Namma

by Kate Karko

  One morning when we were working at the winter house, I was given the responsibility of driving Rhanjer's enormous truck. I had to collect clay from a nearby hill, which was daunting, as I had never driven a heavy-goods vehicle before. Even more perturbing was that half of our family and most of the tribe's children were in the back. It was a challenge and I took it slowly. With much gear-grinding and screeching of brakes I managed to park precariously on a steep slope at the foot of a cliff. Everyone leapt off excitedly and began to dig then sling the earth on to the lorry with spades. Dolma and Wado were in charge of ensuring an even dispersal of clay, in case the truck toppled over, and they stood in the back, spreading fiercely with their hands. They laughed as the diggers lobbed their spades'-worth into the air and showered them with earth. Before we had use of the truck, we had laboriously loaded the clay on to two yaks and returned it to the house over the stream. This was going to make life easier. As usual it was also a chance for everyone to be boisterous and soon we were all covered in clay.

  I drove the lorry through the stream and back to the house in first gear; my manipulation of the clutch had somehow failed. The noise of the engine was painful. Tsedo and Amnye laughed at me when I got back. To them, it was an amazing thing that a woman could drive a truck, as none of the women here drove, but it was amusing that she wasn't quite good enough. Women drivers. When their laughter had subsided, Shermo Donker, Sirmo, Amnye, Tsedo, Tsedup and I started making an extension to the house, the extra room were Tsedup and I would sleep. The men built the walls from turf and stone, and we girls spent the day slapping clay on top to create a smooth surface and block up the cracks. It was the hardest job I have ever done. The clay, which was mixed with water, had to be squelched in our hands to form a good strong mix, then slapped on the walls and spread with our palms.

  Although the sun shone brilliantly from a perfectly blue sky, the earth was so cold our hands ached. It was even worse when we came to do the interior: it was freezing in the shade and there was no longer the psychological comfort of seeing the sun on our skin. I had to take a break as I had lost all feeling in my hands. To make myself useful I collected water from the stream for the workers, then rejoined them outside the house and enjoyed smearing in the sunshine, the feel of the sludge between my fingers. It was incredibly messy work and I couldn't help thinking that a manicure wouldn't go amiss; also a revision of the wardrobe situation, as I looked nothing less than eight months' pregnant in my multiple layers of mud-splattered clothing.

  'You have a baby inside,' they teased.

  When the walls were finished, the roof was put together from beams, bamboo and earth. Shermo Donker shinned up and set about spreading thick handfuls of twigs from the mountain bushes on top of the beams. She then spread plastic sheeting over it and completed the canopy with a layer of clay to seal it. Soon we had an extra room on the house. There was a hole for a small window in the front, which lacked glass, and a hole for a door to be put in. Although glad of a roof, I hoped they wouldn't forget these details. This was to be our bedroom for the next three months and it was below freezing at night now. Sometimes, by morning, my glass of water had turned to ice.

  By sunset we had finished toiling and rode home. About fifteen of us made a caravan on horses and yaks back to the tribe over the hill from the winter houses. The evening light shone gold over the scorched grassland, and everyone was in jovial spirits. Soon they were whipping each other's yaks and racing one another. Shermo Donker, overtaking me on the inside, giggled devilishly and cracked a rope on the rear of my beast as she passed. It bolted and I shrieked into the wind, as I hung on for dear life. Ahead of me Sirmo fell off her yak and everyone teased her. My breath caught in my throat, not because of the wind but because I was overcome by an intense surge of emotion. I felt a strange sense of unreality, as if I was in a film. I think you would call it elation. If there had to be one defining moment that depicted Tibet in all its beauty and wildness, then surely that was it for me.

  The next day I woke up to a seven-year-old piping Amdo songs. Dickir Ziggy had shared my bed while Tsedup had stayed with his brother, Gondo, on the other side of Machu. We lay and chatted about my brother Phil and his naughty antics as a child while the frost gathered on our breath. She was especially interested to hear the story I told her about him lying in the road and pretending to be dead. When the cars had stopped to see what had happened and the drivers got out to check on him, he would jump up laughing and run away. Ziggy giggled.

  I went and washed in the cold stream in the morning sunshine while the sheep collected curiously around me. In the tent I made tsampa and the milk boiled over in the pot on the fire, leaving a pungent smell from the burnt splashes on the clay. Outside, Gorbo led the white stallion across the open entrance. It was the most seductively beautiful creature I had ever seen; pure white and graceful, like a unicorn without the horn. The tents had all but disappeared now. The river valley looked bare, apart from we few stragglers, and the dung mountains that the early movers had left behind. Next door Annay Urgin's tent had gone and only a lonely clay stove was left on the ground where her home had been. The nomads never destroyed a fire. I had watched the tent being dismantled while everyone stood fussing round the yaks, packing huge sacks of belongings – cheese, butter, barley, clothes, the altar, tent poles and the tent itself – on to the animals' backs. Excitement and change had permeated our daily routine and I was looking forward to our move in a few days' time. We had been away in Labrang during the first migration and I was not going to miss this experience. But first we had to go visiting. Apparently this tribe was bigger than I had thought and we had been invited to the other half by the families on the opposite side of Amnye Kula. Tsedup promised we would be back in time.

  I was collected by jeep from the town and driven to a northern valley on the other side of Machu by Namjher, a jovial, portly man. Tsedup followed behind on the bike. He had known Namjher since birth and had grown up with all of the people I was about to meet. It was a sad fact but today the tribe was split in half. During Tsedup's years away the introduction of new legislation from the government meant that there were now land-division policies, with which the nomads were forced to comply. Large tribes were discouraged from cohabiting in favour of small groups of families occupying their own sections of land within the wire-fenced boundaries. A way of life that had been practised for centuries had been changed irrevocably. The very nature of nomadic pastoralism was at threat.

  Before the legislation, a meeting of the heads of the eighty tribes in the Lhardey Nyima area, north of the Yellow river, would have determined where and when they should move within their vast grasslands. Tsedup remembered the land available to his own tribe as covering an area of between ten and twenty miles. At that time, they also moved more frequently, every month in the summer, to allow the grass to regenerate more quickly. Today they were confined to moving only three times a year within their designated areas and the grass was of poorer quality.

  When the nomads had been given the order to divide up, they had been left to sort it out for themselves since the authorities did not have the ability to organise vast areas of nomadic pasture and were concerned about tribal conflict. A group of officials inspected it annually to ensure that the nomads had conformed to the guidelines, and enforced restrictions if they thought there had been any cheating. The Tibetans also had local influence in the form of governors, such as Tsedup's father, so a method of democratic demarcation was employed, in the same way that they had always organised their choice of settlement. They divided it up with dice.

  In Tsedup's tribe they had thrown three dice to see who had the choice of land, and the size of each tract was decided according to population numbers. Their land encompassed the stretch from the valley to the north of Kula down to the Yellow river. They decided to divide the tribe in half. A natural split emerged, with certain families wanting to stay together. From that day the two halves would live separately and see little of each other. The or
iginal tribe had consisted of fifty families, and today twenty lived on our land to the south of Kula and the remainder with Namjher in the north. I thought it a tragic rift.

  Tsedo and some of the other men from our half of the tribe had wanted the northern land, as it was deemed more sheltered and had better grass at the time. Where we were, on the flat grassland, the wind could sweep mercilessly down the river valley whipping up the topsoil of the overgrazed land and further eroding it. However, when we arrived at Namjher's half of the tribe it was clear that they were not doing so well. The valley was steep and heavily grazed, covered in heather and sparse areas of grass, which had dried up in the winter sunshine. It was beautiful with the snow-capped Kula rising majestically above us, but because of its northern aspect, it was also shady beneath the mountain slopes and in these dark shadows the temperatures were at zero and below. Ironically, this place had turned out to be the worst of the two sites, although Namjher's half of the tribe had chosen it.

  They had already all moved into their winter houses and their dwellings were at various stages of comfort. Most were clay-built, with wooden roofs and brick floors, sparsely decorated, with newspaper displacing wallpaper and the odd picture of a Chinese pop star. We were greeted with warmth and hospitality by our hosts, most of whom were relations. Tsedup explained patiently who was related to whom and by what connection, but it was so hard to keep up with that I was soon lost. We had come with Aka Choedak, a monk who was a relative and who had also been in India. He was a cheerful soul, always laughing and chatting. He accompanied us to each dwelling – where we must have been offered about five hundred momos in all, and at every house a plate of djomdi, small brown beans dug from the earth, with rice, sugar and melted butter. When we reached the last house that day, we were forced to decline any further sustenance and sat sipping bowls of tea.

  I had the greatest pleasure in meeting one relative who was tirelessly inquisitive about life in the West, staring intently with the smallest, most close-set eyes I have ever seen, exclaiming, 'hschuck chair! Scary, wow!' over and over as he listened to Tsedup's descriptions of routine things, such as trains that carried people under the ground. Tsedup spoke with authority about life in England. He sounded confident and settled and yet I knew that, deep down, he was neither back home. He still felt like a stranger. England hadn't matched up to his expectations and he had found it hard to forge a living there, but now we were in Amdo, I was glad that he sounded proud to be part of that life in the West, for it had rarely appeared so when we were there. I supposed that the grass was always greener on the other side of the fence.

  That night I went to bed earlier than the rest of the throng, who carried on into the small hours. I was slightly overcome by the heat from the iron stove in Medo's tiny house and bewildered by the language barrier. I found it hard sometimes to appear attentive at these gatherings, as after a while of not understanding a conversation, my mind would wander. I retired to Namjher's house, and slept wrapped up in my tsarer next to Aka Choedak, who was snuggled up in his fuchsia robes. I had never slept in such close proximity to a monk before, and although we were separated by a low table in the middle of the platform, it felt sacrilegious.

  In the morning Tsedup told me that I should have politely declined Namjher's offer of the platform to sleep on. All guests were treated as equals, but according to protocol, it had been wrong of me to sleep next to a monk. I felt embarrassed by my ignorance once again.

  That day we had another seven houses to visit. At the first, there were so many children inside and they looked so alike that it was hard to tell whose they were. Tsedup and I talked about them with our host for some time, as they huddled together in the corner with wide eyes, eating their djomdi and whispering. It was amazing how much Tibetans talked about children. The word shyee, child, was mentioned frequently in conversation and it was clear that they loved their children deeply. They were also fiercely proud of their family heritage, and their children were important to them as they represented the immortality of the blood line. The children clustered eagerly outside as we photographed them, then an elderly relative called Gayko arrived to escort us. Like Azjung, he was a man of distinguished features. We walked over the hill and through the heather with a view of Amnye Kula. It looked different from this side of the valley, inaccessible and monolithic. It towered above us and I couldn't envisage that we had actually climbed it. As we walked, Tsedup told me that his family had lived here during the Cultural Revolution. He pointed to a hillock. It seemed innocuous enough.

  'When I was a boy, I watched my father being made to stand there and hold a wooden post above his shoulders for a day,' he said. 'His arms were shaking uncontrollably, but they wouldn't let him put it down.'

  As I stared at the spot I had a mental image of the scene, a glimpse of more brutal times. For Tsedup, the land was mapped with memories and ghosts and at times he would draw back the veil for me, so that I understood that it was not just a manifestation of physical beauty. There was much more to it than that.

  Gayko led us patiently from family to family as we ate and I listened to them talk. At his own house, his two sons took turns with Tsedup to shoot a gun at a bottle perched on the mud wall outside. They whooped with delight when they struck it. Then we set off to the last house up the valley, which was probably the most interesting of all.

  It was the home of two brothers, Karko and Cumchockchab, who shared one wife. As we sat in the shafts of sunlight on yak skins I watched, intrigued, as the family entertained us. Karko was an amiable old man, naked except for his sheepskin tsarer, a real nomad. He sat on the dried mud floor smoking his pipe and laughing. Tsedup informed me that he was considered a man of integrity and intelligence among the nomads. His brother Cumchockchab was the joker of the two. It had been he who had exclaimed at the wonders of western culture the night before. Their wife sat between them and made momos, which she placed in front of me on a wooden dish. She smiled and urged me to eat. 'Soul Sou!' She was unremarkable in appearance and looked incongruous in their mud hut. Her eyes were quite round and she was almost western-looking. I felt as if I might have bumped into her in the supermarket back home. Yet she had the pleasure of two men's company on those cold winter nights. It set me wondering about their sleeping arrangements. Was there some kind of rota system? Did she tire at all? Apparently polyandry was quite acceptable in these parts, although it was not widely practised. My astonishment was greeted later with mirth by Tsedup. who found my ignorance amusing.

  After an exhausting but enjoyable tribal tour we left, armed with presents of cloth, kadaks and money, for it was a Tibetan custom not only to fill guests' stomachs but to send them away with a gift. We skidded home through the heather, aided by Gayko on his antiquated motorbike; he showed us how to pick a path across the river and down the valley.

  We drove straight to Annay and Amnye's house near the town. They were leaving for Lhasa the next morning. As part of Amnye's work, they were to accompany a lama from Ganden Monastery and would stay on for a month in the city. They were both excited and more animated than I had ever seen them. This was their pilgrimage and they were to visit the great monasteries of their Tibetan heritage to pay homage to their gods. Tsedo and Gondo arrived soon after and we all chatted as Annay and Amnye packed their travel bags and warm clothes for the seven-day journey on the truck. Amnye had his bourgea, a fine Tibetan hat, fur-lined and silk-trimmed, and his traditional Tibetan boots, shangtee, which they urged me to try on. Everyone including Amnye, who was usually so serious, then fell about laughing at me, as they are rather comical in appearance, although functional and warm. Annay was ill with swollen glands. She could hardly speak, but would not let that curb her excitement and her stubborn will to complete the journey.

  We went to bed early, and awoke at five the next morning to accompany them to the truck. It was dark and bitterly cold. Annay and I held hands and followed behind the men, slipping on the frosted ground, but she had forgotten her hat, which I ran back t
o collect from the house. Their neighbour, Annay Gee Gee, called to us to come through her gate as it was a short-cut. We walked through and caught sight of the vehicle that would take them on the seven-day journey. In the light cast from the window of the house in front, I was appalled by what I saw. The truck was piled high with boxes of butter so heavy that it had sunk on its axles. On top of this mountain of produce were about ten people, all trying to negotiate a place to sit. So precarious was their situation, that it would only have taken a sharp bend on an icy mountain road to send them flying out into the valley below.

  This was the potential destiny of my dear parents-in-law, and I was filled with dread as they clambered up on top of the pile. I handed Annay her prayer scarf, placing it over her head as she boarded, and gave Rhanjer's monk son, Tinlee, who was accompanying them, another scarf for good luck. It was his first trip to his capital and I hoped he would get there. Suddenly, as the truck began to grind towards the road, Tsedup jumped up on top and pleaded with his father to take the bus instead. 'Drucker, drucker. It's no problem,' cried his father and Tsedup was forced to throw himself clear, as they disappeared into the dark. I whimpered quietly to myself as I watched the lights of the truck swing out of sight. Was this the last time I would see them? We walked back to the house and went to bed. Later we heard that the truck's wheel had broken on the Wild Yak range, not three miles from the house, and they had taken the bus after all. Relieved, we returned to the tents.

  The next day the move was on. True nomadic spirit prevailed, but with no yaks this time. Technology had made life easier for the nomads and today a truck would do nicely instead. We got up early and began to take down the black tent. Sirmo unstitched the sides and we dismantled the enormous length of heavy fabric. Our hands were black, as it was covered in soot from the fire, and I was impressed to see how small a shape it could be folded into. Our home now sat on the grass, the size of a cardboard box. The day was chaotic: the truck got stuck in the mud and overturned when Tsedo was trying to tow Rhanjer's decrepit car so he had to fetch cable from the town to pull it out. We girls sat around among the sacks with the children and scrabbling puppies – the bitch had given birth to three – surrounded by mountains of ephemera, giggling and joking to pass the time. We waited till late afternoon around the lonely clay stove in the middle of the grassland, drinking tea and eating tsampa, the last of the tribe to go. There was no tent around us, just chilled autumn air and vast space. It had a surreal feel about it. Then Tsedo returned, cursing, in the truck and we heaved everything into the back. We were so overloaded that I was afraid the vehicle would keel over again, but we went on our way, a family on the move in the evening sunlight. We reached the house and unpacked, throwing the sacks on to the ground unceremoniously and, exhausted, piled into Annay Urgin's clay house next door for momos.