India Rising: Tales from a Changing Nation (34 page)

He recounts the case of the Bishnoi community in Rajasthan, who, he maintains, would ‘sacrifice their lives’ before seeing a single tree cut down. Or the tribes of Goa’s sacred groves, who remove their shoes before entering the forest. ‘Such is the respect they have for nature,’ he says passionately. ‘This is the country that has all that too.’

I’m reminded of
India Today
’s message about ensuring India’s heritage informs its future. Arjun, meantime, repeats his belief about how ideas, once they’re out there, burst into the public consciousness and call individuals to action.

I raise my eyebrows involuntarily. ‘You don’t think so?’ he asks, probing my reaction. I agree with the premise, I tell him cautiously. I mention the comparatively low hit-rate for Mumbai Votes and Rajesh’s uphill battle to get his films aired. Aren’t the barriers just too high? The young change-maker looks unconvinced. The domino effect, unseen consequences, the power of the collective. All result in impacts of which we are often not aware, he insists.

Then he reaches for his Blackberry. ‘What are you doing this weekend?’ No plans, I tell him. He puts in a call. Five minutes later, he’s arranged for me to fly with him to Ladakh.

We are off to plant some trees.

The streets of Leh are already busy as our small convoy snakes through the city’s narrow streets shortly after breakfast. The air is cold and crisp, invigoratingly so, like plunging into an ice bath after a leisurely sauna. On the roof of the world, the stifling streets of Delhi feel a world away.

A contingent of army trucks rattles past, bound for the nearby Chinese border. Townspeople shuffle along the pavements, their high cheekbones and oval faces hidden beneath winter hats and woollen mufflers. A family of Punjabi holidaymakers stands on a corner cocooned in fleeced clothing. They look lost and are
huddled around a tourist map as though wishing it were a warm camp fire.

Ladakh’s mountain-cradled capital soon disappears from view as we head up the Indus River valley. Our destination is the village of Changa, a couple of hours’ drive away. The road is flat and the sky as blue and clear as glacial melt. The river, still young and full of mountain vigour, cuts a straight, frothing path along the valley floor. Vivek would approve: there are no offending cables to spoil the view, just two rocky mountain ranges that encase the valley like distant fortress walls. Their granite tips are doused in snow, archers’ posts painted white. I imagine border guards crouched behind them, holed up in insulated bivouacs, eyeing one another through frosted binoculars and dreaming of home.

Arjun is sitting up front in the passenger seat of the hired jeep. His cameraman, a photographer and I occupy the seats behind. The driver, a local man lost inside an oversized jacket, drives in silence. At one stage, he turns on the radio, flits between channels, locates some crackling pop music and then, with a grunt of displeasure, turns it off.

The quiet returns. We journey on, no one speaking, all of us adjusting to the altitude and the vast, impregnable stillness of the landscape.

Arjun breaks the silence to point out the Dalai Lama’s summer palace, lying in the valley below, across the Indus. Nestled amid a copse of slender willows, a rarity in the desert terrain, the retreat itself is hard to make out. Prayer flags flutter among the leaves, yellow as custard, waiting tentatively for the wrenching hand of autumn. Further along, Arjun calls our eye to monasteries perched impossibly above on mountain clefts, serene Buddhas locked away in their own meditative bliss. Stupas stand as sentinels around them, warding off the world outside.

About halfway into the drive, we approach a small roadside hamlet. Arjun requests the driver to slow down. He indicates for us to look to the right. Lining the road is a row of single-storey buildings. Square and squat, they match the houses in other wayside settlements along the way. Yet these are different. They are all
squashed beneath a snowdrift of black, stony earth, each building frozen in time, as if captured on black-and-white camera film and then forgotten on the cutting-room floor. Several roofs have collapsed. One house has the boot of a car projecting out of what was presumably the garage.

‘Mudslide,’ Arjun says. The driver recognises the hateful English word and wrinkles his forehead grimly.

Nearing an army outpost, we drop down from the road into Changa and cross the fast-flowing Indus via a solid steel bridge. Doubling back along the river, the jeep climbs up and out of the drab, colourless village and trundles towards a ridge in the road. Prayer flags stand at intervals along the route, the Buddhist equivalent of traffic cones. Other than us, the road is empty of vehicles. Across the brow of the hill ahead, a faint dust cloud rises. The driver shifts down a gear and brings the car to a halt. Arjun alights and walks towards the ridge, camera in hand. He returns a couple of minutes later, his face aglow.

As we pull out, the source of his excitement comes into view. Down below, spread out over a huge field of scrubland, is a sea of white. Thousands upon thousands are gathered, too many to count. So many people, so much life, it’s as though the gods have pitched a fairground in the desert. Were it a mirage, the scene could not be more surprising.

The photographer winds down the window and immediately starts shooting off frames in rapid succession. He doesn’t stop, not even when we reach the waiting crowds and friendly hands of welcome mob the jeep. We pull up in a caravan of buses and trucks. Vehicles have been arriving since first light, bringing men and women – young and old, Buddhist and Muslims, monks and nuns – from every corner of the valley. Each volunteer is dressed in a white prescription T-shirt and is awaiting the starting bell.

We make our way to the field, pressing through the crowd of onlookers at the entrance gate. Individual teams, five or six people strong, stretch down to the banks of the Indus. Each group stands in the square plot assigned to them. Everyone has an implement with which to dig: some have spades and picks, others nothing
more than sticks and stones. They sing and pray and talk and laugh, a burble as sweet and pure as a mountain stream.

A local reporter is interviewing the Chief Forest Officer. The excitable official is talking ten to a dozen. Trees firm up the soil, staving off soil erosion and preventing landslides, he’s explaining to the camera. He numbers off their other benefits on his finger: more tourism, less ‘toxins from cars’, a nice aesthetic.

The reporter thanks him and turns the microphone to Arjun, whom he recognises as part of the event’s organising committee. ‘So, a
Guinness Book of Records
attempt here in Ladakh today,’ he says. ‘Tell us, how did this come about?’ Arjun repeats the account he first gave me back in Chittaranjan Park: about his initial idea to offset the carbon emissions of the Commonwealth Games, about how one million trees will need planting and how his Holiness the Gyalwang Drukpa had agreed to help. Twenty-seven thousand trees planted in one hour is the current record, he clarifies. ‘Today we’re aiming for fifty thousand.’

A sudden shout goes up. The crowd surges forward. Cutting Arjun short, the reporter mumbles his appreciation and rushes off. His Holiness has arrived.

We too edge forward. Shaven-headed monks with gleeful faces strain to catch sight of their spiritual leader. Villagers too stand on tiptoe, levering themselves up on the shoulders of those in front. As they stretch, the brightly coloured cummerbunds holding their robed garments in place poke out from under their T-shirts. As one, the crowd inches forward toward a scaffolding dais in the middle of the field. Their every step is accompanied by the blare of trumpets and crash of cymbals.

Ahead walks a stately entourage of a dozen men and women, ceremonially attired in traditional Ladakhi costume: flowing robes of silk and velvet, elaborate brocade, black fur headgear, all with loops and twists, bright buttons and silver piping. His Holiness climbs the dais steps. He salutes the crowd. A green flag is raised and the Indian national anthem sung. Then, with a sudden explosion of digging and dust, the record attempt is under way.

I stand there in awe, seeing the seed of Arjun’s idea take root before my eyes. I turn to congratulate him, but find him gone. I look around. Bent-backed volunteers radiate out in every direction, all of them clouded in dust as they scrap frantically at the earth.

I look back and forth, until I finally spot him. He’s off to my left, several plots away, crouched down beside a young woman with pigtails running down the length of her back. A child sits at her side, three years old at most. Arjun is watching the little one as she stretches forward and places the tiniest of saplings in the hole her mother has dug. New India is being born. His face is turned away, but I can tell that Arjun is smiling.

The jeep pulls up along the kerb and I clamber out onto Ghoom high street. Perched on a windswept ridge along the winding road to Siliguri, the air is thin and damp.

Darjeeling would be visible in the foothills below if the clouds were not so attached to the place. The hilly contours and chill winds draw them to Ghoom, just as harbours call in ships from the sea. Today, as usual, a soggy blanket of wet cloud drapes the mountainous settlement in grey. It sits there heavy and snug. There is no sign of it lifting.

Outsiders rarely stop here. Tourists pass through in the pre-dawn mists, racing to see sunrise at nearby Tiger Hill. The narrow-gauge steam train tarries longer, pausing for breath before its descent into Darjeeling. Its passengers huddle in the warm cocoon of their carriages beneath wool scarves and thermals. They rarely, if ever, alight.

It is fifteen years since I was last here. I remember the day I first arrived. It was early evening. A former monk had driven me pillion on his motorbike along a precipitous back road from town. The power supply had just ground to a halt throughout the valley, as it would do every day thereafter. Night came early to Ghoom back then.

I recall entering the monastery and how a flickering candle flame illuminated the abbot’s office in an autumnal glow. The rest was pitch-black. I fought back the tears as I sat in the cold, bare room that was to become my home. Washing was impossible. The water bucket in the outside bathroom had frozen over. I climbed into my sleeping bag that first night and tried to sleep. In the early hours, I woke to the tinkling of a small bell. It was coming from the next-door room. My neighbour was undergoing a lengthy spiritual retreat, I’d later learn. Every few hours through the night, the self-styled hermit rose to pray and ring his bell. Tomorrow would be better, I told myself.

And it was. Gradually, I fell into the rhythm of monastic life. My teaching load was slight. I had time to read, think and sleep. Over the months, my reclusive neighbour and I grew accustomed to one another, my radio in the morning compensating for his nocturnal incantations.

It feels strange to be back. Despite myself, I’d expected everything to be familiar. It isn’t. Recollections filter back to me, faint and blurred – the bend in the road, the railway track, the feel of moist air on my face. I wait for a bolt from the past. It doesn’t come. I feel disappointed and a little cheated.

I stroll back up the road and pass the shop fronts of Ghoom’s rudimentary high street. The place feels bigger than before, like an overweight version of itself. New buildings have cropped up. Old ones have expanded. Phone repair booths, an ATM and several cybercafes now mix among the time-worn convenience stores and roadside eateries. I look for the post office. Back then, before the world went global and shrank, the post office was my lifeline to home. I find it gone. Or not where I remember it.

As I near the end of the village, my feet urge me left up an inclining side road. I obey the impulse and turn off the high street. The lane passes a dimly lit butcher’s hut, half shop, half abattoir. The low-roofed building is grimy. Its unsanitised morbidity feels almost like an intentional affront to Ghoom’s vegetarian residents. Further up the hill, around a sharp bend, my feet come to a halt. A narrow slit opens between two houses, giving way to the tiniest of alleyways. I peer into the shady gap. It somehow seems familiar and I leave the road.

The track is overgrown. Its muddy path cuts behind a row of houses, over a foul-smelling stream and alongside some terraced vegetable patches. Dogs bark from behind gates and wire fences. The route climbs up gradually in gentle zigzags. The general direction feels right and yet wrong. I’m on the verge of turning back when I see a gate above. A white
stupa
rises grandly from a plinth to its right. It’s shaped like a sugary pear drop. ‘Sakyaguru Monastery’, reads a welcome sign – the site of my erstwhile teaching post.

I touch the gate and it swings noisily open on a pair of rusty hinges. A short flight of steps rises up in front. I remember a grander entrance, with a gabled arch and prayer flags. Unsure of myself, I ascend all the same. The steps lead into the monastery’s main courtyard. What used to be the main gate has been relegated to a side door, I now realise. Taking its place on the front side of the courtyard stands a new entrance. It faces directly down the valley. From the courtyard edge, a series of twisting, concrete steps leads to a sturdy road bridge, which crosses a muddy ravine and gives direct access back onto Ghoom’s high street. Another fifty yards and my winding ascent could have been avoided. My feet were right, but out of step with the times.

I find the monastery enveloped in fog. It feels empty and abandoned. Its physical edges are blurred, as if the building were sketched in soft-tipped pencil and then smudged with an eraser. Gradually, a thin film of dampness descends and settles on my clothes. It’s not long before the cold starts nibbling at my fingers and ears. I sit there in the clouds’ silent folds, hands clamped under my armpits, rocking to and fro against the chill air, as the past begins to peak out of the haze – first as suggestions, then as images clear and sharp. I close my eyes. There’s no sound except for the muffled sigh of the wind. For the briefest of moments, I’m eighteen again, my early life unveiling itself before me.

The experience is intoxicating: Morning
pooja
. The Lasar Festival. Breakfasts of unleavened bread. Chess in the sunshine. My classroom. Weekend escapes into Darjeeling. Tintin in Tibet. Steaming
momos
. Stodgy
thukpa
stew. Prayer flags. Conches. Cymbals. Walks in the hills. Home sickness. Kanchenjunga at dawn. The biting cold. Salty tea. Clouds, always clouds. Then it’s gone. The memories fall out of focus.

Feeling the chill creep into my bones, I get to my feet and walk around the courtyard edge.

The gate is not the only modification. A three-storey classroom
and accommodation block now stands where the secretary’s office used to be. Bamboo scaffolding still clings to one end. Across the courtyard, an old storeroom has been converted for an electric generator. The former kitchen, a subterranean burrow stained black with wood smoke, mercifully looks to have fallen into disrepair.

Not everything has changed. The temple, square and resolute, is parked firmly in the centre of the courtyard where it has always been. Its paint looks more weather-beaten than before, but structurally it is identical. Its signature prayer-wheels still cling to the perimeter wall, reminding me now, as then, of giant spools of bronze thread.

Around the corner of the temple, an elderly monk appears from a bank of cloud. His tread is slow, his back stooped. He reaches up a frail hand and pushes each wheel in sequence. The motion is gentle, a soft caress just strong enough to set the metal capsules briefly spinning. For a few seconds, his muffled mantras sail off on the wind, before the wheels stop turning and draw still once more. His arthritic circuit takes him around the next corner and out of sight.

I watch him disappear, wondering how many laps a lifetime’s circumambulations must come to.

My attention is diverted by the sight of a small novice monk skipping down the steps of the new accommodation block. His head is recently shaved and his maroon robe stained with dirt marks. He is wearing a pair of plastic sandals over thick socks.

I beckon him over. He trots across the courtyard and stares at me in amicable silence.

‘Is Tashi Sangpo here, do you know?’ I ask.

He looks me up and down, smiles ever so slightly and then scurries back inside without a word.

Tashi was my closest friend at the monastery. He’d have been twelve or thirteen years old then. Assigned as my aide, he would wash my clothes, bring me my food (I ate alone in my room) and collect my post. All the senior monks had a similar arrangement, the monastic equivalent of army officers and their batmen.

This servile relationship made me feel acutely uncomfortable. And so I’d try and find ways to offer Tashi something in return, to balance things out. I taught him to play cards, lent him my Sony Walkman and shared whatever gifts – mostly chocolate and boiled sweets – that arrived for me in the mail. Each of my interventions probably went against the monastery’s rules, which were strict and unbending back then. The novices had only a few weeks’ holiday per year, were permitted to watch television only one evening per week and would regularly feel the sting of the teacher’s cane.

In fact, one of the most graphic and lasting images I have of my time at the monastery is Tashi’s thrashing. I was sitting in my room, which was located on the second floor above a small courtyard. The elevated position gave me a good view of the classroom below. The sound of yelping reached me first. As I neared the window, I saw Tashi being dragged through the classroom door. The prayer master, an ox of a man, had him by the ear. I watched as he tied a rope around Tashi’s wrists and tethered him to a wooden pole in the yard. Tashi let out a gut-wrenching scream. The burly teacher ignored him, turning around and pacing back to the classroom. He returned brandishing a thick wooden stick.

What followed next has shamed me ever since: I retreated to my bed. Pressing my hands over my ears, I fought to shut out Tashi’s cries and wish myself somewhere else. Anywhere but there. It wasn’t my place to intervene, I told myself. Even so, it was a long time before I could look Tashi in the eye again.

Another monk emerges down the steps. He is in his late twenties and his hair is receding sharply at the temples. Above his robe, he’s wearing a Manchester United tracksuit top in regulation red. Like the younger novice, he too looks at me quizzically.

‘Tashi?’

‘Yes,’ he replies hesitantly.

‘You don’t recognise me?’

He looks at me blankly.

I hand him a piece of lined paper torn from a child’s exercise book. I’d found it hidden among the sheaves of a diary from my time at the monastery. The page contains a letter to Tashi’s uncle.
A practice exercise in his twelve-year-old hand, marked up with my red pen:

Dear Akula, Amila is comes in Sonada to grandmother . . . I think your exam is finished. How like exam? I think your exam is good . . . Ani Ikhcho marriage has finished because I did not goes in marriage because this time I am goes to puja.

Gradually he puts the pieces together. I watch with anticipation. He looks up and grins. ‘Mr Oliver?’ His face lights up in surprise. In his wide smile, I catch a sudden glimpse of the young boy I’d once known. A wave of emotion washes over me. We shake hands (monks don’t hug). ‘But you cut your hair!’ He holds his hands around his head, imitating my curly bouffant of the time. The recollection gives us both cause to laugh and, more importantly, to adjust to the passage of time.

Tashi, I learn, no longer lives in Ghoom. He hasn’t done so for more than a decade. Not so long after I left, he transferred to another monastery further down the valley to complete his education. For the last three years, he’s been based in Kathmandu at the International Buddhist Centre. With enthusiasm, he tells me how he’s studying to become a translator. The news heartens me. He is back at Guru Sakya Monastery for a brief holiday. His return bus to Nepal is booked for Monday first thing. Today is Saturday. He invites me to hang out with him until he leaves.

Blessed with a kind heart and gentle spirit, Tashi always struck me as being well suited to a religious life. The same could not be said for all his classmates. Some were terrors. Many have moved on to other things, Tashi tells me. A few joined the Indian army. A few others, the police. A substantial number left to get married, including Thupten Chopal. I remember Thupten well as he was particularly unruly. According to Tashi, he’s doing well for himself. He now runs a clothes stall on Darjeeling’s Nehru Road. Among the other names I recognise are Tempa Sangpo, who drives a taxi in Sikkim, and Gunden Sangpo, who now lives in Germany with his sister. Of his fellow pupils, one – Kunga Sangpur – has died. I try hard to recall the face of the young monk and feel guilty that I cannot.

After a quick tour of the monastery, where I find my old room covered in lichen moss and devoured by woodlice and damp, Tashi suggests we head into Darjeeling. As with Ghoom, I find the former British hill station familiar yet different. The sight of Glenary’s bakery and the forlorn Planters’ Club fills me with a pleasant, comforting nostalgia. So too the starry-eyed honeymoon couples and the pony wallahs in Chowrasta square, the dilapidated Oxford Book Shop and the resilient Anglican church. Much of the rest, however – the Rink Mall on Ladenla Road, the hectic Doroga Bazaar, the United Colors of Benetton store, the new-build hotels that sprout across the hillside – sits at odds with my memory of the place as a docile mountain haven.

That evening, over soup and dumplings in a ramshackle eatery back in Ghoom, Tashi and I chat about old times. Towards the end, I bring the conversation around to the beating. He looks at me curiously. What beating? Then he remembers. ‘Oh, that. That was nothing,’ he says, brushing off the event with a laugh. The teacher is now the abbot, he tells me. Tashi talks of him with great affection. ‘Things are different now,’ he assures me. ‘Many of the older monks have passed away. The younger monks are more relaxed. We have our responsibilities, but discipline is less.’ The students are no longer beaten, for instance.

The revelation takes a moment to sink in. The memory of Tashi’s beating –for reasons both of its physical barbarity and my own lack of temerity – has hung over me for years. For Tashi, on the other hand, it is buried away somewhere in the past. Just one occurrence among thousands in the helter-skelter process of growing up. Change is like that. Helicopetering back in, every new addition seems stark and sudden to me, like looking at a ‘before’ and ‘after’ photograph side by side. The intervening years, the transitional steps, are brushed aside. To Tashi, the pace is more gradual. Over time, he’s absorbed the idea of himself speaking English fluently or having a Facebook account. These things are no longer a surprise to him. No more than waking in the morning to find himself an adult and not a twelve-year-old boy.