Empires of the Indus

by Alice Albinia

  Tsegar is the only person in Darchen who speaks comprehensible English, and he translates for me valiantly, from Tibetan and Chinese, as I struggle with the indifference of the Yakman, the person officially in charge of allotting yaks and guides to pilgrims and tourists. September is the end of the season in Darchen, and the Yakman has already made enough money. He now wishes to be left in peace to spend it on drink and repose, and it takes all Tsegar’s efforts to rouse him out of his lethargy and persuade him to summon from a nearby village an old pony man called Chumpay who knows the way to the Indus. Meanwhile, I find eight trekkers from the Mountain Climbing Club of Poland in a noodle shop who have a spare tent which Chumpay and I can share, and who decide, on a whim, to trek with me to the source. They are in a hurry to leave, so we set off immediately. But on the second day the youngest member of the party falls into a glacial mountain river and her boyfriend is drenched in the rain; so they both turn back. On the third day, we walk through a blizzard. And on the morning of the fourth day, the remaining six men, each six foot tall, Goretex-clad, equipped with trekking poles, whirring digital cameras and vitamin-rich powdered meals, announce to me that carrying on through the snow ‘would be like suicide’. We are forced to turn back. I am so incandescent with rage that it camouflages me against the heavy snowfall, and childishly I pretend that the Poles are invisible too, and hence speak only to Chumpay during the long march back to Darchen.

  In Darchen once more, the Yakman takes my money and explains to Tsegar that Chumpay is going home to his village for an important yak-meat distribution ceremony. He won’t be available for another fifteen days, by which time my permit will have expired and winter snowfall will have frozen the passes. His friend, the only other person in Darchen who knows the way to Senge Khabab, refuses to accompany me on account of the cold and the distance. ‘There is a monk from Driraphuk Gompa who knows the way,’ says Tsegar that afternoon, ‘but he has gone to Lhasa’ and when my husband rings that evening I dissolve into tears once more like a globally warmed glacier.

  By the next morning, Tsegar has had an idea; but he seems cautious about it, as if it might result in disaster. Leaving his mother-in-law in charge of the phone booth, he walks me over Darchen’s river and down its dirtiest street right to the end where there is a pile of rubbish so imposing that the ferocious village dogs that lie beside it appear sedated by its fumes and yelp wearily without moving when we approach. Opposite the rubbish tip is a kind of hut, and inside is the man we have come to meet, a Nepali called Karma Lama whose personal odour–by the end of ten days I know it well–is akin to that of the rubbish tip, putrid and sweet. Karma Lama sits wrapped in five dirty blankets in the middle of a room that looks as if the same rubbish tip has meandered through before settling down outside; but he speaks a bit of Hindi, was born with ‘the hand-print of a Lama on his stomach’, and says that he knows the way to Senge Khabab.

  Business is rapidly concluded: Tsegar settles the rate (the same as the government’s but without the government’s cut), a Tibetan is plucked from the street outside to act as a porter, and Karma Lama summons his neighbours: two skinny twenty-year-old pilgrims from Lhasa with slicked-back hair and pointy shoes, and they sell me their tent. We unroll it on the ground outside. It is large, white, with blue, red and yellow designs on the flaps. But there are no tent pegs and: ‘It is not waterproof,’ I point out. ‘But all Tibetans sleep in tents like this,’ says the porter, whose name is Yujaa. Tsegar agrees. He gestures across the river to the Tibetan pilgrim encampment. ‘Buy some plastic sheeting from the Chinese shop,’ he says.

  So this is what we do. I give Karma ten yuan for sheeting; Yujaa volunteers his friend’s stove; we agree to spend tomorrow buying supplies and packing; and the day after is fixed for our departure. ‘We Tibetans,’ Tsegar says to me ominously as we take our leave, ‘have too much luggage.’

  The next evening I walk through the rain to Yujaa’s house for our final pre-departure meeting. There I find him sitting in domestic bliss as his wife wets, combs and plaits his hair, and their infant daughter piddles through her clothing on to the floor. (Tibetans clothe their babies in multiple layers, all of which have slits at the crotch to avoid the necessity of undressing in the cold.) Yujaa’s house is also a teashop, and as we wait for Karma to arrive, Yujaa plays cards intently with a Tibetan woman and a Chinese soldier. He and his wife speak no English, and I no Tibetan, so we communicate in shrugs and smiles until it is dark, when at last I trudge back home to Tsegar’s house pondering the whereabouts of Karma.

  In my morbidly despondent state I had imagined that Tsegar was a widower, with only a mother-in-law to care for his two young babies; but his wife was merely on a shopping trip to Lhasa, and I arrive back to find her, a tall, cheerful woman chewing gum, triumphantly reinstalled, and with her like a royal entourage her six younger sisters. The sisters enjoy watching Chinese films, and everybody is pleased when Tsegar reveals that the new solar panel has generated enough electricity to power the black and white television. So it is that we are sitting happily slurping yak meat noodles, when the door bursts open–and standing in a gust of cold air and rain is Karma Lama, the bad fairy, his hair sticking up from his head and alcohol fumes rolling from him like fog. He has spent the plastic sheeting money on Chinese brandy and now he doesn’t want to walk to the Indus after all. The luggage is too heavy and it is raining.

  The seven sisters watch open-mouthed, their eyes flicking from one combatant to another, as Tsegar and Karma argue. Karma gestures at the luggage, heaped by the door, at the skies, at me. Tsegar shrugs, lifts the luggage piece by piece, and delivers his verdict quietly in Tibetan. I know that a truce has been effected when Karma, snivelling slightly, sits down on one of the beds and accepts a cup of yak butter tea from Tsegar’s wife. When he eventually leaves, he even closes the door quietly behind him. ‘What did you say?’ I ask. Tsegar grins. ‘I understand how his mind works,’ he says. ‘I told him how happy you are that he speaks Hindi. This pleased him. Now he will not be any trouble.’

  The next morning Karma shows up at eight o’clock, apparently chastened, but looking and smelling as if he has been wrapped in all his belongings and rolled around the streets of Darchen. With him is Yujaa the Porter, trim in a hand-knitted hat and polished boots. I am wearing my trousers from Quetta, a yak-wool jacket stitched six years ago by a tailor in Delhi, and a straw sunhat from Kashgar. But something is amiss, for Tsegar’s wife rummages in a dragon-painted cupboard, and pulls out a fluorescent-coloured synthetic neck muffler: ‘Now you look Tibetan,’ she says, and Tsegar, after appraising each of us in turn, buys three pairs of yellow washing-up gloves from the Chinese shop: ‘Against the snow.’ We don the gloves, heave the bags on to our backs, Karma picks up the stove and Yujaa and I each take up one of our two ten-foot metal tent poles, which I now find bear more than a passing resemblance to jousting spears, and I am glad that we are not riding up to the source on ponies (which is how many rich Indians begin their pilgrimage), and that wind power has not yet reached Tibet: ‘quixotic’ is an adjective I prefer to forget. Thus accoutred, we set off.

  I have never seen Darchen so misty. In a way it is a relief, for the ugly Chinese buildings are barely visible; but nor are the hills to the south, nor anything but the narrow path ahead. White cloud hangs above us and dribbles rain on to our bags. It speeds Yujaa and me up, but gives Karma an excuse to dawdle. Or maybe he is taking long brandy breaks.

  Mount Kailash–or Kangri Rinpoche, as Tibetans know it–is only a thousand metres above us. It seems smaller than before but larger in impact: everywhere we turn that day and the next it looms over us, its black and white striations glowing through the mist like a jewel. During the day-long walk from Darchen to Driraphuk Gompa, the monastery which marks the end of the first stage of the Kailash pilgrimage, the red hills seem to lean in towards us, as if they might tumble into the river. We pass many Bon pilgrims coming the other way–that day they outnumber the Buddhists and Hindus by three to one–a
nd only two small tent teashops. In the second we sit and wait for Karma. A polite party of South Koreans is already there: an expensive-looking group, with compact tents, a line of yaks and even oxygen bags to mitigate the dangers of altitude sickness. Karma’s eyes light up when he sees the oxygen. Within minutes of his arrival he has contrived to steal a bag.

  We walk on, Karma’s oxygen pillow fluttering over him like a speech bubble. When we arrive at the monastery, Karma throws a tantrum and demands to stay the night here with his friends, instead of continuing on to the nomads who live an hour’s walk ahead. ‘If you carry on shouting and being angry,’ I say to him, in tears again, ‘I will turn around and go back to Darchen.’ In fact nothing would induce me to go back, not even Karma’s drunken raving. But the tears achieve two things: Karma is astonished into silence; and I am resolved into overcoming my fear, resigning myself to being led through the mountains by an eccentric drunk, and trusting instead in the wisdom of Yujaa, with whom I cannot communicate verbally but have developed a fluent mutual understanding based on the language of gestures. We stay that night at the monastery.

  The monks–there are six–are all dressed in dark red Timberland fleeces. Despite abiding by the Chinese prohibition on displaying pictures of the Dalai Lama–only in the remotest places did I meet Tibetans who could afford to disregard this stricture–they seem content, visited by pilgrims from all over Asia. We sit in the monastery kitchen as I munch raw spinach from their garden (I fear I may be getting scurvy) and everybody else drinks yak leg stew. (‘Bad food in the gompa,’ mourns Yujaa on the morrow.) The monks take it in turns to translate the words on my ring, a Tibetan silver coin that I have been wearing for a decade: one of the many minted by the Tibetan Government between 1911 and the Chinese invasion of 1951. On the obverse are the eight auspicious symbols of Tibetan Buddhism–every monk recognizes those; but the reverse causes more problems. It reads: ‘the Ganden Palace, victorious in all directions’, and is thus a symbol of Tibetan independence. The monks seem to regard it with a mixture of curiosity, fear and pride.

  As I leave the smoky kitchen to go to my bed in the monastery dormitory a monk says to me: ‘There was a party of Americans who tried to get to the Indus. They had to turn back: the whole valley was flooded, there was water water everywhere.’ He looks at me as Karma translates. ‘When was this?’ I ask. ‘A week ago,’ says the monk; and to his surprise, I laugh: that was me and the Poles. Already our misadventures have become part of Kangri Rinpoche folklore.

  We wake to thick snow. Karma has found a Shaivic trident under the monastery stairs and he strikes off boldly into the glaring white, using this as a trekking pole; Yujaa and I follow squire-like close behind. We are leaving the Kailash pilgrim track, and thus from now on, we have no map. But I walked through this valley a week ago with Chumpay, and know roughly which way we should go. Karma, however, has other ideas.

  By eleven o’clock we see, as I have been anticipating, two tents in the distance with smoke rising blackly up against the snow. They belong to Drokpa, the nomads who have grazing rights over this valley. This family of nomads are much given to tutting, and Karma furnishes a selective translation over tea and curd: they tut at the long way we have to go, at the weight of our bags, at the difficulty of the route, at my distance from home, at my solitary state (this is a theme to which they return with especially vigorous tuts). Presumably they also tut at the fact that thanks to Karma’s hopelessness we may get fatally lost, but luckily I know no Tibetan and thus miss the close questioning to which Karma subjects them on the best way to reach the Indus (they don’t know). The gravity of the situation seems to have affected the entire family: the tall, bent grandmother who pours us yak curd, her strong young son with his long plait of hair, his shy staring daughter. Only the grandfather seems unconcerned. He lies back on his bed in the tent, sipping tea and trying hard to change the subject.

  I refuse the Drokpas’ kind offer of a packhorse (remembering how Chumpay’s pony detested crossing the glacial streams which lie ahead) and we continue on our way. On our return, seven days later, I will fail to recognize this place until we reach the nomads’ tent again. By then bright sunlight will have entirely melted the snow, and the grassy valley strewn with mammoth boulders will seem a different place altogether, a geological quirk. Today, the nomads’ valley is a long white undulating expanse of snow.

  A few hours later, Yujaa and I stop at the other end of the valley on a small hill for lunch, and wait for Karma. From here the only way onwards is up into the mountains. Yujaa presses snow into the kettle and takes out his matches and pliers. He alone knows how to light his friend’s stove–which is really just a blowtorch, and so powerful that even careful Yujaa burns a hole in the lid of the kettle. He is carrying five foodstuffs: tsampa (roasted barley flour), yak butter, a dried yak leg, tea leaves and salt. I have the Chinese instant noodles that I already loathe, some almonds I bought in Rawalpindi, and a sweet instant cereal from Kashgar that I swap with Yujaa for tsampa (he takes it home for his baby). Yujaa makes sure that I eat tsampa, wettened with tea and seasoned with yak butter, at least once a day; he cannot conceive of a day without tsampa; it is the backbone, substance and spice of the Tibetan diet. Karma’s attitude to food, which is the Indian one of concealing all blandness with chilli powder, disgusts Yujaa. He winces as Karma adulterates his tsampa with sugar or oats or curd. But Karma’s enormous rations are an important part of his self-image; he unwraps them lovingly every evening and spreads them around him like a spell: little twists of spice, cloth bags of grain and flour, instant soup filched from a tourist, foodstuffs that he has acquired hither and thither, all wrapped up in individual parcels and secreted about his person.

  Yujaa and I sit grandly in the middle of the snowfield, sipping salty tea and watching Karma’s slow approach. But when he reaches us, he offloads his bags and instead of sitting down, veers up the hill. ‘Where are you going?’ Yujaa shouts, and Karma motions to the top of the ridge, where three Drokpa horsemen are now just visible, black figures outlined against the snow. The horsemen wait for Karma to approach, and then the four men enter a long discussion. There is much gesticulation towards the west; and eventually our Nepali skips down the hill towards us.

  It is only three hours, he announces, to the next Drokpa settlement. The horsemen have come from there, so we can follow their tracks and stay at their encampment for the night. All we have to do is climb that hill. He waves nonchalantly towards a distant brown mountain. ‘Isn’t it that way?’ I ask, pointing out the route I took with Chumpay, due north. ‘There are many ways to Senge Khabab,’ Karma says philosophically, and then adds: ‘Who has been there before, you or me?’

  Normally paths through the mountains follow the line of least resistance: a ‘pass’ is by definition a low crossing-point. But that afternoon, following Karma’s instructions, we go right up over the mountain, and I think that my lungs are going to burst. As we climb, leaving Karma further and further behind, we can hear the thunder in the distance growing nearer, and when we reach the lakes at the top we can see black clouds gathering on the other side. For an hour Yujaa and I walk along the top of the mountain, following the horsemen’s tracks but without being able to see the Drokpa tents that are surely pitched just round the corner; by now we have been walking for three hours and it is already getting dark. We reach the prayer flags that mark the highest point and stare down into the valley below. It is beginning to rain. If the rain is heavy it will wash away the tracks in the snow; and these tracks at the moment are the only guide we have.

  It was, on reflection, the most beautiful point on our journey: the deep gloaming of the valley, the contours and outlines roughly etched like the black and grey strokes of a lithograph. But I was never so frightened as then, descending into nothing: into the hail, the darkness, the cold of an unknown Tibetan mountain valley.

  We walk for three hours as hail clatters down on our backs, across a landscape so marshy that we step from one island of so
il to another as the melting ice splashes our feet. I look back and see Karma, a tiny blue figure in the distance. Then the tracks run out: we have descended so far that the snow has melted. I wipe rain from my face and force myself not to panic.

  The landscape here is unguessable; I thought we had descended into a valley, but in fact we have only reached the valley’s lip: now we find ourselves at the top of yet another valley where the grass is showing through the ice in green patches. Walk faster, Yujaa indicates, for I am shivering, my feet are wet, and the storm shows no sign of abating: Leave Karma behind, he says. But we cannot leave Karma, however slowly he walks; we have no choice but to wait, our backs to the hail, as night falls.

  And then, within half an hour, everything changes. The clouds overhead shift, the hail stops, and the sun, which I thought had gone down for the night, comes out, numinous, sacred, illuminating the valley in warm, low evening light. We descend still further, along a stream and on to a tableland. Now the clouds lift, and for the first time I can see across the valley to where the ground is strewn with hundreds of little black dots. Perhaps it is some kind of odd rock formation, part of western Tibet’s erratic geology. I call to Yujaa and point. But he utters the word that I have not dared hope for:

  ‘Yak.’

  ‘Drokpa?’ I ask.

  ‘Drokpa.’

  We smile at each other in relief: we are safe.

  As the evening sunshine lights up the entire lower valley, picking out the white dashes of sheep on the farther hillside, the green pasture and the black yak-wool tents, we climb down to a mountain river and splash through the water, and despite our heavy bags, run towards the Drokpa tents, pitched beside the river that cuts through the bottom of the valley. Now we can see the Drokpa themselves, little marks of black on the hill beyond, rounding up their animals for the night. We sit and wait for a Drokpa couple to bring their sheep across the river–they wade through the freezing water in baseball boots–and then we accost them shamelessly and ask for help.