Land of the Dawn-lit Mountains

by Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent

  From Tawang I span down towards Jang through slopes dotted with crimson rhododendrons and puffs of white blossom, the silver thread of a river becoming a foaming torrent beneath a clanking Bailey bridge. In the villages women were laying out wide, flat baskets of onions, garlic and red chillies to dry in the sunshine, waving as I passed. Climbing beyond Jang, the view was even more fantastic, and I stopped beside a friendly yak to imprint the moment on my memory. A hidden river meandered north between steep, pine-furred escarpments and mountains that heaved and tumbled in a mosaic of every imaginable green. Stone villages dripped down slopes felted emerald with fields of young barley and rice. I could hear dogs barking, children shouting, yaks’ bells. There were frothy copses, grassy knolls and black dots grazing around brokpas’ huts. The occasional house stood alone at the end of a ridge, around which prayer flags flapped in the breeze. To my far left, the golden roofs of Tawang glinted on the crest of a green wave and, behind, that perfect line of white. How thankful I was that the weather had given me this chance to witness the magic of the place. The yak stood beside me as I took it all in. Perhaps he was enjoying it too.

  But by the time I reached the Jaswant Singh memorial a rumbling tide of cloud was rolling in from the north, suffocating the tops of the mountains. So sharp was the contrast between blue sky and the advancing line of grey, it was as if an invisible hand was pulling a sheet of iron across the sky. Fresh snow covered the barren slopes around the Sela Pass and I rode the last few miles to the summit shivering in the freezing air. But my Hero was uncomplaining.

  Apart from being woken by some drunk hammering on my door at 2 a.m., it was an uneventful night in Dirang. In Bomdila the next morning plump, Monpa women sat at market stalls behind bags of walnuts, kidney beans, maize, peanuts and cubes of hard yak cheese. Rough tin ladles, saucepans, yak-tail dusters and red woollen shawls hung behind them. I stopped to buy a shawl, handing the woman the equivalent of eight pounds without bothering to bargain. Not once had I tried to quibble over prices here, and not once had I felt ripped off. When I asked to take her photo she shrieked with laughter and pointed to her paan-stuffed cheek, as if to say, ‘What about this?’ But she laughed and posed anyway. Never had I travelled among people so quick to laugh. I’d miss that ready cheerfulness.

  I’d packed badly that morning, shoving too much into my dry bag (now ripped and definitely not dry) and securing the disintegrating top box with worn-out bungees and the last of my trusty duct tape. By now the box was cracked halfway across the bottom, held on by just one and a half bolts, and rattled so loudly you could probably hear me coming from two valleys away. I’d be lucky if it lasted until Guwahati. But after the addition of the bulky woollen shawl, my luggage situation deteriorated. Now the dry bag didn’t close properly, the bungees wouldn’t quite stretch, and its bulging form kept slipping sideways as I rode. Stopping near an army camp to rectify the situation, I moodily wrestled with the bungees, vaguely aware of a white pickup pulling up beside me. Two men got out, stood beside the car and stared wordlessly. After a minute or so one of them, a fleshy, charmless fellow, said: ‘Where you from?’

  I was in the middle of trying to secure the dry bag with a bungee that didn’t stretch.

  ‘England,’ I replied, without looking up.

  ‘Where your husband?’

  The damn bungee still wouldn’t stretch. I was sweating now. ‘England.’

  They looked at me with blank, witless stares and tried again. ‘Where your husband?’

  They were annoying me now. ‘England.’

  ‘No!’ The man shook his head uncomprehendingly and pointed to a group of Indian men who were splashing around in a river just below the road. ‘Where your husband? Bathing?’

  ‘No! England!’ I snapped, wondering how long this would go on for.

  At this, clearly thinking me idiotic, he gave up and fell back into gawking silence.

  A minute later came the inevitable: ‘One click?’

  I wasn’t in the mood for smiling sweetly as the men slipped their arms around my shoulders for a grinning selfie and, for the first time on my journey, I replied, ‘No, not today.’

  Feeling mildly repentant I rode away, the two still staring sullenly after me. But guilt soon turned to regret that I hadn’t thought of a better response to the numberless selfie requests of the past few months. Damn, I thought, if only I’d replied: Yes, but only if you pull a Saturday Night Fever pose, or Yes, but only if we all stick our tongues out. But one always thinks of these things afterwards.

  It had been sunny when I left Dirang at seven, but the weather changed again beyond Bomdila and the blue sky flooded grey. So near the end of my journey, my mood fluctuated as frequently as the weather. At lunchtime I pulled over at a roadside shack for rice and dahl and found three young Dutch motorcyclists inside, two women and one man – the first independent travellers I’d met. Bonded by two-wheeled camaraderie, we crowded around a small table piled with helmets, gloves and maps, stories bubbling out of us excitedly, my belligerence over the men forgotten. They were riding around the world on 250cc trail bikes (which I somehow hadn’t noticed outside), visiting Tawang before crossing India to Pakistan and riding home through China, Central Asia and Iran. It was a brief but high-spirited meeting, and we parted ways with warm hugs and photographs.

  Finishing a journey is always like this – a tidal bore of emotions raw with elation, exhaustion, wonder, relief, sadness, nostalgia and gratitude. I didn’t want it to end, to leave behind the wild mountains and all the exceptional people I’d met here. And this journey had meant more to me than any other. It had healed me. I was a different person to the one who’d nervously boarded the plane almost three months ago. I felt alive, happy (apart from the odd moment of irritation), restored to the essence of myself, as if the real me had emerged from the diminished shell I’d become. I’d been reminded that the only way to beat fear is to face it head-on, to look it in the eye and see it for the gutless bully it is. Fear itself can’t hurt us. Only our reactions to it can. But on the other hand I desperately wanted to see Marley, my family, our dog Seamus; to sleep in my own bed, wash in something that wasn’t a cold bucket and not be woken up by bugling cockerels, volleys of phlegm, or drunks.

  Coasting down to the plains around the same switchbacks I’d trundled up a week ago, dropping so fast my ears popped, I kept telling myself to smell, savour and really look at the lush hills around me. All too soon, they’d be gone. Then, distracted by the view, I turned a tight hairpin bend to find a lorry hurtling towards me on the wrong side of the road, trailing a pall of black smoke. Swerving to miss it, I looked down and shuddered to see my wheels just inches from a vertical drop.

  ‘Concentrate!’ I berated myself. ‘This is India! For goodness sake, don’t get run over now.’

  When an army convoy of forty trucks rumbled past soon after, I pulled over, wincing as the three-foot wheels rolled by, uncomfortably close. My final images of Arunachal Pradesh were three monks squatting beside a white Sumo, changing its front tyre, and a soldier having a crap beside his roadside sentry post. Then I was beside the boiling brown waters of the Kameng, dense, humid jungle rising on either side, and before I knew it the road had spat me out at Bhalukpong. In place of the mountains was a grimy town: dingy ‘fooding and lodging’ joints, tangles of wires, half-built houses encased in rickety bamboo scaffolding, cows lying in the road, wine shops, people. I parked my Hero beside the red and white barrier gate into Assam, scribbled my name beside the details the policeman had taken from me a week ago, and BAM! I’d left Arunachal Pradesh. It was 13 April, the date my permit expired.

  A vermilion sun was sinking between the palms as I drove down the sandy track to Nameri eco-camp. A veritable oasis, its thatched huts and safari tents sat among tall palms and silk-cotton trees, beneath which colourful gardens flitted with birds and saucer-sized butterflies. The only other guests were a group of elderly American birdwatchers, some of whom had travelled to over a hundred countries i
n search of the avian grail. They’d come to the right place: in the morning I was awoken not by howling dogs or violent hoicking, but by the mellifluous trilling, cooing, whistling and piping of an orchestra of koels, barbets and a hundred other exotic birds I didn’t know the name of. The twitchers were long gone, striding through the park with spreadsheets and binoculars, fervently ticking off their morning’s feathered conquests.

  That final morning’s riding comes to me in a sequence of mental images: a troop of red-bottomed monkeys under a row of palms, glaring at me with nasty yellow eyes as I buzzed past; a black goat dashing across the road dangerously close to my front wheel; a policeman in miraculously white uniform standing beside the ‘Welcome to Tezpur: Town of Eternal Beauty’ sign, behind him a brackish, rubbish-filled pond; crowds of people waiting to cast their electoral votes at roadside polling booths, the women in saris with parasols up; the bike gusting sideways in the wind as I crossed a bridge over the immense brown waters of the Brahmaputra; a woman walking over the same bridge, red sari slapping at her legs and silk scarf streaming out behind her. On the wind-blasted plains betel palms arched sideways and paddies rippled like sheets of emerald silk. It was surreal to think that only yesterday my wheels had crunched over the snowbound 4,175-metre Sela Pass, yet now I was skimming along the Brahmaputra Valley, sweltering in thirty-seven degrees.

  Ten miles from Guwahati, by the side of the same road I had left in February, Manash was waiting on his Enfield, looking the epitome of cool in a black T-shirt and jeans. It felt like a year since we’d drunk Tango-flavoured gin at the Paradise Hotel in Jorhat, and I rode the last stretch in the sputtering slipstream of his bike, on roads strangely emptied by the election, smiling from ear to ear.

  At some traffic lights on the edge of the city, Manash turned to me, jubilant, and said: ‘Welcome to Guwahati!’

  I felt oddly numb at first – neither happy nor sad. Just aware that the grand adventure was over and I’d ridden my Hero for the last time. Reaching Guwahati felt almost inconsequential: it was the journey that had been important, not my arrival into the traffic, concrete and heat of the city. I suppose it was a culture shock, too – going from the stark cold of Tawang to the breathless pre-monsoon heat of Guwahati; from hard beds and cold bucket washes to a marble-floored apartment with a maid and a bed big enough for ten. My hosts, journalist friends of Manash, took me out for dinner and presented me with a beautiful red and blue mekhela chadar, the traditional Assamese dress, the last in a long line of people who had shown me extraordinary kindness over the past few months. The two nights I was there I lay awake, sweating in spite of the air-conditioning, my mind flicking through an album of images from the journey: elfish Idu faces lit up in the firelight, the view from Tashigong, the heaving flanks of dying mithun at the reh festival, frayed parachutes amidst the wreckage of the C-46, nuns, monks, mahouts . . .

  I’d travelled through Arunachal at a critical time in its history, when the homogenizing juggernaut of globalization was colliding with tribal cultures that had flourished in near-isolation for hundreds of years. How long, I wondered, would Idu shamans chant to Inni Maselo Jinu or the Monpa throw their dead into rivers? Would Lobsang Gyatso succeed in stopping the dams that threatened his native Tawang? How would the tribes manage to retain their cultural identities in the face of rising pressures from both Hindus and Christians to reform?

  Abhra arrived the next afternoon, fresh from six weeks filming snow leopards in Himachal Pradesh for Planet Earth II. His hair was a little greyer than when we’d last met in Delhi two and a half years ago, but he was still the same laughing, laid-back Bengali. Juggling ten different television projects at once, he spent half the evening with his phone and power bank hanging off his ear, fielding Skype calls from demanding producers at the BBC and elsewhere. It was funny being at the other end of the line, seeing him answer his constantly ringing mobile and say, ‘Yes, now’s a good time to talk,’ and meaning it, whether he was in a car, walking along the street or sitting down to dinner. Answering phone calls at all hours of the day would drive me potty, but Abhra is a man of fathomless energy and good cheer. And he still had the stamina to stay up with Manash and me until 3 a.m., drinking the bottle of Bombay Sapphire he’d brought. This time the gin was at last accompanied by tonic. Real Schweppes tonic water, hunted down by Manash from some obscure shop in the city. We didn’t have ice or lemon, but just the fizzing, bitter taste of a bona fide gin and tonic was enough. Abhra flew back to Calcutta the next morning to celebrate Bengali New Year, before flying up to Uttar Pradesh the day after for a BBC recce. That man never stops.

  My journey had been sewn with such good fortune that it seemed only right I end it at Kamakhya, the temple I’d been blessed at before I left. But a clammy, head-drilling hangover and lengthy farewell lunch with my hosts meant it was late by the time we were ready to leave. Manash and Abhra would be looking after my loyal Hero from now on, while the top box would be immortalized as an objet d’art in their office. After patting both bike and box goodbye I slung my bags into Manash’s car and we set off through the city’s traffic.

  With the temple’s usual crowds swelled by both Navrati – a Hindu festival associated with the goddess – and the start of Bihu, the Assamese New Year, we’d be lucky to even make it into the compound. Tens of thousands would be descending on the temple today, some who would have queued for a puja since dawn. With my flight just three hours from now, the best we could hope for was a quick blessing at the gates from Manash’s family priest.

  We ran past the gaudy stalls and the dreadlocked sadhus, pushing our way through the throng. Then suddenly the panda, the same bony, bespectacled old priest I’d met in February, was at our side and whisking us through the main gates, past the coven of cunning priests and milling crowds. We ducked and jostled past hubbubs of people, billy goats and paving stones spattered with the sticky blood of recently sacrificed animals. Then we were in a small room behind the temple and the panda was hurrying us towards a desk, where a woman was stamping two red tickets printed SPECIAL ENTRY COUPON and saying something about it being a gift from the District Commissioner’s office. Bewildered, slammed by heat and my hangover, I was hurried by the priest into the black maw of the temple, past a crush of people shuffling forward behind a grid of metal fencing.

  ‘They’ll have been queuing all day,’ said Manash’s voice behind me.

  Glancing briefly back at the line I saw it snaking back and forth inside the metal cages, a heaving press of thousands. It must have been fifty degrees inside. Sweat sprang instantly, copiously, from my forehead and back. My head swam. Sweaty bodies crushed against me on all sides. A minute later the panda was thrusting me down the steps into the inner sanctum and one of the temple priests was pulling me to my knees beside the yoni, telling me to touch the water, throw marigolds, give money – all the while unseen bodies pushing me from behind and our panda chanting urgently in my ear. It was fuggy with sweat and incense, charged with fervour. Somewhere behind me was Manash, kneeling and muttering too. Then we were stumbling into the sunlight again, blinking, smeared red, poorer, bewildered, buzzing with adrenaline.

  I looked at Manash, wide-eyed and ecstatic. ‘That was insane! What on earth just happened? How did we get in like that? What did you do?’

  But Manash, his forehead daubed in three lines of red tikka, looked equally confused. ‘I’ve no idea. That just doesn’t happen. The panda must have arranged it but I’ve honestly no idea how. You are quite unbelievably lucky.’

  He was right. I was lucky. It was an extraordinary end to a quite magnificent journey.

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  1. Mist, mountains and a river purling below – a typical view in Arunachal Pradesh. This was taken in the Upper Siang region.

  2. Three Idu Mishmi igu, or shamans, chant at reh festival in the Dibang Valley.

  3. Kormu and Mishing, the lovely Idu Mishmi couple I stayed with near the Dibang Valley’s border with Tibet, plus their fat cat and foxy d
og.

  4. The charred skulls of sacrificed mithun hang on the bamboo walls of a Miju Mishmi house in Anjaw district.

  5. Sipa Melo, the Idu Mishmi shaman. Note the leopard’s jawbone around his neck.

  6. Kabsang, one of my guides in Pemako, and a deaf (but exceedingly cheerful) villager in Tashigong.

  7. The fog-wreathed gompa at Yoldong in Pemako.

  8. Kabsang, Dorje (the King!) and I take a rest outside the main door of Devakotta Monastery in Pemako.

  9. The view from Tashigong. Paradise on earth.

  10. Adi men fixing a hanging bridge over the Siang River outside Tuting. Not a job for anyone suffering from vertigo!

  11. The sun sets over the rice fields of the Apatani Valley in Lower Subansiri district – such a different landscape to anywhere else in the state.

  12. An old Apatani lady who had recently converted to Christianity.

  13. Ursula Graham Bower (left) with two Naga, taken during her wartime stint in the Naga Hills in the early forties. What a lady she was.

  14. My tent in the Nyishi longhouse at Karoi: a source of great entertainment for all the family.

  15. Freddie ‘Buzz Boy Pete’ Raubinger, a 21-year-old pilot – one of the US airmen killed near Karoi in 1945.

  16. Me, my ebullient guide, Tapir (left), and a local Nyishi man, with one of the C-46’s radial engines at the crash site near Karoi.

  17. Nuns at school in Tawang. On the left is Phurpa, one of my lovely hosts.

  18. Riding towards the snow-bound Sela Pass near Tawang.

  19. Me with my Hero, looking jubilant at the top of the 4,175-metre Sela Pass.

  20. With my Indian fairy godfathers, Abhra (left) and Manash, at the end in Guwahati.