Tibetan Foothold (6 page)

Today we scored a big, but rather sad, victory. Many Tibetan laymen wear their hair in long braids tied over the top of the head, and for the past week the chief cook from the Palace has been coming to us daily with an astronomical number of head-sores caused by infected
louse-bites.
Oliver gently tried to persuade him to cut his hair, but he obviously regarded it as being his crowning glory and there was no surrender – until this morning, when one of the sores had turned to a vast carbuncle and that was
that
. I felt so sorry for him, as he sat on a bench on the Dispensary veranda having those lovely (but oh! so lousy) locks shorn off, while his wife stood beside him in tears of sympathy.

A most extraordinary thing happened last night. Yesterday afternoon Jill paid us a surprise visit, on her way back to Delhi, and presented Juliet with a mongrel puppy rescued from the gutters of Dalhousie. As it was a bitch we christened her ‘Poomah’ (Tibetan for ‘girl’) and when Jill left she settled down very happily. Then came supper-time: Juliet was in the ‘bathroom’ and Oliver and I were sitting watching Poomah playing with a stick in the middle of the floor when Chumba, as usual, brought our meal on a big tray. From the doorway he took one look at Poomah and went rigid with fear. Normally he is all beams and greetings but now his face tautened and his eyes went quite glassy with terror. Oliver and I at once realised that this was no ordinary allergy to dogs, since Chumba adores the camp-dog – a big ginger mongrel. And anyway the emotion he showed was not merely physical fear. Meanwhile Poomah had stopped her frisking and was looking doubtfully at Chumba, though Jill had told us that she makes friends rather too indiscriminately. As I stood up to take the tray from Chumba, who obviously wasn’t going to come one inch farther, Oliver asked what was wrong, using his best Tibetan. Chumba looked piteously at us, gave a sort of shudder and said: ‘Very bad dog!’ Then he bolted. Oliver followed and on his return a quarter of an hour later explained that a black dog with a white tip to its tail was the reincarnation of an exceptionally evil man. So poor Poomah had to be banished; apart from anything else we were told that His Holiness would be most upset to hear that such an inauspicious creature was being kept in one of his camps. How true this is I don’t know, but I’ll never forget Chumba’s entry and first sight of Poomah. Something very curious happened to the atmosphere and before Oliver 
or I had the least idea what it was all about we both sensed the weirdness in the air.

Today the monsoon has gone mad and turned the whole world to a liquid turmoil – the mountain sliding and slipping in chunks with rumbling roars, cascades of water tearing by on all sides, the road a racing brown torrent, the paths waterfalls and every roof in the place leaking like a sieve. At lunchtime our soup was diluted by raindrops sploshing down from the ceiling of this
new
bungalow and outside it was almost dark, with nothing, nowhere and nobody dry. The monsoon isn’t fun at the best of times, but in a refugee camp it’s hell. To go out on an evening like this and see rows of children lying on thin sacking laid over damp concrete under a leaking tin roof in a shelter open at both ends, and to listen to the pathetic coughing, would take a tear from a stone. On asking why these children were not in their rooms I was told that they couldn’t sleep because of the hoards of vicious bed-bugs which attacked them nightly. Already Juliet has a supply of Tik 20 ready for the anti-bug campaign – but this is a war that can only be waged in dry weather.

Today is Tuesday, my half-day, and I feel that it was uncommonly civil of the monsoon to ease off suddenly at 11 a.m. By the time we had finished lunch the sun was shining and one could see to the horizon – quite an experience after the enclosed greyness of the past fortnight.

This afternoon I walked miles around the mountains on solitary paths that run through a glorious world of giant trees where today everything was freshly green and sparkling after the rains. Occasionally I turned some corner which gave me a sudden, grand glimpse of the 16,000-foot sheer rock range lying immediately north of the camp, with a few obstinate glaciers still unmelted near its summits. These are the peaks visible from the valley floor, but here we are too close to enjoy an unimpeded view.

On my way back to the Nursery I passed Dall Lake, a place of Hindu pilgrimage overlooked by a tiny white temple. In fact the lake is only a lake during this season; throughout the remainder of the year it’s a lush
green meadow. But today the water was over ten feet deep and looked appropriately solemn and sacred, shadowed on three sides by steep, forested slopes.

Here I saw a sunset of matchless beauty. Against the deep blue sky a wide fleet of diaphanous clouds turned to gold, and for minutes there were just those two colours above a hill whose crown of dark green pines stood out sharply against the radiance behind them.

On my way back from the lake to the camp I had a terrifying view of the flooded plains below as the setting sun turned vast areas of
water-covered
land into glinting sheets of bronze, revealing the uncontrollable ferocity of the swollen rivers: God alone knows what damage is being done down there. Yet here everything quickly returns to normal: already the road that was a torrent yesterday is bone-dry.

After a fortnight here I already feel so much part of the camp that I’m beginning to see how difficult it will be to disengage when the time comes. By now I’ve got sufficiently into the swing of the work to be able to take a quasi-professional interest in the serious cases, which makes a big difference. Also, having been Jack-of-all-Trades and Master of None during my first week, I decided that under these conditions satisfactory results could be achieved only by concentrating on
one
aspect of the general problem. So, with Juliet’s permission, I have taken over the 800 ears of the Lower Nursery – a job any untrained person can do as efficiently as a nurse. My system is to examine carefully every child’s ears, note down the name, room number and personal number of the infected cases and treat these daily; the uninfected minority I’ll clean out weekly. This is going to be a full-time job, judging by the numbers already on my list.

Today is Indian Independence Day but you would never suspect it here. It’s quite a curious sensation to be living
in
but not
with
a country: yet I can’t deny that it suits me to live among my Tibetans, high up on a wild mountain with the real India thousands of feet below in the valley.

Yesterday was our third successive fine day so Juliet decided that we
should begin the anti-scabies bathing campaign. I wish I could send back a tape-recording of the audible results and a movie-film of the visual ones; we found our choir of angels suddenly transformed into a pack of demons. Tiblets can take unpleasant medicines and lanced abscesses and septic ears and bleeding gums but they will
not
submit to the horrible indignity of personal contact with water.

The camp ‘bathroom’ consists of a shed some twelve feet by eight, with two cold water taps and a stone floor. There were over 400 children to be washed and six of us to do the job. This would have been difficult enough had the Tiblets been as co-operative as usual, but with each victim screaming its head off and resisting every inch of the way it soon became a nightmare. I don’t believe our ear-drums will ever be the same again, and as for our backs – none of us has been able to straighten up since!

Juliet has devised a technique guaranteed to frighten the boldest scabies mite to Kingdom Come. As a start the victim is thoroughly soaped with carbolic and well rinsed under the tap. Next he is steeped for five minutes in a huge tin tub of hot water (from the kitchen) containing generous quantities of permanganate of potash. From this he emerges dyed puce and he is then dried by an ayah before being rubbed all over his sore patches with a foul-smelling, sickly yellow concoction of mustard-oil and sulphur – this final torture being Oliver’s contribution to the sadistic orgy. As can be seen, we have an excellently planned strategy – but first you must catch your infant. And I’m sure that never were so many infants so elusive so often as yesterday afternoon. They escaped, panic-stricken, at every stage of the performance – before being undressed, while being soaped (obviously the ideal moment), when placed in the tin tub, while leaving the ‘bathroom’ to be dried outside and when about to be anointed. In every corner of the camp – and even at points up the hillside – lurked the trembling sacrifices to our zeal; but Juliet and I were inexorable. We had proved that painting with mercurochrome or gentian violet made no impression on the scabies and in future a bath for each child was to be part of the daily regime. So we reckoned that only by rounding up the lot on the first day of the experiment could we hope
to break the famous Tibetan stubbornness which we were now seeing in action. The fact that the ayahs were clearly in sympathy with their charges, and regarded us as meddling eccentrics, didn’t help – and here too we felt that an initial show of force was very necessary.

Indians usually obey a European’s orders if under supervision and they will pretend to agree – even when they don’t – with Western ideas; but the independent-minded Tibetans only obey orders from non-Tibetan authorities if they can understand, and approve of, the reasoning behind an order. In this particular case the one way to make them see the logic behind washing the children is to prove that the results are good. So we must resign ourselves to their opposition till time justifies our present ‘tough line’. However, though the native independence of Tibetans has disadvantages, it also creates a much more congenial atmosphere than the servility of Indians. One can respect the Tibetans – even at their most exasperating – and personal relationships with them start from a basis of mutually acknowledged equality.

On today’s evidence we have won the first round of the Bathing Battle. This afternoon the majority of the children accepted their fate – not without protest, but in a manner which tacitly admitted defeat – and the number of attempted escapes was much reduced. The whole operation is certainly a classic example of ‘being cruel to be kind’ and one can hardly blame the ayahs for resenting the amount of additional pain inflicted on their charges. Yet already the Tibetan genius for making the best of a situation is showing itself. Today some of the victims, while sitting four at a time in the potassium tub, discovered that it was fun to pour mugs of purple water over each other’s heads. But I’m afraid that we workers do not enjoy the performance as we bend for hours over a tub, getting soaked to the skin and slipping on the soapy stone floor, amidst shrieking, writhing, naked little bodies whose number never seems to grow less – until at last the blessed moment comes when the final contingent is in and we realise that there is no longer an immediate replacement for every child we have washed.

Sunday again, so I’ve time to luxuriate in a long entry without losing sleep! I waited till today to describe our visit to the theatre on the 14th – an improbable recreation hereabouts, but the group known somewhat formidably as ‘The Tibetan Refugees’ Cultural Association’s Drama Party’ has its headquarters near Macleod Ganj and occasionally musical plays are staged to entertain the locally settled Tibetans. During the monsoon such performances are infrequent, as the audience sits on strips of matting in the open air, but on Wednesday we had word sent us that a classical and a modern play would be staged that evening and after supper we set off to walk round the mountain to the theatre.

Dancing and singing were the main recreations in Tibet, as anyone can deduce from the spontaneous skill of the average refugee in these arts. So strong is the national impulse to dance that many centuries ago it became interwoven with the national adaptation of Buddhism and most people have heard of the lengthy ritual dances – often inaccurately called ‘Devil Dances’ – of the Lamas. The legendary origin of these dances was a ‘thunderbolt dance in the skies’ of the Guru Padma Sambhava when he had exorcised all evil influences from the site chosen for the first Tibetan monastery at Samye. Since that date it seems that the study of the esoteric Tantric texts has been accompanied by a dramatising of their teaching through sounds, postures and rhythmic movements of great variety. These ceremonial dances are as numerous as the texts, and each sect of Tibetan Buddhism uses its own forms, emblems, masks and figures. Obviously such dances could never be understood without a considerable knowledge of the exceedingly complex philosophy which they were evolved to express. Many of them were originally severe mental and physical disciplines through which men attempted to reach a state of supreme mystical exaltation and – as in ancient Greece and Egypt – only the initiated could witness or participate in these rituals. But now they are publicly performed on special occasions and in the majority of cases their symbolism is not fully understood even by the Lama dancers themselves.

In a sense, therefore, the peasant folk-dances and songs are at present a more vital and genuine part of Tibetan culture than the stylised,
semi-meaningless
monastery dances. Up to the time of the Chinese invasion these folk-arts were richly alive and always developing throughout the country. Just as Ireland or England have their village hurling or cricket teams, who play in regional championships, so Tibet had her village dancers and singers, who gathered about once a month in a chosen village to stage a competition. Characteristically, there were no prizes, nor was there any cult of individual ‘star’ performers – the winner was simply the village whose team received the most enthusiastic applause. During the festival of the Tibetan New Year – which falls on the day of the February full moon and is the great national holiday – the villages of an area sent their best team to the nearest town for the big annual competition.

These singers and dancers were always amateurs and it was
considered
very bad form to turn professional; but naturally the required talents were often inherited and certain families were renowned for their ability. In such cases the father usually taught not only his own children but those other local youngsters who showed signs of talent.

The Tibetans had songs to accompany each everyday task and in some cases to accompany the separate parts of one task – e.g. masons had special songs for laying foundations, building walls and putting on roofs. In the fourteenth or fifteenth century of our era dances were composed to go with these songs and both the dances and the costumes of the men and women differ conspicuously in the three chief provinces of Döme, Döte and Utsang: there are also many minor regional differences. Most of the songs refer to the vast beauty of the Tibetan landscape but love-songs are only sung at marriage festivals, which indicates what we would call a lack of emotional involvement in sexual relationships; it certainly does not signify any prudish traditional policy of shielding the young from temptation. A similar lack has been noted among the Buddhist Sherpas by Professor Fürer von Haimendorf, who deduced it from the absence of domestic friction which he observed in polyandric households. It certainly helps to explain that happy-
go-lucky
Tibetan attitude to sex – as a cross between a good meal and
an exhilarating game – which results in a proliferation of warmly welcomed bastards in many refugee camps. Babies are things that
will
happen and no one fusses.