He didn't come home for a while. But it was no longer childish obstinacy that kept him away. Tsedup's friend, Nawang, had been shot a few weeks ago. A man from a distant tribe had tried to swindle his brother, Tsering Samdup, during one of their gambling sessions. The man had ripped off Tsering Samdup's enormous coral necklace. Nawang had got involved, and in the skirmish, the man had pulled a gun from inside his leopardskin tsokwa and shot him in the back. The bullet had passed right through him and out. There had been a lot of blood, but he had recovered well and I discovered that Tsedup had accompanied him to Labrang to the hospital there for a check-up. It worried me. At times like this I was all too aware of the lawless nature of this place.
In the week that followed I remained in the safety of the family home. Since Tsedup had left, I had become accustomed to sharing my sleeping quarters with a whole new collection of life. As usual, I awoke to a small bird scrabbling in the eaves above my head. I watched the outline of its body as it shuffled between the fabric pinned to the wooden beams. It had somehow found a home between the wood and flower-print material and I listened to the rustling of the straw against its feathers. Next to me, the old flea-ridden bitch lay snoring quietly, content to be free of her yapping brood, though on most nights the pups joined us and scrabbled and whined in the straw next to my head. Their mother had recently taken refuge with me in the clay hut, since the nights were freezing and she was no longer as hardy as the other dogs. Behind the woven sacks, saddles and plastic drums of frozen curd, a small rodent called an abra had set up residence. It was much prized by the nomads as a creature of gentle nature, which had been known to exhibit domestic tendencies, accepting tempting treats from outstretched hands, sometimes sitting beside the fire with a generous child. At night it scurried across my bed, furtively seeking out scraps to nibble, and left a pile of droppings at my feet.
That morning, however, I woke to someone walking on the roof and the shrill tones of Shermo Donker, ordering everyone in the house out of bed. If I had had glass in my window, surely her dulcet tones would have broken it. As usual, there was no response from the slumbering Tsedo and I lay drowsily, tasting the wet snow on the sheepskin around my face from the night's light fall, feeling a faint rumble in my stomach. Her persistent shrieks eventually roused him and the rest of the family, and a small commotion ensued outside in the yard. I could hear a ripping sound and was curious to see what I was missing. I disentangled myself from the considerable mountain of quilts and peered through the window. In the yard, not five feet from me, I saw the enormous carcass of a yak, half skinned, legs akimbo, the taut flesh of its stomach stripped pink and naked, steam flushing from the deep gash carved in its chest. Tsedo and Annay Urgin were butchering it. Both were panting from the effort of cleaving this vast beast and their breath clouded white in the hazy morning sunshine. Shermo Donker was running around fetching huge cauldrons in which to spill the fresh blood and her brother, Rinchin, had his arm inside the yak's strained neck, rummaging around for something. I decided to lie down again for a while and let them get on with it. The sounds of cracking bones and swilling blood, flaccid organs flung on to plastic and snapping tendons entertained me for a while, then I got up. I went to the house to watch the proceedings from the window, respectfully muttering, ' Ommani padme hum,' as I passed them.
From inside, I could hear their chaotic chatter and intermittent bursts of laughter. The children were all helping to pare the yak and one of the puppies was tearing excitedly at an enormous pile of offal, until it was dragged away by Sanjay. Tsedo came to the window to sharpen his knife on a stone and I saw the skin of his forearms stained crimson. An enormous liver sat on the gatepost and various organs were trailed along the wall like washing on a line. Soon the job was done. Tsedo came in and sat with me while I prepared him a bowl of water to wash in. 'Our Amdo home is not good,' he said. I thought that maybe he was unsure how I felt about the killing. I knew how much he regretted his task, but we all realised that we couldn't carry on eating just tsampa every day. The kill was long overdue. Until the next death we would have good food.
As they prepared the offal, I played with the children. They were a wild bunch, fascinated by everything and constantly asking me questions. Sometimes I would find one of them alone in the hut, rooting around in my rucksack for a new oddity from the West. As with every day, I took out my book of blank paper and a pen to write, and within moments it was wheedled from my grasp by small, furtive fingers. They wanted to draw. I don't know if they had ever drawn before I came, but I suspected not. It had become a new delight for them, and a fascination for me. It had started with me drawing for them, then I had encouraged them to try for themselves. At first they had touched the paper hesitantly with the end of the nib, intimidated by the white space, then gently and slowly they made tiny shaky marks, maybe a few squiggly circles, not really trusting themselves. As they gained confidence they began to draw yaks, horses, sheep, and eventually people. By now they had each developed a style. Dickir Che drew large, deliberate figures with huge round heads and stick arms, Dickir Ziggy's people were covered in intricate checked clothes and had tiny facial features, while Sanjay's people sometimes had no bodies at all, just heads, arms and exaggeratedly long stick-legs. It reminded me of English children's early drawings, known as 'tadpole men', a primitive body image. Sanjay's drawings were less developed than the other two children's.
I offered him my pad and asked him to draw his mother and father. Instead, he drew his grandmother, Annay Labko, large on the page, then his grandfather, Amnye Karko, smaller, and then Gorbo, with no body. All had enormously long legs. Gorbo was a tadpole man. These three were Sanjay's most treasured relations. As the smallest child in the family, he was unashamedly spoilt by his grandparents, and Gorbo was his hero; I wasn't surprised that he had preferred to draw them. In nomad society it was usually the grandparents who had most physical contact with the children, hugging and kissing them frequently, while their parents seemed more inclined to discipline them. Sometimes, Shermo Donker was particularly hard with the children. She barked her orders at them as they scurried around performing tasks for her. When they fell asleep at night on the floor, she sometimes wrenched them up by the arms to put them to bed, bellowing their names at the top of her voice. I saw their tiny faces contorted with discomfort and heavy with sleep.
The children were always looking nervously at their parents to see if they could get away with doing something and were often seen as a nuisance. If they leant on me affectionately they were reprimanded for getting in my way, and if they scribbled on my drawing book, they were told to stop because they didn't know how to draw. I knew that Tsedo and Shermo Donker were trying to make life easier for me, but I didn't mind the children. I tried to encourage them as much as possible, whenever possible. But I was not naive enough to spoil them. I was aware that without discipline a nomad child possesses the innate qualities of a feral beast and will run wild through the vast grassland unhindered: I knew that Shermo Donker loved them. She was always telling me how good it was to have children and how Tsedup and I should have one soon. I had been thinking about it a lot. I had never spent so much time with children before and I had discovered they made me happy. I thought how good it would be to have my own family.
Sanjay giggled and chewed his dirt-encrusted finger as he surveyed his creation. The snot dribbled from his nose.
'Marger! I can't do it,' he said.
'Warger! You can do it,' I replied.
He was a tiny boy for a six-year-old. Tibetan children were generally much smaller than their western counterparts, but even among his nomad peers Sanjay was small. He was an excellent mimic, copying Tsedup when he sang English songs and making the whole family laugh. Now, bored with drawing, he went outside and ran around pushing a small wheel fixed to a metal rod. He reminded me of a Victorian child with his simple toy.
I gave Dickir Che the pen and asked her to draw something, but she hesitated. Although bossy, she was the least confident of the three. I could feel her desperation for affection in the way she clung to me. Unfortunately, at eleven she was too old to be sweet, and her attempts to attract attention meant that she still spoke in a baby voice and recounted any random piece of information to the family, no matter how mundane, to entertain them. Consequently, she was largely ignored. But she was my great companion, and I loved her.
Dickir Ziggy snatched the pen from her elder sister and went to sit in a corner, where she aimed, no doubt, to draw better pictures than any of them. As she drew, she talked incessantly to herself in a hyperactive babble. I felt that if any of the children should go to school, Ziggy should. She was amazingly quick with numbers and had so much energy and enthusiasm that she didn't know what to do with. She was also very affectionate and would often spontaneously take my hand or hug me.
Afterwards we sat outside in the sunshine and made clay animals, which we painted with water-colours. The children were pleased with the results and lined them up on the window-sill of the hut to dry in the sun. Then Shermo Donker shouted something to them and they scurried off. I watched them from the house as they ran across the far hill in the morning sunshine chasing a stray yak. They called to me, 'Ajay Shermo, Ajay Shermo! Aunty, Aunty!' and I called back across the flat plain, my voice carrying to the depths of the deep shadow at the foot of the hill where they now stood, like matchsticks in a row, waiting for my reply.
That afternoon I saw two distant figures hunched over a hole in the ice of the frozen stream. Dickir Che was helping her father, Tsedo, to wash his clothes. They were scrubbing furiously and occasionally rubbing their hands together for comfort. Shermo Donker had refused to wash them. She had found them filthy in a rice sack and had quickly folded them up and put them away again, giggling with me. Was this nomad feminism, or just common sense? Obviously Tsedo was proud enough of his appearance to risk losing his fingers from frostbite, and Dickir Che would do anything to help.
That evening, when the children had gone to sleep, Tsedo, Shermo Donker and I washed our hair together. The iron stove was well stoked and we sat around in our T-shirts in the stifling heat and took turns to pour warm water over each other's heads from the kettle. They were very impressed by my shampoo. 'Our hair is so soft,' they said, after using it -sounding, ironically, like an advertisement. I laughed. Tsedo and Shermo Donker insisted on regular beauty sessions, and I loved the intimacy of these evenings. With Amnye and Annay away, the atmosphere in the house was far more relaxed, and we laughed and joked outrageously sometimes. Dado, a young man from the tribe, dropped by on his way to hornig and we teased him about not having a wife. He was only twenty-three, poor fellow. Luckily he could take a joke. He asked for a hairwash too, then rode off to impress some girl.
The skin on my hands had become ingrained with dirt and had cracked open in places. I realised that I now had the hands of a nomad woman. At least part of me was like them. I guessed it was because of their exposure to such extremes of temperature and that it was impossible to keep them clean; no matter how often I washed them, they were dirty again within minutes. The winter dust was everywhere.
Going to the loo was now something of an endeavour since, on bad days, the wind gusted through the valley, bringing small cyclones of spiralling dust and billowing clouds of grit. We often went in twos for comfort, and that night I pulled up my kirchi as far as I could when Shermo Donker and I braved the night. We crouched next to each other in the darkness on a slope of dried grass and rocks at the side of the house. The wind was howling eerily and a shape was moving in the blackness. I began to feel uneasy. The nomads were firm believers in ghosts and I was becoming influenced by their fear. I had always been afraid of the dark and this land had been the site of much bloodshed. And Tsedup had told me that people had been abducted by ghosts. I had been sceptical, but as I felt the cold fingers of the frosty night air on me, I wasn't so sure. 'Did you see it?' I whispered to Shermo Donker. She shuffled over and gripped my arm. We peered anxiously into the ebony night as the sound of panting got louder. Then, in desperation, I turned on the flashlight and two eyes shone back at us. It was the dog. Cherger began to jump all over me in greeting and to lick my face, threatening to push me over. I laughed and stroked him. He was warm and his thick fur crackled with static and lit up in magical, neon-green flashes under my hand.
There was no threat of me being mauled any more as, under Annay's supervision, I had spent many days in the summer offering him scraps of dried meat to befriend him. Now he was my good friend. I was part of the pack. He even preferred me to Tsedup. When we pulled up on the bike outside the house and the dogs raced out to attack, Tsedup asked me to call to them, to pacify them. Because he was often away they weren't sure how to treat him. The dogs were fiercely territorial: even Rhanjer, who visited the family every day from his own home, was attacked regularly by the bitch, who seemed to have a personal vendetta against him. There were always fights outside between them, as she lunged at him and he beat her off with a stick. He didn't live in the family so he was not part of the pack. The rules were simple. I felt honoured that I had been accepted.
The next day, I climbed up the foothill of the mountain behind the house with Sanjay and Tselo, Annay Urgin's little daughter. They ran ahead of me, like goats over the rocks, as I puffed my way to the top, feeling the full weight of my tsarer. We sat in the tall grass on top and surveyed the land. Below, the house looked minuscule and isolated within the enormity of the arid landscape. The valley floor stretched away from us down to the glistening river and the blue mountain ranges. Beyond, the tips of the powder-white snow mountains flecked the horizon. Above our heads, hawks spiralled on the warm thermals in the sunlight. We played for a while, then the children scrambled back down the hillside, as I paused to watch the last light sinking behind the silhouette of the Ngoo Ra, Mount Silver Horn.
A shock of grey cloud drifted like a deep canopy above the orange and blue dusk. Pockets of phosphorescence illuminated the distant glaciers on the other side of the Yellow river, and a chill breeze rustled the dry grass at my feet. I could hear the children singing and their voices echoed in the valley among the bleating sheep and lambs as they called them to their corral for the night. Sanjay was now trundling around on his bike and crashing every so often. He had wanted a bike so much that he had said he would sell one of the puppies to buy it. Tsedup and I had saved him the trouble and now it was his prized possession, his only possession. He had tied a yellow prayer scarf around the handlebars as if it was his favourite horse and I watched him mounting it, as his father did his dapple-grey, swinging one leg up and jumping into the seat. His excited squeals carried to me on the breeze.
Gorbo was on the other side of the rocky stream, herding the yaks home for the night. I could just make out his orange hat as he came towards the house between the mountains on his horse, accompanied by a ewe and her lamb that had strayed. The mass of yak hoofs tripped across the valley like showering pebbles and crunched across the ice of the frozen stream. I could hear the whir and crack of his sling, as he chucked a well-aimed stone at a wandering yak. He was singing. His voice rang out clearly and soulfully, alternating between high and low pitch with a gentle vibrato, in the style of a traditional Tibetan song. The words were swallowed at the end of each phrase in a blunt staccato and the rhythm wove a steady pattern, almost hypnotic in the twilight, rebounding and reverberating up the valley.
It might have been a song of love or a song about his land: the mountains, the air, the light, the flowers, the life of the animals and their intrinsic value. Gorbo had said he wanted to be a bird. When he herded in the valleys, he would look up and wish he could be there, soaring over the mountains. In song the theme of nature was always used as an image of man's profound emotions. A song would be riddled with metaphor and had a unique relevance to the people of this land; Machu was renowned all over Amdo for its talented singers and many of the best Tibetan songs came from here. The Amdo people were imbued with the spirit of the land and their lyricism was a direct reflection of the profound love they felt for their culture. They sang with a raw energy unmatched in western society. This was a place where young lovers still sang across the valleys to each other; the two would spontaneously construct a song using metaphor and innuendo. These love songs, called kabshat or lazjhee, literally 'mountain song', were the most beautiful. They were flexible in their subject matter and might contain messages of love or teasing and sarcasm. It depended on the singers' mood. Sometimes they would deliver a verse alternately, which resulted in witty retorts, as each tried to come up with a better reply than the other. It was a formidable challenge and required a creative mind – but, then, they thought in that way. In Amdo, everyone was a poet. It was no exaggeration.
The music was often sorrowful. Amdowas had a strong sense of identity, an unfaltering concept of home, and an acute sense of the visual. Their vocabulary directly reflected this and they had a stardingly subtle variety of adjectives at their disposal. They had specific words for each minute colour variation of their horses and that colour could not be used to describe anything other than a horse. I was often reminded of the inadequacies of my own language in this respect, as some things were impossible to translate without sounding clumsy.
Tsedup's cousin, Lugerjar, was a singer-songwriter famed throughout Amdo. He made his living producing audio cassettes, which were sold across Tibet, and running the local School for the Performing Arts. I was privileged to have heard him sing for us one night in a restaurant. It was a melancholy sound, a lingering, crystal vibrato. He delivered it with passionate force from the pit of his solar plexus. Everyone stopped eating when they heard it:
Another relative, Choegetar, had just produced his first cassette. He was the one who had sung the reunion song for us in the tent when we had first arrived home with Tsedup. His music was haunting, revealing the drama and strife of this land, and now that I knew more about him I understood why. A few years ago, his father had been killed over a land dispute. All of his sons displayed creative tendencies -Choegetar's younger brother, Sherab, had published a book of poetry, and the youngest, Jachwar, was a dancer and singer at the local School for the Performing Arts – and their work was imbued with a sensitivity and an acute sense of empathy that perhaps is only felt by those who have truly suffered.
But not all nomad lyrics were sorrowful. At our marriage blessing in England our Amdo friend Lamakyab had stood at the altar and read Tsedup and me the words to a lazjhee.
I had also heard Tsedo and Rhanjer chanting aloud a traditional rhyme that chronicled the transition of the various stages of winter, which were split into units of nine days:
We were deep into the winter and still had a long way to go before spring. I regretted that Tsedup and I would not be here then: we would be leaving, and as the daylight hours shortened I knew that our time here was running out. We were somewhere in November and my awareness of the date was gradually becoming all too keen. We were dreading going back to England and the closer it came to the end of December, the more sad and reflective we both became. I missed my family and it would be good to see them and our friends, but we also had responsibilities I would rather have forgotten about. Our days of living in the wilderness were drawing to a close. London and a mortgage beckoned. I had also missed Tsedup's parents while they had been in Lhasa. They were due to return soon and it would be good to spend some time with them before we left.
A few days later the children came running breathlessly down from the mountains, their sacks bulging. They had been collecting grass worms. Previously I had denied the existence of a worm that could turn into a piece of grass, dismissing it as a Tibetan myth. I had heard many things, but this topped the bill. In England I remembered Tsedup telling me that in Tibet there was a tiny dog that was known to hatch from an egg. I had trouble swallowing this one too. But in the case of the grass worm, I was disproved. Indeed there did exist a worm that grew fungus on its head in autumn, which looked like grass, then died. It was called yarsa gunba. The Chinese used it as an expensive medicine, and at this time of year the nomad children were despatched by their parents to collect as many as they could from the mountains to sell in town. They were pleased with their haul today, but were even more ecstatic to be able to inform us that they had seen the tolla bringing Annay and Amnye up the track to the tribe.
Sure enough, the rickety vehicle was chugging towards us in a dustcloud. We hadn't had snow for a month now. It was bad news for the road, which, through lack of moisture had achieved the consistency of powdered turmeric. It was like driving on a beach. That day the wind was up and the powder enveloped the tolla in whipping clouds as the hunched figures of Tsedup's parents clung on tightly and lurched through the landscape, their faces covered with scarves. They pulled up at a distance, as the Chinese driver was nervous of the dogs, and the children ran whooping and squealing from the house to greet their grandparents. Annay Urgin, Shermo Donker and I followed and helped to unload the sacks and boxes that Annay and Amnye had brought back from Lhasa. Everyone was talking at once, grinning and laughing, happy to be reunited. The dogs were barking and jumping around Annay excitedly. Sanjay was pulling at the skirt of her tsarer and Dickir Che clung, chattering, to her grandfather's arm.
Then, in the commotion of voices and fervour of chuckling faces, Annay asked, 'Where is Sirmo?'
There was silence. It was the moment we had all been dreading. Annay and Amnye would have to be told that their daughter had eloped. But who was to do it? Shermo Donker busied herself silently with the luggage. I stared at the ground.
'She's gone,' said Annay Urgin. 'We thought you might have heard on the way.' This sort of news travelled fast.
'No,' said Annay, her voice quavering. She began to fuss with the dogs while Amnye spat the dust from his mouth. An uncomfortable lull descended on the welcoming party.
Inside, Annay cried. Amnye sat quietly in the other room with the children. I could hear him asking them where his daughter had gone. He asked Sanjay, Dickir Che and Ziggy, but none had the courage to answer him. They shied away, sensing that something wasn't right but not fully understanding what.
That evening, Tsedup returned. As promised, it was only the presence of his parents that had brought him home. Despite the circumstances, I was excited to see him as his bike screeched to a throbbing halt in the yard and his dust-clogged hair flapped around his face. He was followed by his brothers, Tsedo, Gondo and Rhanjer, who pulled up behind. When the whole family had assembled in the small house, there began a heated discussion. Tsedup challenged his father over the schooling issue, but with less force than I had anticipated. He had cooled down now, and was capable of discussing it man to man. Indeed, his relationship with his father had changed from when he was there last. He had told me that he didn't really talk to him much, apart from the obvious 'Can I borrow your rifle?' requests, to which his father usually replied no. But Amnye was jubilant to see Tsedup again and must have realised how much his son had grown up since he left. Just as Tsedup had noticed how old his parents had become. But I also realised how nervous of Tsedup his family were sometimes. Apparently he had always held strong opinions, but now that he was a man he could be quite intimidating. The iron stove pumped out heat and the air was thick with smoke. Shermo Donker and I sat on the floor and I slipped her a sip of my beer every now and again. She giggled quietly as Amnye railed in the corner and Annay sat rocking on her haunches, cuddling the puppies for comfort.
'One day he will leave her,' repeated Amnye, over and over again, as he coughed on his cigarette. He was angry with Sirmo and Chuchong. The match was clearly not approved. He seemed suspicious of her suitor and I supposed he thought it a weakness in Chuchong's character that he had stolen his daughter. Didn't all fathers deserve respect? But he didn't just blame Sirmo's unexpected new husband. As he debated with his sons, I discovered that he had anticipated the possibility of his hot-headed girl's flight before he went to Lhasa. He had implored her not to run away while he and Annay were gone and she had agreed. Now he knew she had ignored him and he was furious. He knew that Sirmo had gone to a huge family and would be living communally with them all and he insisted that, over time, she would not get on with so many in-laws. Only if they were given their own home would Amnye agree to give Sirmo her share of the family wealth that was due to her. As a new bride, traditionally, Sirmo should be lavished with silver, coral, turquoise, new leopardskin tsarers and her own quota of yaks.
Amnye slept outside that night beside the clay house where we stored the meat. He had missed Amdo when he was in the city and had had enough of sleeping on beds, he said. As for the food, he told us he preferred plain Amdo fare. He had dreamt of a bowl of tanthuk. Lhasa had changed beyond recognition. Now it was another Chinese city: too many people, too many buildings. Tsedup and Tsedo tried to dissuade him from sleeping outside, as he clearly had flu, but he grunted obstinately and they tucked him up on the frost-bitten ground. The sand blustered around his head, but he didn't care. He needed to feel the earth again.
Two days later the mediator arrived, a goblin-like man. His name was Garsay and he had been selected by Sirmo's new family to act as go-between in this most sensitive of issues as it was not appropriate for the two families to meet. He arrived from Sirmo's tribe in the morning and Amnye entertained him, despite the severity of his illness. The diminutive man had brought cloth from the groom's family as an offering. The exchange was heated, Amnye speaking most. The mediator was there merely to listen and relate Amnye's words to the unfortunate new bride and her in-laws, but he was in for an earful.
We sat in the adjacent room, sewing quietly and listening to Amnye's passionate protestations. 'Zuncha ma, liar,' he said, over and over. Sirmo had lied to him by leaving. Annay interrupted his stream of invective with her own hysterical tirade, until Tsedo told her to shut up. She came out to sit with us by the clay stove, muttering to herself. Shermo Donker and Annay Urgin tutted along. From the huge mound of matted sheepskin piled between them came a faint odour of damp and cheese. They were making a tsokwa for Dado, who needed a wife. I asked them if Amnye had been as angry when Tsedup had run away all those years ago. They said no. No doubt, it was different for boys. Then Annay Urgin stopped sewing, as if recalling a moment from that time. She told me that Amnye had cried when, after five years of no communication because the mail hadn't got through from India, he had received Tsedup's first letter. I realised how devastating the waiting must have been for him. Although I was ignorant of the subtle complexities of matrimonial negotiation, I thought it strange that such a sensitive man wished to punish his daughter. For I had heard his ultimatum.
'She is not welcome back here,' he bellowed. 'Not until this problem is settled and they are given their own home.'
The goblin shuffled out of the door, somewhat abashed, followed by Amnye and Tsedo. I knew that when he returned to Sirmo and related her father's words, she would be unhappy. This dispute had signalled a real rift from her own family. She had been banished until the negotiations were complete, and how long that would take nobody knew. She would be missed. Tsedup and I would probably not see her until we returned to Amdo, and we had no idea how long that would be. As Garsay mounted his horse to ride back to the other tribe, Annay waved the cloth he had brought. 'Look, we have swapped our girl for this!' she cried, as he disappeared down the dusty track.