The Waiting Land (10 page)

Encouraged by my revelation of a very rudimentary knowledge of Tibetan Buddhism he followed this potted autobiography with a lecture on the importance of accepting the impermanence of all matter and acting accordingly. But at this stage my concentration began to be seriously impaired by most inappropriate pangs of hunger and, though the spirit was willing, I can now remember few of his profound remarks. He asked me if I believed in God, nodded approvingly when I said, ‘Yes’, and observed that he had heard rumours to the effect that many modern Europeans were atheists, which seemed to him a pity, as they had a very good way to God in their Christianity. Whereupon I felt compelled to admit that I wasn’t exactly an orthodox Christian and on hearing this the lama looked slightly worried, and said he hoped I wasn’t a Buddhist, as the Western Buddhists he’d met in Kathmandu were very unhappy people and in fact only imagined themselves to be Buddhists – which is as good an analysis of the breed as I’ve yet heard.

Meanwhile our supper was being cooked, on a wood fire between stones, by the twelve-year-old boy who is Lama Ongyal’s personal servant, and when it at last appeared I noted that our host was not eating with us. I longed to ask if he ever ate
anything
– since as far as my observation goes he exists on buttered tea only – but fearing that the question might sound impertinent I restrained myself. The meal consisted of rice, green dahl and potatoes – a true banquet by Tibetan standards, and it tasted none the worse for the fact that I knew it to
have been cooked outside the backdoor almost exactly where I (and not a few Nepalese) habitually answer Nature’s calls.

Incidentally, I have had the undeserved good luck to escape unscathed after my reckless water-drinking of a few days ago.

This morning two Dakotas took off from the airfield loaded with the remains of the German Expedition’s equipment – and this was apart from the masses of food given away today because it’s not worth the freight-charges back to Kathmandu. What looked like the whole Nepalese and Tibetan population of Pardi and exactly half the European population (that’s me) were at The Annapurna for the share-out, and in due course I came away shamelessly bearing a tin of chocolate biscuits and two jars of meat extract – a month in Pokhara makes you put your pride in your pocket when such delicacies are going gratis. As for the Tibetans – this evening the camp is full of the most exotic things in tubes, tins, packets and plastic bags, and the people are as thrilled by these colourful luxury containers as they are by the mysterious contents. Walking around the camp at
suppertime
I saw pâté de foie gras being tentatively mixed with
tsampa
, salad cream being added to tea and soup cubes being chewed as toffees and then suddenly spat out. Terrifying howls of agony were coming from one tent, where some unfortunate little girl had just been given a spoonful of neat mustard by her loving mamma.

Trade is also brisk this evening; at the conclusion of an expedition the Sherpa guides receive as ‘perks’ sleeping-bags, anoraks, boots, transistors, boxes of electric batteries, nylon rope and many other locally rare objects, most of which they auction in the courtyard of The Annapurna before returning home. Tomorrow the 1965 Japanese Dhauligiri Expedition is due back here – in a rather depressed state, as their two senior Sherpas were killed by an avalanche. They are reported to have even more fabulous equipment than the Germans, both in quality and quantity, so we’re all agog for the morning!

Tomorrow, too, is King Mahendra’s birthday, a national holiday and in theory an enormously important occasion of universal
rejoicing. During the past week all the local Government officials of every grade have been busy organising the celebrations to the detriment of far more urgent practical matters. It’s rather obvious that in Pokhara Valley at least the general public have no great desire to demonstrate their loyalty to the King, and for this reason it is essential to
organise
these festivities, though the innumerable complicated religious festivals seem just to
happen
, powered by tremendous popular support.

Going on my own very limited knowledge of the Nepalese political scene I would say that the King is certainly doing his best to impose some sort of order on the indescribable mess bequeathed him by the Rana rulers. Also I have tremendous admiration for the moral courage he displayed in 1960, when he admitted that feigning to operate a democratic government in Nepal was a piece of pernicious nonsense. In the nine years since the overthrow of the Ranas in 1951 Nepal had had ten different governments, each more corrupt and cynical than the other, but now at least there is some degree of stability, though few of the needed improvements have yet taken place.

One of those improvements concerns land redistribution, about which there is at present a great deal of talk, but very little action. Here the King is up against problems similar to those of the Shah of Persia: the rich Brahmin landowners, with their superstition-based influence over the people, are analogous to the Persian mullahs – and apparently even more powerful – and the King’s position is not secure enough for him to defy these Brahmins effectively. In the Kathmandu Valley he seems to have the affectionate support of a majority of his subjects, but to the average person in Pokhara both the King and Kathmandu are remote and unimportant. I have met many ex-Gurkha soldiers who have been to Delhi, Hong Kong, Singapore, Cairo and even to London – but who have never been to Kathmandu. And when I ask them, ‘But don’t you want to see your own capital?’ they stare at me and say, ‘For what?’ In theory Kathmandu is their capital, but in practice they feel that they owe allegiance only to their tribe – and one can see the justice and logic of this attitude. For centuries no ruling power in Kathmandu knew or cared anything about the hill-people,
and even now the King is an exception in his concern for the welfare of
all
his subjects; the majority of Government officials are still completely ignorant of and indifferent to what happens outside the valley and for them ‘national improvements’ mean the shoddy modernisation of Kathmandu and the installation of refrigerators in their own homes.

Today I have had quite the most gruesome experience of a lifetime. Dolma, a forty-two-year-old Tibetan woman, died last night of debilitation (following prolonged dysentery) at the Military Hospital, where I went this morning to enquire about three other patients from the camp. On my way, while walking by the river, I rounded an outcrop of rock and found Dolma’s severed head at my feet. I must confess that to come on such a sight unexpectedly, when less than twenty-four hours earlier this woman had been sitting with her head on my shoulder, receiving cheering-up treatment, gave me rather a shock. Nearby the four camp chiefs were dismembering the trunk with blunt little wood-axes, before throwing it into the water, and I left the scene as quickly as possible.

Here the Tibetans choose this method of corpse-disposal in preference to the chopping up of bodies on a ‘cemetery-rock’ for birds of prey to eat – the more popular method in Tibet itself. Some Nepalese tribes, who live at high altitudes where wood is scarce, also use the rivers as graves, and I should think the bones are picked clean very soon after the dismembered body enters the water; at the moment I have a few open sores on my legs, and when I’m swimming these attract swarms of savage little fishes. In Tibet the office of undertaker – or chopper-upper – belonged to a special caste who were shunned by the average Tibetan; but the camp has no member of this caste and the task is so unpopular that the chiefs are forced to do it themselves. However, it would be wrong to imagine that these nomads are averse to such a job out of our sort of squeamishness; they decline to do it for superstitious reasons, not because the actual chopping up of a human body is repugnant to them.

Our Royal Birthday Celebrations had been scheduled to begin in the camp at 12.30 p.m., when the Anchiladis and local Panchayat officials were due to assemble and make speeches and listen to the Tibetans praying for the King and expressing their non-existent gratitude for Nepal’s reluctantly extended hospitality. A large piece of tarpaulin had been borrowed from the Indian Army Pension-paying Post and under this were arrayed a table (as altar), chairs and pictures of His Holiness and His Majesty (all borrowed from The Annapurna Hotel), while scarves and garlands of paper flowers were laid in readiness to be draped over the pictures. My worry was that the mailbag plane would arrive when Kay and I were shackled by courtesy to the camp – and sure enough in it came at 12.20 p.m., its wheels seeming almost to touch the tops of the tents. I then calculated that Nepalese officials due to appear at twelve-thirty would never present themselves before one o’clock at the earliest: so I leaped on Leo, dashed through the village to collect those precious envelopes, was back in camp by a quarter to one – and found that I had ample time to read ten letters before the Anchiladis’ party arrived.

The heat was intense today and all the officials looked exceedingly bad-tempered and unfestive, having already attended several ceremonies in various places – and with many more to come. I gathered that they had only consented to attend the camp ‘celebrations’ because of pressure from certain quarters in Kathmandu, where a demonstration of ‘solidarity’ between the people of Pokhara and the refugees was considered very desirable. The whole thing felt extremely phony; of solidarity there is none and our celebrations here were incredibly bogus. Amdo Kessang, Penjung and Chimba had all vigorously exhorted the people to smarten up and produce appropriate symptoms of loyal rejoicing – yet when the officials arrived no one was paying the slightest attention to the Occasion. On every side Tibetans were going about their ordinary tasks or sitting in their tents digesting lunch – and I have to admit that I was glad of this. Contrived demonstrations of insincere feelings may be good diplomacy, but they are anathema to me.

The arrival of the Anchiladis’ jeep presented an extraordinary spectacle; in Asia overloaded vehicles are a common sight, but this really was the ultimate in overloading. Though the jeep in question is the tiniest possible model it brought eleven men to the camp, and as the last three emerged one began to feel that one was watching a conjuring trick. The Anchiladis immediately announced – with comically un-Nepalese time-consciousness – that they could stay for only fifteen minutes; but ten minutes had passed before Penjung’s wife and daughters produced the ritual tea and expensive, repulsive Indian biscuits and toffees; and a further twenty minutes passed before a sufficient number of Tibetans could be persuaded to assemble around the shelter to watch scarves and garlands being draped on the pictures and to hear the various speeches. At the conclusion of the speechifying everyone unenthusiastically chanted a prayer for the King, and finally the schoolchildren – if they can be so described – sang the Tibetan National Anthem, recently taught them by Chimba; and that was that. I particularly liked this last touch, which could easily be interpreted as showing a certain
lack
of solidarity on the King of Nepal’s birthday; but the attendant press-photographer took countless shots with his archaic camera, and as facial expressions do not reproduce well on Nepalese paper the desired effect will doubtless be obtained in Kathmandu.

Then, when the jeep conjuring trick had been repeated in reverse and the vehicle had swayed away – invisible under its festoon of men – a demonstration of a different kind started spontaneously.

Suddenly the camp realised that a picture of His Holiness was hanging beneath the tarpaulin and their reaction astonished me. Normally these nomads don’t seem nearly as devout as the Tibetans one meets in India but now everyone, including great tough men with shaggy hair and knives in their belts, came rushing to prostrate themselves before the simple black and white photograph, and then proceeded to pray lengthily with clasped hands and a look of
near-ecstasy
on their sun-plus-dirt-blackened faces. I couldn’t help reflecting that if Tibet went under so comparatively easily to the Chinese, despite the unifying force of this tenacious loyalty to His Holiness, Nepal could go under even more easily with its lack of any such leadership.

This morning I awoke to what looked like heaven – a world mistily draped in gentle clouds that completely hid the great mountains and almost concealed the nearer hills. It’s impossible to describe the relief of seeing and feeling this grey dampness; of course the temperature was still about seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit – but what a joy, after the glare of the past weeks, to experience such cool dimness and to find clouds still shielding us as the morning progressed! Then at midday the sun reasserted itself and shone until about five o’clock when (cheers!) the monsoon started – not with any spectacular storm but just as a steady downpour, accompanied by incessant rumblings of thunder and frequent glares of blue sheet-lightning. On my way home from supper at Kay’s house I fell repeatedly on the slippery, flooded road, in the coal-black intervals between lightning flashes that clearly and beautifully illuminated the whole width of the valley; and now the din of heavy rain on the tin roof is so deafening that I can hardly hear myself think.

I’ve refrained from giving details of the trials and tribulations involved in erecting monsoon huts for the camp – but the number and variety of these trials and tribulations would drive Job to drink. Between Nepalese procrastination and Tibetan laziness the whole operation is taking ten times as long as it should and today it was possible to move only half the camp from badly leaking tents into less badly leaking bamboo shelters. I suspect that in this case the Tibetans’ laziness is a form of passive resistance; these nomads obviously prefer the seclusion of their traditional tent life, however inadequate the available tents may be, to the sort of communal existence they will have to endure in the new shelters – and as someone who values privacy far more than comfort I secretly sympathise with them. Having never experienced the persistent damp of a monsoon season they don’t yet realise that their removal to less unsuitable accommodation is literally a matter of life or death – especially as many of them are already in a weakened condition because of the debilitating heat of this valley and an ill-balanced diet.