The Waiting Land E-Book

Dervla Murphy

• Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 403

Beschreibung

The Waiting Land is an exploration of Nepal by a feisty, generous-hearted young Irish woman in the spring of 1965. The third in a series of books tracing Dervla's involvement with the self-sufficient mountain cultures of the Himalayas, she is lured by the chance to work again with Tibetan refugees - this time a group of five hundred lodged in tents in the remote Pokhara valley. Once established in Kathmandu, and later at home in a tiny, vermin-infested room above a stall in a Nepalese bazaar, she falls under the spell of this ancient land, poised between East and West, between China and India, between Buddhism and Hinduism, yet true to its own distinct civilization. Dervla's understanding of the roots of the Nepalese past, and her own stamina, culminate in an epic trek into the remote Langtang region on the border with Tibet.

Leseprobe

The Waiting Land

A Spell in Nepal

DERVLA MURPHY

Contents

Title Page

Maps

Dedication

Prologue

1 The Iron Road to Rexaul

2 Kathmandu

3 Descent on Pokhara

4 Under Machhapuchhare

5 Tibetans on Trek

6 Animal Spirits

7 Conflicting Views

8 A Thief and a Goddess

9 Purifying Spirits

10 On Foot to Langtang

Epilogue

Index

Plates

Copyright

To Brian, Daphne, Robin and Peter with love

Prologue

My six months among the Tibetans in 1963 had shown me that many refugees do not deserve the haloes with which they have been presented by sentimental fund-raisers in Europe or America. But by the time one has been disillusioned by Tibetans one has also been captivated by them; though unpleasant individuals and events may demolish the idealised version there remains an indestructible respect for the courage, humour and good manners that mark most Tibetan communities.

Before leaving India, early in 1964, I had determined to come back to the Tibetans as soon as possible. However, refugee situations can change quickly and by the spring of 1965 conditions in India had improved so much that nothing really useful remained to be done by an untrained volunteer, and I felt that it would be wrong to inflict on the Tibetans yet another aimless ‘Tib-worshipper’. But then came an item of news from Nepal concerning a recently-formed refugee camp in the Pokhara Valley, where 500 Tibetans were living as family units in 120 tents with only one Western volunteer to help them. It was considered that here I would at least not be in the way, even if my limitations prevented me from achieving much, so on 5 April 1965 I flew from Dublin to London to prepare for the journey to Nepal.

In contrast with my January 1963 departure from Ireland that flight seemed sadly drained of adventure; but my wanderlust revived next day when I went to the Royal Nepalese Embassy to apply for a visa. There I was presented with a leaflet headed ‘A Guide to those who intend to visit Kathmandu, capital of Nepal’, and with a booklet – poorly printed in Kathmandu for the Department of Tourism – entitled Nepal in a Nutshell. The leaflet announced with rather touching inaccuracy that, ‘The best months to visit the valley are February-April and September-November. The rest of the months are either very wet or too cold’; but the booklet truthfully claimed that ‘The cold season is pleasant throughout Nepal with bright sunshine and blue skies’ – and at once I warmed to this bewildered country which couldn’t make up its mind how best to sell itself to fussy tourists. Then, reading on, I found a still more endearing statement to the effect that ‘The fascination of Biratnagar lies in its picturesque spots and industrial areas. Biratnagar has some of the largest industrial undertakings in Nepal’. Somehow it is difficult to believe that those travellers who are fascinated by ‘industrial undertakings’ would ever go to Nepal to gratify this particular passion.

On the booklet’s first page Tibet was referred to as ‘the Tibet Region of China’ – a politic ‘siding with the boss’ which would have infuriated me were I not so aware of Nepal’s terror lest she should herself soon become ‘the Nepal Region of China’. Merely to glance at a map of Asia reveals the uncertainty of the kingdom’s future; it is a slender strip of land squeezed between Chinese-controlled Tibet and a decreasingly neutral India, and already a mysteriously-motivated Communist army is arrayed along its northern frontier. Some experts argue that the Central Himalayas are themselves defence enough against any army and that a south-bound Chinese invasion force would always have the good sense to skirt Nepal; but the Nepalese Government has not forgotten how cunningly Tibet was subdued within a decade and at present Nepal’s diplomats and politicians are almost dizzy from their efforts to placate simultaneously both East and West.

On 13 April I spent two very interesting and instructive hours at the Nepalese Embassy’s New Year party. Nepal in a Nutshell had informed me that ‘The State was integrated by King Prithvi Narayan Shah the Great in 1769’, but now I began to realise that Nepal’s nationhood is a very artificial thing. For all the tempering influence of a London social function it was soon clear that the various groups to whom I talked represented a basically tribal society which has only recently acquired the ill-fitting political garments of a modern state. The mistrust, jealousy and dislike of one ethnic and religious group for another showed through repeatedly, and it was interesting to compare the suave, astute Ranas and the ambitious, slightly arrogant Chetris with the inarticulate but gay little Gurungs and the poised, cheerful Sherpas of Tibetan descent. One wonders if there will be time to weld all these dissimilar tribes into a truly united nation before either the Chinese or the Americans annihilate every ancient Nepalese tradition. It seems regrettable that any such welding process should be considered necessary, but perhaps only thus can Nepal hope to preserve her independence.

The flight to Delhi was a mixed experience. We left London Airport at 4.15 p.m. on 21 April and, as always, I resented the slickness of flying and felt too nervous to sleep. As we flew over Erzurum and Tabriz I remembered ‘the old days’, when I had cycled on Roz through that region, and inevitably I experienced an acute sense of anti-climax.

Then came an uncannily beautiful descent to Teheran. At a height of five miles the engines were suddenly switched off and we began to glide soundlessly down, down, down through the darkness; to look out then and feel the silence and see the gigantic length of wing in a faint shimmer of moonlight gave me the fairy-story illusion of being carried along by some monstrous, softly sailing moth.

Here I disembarked – for Auld Lang Syne – and unmistakably I was back in Asia, where air hostesses mix their passenger lists and then fly off their nests in a delightfully unprofessional way. At European airports hostesses are trim machines who rarely muddle anything and scarcely register on a passenger’s mind as fellow-beings: but here they are girls who flush with anxiety and snap angrily at each other because all the passengers bound for New York were very nearly sent to Hong Kong.

When we emerged on to the tarmac two hours later the sky was paling above the mountains and, as we climbed, the stark symmetry of Demavand soared high and proud above hundreds of lesser peaks – a flawless blue cone against a backdrop of orange cloud; and immediately beyond stretched the Caspian, its metallic flatness oddly surprising at the base of the mountains.

One has to admit that just occasionally flying provides beauty of a quality otherwise unattainable. Below us now a scattered school of porpoise-shaped cloudlets lay motionless and colourless in the void; and down on that plain which Roz and I had traversed en route to Meshed several tiny lakes were looking weirdly like pools of blood as they reflected the pre-sunrise flare. We had regained our normal cruising altitude when a crimson ball appeared so suddenly above the horizon that it seemed to have been flung over the earth’s rim by an invisible hand – and momentarily I was too taken aback to recognise this object as the sun. Then it climbed – so rapidly that one could see it moving – until the sky above the horizon was pale blue, shading off, because of our altitude, to an extraordinary navy blue at the zenith.

We soon turned south, and now the Great Desert below us was covered in cloud so that one looked down on a limitless expanse of grotesque white softness, in which were visible broad ‘valleys’ and narrow ‘gorges’ and ‘mountains’ that threw shadows as real mountains would in early sunshine – the whole ‘landscape’ exquisitely distorted and eerily immobile, as though all that vapour were frozen solid.

At 5.45 a.m. we touched down at Palam Airport. In a desperate effort to retain some grip on reality I had kept my watch at Greenwich Mean Time, but now I put it on to 10.15 a.m., before staggering out into the dusty glare. Luckily the day was ‘cool’ (only eighty-five degrees Fahrenheit in the shade) though coming from forty-four degrees in London I can’t say it felt particularly cool to me.

As the rickety old airport bus rattled and blared its way along the narrow road to New Delhi I was conscious of an extraordinary sense of peace. When we were approaching Connaught Circus, through the usual tangle of loaded cyclists, ambling buffaloes, sleek cars, lean pedestrians and bouncing, Sikh-driven ‘chuff-chuffs’, I tried to define what I was feeling – but could only think of it as the peace of poverty. People may jeer at this phrase as romantic nonsense, yet to arrive suddenly in India after a fortnight’s immersion in an affluent society does induce a strong sense of liberation from some intangible but threatening power. One is aware of man being free here, at the deepest level, as he cannot possibly be in societies where elaborately contrived pressures daily create new, false ‘needs’, and wither his delight in small and simple joys.

At Dharamsala, where I had previously worked in the Tibetan Refugee Nursery, it was a joy to see how enormously conditions had improved since my departure. Pema Janzum, the younger sister of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, is now running the camp, and her intelligence, common sense and flair for leadership have transformed the place from a squalid, disease-ridden inferno to a model nursery full of bouncing, rosy-cheeked Tiblets.

Since 1961 the Dalai Lama himself has been living in a heavily guarded bungalow quite close to the Nursery. His residence is usually given the courtesy title of ‘Palace’, though in fact it is far from being palatial – which no doubt pleases its simple occupant, even if the refugees are saddened to see ‘Yishy Norbu’ living at such a remove from the splendours of the Potala.

On the morning after my arrival His Holiness generously consented to receive me in audience and I found the change in him scarcely less remarkable than the change in the camp. During my first audience, sixteen months earlier, he had given me the impression of being a little unsure of himself and remaining rather on his guard against foreign observers; but now he seemed much more confident and relaxed, and this meeting felt less like an audience than a discussion between two people with an absorbing mutual interest. Our conversation centred on the problems of the refugees in Nepal, where the political difficulties of the host country create many special complications, and as we talked I realised that it would be impossible for me to enter in my diary and send through the post any detailed accounts of our work at Pokhara Camp. In this sort of situation what may appear to be minutiae can on occasions have the most disconcerting significance.

After two happy days at Dharamsala I went on to Mussoorie – a sixteen-hour journey by bus, train, bus and finally a shared taxi from Dehra Dun. On leaving the taxi at the edge of the town the first person I saw was Jigme Taring, a Tibetan-Sikkimese prince who runs the co-educational six-hundred-pupil Tibetan school and prefers to be known as a ‘Mister’. During my previous visit to Mussoorie he had been away in Sikkim, but though we had never met we simultaneously recognised each other and drove together to Happy Valley, the appropriately-named centre of the local Tibetan community.

For all his illustrious ancestry Jigme Sumchan Wang-po Namgyal Taring is a typical Tibetan – simple and gentle, with a keen intelligence and a tremendous sense of humour. He and Mrs Taring, who runs the Tibetan Homes Foundation, illustrate the best side of feudalism; they feel that the thousands of peasants in exile are partly their responsibility – a logical view, though one that is uncommon among rich Tibetan exiles.

The Tarings’ Lhasa residence was near the Potala and during the shelling of the Palace, in March 1959, it too was partially demolished. Their first-hand account of the Lhasa Insurrection interested me greatly because, on reading the Gelders’ book, The Timely Rain, it had seemed to me that among the authors’ few plausible arguments was one supporting the Chinese claim that the Potala had not been heavily shelled. Yet Mr Taring, who was then C-in-C of the Tibetan Army, has a cine-film of the actual shelling, taken by himself before he left the capital. As Mrs Taring quietly pointed out, he had obtained this film at the risk of his life, realising how effectively it could counteract Chinese propaganda and foreseeing its future historical value.

When His Holiness left the Summer Palace on 17 March Mr Taring remained behind for two days, to help delude the Chinese into believing that the Dalai Lama was still there. Then he set out on foot for the Indian frontier with one companion – the Tarings’ present cook. Meanwhile Mrs Taring had fled on horseback, also with one manservant, and months passed before either knew that the other was safe.

It is significant that both Tarings unquestioningly followed His Holiness into exile, making no attempt to rescue their children and grandchildren. On first hearing their escape story, two years ago, I was privately a little shocked by this ‘desertion’, since in similar circumstances most Europeans would choose to stand by their nearest and dearest. Yet after several hours’ conversation with the Tarings one realises that to them His Holiness is their ‘nearest and dearest’ – not as an individual, but as the living vessel containing the Spirit of Chenrezig. Therefore their sacrifice of family loyalties to his needs was a form of religious martyrdom; they each knew that in exile he would require guidance from those few Tibetans who have received a Western education but who still retain a religious faith as strong as that of the simplest peasant.

The most remarkable characteristic of Tibetan Buddhists is their freedom from bitterness against the Chinese. Despite the emotional scars discernible beneath the Tarings’ courageous good humour neither shows the faintest flicker of hatred or anger when discussing the past; indeed they shrink from such reactions on the part of less spiritually disciplined Westerners like myself, who in this context cannot help but utter some impulsive condemnations. The manner in which most Tibetans distinguish between wrong actions and the individuals performing them – with whom they seem to sympathise as fellow-victims of Evil – made me uneasily aware of the immaturity of our susceptibility to petty propaganda.

In Mussoorie the Tarings occupy one large room, partitioned by a curtain into bedroom and living-room, which is rather less comfortable than many of the Homes run by Mrs Taring for Tiblets. The rest of this house accommodates some of the teaching staff, plus seventy-two small children. After we had gone to bed one of the children began to cry and at once Mr Taring hurried to investigate; he and Mrs Taring take it in turns to do ‘night duty’ in addition to working at least twelve hours a day seven days a week. My own room was a tiny cubbyhole, containing nothing but a charpoy, and it soothed me to observe such unusually austere standards being upheld by workers among the refugees.

1

The Iron Road to Rexaul

29 APRIL 1965 – MUZAFFARPUR RAILWAY STATION – 11.30 P.M.

I’m now sitting in the Railway Ladies’ Waiting Room being almost asphyxiated by the stench of stale urine and surrounded by recumbent Ladies. Some are on the floor on bedding-rolls, others are lying on lumpy Victorian couches and two are curled up on the table, their saris drawn over their faces. At present I’m conscious only of being in a Railway Waiting Room, enduring its unique combination of aesthetic repulsiveness, physical discomfort and powers of suspending mental animation. Notice-boards tell me I’m in Muzaffarpur, but I could as easily believe myself to be in Waterford or Milan.

The twenty-nine-hour journey from Dehra Dun was brief by local standards, yet it was by far the longest train-ride of my life and seemed decidedly penitential. The fare (one pound eight shillings and fourpence all the way to Nepal) covered reservation of a slatted wooden shelf, on which I slept quite well last night, but by morning a gale-force wind was whipping a dust-storm across the endless, arid, grey-yellow plain, and this diabolical torture by Nature continued until dusk. Visibility was down to about a hundred yards, the hot sky was sullen with dust, and dust and sweat formed a mask of mud on my face. All morning I sat in a semi-coma, reflecting that at last I was experiencing real hardship; compared with such a journey cycling to India is just too easy.

However, the worst was yet to come. At Lucknow I changed trains and found myself sharing an eight-seater compartment with seventeen Gurkha soldiers going home on leave. Each was carrying a vast amount of kit and initially it seemed a sheer physical impossibility for all of them to enter the compartment; yet it’s not for nothing that the Gurkhas have won so many VCs and enter it they did, bravely disregarding the possibility that we would all suffocate to death long before the journey ended. At first they had appeared to be slightly nonplussed by the sight of a dishevelled Memsahib in one corner, but they rapidly decided that I was best ignored and within seconds I found myself nine-tenths buried beneath a pile of bed-rolls, haversacks, wicker baskets and tin trunks. This pyramid was then scaled by two nimble little Gurungs, who expertly inserted themselves into the crevice between the top-most trunk and the roof and immediately began to dice and smoke, dropping unquenched cigarette ends onto my head at regular intervals. I don’t doubt that the Gurkhas are a wonderful people, but somehow today I never really managed to appreciate them.

Then, soon after dusk, my luck changed. When we stopped at a junction I strenuously effected an earthquake in the carriage, bringing Gurungs and trunks mildly to grief as I fought my way out through the window. No one had told me where to change trains and as it was now essential to find out I went hobbling anxiously down the platform, every muscle knotted with cramp, in search of some knowledgeable-looking individual. Having questioned three officials, who each indicated that they couldn’t care less whether I ended up in Calcutta or Kathmandu, I was enormously relieved to come upon an Englishwoman strolling along the platform beside the first-class carriages. She at once assured me that I did not have to change until Muzaffarpur – and then we began to discuss our respective destinations. When the Englishwoman mentioned that she was returning to Dharan I said, ‘Then you must know Brigadier Pulley?’ (to whom I had a letter of introduction) and she exclaimed, ‘But I’m his wife!’ A moment later the Brigadier himself appeared and, when everyone had made the appropriate remarks about the dimensions of the earth, the Pulleys very kindly invited me to continue my journey in their air-conditioned coach. By then my addiction to ‘travelling rough’ had been so thoroughly – if temporarily – cured that it was difficult for me to refrain from hugging my benefactors.

It is now only 1.45 a.m. and the daily train for Rexaul, on the Nepalese frontier, does not leave until 6 a.m.; but I’m afraid to sleep lest I should fail to wake in time.

30 APRIL – REXAUL RAILWAY STATION RETIRING-ROOM – 9 P.M.

This pedantically-named apartment – no doubt a verbal relic of the era when trains were introduced into India – is equipped with two charpoys, a lukewarm shower and a defunct electric fan; but despite this wealth of refinements I now feel irremediably allergic to everything even remotely associated with railways.

Today’s hundred-mile journey on a narrow-gauge track took eight blistering hours. The elderly engine was falling asunder and at each village it stopped, lengthily, to pull itself together before moving at walking speed to the next village. Also it killed a young man; but no one took much notice of this grim sight and we were only delayed ten or fifteen minutes longer than usual. The police did not appear (perhaps there are none in these remote villages) and one gathered that the event was unimportant. My Nepalese neighbour told me that it was probably a case of suicide, as people with family or financial troubles frequently throw themselves under trains; and this seemed a likely explanation, since our snail-paced engine could hardly take anyone unawares.

This morning, on the platform at Muzaffarpur, I met an Irish boy named Niall who was travelling to Kathmandu with a Swiss youth named Jean and an American girl rather disconcertingly known as Loo. Loo had recently arrived in India on a round-the-world air trip, and had been persuaded by the boys, against her own better judgment, to sample life in the raw by going overland to Nepal. She spent most of today pointing out just how much better her own judgment was, and though recriminations seemed futile at that stage one could see her point of view.

Certainly life cannot be much rawer anywhere than it is in these villages of Bihar. Throughout the Punjab one rarely encounters that extremity of poverty traditionally associated with India – but here one does. And, as the hot, squalid hours passed slowly, I began to take a more lenient view of our affluent society. The people all around us seemed inwardly dead, mere mechanically-moving puppets, their expressions dulled by permanent suffering. To look at their bodies – so malformed, starved and diseased – and to sense the stuntedness of their minds and spirits made me feel quite guilty about helping Tibetans when so many Indians are in such need. Yet one doubts if Indians ever can be helped in the sense that Tibetans can. Apart from the vastness of their current material problem the very nature of the people themselves seems stubbornly to defy most outside attempts at alleviation.

Rexaul is a smelly, straggling little border-town, overpopulated by both humans and cattle. It has an incongruous air of importance, since all the Kathmandu truck-traffic passes through its streets, yet its cosmopolitanism is limited. When I went to the Post Office – a dark wooden shack – to airmail the first instalment of this diary to Ireland my request caused unprecedented chaos. To begin with, registration was not permissible after 4 p.m. and it was now 5.30; however, when I had flatteringly explained that I wanted to post from India rather than Nepal the senior clerk consented to make an exception to this rule. But then came the knotty problem of deciding where Ireland was – and the even knottier problem of determining the airmail registration fee for such an outlandish destination. In the end no fewer than seven men spent twenty minutes working it all out, consulting thick, flyblown volumes, weighing and re-weighing the package on ancient scales of doubtful accuracy, checking and re-checking interminable sums on filthy scraps of paper and finally laboriously copying the address, in triplicate, on to the receipt docket – with hilarious results, since even intelligent Europeans often find my handwriting illegible. I suppose it is possible that the package will eventually arrive on the Aran Islands, but one can’t help having horrible doubts.

1 MAY – KATHMANDU

The ninety-mile Tribhuvan Rajpath, named after King Mahendra’s father, was built by Indian engineers during the 1950s. At present it is Nepal’s only completed motor-road – though the Chinese are working hard on an uncomfortably symbolic continuation of it from Kathmandu to Lhasa – and it must be one of the most remarkable engineering feats in the world. Yet the Rajpath’s inexplicable narrowness (or is this defect perhaps explicable in strategic terms?) means that trucks are often rammed against cliffsides by other trucks, or go skidding over precipices in successful but unrewarding attempts to avoid head-on collisions. However, the art of truck-driving is only nine years old in Nepal, so perhaps it is not surprising that most drivers apparently long for a rapid reincarnation; doubtless the next generation will have learnt that too much rakshi does not aid the safe negotiation of six hairpin bends per mile.

In view of the Rajpath’s reputation it is understandable that trucks are forbidden to carry foreigners. A high mortality rate among visitors might be bad for the tourist trade, so in theory all foreigners use the senile bus that leaves Rexaul daily at 6 a.m. But the bus fare is Rs. 16/- while the truck fare is only Rs. 8/-, and therefore many travellers blithely ignore the illegality of trucks. Fortunately the border police also ignore it, or perhaps are unaware of the law’s existence – an anomaly that would be typical of this deliciously topsy-turvy land.

This morning we left the railway station at six o’clock and walked the two miles to the border. The next three hours were spent wandering in and out of tumbledown customs, police and passport offices, where courteous but clueless officials entertained us to innumerable glasses of tea while trying to make up their minds exactly why they wanted to interview us. One felt that this profusion of bureaucratic formality was a game, since none of these men seemed to comprehend the nature of his job clearly enough to take it seriously. The whole performance appeared to be part of Nepal’s sudden attempt to get ‘with it’, after centuries of deliberate isolation, and over all those glasses of tea the stiff, alien formalities spontaneously blossomed into flexible, indigenous informalities.

The Nepalese expertly elude the tyranny of Time simply by refusing to allow it to affect any of their actions. We waited endlessly for everything: for glasses of tea to be carried on trays from the bazaar, for a policeman’s bunch of keys to be fetched from his home down the road, for an adjustable rubber stamp which would not adjust to be dissected (and finally abandoned in favour of a pen), for a Passport Officer to track down Ireland (whose existence he seriously questioned) in a dog-eared atlas from which the relevant pages had long since been torn, and for the Chief Customs Officer, who was afflicted by a virulent form of dysentery, to withdraw to a nearby field between inspecting each piece of luggage.

To me all this was enjoyably relaxing and precisely what one expects at a Nepalese border-post – though I suspect that these dilatory methods will twang on my nerves when I am encountering them daily. But unfortunately my companions reacted adversely to this subjugation of Time, and the Nepalese were bewildered to find that neither their conversation nor their tea could begin to compensate for so many ‘wasted’ hours. In the end I felt thoroughly ashamed of Loo’s querulous impatience, Jean’s contemptuous sneers and Niall’s ill-tempered commands – none of which had the slightest speeding-up effect on the Nepalese. Yet no doubt I myself will behave equally badly on occasion during the next few months.

When at last we were freed we walked another mile or so to the little town of Birganj and there, after much playing-off of drivers one against another, we secured seats in the back of an almost empty truck.

By now the sun’s rays were fierce and we had no protection against them as we covered the next twenty miles. This section of the Terai has been spoiled by the railhead and road, and as nothing of interest lay on either side I was all the time eagerly looking north; but the heat haze restricted visibility, and only on approaching the village of Bhainse could one see that gigantic mountain barrier which here rises so suddenly and splendidly from Northern India’s eternity of flatness.

At Bhainse we stopped outside an eating-house, and without bothering to replace my boots I hopped out of the truck into the welcome shadow. Loo declined any refreshment, after one shuddering glance around the mud-floored, fly-infested interior, but the rest of us enjoyed piles of rice moistened by dahl and curds – with a very hot curry for the driver. Here the devastating poverty of Bihar was no longer apparent, though otherwise there was little to distinguish these people from their Indian neighbours; only the style of domestic architecture (already some Newari influence was evident) indicated that we had entered Nepal.

When the driver had demolished his Everest of rice he told us to wait in the eating-house, and twenty minutes later I had to walk half a mile, barefooted, to rejoin the truck beyond a tollgate. By now the sun was directly overhead and melting tar on the road forced me to cover this distance by running about ten paces, sitting down to get my agonised feet off the tar, jumping up when my behind became equally agonised – and so on … and on … and on. The locals were vastly amused at this spectacle; but oddly enough the humour of the situation escaped me.

From Bhainse – which is almost at sea level – the road climbed steadily over the Churia and Chandragiri mountains, crossing a pass of more than 8,000 feet. On every side the slopes and crests were heavily wooded and freshly green and this abrupt ascent seemed most dramatic in contrast to the dead plains which stretch from Dehra Dun to Bhainse. At one point we could see below us the twelve hairpin bends which we had rounded on our way up that particular mountain, and often the famous cable on which some goods are still brought from India to Kathmandu was visible overhead, its wires spanning the deep valleys from mountain-top to mountain-top. Until we crossed the pass no villages were visible, but at Bhainse the truck had filled up with cheerful, unkempt families who were returning home from marketing trips. These people, bred to walk everywhere, have been very quick to take advantage of the luxury of motor transport.

Even motoring up the Rajpath gives one a sense of achievement, felt on behalf of those Indian engineers and Nepalese coolies – many coolies were killed on the job – who had the brains and the guts to construct a road in direct defiance of the laws of Nature. Most Nepalese believe that the coolies’ deaths were caused by enraged mountain-gods and I can sympathise with this view. The Rajpath is a triumphal example of man’s ingenuity, but it is also an impertinent defacement and naturally the gods would resent having their mountains so humiliatingly brought to the heel of Progress.

We reached the pass at 3.30 and here the air was tinglingly crisp and keen. To steady our nerves we stopped for tea in a tiny hut near the forest’s edge; a few moments earlier, when toiling around the last hairpin bend, we had missed by inches a grossly overloaded jeep taking the corner at top speed.

Our descent to the Palang Valley was more gradual than the upward climb – though hardly less dangerous, for the truck’s brakes were not of the best. The two-storey farmhouses scattered around the valley floor looked curiously European, with their curly red tiles and brown brick walls, and they were far more skilfully built than the average dwelling of rural India; I noticed that instead of chimneys square apertures were visible in the gable walls. The people were small, sturdy and gay, and groups of children shouted, waved and laughed as we passed; evidently many of the Nepalese are temperamentally closer to the Tibetans than to the Indians. On all sides this valley was guarded by mountains and, despite the encroachment of ‘The Road’, it retained an atmosphere of tranquil ‘lostness’. Looking at the sunny expanse of cleverly terraced young wheat, and at the high-spirited children and bounding flocks of goats, I was very conscious of being in a new and pleasant country.

When the road began to climb again the nearby mountains became bare walls of reddish clay that reflected the slanting evening light like giant uncut jewels. I felt myself getting more and more excited as we passed the new, neat milestones saying ‘Kathmandu 15 miles … 14 miles … 13 miles’ – but then suddenly it was dark, and still we were slowly rounding bend after bend, though we had just passed a notice forbidding vehicles to use the Rajpath by night.

At 8.30 p.m. we stopped near the hamlet of Thankot, six miles from Kathmandu, where a tree-trunk on trestles blocks the road outside a Police-Passport-Customs check-post. Now the spice of melodrama filled the air. Our driver – using what can only be described as a hoarse whisper – instructed us to leave the truck quietly, go through the necessary hoops with officialdom, walk on a quarter of a mile and wait for him to retrieve us. We need take only our passports; everything else could safely be left where it was.

At this point my drab European rationality prompted me to wonder what the police would make of four Westerners, equipped only with a passport and two legs apiece, appearing out of pitch darkness on the rim of the Kathmandu Valley and producing visas which declared that they had entered the country a mere ten hours earlier. But at once I reproved my rationality for intruding on this first gay day in Nepal.

The checkpoint was enchanting – a tiny bamboo lean-to, containing an affable character arrayed in pyjamas and armed with a revolver. This officer peered briefly at our visas, by the light of a wick floating in a bowl of grease, and then politely made the required assumption that we had come from Rexaul by magic carpet. However, Loo’s native honesty did cause a moment’s tension. On being asked if she had cameras, transistors, tape-recorders or binoculars she admitted to one of each and Pyjamas, looking faintly irritated by such candour at so late an hour, dutifully asked her to produce them – whereupon she saw her indiscretion and stared through the low doorway in wild surmise, while the boys and I giggled cruelly. Our driver was in the adjacent tea-house, having something stronger than tea and stolidly feigning not to be acquainted with us, so any attempt to contact him would have been monumentally tactless. But Pyjamas obviously had a quick understanding and a kind heart for now he gestured grandly, saying ‘These things are not important’ – and immediately we were released, our passports enriched by one more set of convulsed squiggles and solemn seals.

From Thankot the downhill road to Kathmandu was lined with flowering bottle-brush trees, and by the light of the head-lamps their long scarlet blossoms formed glowing curtains of colour on either side. I was a little puzzled not to see, somewhere on the valley floor, that shimmer of light which is to be expected after dark from even the least advanced capital city; but I later discovered that this was one of the not infrequent occasions upon which the urban electricity supply had quietly faded away.

It takes only a few moments to drive through the ‘suburbs’ of Kathmandu and by half-past nine I was standing in the city centre, beside ‘Bhim’s Folly’ – a cigarette-like white tower erected for no apparent reason by Bhim Sen Thapa, that murderously scheming nineteenth-century ruler of Nepal who instigated the Prime Ministerial reign. The area around the Folly is the General Truck Terminal, and therefore the scene of much haggling, arguing and general commotion at all hours of the day or night; in fact it seems to provide the only sign of life in the city after dark. Already Loo and Niall had been led away by Jean, who is familiar with Kathmandu, and I now discovered that – as pronounced by me – the address to which I was going conveyed nothing whatever to any of the surrounding Nepalese. But eventually I observed two young men, clad in semi-Western fashion, who spoke some English and soon fixed me up with a cycle-rickshaw.

Half an hour later I was installed in this dingy but – by Asian standards – wildly expensive hotel. The charge is £1 per night for a large, filthy room, containing only a plank-bed and a roll of bug-infested bedding – and no breakfast will be provided. In itself the dirt leaves me unmoved, since I have survived even greater extremes of filth elsewhere, but the excessive charge moves me deeply. I only hope that it is not a reliable guide to the general cost of living in Nepal.

2

Kathmandu

3 MAY – KATHMANDU

Yesterday began well when I heard after breakfast that Sigrid Arnd – a Swiss friend first met when we were both working in India – is now living here; and last night she most generously invited me to stay in her Jawalkhel home, near Patan, until I leave for Pokhara on 12 May.

Sigrid prefers to live reasonably close to the local level, and she has proved that in this country one can create a very attractive home through an imaginative adaptation of native materials and customs. She rents a two-roomed wing of this three-storey brick house, and the simple living-room – where I’m now sitting – has a low, black, raftered ceiling, whitewashed walls and pale gold matting. Everything in the room is both beautiful and Nepalese, and Sigrid’s four-months-old black and silver mongrel puppy is also both beautiful and Nepalese. His name is Puchare (‘Tail’ in Nepali) and he has an adorable personality, in addition to being a good deal more ornamental than many an effete thoroughbred I’ve known. The household is completed by Donbahadur, a Newari daily servant who shops intelligently in the bazaar and cooks like an angel. (Many Westerners in Kathmandu won’t even walk through the bazaar, much less eat food that has been bought there.) Donbahadur has a bubbling sense of fun, an almost visible integrity and an awe-inspiring but quite effective method of communicating through the medium of Swiss German-cum-English. One senses that the approves Sigrid’s appreciation of things Nepalese, which interests me; in India a Memsahib would almost certainly lose face with the servants if she did not maintain entirely European standards.

A small bathroom (with a cold shower but without a bath) and an even smaller kitchen lead off this living-room, while at the back a narrow wooden staircase, to Sigrid’s bedroom, is concealed by a cupboard-like device. Outside, in the large, haphazard garden, twin giant poplars stand handsomely in one corner, and at the moment I can see Donbahadur in another corner, baking delicious bread in that mud-stove which is his contribution to the establishment’s excellent system of improvisation. Beyond the ten-foot wall enclosing the garden runs a very wavy, very pot-holed and very dusty track, which unfortunately happens to be one of the valley’s main roads, linking Kathmandu, Jawalkhel and Patan. At this season the frequent passage of buses envelops the garden in a veil of yellow, suffocating dust; only the tops of these vehicles are visible as they lurch slowly by, so one has the curious illusion of watching ships on a stormy sea.

Tonight, with Sigrid’s blessing, Puchare and I will curl up together on a Tibetan carpet; I don’t often encounter the perfect hostess who refrains from registering horror at the prospect of a guest sleeping on the floor.

5 MAY

What a lovable little city this is! Each day I enjoy it more, though before coming here I had thought of the place as no more than a stepping-stone to Pokhara. But my vision of the Kathmandu Valley as being only slightly less dire than India was quite false. Of course there are the obvious resemblances – dust, stench, flies, ubiquitous sacred cows and mangy dogs in gutters. Also many of the women now wear either the sari or the shalwar and chemise, though the majority of men have retained their distinctive dress of jodhpur-type loose-seated trousers, high-necked tunics flaring out above the knees and jaunty little caps – a reversal of the common pattern in the East, where men are usually the first to abandon the national costume. However, the obvious differences between the two countries are far more important. The ordinary Nepalese seem to be without a trace of the Indians’ servility, or their touchiness, or that excruciating national inferiority complex which masquerades so pathetically as a superiority complex. In the past the Nepalese suffered more injustice and cruelty under their own corrupt and unscrupulous rulers than the Indians ever did under the British; but at least they were spared that lethal blow to a country’s pride which can be given only by foreign conquerors. All the other Westerners to whom I have spoken during the past few days agree with me that on most levels the Nepalese are far easier to get along with than the Indians – which alone would make the atmosphere of Kathmandu much pleasanter than that of New Delhi.

Another of my misconceptions concerned the influence of tourism on the valley. I had pictured it as having been already spoiled by and for tourists, but despite the fact that ‘everyone’ now comes here, in much the same way as ‘everyone’ leaves London during the summer, it would be ridiculous, at present, to describe Kathmandu as a Tourist Centre. However, in its outward aspect it is already far less ‘exotic and romantic’ than one has been led to believe; there are almost as many petrol-pumps as temples, and ugly new buildings are going up everywhere. No one could call it a lovely city, yet there is an abundance of beauty to be found here, and the friendly gaiety and inconsequential craziness of the atmosphere have completely captivated me. This craziness is repeatedly manifested in various Gilbertian ways. When I moved from the hotel to the labyrinthine Youth Hostel at Jawalkhel – one of the many tasteless ex-Rana palaces that litter the valley – I found a multitude of h. and c. taps and some very imposing Western flushes above Eastern latrines; but the nearest water was in the nearest well. Also there is an intriguing urban telephone system, installed by the Americans a few years ago in the fond hope that local activities might thus be speeded up, and to date this innovation has made several quite important contributions to the national muddle. On some days it works only in some areas and on other days it works only in other areas, so the consequent alarms and excursions create far more tension than would ever have to be endured if life were philosophically geared to an absence of telephonic communication. Then there are the foibles of the electricity system. These include switches that have been humorously hidden in the most unlikely corners – at floor or ceiling level, or behind window shutters – and that function, if at all, only after prolonged and highly dangerous manipulation. Because of the current’s ‘erraticism’ everyone keeps a supply of candles at the ready, and this evening, at a meeting of Father Moran’s Tibetan Refugee Committee in The Royal Hotel, I noted with joy that amidst so much ornate splendour our conference was being illuminated by two candles stuck on saucers.

Since Nepal was opened to foreigners in 1951 The Royal Hotel has been the centre of what passes for social life in Kathmandu. Officially it is a ‘luxury hotel’ and as such not at all my line of country; but one soon discovers that here even ‘luxury hotels’ are purged of their uniformity, and in fact The Royal is as outrageously individual as all other local phenomena. Partly this is due to a ludicrous magnificence, both in the building itself (another ex-Rana palace) and in the Grand Opera décor, which is so gorgeously ‘un-with-it’ that one is immediately charmed into forgiving its excesses. But mainly the uniqueness of The Royal is due to the personality of Boris, that legendary Russian whom I had already met with delight in so many books and whom I met today, with even greater delight, in person. Undoubtedly Boris belongs to that corps of larger-than-life cosmopolitan eccentrics who have been born to redeem this conforming age, yet to me the most impressive thing about him is his simple kindness. He seems essentially a benevolent rural inn-keeper, rather than the owner-manager of an international hotel, and on his account I fear the more ruthless and practical hoteliers who are now beginning to invade Kathmandu.

At The Royal I was also introduced to Peter Aufschneider and Sir Edmund Hillary. Sir Edmund looks and behaves exactly as one would expect a conqueror of Everest to look and behave, and on shaking hands with him I got a positively schoolgirlish thrill – though it is to be hoped that this was not apparent, since the unfortunate man must be bored almost to extinction by thrilled females. Peter Aufschneider (Heinrich Harrer’s companion in Tibet) lives permanently in Kathmandu and now works for the Nepalese Government. He is very shy, modest and likeable – but unfortunately I’m invariably struck dumb on first meeting people who have long been admired from afar, so as a conversational unit we never really got off the ground.

Inevitably The Royal forms a hollow into which all Kathmandu gossip finally trickles and, as much of this gossip concerns the sex-life of various Nepalese royal personages, or of prominent foreign residents, the resulting pond is depressingly murky. But more interesting subjects are occasionally discussed, and here I heard that it is now very difficult to obtain a trekking permit for Northern Nepal. Apparently a certain writer recently took unfair advantage of having been granted such a permit, went to or beyond the Tibetan frontier, took a film of various odd happenings there, wrote about his exploits in European newspapers and generally so upset the Nepalese that they are now thwarting innocent travellers who wish to explore Nepal from no motive other than wanderlust. Personally I know only too well how forbidden frontiers tempt one’s juvenile devilry and I have once been guilty of succumbing to their lure; yet out of common politeness to the Governments concerned and for the sake of other travellers one should surely refrain from writing up such incidents – especially in a justifiably jittery country like Nepal. No doubt these regrettable activities near the Tibetan frontier are also partly responsible for the Nepalese Government’s ban on further Himalayan expeditions.

Another news item concerned the voluntary return to Tibet, within recent months, of an unspecified number of refugees who had been squatting in Eastern Nepal for the last two years. My informant on this matter was as reliable – within the limitations of the subject – as anyone could be, so I was greatly interested to hear that the uncommitted traders who still travel between Lhasa and Namche Bazaar are bringing reassuring verbal messages from those who returned to their friends in Nepal. The messages say that these ex-refugees find themselves a lot better off in present-day Tibet than they ever were in Nepal and that the Chinese, having secured a firm grip on the country, are now relaxing their first savage pressure. Possibly this news simply represents another victory for Chinese propaganda. The Communists badly need more labourers and I remember hearing, about eighteen months ago, of the Lhasa-printed leaflets then being circulated in India and Nepal, urging the refugees to return to Tibet and guaranteeing them a ‘pardon’ for their flight into exile. Yet it does seem psychologically probable that the Chinese regime is now evolving from its initial fiercely repressive stage, and I can’t help wondering if a return home might not be the happiest solution for many of the Tibetans in Nepal. Whether they are living under the Chinese or in exile it is going to be impossible for them to preserve their ancient religious and social traditions, and in Tibet they would at least enjoy a suitable climate and altitude. I suspect that many Westerners, being unprepared to concede that the Chinese are human beings, would be enraged by this suggestion; yet it does seem a pity to let ideological biases confuse humanitarian issues.