Where the Indus is Young (22 page)

Khapalu’s solid, British-built, well-maintained Rest House stands at right angles to the brown outcrop and about two furlongs from it. Through our window we look past the majestic
chenar
in the garden, across the Shyok – scarcely fifty yards away – and up the widest stretch of the valley to those pointed peaks. Behind are cosy stables, and then orchards and terraces with icy paths leading steeply to the bazaar. These are short cuts; the jeep track finds a more gradual gradient.

Bazaar prices are lower here than in Skardu, despite additional transport costs; Khapalu’s merchants do not automatically raise their prices when a foreigner appears. This afternoon we got ten fresh eggs for Rs.5 and a seer of onions for one rupee. Moreover, a load of hay costs only Rs.2, and the elderly chowkidar tells me that tomorrow he can provide oats at Rs.1.50 per seer. He is a splendid character, intelligent, discreet and courteous – the first genuine
chowkidar-type
we have met in Baltistan. Short and sturdy, he has a square
nutbrown
face with twinkling blue eyes; he and Rachel fell in love at first sight.

Khapalu is much colder than Skardu and this room has such a high ceiling it is virtually impossible to warm it with one small
oilstove
. I am now wearing every garment I possess, including a glove on my left hand, and the stove between my feet is turned up full – yet I am shivering.

Roti
-making takes far longer on our own tin pan than on Sadiq’s iron griddle. It kept me busy for two hours this morning and I have now perfected a formula – using lots of ghee and some sugar to give us energy – which produces a Balti shortbread.

Today we followed the jeep-track to 10,500 feet. The sun was warm when we set off and the light had a clarity extraordinary even by local standards. Every colour seemed alive and every breath tasted like sparkling wine as we climbed gradually through scattered hamlets, poplar groves, rich orchards and hundreds of tiny terraced fields. Khapalu’s population (about 9,000) is so spread out that one has no sense of being in even a small town. The atmosphere is completely ‘village’ and the people are much more welcoming than in Skardu.

From afar one sees a large building near the foot of Khapalu’s semicircular, southern mountain wall, where the jeep track begins to climb steeply. This is much the biggest edifice in Khapalu, and perhaps in all Baltistan – apart from Skardu’s fort. ‘It must be the Raja’s Palace,’ observed Rachel, already wise in the ways of the Karakoram. The eccentric, whitewashed pile of wood and stone and carved balconies has a slightly Tibetan air, though its walls lack the characteristic Tibetan inward slope. It is wildly ramshackle, yet
handsome
in its simplicity and undeniably imposing as it dominates the valley. Two small circular summer-houses are conspicuous on the enormous expanse of its flat roof, from the edge of which several midget-like figures were studying us with the aid of binoculars. The usually docile Hallam was so determined to leave the jeep track here that I feel sure he once formed part of the Raja’s polo team. When Rachel at last got him past the turn-off we were walking parallel to the polo-ground, distinguishable because of its area – about ten times that of the average field.

An hour later we were on the rim of an oval plateau some three miles wide and six miles long. Here was mountain beauty in all its perfection: the flat land aglitter with new snow, the light crystal, the blue sky faintly streaked with wispy cloud, the silence profound. But as we walked on Rachel wanted to know what uranium is, how gems are mined, why different races speak different languages, where numbers were invented and when the Himalayas were formed. At times I itch to push her over the nearest cliff.

On our way home we were at one point overlooking a small hamlet and could see all the life of the community on the rooftops: men, women, children, yak, dzo, sheep, goats and poultry. Many Balti houses are built either around or right beside an ancient apricot, mulberry or
chenar
tree. On these clothes are hung to dry, having been washed by laughing women in glacial streams with ice a foot thick along the edges. Most of the local women go unveiled – being Nurbashi rather than Shiah – and are remarkably good-looking. To everyone’s amusement Rachel is exactly the same physical type as the majority of the local children; they, too, have round faces, rosy cheeks – now somewhat the worse for windburn – dark brown eyes
and straight, light brown hair. This afternoon some of the older boys tried to upset Hallam; obviously they long to see Rachel falling off. Their elders attempted to control them, but without much success. This sort of hooliganism is unexpected here.

It was a grey morning, with more snow in the air and thick ice on the bucket of water that had been in our room all night. After breakfast we set off on foot to follow an interesting little path around the flank of the nearby outcrop mountain, but it soon proved too interesting to be wholesome. It was about eighteen inches wide, covered with frozen snow and directly overhanging the Shyok. As we turned to retreat we found the way blocked by a dozen goats who showed no inclination to move politely aside; both above and below this apology for a path the cliff face was unattractive, even by goatish standards. However, the drop into the Shyok was scarcely thirty feet, and no rocks were visible, so our chances of survival seemed quite good. Then the goatherd appeared, a cretinous-looking youth with feet bound in leather thongs. He shouted angrily, whether at us or at his animals was not clear to me. But the goats took it personally and came straight towards us. I seized Rachel and forced her into a providential crevice I had just noticed in the rock face. Then I
spreadeagled
myself against the cliff and hoped for the best. As the goats passed, one young male – probably unnerved by our strange smell – did go over the edge, to the youth’s fury. But having been swept twenty yards downstream he was able to scramble out more easily than we could have done.

Further wanderings along the base of this mountain brought us to a leafless thicket of some unidentifiable shrub where a flock of exquisite little birds was feeding on I can’t think what. We stopped, enchanted, to listen to their tentative end-of-winter song. It sounded very sweet – and brave – against the enormous snowy silence of the valley. They had white caps, black collars, crimson breasts and black and white barred wings in flight; they were finch-sized but their song was thrush-like. We also saw one large black and white wild duck feeding in the Shyok.

At noon we came on a hamlet high above river level where
everybody
gathered along the edges of the roofs to observe our progress and wave and smile and shout greetings. Then a man addressed us in English, asking the standard set of Balti questions – ‘Where is your city? What is your age? How much you pay for horse?’ When we accepted his invitation to drink tea a door was opened in the high stone wall beside the path and we followed a shy girl along a dark, wide passage – evidently a stable – from which led a
boulder-stairway
of shallow steps, specially constructed for cattle. The roof was divided into two sections and we sat on shaky home-made wooden chairs in the open-air parlour under a
chenar
, while a yak and three dzo gazed disbelievingly at us through a decrepit wall of woven willow-wands. From a higher roof – that of the kitchen and bedrooms, which led off the ‘parlour’ roof – sundry tiny white and brown sheep, and long-haired grey goats, peered down at us in comical astonishment. A fine cock and his harem flew to and fro – Balti poultry are great fliers – and the fascinated women of the family, themselves looking not unlike roosting hens, squatted in a row on a single tree-trunk ‘bridge’ linking two roofs; had they toppled backwards they would have fallen twenty feet.

Our young host introduced himself as Khapalu’s ‘animal dispenser’ and despite limited English managed to tell us the sad story of three New Zealand rams which he progressively acquired five years ago. For some reason they did not get the Balti ewes in lamb and last week all three died of a mysterious fever. It seems that yak and dzo are immune to TB but very prone to brucellosis, and almost all the local animals harbour a variety of worms. Our
chai
, when at last it came, was unwontedly elegant – Chinese jasmine tea (which costs Rs.24 per pound in Gilgit), served in Pyrex cups made in France.

After lunch we paid our respects to the Raja; on the way it began to snow and it hasn’t stopped since. By giving Hallam his head we were shown how to enter the Palace courtyard through a wooden double-door – fifteen feet high and beautifully carved – in a
twenty-five
-foot-high stone wall. A wide passageway between two-storeyed stables and granaries leads under an archway to a secluded
quadrangle,
and on the far side stands the many-storeyed Palace, built about 140 years ago by the present Raja’s great-grandfather. The off-white, fortress-like façade is broken at irregular intervals by ten windows of very unequal size. In the centre, built on to the main structure like enormous bay windows, and now in a sad state of disrepair, is a handsome set of four wooden balconies. As the main entrance is no longer in use we climbed a flight of broken,
ice-encased
steps to a side door where two lovely-looking but very shy young women were obviously awaiting us. The Raja’s daughters, I assumed, though they spoke no English. Smilingly but in silence they guided us along interminable twilit corridors with mud floors and mud walls no different from any peasant’s hovel. Then a low doorway led into almost total darkness and we both stumbled frequently while groping our way through further low doorways, with invisible raised thresholds. When a startled hen squawked and fluttered beside us in the darkness, Rachel emitted an
understandable
yelp of alarm and gripped harder on my hand. At last we saw a glimmer of light ahead and stepped into a small, low-ceilinged room with a tiny window near the floor. The temperature was around freezing point and the only furniture was a charpoy, a threadbare Bokhara rug and a much-dented tin stove. Two rifles stood against the wall in one corner and a razor and shaving brush lay on the window ledge. The young women gestured towards the charpoy, on which we duly sat. Then they seated themselves on the rug – still silent – and a beaming, excited-looking maidservant hurried in to light the stove. Despite our companions’ resolute silence I felt bound to attempt some bright social chit-chat, in my best hybrid English/Urdu/Balti, but mercifully the Raja soon arrived.

Stud Yabgo Fateh Ali Khan is a tallish, well-built man in the
mid-sixties
who wears dark glasses and a home-spun gown. He looks completely European, though one of his grandmothers was a member of the Ladaki royal family, and when we had introduced ourselves he sat on the floor near the stove, leaning against the mud wall, and launched into a spellbinding dissertation on his ancestors. I already knew that for generations this family has been producing
most of Baltistan’s few scholars and he is certainly keeping up the tradition. He was educated at a Srinagar college – where the
headmaster
was an Irishman, one Mr MacDermot – and before Partition he represented Kashmir in India’s embryo parliament. He is descended from a branch of the Seljuk Turks that settled in Baltistan just before their more ambitious fellow-tribesmen pushed west into Persia and Turkey, and he emphasised that his family has never intermarried with the Baltis. Yet throughout the centuries there have been many marriages between the men of his family and Buddhist women of the Ladaki ruling family, though never vice-versa. (A good example of class mattering more than creed.) The wives usually remained Buddhists, while their children were brought up as Muslims. The Raja’s family, like the vast majority of the people of Khapalu, are Nurbashis – the most liberal and unorthodox sect of Islam. So it was easy for them to ignore the Islamic ban on marriage with those outside the Peoples of the Book. Nurbashi tolerance also explains Khapalu’s natural ratio of unveiled women to men, which comes as quite a shock after the exclusively male-populated streets of Gilgit and Skardu.

The Raja’s deposition is too recent to have made the slightest impression on his subjects. To the people of Khapalu he is still their beloved ‘Raja Sahib’, a man very nearly as poor as themselves in material possessions, but full of wisdom, and of concern for their well-being, and surrounded by the irreplaceable aura of some seven centuries of inherited authority. He himself is altogether without bitterness towards the Pakistani government; he is too dignified and profoundly self-assured for petty resentment, and too intelligent to imagine that any inhabited corner of the world can escape ‘Progress’ in the 1970s. But he does not disguise his personal antipathy to the trappings of Progress and it delighted me to hear him referring to jeeps and aeroplanes in a tone that put them on a level with
disease-carrying
insects. I laughingly remarked on this and he promptly pointed out that such machines
are
disease-carriers. Thirty years ago, when it took three weeks to walk in from down-country,
smallpox
, typhoid, TB and measles were virtually unknown here: now they are common.

As we talked, the two beautiful daughters and a selection of ragged servants and retainers sat cross-legged around the stove and for their benefit the Raja often paused to translate. There was a distinctly medieval quality about the atmosphere, created by the extreme discomfort of this ‘Palace’, the numbers of under-employed but cherished retainers and the autocracy-cum-informality of
Raja-subject
relationships. I found the whole scene wonderfully congenial.

At four o’clock tea was served in a monumental teapot of solid silver. The eldest unmarried daughter now appeared, her beauty enhanced by a delicate flush because she had been busy cooking delectable savoury and sweet titbits. Only when I tasted them did I realise that since leaving Islamabad we have not eaten anything else cooked in a civilised manner.

It snowed all night and was still snowing when we woke. After breakfast Rachel went off to make merry in the chowkidar’s quarters while I baked, greased boots and tack, broke apricot kernels, crushed rock-salt and attended to other trivial but time-consuming domestic chores.

At noon, when we went egg-hunting, the beauty of the snow-laden valley was dream-like. There was no one to be seen and on reaching the first straggle of bazaar booths we found them all locked; evidently most denizens of Khapalu simply stay in bed on such days as this. However, at the far end of the Sadar Bazaar the ‘Karakarom [
sic
] General Stores’ was open. Khapalu’s most ambitious shop is run by Haji Abdul Rehman and his son Ghulam, a burly young man with light brown hair, hazel eyes and such a flair for languages that he managed to acquire intelligible English at the local school. Ghulam befriended us within hours of our arrival and today invited us to sit on the shop verandah, where a tiny fire of wood-chips was burning in half an old kerosene tin. Five passers-by who had happened to notice this hint of warmth were crouching around it, their blankets covering everything but their dark eyes, which rested on us with varying degrees of wondering friendliness. Unsteady stools were provided for us and as snow continued to swirl down Ghulam questioned me yet again
about Ireland and Europe and Pakistan, which last country seems to him almost as remote as Ireland, despite its being only an hour’s flight from Skardu.