Blue Sky Kingdom

Zanskaris describe the size of their farmland by the number of days it takes to plough. A large field might be a “two-day field,” and a small one a “half-day field.”

By this measure, Lamo and Dorjey owned—or more accurately, were guardians of—a ten-day farm, which by Western measure covered roughly five acres. This was typical; approximately one acre per working member of the household, for beyond that, land was of diminishing return. And until recently, Lamo and Dorjey’s four children had provided critical assistance during the intensive seasons of planting and harvest.

But two years ago, their eldest daughter had married and moved to Stongde village, some thirty kilometres distant, where she was now busy raising an infant son of her own. And earlier that fall, their other three children had left home to attend school; two middle daughters studying nursing in distant Jammu, and a twelve-year-old son attending private school near Padum. While this was good news for the family, it left Lamo and Dorjey facing a crisis: could they manage the demands of harvest?

Their neighbours—a middle-aged couple whose children had also recently left home—had given up farming and sold their fields to an Indian multinational corporation, something unthinkable just a decade ago. Those fields were now tended by migrant workers, who didn’t contribute to any paspun. Meanwhile, the parents had built a roadside shack, and were struggling to make a living hawking soda pop and deep-fried snack packs to passing truck drivers from Srinagar.

It was a familiar pattern seen across Zanskar, where more and more children were moving on from rural life, and a society that had existed for thousands of years was dissolving within the space of a generation.

For now, Lamo and Dorjey clung to the past, which was the reason Lama Wangyal had brought us to lend a much-needed hand. The pair had been working non-stop for three weeks already, and an enormous amount of work still remained. Six fields of barley had yet to be pulled. Ten tons of barley and peas needed to be carried to threshing circles. (Pea flour is routinely added to tsampa to stretch supplies.) An equivalent weight of alfalfa was required on their roof. There were carrots, potatoes and radishes to be dug, and piles of yak dung to be collected.

Despite the enormity of the task, neither Lamo nor Dorjey appeared rushed or stressed. They worked at a pleasant pace, pausing frequently to talk to neighbours, enjoying unhurried meals together.

So it continued, one warm autumn day flowing into the next, exhaustion and joy ebbing and swirling.

On the third morning, a fresh dusting of snow coated the surrounding peaks. Crouched beside an irrigation ditch, splashing icy water on my face, I listened to the hysterical braying of a distant donkey. Plumes of smoke billowed from behind a grove of nearby poplar. Suspecting the smoke indicated that a field was being razed, I took Bodi and Taj to investigate.

Instead, we found a gang of road workers from Kerala, faces hidden behind rags, melting tar over a bonfire. They were paving the dirt track that lead into town.

The next morning, the road workers had disappeared, leaving behind their rusty drum caked with tar. Lamo hurriedly dragged it home. She would use the barrel, she explained, for milking the dzos.

“I can’t imagine any positive benefits for the family’s health coming from this,” Christine whispered. But she held her tongue.

Generally Zanskaris waste nothing, and there is no such thing as a garbage can in their homes. That which cannot be eaten is fed to animals. Or used as fertilizer. Dishwater is either drunk by livestock or splashed across gardens. Cans, jars, shampoo bottles and even juice boxes become domestic organizers, holding everything from tooth- brushes to seeds and spices. Apricot kernels are crushed, and the resulting oil used for lubricating prayer wheels. The rotten grains of barley found floating atop chang are dried and saved for snacks. Even old T-shirts, too threadbare for another patch, will be filled with earth and used to reinforce slumping irrigation channels.

While it is easy to romanticize traditional village life, I think it is fair to say the people of Tungri seemed, by and large, content. They certainly appeared happier than those living in Padum, just twenty kilometres away; a place of business, and busyness, where one found less smiles and more stress; where for the first time in memory, the unemployed loitered on street corners, already left behind by the false promises of a modern world that had no place for them.

We were grinding up our first pass—a relatively gentle ascent to the PerfiLa—when we caught a glimpse of the Zanskar River, languid and green, snaking away into canyonlands to the east. This marked the mouth of the legendary Chadar gorge; sheer cliffs and ferocious whitewater downstream acted as a barricade to Zanskar.

Traditionally, the Chadar was only passable in the depths of winter, when brave Zanskari butter traders tiptoed over uncertain ice. Travelling in jato (leather-soled, straw-stuffed woolen boots with upturned toes), the men used walking sticks to sound for thickness. When water flowed over the ice, as it often did, the men walked barefoot. Elsewhere, they inched precariously along ledges on canyon walls. By night they slept in caves, huddled close beneath robes, on their knees.

This extraordinary practice of sleeping balanced on knees—arms laid backward and hands grasping ankles—was once common throughout Zanskar, and children were taught the skill from the earliest age. It was a habit born of necessity, leaving only shins and forehead in contact with the ground, for to lie flat on a cold surface exposes one’s entire body to substantial heat loss. And it speaks of a toughness that has since passed from our world.

Today, the Chadar represents the final and most challenging link in the Zanskar Highway project. Road surveys began here in 1971, and dynamiting started soon afterward. But progress has been painfully slow, with annual gains measured in metres, exacting terrible loss of life. Despite legions of foreign labourers and fleets of heavy equipment, completion targets continue to be pushed back, and there still is no end in sight.

But at some point, traffic will flow.

As I stared down at the tiny road carved into the walls of the canyon, I saw a crack in the natural dam protecting Zanskar. When the road is completed, this millennia-old barricade will fail, flooding the hidden valley with modernity. And while undeniable benefits will arrive, including improved education and medical services, other more insidious changes will slip in too, such as real-estate speculation, cheap labour, foreign-owned factory farms, poverty and homelessness.

Within one generation, Zanskar’s co-operative, self-reliant lifestyle will be extinguished.

Buddhists accept impermanence unhesitatingly. Why did I struggle to do the same? Was it just nostalgia? And was it even fair for me, a transient visitor, to mourn such a loss?

These were questions I’d wrestled with all summer.

I awoke before dawn, feeling haunted. Our tent was pitch black, and I slipped out, careful not to disturb Christine or the boys. The Pony Men had already left, leading their horses away toward Zanskar in darkness. Cold gusts snatched the remaining leaves from tall poplars.

How do we hold on to the things we love most, knowing seasons are always changing?

With silver shading the eastern sky, I wandered the empty streets, past rows of concrete buildings, their storefronts hidden behind steel garage doors. Red Coke flags streamed from fences, and a plastic bag bounced down the centre of the road like a tumbleweed.

The silhouette of a monastery beckoned from a ridge above town, and I climbed to it. Passing through a stooped doorway, so narrow my shoulders could barely fit sideways, I found myself before a golden statue of Avalokiteshvara, at least nine metres tall.

At its feet sat an elderly monk, chanting alone, beside a candle. I lowered myself beside him.

Of all the deities in Tibetan Buddhism’s dizzying pantheon, it was Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion, who spoke most powerfully to me; the one who had forsaken nirvana in the hope of aiding others on their own quests for enlightenment. For some time I thought only of my breath, swaying with the monk’s chant, admiring the golden figure before me—its own peaceful eyes gazing toward the infinite. Eventually I rose to leave. But first I rummaged through my pockets and placed a handful of rupees at Avalokiteshvara’s feet, adding to drifts of bills.

Then I bowed, ever so slightly.

I bowed to the monk, chanting alone by a flickering yak-butter candle. I bowed to all the men and women chanting in all the musty temples still dotting the Himalaya, perched on the precipice of extinction. I bowed to the scholars, lamas and mystics who created this vibrant expression of humanity. I bowed to the idea of compassion itself, something the world could use much more of. I bowed to the statue towering above me, the incarnation of compassion itself, first in an ancient lineage leading all the way to today’s Dalai Lama. I bowed to my son, who seemed a bodhisattva himself, sent to strip away my ego and clear my illusions. And I bowed to the Avalokiteshvara in all of us.

Then I slipped out, toward a brightening day.

Three soapy-smelling men had arrived in camp while I was away, wearing blue jeans and puffy jackets. Their shiny minivans would carry us, and all the trekking gear, back to Leh, some one hundred kilometres distant. All three hailed from Zanskar. And all three were neighbours of Sonam Dawa. The ageless system of the paspun endured, even here.

As we awaited breakfast in the cook tent, I squeezed onto a crate beside one of them. With bookish glasses and carefully coifed hair, twenty-five- year-old Norbu was an excellent English speaker who would not have appeared out of place on the streets of New York. A programmer with India’s Department of Defence, he had taken a day off work to help his childhood friends, Tundup, Sundup and Tsewang.

That trio was now almost unrecognizable, having scrubbed themselves in an irrigation ditch, run gel through their hair, put on collared shirts and splashed themselves with aftershave. (I surmised there was a fair chance of encountering young women in the hours ahead.) By contrast, still wearing Lama Wangyal’s Zanskari robe, I remained scruffy and unshaven, my hair tangled like a Nick Nolte mugshot.

“Isn’t it silly?” Norbu laughed as we gulped down chapatti and eggs smothered in chili sauce. “We are all dressed up like Americans. And you are dressed up like a Zanskari.” 

When I asked his thoughts on the changes sweeping through his homeland, Norbu paused.

“We have a new tradition in Zanskar,” he finally began. “When a child reaches fourteen or fifteen years old, they leave their village, usually without telling their parents. They travel to Leh, where they work for some months, in a shop or doing construction. They can make quick money, and it is an easy life. Maybe they rest for some weeks between jobs, if they like. Of course, they eventually return to Zanskar to visit their family, but when they do, they have changed. They dress differently. They talk differently. They think differently. And these changes seem very attractive to other village kids. So they too soon leave their farm, and travel to the city. Every year the cycle grows. I know, because that was what happened to me.”

I asked about the highway project.

“When that road reaches Zanskar, it will bring money. And medicine.

And better education. And those things are important. But it will also bring bad things. Maybe some very bad things. But I don’t think people in Zanskar sees this, because they are all hungry for easy money.” 

What bad things?
“Today, there are no rich people in Zanskar. But there are no poor people either. This is a concept we don’t understand. Everyone is the same, more or less. The families owning the best land live side by side with families holding the worst. They socialize together. They help each other. They harvest together. They go to weddings together. And funerals. But in Leh, life is different. The rich form clubs. They drive fancy cars. They eat together. They go to each other’s weddings.
But they don’t live close together.

“And the poor? They have nothing. You’ll see them sleeping on the streets. Begging. No one is helping them. Such a thing could never, ever happen in Zanskar. At least not now. But it is coming.”

We talked about Zanskar’s traditional lifestyle, and Norbu mourned the vanishing knowledge.

“A good example is Tundup’s father,” he said, pointing to the young man who had crossed the mountains with us, now wearing dark sun- glasses and listening intently. “I visited his father in Zanskar just last month. I’ve known him since I was a baby, because he is my neighbour. Some in the city might say he is just a farmer. But think about how much he knows. He can shoe a horse and birth a yak, so you might say he is an animal doctor. He knows when to plant his barley, based on the arrival of a bird or the length of the sun’s shadows. So he is a biologist and astronomer too. He designed his own house, and built it by hand. He is an architect and carpenter. He forges iron, repairs ploughs and constructs irrigation ditches, so he’s an engineer too. But that’s not everything. He knows his family history going back for generations. And he knows all the legends of his village, so he is a historian. He can read and write in Tibetan, so he is a scholar too. And he can sing. Not just one song, but hundreds. At the party last month, he sang from the start of the evening to the very end. He is an entertainer. He is an amazing man. But the important point is, in Zanskar, he is not unusual.”

There was a long pause. Everyone in the tent was listening.
“And us? The next generation?” He pointed at the circle of shiny-shoed men huddled around the kerosene stove, wearing pleated pants and doused in cologne.
“We can speak English and use a computer. So what? It makes me so sad to see all that lost in one generation. But what can we do? Nothing. So we just sit and watch.”