Empires of the Indus

by Alice Albinia

  Human settlements are ephemeral in this landscape, for this is nomad country. Mahe Bridge, the furthest east along the river that civilians are allowed to go, is also where the Changthang begins: the dry Tibetan plateau north of the Himalayas, which stretches from Ladakh into Tibet. In Ladakh many of the nomads who live in the Changthang–they are known as Changpa, or Drokpa in Tibetan–escaped here along the Indus when the Chinese invaded. They thus preserved both the age-old pastoralism which was once practised all over the world by Palaeolithic humans, and the polyandry that was part of the ancient fabric of Strirajya, both of which the invaders attempted systematically to destroy. It is difficult keeping up those old traditions, but the Changpa today make the burghers of Leh jealous with their pashmina businesses (‘They cook on gas, drive gypsy vans, and eat imported rice,’ somebody tells me). The Drokpa of Tibet, I find later, have not been so lucky.

  I stand on the bridge looking at the Indus through the haze of hopefully fluttering Buddhist prayer flags. A young Indian soldier, wary of my camera, picks up his gun and walks out to join me in the middle of the bridge. ‘Until the war with China,’ I say to him, ‘the Changpa migrated along this river between Ladakh and Tibet. Now all that has changed.’ ‘Everything has changed,’ he agrees. ‘In the olden days, thirty years ago, it was nothing but plain here, there were no mountains.’ I look at him in surprise and laugh, until I realize that with his youthful conception of time he has missed out the word arab (million).

  This land was flat once, fifty million years ago, before the Indian plate crashed into Asia, displacing the sea, launching the river on its long journey south, sending the mountains up into the sky. In Zanskar, I found three delicate seashell fossils–relics from the Tethys Ocean–embedded in a smooth black rock near the river. Here on the border between the two countries, the geological antiquity of the river begins to assert itself. And the Indus, which is older than the mountains, older than the Ganges, follows the fault line from western Tibet right through Ladakh, tracing the seismic join between the continental plates.

  In the face of the tectonic revolutions which have convulsed this land and created this river, the loss of a few human scratches from the surface of the granite batholith through which the Indus passes seems momentarily insignificant.

  12

  The Disappearing River

  Fifty million years ago

  ‘There is a plain in Asia which is shut in on all sides by a mountain-range…The Great King blocked up all the passages between the hills with dykes and flood-gates, and so prevented the water from flowing out…From that time the five nations which were wont formerly to have use of the stream…have been in great distress…the king never gives the order to open the gates till the suppliants have paid him a large sum of money over and above the tribute.’

  Herodotus, Histories, fifth century BCE

  ON THE UPPER reaches of the Indus, in the town of Ali (the Chinese-built headquarters of far western Tibet), I check into a hotel, pay the mandatory fine for entering the ‘Autonomous Region’ illegally–and rush to the river. The town, which is also called Shiquanhe (the Chinese name for the Indus) and Senge Khabab (the Tibetan name for the source), straddles the river two hundred kilometres upstream of where I last stood watching it flowing past me in eastern Ladakh.

  I was prevented from continuing along the river by the militarized border, guarded by the Indian Army on one side and the Chinese on the other, and so to complete my journey to the source I had to make a four-thousand-kilometre loop around to the nearest legal crossing-point. This meant descending again into the Punjabi plains, travelling west into Pakistan, over the mountainous border with China, and then east, in a jeep driven by a maniac, through the high-altitude desert of Aksai Chin (which the Chinese took from India in the 1960s), and thence into Tibet (stolen property).

  Now that I am here, I stand on the river’s bank in confusion, wondering whether I am in the wrong place. There is a blue boot and a bicycle tyre where the water should be; Chinese instant-noodle packets are scattered about like flowers–but where is the water? My map clearly shows the Indus running straight through the middle of this town. Have I travelled 1,400 kilometres from Kashgar…in the wrong direction? I look through the list of Emergency Chinese in my guidebook and stop a passer-by: ‘Shooee?’ I say. Water? ‘Tsangpo? River? Darya?’

  The passer-by, a middle-aged Chinese man with a limp, looks down at the river and up at me. He makes a noise like a cat coughing; a cutting motion with his hand; he swipes the air. Then he flicks through my phrasebook and rifles through my bag. The former does not deal with emergencies of the riparian sort but in the latter he finds my Ladakhi handpress torch. He holds this up to my face, switches it on and off, and I feel strongly, though I am not sure, that he swears at me in Chinese. Before he can assault me for my stupidity, I click: the answer to my question is electricity.

  Twenty-four hours ago, as I was hurtling through Aksai Chin, vomiting repeatedly because of the high altitude, unable to communicate with anyone around me, I was troubled by a thought, which I wrote like a portent in my notebook. I am reading that note now, scrawled in handwriting distorted by lack of oxygen: ‘What will happen if the Chinese dam the Indus?’

  The man with a limp ushers me into a taxi and gives a rapid set of instructions to the driver. I have no friends in Tibet, and no common language with this stranger. That I have decided to trust him is not the consequence of judgement; it is instinct born of exhaustion and distress. Besides, I have to discover what has happened to the Indus. I grip the ragged taxi seat and watch as the town rattles slowly past.

  Despite its imposing police station, saluting soldiers and plate-glass tower blocks that stand empty, opaque with dust, Senge-Ali is a small town barely five streets broad. There are very few Tibetan inhabitants; Han Chinese run the supermarkets, march up and down in green uniforms outside the government buildings, and apply lipstick inside the neon-lit hair salons that double as soldiers’ brothels. I imagine that the towns of the British Raj looked as anomalous as this; there is something morgue-like in the neatness with which the foreign culture superimposes itself on the landscape.

  The tarmac soon ends, along with the bureaucratic buildings, and after that we bump along a track. Dark hills encircle the town, removing any grand illusion of modernity. Their forbidding aspect is reassuring: humans have not yet managed to tame this land, they seem to say. I stare out of the window into the stony emptiness as the taxi driver and my impromptu guide confer. After a little while I see, stretched across the road in the distance, a barrier, an army checkpoint. The driver draws up beside it and beeps his horn.

  It is only nine o’clock in the morning, and the soldier is still asleep: he comes slowly out of his hut, rubbing his eyes, and indicates that I should crawl under the barrier. But the car is not allowed to advance further. To my consternation it reverses and turns. ‘Please stop,’ I say, ‘please.’ It will be a long walk home along this empty road. But my guide leans out of the window and makes it clear that the car won’t wait. I hand over the money for the fare; the car disappears in a cloud of dust; and I am left all alone.

  Not quite alone: the soldier. He yawns, and waves me on.

  I am still unsure whether the stranger and I have understood each other perfectly. But I have no choice now, and so I obey the policeman, and walk on down the track. Beyond the checkpoint is a cluster of small huts and a large fence, enclosing a compound. I hear a dog barking, and pick up a stone to defend myself. The gate of the compound opens and out comes a large dirty truck, with twenty Chinese workers in the back. It rounds the bend in the road ahead of us and disappears.

  Ten minutes later I too turn the corner, and then I see it.

  The dam is huge, pristine. Its massive concrete curve looms up from the riverbed like a vast wave frozen in mid-air. I stare at it in disbelief, fighting back tears. The structure itself is complete, but the hydroelectric elements on the riverbed are still being installed. There are pools of
water this side of the dam, but no flow. The Indus has been stopped.

  I walk towards the dam, expecting any minute to be arrested and searched; but nobody even asks me where I am going. The fence along the road is lined with multicoloured flags–State Grid of China, they say in Chinese and English–and I follow them over a bridge across the dry river and up along its banks to where the Chinese workers are encamped. When I arrive at the dam itself, I step tentatively out along it–and still nobody stops me. Instead, when I reach the middle and pause to look down at the hydroelectric plant, the men in hard hats wave. Take our picture, they mime; but in a spirit of precaution, accustomed to the forbidding signs on every bridge in India and Pakistan, I do not remove the camera from my bag.

  On the other side of the dam the road ends abruptly, submerged beneath the water. The river lake is huge; opaque and green, it fills the mountain valley and I want to cry out at the unkindness: at the demands imposed by other people’s needs, somewhere far away in China. Is the dam just for electricity? Or will the Chinese use it to supplement their falling water tables, as the Pakistanis do, for irrigation or drinking water elsewhere in the great Republic? I stand on the edge of the lake as the water laps at my feet. After a while, the workers call out to me, and so I walk silently back.

  From now on, for the rest of my journey to the river’s source, I feel stricken: there is no Indus. ‘They cut the river,’ a kind Tibetan policeman explains later that day, ‘two months ago.’ So for the past two months, as I have journeyed east through Baltistan, Kashmir and Ladakh, it is not the Indus I have been following upwards, not the Indus’s history I have been writing, but the sum of its tributaries: the Gar, Zanskar, Shyok, Shigar. ‘Were there any protests?’ I ask, and the policeman laughs. In Ladakh, four hundred Buddhists marched against the Basha dam downstream in Pakistan, which will submerge the prehistoric and Buddhist-era rock carvings at Chilas. In Pakistan, Sindhis regularly protest against army dam-building in the Punjab. Here in the Tibetan Autonomous Region, the inhabitants have no forums through which to debate how their landscape, customs and language should be preserved; they no longer have any power over their river or their land.

  My own sadness is only slightly tempered by my trepidation at embarking on the final stage of my journey up to the source of this once-immortal river. I return to Senge-Ali with a group of dam-workers and search for transport to Darchen. Three hundred kilometres away to the east, the village of Darchen is the staging-post for pilgrims wishing to circumambulate the sacred mountain of Kailash. From the watershed of this iconic mass of rock, four great rivers of South Asia rise. The Indus flows north-west towards Pakistan, the Sutlej west through India, the Karnali south-east into the Ganga, and the Brahmaputra east into Bangladesh.

  Where the four rivers begin, four faiths–Bon, Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism–congregate in pilgrimage. The worship of mountains and rivers is intrinsic to the fabric of South Asian tradition, and the mountain where these rivers begin is the epitome of that philosophical intermeshing. Tibetan Buddhists call it Kangri Rinpoche: ‘Precious Snow Mountain’. Bon texts have many names: Water’s Flower, Mountain of Sea Water, Nine Stacked Swastikas Mountain. For Hindus, it is the home of the wild mountain god Shiva and a symbol of his penis; for Jains it is where their first leader was enlightened; for Buddhists, the navel of the universe; and for adherents of Bon, the abode of the sky goddess Sipaimen. For early European travellers who heard tell of its mythological dimensions, it was both the Garden of Eden and Mount Ararat. For modern Chinese and Western trekkers it is still a zone of exploration that carries cachet on account of the strenuousness of the trek, the difficulty of getting there, and the lack of amenities. This is no place for frivolous Western itineraries. The Hindus’ Mount Kailash–so the guidebooks say–is rooted in the seventh hell and bursts through the highest heaven. It certainly lies in what some trekkers call the ‘dead zone’–a place of such high altitude, prone to such dramatic variation in weather, that every year pilgrims and trekkers die trying to make the three-day walk around the mountain. The source of the Indus, meanwhile, lies days’ and days’ walk to the north, in the mountains beyond Kailash.

  Until now, my entire plan for reaching the source has been based on the assumption that in Senge-Ali–as elsewhere on my journey–I will be able to glean all the reliable knowledge I need about the lie of the land from local people. Out of curiosity, expedience and an utter lack of mountaineering knowledge I have already decided that I want to see the mountain and its river just as Tibetan pilgrims see it, without the paraphernalia of modern trekkers. Looking in vain through travel guides for directions to the source, I turned to the map of western Tibet, and decided that the people who actually live in the mountains should have everything I need. In Senge-Ali, I imagined, I would be able to find a Tibetan guide, rent a tent and stove, and thus settle my vague fears of walking into the mountains without any local languages or accurate maps.

  These illusions prove laughable in reality. The town has a supermarket selling tinned pineapple; boutiques hawking underwear from Thailand; even a karaoke bar. But while it caters to the Chinese administration, soldiers and traders, most pilgrimage parties and tour groups to Kailash come from the east, from Lhasa or Nepal; and they come carrying everything they need from elsewhere: equipment, provisions, expertise.

  Pinning all my romantic notions and slender hopes on the residents of Darchen–at least one of whom must know the way to the source of the Indus–I buy a seat on a jeep. The seven other passengers are Chinese tourists, all strangers to each other, all only-children. Normally the journey to Darchen takes six hours, but the rains have been severe this year, five rivers have flooded, and so we spend two days and a night reaching our destination. We break down every few hours–the jeep’s engine is flooded. I have a long time in which to contemplate the landscape.

  We are so high here–the Tibetan plateau is twice as thick as the rest of the earth’s crust–that never before has the sky been so large, or so full of cloud and light: the sun seems to emanate from six different parts of the sky, like a Turner blown out of proportion. The landscape, too, runs the gamut of every form known to the Indus valley: rivers in spate, sandy Sindh-like desert, green Punjabi hills, snow-topped mountains, all in an eye’s glance. I feel as if the whole of the Indus valley is laid out before me in one vista. Senge Khabab, Tibetans call the source of the Indus: the Lion’s Mouth. From the source to the sea, the entire trajectory of the river is contained in this sad place.

  We reach a river but the jeep’s wheels churn up mud on its edge and we are unable to cross. It has begun to rain. On the far side are two buses full of Tibetans; and stranded in the middle of the roaring waters–I feel sick when I see this–is a bus whose passengers press their noses to the glass in alarm. A Chinese Army bulldozer has moved into the river to rescue it. The bus driver is handed a rope by a soldier, and he climbs with it round to the front, down into the swift black water, and connects the two vehicles together. The bulldozer judders backwards; the bus lurches to one side; the rope snaps; and fifty Tibetan passengers sway in fear.

  There is a second bulldozer too. I watch, amazed, as at a signal from a Chinese Army officer, it ignores the two other buses and moves across the river to where our jeep is moored in the mud. My fellow passengers are Chinese: the army is coming to our rescue. A soldier lashes our jeep to the bulldozer with a metal cable and we are towed across the river in a moment. This neat operation, I realize as we arrive on the other side, is being filmed by a young officer. He continues filming as the students cheer, the soldiers salute, and the driver shakes everybody’s hand. The Tibetans are still stuck in their swaying bus as we accelerate away into the distance.

  The Chinese Government, which opened Kangri Rinpoche up to pilgrim and tourist traffic in the late 1980s, must make plenty of money from visa fees and fines. But it is difficult to see how the Tibetans benefit. Darchen, when we eventually reach it, has all the joy of a Native American reservation; and the ana
logy extends beyond the coincidence of drunk men with long black plaited hair (wearing cowboy hats, to confuse the issue). The sight of Tibet’s heritage for sale in dollars or yuan; the disappearing language and culture; the dominance of Chinese businesses, shops and goods–were it not for the high altitude, I would follow local example and drown my sorrows in a bottle of Lhasa beer.

  The man who runs the telephone booth saves me from despondency. I am unlike all his other customers in that I burst into tears every time I use the phone. It is strange to recall now, but I weep almost every day that I spend in Tibet. These are not just tears of sympathy for the people and for a culture disappearing as fast as the river is dying (though I feel this too). Nor tears of anger at the Chinese colonizing project. By now, I weep for myself. I feel myself imperilled–in a way that I had not in proximity to gun-toting tribals, peasant-raping feudals or any of the other stock lower-Indus horror stories–by that unquantifiable, non-reasonable thing: the emptiness of the landscape. In Kashgar, in Senge-Ali, in Darchen: every time I speak to my husband on the phone I shed tears like an unruly river.

  I stand there weeping in Tsegar’s shop as Tibetans crowd around me, waiting their turn, and for three days Tsegar sits and watches, hunched into his leather jacket, until eventually he moves me into his house next door where there is a phone my husband can ring me back on, and a mother-in-law who thankfully says nothing as she shuffles around the kitchen in her long Tibetan robes sweeping up the droppings of the baby pet goat and pouring me cup after cup of salty buttery Tibetan tea. ‘What is wrong with you?’ my husband asks, for I weep at the slightest endearment. Later I put it down to the psychosomatic effect of high altitude. Or strange geology: Tibet’s ‘Magsat crustal negative anomaly field’, as geologists put it.