We had been in Machu for almost a month when we were summoned to the police station. It was the moment we had both been dreading. Leaving the country surreptitiously, as Tsedup had, could incur a serious penalty or worse. We had heard of others who had returned and been temporarily imprisoned. We had no idea what to expect. I said a silent prayer the night before that no harm would come to him.
The next morning we pulled into the forecourt of the police station, which was the first building on the tarmac road into town. It was of the usual concrete variety, three storeys high, glass-fronted, with the scarlet and gold emblem of the police force hung above its pillared entrance. The third floor was shielded by a large net curtain and was reserved for karaoke parties. The place breathed boredom. Apart from a builder toiling leisurely in the corner of the yard, there was no one in sight. We got off the bike and I followed Tsedup up the steps into the cool of the entrance. It smelt of dust, and I was surprised and momentarily delighted to see Tashintso. She sat in the dark reception room behind a sheet of glass on which were written various scarlet characters in Chinese and Tibetan. She wore her conscientiously pressed dull green police uniform, and a coquettish smile. 'Cho demo,'' she giggled in greeting, as we took seats in the black plastic armchairs opposite her kiosk. Beside her sat another young woman, identically dressed, who smiled shyly at me from beneath her permed fringe. A pile of paperwork sat neatly at the side of their desks, which were otherwise bare. Tashintso came round from behind the glass partition and said something to Tsedup, then she disappeared out of the door and I could hear the clump of her heavy high-heels down the corridor.
'Will they want to see me?' I asked Tsedup, taking advantage of the last few moments alone. ‘I have no idea what to say.'
'Just leave the talking to me,' he said.
But I wasn't reassured. What if they wanted to see us separately? It was like our interrogation at the High Commission in Delhi all over again, but this time more serious. However, I hadn't realised that I would be excluded from the grilling, simply because no one spoke English. A few minutes later Tashintso returned and signalled for Tsedup to follow her. He left, and I sat chewing my lip and studying a calendar with a picture of a tree in blossom beside a lake. The scene did little to pacify me and I imagined that the young policewoman sitting across from me would confuse the thudding of my heart with the thumping of her rubber stamp on the crisp white sheets before her. The main responsibility of the office appeared to be the endorsing and renewing of identity cards for the local population. She stamped face after face. The blood pulsed in my eardrums. My palms stuck to the chair.
Soon Tashintso returned and put on the kettle to make me a cup of tea. It seemed a ludicrously civil thing to do at the time and I felt slightly more at ease. She beckoned to me to come round the back of the screen into their small section where she drew up a chair for me and then pulled out her knitting from the drawer under her desk. As if this were a signal, the other policewoman stopped her stamping and took up her needles from a stool by her knee. Then Tashintso struck up a conversation with me as the pair of them clicked away. She was fashioning a brown tank top with a rather intricate pattern for her husband, and her partner was putting the finishing touches to a fluffy blue jumper for her baby son. The corridors were silent and Tashintso's sporadic giggling and the relendess tick-tick of the needles echoed down the halls. I wondered in what deep recess Tsedup was cornered and strained my ears for a voice. But I heard nothing, except the twang of a plucked guitar string in the karaoke room upstairs and a gurgle as the kettle began to boil.
Tashintso poured us tea and distracted me effectively with idle chatter for some time, until I became increasingly aware of the surreal quality of our situation. There was I, a western girl in full nomad attire, sitting opposite two Tibetan women knitting in police uniform. Whenever their superior passed the office they deftly concealed their handiwork and stopped giggling. Upstairs a policeman was practising the guitar for the evening's party, while I imagined my husband in a cell suffering interrogation under a stark lightbulb. I began to laugh, only gently, of course, but it helped to relieve the exhaustion my anxiety had inflicted and I was grateful for the moment of irony.
After two hours and several cups of tea, Tsedup emerged. He looked fine. He asked me for our passports, which he gave to Tashintso, and spoke a few words to her. Then they laughed and I realised that everything must be all right. 'Come on,' he said. 'Let's go and get some food.'
In the Formica back room of a restaurant we slurped our noodles and he told me what had happened. The sergeant was Tibetan and very amenable, although curious. Once he had established that Tsedup had no political motivation, they had shared tea and enjoyed a long, convoluted discussion about life in the West. Tsedup had paid a small fine and his file had been closed, the 'black mark' removed. The sergeant had even been generous enough to offer to assist us with extending our visas, which we had feared would be impossible here. I was speechless and euphoric all at once and, since we were in a private room with only the buzz of the strip-light for company, I jumped up and hugged him.
We had been spared the third degree and I felt lucky that day. Police dominance of the local community was widely known. But I discovered that later, although policing the population was the responsibility of the local force, there were other important figures in the nomadic community who played a part in maintaining social order.
Tsedup's step-grandfather, Azjung, 'uncle', was something of an éminence grise. For the nomads of Machu, his role was greater and his title more hallowed than any state authority could bestow upon him. For Azjung was a Sky Man.
Nam Nyeur, Sky Man, or ancient man, is the name given to an old person by their people. The title is not appointed, but means that that particular person has come to represent the last of a generation. They bring the past into the present with their story-telling and have remarkable powers of recollection. Since the nomads have no written history, it is the responsibility of the Sky Man to continue the oral history of a people. He is the text. The tradition carries with it enormous responsibility in terms of morality, for it is the Sky Man's duty to resolve domestic disputes among tribes by his wisdom. Most tribespeople carry the stories of their forefathers with them and retell them throughout their lifetime to the next generation, yet Azjung carried between five hundred and six hundred years of stories passed on orally from generation to generation. He was considered particularly sharp and could mediate to solve problems with a superior knowledge of historical precedents, selecting and recounting exact times in history and relating the stories of past events to clarify and resolve a present situation, so that the grieving or avenging parties may know how to follow the right path. He also had the power to set new precedents for future reference, providing the disputing parties both agreed to his proposal. This was nomad law.
Of course, if a story was very old, it might take on mythical proportions, accruing layer upon layer of embellishment from circling around the people of this land. The exact words of a particular figure in a tribe's history could be invented and reinvented, along with their emotions and thoughts, for that is the nature of story-telling. A story-teller must have an audience and the audience must be amused.
Nam Nyeur may also be female and the nature of a woman's wisdom and story-telling may be of a different nature altogether. Whereas a Sky Man tells of conflicts in battle, disputes over territory or livestock, a Sky Woman usually has a female audience and her stories provide more of an insight into intimate relationships. Thus she may tell of marriages, love or family concerns and disasters, and just as the old stories of the Sky Men assume mythical proportions, so the tales of the Sky Women are, in their turn sometimes romanticised. For that is often the nature of women.
On the afternoon of the interrogation we visited the Sky Man. He and Tsedup's grandmother, Ama-lo-lun, lived at the monastery with Tsedup's brother, Cumchok, and his nephew, Tinlee, who were both monks. The monastery stood at the top of a hill above the town at the end of a winding track; it was small in comparison with the palace of Labrang, yet still elaborate enough to suggest its spiritual significance in the community. It sat among a jumble of small dwellings ramshackle and tumbledown, inhabited by the monks, the whitewashed walls propped up by tree-trunks stripped of bark, each with a wooden door, leading to quiet courtyards, books and rooms of contemplation.
We stopped outside one such door in the labyrinth, and as we pushed it open a small brass bell tinkled above our heads. The sound was not enough to alert the tiny aged figure who knelt on the veranda opposite, bent over like a dried piece of leather. Ama-lo-lun continued sorting through a pile of dried flowers, oblivious of our presence, her careful handling of the blue and yellow blooms interspersed with prayer. But as we crossed the bare courtyard and came up the dirt path towards the wooden house we called out to her and she lifted her head, not knowing us for a moment, her pebble eyes squinting. 'Sou ray? Who is it?' she exclaimed, and then as we came closer she remembered: the One Who Is My Heart.
She cried out Tsedup's name and we helped her to her feet as she clucked in appreciation and led us back down the steps of the beautifully made house. It had been built for Cumchok at Amnye's instruction, but Azjung and Ama-lo-lun had their own small hut to the side of the courtyard. It was meagre by comparison: small, with a turf roof and a dirt floor, a sleeping platform, a stove and one window, glassless but covered in dusty plastic, which had weathered and torn at the corner. Dust had settled deep into the skins on the bed and the pots hanging from the wall were soot-stung and blackened. I smelt dried meat, earth and strong tea, as the dented kettle steamed and the fire crackled and spat out the husks of dried grass from the dung. They seemed to have only the barest necessities, a habit that had lingered, no doubt, from two nomadic lives. It is customary now for elderly nomads to settle in a house when their bodies can no longer endure the hardships of weather-beating and work, but a roof over the head does not quell the nomad spirit. Azjung and Ama-lo-lun looked every bit as wild as they sat on the dirt floor in their sheepskin tsarers and served us the bitter, black tea. They were exactly as Tsedup had described them when we were in England. In the years while we waited for his documents he had feared that they would die before his return, but it had not been too late and that day, watching them together, I was moved.
Despite his years, Azjung was a remarkable-looking man: his old skin was taut on his skull, like stretched hide, over cheekbones smooth as stone; beneath his shorn head his brow was as square as the thin line of his mouth, and as he turned to lift his bowl I saw that his nose was not flat at the bridge, as many Tibetans' are, but ridged and aquiline, almost aristocratic. He smiled at me and the deep sockets of his eyes were filled with a dark sparkle.
Ama-lo-lun sat before us fingering her prayer beads, her lips moving rapidly as she mouthed her silent mantra. Her shock of dreadlocked grey hair was woven into two miniature plaits, one on either side of her neck, which protruded rakishly like two stick antennae. Around her neck she wore a tangle of religious adornments: a string of ivory prayer beads, a small, faded silk purse containing blessings, and a piece of frayed, luminous green ribbon given to her by a lama. Her tsarer seemed as old as herself, a crush of matted sheepskin and faded trim, beneath which she wore a soiled, bottle-green sweatshirt turned inside out. Her small face was a lattice of furrows and her green eyes burned, keen and sharp, darting from face to floor to space, observing everything and missing nothing. Occasionally she would laugh, a curiously girlish outburst, and punctuate each sentence, each pause between sentences, with 'Oh, yeah,' muttered through toothless gums.
The Sky Man spoke to Tsedup in a low voice while bent double over the prayer beads that he fingered slowly and methodically in his big hand. His sunken cheeks filled and puffed out the words in a throaty resonance. He had a presence, as if time itself had settled around him like a cloak. Azjung was not only a man with a good memory, he was living history. He listened carefully to his young relative and gave ponderous, methodical answers, smiling benignly. He wanted to hear about the West and Tsedup told him. Occasionally he laughed huskily at something ironic or surprising, relishing this new knowledge and storing it for future reference. New stories from a new world.
As they sat talking by the fire, which belched out a small cloud of smoke now and again, I felt humbled by the spirit of this old couple. They had enormous dignity, and it struck me that, because of the importance of oral tradition here, they had attained the respect they so rightly deserved. It was clear that the more old people talked, the more others listened. Their wisdom could directly affect the morality of a society and they were therefore placed at the top of the hierarchy and were profoundly revered. I had always felt that there was so much more I could have learnt from my own grandmother. I had tried to suck up her words as we sipped tea from china cups, the clock ticking on the sideboard, the dog snoring in the chair. She was my history. But, in the West, the war stories of a pensioner are often discarded as of little consequence. The young audience are too busy to listen, too bored by the past. In a fast-moving world there is no time for stories, no fire to tell them around. And the spark of imagination died with TV.
Tsedup listened respectfully to the old man, laughing with him, debating, learning. Sometimes they fell into quiet, intimate discussion, and I could hear the steady chink of the prayer beads and the squeak of Ama-lo-lun's prayer wheel as it spun in her bony grip. She smiled at me with such warmth that I was reminded of my own grandmother. They shared the same strength of character honed from years of experience, both diminutive but powerful women, their bodies decrepit but their minds alive with wisdom, defiance and raw energy. My grandmother had loved Tsedup because she sensed his respect for her. When she died, he telephoned his family to tell them. They asked for her name. He told them Lily. I could hear them pronouncing it tentatively down the receiver. Then Ama-lo-lun and Tsedup's mother came to this monastery and asked the monks to pray for her spirit on its journey to the next life. One hundred butter lamps were lit for her here on this hillside. A life that had begun in 1910 in the depths of suburban London, had ended with a tribute by Tibetan nomads on the Roof of the World. It was memories such as these that made the polarity of our cultures and their fusion seem even more remarkable.
Before we left, Azjung took a small felt holdall from inside the musty cupboard. Tied carefully inside it was a small polished bowl made from a light substance. He said he didn't know whether it was wood or fungus. It had been in his family for four generations and his ancestor had paid for it with a yak. It was obviously of value. A Tibetan's prize possession, along with the obligatory knife and tinder box, is their own bowl, so it was a great honour when he pushed it into Tsedup's hand and told him to keep it.
We closed the wooden door behind us and heard the familiar tinkle of the bell. Time had stopped in the dark dust of that hut. I could still hear the voice of the Sky Man and it was no longer a simple resonance, a vibration on the dirt floor and soot walls, but the echo of a thousand forefathers in my ears.