The Waiting Land

by Dervla Murphy

  I had often wondered why all the local lanes and streets look like dried-up riverbeds and now I know – they are dried-up riverbeds. On the way to my house a knee-deep torrent was swirling furiously between the buildings – which, as in Kathmandu, are almost all raised some three or four feet above the ground – and three dead hens and a dead puppy were swept past me as I waded home.

  As usual I had left my window open and the room had been thoroughly blitzed: on the floor lay rice and onions and smashed eggs, sodden papers and books, and a broken lantern and spilled kerosene. I swept up the rice, which is in any case filthy when one buys it, and lifted a neighbour’s dog up the ladder to dispose of the eggs, and now I’m writing by torchlight, pending the replacement of the lantern. Luckily my ‘cellar’ escaped so I’m not deprived of spiritual consolation. At the moment this consolation consists of a brew distilled in Kathmandu, sold at seven shillings per pint bottle and imaginatively described on the label as ‘Pineapple Wine’. Somehow such a description conjures up pictures of elderly ladies (retired missionary type) daringly sipping a beverage made from great-grand-mamma’s recipe and containing .001% alcohol: yet here this coy name disguises a spirit that would make hair grow on an egg. (A recent visitor of mine went so far as to claim that the stuff could propel a steamroller up Mount Everest, but I feel this may be a slight exaggeration.) Most certainly ‘Pineapple Wine’ is not wine and I doubt if pineapples play any part in its production – at a guess I’d say that it’s pure poteen, coloured green. For even the best heads two tablespoonfuls produce the desired effect, and it is probable that three tablespoonfuls would result in macabre hallucinations, quickly followed by death. What it does to one’s inside, when taken regularly, I hate to think – but time will tell.

  4 JUNE

  As from today I’m living with a lama – the untented one, who presented himself on my doorstep this morning and said, ‘Please may I come and live with you?’ or words to that effect. At first I had some misgivings, not for the conventional reasons that might operate in Europe, but because it is against the rules for any refugee living outside the camp to draw rations. However, a lama is a lama, so after a moment’s hesitation I said, ‘Very well, come right in – but you must give me your ration-card and every Friday morning I’ll bring you your supplies.’ A big grin then spread over his face, and after many expressions of gratitude he hurried off to collect his possessions.

  Half an hour later I beheld a brigade of twenty-two small boys marching towards my door, each child carrying five enormous cloth-bound volumes – except the last, who was carrying only three. I then did some simple mental arithmetic and realised that this was the full Buddhist Canon – all one hundred and eight volumes of it – arriving as item number one of the lama’s luggage. Mercifully the other items were less impressive – an incense burner, a prayer-wheel, a prayer-drum, a dorje, a prayer-bell, a small photograph of His Holiness, eleven tiny silver butter-lamps to burn before it and (as non-religious goods) a dented kettle, a wooden, silver-rimmed bowl to drink from and an uncured, stinking yak-skin to sleep on. The little room downstairs (or down-ladder) has now been transformed into a miniature temple, from which the exquisite scent of incense comes wafting up, and my life is further brightened by ecclesiastical music; I find the sweet melody of drum and bell so absolutely enchanting that when it starts I simply drop everything and listen.

  This afternoon we had another violent storm – not as devastating as yesterday’s cyclone, but a passable imitation of it. These storms are not to be confused with the monsoon, which isn’t due for another week or ten days, but I’m told that they herald it annually in this region. Tonight the room temperature is down to a blissful seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit and, as my body is now free of heat-rash for the first time in weeks, I’m looking forward to a good night’s sleep.

  5 JUNE

  Famous Last Words! I’ve discovered that living with a lama has its limitations, the chief of which is His Reverence’s predilection for praying – with full instrumental support – from 3 a.m. onwards. Unhappily this is an hour at which the very sweetest of melodies leaves me quite unmoved so perhaps I’d be justified in asking him to postpone his Matins until 5.30 a.m. But somehow this seems slightly disrespectful, though as he doesn’t conclude his devotions until 11 p.m. it might be good for his health to force him to sleep a little longer. The unfortunate thing is that these advanced lamas seem to have long since transcended our frail needs for regular meals and eight hours’ sleep, and His Reverence is capable of praying non-stop for six hours without moving a muscle.

  6 JUNE

  This evening I learned quite a lot about my exalted guest, when he invited Thupten Tashi and me to supper. Armed with our own dishes, spoons and salt, we joined him downstairs at seven o’clock – by which time I am always ravenously hungry, having eaten very little since breakfast-time – but the meal did not start until half-past nine. However, it was preceded by much interesting conversation and nine or ten cups of buttered tea (about five cups too many for the average Western stomach) so I’m not really complaining.

  Thupten Tashi is by far the best Tibetan interpreter I’ve ever known, and with his assistance the lama briefly recounted his own life-story. Though he had always wanted to enter a Gelugpa monastery as the only son of a rich farming family he was forced into marriage with a neighbouring farmer’s daughter at the age of eighteen; but bringing a horse to the water doesn’t necessarily make him drink and bringing Lama Ongyal to his bride’s bed did not make him consummate the marriage. Then, after two years of domestic celibacy, he renounced his inheritance and ran away to a monastery in Kham – no doubt to the considerable relief of his still virgin bride, who was now considered free to seek a more practical mate. In Kham he studied for sixteen years under a very learned Rimpoche, before spending three years as a hermit in a Himalayan cave at an altitude of 18,000 feet. Next he returned to his monastery, did his final examinations and moved on to be a tutor or guru at Drepung Monastery – from which he fled to Dholpo in 1959.

  Encouraged by my revelation of a very rudimentary knowledge of Tibetan Buddhism he followed this potted autobiography with a lecture on the importance of accepting the impermanence of all matter and acting accordingly. But at this stage my concentration began to be seriously impaired by most inappropriate pangs of hunger and, though the spirit was willing, I can now remember few of his profound remarks. He asked me if I believed in God, nodded approvingly when I said, ‘Yes’, and observed that he had heard rumours to the effect that many modern Europeans were atheists, which seemed to him a pity, as they had a very good way to God in their Christianity. Whereupon I felt compelled to admit that I wasn’t exactly an orthodox Christian and on hearing this the lama looked slightly worried, and said he hoped I wasn’t a Buddhist, as the Western Buddhists he’d met in Kathmandu were very unhappy people and in fact only imagined themselves to be Buddhists – which is as good an analysis of the breed as I’ve yet heard.

  Meanwhile our supper was being cooked, on a wood fire between stones, by the twelve-year-old boy who is Lama Ongyal’s personal servant, and when it at last appeared I noted that our host was not eating with us. I longed to ask if he ever ate anything – since as far as my observation goes he exists on buttered tea only – but fearing that the question might sound impertinent I restrained myself. The meal consisted of rice, green dahl and potatoes – a true banquet by Tibetan standards, and it tasted none the worse for the fact that I knew it to have been cooked outside the backdoor almost exactly where I (and not a few Nepalese) habitually answer Nature’s calls.

  Incidentally, I have had the undeserved good luck to escape unscathed after my reckless water-drinking of a few days ago.

  10 JUNE

  This morning two Dakotas took off from the airfield loaded with the remains of the German Expedition’s equipment – and this was apart from the masses of food given away today because it’s not worth the freight-charges back to Kathmandu. What looked like the whole Nepa
lese and Tibetan population of Pardi and exactly half the European population (that’s me) were at The Annapurna for the share-out, and in due course I came away shamelessly bearing a tin of chocolate biscuits and two jars of meat extract – a month in Pokhara makes you put your pride in your pocket when such delicacies are going gratis. As for the Tibetans – this evening the camp is full of the most exotic things in tubes, tins, packets and plastic bags, and the people are as thrilled by these colourful luxury containers as they are by the mysterious contents. Walking around the camp at suppertime I saw pâté de foie gras being tentatively mixed with tsampa, salad cream being added to tea and soup cubes being chewed as toffees and then suddenly spat out. Terrifying howls of agony were coming from one tent, where some unfortunate little girl had just been given a spoonful of neat mustard by her loving mamma.

  Trade is also brisk this evening; at the conclusion of an expedition the Sherpa guides receive as ‘perks’ sleeping-bags, anoraks, boots, transistors, boxes of electric batteries, nylon rope and many other locally rare objects, most of which they auction in the courtyard of The Annapurna before returning home. Tomorrow the 1965 Japanese Dhauligiri Expedition is due back here – in a rather depressed state, as their two senior Sherpas were killed by an avalanche. They are reported to have even more fabulous equipment than the Germans, both in quality and quantity, so we’re all agog for the morning!

  Tomorrow, too, is King Mahendra’s birthday, a national holiday and in theory an enormously important occasion of universal rejoicing. During the past week all the local Government officials of every grade have been busy organising the celebrations to the detriment of far more urgent practical matters. It’s rather obvious that in Pokhara Valley at least the general public have no great desire to demonstrate their loyalty to the King, and for this reason it is essential to organise these festivities, though the innumerable complicated religious festivals seem just to happen, powered by tremendous popular support.

  Going on my own very limited knowledge of the Nepalese political scene I would say that the King is certainly doing his best to impose some sort of order on the indescribable mess bequeathed him by the Rana rulers. Also I have tremendous admiration for the moral courage he displayed in 1960, when he admitted that feigning to operate a democratic government in Nepal was a piece of pernicious nonsense. In the nine years since the overthrow of the Ranas in 1951 Nepal had had ten different governments, each more corrupt and cynical than the other, but now at least there is some degree of stability, though few of the needed improvements have yet taken place.

  One of those improvements concerns land redistribution, about which there is at present a great deal of talk, but very little action. Here the King is up against problems similar to those of the Shah of Persia: the rich Brahmin landowners, with their superstition-based influence over the people, are analogous to the Persian mullahs – and apparently even more powerful – and the King’s position is not secure enough for him to defy these Brahmins effectively. In the Kathmandu Valley he seems to have the affectionate support of a majority of his subjects, but to the average person in Pokhara both the King and Kathmandu are remote and unimportant. I have met many ex-Gurkha soldiers who have been to Delhi, Hong Kong, Singapore, Cairo and even to London – but who have never been to Kathmandu. And when I ask them, ‘But don’t you want to see your own capital?’ they stare at me and say, ‘For what?’ In theory Kathmandu is their capital, but in practice they feel that they owe allegiance only to their tribe – and one can see the justice and logic of this attitude. For centuries no ruling power in Kathmandu knew or cared anything about the hill-people, and even now the King is an exception in his concern for the welfare of all his subjects; the majority of Government officials are still completely ignorant of and indifferent to what happens outside the valley and for them ‘national improvements’ mean the shoddy modernisation of Kathmandu and the installation of refrigerators in their own homes.

  Today I have had quite the most gruesome experience of a lifetime. Dolma, a forty-two-year-old Tibetan woman, died last night of debilitation (following prolonged dysentery) at the Military Hospital, where I went this morning to enquire about three other patients from the camp. On my way, while walking by the river, I rounded an outcrop of rock and found Dolma’s severed head at my feet. I must confess that to come on such a sight unexpectedly, when less than twenty-four hours earlier this woman had been sitting with her head on my shoulder, receiving cheering-up treatment, gave me rather a shock. Nearby the four camp chiefs were dismembering the trunk with blunt little wood-axes, before throwing it into the water, and I left the scene as quickly as possible.

  Here the Tibetans choose this method of corpse-disposal in preference to the chopping up of bodies on a ‘cemetery-rock’ for birds of prey to eat – the more popular method in Tibet itself. Some Nepalese tribes, who live at high altitudes where wood is scarce, also use the rivers as graves, and I should think the bones are picked clean very soon after the dismembered body enters the water; at the moment I have a few open sores on my legs, and when I’m swimming these attract swarms of savage little fishes. In Tibet the office of undertaker – or chopper-upper – belonged to a special caste who were shunned by the average Tibetan; but the camp has no member of this caste and the task is so unpopular that the chiefs are forced to do it themselves. However, it would be wrong to imagine that these nomads are averse to such a job out of our sort of squeamishness; they decline to do it for superstitious reasons, not because the actual chopping up of a human body is repugnant to them.

  11 JUNE

  Our Royal Birthday Celebrations had been scheduled to begin in the camp at 12.30 p.m., when the Anchiladis and local Panchayat officials were due to assemble and make speeches and listen to the Tibetans praying for the King and expressing their non-existent gratitude for Nepal’s reluctantly extended hospitality. A large piece of tarpaulin had been borrowed from the Indian Army Pension-paying Post and under this were arrayed a table (as altar), chairs and pictures of His Holiness and His Majesty (all borrowed from The Annapurna Hotel), while scarves and garlands of paper flowers were laid in readiness to be draped over the pictures. My worry was that the mailbag plane would arrive when Kay and I were shackled by courtesy to the camp – and sure enough in it came at 12.20 p.m., its wheels seeming almost to touch the tops of the tents. I then calculated that Nepalese officials due to appear at twelve-thirty would never present themselves before one o’clock at the earliest: so I leaped on Leo, dashed through the village to collect those precious envelopes, was back in camp by a quarter to one – and found that I had ample time to read ten letters before the Anchiladis’ party arrived.

  The heat was intense today and all the officials looked exceedingly bad-tempered and unfestive, having already attended several ceremonies in various places – and with many more to come. I gathered that they had only consented to attend the camp ‘celebrations’ because of pressure from certain quarters in Kathmandu, where a demonstration of ‘solidarity’ between the people of Pokhara and the refugees was considered very desirable. The whole thing felt extremely phony; of solidarity there is none and our celebrations here were incredibly bogus. Amdo Kessang, Penjung and Chimba had all vigorously exhorted the people to smarten up and produce appropriate symptoms of loyal rejoicing – yet when the officials arrived no one was paying the slightest attention to the Occasion. On every side Tibetans were going about their ordinary tasks or sitting in their tents digesting lunch – and I have to admit that I was glad of this. Contrived demonstrations of insincere feelings may be good diplomacy, but they are anathema to me.

  The arrival of the Anchiladis’ jeep presented an extraordinary spectacle; in Asia overloaded vehicles are a common sight, but this really was the ultimate in overloading. Though the jeep in question is the tiniest possible model it brought eleven men to the camp, and as the last three emerged one began to feel that one was watching a conjuring trick. The Anchiladis immediately announced – with comically un-Nepalese time-c
onsciousness – that they could stay for only fifteen minutes; but ten minutes had passed before Penjung’s wife and daughters produced the ritual tea and expensive, repulsive Indian biscuits and toffees; and a further twenty minutes passed before a sufficient number of Tibetans could be persuaded to assemble around the shelter to watch scarves and garlands being draped on the pictures and to hear the various speeches. At the conclusion of the speechifying everyone unenthusiastically chanted a prayer for the King, and finally the schoolchildren – if they can be so described – sang the Tibetan National Anthem, recently taught them by Chimba; and that was that. I particularly liked this last touch, which could easily be interpreted as showing a certain lack of solidarity on the King of Nepal’s birthday; but the attendant press-photographer took countless shots with his archaic camera, and as facial expressions do not reproduce well on Nepalese paper the desired effect will doubtless be obtained in Kathmandu.

  Then, when the jeep conjuring trick had been repeated in reverse and the vehicle had swayed away – invisible under its festoon of men – a demonstration of a different kind started spontaneously.

  Suddenly the camp realised that a picture of His Holiness was hanging beneath the tarpaulin and their reaction astonished me. Normally these nomads don’t seem nearly as devout as the Tibetans one meets in India but now everyone, including great tough men with shaggy hair and knives in their belts, came rushing to prostrate themselves before the simple black and white photograph, and then proceeded to pray lengthily with clasped hands and a look of near-ecstasy on their sun-plus-dirt-blackened faces. I couldn’t help reflecting that if Tibet went under so comparatively easily to the Chinese, despite the unifying force of this tenacious loyalty to His Holiness, Nepal could go under even more easily with its lack of any such leadership.