The Himalayan Arc

by Namita Gokhale

  Arriving from conservative, buttoned-up Gujarat – where men had fallen off their bicycles craning their necks to get a closer look at me, so unused to seeing foreigners were they – nothing could have prepared me for this place. Yet, which category, I wondered, did I fit into? The nebulous and perplexing concept of ‘home’ reared its head again. I had always somehow felt divorced from the country of my birth. And here, in McLeod Ganj, I found I was an exile in a community of refugees I was foreign to, marooned in a land where both they and I were alien: I by my own free will, they forced by circumstance. What, really, had brought me here? Why had I stayed?

  Just a few months after I moved to McLeod Ganj, I was able to read and write basic Tibetan, and took conversational lessons with a nun from a nunnery nearby. I had always been a good mimic, able to quickly pick up music and languages, not through rigorous application but by ear. I practised the Tibetan alphabet daily in a flimsy school jotter. The script was a composition of elegant arches and curlicues, of dashing accents and stripes, and I loved to see the words form from my pen. When I first settled there, I kept strange company. I was one of an odd gang of five who shared a basement dormitory in a pretty hostel called Ladies Venture, the room a menagerie which thrummed with insect life at night. Rarely did we do much as a group, but they would individually cajole me into joining them in their pet activities, none of which I shared their enthusiasm for. The painfully anorexic English girl called Rachel rustled plastic bags of food under her bed in the dead of night, and drew looks of alarm from Indians almost as thin as she was. In the bed opposite mine was a Brazilian who had shaved her locks and taken the vows of a Buddhist nun, relinquishing her name in favour of Tenzin Nyima, conferred upon her by the Dalai Lama himself. She tried valiantly to convert me to Buddhism, taking me to a retreat centre where I was expected to help clean butter lamps and engage in tedious discourse on obscure Buddhist texts. Yossi, the Israeli boy I met on the day I arrived, attempted to teach me how to play his didgeridoo, which he had lugged overland from Vietnam. Apparently he’d traded it there in exchange for drugs. McLeod Ganj was a particular haven for him. ‘Special’ lassis and charas-infused chocolate balls featured heavily in his diet.

  In my letters home it was difficult to convey McLeod Ganj’s singularity. I wondered how words might ever do it justice, for its appeal was not merely aesthetic. In those heady, inebriated early weeks – it was hardly surprising some nicknamed it Ganja Cloud – I began to wonder whether there were any sane people at all in the place; indeed, wondered whether I was losing my own grip on sanity the longer I stayed there. My life revolved around our dormitory, the Dalai Lama’s temple and the tiny language school where I had volunteered to teach English and general knowledge to Tibetans. But I liked it. I was infatuated by its weirdness and wonder, and not yet ready to bid it farewell.

  Dr Tsomo, the Tibetan physician I occasionally consulted, listened to my pulse to identify my sickness. McLeod Ganj had been my home for three years; I had got married, to a Tibetan whose former life as a nomad in the high grasslands of the Kham region of Tibet was as unknown to me as he himself was at times. Namgyal, my husband, could be sweet and caring. His term of affection for me, in Tibetan, was nyi nying-tsilo; when I asked him to translate it, he said it meant ‘the fat of my heart’. At times he was thoughtful and measured. When I was hospitalized with dysentery he slept on the floor alongside the other families camped out around their sick relatives. He was genuinely distressed at my listless state, and would accompany me – despite my weak protestations – on each agonizing trip into the hospital’s shared squat toilets. As I grew stronger he implored me to drink mugfuls of salted milky ‘Amdo tea’, or Am-ja, which he boiled from paper-wrapped bricks of dried twigs imported from China.

  But soon after we married I discovered that he could also behave despicably. If I did something that displeased him – dawdled too long in the market, or chatted for longer than he cared with one of my few Western friends – he would simmer with a jealous rage, sometimes throwing his mobile phone at my head, and then ignore me for days on end. Occasionally he would disappear and be gone for hours. More often than not, he could be found engaged in hours-long games of carrom, popular at McLeod Ganj’s outdoor cafés, placing low-level bets and drinking his favourite Bagpiper whisky from the nearest speakeasy, wrapped in newspaper. He was irrationally envious of anything that tempted my attention elsewhere, especially angry when I vanished into a book, jealous of the paper and print he could not read and which stole me away from him. ‘Books are for monks, not wives!’ he hissed. He disliked socializing with my friends. If on the street or at the temple we met any by accident, he would invariably hang back, distrustful and scowling, and later chastise me for being ‘clever’ – the ultimate insult – with my long English sentences and words he could not understand, and which he believed to be a deliberate act of sabotage on my part. Being married to a footloose foreigner, whose power lay in her citizenship, her education, her worldly experiences, was a profoundly emasculating experience for him.

  I had done nothing wrong, yet felt guilty of some transgression. The more he misbehaved, the harder I worked to fulfil my role. If he entertained friends, it was my job to cook and to serve. I was to be a homemaker, to wash his clothes, to ensure his needs were met, to provide wifely comforts. Like a beseeching Desdemona I worked to persuade him of my fidelity, deferring to his superiority in all things. It went against every ounce of my will.

  Lying on Dr Tsomo’s stiff bed, I allowed my eyes to wander around the room, taking in the countless jars of dried herbs and incomprehensible charts mapping the body’s three principal systems underpinning traditional Tibetan medicine: lung (circulation), tri-pa (bile) and pay-gyen (phlegm). She took my pulse and tutted, addressing me by the Tibetan name that had been bestowed on me at the Dalai Lama’s temple before I married: ‘Your heart, Tenzin Dekyi, your heart… It is bad, very bad.’

  Shaking her head she looked at me severely through her wire-rimmed glasses. I intuited that she was referring to my happiness, rather than a cardiac complaint. It was ironic that dekyi meant happiness. She offered no other words but dispensed some foul-tasting medicines, dark pellets of dried herbs which looked like aniseed balls counted out into small brown paper bags that she stapled closed. I was to drink them three times a day, crushed into warm water. I knew that I would probably take them for a day or two, then chuck them in the garbage; it was Namgyal who, in a short-lived fit of regret following one of his white rages, had suggested that Dr Tsomo take my pulse.

  It was December, and the windows of Dr Tsomo’s rooms had iced over. Winters in McLeod Ganj were bitterly mean. It could be as bitingly cold indoors as outdoors, unless you were able to warm your rooms with a gas heater. But cylinders were limited to strictly one per household, and normally reserved for the kitchen. The electricity was too unreliable to gain any long-term benefit from one of the little wire-encased bar heaters from Kotwali Bazaar; in any case, the electric cabling – encased not in plastic, but the woven variety I remembered from my childhood – was a safety hazard. Little things like this, so curiously reminiscent of a life recent and comforting to me, served only to make me feel more estranged from myself.

  During the winter months I developed more pronounced Tibetan habits; somehow, the harshness of the season amplified my adopted mantle of a nomad’s wife. I slept in my clothes with a sheepskin chuba as a bedcover, showered at most once a week, and boiled thermoses of tea in the morning, from which we made a porridge of tsampa, roast barley flour. In Tibetan households, like ours, a sack of tsampa was a staple. In reality, the porridge was more of a cookie dough. I made mine with jaggery and black tea, moulded it into small lumps and ate them like sweets. Namgyal mixed it into a sort of soup with milky tea and chura, the dried yak milk cheese that came strung like a necklace. Had Dr Tsomo diagnosed some sort of homesickness in me? Strange. I had never felt homesick in my life. It was a new concept, one I did not recognize since I had never truly encountere
d it. When I was very young my father’s work took him to Italy and we were uprooted to live abroad. I could hardly contain the excitement with which I anticipated the new friends I would make, the exotic foods we would eat, the astonishing prospect of living in an apartment rather than a house. As I grew older, nationality became an abstraction, a label that smudged and came unstuck. Any sense of national identity was replaced with a quite different notion: that of occupying a space in the world. The longer we lived abroad, the less British I felt. Whenever we returned ‘home’ I felt a pleasant apartness, bemused by a way of life I was supposed to be comfortable with. It compounded my long-held belief that I had been born in the wrong century, or on the wrong continent. I always felt incongruous. Scotland – the closest thing to home, since that was where our grandparents lived – was just another foreign posting. Life, in fact, became a series of foreign postings.

  The poky marital home I shared with Namgyal was, in fact, two adjoining rooms with a kitchen and an outdoor bathroom which had only cold water, all connected by a narrow balcony of a large house belonging to a local Indian family. The patriarch of that family was called Lal Shankar. He suffered a mysterious skin complaint, and his elderly mother still anointed him daily with cream, a ritual which took place in their courtyard. But it was his wife – Mummy-ji – who wielded the power. She instructed me in a certain number of domestic skills that I needed to deploy in my newfound role of good and faithful wife to a Tibetan nomad.

  Mummy-ji would dispatch one of her own staff to guide me around the bazaar, making sure I got the best price for the chicken I bought from the chicken-wallah, and the freshest pak choi and mustard greens to fry for supper. We bulk-bought rice, and the flour with which I made momos, thukpa noodles and fresh chapatis. Sometimes Mummy-ji herself walked with me to the Muslim butchers in Dharamshala, where she taught me to assess hunks of fly-spattered goat and mutton. Rivulets of blood streamed into the concrete grooves that met in a grotesque soup of mud, dust and purple innards at the centre of the hidden courtyard from which the men traded. Beef or buffalo could be bought on the black market, although it had often travelled for days.

  Unlike Namgyal I was not a practising Buddhist, although at times I attended the Dalai Lama’s teachings. But whether His Holiness was giving teachings or not, every day – either at daybreak, or in the early evening as the sun plummeted behind the march of snow-peaks – I joined the hordes of pilgrims who circumambulated his temple, sometimes with my husband, mostly alone, ten, fifteen, thirty times, often chatting with friends of Namgyal’s doing the same thing. Tibetans call this circumambulation ‘kora’, meaning revolution: both a pilgrimage and a form of meditation. Some perform cycles of prostrations in front of the Kalachakra temple, rags wrapped around their knees and wooden paddles strapped to their hands which swoop in and out in a semicircular Charleston-style movement as they kneel and then splay their upper bodies on a timbered floor made glossy with worship.

  We would spin the rows of bronze prayer wheels as we passed them, their wooden handles rounded waxy-smooth by millions of hands. During difficult times, or on religious holidays, we would pay a few rupees to light butter lamps in an ante-chamber of the main temple where monks in dirty aprons, their faces smeared with soot, performed a rota of lighting and cleaning the hundreds of tiny coppery bowls filled with ghee. I owned a couple of malas, which I used as worry beads. My favourite was a modest string of 108 smooth sandalwood spheres, which would remain in my pocket as I repeated my kora. Silently I would count the beads back and forth until I had completed dozens and dozens.

  Faith had not been a feature of my childhood, and I had always felt strangely cheated; I would rather have had a religious framework imposed on me against which I could rebel – which I might have questioned, or indeed perhaps embraced – than have none and wonder for years what all the fuss was about. This lack of faith was a hole in my upbringing. But there in India, in a soup of tribes, faith was the scented oil that carried and sustained those for whom daily worship was more than just habit, more than even the marrow of their soul. It was secularism that was foreign, and I liked that. The leather-faced Tibetan amalas who worshipped alongside us in the temple, or Lal Shankar’s pious Hindu mother, were not so different from my own maternal grandmother, Granny Groves, whose devout Catholicism defined her.

  And so it was that the Dalai Lama’s temple became a place of refuge for me. It was a place where I could draw comfort from my detachment. I had reason to suspect that Namgyal sent his friends to spy on me when I went out by myself; at least I could not be punished for spending time in an apparent act of religious devotion. When alone I preferred to take the Lingkhor, the longer pilgrim route through the forest surrounding the temple, so named after the Lingkhor in Lhasa. White columbines and peonies poked through the undergrowth alongside lilac asters, Himalayan snowberries and triffid-sized ferns. Wild hill thyme and marjoram scented the air. It was a walk of extreme prettiness that skirted the vertiginous edge of a ridge, as if hanging suspended above the Kangra Valley. There I could hear the song of the viridian flycatchers, according to local lore another manifestation of Shiva, and without fail would recall lines from the poem ‘Adlestrop’:

  And for that minute a blackbird sang

  Close by, and round him, mistier,

  Farther and farther, all the birds

  Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

  Light-headed from the exertion I would stop and then, as if from the prow of a ship, survey the endless plains ahead and, behind, the mighty Dhauladhars: layer upon layer of crumpled granite, awesome in their solid solitude and yet dwarfed by a seamless expanse of sky. I found that I could recapture, if only for a moment, a morsel of the flawless happiness that I had stumbled upon in the past; the sort of insistent happiness that requires you to halt and acknowledge it, to salute its gravity. I had felt such fugitive joy at other times: on top of Mount Sinai; marooned in the Australian outback; hearing the sunrise call to prayer in Cairo’s Tahrir Square; looking onto Mount Everest; surveying the navy-blue Aegean Sea from the Acropolis; even standing alone on the top of a Cumbrian fell in the English Lake District, where the expanse of nature could swell the heart almost to bursting.

  But the bubble of happiness would burst in the sudden manner in which a dream ruptures and evaporates almost invisibly at the moment of waking. And I feared that I belonged less in India than I did anywhere; that I belonged least of all in a broken marriage, broken even before it had been built. The truth is that the peace that I could sometimes find on the Lingkhor was tempered always, diminished by a corrosive unease. For I was no Penelope, and my marriage was as delusory as Laertes’s shroud. It rendered me immobile, shackled to the weaving of a chimera. These things I considered on the circular route of the Lingkhor, a blunt reminder of the circular nature of samsara: a wheel of existence laden with suffering which continued, without end, through life, death and rebirth.

  THERE’S A CARNIVAL TODAY

  Indra Bahadur Rai

  Translated from the Nepali by Manjushree Thapa

  In this Translation

  ‘Someone really ought to have written a novel about the old Darjeeling,’ Janak says at one point in There’s a Carnival Today, reminiscing about times past. Indra Bahadur Rai is that someone, and There’s a Carnival Today is the novel he wrote. It is, at its most intimate, the story of Janak, but at its most panoramic it is the story of post-Independence Darjeeling as it falls under the influence of the two political movements that have shaped its fate: the Naxalite or communist labour union movement in the tea plantations, and the formation of a ‘Gorkha’ identity and the rise of the demand for a Gorkhaland state in India.

  Previously the homeland of animist and Tibetan Buddhist Lepcha, Limbu and Bhotia communities, ‘Dorje-lyang’ – the land of the thunderbolt – has transformed rapidly, and is still in a churn. It was ruled by Sikkim and Bhutan before Nepal won it in 1789 in an expansionist drive across the Himalaya. In 1816, following the Sugauli Treaty,
Nepal ceded it, as well as all of the territory between the Mechi and Teesta Rivers, to the British East India Company. The British East India Company passed it on to Sikkim, but then, upon George Alymer Lloyd and J.W. Grant’s 1829 ‘discovery’ of ‘Dorjeeling’, wrested back the right to develop it as a hill station, complete with road and railway access. They brought in labourers from impoverished Nepal to do so.

  From its seat of government in Calcutta, British India came to prize this rugged area at the foothills of Mount Kanchenjunga for its beauty, its cool, misty summers, and its lucrative, rapidly expanding tea plantations. Darjeeling district, which first took shape in 1865, included the Dooars plains as well as the hill town of Kalimpong, east of the Teesta River. This became a major site of recruitment for the Gorkha regiment to the British Indian army, as well as a place to settle retired Gorkhas. It also became an important centre of learning as Christian missionaries set up convent schools and colleges that attracted students from all over India and abroad.

  Over time, the diverse community of settlers from Nepal, who built Darjeeling’s physical infrastructure, also gave shape to its society. The majority, who used Nepali as a lingua franca and adhered to Hinduism, began to forge a common identity in India, as Gorkhas. The area’s other local residents included the indigenous Lepchas, Limbus and Bhotias, and Bengali administrators and tea-plantation owners, as well as Bihari and Marwari traders. Darjeeling had always had a cosmopolitan air due to its British ties. During the Second World War it became a centre of R&R for British, Australian and American soldiers who infused the area with Western culture, including popular films and music, including the Goan Jazz that Indra Bahadur Rai mentions in this novel. This is the social commingling of There’s a Carnival Today. In 1947, with India’s Independence, when Darjeeling joined the state of West Bengal, it was home to some 30,000 people. This is when Janak’s story begins.