I sat with the boys in a restaurant and we sipped tea quietly. 'Are you lonely?' they asked intuitively.
Tsedup, sensing my fragility, took me home on the bike. We made a detour on the way and, under the brilliant glare of the afternoon sun, we made love naked by a stream in the valley. Only the hawks watched us, spiralling lazily in the blue, as we lay together savouring the freedom, the breeze caressing our skin.
Eleven. Blind Date
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.