly swinging bridge. Since the long-awaited new bridge over the river had yet to be built, everyone travelling by Sumo to Tuting had to first walk across 200 metres of slats and rusted cables known as the Gandhi Suspension Bridge. It was the stuff of vertigo nightm
ares. Gripping the side wires with one hand, and Ducky’s basket in the other, I slid and swayed across, imagining the awful scenario of dropping the poor mallard to its death. Soldiers trotted past in the opposite direction, seemingly unfazed, greeting me with breezy ‘Good morning, Ma’am’s. It brought to mind Frank Kingdon-Ward’s abject fear of heights and snakes, two things in terrifying abundance in these parts. Goodness knows how he survived all those expeditions.
When I did reach the far side, shaky and a little nauseous, we crammed ourselves, our luggage and Ducky into a waiting Sumo and set off. The hours rolled by in the usual blur of Hindi pop and jolting, the narrow road snaking north amidst a wilderness of clouded hills. There were no roofs glinting in the light, or other roads slicing through the green, just an eternity of crumpled earth receding into the supernal mist. Jungle licked at the muddy road and far below curled the Siang, its waters surprisingly green and calm.
The only other traffic consisted of huge convoys of lumbering Ashok Leyland army trucks. We pulled over to let them by, up to sixty at a time, their turbaned Sikh drivers looking down at us as they passed. Soldiers sat on benches in the open backs, staring blankly out, and I noticed as they rumbled by that there wasn’t a man among them with a bare upper lip. I wondered if it was an Indian Army requirement to have a moustache – as if it were a standard-issue item along with boots and fatigues. Or if, in a country where moustaches are traditionally a sign of virility, the length of one’s whiskers depended on rank. Occasionally, among the uniformly clipped faces of the sepoys and subadars, would be a Rajput, the curling magnificence of his moustache sprouting from his upper lip and cheeks like well-tended topiary.
The Sumo drove into Tuting at three that afternoon. It looked a run-down settlement, and much smaller than I expected, but Dorje was of a different opinion. ‘Tuting very sacred place. This where Siang and Yangsang Chu rivers meet; it most secret place of goddess Dorje Phagmo. In Tibetan language “Tu” means “women’s private parts” and “Ting” means “deep inside”.’
Land of the Dawn-lit Mountains Page 16