‘She sells sea-shells on the seashore.' The next day Rhanjer was in full swing. Having mastered the basics of the English language he was feeling rather pleased with himself. The tent was full. The rest of the tribe had allowed us time last night for the joyful reunion but now they flocked impatiently to see Amnye Karko's son. Everyone seemed to be a relative. There were hordes of dreadlocked children clustered in the entrance to the tent staring at the strangers. We sat inside breathing the thick, fragrant dung smoke, as the nomads talked together and the rain fell on the yak hair outside. It seemed that we had achieved minor celebrity status and I began to feel slightly self-conscious.
Last night had been a riot of excitement and talk before eventually we had retired to our white tent with Gondo and Rhanjer, who drank beer with their brother into the small hours. I had had an interesting time tackling an army of ants that had built a nest directly under my sleeping mat. This morning my parents were nursing pounding heads from a sleepless night of fear: the altitude, and the Tibetan mastiffs who had sniffed round their tent and barked all night, had sent them into pulmonary palpitations. Today we were all a little deflated.
But it was wonderful to see the landscape revealed now that the darkness had lifted. The grassland was lush and covered with summer flowers. Herds of yaks and sheep wandered the hillsides above the tents and as I looked down the valley I saw the Yellow river and the cobalt mountains of the Silver Horn range. There was an overwhelming sense of space. Machu had exceeded my expectations.
We ate breakfast in the main tent, then Tsedup and I were presented with our own tsarers, which my new sister-in-law, Shermo Donker, had sewn. Shermo was the title by which she referred to me and I her from now on. I had only been here a day and had already acquired two new names: Shermo and Namma. I was part of the tribe. My tsarer was made from thick black fabric in the shape of a long coat, trimmed with snow-leopardskin, silk and gold piping with a colourful woven hem called tugh. She had obviously spent hours making it for me. She helped me to dress, carefully readjusting the length until she was satisfied, then tied the long red sash, the kirok, tightly round my waist. I could barely breathe. But I felt the part.
As I sat quietly watching Tsedup, a thousand eyes seemed to bore into me, but there were smiles of encouragement from his mother Annay. She knelt by the fire, fingering her prayer beads in a steady rhythm between thumb and forefinger, mumbling the Tibetan prayer, 'Om mani Om mani Om mani Om mani,' a twist of religious tokens around her plump neck.
Behind her Shermo Donker, small and jumpy, giggled into her cupped hands and Sirmo, Tsedup's youngest sister, hid shyly in the back of the tent behind the crowd. She was tall and exquisite with full Cupid's-bow lips, a pale skin and soft, dreamy eyes that flashed when she smiled. She wore full traditional costume: her tsarer of emerald-green velvet, with six strings of coral beads around her neck. Across the top of her head and over her sleek black plaits, a string supported two enormous silver and coral earrings that dangled as low as her shoulders. I couldn't help but stare at her. She seemed so graceful among the bustling throng.
Soon the conversation turned to song as Choegetar, Tsedup's second cousin, took a banjo and began to pluck the strings. He sang an Amdo song of reunion, his voice rising in a clear vibrato, his eyelids flickering with concentration. It was dark in the tent, except for the slit of pale light and thin rain drifting through the gap in the roof. Everyone was dressed in traditional costume with about a kilo of coral necklaces apiece. Tsedup's father, Amnye, sat by the fire. He was a fine-looking man with dark skin and broad cheekbones, tight curly hair, a twinkle in his eye and a goatee beard. A wooden cosh protruded from inside his sheepskin tsarer and a cigarette from his mouth. He never smoked a whole one, kept half for later. Gorbo, Tsedup's sixteen-year-old brother, crouched by the dung pile, an enormous silver and coral earring dangling from his left earlobe. He sniggered as Tsedup strummed a western song, embarrassed by his brother's peculiar taste in music.
We had brought gifts for the family and handed them out one by one: a portable tent for his father to take hunting and the same for Gorbo; cloth for his mother; silver jewellery, perfumes and soaps for Shermo Donker and Sirmo; watches for Rhanjer and Gondo; boots for Tsedo and a kite for the children. They clucked admiringly. Amnye and Rhanjer turned each object over and over in their hands, studying them. As soon as the rain had abated we set up the tent for the children and they squealed around inside. 'Let's go and fly the bird!' they said. On the mountain it soared and arced in the sky as the sun beat down. They had never seen a kite before.
That evening, as the sunset spilled over the mountain, I watched Gorbo herding the yaks home. He guided them in on his father's white stallion, down through the valley from the higher slopes where they had spent the day grazing. My sister-in-law tied them up while the children chased the errant calves. I was introduced to my yak, Karee Ma, White Face, for the first time. Tsedup had asked his parents if I could have one of the herd as a birthday present a few years before. I approached her uneasily. She was the ugliest one of all, with a huge, white head and albino, pink-rimmed eyes. She resisted my wary touch. Still, we would bond in time.
Each day we were invited to a different tent and I was beginning to learn exactly what it was to be a guest of the nomads. Pride of place was always closest to the fire on the top right-hand side and this was where we always sat. Plates were piled high with momos, the traditional steamed parcels of meat, like miniature Cornish pasties, along with deep-fried bread, hunks of boiled meat and yak intestines stuffed with mince and black pudding. Djomdi, a mixture of small brown beans dug from the earth, rice, sugar and melted butter, was always on offer, a particular delicacy, along with a bowl of tuckpa, a soup of rice noodles and meat. All this was washed down with a bowl of strong tea. They watched us intently, constantly urging us to eat more with the command, 'Sou! Sou!' They didn't mind if we abstained, but in Tibet it is customary to offer hospitality to a guest. Annay said, via Tsedup, 'We cannot talk to one another, we do not understand each other's language, but I can talk to you by offering food. It is the only way that I can communicate with you.' Communication was not a problem. In the tenth home, I tried to remember the Tibetan for 'I'm full', as I chewed tentatively on another morsel of fat. I had never been a great fat fan. I was going to have to get used to it. I was going to have to get used to a lot.
I could already sense the tribe's acceptance of me, and was amazed at their spirit of generosity. Most had probably never seen a western person before and suddenly I was their relative. I remembered Tsedup telling me about when he had first seen western people as a child: a fat man with a ginger beard and a thin woman with sunken cheeks, two ghosts eating noodles in a restaurant. He had run away. He had never seen such ugly people in his life. Today no one ran, they just stared – at our long noses. They were proud: I was their Amdo namma and they called me that often, laughing.
I didn't look like your average nomad bride, after all. I was a curiosity. Mostly I think they were just happy to be accepted by us. Years of repression and reproach from their Chinese neighbours had led them to believe that other people saw them as a barbarian race, a backward people. As a child, Tsedup remembered the whole family travelling on a pilgrimage to Lhasa. They stopped on the way in Lanzhou. None of the hotels would have them so they pitched tent in a field in the city. He and his father and brothers went to buy food and when they returned the tent was surrounded by hundreds of Chinese and piles of bicycles. They all covered their noses with their hands. In the middle of the staring, pointing throng sat Tsedup's mother, nursing her baby and crying. Gorbo was two months old. It was then that Tsedup began to question his identity.
Amnye, Tsedup's father, told us that just before our arrival a man from a neighbouring tribe had returned home with his fifteen-year-old daughter. He was a nomad but had settled in the city with his Chinese wife. His daughter had never seen his home but when he brought her to the tent she would not go in. She recoiled in disgust and sat in the jeep crying. Today, the sense of relief was almost tangible.
My parents were shown particular honour and respect. They had wanted to witness the reunion, to see their son-in-law back with the tribe, and despite the hardships, they had made it. I was proud. Initially, my mother had found it difficult to cope: she couldn't sleep at night because of the dogs, her pulse was accelerated and she had dizzy spells. We feared it might be acute mountain sickness, in which case she would have had to be moved to a lower altitude. She felt like a neurotic westerner, but she recovered with the aid of Annay, who brought her samker, a mixture of barley, salt, milk and water, and prayed over her as Mum lay in her tent. Mum wanted to tell her that she knew how much Annay had longed for her son's return – she had her own son and understood her pain. She had wanted Annay to know how long she had waited to meet her and how glad she and Dad were to have her son in their family, but she couldn't. Instead she gave her a picture of Tsedup and me on our blessing day, laughing.
At every home the families thanked my parents for looking after Tsedup in England. They were fascinated by my father's gadgetry and much was made of the camera, binoculars, penknife and compass he had brought for the trip. The father of each family, and Tsedup's eldest brother, Rhanjer, would ask him endless questions about the West and he, with Tsedup as interpreter, responded enthusiastically to their thirst for knowledge of the outside world. They stroked his arm. Body hair seemed a mystery as they had virtually none of their own. They admired his portly appearance and hearty laugh, and they thought my parents were beautiful, especially my father's huge green eyes. Compared to Tsedup's parents they looked so young. In fact, Tsedup was shocked at how frail and aged his parents had grown over the years.
My mother's sketching skills were a revelation, and Annay and Amnye sat patiently for her as she immortalised them. The tribe never once seemed curious about her hands. As a child she had fallen into the fire and they were disfigured; a constant source of anguish for her. She often hid them when meeting people for the first time: she didn't want to shock them or have to explain. Unlike their western counterparts, even the children did not stare or point.
The tribe's encampment formed a large circle of twenty black yak-hair tents in the middle of the grassland, in the shape of a turtle. In Tibetan culture, the turtle is the symbol of water and earthly spirits, so a family's home is believed to be protected if they settle on land with either water or earthly spirits. All the tents faced due south. As the sun moved from east to west in the sky, the beam of sunlight that penetrated the slit in the tent roof moved from west to east inside, telling the family what time it was. It was very precise. At eleven o'clock when the sun began to bake the cool ashes at the side of the clay stove, Annay would call Gorbo to herd in the yaks for milking. Our tent had survived four or more generations. During the Chinese Cultural Revolution it had been purloined and used for yaks and sheep to sleep on, but half of it had survived. It was later given back and patched up by the tribeswomen.
Every tent looked the same inside. At its heart was the fire. Women sat on one side, men the other. Most had an altar in the top corner. A small cupboard contained pictures of Tibetan lamas, small, brass cups, thib, for filling with water as an offering and butter lamps burning fragrantly. An enormous vat of yoghurt, cooking pots, wooden pails, water barrels and the milk churner occupied the women's side. Then there was a mountain of dried dung, its size a direct reflection of the women's industriousness. (The bigger the better, it seemed.) To the rear, under a sheet of plastic, were skin-clad boxes of butter, sacks of barley, rice, flour, cheese, clothes and rush baskets of tea. An injured tape-recorder sat on the battery box. The nomads have discovered solar power and every family had a panel, which was placed on the roof of the tent each morning to catch the sun's rays. Everything had its place, and although the tent became dishevelled at times, with the children running around, people eating, mud on the mats, every effort was made to treat it with respect and it was frequently swept with a small brush made from twigs. (This produced an amazing amount of dust.) Before Amnye returned the tent was always tidied and the mats positioned neatly for him to sit on.
Our tent was inhabited by Tsedup's father, Amnye Karko, his mother, Annay Labko, Tsedup's elder brother Tsedo, his wife, Shermo Donker, and their three small children; also Sirmo, Tsedup's youngest sister, and Gorbo, his youngest brother. Our arrival had made it slightly more cosy than before. The remainder of his family had married away, which was a blessing, as there were eight of them and it would have been a trifle too cramped if they had stayed. Rhanjer, Tsedup's oldest brother, had his own family tent in the tribe. Thankfully, we had our own white tent to sleep in, as did Tsedo and his wife, which allowed for a modicum of privacy.
In the evening the tent was the best place to be. After the yaks had been tied up everyone sat around the fire and we talked and laughed, played cards and ate our supper, usually tuckpa or momos, which we made together. The children collapsed after a day of hard playing. There was a conscientious search for nits in their clothes, then they were put to bed in a row in a sheepskin, three heads poking out of the top. They lay listening to the soporific lull of family chatter in the firelight, the distant howl of a lone wolf, the dogs barking, their father sucking on his pipe.
The last few days with my parents were spent picnicking. On the first day, the whole family set up tent by the Yellow river – the Tibetans call it Ma Chu. We piled the children, food and tent into Rhanjer's truck, then bounced the half-mile or so through the grassland to the river on the back of the boys' bikes. Annay rode the stallion in a Stetson, one of the dogs running alongside. The flat plain was covered in flowers, and birds trilled. (Skylarks, my father said.) Butterflies flitted from daisy to daisy, and the misty mountains rolled on into the infinite haze of the summer-blue horizon. We made momos together as the sun shone and the children made flower garlands for our heads. Then they ran naked and shrieking into the water as Tsedup's grandmother cried out warnings from the hillside. The current was fast. The Yellow river had been given its name for a reason: it churned up silt into an opaque, ochre flow. Froths of bubble-mush collected along the banks. Tsedup showed off his swimming skills, while his brothers sploshed crudely. It wasn't appropriate for a woman to expose her flesh, so I watched jealously from the bank. Then we played volleyball until dusk.
On the second picnic, we made a trip deeper into the Valley of the Rocks to see Tsedup's uncle. His home was at the foot of a mountain. He had erected a tent for us on a grassy knoll and we sat inside and ate as the yaks grazed in the drizzle outside. Then we climbed to a cave high up on the side of one of the valley slopes. Outside it were the rubbled remnants of an abandoned chorten. It had been the site of worship for an old monk, a lama who lived in the cave three hundred years ago in complete isolation. He spent his entire life in contemplation of the holy mountain peak visible through the crack of light at the opening to the cave. When he died a rainbow took his soul, so the story goes. We looked down through the valley from our rocky outcrop. He had not been the only one to die here: on one particular day during Mao's Great Leap Forward, fifty women from the tribe had been widowed. When the fighting was over, they came down from the mountain to perform the traditional sky burial. It was usually the task of men. They had to scalp each father, son, husband, brother. Then they chopped up their bodies and left them as carrion for the vultures on a mountain peak.
As we said goodbye, Tsedup's uncle gave my father a book wrapped in soot-stained, burgundy cloth. It was a long, rectangular Tibetan manuscript, which had been in the family for generations and had survived burial during the purges by the Chinese. It was dedicated to the second reincarnation of the founder of Labrang Monastery, Genchen Jigme Rhongwo. It was three hundred years old.
The night my parents left Machu we all stayed in the town-house near the monastery. Tsedup's parents had invited them for a last supper. Annay walked the six-mile journey, since she couldn't face riding in the jeep my parents had hired – it made her sick. Amnye arrived from the town on his brakeless bicycle. The house stood in a field of tall grass surrounded by a stone wall. It was ramshackle with odd windows and two steps up to the wooden door. Inside were two cobbled rooms, a clay stove in the first. On the wall there was a collage of faded posters: a wooded lake glistening in the morning light; two fat cherubs holding a hundred-yuan note; galloping horses, snorting dragons, fierce tigers. There was a picture of Tsedup at school with cropped hair and flares, a skinny boy, smiling. Behind a woven cloth sacks of barley husks, stored for twenty years, nudged boxes of butter covered in skin. By the door was a collection of musty canvas bags, the brush made from a yak's tail, the dung tray, some old boots. In the second room there was a sleeping platform of straw and wood, a metal stove and an old Victorian sewing-machine, with 'Flying Angel' painted in scrolled gold lettering on its side. Next to it, the altar cupboard stood in the corner. A rotating light illuminated the lamas' images and brass cups, like a small, silent siren. On the wall were photographs of Tsedup and me and my parents, in a frame. It was strange to see them here. We had sent them so long ago. It was like a shrine to their missing boy.
That night we talked, a sensitive task for Tsedup, since he did all the translating and most of it was about him. Annay and Amnye told my parents how grateful they were to them for having taken care of him in England and bringing him home. My parents said that they had been happy to help their son and to have him for a son-in-law. By knowing him their lives had changed. The tears flowed freely down Annay's cheeks. She left the room to fetch a stained cloth, then sat dabbing at her eyes, thanking them over and over. My parents said it was a wonderful thing for them to be there with his family.
Until that point, Ama-lo-lun, Tsedup's tiny octogenarian grandmother, had sat silently reciting her mantra and turning her korlo, prayer wheel. Suddenly she looked up at my parents. 'Please look after him. He is my heart,' she said, clasping her bony hands to her breast. Amnye got up from his seat and pretended to fuss with the butter lamps on the altar. Then he walked out of the door. It was not the thing to do, to stay and cry.
I had just one thing to say. I said it to Amnye when he came back in. He readjusted his wooden cosh in his tsarer and sat on the platform cross-legged, then removed the white Tilley hat that Dad had brought him.
I said, 'How do you feel that your son has married a western girl?' I knew that I wasn't quite what he had expected for his son.
He lit a cigarette, drew in a lungful of smoke. 'All my sons are free to do what they wish with their lives,' he stated simply. That was it. He smiled at the very corner of his mouth, giving nothing away. Did he like me? Was I a social embarrassment? He was an important man in the tribe and in the town. I guessed that Tibetan fathers-in-law were not used to such impertinence in the average namma.
Maybe I should have kept quiet, but I said, ‘I know how much Tsedup loves Tibet. I love it too. I don't want to take him away from his home. I want to be part of it.'
Annay wept again. I had meant it. I wanted to be a part. Surely it couldn't be that hard.