Namma

by Kate Karko

  Then they took us to see the holy cave. Long ago, it had been the lair of the last tiger in the area and a place of worship. It was how the town had acquired its name, for Tugsung means 'tiger's lair'. We walked up the other side of the hill past temples with rows of painted prayer wheels, turning each one and muttering, ' Om mani padme hum, as they creaked and rattled on their axes. Small wooden hutches stood on stilts in the stream to our left and Tsedup explained that they were also prayer wheels, driven by the water. Soon we came to a tall cliff, surrounded by pines that sighed and rustled in the drizzly air. At the foot of the cliff, hundreds of ndashung speared the ground in a thick cluster and we realised that we had reached the tiger's lair. All around the bottom of the cliff were recesses containing tsa tsa, small triangular clay icons, a few inches high, depicting the Buddha, formed from a bronze mould and sun-dried. Around these were piles of mani stones, rocks that pilgrims had carved with sacred syllables. The white rock face was covered with the same brightly coloured mantras: huge 'om' symbols scrawled like sacred graffiti. We squirmed into the cave mouth, only about a foot high, and ducked under the low crags, into the damp blackness. Someone lit a match and the flame cast eerie shadows around the walls of the deep, low cave. It felt strange to be inside the lair of a fierce beast and even though I knew it had been empty for a long time, I still felt the hairs on the back of my neck quiver.

  On the journey home the wind drove like knives into our legs, and we were nearly attacked by mastiffs as we drove past a tribe whose encampment was close to the road. But safely back in Machu, we sat around the iron stove of a restaurant and ate huge, steaming bowls of tuckpa. It had been a good day, I said to Tsedup later. He looked at me earnestly, with a slight frown. 'You westerners are always measuring the days,' he said.

  I hated being stereotyped. In fact, the girls' presence was making me realise a few things about myself. I was thrilled to have them here, but inside me there seemed to be some resistance to the little piece of England that they had brought with them. Things that had been part of my everyday vocabulary in London were now alien to my ear. As they talked, I was surprised by how my body bristled at the mention of Pizza Express, Camden Market, lattes in Ladbroke Grove and spritzers in Soho. It wasn't that I hated London, but I felt as if I was not in Amdo to reflect on the merits of McDonald's or the joy of a trip to Harvey Nicks. There was a clarity here that had been difficult to find in a throbbing metropolis. There was space, air and light. Time was only dictated by the circumference of the seasons and by the nomads' daily tasks of eating, milking the yaks in the morning, tying them up at night, preparing and collecting the dung. The most alien idea imaginable was of standing on the tube with my head in someone's armpit, crushed, breathless and late. Here, there was no late. It was only late when it was dark, but you were never late for anything. Vagueness pervaded. Maybe I will see you tomorrow, maybe not. No goodbyes when you left someone, you just went. This had been one of the most difficult things for me, as a western-bred person, to understand. But now, apart from mentioning that it had been a good day today, I felt as if I had slipped into that timelessness. I didn't want reminding of my hectic world. I was just content to be.

  The next day the sun returned and we picnicked by the Machu river. We played tag like children, threw lizards at the boys and jumped into sand dunes. That night we went to a karaoke bar. The nomads sat uncomfortably under the neon bulbs as Chinese pop music boomed through the amplifier. Ells and Chloё were swept off their feet by many an obliging town boy. Gondo sat shaking, a cigarette butt in each ear, to block out the noise. Tsedup pleaded with me to make his brother dance with me. I had some trouble persuading him, but eventually he yielded and Tsedup laughed as I guided Gondo awkwardly round the floor. He had never danced before.

  Later, they turned off the music and the nomads sang. Gondo might not have been a great dancer, but he was a formidable singer. He stood at the microphone, one hand cupping his cheek, his eyes closed. Everything stopped when he opened his mouth. No one talked, laughed, moved. The love song was plaintive; a deep yodel in his throat that echoed beyond that small room and out to the sleeping town. When I glanced at Ells and Chloё, their eyes were wet with tears.

  Before they left there was another bike crash. We were all washing our hair in the stream's small waterfall. By this time, Ells had converted the men into glossy-haired, moisturiser-coated examples of maledom. Our neighbours were popping over for a shave. She had even located a shower in Machu town and insisted that, after she left, I went at least once a week. That day, she and I had been racing on the motorbikes in the grassland. We were going pretty fast and were impressed with each other, until it came to stopping. As we neared the bank of the stream, I remembered to brake, but forgot how heavy the bike was and fell off. Ells accelerated and flew over the handlebars on to the edge of the bank. She landed head first, knickers up, on the stones. We rushed into the stream and pulled the bike off her legs. Remarkably she was unhurt, thanks to a strong survival instinct – she had put out her hands to protect her head. This really wasn't the place for a major head injury. When we realised she was all right, we burst out laughing then made Sanjay promise not to tell anyone about it. Tsedup's father would be angry with him if he knew we had been allowed on the bikes. He was very protective of our guests. But back in the tent, Sanjay, a typical six-year-old, wasted no time in telling both Annay and Shermo Donker. 'You big mouth!' I said to him. He giggled and ran outside as we chased him. Tsedup was duly scolded.

  When the girls left, in a trail of dust, I cried. Our 'holiday' was over. A piece of England had gone and a new phase would begin for me. The long autumn and winter lay ahead. I would have to make the most of my female relationships here. Ells and Chloё had helped to reaffirm many of my good feelings for my new home, but now that they had left, I felt alone as I walked back into the town. They were part of my other life. They were the familiar, and even if that type of familiar had sometimes grated on me in this environment I knew that I would miss them.

  I sat with the boys in a restaurant and we sipped tea quietly. 'Are you lonely?' they asked intuitively.

  Tsedup, sensing my fragility, took me home on the bike. We made a detour on the way and, under the brilliant glare of the afternoon sun, we made love naked by a stream in the valley. Only the hawks watched us, spiralling lazily in the blue, as we lay together savouring the freedom, the breeze caressing our skin.

  Eleven. Blind Date

  It was the end of September. Or perhaps October. I could never be sure. I had stopped measuring the days. To begin with I had kept my diary, but as one day drifted inconspicuously into the next, if I missed an entry I lost count. It was a strange feeling. Soon I felt the ridiculousness of monitoring each day as the family looked at my Filofax with bewilderment. It seemed out of place. When they saw all the phone numbers in the address section they were amazed. So many friends, they said. What they didn't grasp was that half of the numbers were required for the exhausting practicalities of urban living: the Gas Board, job contacts, pizza delivery. My only concession to time-keeping was my watch, which I could not abandon.

  Of course they knew what date it was, but it wasn't the same: their time is laid down according to the sun, moon and the passage of the planet Jupiter around the sun, which marks a sixty-year cycle. Each sixty-year period is broken into five blocks of twelve solar years. Each year is named after an animal and an element, so that year, 1998, was the Earth Tiger year. Every year the most important festival, Losar, which usually falls around February, marks the annual passage of the sun and is a time of New Year celebrations. Around that time, the astrologers of the Lhasa Menzikhang are responsible for calculating next year's calendar. The solar year is divided into twelve lunar months and the Tibetans schedule all of their festival days according to the phase of the moon during these months. Many days are auspicious and some inauspicious. But my knowledge of their calendar system put an amusing perspective on the Millennium fever in the West. It was all rather i
nconsequential here, as the Tibetans were already enjoying the year 2125.

  Without any real sense of time measurement I was learning to be more responsive to the changing seasons. One morning I woke, stepped out of the tent and turned to pass alongside the stream gushing freshly from a night of sky-falling. The sight of the snow-capped mountains sent my spirit soaring. I stood still for a moment and breathed in the moist air, watching the yaks grazing silently on the cloudy prairie. The land was changing. What had been a lush, emerald carpet flushed full with wild summer flowers of blue, violet and yellow, with skylarks whistling up out of their ground nests, was now a rough ochre expanse of autumnal shades. Welts of black earth and mahogany dung-spread patched the umber grass where the yaks were tied at night. Dotted about the encampment, like miniature mountains, were sculptured mounds of dung, taller than a man, some composed entirely of dense faeces, caked dry and smooth like an upturned mushroom head. Others were carefully constructed from dung pancakes, dried in the sun and arranged like intricate, vertical parquet flooring. Downwind the cliffs cleaved by the Yellow river stood like black scarps, shearing into the mud current that churned round the bend. The air was chilly these days and given to gusting under the lip of the katsup, threatening to carry off the tent on some blustery nights. We would huddle inside, drinking tea from soot-sprayed bowls, while outside the tethered yaks hugged the ground for comfort, those exposed at the end of a line catching the worst of it. For me, the component conspicuously missing from this autumn experience was the chorus of shivering leaves on creaking boughs, since as we were above the tree-line, there were no trees.

  But winter had not yet taken a hold and we could still enjoy bright, hot days and sun-blistered cheeks. There was a change in the routine of the tribal workload. As we now had enough butter and cheese to last the winter, Amnye had given his permission for the yaks to be milked once a day only. Shermo Donker seemed happier. At this time the women were busy with textile chores and fuel preparations for the cold months ahead. Over the summer months they had collected yak wool in sacks and now they spun it into yarn for weaving. One morning, I helped Shermo Donker, Sirmo and our neighbour's daughter, Dolma. We emptied the raw fluff on to the tent floor and sorted and thinned it out by tufting it with our fingers, removing stubborn clumps and matted shanks. Then, inside the tent, I watched as they laid out yak skins to sit on, threw the good wool down and, with two long canes apiece, beat the hell out of it, until it rose and fell so lightly in the wake of each beat, it resembled spun sugar. Then they twisted it into stiff coils. All the while they joked and laughed until their cheeks flushed crimson and the sweat shone on their temples. What I could not gather of their conversation from my limited Tibetan, I could easily grasp from their blatant gesticulations and from their eyes, which sparkled with mischief. The topic, of course – what else when a gaggle of girls is out of earshot of their menfolk? -was sex. They were keen to draw me in and soon we were all hooting together. The black tent sucked in the heat of the noon sunshine and steep shafts of light cut through the roof, revealing the churning dust in the sweaty air. They became so hot that they took off their tsarers and sat on their knees in their leggings, teasing each other about the hottest parts of their anatomy, gesturing with their canes.

  That day of the beating drums, of sweat and innuendo in the smouldering tent was revealing to me. Again I observed that although the women were quiet and obedient in front of the men, especially the older generation, at these times alone, they were bewitching, and their earthy humour was a welcome release. I was enraptured by them. They were clever, beautiful, spirited women, full of energy and life.

  The next day they were up early spinning the yarn. They employed the children to sit in the hot sun and pull the strings of a small wooden instrument with raddles attached that turned on each tug, twisting the wool into a single-ply thin thread. The thread was gently eased away until the women stood at a distance of fifty metres, then trained straight over a pole and hook to keep it from the ground. When the yarn was plied they laid it on the grass to roll into a ball, then returned to repeat the process, until soon there were several tens of lines of black yarn stretched out on the ground.

  Beyond the toil I could see our neighbour, Dolma, weaving a length of black fabric on a loom. It was triangular in shape, constructed of three vertical poles supporting a warp about a foot wide, which was spread flat on the ground. Bent double, she beat down the slack after each weft with enormous strength for such a slight girl, and as she worked she sang. Her voice carried to us on the westerly breeze. I joined her and she showed me how to do it.

  I had studied weaving at university, but this was something else. With no treadle on the loom to pump with your foot, the fibrous yak yarn had a tendency to stick. To make a shed between the warp threads, I had to push a length of heavy wood between them and turn it upright, then slide the ball of weft through the space. Without a shuttle to feed the weft through, it was a laborious process. Still, I persisted and she laughed kindly at my efforts, sniggering and covering her impish face with her hand.

  She was a cheeky girl of sixteen, with wide, almond-shaped eyes and red cheeks, which she diligently rubbed with white face cream. She wore a rawa, a length of red silk fabric embroidered with coloured stripes, which was sewn to the hair on the crown of her head and fell right down her back. Attached to the fabric were four huge, convex silver discs, covered in rich patterns. In the middle of each was a large coral stone. Above these were four smaller silver discs and three smooth amber stones set in silver. At the bottom of the fabric, five red tassels sprouted from thin silver tubes. Around her forehead she wore a gorji, a thick headband of huge lumps of old amber. This elaborate costume proclaimed her of pubescent and therefore, datable, age. She didn't wear it all the time, I presumed because it caused some discomfort, especially when it came to sleeping. Her mother, Annay Urgin, would sew it into her hair and she might wear it for a week or two, then take a break for a couple of weeks.

  A few of the other girls in the tribe also wore rawa. The headpiece was handed down from mother to daughter throughout the generations. The girls would wear them for a year or two, then abandon them and begin to braid their hair in the style of the older women, with two plaits joined at the back. Until not so long ago the women wove their hair, in the traditional fashion, into 108 tiny plaits. That is a Tibetan's auspicious number, the length of their prayer beads. Tsedup remembered his mother having such elaborate hair, but today, although this hairstyle was still worn by some of the women I'd seen in Machu, it wasn't in our tribe, except for a special occasion, such as a marriage. It was considered too laborious a task.

  Dolma and Sirmo were best friends. They were related too. Dolma's mother, Annay Urgin, was a real character. She had seven daughters by five different men and had never been married. This was not a problem in the tribe, although for Annay Urgin it was sometimes difficult because there were no men in the family to slaughter her animals. At these times she had to rely on Tsedo to help her. She lived next door to us with Dolma and her youngest daughter, Tselo, as all of her other daughters had married into other tribes and one daughter, Dado, was at school in Gannan. But despite the harshness of her existence, Annay Urgin never stopped laughing. She was the warmest and most earthy woman I had ever met. She was often in town visiting her sister, which left the tent empty for Dolma and Sirmo to have their sleepovers. I had often heard them giggling long into the night, though exactly what they got up to was a mystery to me. If anyone knew about 'the beautiful one with the earring', it was Dolma. I asked her if she knew Sirmo's lover's name.

  'Chuchong Tashi,' she said, tittering, as if she had betrayed a secret. 'He's very beautiful.' We laughed.

  I was clearly becoming as fervent a gossip as the other tribeswomen. 'Does he have a good heart?' I asked. The nomads used this expression to mean 'kind'.

  'A very good heart,' she confided.

  I was satisfied. I had Dolma's testimony and was one step closer to uncovering t
he mystery, since Sirmo was not forthcoming.

  That afternoon we made dung mountains. The children made round pancakes of dung and spread them out in rows to dry in the sun. Then we collected yesterday's, which were now biscuit crisp, and stacked them methodically, artistically too, on top of each other, like overlapping dominoes, twisting round and round until we had made a large cone. This ensured that the dung inside would stay dry and protected from rain during the winter months. When it was required the fuel would eventually be transported to the winter house in the valley, and also to Annay and Amnye's house in the town.

  The rest of the day was devoted to felt-making. Amnye was spreading sheep's wool on to a plastic sheet beside the tent and sprinkling it with water. He rolled up the sheet as he went, until he had formed a long cylinder with all the wool wrapped inside. His job done, he retired to the tent to smoke and play cards with his friends. I joined Annay, Shermo Donker, Sirmo, Dolma and Dickir Che and we formed a line on our knees in front of the trunk of wrapped wool. We rolled up our sleeves and began pummelling. Like all nomad tasks, it looked easy and, like all nomad tasks, it wasn't. The idea was to push the cylinder forward with the length of our forearms and let it roll back, rhythmically, with an even distribution of weight. Within a few minutes, I had developed a rash from the friction of the wool's coarse fibres on my work-shy, soft skin. But I laboured without complaint and accompanied the others as Annay led us in a counting song:

  Chick, ray

  Nyee, ray

  Sum, ray

  Jher, ray…

  Little Dickir Che looked up at me and laughed as I started them all singing in English: