A few hours later I asked Thutan if the Monpa believed in the yeti. His daughter didn’t understand what I meant at first, then said: ‘Oh! You mean the gret!’
‘Of course,’ the old man replied. ‘It lives in the mountains; it walks like a human and looks like a big monkey. The brokpa [nomadic yak herders] often see it, but only at night, and it always hides its face.’
Once, in the 1960s, he and four friends had stopped for a night at an abandoned hut in the mountains while on their way to Assam. ‘We lit a fire to keep warm and all at once a gret came and shook the hut from the outside. It felt like an earthquake! The gret is afraid of fire and we knew it wouldn’t come inside, but we were still very scared.’
There was another thing I’d heard about the Monpa, which particularly intrigued me, and that was their traditional way of disposing of the dead. Unlike other Buddhist tribes they don’t burn bodies or leave them on mountaintops for vultures to eat. Instead they chop the corpses into 108 pieces and throw them into rivers. Through this, they believe, the deceased is guaranteed a good rebirth. Surprisingly it isn’t a priest or lama who undertakes the gruesome task of dismemberment; any male in the community can volunteer. In a macabre version of community karma service, the more dead you chop up, the more karma you accrue: if you hit the magic 108 corpses you’ll have climbed several notches up the ladder towards enlightenment.
Fascinated by this, I asked the family about the practice. It still happened, they said, but not everyone did it now and the government was trying to discourage it. But a few hours later, one of the English teacher’s friends popped in: a suave-looking, middle-aged man in jeans, he sat down next to the teacher and began absentmindedly scrolling through his phone.
‘He’s cut up the bodies for river burials – ask him,’ said the teacher, giggling. The man looked embarrassed and buried his head in his phone. But after some gentle persuasion he opened up, telling me in good English about his experiences. The first body he’d ever done was a three-year-old female relative, and he’d chopped at least twenty bodies since. Young people’s bones were much harder, but old people’s were soft and broke easily. It had been difficult at first, he said, especially since it was a young child but, like anything, you soon become used to it. Fascinated by the gory details, I asked him what it was like to do it.
‘You have to cut the body in a special way. First you cut the head off and hide it so it can’t see; then you cut up the rest of the body, counting the pieces and throwing them in the river as you do it. The head goes in last. You have to cover your face when you chop the body—’ he lifted his hand in front of his face to show me, ‘because the blood spray everywhere.’ I grimaced at the mental image.
‘Why do you do it?’ I asked. Notching up karma points was one thing, but actually chopping up the corpses quite another.
‘People don’t want to do it anymore, and no one in my village was volunteering, so I thought I should.’
‘You’re not a vegetarian are you?’ I quipped.
‘Yes. Pure veg. For twenty years.’ Everyone in the room laughed.
Maybe if you weren’t a vegetarian, it would be enough to make you one.
There was a third daughter – a quiet, gentle woman of about forty who often sat in the corner of the room knitting socks for her father. With her shaven head covered by a pink woolly hat and a coat over her robes, I hadn’t noticed at first that she was a nun. Of the four children, she was the only one who didn’t speak any English, but her sisters told me she’d made the choice to enter a nunnery when she was nine years old. Now, having studied away for several years, she was about to return to her old nunnery in Tawang. Wanting to experience what life was like for the nuns in these cold mountains, I asked if I could go and stay there. Several phone calls later it was all arranged – I’d walk to the nunnery tomorrow afternoon and take Chopa, her younger brother, to translate. Although he was a man, as a relation of one of the ani, nuns, he was allowed to stay there too.
*
No one is sure how old the Bramdung Chung Ani Gompa is: some say it was built by an eighth-century Tibetan king as a place for his wife to meditate; others that it was founded by the same lama who constructed Tawang. A cluster of white buildings muscling out of the face of a mountain, it sits amidst slopes thick with juniper, pine and scarlet rhododendrons. Below it, in bald, grassy clearings, yaks graze around the small stone huts of brokpa, the alpine tinkle of their bells drifting up to the nunnery’s whitewashed walls. Inside these walls, worn stone alleys run between rough whitewashed buildings with painted windows and gold corrugated iron roofs. Firewood is piled up to the eaves. Baskets of chillies dry on the balconies of the nuns’ wooden houses. Androgynous, bald-headed figures in maroon robes walk past windowsills bright with old paint pots planted with primroses and geraniums. In the middle of it all is the main gompa, its ornate windows and soaring main doors looking down across a deep gorge to the main monastery and Bhutan beyond. Compared to the sprawling monastery, though, it’s much smaller: just forty-seven ani live here; a tenth of Tawang’s monks.
Phurpa was eight when her parents sent her to the nunnery. She’d been too young to fully understand what was happening, she said, but remembers all the other nuns looking after her. Now the woman sitting on the floor beside me was twenty-seven, a striking-looking Monpa with wide-set eyes and full lips. I asked her if she was happy here.
She replied in faltering English, her voice soft and lilting. ‘Yes, I like very much.’
Chopa and I had arrived at the spartan, two-roomed house Phurpa shared with two other nuns just as a storm broke, and now the three of us were huddled around the wood-burner, our voices competing with the clatter of hailstones on the metal roof. A bright young woman fizzing with energy and intelligence, Phurpa bobbed up and down – pushing logs into the wood-burner, pouring tea, chopping vegetables. In between this we warmed ourselves around the fire and spoke in broken English, with Chopa filling in the linguistic gaps. Although Phurpa had only started learning English at the nunnery’s school a month ago, she could already hold a basic conversation.
‘I want to be an educated nun.’ She said it like a mantra, her brow knotting in determination.
‘Why English?’ I asked.
‘I speak Monpa, Hindi and Tibetan too. But English is most important language. With English can communicate all over world.’
We hadn’t been there long when a frail-looking, toothy nun and an adorable little girl in a pink, sparkly woollen hat walked in – Phurpha’s two housemates returning from a visit to some healing springs near Jang. Sitting with us by the wood-burner, Legpe, the older nun, immediately unscrewed a flask of hot arag and poured me a bowl.
She nudged the bowl of steaming liquid across the wooden floor, smiling and talking in Monpa. ‘She’s telling you it’s cold – that you need to drink,’ translated Chopa, accepting a bowl himself.
This is not what I’d expected in a nunnery, I thought, trying not to gag as the taste of greasy, rancid melted yak butter hit my tongue. (Just as in Pemako, the Monpa melt butter in tea and alcohol to help with the calorie-burning effects of the cold.) But as soon as I’d taken a few sips, Legpe was topping me up, encouraging me to drink in the same way a kindly nurse might administer medicine to a sickly child. If I paused for too long she’d tip the bowl towards me, saying: ‘It’s a cold place here – you need to drink. You need it to sleep better!’
Between sips, I jokingly admonished her. ‘Legpe, you’re so naughty! You’re a bad influence. A nun shouldn’t be getting me drunk.’ But she just smiled her gap-toothed grin and poured me more. When she wasn’t administering arag, she fetched pillows from the bedroom they shared, plumped them behind my back and worried that I wasn’t comfortable enough, ignoring my assurances that I was.
‘You’re a guest, you’ve come so far, it’s my duty to look after you.’
At this rate, the 3 a.m. alarm call for morning prayers was unlikely to be pretty. Drinking forty per cent proof alcohol is
likely to affect you on most occasions, but on an empty stomach, at the oxygen-starved altitude of 3,200 metres, it was even more potent. I was drunk in no time. Not head-spinningly, throwing-up drunk, but the sort of inebriation where details fade, conversations converge and your brain retreats into a warm, fuzzy, booze-filled cocoon. I know that Phurpa bustled about and cooked us dinner on the gas stove in the corner of the room, but for the life of me I can’t recall what. Rice perhaps, and some sort of vegetables. And I can picture little Tenzin, an angelic-looking girl of eleven, falling asleep across Legpe’s lap as the old nun lovingly stroked her head. I would have liked to talk to her more, to ask her how she’d felt when her parents sent her a year ago. But she spoke only a few words of English and the older nuns always answered for her. She was still adjusting to the rigorous discipline of her new life, they told me.
‘She’s naughty – she has a lot to learn, but she’s only young,’ said Legpe, looking down at her adoringly.
The three of them were related, I found out, and came from the same village near Jang. Phurpa and Tenzin were first cousins, and Legpe – who’d been here for forty of her fifty years – their aunt. In the absence of their own parents or children, they were like a close family.
With such an early start, the nuns normally went to sleep at eight, but it was after ten by the time Legpe refilled my bowl for the last time. Chopa slept by the fire and us girls in the bedroom: Legpe and Tenzin snuggled up together in one bed, Phurpa and I were in the other two. Phurpa coddled me like a child before she turned out the light, pulling the blankets around me and tucking them under the thin mattress. Afterwards I fell asleep in a drunken, happy stupor, tears of contentment and gratitude wetting my cheeks.
‘Sister! Sister! Wake up!’ It was the middle of the night and Phurpa was gently shaking me. A bulb flooded the room with harsh yellow light. ‘Sister, time for prayers.’
I groaned. Odd dreams, a midnight stumble to the outside loo, and a nun snoring thunderously in a neighbouring house had made for a fitful sleep. All I wanted to do was burrow into the blankets and stay in bed for another five hours. But instead I blearily pulled my jeans over my thermal leggings and followed the nuns into the black, starless night, our breath ballooning in freezing clouds as we trotted down an alleyway to the main gompa. From across the inky darkness of the gorge came the solemn blasts of conches calling the monks to prayers.
The gompa flickered in semi-darkness, the light of yak butter candles falling on silk banners, golden icons and rows of shaven heads. Sitting cross-legged between Tenzin and Phurpa, on one of the low platforms that ran at right angles from the altar, I watched the nuns rub sleep from their eyes, yawn and pull their woollen shawls about them, their breath rising in the gloom. It was just above freezing now, but even when it was minus twenty they were forbidden to wear warm coats over their robes during morning prayers. It was a form of mental training, Legpe had told me: the older nuns used a type of meditation called nen jurma that generated internal heat.
‘But you have to control your mind first. It’s very hard.’
It sounded just like tumo, meaning warmth, an advanced form of meditation used by Tibetan monks and ascetics to raise their core temperature. The great traveller and Tibetologist Alexandra David-Néel witnessed new initiates of tumo proving their abilities by drying freezing wet towels on their naked bodies in the middle of the Tibetan winter, and Tibetan hermits surviving winters in freezing caves with nothing but tumo to keep them warm.
At 3.30 a.m. the head nun, a bullish woman of about fifty, took her seat nearest the altar, drilbu and vajra in hand, and led the nuns in a low chant. At times the chanting was drab and dirge-like, at others more urgent, but always it surged on in the same flat tone, the voices of the younger nuns shrill above the rest. Some of the women looked bored and half-asleep; others, like Phurpa, belted out the prayers with evident gusto. Tenzin soon nodded off, her chin dropping into the folds of her robes, and the nun next to her, a child of about the same age, giggled when she saw. Every ten minutes or so a shy nun of about fifteen came round and poured a steaming flask of salty butter tea into our wooden bowls but, in spite of the cold and my need for caffeine, it still made me gag.
Warming my hands around the bowl instead, I closed my eyes and let the sound of the chanting wash over me, my mind floating across an hypnotic, changing landscape of voices and tinkling bells. Several times the chanting paused and, in its place, the silence fidgeted with the slurping of tea and the shuffle of robes being pulled tighter around cold bodies. By 5 a.m. tiredness overtook me, and my head lolled into a doze, but soon a revived Tenzin was prodding my knee, smiling conspiratorially as I groggily caught her eye. At six the prayers ended and we emerged into a grey dawn. Below us, blue smoke curled from the yak herders’ huts and Tawang slumbered in a pallid light. To the southeast, a thick blanket of dark grey clouds smothered the peaks of Bhutan.
‘Has she had her breakfast?’ bellowed the monk, half-jokingly.
It was morning assembly and twenty nuns were standing in sheepish rows outside their two-roomed concrete schoolhouse above the gompa. Their teacher – a wiry, elfin-faced 26-year-old monk whose pointed features made me think of Mr Spock – had asked one of his pupils to stand at the front and recite a Tibetan verse. Now she blushed and mumbled shyly at the ground, her thin voice barely audible.
The monk paced up and down beside the nuns, a sergeant major drilling his troops. ‘Has she had her breakfast?’ he repeated. But the nuns just tittered coyly in response. It was obvious that the young monk took his job extremely seriously, chivvying and goading his pupils with a zealot’s intensity.
‘It is my duty to educate these nuns. I want to do the best for my disciples,’ he told me earnestly.
All morning the nuns sat obediently behind low wooden desks – Phurpa and six older girls in one room, Tenzin and the youngest nuns next door – the monk pacing between the rooms, teaching two classes at once. In the first class, Buddhism, the rooms rang with the pupils’ enthusiastic, if not always tuneful, singing. The monk danced around the front of the class, bursting into snippets of Hindi song. He was a funny character, half-stern, half-comic, but the nuns clearly liked him and I wondered if any of them harboured secret, un-nunly crushes. Sitting quietly against the side wall in the older nuns’ classroom, I watched the nuns whisper and chew the ends of their pens, their fingers following the lines of text, while in the front row Phurpa hunched studiously over her books, furrowing her brow in concentration. She was a whirlwind of energy, that girl, determined to learn and make the most of her opportunities.
At one point the monk leant over to correct her work, the top of his robe flapping open to show a pale-blue Real Madrid shirt underneath. ‘She’s my best student,’ he said, unabashedly.
By mid-morning the nuns’ efforts not to be distracted by me had largely failed: every time the monk went next door their curiosity fizzed out in a torrent of excitable questions.
‘Sister, you like nun?’ Seven expectant faces looked at me.
‘Yes, of course!’
‘Sister, why you not become nun?’
I could see the appeal of life here – not having to worry about money or finding a job or a husband, sheltered from the tumult of the outside world. One nun I spoke to was thirty-seven, the same age as me, and had only just arrived. Painfully shy, she could hardly look me in the eye, but through Phurpa she said she’d come to escape life’s difficulties. But I knew I wasn’t cut out for life in a nunnery, especially the 3 a.m. starts.
‘Erm, I don’t think so. I’ve got too many sins,’ I replied.
‘Sister, are you married?’
‘Sister, what class did you reach?’
‘Sister, what are your responsibilities?’ I had to think hard about this one. ‘My dog?’ I ventured.
‘Sister, what is your hobby?’
This needed less thought. ‘Travel.’
‘Sister, how many countries have you visit?’ They gasped when I said
fifty-two.
‘Sister . . .’
When the monk walked in the nuns looked down at their books and fell guiltily silent. But at least they were practising English.
Chopa had returned home that morning, so I walked back to Tawang alone just before dusk.
‘I miss you,’ said Phurpa as I left. ‘Please come back.’
Then, in a rush of affection, she presented me with a string of prayer beads she’d been given during the Dalai Lama’s visit in 2009. ‘Please have this, so you no forget us.’
I was extremely touched, and have written this book with those prayer beads beside me, and thought of my friends at the nunnery often. After giving Tenzin, Phurpa and Legpe big hugs, I shouldered my rucksack and walked out of the gates, brimming with happiness.
20
YAK TO THE PLAINS
I left Tawang under a brilliant blue sky and understood, for the first time, the true beauty of this place. For five days the town had drowsed under fog and cloud, the surrounding mountaintops severed by cantankerous banks of grey. But now I rode away squinting into dazzling sunshine, the mountains transformed to a glittering wall of white. In the middle of this magnificent arena rose the monastery, shining like a knob of fresh yak’s butter on its mount. A few times over the previous week I’d stopped to look at a view and felt oddly unmoved by the scene, as if I was trying to save photographs to a memory card that was already full. But now, despite the freezing wind that flayed my cheeks, I gloried in the astounding vista, and couldn’t have been happier. Around my neck was a white khata, given to me by Thutan’s family as I left. I’d tucked it under my down coat and waved goodbye until the bulky, coated figures in my wing mirror had vanished around a corner.
Land of the Dawn-lit Mountains Page 27