by Andrew Greig
Where to begin when talking about Askole? It’s all so interconnected, I find it hard to talk about one aspect without talking about every other.
Here’s a beginning: Askole has no shops. Haji Mahdi has a parlour where he has cigarettes, sometimes cheese, tea, sugar, tins left from other expeditions, which he will sell to climbers and trekkers passing through, but that’s a service to westerners, not inside the village. No one there lives by buying things at one price and selling them at another. No one lives by employing other people to work for them. There is private property, but a house or field or mill doesn’t seem really to be owned by an individual, more by an extended family.
Askole has a schoolteacher, paid by Haji, a policeman (though he looks like a porter and seems to spend his time portering, and never seems to do any policing), and a priest. It is not a cash economy. Unemployment does not exist; more importantly, it is a concept which would be incomprehensible in these mountain villages. The smallest child, the oldest man, the most cretinous half-wit, all have their roles (carrying tiny baskets of weeds, collecting dried yak dung, herding goats, respectively).
As a way of life it is not so much medieval as neolithic. The only metal tool I’ve seen there is the blade of their irrigation spades. Even the ploughs, a single prong pulled through the soil by two oxen, are entirely wooden. The baskets are woven from branches. I presume there must be an axe to chop down wood, but I never saw one, and I have seen porters chop wood by bashing it with a sharp stone, crouched in the same attitude as our earliest ancestors.
Their houses are like a Scottish croft or but-and-ben built of rocks, except the one room is stacked on top of the other. The ground floor – often dug down into the earth is for the animals and grain, the first floor is for people, where they eat, sleep, gossip, feed babies, giggle and stare at the curious westerner who has many rupees but no land or family or permanent home. The Baltis have not yet invented the chimney; instead they have a square hole in the roof and a room thick with smoke (hence the conjunctivitis).
Often on the roof is a woven tentlike structure for sleeping in during summer. In the winter, everyone moves downstairs with the animals for warmth. In winter there is snow on the ground for some five months, and there is nothing to do but sleep, eat a little, talk a little, keep the animals going.
‘But surely,’ I insisted to Haji as he explained aspects of Askole life to us in his quiet, mild murmur, ‘you must do something in winter.’
He looked up slowly at me, then Kathleen, then down at his feet with a smile of recollection or perhaps anticipation.
‘Also,’ he added when we stopped laughing, ‘perhaps we make hats.’
We’d seen the hats. They are the chief and characteristic ornamentation of the mountain women, made of stiff black cloth, then fringed and hung with beads, glass, plastic, expedition tags, ring-pulls from cans, anything bright that came to hand.
‘To sell?’ Kathleen asked, sensing a cottage industry.
‘If too many hats, we sell.’
Then he smiled mildly and head down, hands clasped behind his back in a Duke of Edinburgh stylee, shuffled down the mud alleyway of the main street, trailing us in his wake like bewildered, enchanted satellites.
The more we saw of Haji Mahdi over the following days, the more impressed we were. He has more natural dignity than anyone I’ve ever met. It is a dignity that has nothing to do with a straight backbone or any kind of aloofness. It is a dignity that one senses comes from deep inner tranquillity, from being completely at home with who and what he is. It is a dignity that needs no assertion.
He always wears a grey Pakistani-style pajama suit with a tan waistcoat. He never hurries any movement, word or gesture. His eyes are brown, mild, intelligent, at once amused, absent-minded, and alert. He drifted round Askole in what looked like carpet slippers, his eyes to the ground, his hands precisely so behind his back: right hand clasped loosely round his left wrist, left fingers hanging down relaxed. I spent a lot of time following him on the single-track paths between the fields, and I never saw those fingers ball up or clench. He seemed incapable of tension. He’d pause to murmur a word here, an instruction there. He’d spend an hour in the shade of the schoolroom with the old gap-toothed men of the village, watching the children chanting through their lessons, chatting over this and that. Then he’d pad up through the fields, or watch someone weaving, or joke with the old women squatting at their doors. I’d come upon him in the street, mildly contemplating a scrawny goat that stared back at him from its crazed yellow eyes.
He is responsible for the overall pattern of Askole. He channels its resources in the same unobtrusive way the villagers direct the water that makes their lives possible. A rock lifted, a cut with a spade, a word, a nod, a joke – all part of the same activity.
His position as the headman of Askole is not conferred by the state or the law. Nor by election, heredity, or the amount of land he owns. In a tiny, organic society like Askole where everyone is related, where three or four hundred people know each other from cradle to grave, there is no need to count hands to know the village’s will.
His authority seems to have two sources. The first is religious: he is a haji, he has made the pilgrimage to Mecca and gone through the statutory processes of instruction, prayer and reflection. In fact, he’s been there twice, he admitted with a shy smile. I found it hard to imagine this man flying to Mecca on a jet plane, catching a taxi, dodging traffic, changing money – and yet, of course, he would do it patiently, calmly, humorously, as he does everything else.
And that’s the second source of his authority: the man he is. His humility, natural intelligence and self-possession allow him to direct and represent the village. He deals with the climbing and trekking parties that pass through Askole – a considerable number, perhaps forty to fifty a season, each with from four to 200 porters. We were never alone on our camp site the whole time we were there. At times it was like Piccadilly Circus. Putting them up, selling them flour, lentils, tea, fresh meat or livestock if necessary, supervising the hiring of local porters in accordance with government regulations, requires a considerable amount of bargaining and organization.
He showed me a fat, battered notebook full of spidery moon-writing Urdu script with notes, recommendations, autographs in English, Japanese, German, Swedish, French, Italian. He pointed out the signatures of Messner, Bonington, Pete Boardman, and seemed to have a fair idea of who was who in the Himalayan climbing world. In that notebook were listed all the parties expected through Askole that season, how big they were, how many porters they might require.
Surely this influx of foreigners with their needs, their money, their attitudes and possessions, would damage the economy and social structure of Askole? Kath saw the effect of climbing parties epitomized in the locals walking round with climbing rope holding up their trousers, or slings used as leads on sheep, or the expedition tags on the women’s hats. What comes from outside is used and incorporated, but does not dominate. Not yet.
The culture of Baltistan is very resilient. It is sustained by its religion – Shiite Moslem, rather than the Sunni Moslem of Pakistan – and by the inevitable nature of its agriculture. Not only is Askole too remote to be mechanized, there is little room for mechanization in the irrigation system. You cannot plough stacked paddy fields with a tractor.
Trekking and climbing have brought money into Askole but not yet turned it into an acquisitive society. The people have, to our eyes, astoundingly few possessions – little more than the clothes they stand up in. The schoolmaster has a cassette player, two old Rolling Stones tapes and one of Indian warbling. They have no radios, books other than the Koran, magazines, alcohol.
So where does the money from portering (a highly paid job in Pakistani terms) and selling provisions go? The porters don’t spend it on good gear for their job, that’s for sure. They wear little rubber boots, smooth-soled sandals, disintegrating gym shoes, all without socks. Not surprisingly, they suffer a lot from cuts
and blisters. If regulations force expeditions to outfit them with, say, shoes and dark glasses, they never use them but sell them again in Skardu.
I think porter money goes towards supporting relatives, some of them as far away as Iran or Saudi Arabia. One of the attractive aspects of the Moslem religion is the in-built social security system prescribed in the Koran, where one has a clear responsibility to provide not only for immediate and distant family, but also for the poor and unsupported (usually through the mosques). This is why there are few beggars or complete destitutes in Pakistan; though many are poor, and the village children barefoot, ragged and grubby, no one seems to be starving. And the Baltis are very affectionate towards their children.
The village cash, together with any surplus wheat or lentils they grow (their only crops), allows them to buy and carry from Skardu tea, sugar, salt, rice, and cigarettes. Like many far-flung peoples, they have enthusiastically taken up cigarettes at the very time the self-absorbed western world is giving them up. I asked Haji if many local people died of lung cancer. He shook his head. ‘Cancer very not often. One man, I think, in village near here, but not lungs.’ We were sitting in the shade of the schoolhouse, watching the children hand back their slates to the teacher. I offered him a K2, he smiled but waved a refusal. ‘Later.’ I remembered it was still the fast of Ramadan and felt embarrassed at my clumsiness.
‘You smoke,’ he murmured, ‘the smell is good. Smelling is not prohibited!’ He repeated the remark in Balti and the old men rocked in silent laughter. It was wonderfully easeful being in their company. They seemed to draw from me any tension or anxiety without taking any stain of it on themselves.
The porter’s dream is to save enough money to open a little stall in Skardu where he can drink endless cups of tea, develop a paunch and wear a hat like a pile of chapatis, and where he will buy back unused gear from other porters and sell it back to the expeditions who give it to porters who bring it back to him again. Balti wisdom! The man who sells the same pair of shoes five times over has found a way to deal with the world.
Askole people don’t die of heart disease or cancer or automobile accidents. They die from infectious diseases and slightly premature old age. They are buried in little plots between the fields, on pathways, near walls, on the edge of the village square. There are no names or headstones, they are content to sink back into the vast anonymity of the earth under the sky. All that marks their final resting place are small rectangular wooden slats with little posts or sometimes white stones at each corner. They look for all the world like old bottomless seed boxes.
Is Askole a pit or a paradise? It is desperately poor, the animals are scrawny, the children dress in ragged sacks, their houses are full of smoke, their lives confined to this one valley, their thoughts to village thoughts … Most people who pass through just see the pit aspect. I watched a bunch of Askole chickens scratching in the dirt and remembered Pete Thexton’s remark that they must be the most unfortunate form of life on earth.
No. Being an Askole chicken is better than being a battery hen. And, for me, that goes for the people. Better, far better, to live like this, scraggy, tatty, scraping out a living yet free, without bars, without crowds. Me, I’m glad to be here, free-ranging in the Himalayas, scratching through life.
We’re a bunch of shuffling dossers. We’re renegade roosters, run away from the comforts of the battery farm. And though there are things one often misses – the security, the central heating, the low red lighting – none of us is going back.
So, just to set the record straight, there are many worse fates than being an Askole chicken.
Every day seemed the same in Askole. I was brought up in the country and have always found rural rhythms deeply satisfying. Before dawn, the sobbing, ecstatic cry of the muezzin. At dawn, the clink of a spade, squish of boots as the men set off into the network of irrigation channels. The animals are let loose, the mill is opened up, the oxen are harnessed to the plough. Groups of women and girls shoulder their baskets and disperse into the fields to weed.
The school children gather under the tree in the square; yawning, the teacher carries the blackboard out of the schoolhouse. As they sing the national anthem, the funny foreigners are drinking cocoa and looking at the clouds motoring up the valley, wondering when help will come. Haji shuffles into the square, ducks his head in greeting to the foreigners, contemplates the children, then joins the old cronies in the shade.
A flock of empty porters pass through on their way down the valley. They’re paid off so are in a hurry to get back to their wives and the bright lights of Skardu. They pass on the latest news of the expeditions up the Baltoro. One of them hands a note to the American who looks like a frog. They collect the mail and hurry away.
Paiju, 26 June
Hello, how goes it there in Askole? I cut my heel wading a stream so had to get some attention from Aido. The rest of the team are going really well. Alex seems to sleep quite a bit. Aido has been busy doctoring folks. He had a bad head yesterday, but is going well today.
I hope you folks are OK down there. We’ve talked a lot about your situation, we appreciate being up here, but really wish you were here too.
So do something about that, eh!
All the best,
Sandy
That was the big event of the day. The lunchtime fires are lit and the air is full of woodsmoke. The children say a short prayer and run home. The women and the men drift in from the fields, the oxen are unyoked and tethered. Everyone has tea and chapatis, unless of course it’s Ramadan in which case only the very young and the sick partake.
The heat of the day. Askole sizzles like a brown frying pan, surrounded by green salad fields. The miller falls asleep in the dim mill. A foreigner, entering from the dazzle outside, fails to see him at first, is aware only of a bundle of rags in the corner. What the foreigner sees is the white flash of the water rushing down the hollow log, hitting the blades that turn the wheel which spins round and round, grinding nothing. A circle of husks surrounds the grindstone, three goat-skins full of wheat flour are stacked beside it, next to a pile of unground wheat. The foreigner feels the cool waft of air from the water, hears the water and the creak of the rolling wheel.
‘A husk, a prayer of wheat.’ The phrase speaks quietly in the mind of the foreigner as he stands in the doorway, strangely moved. Then the bundle of rags in the corner stirs in its dreams, and the foreigner realizes with a shock that he is in a painting. It is probably of the Dutch school, brown, domestic and dim; it is called The Sleeping Miller’.
The foreigner leaves, quietly closing the door behind him.
Askole sleeps or merely waits.
Later in the afternoon, the men and women return to the fields. They do not hurry, their work is steady but not hard. The women go in groups and talk, the men set off alone or in pairs. A pair of trekkers with four porters come up the valley from Chaqpo; they are tired and thankful to arrive, and set off in search of Haji Mahdi who of course knows they are coming through the mysterious valley telegraph and is even now quietly leaving his house and heading for the village square.
The blue-eyed British memsahib is in the fields with a group of girls. They are laughing and communicating in sign language and her halting Urdu. The memsahib hands her camera to Kali, the most intelligent and independent of the girls. One may not take pictures of Balti women – but no one said they cannot take pictures of each other, which Kali proceeds to do, amid much laughter.
The memsahib is happy. Happiness is in the air and in their laughter. She is thinking she would be happy never to leave. She is planning how she could train as a nurse and return here.
The sick American, suffering once again from heatstroke and diarrhoea, totters across the square to the village latrine, much to the quiet amusement of the old men, then totters back groaning to the oven of his tent. His memsahib turns another page of her book about the Ninja of Japan. It is set in America; it is largely about people shoving themselves into each ot
her and chopping each other into little bits.
Late afternoon. The Pakistani officer returns spick and span from the high spring, his moustache combed, his oiled quiff perfectly in place. He is holding his radio close to his ear and listening to the ball-by-ball commentary of the test match between England and the West Indies on the BBC World Service. The West Indies are chopping England into little bits while the commentators chat about cream cakes and the clouds gather over the gasometers.
With a sigh, Abdul the cook rouses himself and lights the fire. He stares into it and rubs his beard thoughtfully while he thinks of his wife in Skardu expecting their first baby in two weeks. Will the leader arrive in time to let him get back before it is born? Naturally, he hopes it is a boy. He sees the Liaison Officer approaching, and sighs. More orders.
The people return from the fields. The cooking fires are lit. Dusk starts to silt up the valley below while the foreigners sit on cardboard boxes round Abdul and eat their strange food from silver pouches. Above, the sky turns platinum, mauve, pale silver, and the snow summits catch the last light and seem to abstract themselves from everything below and drift away into a dream of their own, delicate as thoughts of home.
Finally, when it is judged to be dark enough, the muezzin cries out the end of the day. His long sobbing call trails into silence. It is time to face Mecca and pray, time at last to eat and drink and replace the sweat of the day.
The trekkers exchange news with the stranded climbers. The villagers talk over the events of the day by firelight, or by the glow of the few lanterns in Askole. It is time to have a last K2 cigarette, to soothe the last baby. The voices fade, the fires burn down, the day is ended.
Each day is the same. Yet each is subtly different, each is today not yesterday, though they seem a seamless garment. Everything is moving forward, the wheat and lentils and apricots inch towards harvest. When the climbers finally leave the mountains, it will be autumn. Then winter. Then spring. Then summer again, sure as water flows downhill, without pause or hesitation.