Lately I’ve observed that among Nepali diseases there is an affliction, peculiar to resident Americans, known as ‘Cultural Shock’. In older English this means not liking local smells and being disturbed by the national habit of flinging garbage into the streets; nor does any consolation derive from the fact that in villages all such garbage is instantly disposed of by battalions of cattle, pigs, dogs, horses, goats, hens and ducks. Fortunately Europeans are immune to this disease and, though Kay and I were both quite nicely brought up, we have long since adjusted to flinging through our windows eggshells, potato peelings, onion-skins and basins of filthy water, with never a thought for the passers-by – who anyway are usually protected by umbrellas at this season, which I am not when I cycle past their windows at dumping-time. We must take great care to break this habit before returning to countries where it might culturally shock the natives.
At noon today there was a marathon row in the street below my window. It began when one young woman accused another of having an affair with her husband – accompanying the accusation with a blow across the face. Then, within moments, an excited crowd of about a hundred and fifty mysteriously assembled, and I was looking down on a sea of bobbing black umbrellas, beneath which men and women were furiously arguing and gesticulating, each trying to shout or scream more harshly than the rest. Personally I should have thought this an exclusively family matter – but possibly these hundred and fifty protagonists did all belong to the three families involved. The argument continued for some forty minutes, and then the husband vigorously whacked both women on the back with his rolled umbrella and told them (if one may judge by his tone and expression) to go to the Hindu equivalent of Hell – or, perhaps, to become worms in their next incarnation. In Nepal a man is not expected to pretend to be faithful to his wife (though she is required to be very discreet about her own infidelities), so this should have concluded the argument. But instead of accepting their chastisement with womanly humility these two shrews promptly declared a truce and united to attack the husband with their hastily rolled umbrellas – at which point they were seized by several men, on whom they lavished kicks and scratches before being partially subdued and frogmarched away out of sight. Now I noticed that the original dispute had sparked off a variety of subsidiary quarrels among the crowd, all of whom were enjoying themselves enormously. Clearly this sort of ding-dong battle is the Nepalese peasant’s favourite recreation, and one can’t help wondering if the apparent lack of civilisation revealed by such scenes is not in some respects healthier than our repressive over-civilisation, in which sedatives and tranquillisers are necessary to so many.
After watching one of these not uncommon mass-arguments, or even after spending a few hours dawdling around the bazaar, waiting for someone or something, a return to the camp provides the most extraordinary contrast. Tibetans rarely raise their voices, however heatedly they may be disputing, and instead of the Nepalis’ cheerfully shouted ‘Namaste’ one is welcomed by a silent bow or a tongue stuck out respectfully to its full length. It is curiously moving to find the distinctive Tibetan gentleness showing through so often among these uncouth and at times unruly nomads; and in their case one cannot reasonably associate this gentleness with the practice of Buddhism, since it is obvious that they have been chiefly influenced by the cruder and more ancient Bön-po religion.
The weather is really grim now; there has been no rain for eight days and the temperature of my room, under this low tin roof, reaches 102º or 103º Fahrenheit by 2 p.m. At bedtime it’s down to about 88º and I lie naked on my bamboo mat, tormented by a heat-rash, while the rats provide background music by upsetting dishes and spoons and squealing angrily at each other. At first I found it rather disquieting to lie on the floor with these brutes scampering around me – there seemed no guarantee that they wouldn’t nibble at the edges of recumbent bodies – but now I’ve become adjusted, though I’m still afraid to chase them as they are reputed to turn savage if treated rudely; recently Kay was bitten on the finger when she tried to push one off her pillow in the small hours. But in a way the millions of tiny, red-brown ants are even more troublesome than the rats: they get into all the food and swarm over one at night in tickling (but not biting) hordes. Initially I tried to pick them out of the rice, dahl, sugar and tinned milk, but I soon gave up – life’s too short – so now I suppose cooked ant is my chief source of protein. All things considered I don’t especially look forward to night-time at the moment. Yet on the whole I’m very happy and one can’t have perfection.
3 JUNE
Today I distinguished myself by getting hopelessly lost for eight hours. Kay had asked me to go up to the Shining Hospital for some medical reports and then to collect an X-ray result from the Indian Military Hospital on the other side of the Seti Gorge; but at the Shining Hospital one of the missionaries very kindly, though rather vaguely, directed me to a short cut and by 2 p.m. I realised that I was probably halfway to India. However, as there has been no opportunity to take a day off since my arrival I decided to make the most of this involuntary expedition, without feeling too conscience-stricken.
On the whole my sense of direction is quite reliable, yet soon it was clear that I was becoming ‘loster and loster’ – and my compass was in my knapsack at Pardi. The sort of reasoning which can usually be applied to such situations seems to count for nothing in Nepal, and I’m seriously tempted to believe that here even the sun flouts the natural laws. One complication is that those low, wooded hills which rise at intervals from the valley floor look identical to the newcomer, so one is wildly misled and lured over the plain for two or three miles in the conviction that Pardi lies just there – only to find oneself on the verge of a magnificent 1,000-foot river-gorge one has never seen before and which is certainly not negotiable; and so it goes on … and on … and on.
Though Pardi and Pokhara have now been put on the tourist map by the airfield one only has to travel a few miles beyond them to reach, within the valley itself, villages so untouched by outside influence that a white woman on a bicycle creates a veritable sensation; and this unblemished picturesqueness has its snags, for whenever I asked for directions the villagers were too astonished, too scared or too amused even to attempt any helpful response or gesture. Once a man did point down a track that appeared to be leading direct to the middle of nowhere, and optimistically I followed it to its terminus on the brink of yet another gorge – or perhaps at a different point along the same gorge.
All day the heat had been intense and by 3 p.m. I was feeling quite dehydrated, having covered over forty miles according to Leo’s milometer. Partly for this reason, and partly because I despaired of ever disentangling the inconsequential tracks of the plain, I now attempted to descend to river-level and follow the course of the Seti – an idiotic move which involved Leo and me in a series of gymnastic feats and stamina-tests such as even Roz and I have never had to endure. And Leo is twice the weight of Roz … Eventually I discovered that one could descend to within about one hundred feet of the water, but no further – something which would have been obvious from the start to any moderately intelligent person. So I sat down in the shade of a tree by the cliff-edge to smoke a cigarette while reflecting on the sad fact that soon we would have to ascend somehow to plain-level and resume our war of nerves with those tracks.
However, it was impossible to remain glum for long in such surroundings. Below me the Seti (its name means ‘white’) was a swift, seething torrent, narrow at this season but still violently strong amidst a desert of pale, rounded stones. From the opposite cliff rose smooth-browed, forested hills enclosing the gorge in a wide, gentle curve, while behind, rising in layers to the plain, lay the rough, silent, sun-beaten countryside that we had just traversed. I hadn’t expected to find such solitude within this valley; yet for hours past people had appeared only in the vicinity of the few hamlets and from here not a trace of humanity was visible. But then, when my almost pathological aversion to ‘turning back’ drove me on up the g
orge – I was able to cycle for about a mile over the short, burnt grass and pungent herbage – a lone farmhouse appeared on the very edge of the cliff. This building, clumsily constructed of timber and stone, was a mere loft over an open-sided shelter for cattle, crops and firewood – yet in it lived an old grandmother, her son and daughter-in-law and their five children, of whom the younger three were stark naked and pot-bellied. Around this pathetic dwelling (the most impoverished I’ve seen outside of Gilgit) stood a few acres of poorly maize and three feeble banana trees, beneath which a starved-looking buffalo lay chewing the cud. (Though what that cud consisted of I can’t imagine.) The usual Nepali ‘ladder’ – a notched tree-trunk – led up to the entirely unfurnished living-room, where the family were sitting idly, sharing a local version of the hookah. When they saw Leo and me at the foot of the ladder their astonishment was considerable, but they responded to my urgent plea for ‘pani’ by beckoning me ‘upstairs’ and handing me a brass pint-measure of riverwater which tasted faintly of human excrement (or was I imagining things?) yet which at that moment seemed an ineffably delicious drink. With wild disregard for the probable consequences I emptied three of these measures, while the family tried to question me and registered incredulity at my ignorance of Nepali. They were a remarkably cheerful group, though not one of them looked healthy, and after their first shock of surprise they treated me as though we were old friends.
I longed to be able to find out how they came to be living in such isolation; it seems likely that they belong to the Siva Bhakti tribe, which was formed of ex-slaves after the abolition of slavery in Nepal on 28 November 1924, and which now constitutes an almost untouchable caste of people who are allowed to marry only among themselves. It is estimated that about 50,000 slaves were freed at that time, their 16,000 owners receiving a cash compensation from the state. The majority of those freed became apprenticed to their previous owners for a seven-year period, eventually settling down as labourers, and this ‘improvement’ in their status often left them worse off than before, since employers were no longer bound to provide food, clothing and shelter. An enterprising minority, however, set up as independent coolies and in time had saved enough money to settle on just such scraps of wasteland as my friends of this afternoon are farming.
Before saying goodbye I made a determined effort to obtain some idea of where Pardi might be and at last the eldest child, a boy of about fourteen, volunteered to show me the track for a fee of one rupee. I had already paid these unfortunates for their water (as requested) and I certainly didn’t grudge the boy a rupee: yet I couldn’t help contrasting this profiteering attitude towards a stranger in difficulties with the boundless generosity of those equally poor Muslims and Tibetans whom I’ve met elsewhere on my travels.
Leaving the shack we walked away from the river for some half a mile, through dense, knee-high, prickly bushes which tore deep scratches in my legs, to the base of a 500-foot cliff. There the boy pointed towards the sky, said ‘Pardi’, smiled a farewell and briskly trotted off.
Surveying the cliff it seemed to me that I had had a very poor rupee’s worth of guidance; this precipice was completely overgrown with tangled shrubs and looked like a monkey’s playground rather than a route to anywhere. But then, hidden beneath the bushes, I saw what might possibly be described as a track, though it more closely resembled a dried-up watercourse. This ascent would have been strenuous without a bicycle and only by a savage combination of obstinacy and brute force did I finally get Leo over the top and on to the plain. By then every muscle in my body was throbbing from the fearsome contortions involved in heaving both of us over five-foot high boulders, across four-foot-wide crevices and through thick patches of scrub, so I sat down to recover while studying our new horizons – which unfortunately did not look very new. I saw the same identical hills, rising on three sides, and the same gorge – from a different angle – and the same brand of little-used track that tends to expire at a moment’s notice. In fact the only change was overhead, where the sky had suddenly become black with welcome storm-clouds. But as progress in some direction seemed advisable I mounted Leo and bumped off hopefully towards the north-west, which seemed just as good a bet as the south-east.
Twenty minutes later I rounded a hill and saw a village ahead and another river-gorge on my left; and providentially the storm broke only as we reached the outskirts of this village. Normally being exposed to a storm delights me, but now I raced for the nearest shelter – a small Gurung farmhouse – with head bent to protect my face from being lacerated by the hail which a 110 m.p.h. gale was driving horizontally across the valley. (Later this evening a stranded air-pilot gave me details of the wind’s force and told me that during such storms cattle are occasionally beaten to death by the hail.) Of course this is not what we think of as hail; I measured many of the jagged pieces of ice that came shooting like bullets through the open doorway and several of them were three inches by two and at least an inch thick – extremely effective ammunition for the use of angry mountain-gods!
Certainly some god was very angry today; never have I witnessed anything approaching the ferocity of this storm, either during my previous monsoon among the Himalayas or during my winter months on a North Atlantic island. As I crouched just inside the doorway among an assortment of frightened villagers, for whom this house had been the nearest shelter, I could see my host’s little field of six-foot maize being plastered to the ground within moments – then his one stack of hay was swept off its high platform and went sailing out of sight, twenty feet above the ground, creating a curiously Mary Poppins-like effect. I could sense that my companions’ fear was not merely for the safety of their families, dwellings or crops: they were responding also to the spiritual malevolence which was being conveyed to them through the devastating fury of the elements. My normal reaction to any demonstration of Nature’s power is a simple awe, yet I found it easy today to sympathise with these peasants’ taut perception of some sinister force behind this onslaught.
Within moments of the storm breaking the temperature had dropped so abruptly that soon everyone was shivering. Forty minutes passed before the gale suddenly died and allowed us all to proceed, through almost solid sheets of rain, to our respective destinations. For the duration of the gale rain had been as continuous as hail and now all tracks were rivers, flowing between piles of greyish, unmelted ice-bullets. Then, cycling against the current through a foot of water, I realised that we had passed this village quite early in the day, which meant that though I still had no idea how to find Pardi I could at least try to retrace our original route from Pokhara Bazaar.
The whole valley – this morning parched and quivering silently in the heat – was now an ocean of noisy brown water, rapidly moving on every side as the fields are so designed that the rains pour from one to another before finally reaching river-level. Very soon cycling became impossible; I simply walked through a sort of submarine world in which the cold rain falling around me seemed no less in volume than the knee-deep, earth-warmed torrent through which Leo was being dragged. At one point we had to re-cross a river – for all I know the ubiquitous Seti again – that earlier had been ankle-deep but was now breast-high and positively dangerous. Then, incredibly, from a slight hill I saw through the curtain of falling water an aeroplane parked under a tree; and that vision could only mean that I had – as might have been predicted – lost the Pokhara track and inadvertently found Pardi. But between us and the airfield lay wide, flooded paddy-fields of such soft mud that I sank in to my knees at every step and could not possibly get Leo through. I was determined to make for that aeroplane in a straight line, lest we might find ourselves behind one more low, green hill, so I painfully carried Leo along half a mile of the narrow, slippery ditches that intersect paddy-fields, frequently falling into three feet of muddy water and feeling rather like a drunken tightrope walker. Then, as we crossed the airfield at 6.15 p.m., the rain stopped and a startling gleam of sunshine lightened the valley.
I
went direct to the camp, dreading what I might find. Inevitably it is in a shambles: most of the tents have been torn to shreds and four have been blown away, including the chief lama’s. From the airfield sheets of water raced across the whole site, and to enter the camp one had to wade across a twenty-foot wide, four-foot deep torrent in which one of the children had nearly been drowned a few minutes before my arrival. All clothing, bedding and firewood are saturated and the little cooking-holes in the ground will be unusable for the next twelve hours; so these unfortunates cannot even console themselves with a hot drink, much less change into dry clothes as I have now done. When I arrived some of the torn tents were already being moved to less flooded spots, and piles of drenched possessions were stacked on the high firewood heaps all over the camp. Many families had begun frantically to dig drains, using spoons, knives, hands and feet in an attempt to get the water away more quickly. The sodden remains of those prized cardboard US milk cartons, which are used as domestic altars, were floating off rapidly in every direction and most families’ weekly grain ration was soaked through. Tiny children stood shivering beside their collapsed tents, and stiff-jointed grandparents searched in vain for a dry spot on which to sit.
The whole heart-rending picture would have made a real tearjerker had it been filmed, but for one detail which ruined it all – the unconquerable good humour of the Tibetans. Wherever I looked I saw people roaring with laughter as they waded around through the flood, and it was plain that the majority regarded this whole performance as the funniest thing to have happened in years. So I gave up feeling guilty about my own good fortune in having a roof over my head and came back here to enjoy it.
The Waiting Land Page 8