It was the end of September. Or perhaps October. I could never be sure. I had stopped measuring the days. To begin with I had kept my diary, but as one day drifted inconspicuously into the next, if I missed an entry I lost count. It was a strange feeling. Soon I felt the ridiculousness of monitoring each day as the family looked at my Filofax with bewilderment. It seemed out of place. When they saw all the phone numbers in the address section they were amazed. So many friends, they said. What they didn't grasp was that half of the numbers were required for the exhausting practicalities of urban living: the Gas Board, job contacts, pizza delivery. My only concession to time-keeping was my watch, which I could not abandon.
Of course they knew what date it was, but it wasn't the same: their time is laid down according to the sun, moon and the passage of the planet Jupiter around the sun, which marks a sixty-year cycle. Each sixty-year period is broken into five blocks of twelve solar years. Each year is named after an animal and an element, so that year, 1998, was the Earth Tiger year. Every year the most important festival, Losar, which usually falls around February, marks the annual passage of the sun and is a time of New Year celebrations. Around that time, the astrologers of the Lhasa Menzikhang are responsible for calculating next year's calendar. The solar year is divided into twelve lunar months and the Tibetans schedule all of their festival days according to the phase of the moon during these months. Many days are auspicious and some inauspicious. But my knowledge of their calendar system put an amusing perspective on the Millennium fever in the West. It was all rather inconsequential here, as the Tibetans were already enjoying the year 2125.
Without any real sense of time measurement I was learning to be more responsive to the changing seasons. One morning I woke, stepped out of the tent and turned to pass alongside the stream gushing freshly from a night of sky-falling. The sight of the snow-capped mountains sent my spirit soaring. I stood still for a moment and breathed in the moist air, watching the yaks grazing silently on the cloudy prairie. The land was changing. What had been a lush, emerald carpet flushed full with wild summer flowers of blue, violet and yellow, with skylarks whistling up out of their ground nests, was now a rough ochre expanse of autumnal shades. Welts of black earth and mahogany dung-spread patched the umber grass where the yaks were tied at night. Dotted about the encampment, like miniature mountains, were sculptured mounds of dung, taller than a man, some composed entirely of dense faeces, caked dry and smooth like an upturned mushroom head. Others were carefully constructed from dung pancakes, dried in the sun and arranged like intricate, vertical parquet flooring. Downwind the cliffs cleaved by the Yellow river stood like black scarps, shearing into the mud current that churned round the bend. The air was chilly these days and given to gusting under the lip of the katsup, threatening to carry off the tent on some blustery nights. We would huddle inside, drinking tea from soot-sprayed bowls, while outside the tethered yaks hugged the ground for comfort, those exposed at the end of a line catching the worst of it. For me, the component conspicuously missing from this autumn experience was the chorus of shivering leaves on creaking boughs, since as we were above the tree-line, there were no trees.
But winter had not yet taken a hold and we could still enjoy bright, hot days and sun-blistered cheeks. There was a change in the routine of the tribal workload. As we now had enough butter and cheese to last the winter, Amnye had given his permission for the yaks to be milked once a day only. Shermo Donker seemed happier. At this time the women were busy with textile chores and fuel preparations for the cold months ahead. Over the summer months they had collected yak wool in sacks and now they spun it into yarn for weaving. One morning, I helped Shermo Donker, Sirmo and our neighbour's daughter, Dolma. We emptied the raw fluff on to the tent floor and sorted and thinned it out by tufting it with our fingers, removing stubborn clumps and matted shanks. Then, inside the tent, I watched as they laid out yak skins to sit on, threw the good wool down and, with two long canes apiece, beat the hell out of it, until it rose and fell so lightly in the wake of each beat, it resembled spun sugar. Then they twisted it into stiff coils. All the while they joked and laughed until their cheeks flushed crimson and the sweat shone on their temples. What I could not gather of their conversation from my limited Tibetan, I could easily grasp from their blatant gesticulations and from their eyes, which sparkled with mischief. The topic, of course – what else when a gaggle of girls is out of earshot of their menfolk? -was sex. They were keen to draw me in and soon we were all hooting together. The black tent sucked in the heat of the noon sunshine and steep shafts of light cut through the roof, revealing the churning dust in the sweaty air. They became so hot that they took off their tsarers and sat on their knees in their leggings, teasing each other about the hottest parts of their anatomy, gesturing with their canes.
That day of the beating drums, of sweat and innuendo in the smouldering tent was revealing to me. Again I observed that although the women were quiet and obedient in front of the men, especially the older generation, at these times alone, they were bewitching, and their earthy humour was a welcome release. I was enraptured by them. They were clever, beautiful, spirited women, full of energy and life.
The next day they were up early spinning the yarn. They employed the children to sit in the hot sun and pull the strings of a small wooden instrument with raddles attached that turned on each tug, twisting the wool into a single-ply thin thread. The thread was gently eased away until the women stood at a distance of fifty metres, then trained straight over a pole and hook to keep it from the ground. When the yarn was plied they laid it on the grass to roll into a ball, then returned to repeat the process, until soon there were several tens of lines of black yarn stretched out on the ground.
Beyond the toil I could see our neighbour, Dolma, weaving a length of black fabric on a loom. It was triangular in shape, constructed of three vertical poles supporting a warp about a foot wide, which was spread flat on the ground. Bent double, she beat down the slack after each weft with enormous strength for such a slight girl, and as she worked she sang. Her voice carried to us on the westerly breeze. I joined her and she showed me how to do it.
I had studied weaving at university, but this was something else. With no treadle on the loom to pump with your foot, the fibrous yak yarn had a tendency to stick. To make a shed between the warp threads, I had to push a length of heavy wood between them and turn it upright, then slide the ball of weft through the space. Without a shuttle to feed the weft through, it was a laborious process. Still, I persisted and she laughed kindly at my efforts, sniggering and covering her impish face with her hand.
She was a cheeky girl of sixteen, with wide, almond-shaped eyes and red cheeks, which she diligently rubbed with white face cream. She wore a rawa, a length of red silk fabric embroidered with coloured stripes, which was sewn to the hair on the crown of her head and fell right down her back. Attached to the fabric were four huge, convex silver discs, covered in rich patterns. In the middle of each was a large coral stone. Above these were four smaller silver discs and three smooth amber stones set in silver. At the bottom of the fabric, five red tassels sprouted from thin silver tubes. Around her forehead she wore a gorji, a thick headband of huge lumps of old amber. This elaborate costume proclaimed her of pubescent and therefore, datable, age. She didn't wear it all the time, I presumed because it caused some discomfort, especially when it came to sleeping. Her mother, Annay Urgin, would sew it into her hair and she might wear it for a week or two, then take a break for a couple of weeks.
A few of the other girls in the tribe also wore rawa. The headpiece was handed down from mother to daughter throughout the generations. The girls would wear them for a year or two, then abandon them and begin to braid their hair in the style of the older women, with two plaits joined at the back. Until not so long ago the women wove their hair, in the traditional fashion, into 108 tiny plaits. That is a Tibetan's auspicious number, the length of their prayer beads. Tsedup remembered his mother having such elaborate hair, but today, although this hairstyle was still worn by some of the women I'd seen in Machu, it wasn't in our tribe, except for a special occasion, such as a marriage. It was considered too laborious a task.
Dolma and Sirmo were best friends. They were related too. Dolma's mother, Annay Urgin, was a real character. She had seven daughters by five different men and had never been married. This was not a problem in the tribe, although for Annay Urgin it was sometimes difficult because there were no men in the family to slaughter her animals. At these times she had to rely on Tsedo to help her. She lived next door to us with Dolma and her youngest daughter, Tselo, as all of her other daughters had married into other tribes and one daughter, Dado, was at school in Gannan. But despite the harshness of her existence, Annay Urgin never stopped laughing. She was the warmest and most earthy woman I had ever met. She was often in town visiting her sister, which left the tent empty for Dolma and Sirmo to have their sleepovers. I had often heard them giggling long into the night, though exactly what they got up to was a mystery to me. If anyone knew about 'the beautiful one with the earring', it was Dolma. I asked her if she knew Sirmo's lover's name.
'Chuchong Tashi,' she said, tittering, as if she had betrayed a secret. 'He's very beautiful.' We laughed.
I was clearly becoming as fervent a gossip as the other tribeswomen. 'Does he have a good heart?' I asked. The nomads used this expression to mean 'kind'.
'A very good heart,' she confided.
I was satisfied. I had Dolma's testimony and was one step closer to uncovering the mystery, since Sirmo was not forthcoming.
That afternoon we made dung mountains. The children made round pancakes of dung and spread them out in rows to dry in the sun. Then we collected yesterday's, which were now biscuit crisp, and stacked them methodically, artistically too, on top of each other, like overlapping dominoes, twisting round and round until we had made a large cone. This ensured that the dung inside would stay dry and protected from rain during the winter months. When it was required the fuel would eventually be transported to the winter house in the valley, and also to Annay and Amnye's house in the town.
The rest of the day was devoted to felt-making. Amnye was spreading sheep's wool on to a plastic sheet beside the tent and sprinkling it with water. He rolled up the sheet as he went, until he had formed a long cylinder with all the wool wrapped inside. His job done, he retired to the tent to smoke and play cards with his friends. I joined Annay, Shermo Donker, Sirmo, Dolma and Dickir Che and we formed a line on our knees in front of the trunk of wrapped wool. We rolled up our sleeves and began pummelling. Like all nomad tasks, it looked easy and, like all nomad tasks, it wasn't. The idea was to push the cylinder forward with the length of our forearms and let it roll back, rhythmically, with an even distribution of weight. Within a few minutes, I had developed a rash from the friction of the wool's coarse fibres on my work-shy, soft skin. But I laboured without complaint and accompanied the others as Annay led us in a counting song:
Little Dickir Che looked up at me and laughed as I started them all singing in English:
Even Annay was cackling and pummelling and struggling to form the words.
We continued in this fashion for an hour or so, until the welts on my arms had formed welts of their own. My face was stinging from the heat of the afternoon sun. Their familiarity with the outdoor life had given them naturally ruddy cheeks, but I resembled a lobster. They urged me to stop and go and rub on some butter to soothe my skin, while they saw the job through until nightfall.
The autumn heat had not only fired the women, as I had seen the day before, it seemed to have brought about a rise in activity among the teenage boys of the tribe. I was beginning to notice a pattern to each evening. On one particular night after dinner in the tent, a few boys turned up. They had come for Gorbo. They sat with us and ate as they waited. One was Wado, a tall lad with a permanent gormless grin. He was a bit of a clown and looked far more clueless than he was. His father, Athung, had been brought up with Amnye, and Gorbo and Wado were cousins. Tonight, under his tsarer, he sported a garish, silky, flower-patterned shirt that he had instructed his mother to make for him from a scarf he had bought in town. He felt rather special, but his new look caused an uproar in the tent. Tsedo and Tsedup teased him and slapped his back. ' Yucka!' they cried, choking and spluttering on their noodle soup. He continued to grin gormlessly.
Accompanying him was Rinchen, Shermo Donker's youngest brother and a real Artful Dodger. He stood sniggering and hanging on to the tent pole by the fire. His head was covered in stiff stubble with bald patches where the razor had gone too far. He sniffed intermittently and wiped his nose with the back of his grubby hand. He had the same wide mouth as his sister and a huge silver hoop hung from his earlobe. He was fourteen but looked about eleven, such was his diminutive size, and this was his first night out with the older boys: his initiation. He was nervous. Tsedo and Tsedup gave him beer then spent the next hour teasing him as he reeled drunkenly, guffawed loudly and puffed on a cigarette, attempting to look grown-up. Meanwhile, Gorbo rummaged around quietly in the drawer under the altar and found what he had been looking for. He knew that Ells had given some perfume to Sirmo and, rising awkwardly from the corner of the tent, he moved among us in a pungent cloud of Chanel No. 5. This produced more laughter from the family. The boys were really going for it that night. They were on for a serious hornig.
Hornig was the nomads' dating game. I had laughed when I had first heard the word as it sounded strangely familiar. These boys were indeed horny as hell. Their task was to set off into the night on horseback or on a yak and seek out young girls in their tents at night. They often travelled miles under the stars if they had heard of a particularly beautiful young girl who lived in another tribe. Or they might have glanced at her in town or on the open road. The trick was to find one who was not 'locked in'. If a girl was locked in, it meant that her parents were in the tent with her. She could not be wooed. I had heard tales of boys being chased away by fathers wielding knives and throwing cooking pots. It was best to be careful. But the real art to entering a tent was to get past the mastiffs, a potentially life-threatening task. The boys each carried a chukgor, a steel weight on the end of a long leather thong, which they swung round threateningly in huge arcs as they approached the dogs on horseback, creating a path as the animals snapped crazily at their heels. When a dog got too close, its strangled cries rent the night sky.
A boy's second most prized possession was his torch. He was lost without it. Once inside the tent, he would seek out his loved one among the mass of her sleeping brothers and sisters, then silently lie down beside her. He would wake her and, if she liked the look of him, he would be permitted to stay. If not, he would be told to get lost and his quest would be over before it had even started. This was the young Romeo's first hurdle. It was easy to see how hornig might be a soul-destroying experience for less attractive wooers. But if a boy was considered desirable he would stay and talk with the girl, perhaps sing her an Amdo love song. Thus it was also imperative that he could sing. A girl would often judge him on the quality of his voice and those with a bad ear were at a major disadvantage. Despite the pitfalls, there were no hard and fast rules to hornig. A boy could roam freely until dawn from tent to tent, night after night, in the most promiscuous fashion, or he might find love and return again and again to the same girl. This was how the nomads eventually found a marriage partner.
For me, hornig seemed so mysterious and romantic. Here were all the ingredients of a first-rate drama: secrecy, danger, love and courage. I had visions of battling dogs, swaying torchlight and love songs whispered on young lips. Even these young boys, so unpractised in the art of seduction, were gallant in a way that had become old-fashioned in the West; this kind of custom did not translate into my culture. There, the most the average teenage girl could hope for was the promise of a slow dance and a grope in the dry ice at the local disco. As the boys swaggered out of the tent that night, I wished them luck and wondered what it was like for them to brave the night.
Perhaps I would never have found out if Tsedup hadn't stayed in town one night the next week, for then I shared my tent with Sirmo. As we lay down together, I noticed that she had on all of her jewellery, which I found curious. She usually placed the enormous coral beads and silver earrings by her pillow at night when she slept in the main tent. Still, I was green in these matters and didn't question her. We gossiped under the covers until I slipped into a deep slumber. Later, I woke in the darkness and heard her whispering to herself. Then I heard a young man's voice whispering back. At first I thought it must be her brother, Tsedo, but the voice was not sonorous or deep. It was the voice of a young man, not more than twenty perhaps, and they were talking to each other at great length. There was a man in our tent! Could it be Chuchong Tashi, the beautiful one with the earring? He was behind us, very close. I could feel the pressure of his head or his arm on the sheepskin pillow between us. I thought him most brave to have dared to enter the tent in the dark with me there and most stealthy to have reached his position of intimacy close to her by the tent wall. I lay motionless and listened curiously, trying to regulate my breathing so they would think that I was asleep.
'Hja serro! Yellow hair!' he exclaimed at one point, and I could feel the warmth of a torch bulb on my cheek as he amusedly examined the foreigner next to his love. I struggled to stop my eyelids flickering, listening to his horse outside, the chinking of the stirrups and bridle as it stood patiently in the moonlight. They talked for what seemed like hours, but I didn't understand a word. When I heard the zip opening on her sleeping-bag, I prayed they wouldn't be getting any more intimate – I was not that flagrant a voyeur. I must have drifted back to sleep for when I woke she was there in the candlelight and he had gone. She climbed into bed and leant over me to extinguish the flame but found no breath for a while and, unable to contain myself any longer, I laughed as she puffed, at last acknowledging that I was awake. She told me nervously that she had just been outside to the loo. I didn't say a thing.
I settled back into the folds of blanket, smiling silently. I had experienced a hornig, and even though it was not my own, I had still felt the thrill of it. Now, whenever I heard the baying of dogs and the dim thud of horses' hoofs around the tribe at night, I would know.
The next day I stayed silent. I had resolved not to divulge my secret to anyone, not even Tsedup. I felt I had trespassed on Sirmo's private moment and in the stark light of morning I felt cheap. But it soon transpired that Sirmo's business was to become a matter for the whole family.
One morning I walked into the main tent and Tsedup and his mother were arguing. Annay was crying as Tsedup berated her. He was frowning and worrying at a piece of bone with his knife as he addressed her sharply. I felt uncomfortable and sat down and ate my tsampa quietly as the two harangued each other.
'Namma, Tsedup is not good,' Annay said to me, through her tears. 'He's always telling me off.'
I had no idea what they had been talking about, but decided it was probably best to remain impartial. I was upset to see him treating his mother like that. She was an emotional woman at the best of times, but to have her son speaking to her so harshly was too much.
'Tsedup, have some respect,' I implored. He had sounded authoritarian, like a father talking to his child. But I realised that, despite the atmosphere of hostility, the family were getting closer. Now that they had returned to normal family squabbles Tsedup had truly settled in. The strange time of reunion and self-assessment was over. Tsedup had the confidence to act in this way. He was no longer racked with guilt for having run away and he had left behind the peculiar limbo state of his early days at home, when he had been struggling to find a foothold among the people he had left behind. I had watched him tentatively reasserting himself, reacquainting himself with his nomad ways and reconciling his modern mind with his past values. Today he seemed strong and very much at home, if a little petulant.
I asked him what they had been arguing about. It was Sirmo. Her lover had proposed to her. With a thrill of recognition I realised that I had probably witnessed it that night in the dark of the tent. This morning Tsedup had walked in on his mother worrying and fussing at Sirmo. 'If you can't make your mind up, make sure you don't get pregnant,' she had said, never one to mince her words.
Sirmo sat embarrassed, churning milk in the corner of the tent and blushing. As a private sort of girl she was visibly cringing. It reminded me of myself and my own mother. But Sirmo's family were concerned for her: she was the youngest girl in the family, maybe even a little spoilt, especially by her father, and they wanted the best for her. Was it the right thing to marry this boy?
Tsedup knew that his mother had been applying the pressure. He accused her of pushing Sirmo into marriage. The older nomad women were always telling Sirmo she was getting old and should find a husband, and Tsedup was sick of it. He urged Annay to leave Sirmo alone. She was only twenty-one and, as far as he was concerned, she was too young to get married. It was a grievance that, as a nomad man, he would not have expressed and I could see how much the West had influenced him. He turned to Sirmo: 'You're too young,' he pleaded. 'Why don't you wait and do some different things with your life? You'll find someone later on.' Then he continued to rail against his mother, who wept into the sleeve of her tsarer. Sirmo sat subdued in the corner, quietly churning the milk and staring at the hem of her skirt, listening as they discussed her future. She didn't say a word, and whatever she held inside, she did not share it.
For some light relief, when Sirmo had finished churning I suggested we go out and wash the clothes together. We carried the load in a tin basin down to the stream, crouched in a hollow of the bank and scrubbed as the hot sun shimmered on the wet pebbles. She didn't sing.
'You are still young. Don't rush into marriage,' I said.
'I am old, Shermo,' she stated matter-of-factly, and with what I felt was a glimmer of irony.
'No, you're not.'
'Yes, I am.'
It was useless to argue. What was young for me, was not for her. Here people married in their teens and to stray too far into your twenties without finding a mate was frowned upon. I just didn't want her to feel pressured into marrying Chuchong Tashi. If she chose him, I hoped he deserved her. Dolma had said he had a good heart and I hoped so. It was really none of my business what she chose to do. I was imposing my western values, as Tsedup had.
We didn't speak any more. She sighed and the corners of her mouth curled up into a curious smile. I wondered what she was thinking.