The Himalayan Arc

by Namita Gokhale

  Ai first 1 told myself it was a coincidence. I had learnt in Pelling, the small village below the monastery, that my host’s name was Yongda. Surely there must be more than one Yongda with connections to a monastery in Sikkim. But curiosity took me to the index. There were multiple references under ‘Yongda, Captain Sonam’. I turned to the first:

  Captain Sonam.Yongda … had passed out with distinction from the Indian Military Academy and had trained for more than a year with an Indian Gurkha regiment. The son of a senior lama at Pemayangtse Monastery, where he himself had also been ordained, Yongda came of sturdy Bhutiya stock.

  The odds were narrowing: this Yongda had been at Pemayangtse too. Another passage hinted at a man of some courage: ‘With Yongda behind bars, the Sikkim Guards were deprived of the only officer who could have forged commitment and fervour into resistance.’

  Curious, I returned to the main story and read on. It was obvious that the author held the king in high regard and was convinced that he had been badly mistreated, abandoned by all but a few loyal supporters, including this ‘Captain Yongda’. It was a compelling story of tragedy and intrigue. Even the piercing cold could not stop me reading till the small hours of the morning.

  I woke early and dressed quickly, donning fleece layer after fleece layer. I told myself again it must simply be a coincidence: the military man in the book must be a different Sonam Yongda, a brother or a cousin of the monk who was my host at Pemayangtse, nothing more.

  I made my way downstairs and into the kitchen area, past the wooden bed frames, towards the low tables and benched seating. Three girls were bustling around the kitchen, filling bowls and pouring tea. The monk was at the table, hunched over a bowl of porridge. He was dressed in an extraordinary outfit – it was hard to reconcile him with the maroon-clad monk of the previous evening. His monastic robe was gone, replaced by a turquoise shellsuit over which he wore a thick, dark-blue down bodywarmer. He had a bulky woollen hat pulled down over his brow. He glanced up from the bowl of porridge and nodded a greeting to me. I took a seat beside him. One of the girls brought over a mug of steaming tea and a bowl of porridge sprinkled with chilli flakes. The three girls also took seats at one end of the low table with their own bowls. I tucked in to the delicious porridge and, with no idea what to say, I waited for the monk to open the conversation.

  ‘So. How you sleep?’

  ‘Yes, well, thank you.’

  ‘Did you like the book?’

  I looked over at him but couldn’t read his face in the morning gloom.

  ‘Yes, I did.’ I decided to chance it. ‘I came across references to someone called Yongda from this monastery. I wondered if he might be a relative of yours.’

  I noticed that the girls were all suppressing giggles. I glimpsed the slightest of smirks as Yongda looked over at them.

  ‘You?’ is all I could think to say.

  He nodded, the hint of a shy smile on his lips, which quickly disappeared. It seemed barely believable that this was the man in the book. I could not hide my curiosity. I blurted out, ‘So you were the King of Sikkim’s personal bodyguard?’

  He nodded again, then looked up at me. ‘You must read the whole book. It is a very important story. A terrible story, terrible what they did to the Chogyal.’

  His face turned impassive again. ‘But that was a long time ago. And I am now late,’ he said, standing up. He gathered his things and left.

  When I set out on the journey, my intention had been to write about my reconnection with my grandfather’s years living in India and his love for the Himalaya, particularly Sikkim. But the book that the monk gave me contained such an extraordinary story of political intrigue and wonderful characters in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s that my horizons soon broadened. I stayed in the monastery for a further three days, talking to Yongda about his memories of the king, and reading the account of the final days of the Himalayan Kingdom of Sikkim. I read how this tiny part of the world had survived as an independent entity after India gained its own independence; how King Thondup, the last Chogyal, had married an American woman, Hope Cooke, once talked of in the same breath as Grace Kelly, and how together they had believed they could revive the ancient kingdom; how (the author of Smash and Grab alleged) Indira Gandhi had used her intelligence services to bring that dream to a close, surrounding the palace with troops as she annexed the kingdom in 1975. And as if the drama of the story were not enough, the cast of supporting characters had names worthy of a James Bond novel: the Kazini, a shadowy Scottish woman who orchestrated events on behalf of her husband, the leading politician in Sikkim who harboured a lifelong grudge against the king; the improbably nicknamed Princess Coocoola, the king’s sister, who Heinrich Harrer (of Seven Years in Tibet fame) believed to be the most beautiful woman in the world. The most astonishing revelation was that Sonam Yongda, the monk who had given me the book, had played an important part in the climax of the story as a captain in the Sikkim Guards, the small body of military men who protected the king. In hour-long sessions, he slowly revealed the details of his role in this remarkable tale.

  It took me four days to trek back to the Sikkimese border.At one point I l’ound myself walking along old moss-covered cobbled bridleways through ancient forests of deodar. Finally, I reached the river and climbed 5,000 feet back up to the ridge that Darjeeling straddles, returning to where I had started a fortnight before. I spent a week trying to process what I had read, looking for other accounts of Sikkim’s story in the best bookshop in the hill town, the Oxford Stores. I discovered that Sikkim’s name stemmed from a word meaning ‘happy home’. But in the few slim volumes that mentioned the events of 1975 most referred to it as a ‘merger’ between Sikkim and India, a triumph for ‘democratic forces’, the culmination of a popular rising by the Sikidmese people themselves – against a feudal monarch. Some oven referred to Hope Cooke as a CIA agent. And of the few people I found will to talk about their recollections of the time, none gave me the same account. The story seemed slippery, full of nuance and complication. Versions seemed to proliferate like subdividing cells.

  From Sikkim, I travelled through Nepal and into Tibet, where I began to understand the delicate political and religious connections and tensions between the countries across the Himalayan region. But it was Sikkim’s tale that now obsessed me. When I eventually returned to my home in Scotland, I immersed myself in finding out what I could about the place. I discovered that there was a small group of academics researching its early history. I learnt that Sikkim’s ties to Tibet and its position alongside the biggest chink in the Himalayan massif had made it geopolitically valuable for centuries.

  Most importantly, I understood that the history of Sikkim’s demise could not be seen in isolation. The British involvement in Sikkim and Tibet in the early twentieth century had set up many of Sikkim’s problems. After the British left in 1947, the Himalayan region had been at the centre of a period of international intrigue across Asia, a second front for the Cold War. I began to realise that Sikkim never stood a chance.

  But I still felt I was some distance from getting under the skin of what happened in Sikkim. Smash and Grab was a valuable first-hand account, but the author was open about his close friendship with the Chogyal. I wondered if that had coloured his narrative. I longed for another perspective. My first break came when I was introduced to Martha Steedman (née Hamilton) by a friend of my parents. Martha, a bright, energetic Scottish woman in her late seventies with a distinguished teaching career behind her, had been headmistress of the main girls’ school in the Sikkimese capital, Gangtok, between 1959 and 1966. Sikkim was a small place, and she had direct access to the Palace. She showed me extraordinary photographs of the royal couple, of their wedding and coronation. The turning point came when she asked if I’d like to see the weekly letters she had written to her parents from Sikkim. Far from being ‘of little interest’, as she had suggested, the pale blue aerogrammes provided a unique perspective on the world of Sikkim. Life in the palace bu
rst into full Technicolor. I began to discover references to Sikkim in travel memoirs and articles in magazines such as Time, Newsweek, National Geographic and Paris Match that illuminated matters further.

  With the help of Martha Hamilton’s letters, I started to piece together the story. But she also gave me my second break. Perhaps, she suggested, I might like to speak to her successor as headmistress at the school, lshbel Ritchie, another Scot, who had served in Sikkim between 1966 and 1996. A fortnight later I was walking out of Ritchie’s home in Dunfermline laden with another box of weekly letters home. As I put them into order, I realised I had stumbled across another treasure trove. Ritchie’s letters (which she had to hide from the Indian censors operating in Sikkim) were just as insightful as Hamilton’s. I now had first-hand, contemporaneous accounts of the years from 1959 to 1975, during which Thondup and his queen, Hope Cooke, had tried to reinvigorate the Kingdom of Sikkim.

  A project that I thought would take a year had already taken 18 months. But there was one big problem. I was now so immersed in the local story of Sikkim in the 1960s and 1970s that I had missed the other vital part of the story – the geopolitical context within which Sikkim had existed, located on the frontier between India, which had emerged from British rule in 1947, and Tibet, occupied by China since 1950. I began to delve into the motivations of the Indian and Chinese governments in this period, understanding that they were deeply influenced by the Cold War politics swirling around Asia at the time. I realised that understanding the motivations of one woman in particular – Indira Gandhi, the Indian Prime Minister from 1966 to 1977 and then again from 1980 to 1984 – was critical in telling the story of Sikkim.

  Suspecting that official records of the UK government might also shed light on the story, I turned to the Foreign Office records in the National Archives. Every year, under what is called the ‘30-year-rule’, the UK government releases secret files from three decades previously. I realised that files from the 1970s would be available. I discovered a remarkable set of documents demonstrating that the UK government had shown a keen interest in the events in Sikkim, a place that was clearly dear to many Foreign Office mandarins, some of whom had been intimately connected to Sikkim’s royal family. Secret reports and memos added to the sense of intrigue in the story.

  Meanwhile I returned to Sikkim on a number of occasions, tracking down some of those who had been involved in the events I was writing about. As they entered their seventies and eighties, some welcomed the opportunity to unburden themselves, talking openly of their role in the events of the time, often admitting to a sense of embarrassed guilt.

  Finally, in early 2013 […] Wikileaks released a tranche of US government cables from the early to mid-1970s. With some trepidation (I had by now had enough of ‘revelations’) I decided to do a word search within the documents for Sikkim. The computer revealed 500 secret cables that brought to life the extraordinary Cold War background to Sikkim’s demise. It was the last piece of a complex puzzle, putting the events of Sikkim into their proper global context.

  At last, I felt I had a complete story to write.

  A TRANQUIL TENURE

  Chetan Raj Shrestha

  Now, sitting in the balcony of his flat in Lajpat Nagar, Mr Sanchan shook his feet and thought, ‘In Gangtok, I would still be wearing socks.’ It was early April and the cold would not have ebbed completely in Laizhal Villa. It had crested a lofty spur of the Gangtok hill and at that height, winter behaved like a typical Sikkimese guest, arriving early, leaving late, and confining its host indoors throughout its stay.

  ‘Move.’ A shove from Mrs Sanchan broke up his thoughts. She had come to water her hydrangeas which she cultivated in six pots, his rivals for space in the balcony, so small that Mr Sanchan was sure the builder would pay for it in his next life. He snapped and conceded the space to her. ‘You also have to do this now only?’

  He went into the living room, sat on a sofa, and resting his feet on a dragon-decorated footstool – another acquisition from Sikkim – resumed the quivering of his feet. He heard her hum as she watered her hydrangeas, which she had brought from Sikkim. She had nurtured them for the last four years, ever since they had been gifted by Mrs Pradhan, whose name, like those of so many others, could not be taken any more.

  Mrs Sanchan’s botanical zealotry surprised her husband. She had shown no interest in all the time he had been an officer of the Indian Forestry Service, which he had joined in the first year of their marriage. Perhaps it began when Mr Sanchan’s office had announced the Himalayan Endangered Species Action Mission (HESAM). It was expected that either Mr Khanna, who had initiated the mission, or Mr Singh, who had secured the funding, would receive the posting to Sikkim, prized above all others, for they had all heard of its reputation as a hospitable land whose most revered guests were representatives of the central government. Mr Sanchan and the rest of the office had watched as two candidates tried to outmanoeuvre each other: through intrigues, negotiations, and then challenges. The matter was decided when Mr Singh threw his lunch at Mr Khanna during a particularly acrimonious lunch hour. Mr Khanna went into the departmental chief’s office in a shirt stained with bhindi masala and, waving a mooli parantha, wept at the viciousness with which he was being assaulted. And so Mr Sanchan, colourless and quiet and a lifelong resident of Delhi, with an unannounced passion for the films of Dev Anand, was asked to report to Sikkim as the Principal Director of the Directorate of Biodiversity, an adjunct to the environment department, and entrusted with the protection of some of the nation’s most vulnerable species. He had last stepped into a forest during his honeymoon in Nainital, thirty years ago.

  It was a boon, a thoroughly unexpected one, and would henceforth always be recollected whenever his patience was questioned. It was the early days of the mission and there were no schemes or projects. Much of his work involved surveys, study tours and reports to Delhi. The directorate was small with forty-two employees and, until Mr Sanchan arrived, was governed by two additional directors – Mr Pradhan and Mr Lepcha, who were aided by a few middle and junior officers, the most vivacious of whom was Mrs Bhutia, a joint director, and a number of clerks and peons.

  It was to be a tranquil tenure, and in its course, Mr Sanchan visited almost every village and corner in Sikkim, always as the head of a respectable contingent. Every time he encountered the landscape – the tropical forests, the sunset on river valleys which were theatres of primary shadow and light, the mists of monsoon gathering into clouds, a sudden encounter with a rare bird, the butterflies indifferent to their own beauty, the unreachable orchids in steep and aqueous forests, the hot-water pools in hidden folds – he would pause and give thanks to fate. Had it not been for the auspicious tussle between Mr Khanna and Mr Singh, he would have retired ignorant of what he now beheld.

  In Gangtok, he found that he had been assigned Laizhal Villa, a steep-roofed Himalayan bungalow with chimneys, a gently undulating garden enclosed by pine trees, and Sikkim’s surest mark of privilege – a VIP power supply. It was here that Mrs Sanchan’s dormant gift for gardening took root and flourished, under the nurturance of Mrs Pradhan, the wife of his additional director. She visited nearly every day in the early months of the first year and provided a patient tutelage. In the second year of their stay, Mrs Sanchan declared that orchids were overrated and hydrangeas were her personal favourite.

  It was the Pradhans who, more than anyone else, helped make Laizhal Villa worthy of the principal director’s stature. They offered furniture from their house. They brought in helpers from their village – a woman named Maya and a boy named Chakrey. Maya imitated all of Mrs Sanchan’s dishes so well that soon they couldn’t be distinguished from the original, leaving Mrs Sanchan suspended between pride and irritation. And in the evenings she massaged Mr Sanchan’s gout-swollen legs with heated mixture of methi and mustard oil. Chakrey ran errands and tended the garden and, in unguarded moments, Mrs Sanchan attributed its peaceable resplendence to him.

  Now, in Lajpat
Nagar, Mr Sanchan struggled to shut out the sounds of the city’s discord – the barks of scampering urchins, the cries of children on their way to school, the whirr of motor vehicles using the lane as a shortcut, and cushioning all these sounds, the yodels of the sabziwala announcing that he had fresh onions today. It was a sea of noise and Mr Sanchan willed himself to float on it; it was the only alternative to drowning.

  Mrs Sanchan caught the yodels and stuck her head out of the kitchen. ‘We need onions.’

  ‘Send Maya to buy some,’ Mr Sanchan said. When she emerged from the kitchen and glared at him, he smiled meekly, to let her know that it had been a deliberately feeble joke. He went to the balcony and contributed to the din, shouting to catch the sabziwala’s attention. As Mr Sanchan waited in the stairwell outside the flat, he made way for his neighbour, taking her boy to school. She pushed the child in the direction of the lift and he resisted, like a beast resisting slaughter, his shoes clattering on the floor as he struggled for a grip.

  In his third month as principal director, Mr Sanchan mistook an office supplicant for Karma, his peon, and received a public shaking of his collar for his error. After his own anger had subsided, Mr Sanchan identified the issue. The peons were not uniformed and this made them indistinguishable from members of the public. He recalled the monochromatic and pliant peons from his Delhi office and issued a directive for the peons to begin wearing their prescribed uniforms. This caused an instant revolt, and the six peons, led by Karma, threatened to go on mass leave.

  It was Sachit, one of the junior officers and a rumoured nephew of the environment minister, who effected a truce. The peons would not be made to wear their mandated uniform but a common dress code – a white T-shirt with jeans for the men and a green kurta for the women. The code lasted for five months, after which colours and patterns reappeared in their attire and the peons were again one with the crowd. Sachit, always cheerful despite being shunned as a spy, said, ‘Sir, think of them as children and forgive them.’