The Waiting Land (8 page)

Recently I have been chiefly occupied in supervising the building of bamboo huts, into which we hope to move most of the Tibetans before the monsoon breaks. However, at this season it is not easy to obtain the necessary matting and poles, and today we suffered yet another setback when a local farmer, who had agreed to sell us forty bamboos, announced that his astrologer had advised against the sale as it would be most inauspicious to cut bamboos on his land before the rains came. A practical streak was perceptible in this edict, since
May is the least suitable month for felling bamboos; but obviously it simplifies life if one can refuse to honour one’s promise on the advice of an omniscient astrologer. Everybody knows that this sort of argument is incontrovertible in Nepal, where the hour at which King Mahendra begins an air-journey is still determined by astrology as well as meteorology.

It was 5 p.m. when Chimba informed me of this development and at once we set off on our bicycles to hunt for a more amenable farmer, cycling through one of the many beautiful corners of the valley that I haven’t yet had time to explore. By now the level land south of Pardi is grey, arid and harsh to the eyes – but half-a-mile north of the village one is in a new, cool green world where the narrow laneways are shaded by towering, leafy trees and where clumps of powerfully curving bamboos, more than one hundred feet tall, bend their feathered tops over fields of shoulder-high maize. At about 6.30 a strangely muted light began to come from the west and soon this suppressed sunshine, slanting through torn copper clouds, was casting a red-gold glow over the whole landscape until the circular, ochre farmsteads seemed like giant lanterns against their dark green background.

For over an hour we toiled from farm to farm along stony tracks ankle-deep in fawn, powdery dust and often blocked by droves of obtuse buffaloes who panicked at the unfamiliar sight of bicycles. At the first farm we negotiated with a timid boy of eight or nine and his great-grandad – an ancient whose skin was so wrinkled that his legs looked as though he were wearing brown nylon stockings several sizes too large. Not surprisingly these negotiations came to an unsatisfactory conclusion; and at the next two farms the owners, having discovered that we were not going to pay a fancy price, brusquely claimed to need all their bamboo for themselves. I was very aware that these Brahmins were hostile to us non-Hindus – less, I should think, because of our ritual uncleanness than because they see the infiltration of foreign ideas into the valley as a threat to their present profitable influence over the villagers. However, we were eventually promised twenty-two bamboos, of varying sizes and qualities; but tomorrow being Saturday (when it is inauspicious to fell bamboos) we can’t send the Tibetans to
collect until Sunday morning – by which time there may have been further astrological intervention.

We cycled home along the lakeside, past the hideous new
pseudo-European
Royal Palace, and the very sacred Hindu temple that rises out of the water some two hundred yards offshore. When we were out of sight of the Palace I dismounted and asked Chimba to go ahead; then I sat for a little time by the lake. Rarely have I seen anything more lovely than that still, vast expanse of emerald water, beneath a tremendous arch of bronzed cloud, through which a few nearby peaks and crags were just discernible.

At five-thirty this morning a jubilant Chimba came scrambling up my ladder (fortunately Tibetans are not at all embarrassed when confronted with semi-nude females) to tell me that the German Annapurna Expedition want forty-two porters for twelve days at Rs. 12/- per day – and are willing to employ our Tibetans. When you remember that Rs. 3/ – is the average daily coolie wage Chimba’s elation is understandable, and together we rushed off to the camp to choose twenty-one men and twenty-one women – a list of whose names and registration numbers would have to be presented to the Anchiladis when we applied to him for permission for the refugees temporarily to leave his district.

By nine o’clock we had made our selection of those most suitable and I had written out the list for Kay to type; but then we received a message that, for a very odd reason, only men would be acceptable. Apparently one of the Hindu hamlets
en route
to the base camp is fanatically orthodox, and recently the inhabitants have been experiencing great difficulties with their local god because some passing travellers killed a chicken in the village. Therefore it would be extremely dangerous further to provoke this god by admitting into his territory outcaste women who might happen to be menstruating at the time without heeding any of the very strict Hindu taboos that apply to the occasion. As we returned to the camp to revise our list I noticed that even Chimba, who has his full share of Buddhist tolerance,
was finding this hitch hard to stomach – perhaps because it had followed so soon on yesterday’s astrological débâcle!

Lately I’ve observed that among Nepali diseases there is an affliction, peculiar to resident Americans, known as ‘Cultural Shock’. In older English this means not liking local smells and being disturbed by the national habit of flinging garbage into the streets; nor does any consolation derive from the fact that in villages all such garbage is instantly disposed of by battalions of cattle, pigs, dogs, horses, goats, hens and ducks. Fortunately Europeans are immune to this disease and, though Kay and I were both quite nicely brought up, we have long since adjusted to flinging through our windows eggshells, potato peelings, onion-skins and basins of filthy water, with never a thought for the passers-by – who anyway are usually protected by umbrellas at this season, which I am not when I cycle past
their
windows at dumping-time. We must take great care to break this habit before returning to countries where it might culturally shock the natives.

At noon today there was a marathon row in the street below my window. It began when one young woman accused another of having an affair with her husband – accompanying the accusation with a blow across the face. Then, within moments, an excited crowd of about a hundred and fifty mysteriously assembled, and I was looking down on a sea of bobbing black umbrellas, beneath which men and women were furiously arguing and gesticulating, each trying to shout or scream more harshly than the rest. Personally I should have thought this an exclusively family matter – but possibly these hundred and fifty protagonists did all belong to the three families involved. The argument continued for some forty minutes, and then the husband vigorously whacked both women on the back with his rolled umbrella and told them (if one may judge by his tone and expression) to go to the Hindu equivalent of Hell – or, perhaps, to become worms in their next incarnation. In Nepal a man is not expected to pretend to be faithful to his wife (though she is required to be very discreet about her own infidelities), so this should have concluded the argument. But instead of accepting their chastisement with womanly humility these two shrews promptly declared a truce and united to attack the husband
with their hastily rolled umbrellas – at which point they were seized by several men, on whom they lavished kicks and scratches before being partially subdued and frogmarched away out of sight. Now I noticed that the original dispute had sparked off a variety of subsidiary quarrels among the crowd, all of whom were enjoying themselves enormously. Clearly this sort of ding-dong battle is the Nepalese peasant’s favourite recreation, and one can’t help wondering if the apparent lack of civilisation revealed by such scenes is not in some respects healthier than our repressive over-civilisation, in which sedatives and tranquillisers are necessary to so many.

After watching one of these not uncommon mass-arguments, or even after spending a few hours dawdling around the bazaar, waiting for someone or something, a return to the camp provides the most extraordinary contrast. Tibetans rarely raise their voices, however heatedly they may be disputing, and instead of the Nepalis’ cheerfully shouted ‘
Namaste
’ one is welcomed by a silent bow or a tongue stuck out respectfully to its full length. It is curiously moving to find the distinctive Tibetan gentleness showing through so often among these uncouth and at times unruly nomads; and in their case one cannot reasonably associate this gentleness with the practice of Buddhism, since it is obvious that they have been chiefly influenced by the cruder and more ancient Bön-po religion.

The weather is really grim now; there has been no rain for eight days and the temperature of my room, under this low tin roof, reaches 102º or 103º Fahrenheit by 2 p.m. At bedtime it’s down to about 88º and I lie naked on my bamboo mat, tormented by a heat-rash, while the rats provide background music by upsetting dishes and spoons and squealing angrily at each other. At first I found it rather disquieting to lie on the floor with these brutes scampering around me – there seemed no guarantee that they wouldn’t nibble at the edges of recumbent bodies – but now I’ve become adjusted, though I’m still afraid to chase them as they are reputed to turn savage if treated rudely; recently Kay was bitten on the finger when she tried to push one off her pillow in the small hours. But in a way the millions of tiny, red-brown ants are even more troublesome than the rats: they get into
all the food and swarm over one at night in tickling (but not biting) hordes. Initially I tried to pick them out of the rice, dahl, sugar and tinned milk, but I soon gave up – life’s too short – so now I suppose cooked ant is my chief source of protein. All things considered I don’t especially look forward to night-time at the moment. Yet on the whole I’m very happy and one can’t have perfection.

Today I distinguished myself by getting hopelessly lost for eight hours. Kay had asked me to go up to the Shining Hospital for some medical reports and then to collect an X-ray result from the Indian Military Hospital on the other side of the Seti Gorge; but at the Shining Hospital one of the missionaries very kindly, though rather vaguely, directed me to a short cut and by 2 p.m. I realised that I was probably halfway to India. However, as there has been no opportunity to take a day off since my arrival I decided to make the most of this involuntary expedition, without feeling too conscience-stricken.

On the whole my sense of direction is quite reliable, yet soon it was clear that I was becoming ‘loster and loster’ – and my compass was in my knapsack at Pardi. The sort of reasoning which can usually be applied to such situations seems to count for nothing in Nepal, and I’m seriously tempted to believe that here even the sun flouts the natural laws. One complication is that those low, wooded hills which rise at intervals from the valley floor look identical to the newcomer, so one is wildly misled and lured over the plain for two or three miles in the conviction that Pardi lies just
there
– only to find oneself on the verge of a magnificent 1,000-foot river-gorge one has never seen before and which is certainly not negotiable; and so it goes on … and on … and on.

Though Pardi and Pokhara have now been put on the tourist map by the airfield one only has to travel a few miles beyond them to reach, within the valley itself, villages so untouched by outside influence that a white woman on a bicycle creates a veritable sensation; and this unblemished picturesqueness has its snags, for whenever I asked for directions the villagers were too astonished, too scared or too amused
even to attempt any helpful response or gesture. Once a man did point down a track that appeared to be leading direct to the middle of nowhere, and optimistically I followed it to its terminus on the brink of yet another gorge – or perhaps at a different point along the same gorge.

All day the heat had been intense and by 3 p.m. I was feeling quite dehydrated, having covered over forty miles according to Leo’s milometer. Partly for this reason, and partly because I despaired of ever disentangling the inconsequential tracks of the plain, I now attempted to descend to river-level and follow the course of the Seti – an idiotic move which involved Leo and me in a series of gymnastic feats and stamina-tests such as even Roz and I have never had to endure. And Leo is twice the weight of Roz … Eventually I discovered that one could descend to within about one hundred feet of the water, but no further – something which would have been obvious from the start to any moderately intelligent person. So I sat down in the shade of a tree by the cliff-edge to smoke a cigarette while reflecting on the sad fact that soon we would have to ascend somehow to plain-level and resume our war of nerves with those tracks.

However, it was impossible to remain glum for long in such surroundings. Below me the Seti (its name means ‘white’) was a swift, seething torrent, narrow at this season but still violently strong amidst a desert of pale, rounded stones. From the opposite cliff rose
smooth-browed
, forested hills enclosing the gorge in a wide, gentle curve, while behind, rising in layers to the plain, lay the rough, silent,
sun-beaten
countryside that we had just traversed. I hadn’t expected to find such solitude within this valley; yet for hours past people had appeared only in the vicinity of the few hamlets and from here not a trace of humanity was visible. But then, when my almost pathological aversion to ‘turning back’ drove me on up the gorge – I was able to cycle for about a mile over the short, burnt grass and pungent herbage – a lone farmhouse appeared on the very edge of the cliff. This building, clumsily constructed of timber and stone, was a mere loft over an open-sided shelter for cattle, crops and firewood – yet in it lived an old grandmother, her son and daughter-in-law and their five children, of
whom the younger three were stark naked and pot-bellied. Around this pathetic dwelling (the most impoverished I’ve seen outside of Gilgit) stood a few acres of poorly maize and three feeble banana trees, beneath which a starved-looking buffalo lay chewing the cud. (Though what that cud consisted of I can’t imagine.) The usual Nepali ‘ladder’ – a notched tree-trunk – led up to the entirely unfurnished living-room, where the family were sitting idly, sharing a local version of the hookah. When they saw Leo and me at the foot of the ladder their astonishment was considerable, but they responded to my urgent plea for ‘
pani
’ by beckoning me ‘upstairs’ and handing me a brass pint-measure of riverwater which tasted faintly of human excrement (or was I imagining things?) yet which at that moment seemed an ineffably delicious drink. With wild disregard for the probable consequences I emptied three of these measures, while the family tried to question me and registered incredulity at my ignorance of Nepali. They were a remarkably cheerful group, though not one of them looked healthy, and after their first shock of surprise they treated me as though we were old friends.