The Heat and Dust Project

by Saurav Jha

  — Milan Kundera to Ian McEwan in an interview published in

  The Novel Today.

  50

  It is 2007. The year rocket leaves have suddenly become popular in Delhi restaurants. Autumn is filled with a strange restlessness, a madness that eggs one towards bad decisions. Among the many extremely bad decisions to which I have been drawn, much like a moth to a flame, the acquiring of a timeshare is the crown jewel.

  I am twenty-three. I have, for the first time in my life, a job. It pays a measly 15,000 rupees per month but allows me to read through the day and continue with my MPhil. One morning, I read in the newspaper about this resort timeshare, an exclusive club if you will, through which members can stay in the finest getaways tucked away in secret serene hills or dense forests or by the deep blue expanse of the Arabian Sea. All I need to do is call the toll-free number and a representative will come and make a presentation to us.

  It is a curious time in my life. I have, for the first time in life, a husband, but somehow we never can manage a honeymoon. Setting up a household from scratch – even with help from the parents – has turned out to be a black hole for cash. There just isn’t enough for a proper upper-crust honeymoon that one can tell one’s peers about. I pick up the phone. I speak for a long time to the sweet call-centre girl. And I understand the basics. If we take a membership, for a small EMI (and a minor down payment in the beginning), we shall have access to a lifetime of honeymoons. How about that? She is going to send a representative this evening. For a second, I think of S’s reaction. But then I remember I am a feminist, and now with some independent means. And a lifetime of weeklong honeymoons? Starched sheets and forests framed on windows? S would be an idiot not to agree. I drool over the website.

  In the evening, the guy comes. He is full of jargon and bluster and shows us a short film about the beautiful resorts, one after the other, until my tongue begins to water at the prospect of getting away to Munnar or Binsar or Bangkok – and S is sufficiently numbed into a stupor. After a long day at work, image after image of green forests and sun-dappled backwaters can have that effect on people. I whip out my chequebook. There is that money we got at our wedding that we’d meant to put into a fixed deposit. It will be enough for the down payment. And since S pays for most of the other stuff, I can pay the EMI for four years. I look at him, affecting my best puppy eyes. What? No, really, think it through, but would it be sooo bad?

  ‘What the hell!’ he says. ‘We only live once!’

  He is twenty-four going on twenty-five. We sign. We get a few freebies. The guy zooms off on his motorbike, happily calculating the commission he will receive. We eat dinner and go to bed. In the middle of the night, S gets up from the bed and begins to pace like a bear on heat. ‘Worst decision ever,’ he fulminates. ‘Colossal waste of money if there ever was any colossal waste of money! I don’t know what came over me.’ I sit up, feeling awful. But not too awful. Tomorrow morning, I can begin planning the first of my holidays. ‘I did the math in my head. It is supremely expensive. Food at the resort will be phenomenally pricey. Then there is a hefty annual maintenance fee. What about that? Damn.’

  ‘But you said we only live once.’

  ‘Exactly. I was wrong. We are Hindus. We are born again and again and again. And this bloody mistake – God knows if these resorts flout ecological principles – this mistake will wear very heavy on our karma. Mark my words.’

  He sighs and returns to bed.

  2009. Unfortunately for me, karma catches up in this life itself when we quit our jobs to write books and travel. The EMI? My brother-in-law offers to buy it from us. But I can hardly bear to give over my dear package of honeymoons-for-life to someone who is already paid hefty sums by a big corporation to go on holidays anywhere in the world, with family, once a year. Instead, I swallow my pride, have several screaming matches with my mother, and after a round of bitter recriminations and slammed doors, she agrees to pay it on my behalf. ‘It isn’t about the money,’ my mother says again and again, like a gramophone record that is stuck. ‘How could you – my daughter – be so stupid as to get conned into such a thing?’ I have no answer.

  Back to the present. Cold blue room in Paharganj.

  Now that the extremely bad decision has already been executed, and the EMI payments are being made on my behalf, one fine day it occurs to me after I hear some travellers gushing about McLeodganj, that we ought to get some paisa wasool out of it. No? Two birds with one stone.

  ‘Let’s go to Dharamshala and stay in the timeshare?’ I tell S, who is reading an article. ‘The rooms will be free. We’ll eat outside in cheap places but enjoy the comforts of the room.’

  ‘It sounds like one of your bad ideas.’ S says, uncharitably.

  ‘How?’ I ask earnestly. ‘How is it one of my bad ideas? Purely transparent. Instead of paying 300 rupees a day at a hotel or 400 rupees here in Paharganj, we will stay for three days in Dharamshala, paying nothing. Easy way to balance our budget. Isn’t it?’

  Eventually, he agrees. If only to escape the Paharganj posture for a few days and take in some mountain air.

  The call centre gets reservations done in a jiffy. Because it is still frightfully cold in Dharamshala, several rooms are available. Tactfully, I don’t say anything about the weather to S and confirm our interest in a room with a view for the morrow. And just like that, in an hour or so, we are ready to roll. It is evening when we text the twins, who are busy with the Chabad House party, and late evening when we finish packing our bags, give up our room and take an auto to the bus depot.

  Dharamshala! Here we come!

  At ISBT we get into a bus bound for Kangra Valley. The category of the bus is ‘Ordinary’ and they have no illusions about themselves. The windows are dirt-encrusted and they don’t shut properly since the clasps are broken. From the dirty windows, I gaze at the sea of people billowing around. A madwoman weaves through the masses, a pink dupatta wrapped coyly around her head. She is barefoot and drags a giant plastic bag stuffed with worthless treasures. She behaves with the neat shy movements of a young bride. Once the bus leaves Delhi, it is plunged in darkness. We doze. At some point an icy wind sneaks in through the half-open window, and I shiver for the next few hours. When the bus stops at a dhaba, our co-passengers jump off the bus like flies and pee below my window, their faces turned towards some hedges. I feel thunderous. I doze some more as the bus trundles through darkness.

  For the first time, I see daybreak in the hills as it rains and our bus negotiates hairpin bends at high speed. The green is a balm to eyes that have got used to the grey sordidness of Paharganj for a while; the pale blue of early dawn is reminiscent of an ancient joy, a childhood joy of school vacations and books, half-remembered in that cold sleepy state.

  The happiness is short-lived. Because of snow, our bus gets stalled on the highway for several hours, after which it breaks down and we have to take another bus. We eventually reach our fancy resort way past noon, bedraggled and drenched. My bladder is fit to burst. It is unbelievably cold. S has finally realized that his bravado in a single jacket is misplaced and he’s going to come down with a cold. There is nothing else for us to do but take hot baths in the beautiful bathroom and curl under the duvet in the beautiful bed. The blankets are heavenly. The pillows fluffy and soft.

  It is damn comfortable – and nothing like home.

  Saurav

  ‘Pretty steep,’ D says, as we both look at the snowed-in square that hosts McLeodganj’s bus stand right below the wooden cafe where we sit.

  ‘The prices? Absolutely!’

  ‘Uff!’ she groans, not wanting that thought to intercede between the cinnamon cappuccino and herself. ‘I meant the climb.’

  A colonial relic situated 4 kilometres above Dharamshala (about 10 kilometres by a circuitous road), McLeodganj was a backwater until it became the headquarters of the Tibetan government in exile and the chief re
sidence of His Holiness, the fourteenth Dalai Lama. It is now the most popular hangout zone for backpackers in Himachal Pradesh, its idyllic charm as affective as Pushkar’s. Outside, the road is white with snow. A yellow-black autorickshaw, a common enough sight across India but a bit of a novelty in McLeodganj, given the terrain, moves across the square. Its wheels add yet another tyre pattern to the other watery vehicle tracks that are visible, brown against the snow. A couple of policemen in black leather jackets throw their heads back in laughter. A couple of old lamas in maroon walk up the narrow road to Bhagsu with colourful umbrellas and no warm clothes.

  Eventually, we begin to walk along the marketplace, slipping on the snow every so often. I acquire a sweater from a small shop where the owner has no memories of Tibet. He came on his mother’s shoulder at the age of six in 1959, the same year when the Dalai Lama escaped to India from a Tibet which was invaded by the People’s Liberation Army in 1949. Since then, at least 1.2 million people have been killed, and major steps have been taken to wipe out most of the cultural heritage of Tibet. Facing unbelievable levels of persecution, some 250,000 refugees had crossed the mountains on foot.

  After this, my next stop is to get a cap. I get one which says ‘Free Tibet’, and it has a jaunty mix of colours: red, white, yellow, black and blue. Momos from the street, then tomato soup and Tibetan bread. We eat and we walk and we eat and we walk. Then it begins to snow, and we begin to look for cover.

  It is the first time in our lives that we have had to duck into a cafe to save ourselves from snow. Rain often, hail sometimes, even a band of monkeys once (in Bengali Market in Delhi) but not snow. Having spent most of our early lives almost bang on the Tropic of Cancer, that isn’t surprising. We’ve been to the Himalayas before, of course, but we’d never been caught in snowfall somehow. We were snow virgins, in D’s language, but now that is over. We grin at each other and peruse the menu.

  The cafe is a bit different from the others in McLeodganj. To begin with, it’s new. The bright lighting, chairs with steel rods, the plywood gloss all resemble the numerous new-new cafes that are springing up all over India, even in small towns. There is no dim lighting, Tibetan lanterns or heavy wooden furniture here. It is sparse and functional – start-up-ish. On one side, there is a door leading to a balcony that looks down into the valley below. On the other side, to our left, the windows open onto a narrow lane where children pelt snowballs at each other. Their cheeks are pink.

  ‘Please…’ A young Tibetan hands us a menu. He has a pen behind his ear.

  Instead of asking for her customary cappuccino, D suddenly says, ‘Are you from here? I mean, were you born here?’

  The Tibetan, however, understands the context of the first question itself and says, probably used to nosy tourists, ‘My twelfth year here. Came away from Tibet when I was twenty.’

  ‘Your English is very good,’ I remark.

  ‘Yes, thanks, learnt it by speaking to tourists here. Learnt Tibetan also here only. In the Tibetan school here.’

  ‘Why? I thought you came over from Tibet only as an adult?’ asks D, mystified.

  ‘In Tibet, less Tibetan. More Chinese. In schools, they teach only Chinese. Like Pema here, he still doesn’t speak any Tibetan, only Chinese.’

  ‘So when did he get here?’ D asks.

  ‘Just three months ago.’

  ‘Can we talk to him? Would you be kind enough to translate?’

  ‘Sure.’

  We order a hot chocolate and a green tea for good measure. In any case, the cafe is deserted, so we are not keeping them from their duties.

  It turns out that Permat Pema Tseten, as his full name reads, is mostly a Chinese speaker though he has somehow learnt to scribble his name in the Roman alphabet. He escaped across Tibet’s border with Nepal near Lhasa and then made his way here. However, Permat does not come from within the current political boundaries of Tibet within China or the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) as it is called now. He says that he is from Amdo, which, along with U-Stang and Kham, is one of the three traditional ethno-cultural regions of Tibet and today falls mostly within the Chinese province of Qinghai. The present and fourteenth Dalai Lama, Tenzing Gyatso, incidentally, was born there.

  To follow this logic, U-Stang is basically China’s TAR and Kham is a reference to the Sichuan province. Indeed, this geographic spread of the Tibetan people beyond TAR, in areas that have mostly been under the administrative control of various Chinese dispensations in the last 500 years, was one of the reasons why China moved in to take over what is now called TAR (where the Dalai Lama was the political ruler) not long after the communists consolidated power in the traditional Han heartland of the Yangtze, Hwang-Ho and Xie river basins. Between 1910 and 1949, Amdo was also the stranglehold of three Muslim Chinese warlord families, together known as the ‘Ma Clique’ who were aligned with the Kuomintang. ‘Ma’ is the Chinese version of Mohammad and was the first name of each of the three warlords in the clique. It is a common name among Chinese Muslims, who are often called Hui, although there are some Hui who are not Muslims. Moving into TAR was also important in order to deny any retreat to Kuomintang-allied forces. Otherwise, the newly emerging People’s Republic of China would have faced its civil war rivals in both the east, i.e., Taiwan, and the west, i.e., Xinjiang and Tibet. In the long-term, Mao also wanted TAR as a buffer against any other ‘threat’ from China’s west, i.e., either India or Russia.

  ‘So how did you make it across? How did you beat the border guards?’

  ‘I hired a guide. I had to pay him 4,000 yuan, 500 as advance. But that wasn’t enough. In Mustang, Nepal, he demanded another 3,000 yuan which was paid by the Tibetans there.’

  ‘Where did you get the initial money?’

  ‘I worked as a labourer in Lanzhou for three months along with some other Tibetans. They paid 5,000 yuan lump sum and provided food.’

  ‘But tell me, China has so much economic activity going on. Why did you come here?’

  ‘Not all Tibetans can get jobs in China, especially if they have not gone to government school and learnt Chinese. At times, only some seasonal jobs like the one I did in Lanzhou are available. They also make you join the Communist Party of China if you want to get work.’

  ‘Hmm, I see. But they don’t make others, I mean, the Han do that?’

  ‘No, they don’t. Nowadays there are many Han in Tibet. They have been settled in the grasslands. Many spies. Many spies in Lhasa.’ Permat’s reply, of course, is yet another reaffirmation of the well-known Chinese policy of looking to alter the demographics of the western borderlands under their control. In both Tibet and Xinjiang, the Chinese have encouraged Han settlers from the plains by offering them inducements and a favourable share of the ‘China Western Development Plan’ announced in the year 2000. The plan revolves around building extensive railroad and other infrastructure in China’s western territories, including the vast Eurasian borderlands (deemed ‘autonomous’ regions in China) that lie beyond the traditional Han homeland and continue to defy Beijing’s iron hand to varying degrees. Taken together, China’s western provinces and ‘autonomous regions’ account for three quarters of its territory but only a quarter of its population, and less than 20 per cent of its total GDP.

  Now, under the China Western Development Plan, Tibet for the first time has got connected by rail with the Han homeland through the Qinghai Tibet Railway that links Golmud in Qinghai to Lhasa in TAR. While this rail link, the highest existing railway line in the world – considered an engineering feat – has caused great consternation in the minds of Indian strategic thinkers, since it theoretically allows the Chinese to build up military forces much quicker in TAR, ordinary Tibetans are more worried about the droves of Han who might ride this line to migrate to Tibet. According to the Dalai Lama, two-thirds of Lhasa is already Han, and Tibetans often voice fears of being swamped. Although, at the moment, Han Chinese are, at least offi
cially, still less than 10 per cent of Tibet’s population.

  ‘But aren’t there Buddhists amongst the Han?’

  ‘Yes, there are. But Chinese Buddhism is different from Tibetan Buddhism.’

  ‘But don’t they visit Tibetan temples in Lhasa?’

  ‘Some of them do. But they are also building their own temples.’

  ‘What about the monasteries?’

  ‘Young men, whether Tibetan or Chinese, are not allowed to join the monasteries. They actually threw out 2,000 monks from the monastery in Labrang during the 2008 uprising. No TV channels are allowed in Lhasa. In Chinese Internet, if you search Dalai Lama’s name you only get a photo of him with Mao from the 1950s.’

  ‘Really? So they do try to control everything?’ D exclaims.

  ‘Indeed. While it didn’t register much in India, Tibet actually went up in flames in the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Some Indians may perhaps remember the Olympic torch controversy, but few would know that Lhasa was burning while Beijing was shining. The 2008 Tibet unrests which spread to all the historically Tibetan regions revealed that China’s grip there continues to rely to a great extent on methods that did not really involve any accommodation with the Tibetans. Rapid reaction forces of the Chinese army moved in armoured vehicles to restore order on the streets of Lhasa and to reinforce the confidence of Han settler groups skirmishing with Tibetans.’

  When this is loosely translated to Permat, he nods his head. ‘Yes, they sent in tanks.’

  As a student of geopolitics, I have always felt that China’s hold on its periphery continues to be tenuous. Despite consciously altering the demographics of Tibet and building up military infrastructure, China remains extremely worried about the future of its Tibet problem. While Beijing blamed the Dalai Lama for instigating the 2008 unrest and continues to refer to him as a ‘splittist’, it is probably even more worried about a time when the Dalai Lama is no longer around.