We left our home in the dark before the new moon and traveled south, to the ocean, to Jason’s family and the place of his birth. Then south again, train and bus to the sweet refuge of a studio home in New York City and the kindness of an old friend– phone dying– and then on again, untethered, by flight across the world.
We travel on planes full of pilgrims. We fly to Mecca from New York with American Muslims, then spend a long day waiting in an airport in the desert. We board a plane again in the evening and join another group of pilgrims, flying home to India after Haj. A prayer from the Prophet Mohammed is offered in Arabic at takeoff, translated fragments hanging in my mind throughout the long-stretching day and night: may we travel safely, not lose faith, may the ones we leave behind be well-cared for, may obstacles not bar the way.
On, through the pre-dawn heat and smoke of Delhi. They are burning the fields in the Punjab after harvest. We wear our masks outside to keep our lungs from burning. We board the plane to Leh as light rises through the smog and fly in an hour up and over the impossible ocean of mountains, to land. Ladakh.
Becky greets us at the airport and we rest gratefully in the bright warmth of her hospitality. Ten days pass as we grow slowly stronger, lungs learning again the use of this high fine air. Two young men from the south of India share her home these days, Sunil and Varun; the five of us share food, talk, journeys to and from Leh in Becky’s tiny rattling excellent car. They help us navigate the thicket of technology and communication, patient and generous with all the needs we have. One day we stretch the plastic over the greenhouse frame on the front of Becky’s home. Young men from SECMOL, her former students, come to help.
Varun is an artist from Tamil Nadu; he came to Ladakh four years ago and has been living and studying with the potter in Likir. He tells us about his arrival. “When I asked Aba-le if I could stay and learn from him, and asked what I should pay, he said ‘Why do you need to pay to learn?'”
He is working on designing a game, played across a beautiful map of Ladakh. The players are spirits, working to protect cultural and ecological elements from the different regions, preserving the lands against disasters like burning landfills and glacial melt. We play in the evenings, and I am so grateful for his graceful hands and sight. It eases some of the grief that I am feeling, and there is so much grief–
Ache of trucks and diesel fumes, towers wires roads like a cage overlaid on something beautiful, tracks of machines in place of dzo and song. Urban children gazing into phones. BJP flags, fancy cement houses, migrant laborers from Bihar and Nepal breaking rocks on the road. Too much like everywhere in the world, where labor is a free market, and some win and some lose.
The monastery at Spituk stands on a rocky outcrop several kilometers from Leh Khar, two ancient bodies of stone and earth facing each other for many centuries across desert plain. Now, across a field of war: army encampments sprawl over the floor of the Leh valley, rows and rows of cement and metal structures surrounded by high walls and coils of barbed wire. Outside of the new Military Hall of Fame sits an effigy of the Buddha, flanked on both sides by camouflage painted tanks. I am grieving what I see here, and what I know moves all across the world in these times. It is not new grief, but somehow fiercer arriving here. harder to move with without being swept beneath it. I have been unguarded.
Chonga — Full moon
We travel by bus down the Indus, past the vast army base outside of Nyemo where a sacred spring once was. West into Sham, through villages with their old and new buildings stacked together, red-gold apricot leaves falling over fields bare for the autumn. Jason stands by the door and I half-sit on a bench seat with a grandmother and a young woman from Skyurbuchan, pushing hard against the seat to keep from falling on the turns. Jason watches the slopes and ridges, amazed. But I am weary with sorrow, seeing so much change so swift, struggling to see through to the benefit it brings. Not my place to have an idea about it, not my place to choose. I am just a human, sad.
The bus arrives, at last, to Nurla, and we call out at the footbridge. Heavy packs, breath easier for being outside again. The prayer flags on the bridge are faded. We make our way up, slow, each step each breath effort and life. Power lines strung in the poles that were empty three years ago, electricity rising through the valley from the dam at Alchi. I am squinting now to see through them to the rock walls, the water, the sky.
We stop to eat bread and yogurt, rise feeling stronger, burdens lighter. It is hot in the sun. Then on the slope, ibex– eighteen maybe, all females and young. Konchok and his family come down the path and he calls out, greets us warmly, happy to see us returning. We meet his wife and two young sons for the first time. He tells us to go and see Azhang Tundup, his father.
Up through the lower village, yokma, where thistles are thickening the fields. There is alfalfa on Acho Tashi’s roof at least, new power lines spreading from a transformer footed in the field where we planted potatoes with Padma Itses when she was just a toddler.
We stop at the Lhashing, the great spreading cedar that stands alone in the valley. Their branches twist thick and grey in the upper sun, many seeds on the ground among the roots. I wonder how long this one has lived here, how long they may continue on.
Afternoon growing later as we come into the gorge and I feel breath and heart stilled with the amazement of stone, ancient cliff and water-carved hollows, water sound amplified, echoing as it descends. Feel the power lines like an intrusion into a temple’s heart, or my heart at least. Old mani carved on the walls joined now with painted graffiti, names of tourists come and gone, in one place even written over the sacred syllables.
The path turns to switchbacks and we reach the Tara rangjon, stop to rest, give cedar.
Looking up through the gap towards the first sight of Drakchanpa we see the head of a giant orange and white striped cell tower. We heard that cell service reached the village but I never imagined it would be this way– I am astonished, reeling with the effort of material and labor that brought it here. I wonder if people would ever have imagined doing this, had they been Ladakhis carrying the steel. But it was not; it was Kashmiri laborers who are suffering political oppression in their homeland beyond the mountains.
I am angry and also
It’s not my place to be angry and
What is right to do? and
Not mine to judge and
How shall we live? All of us, together in this world?
The village is quiet as we arrive, up the stream, past Abi Dolkar’s house– empty– and across her big field. We call out for Azhang Tundup as we pass Kargopa, but there is no response.
One of the great trees at the yulsa, village earth, has fallen, uprooted. We come around and see Ache Konchok Palmo’s small shape crossing back toward her house, gathering dry dung for the fire. We call out, and she is happy to see us. We put our things down, drink tea.
As the afternoon grows later we go out to see Azhang Tundup again and find him home, sitting outside above the sheep pen. He is smoking tobacco, which I have never seen him do before. He wears an old patched goncha; his beard, always clean-shaven before, coming in white-grey. His eyes light and he stands to touch our hands, invites us into the kitchen below. He has an electric heater now, and the room warms quickly. He doesn’t light the fire, offers us tea from the morning and barley flour soaked in chang.
We sit in the warmth together for some time and he speaks to us of loss. How he wanted to continue on with everything, but there are no young people in the village, and his knees hurt him too much now. Now he has only ten sheep, two cows, and dzo. All the other houses have given up their animals. Five sheep or so at Ache Kunzes’, five or so with Ama Balu, one goat at Konchok Palmo’s and a cow or two at each house. Many fields unplanted now these last three years.
He speaks, at last, of Abi Yangchan. I remember how they would sit on the rooftop and bicker at each other, boss each other around– but now his voice is full of praise for her, her excellent hands and being. The way she would sit in the sun and spin, her beautiful perfect yarn, all her efforts in their lives together.
“Now I am only one here, alone,” he says, “I don’t feel even the energy to eat most days. Just a thermos of tea in the morning and then a little chang. It helps with the pain.” He tells us we can come, stay there, keep the fire. There is flour, vegetables, everything we need. We thank him, wishing his own family were there to inherit this life. I imagine for a moment how it would be if the house were full with the energy of a young couple in their strength, and children.
“Two people together used to be able to take care of all of this,” he says– the fields, plowing, watering, harvest, threshing, the rantak (water mill), the animals, the tools, the household and hearth. He is remembering his parents, and himself. It seems incredible to me, the work and skill of that life. We stay a little longer after all our words fail, and then leave to make our way up to Yokangpa as the darkness falls.
I remember finding our way among the fields and water canals that first spring we were here, eight years ago, after late plowing dinners, through the dark of stars and flowers. Now, we stop on the terrace below Ama Balu’s house, hold each other. And now we are weeping, shaking with sorrow– for Azhang Tundup’s loneliness and grief, for all that has been, beauty and pain, for the suffering of change, sickness, old age, death. Nameless tears, also, beyond our fathoming.
At last we breathe more quietly, continue upwards. We find Ama Balu at the door, tiny, full of fiery love and command as ever and we are immediately brought to tears again. She has a small can of warm water in her hands, for washing. “Touch the water!” she shouts. “Say chot!” We are smiling and crying in streams of language; Abi Tsewang arrives carrying a tsepo with small jugs of water, on her way to make offerings at the Gompa. She tells us she has been ill. “Come tomorrow,” she says.
We make a plan with Ama Balu to go to the house in the gongma together the next afternoon. It is there for us, of course it is, she tells us. It is our home.
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Days pass. Moon slowly wanes and we settle here again. Joy comes, singing, watching Meme Murup Namgail recite the Gesar epic with Konchok Palmo on their new TV, meeting dear ones again. KP was married in the spring, and her new husband is a lovely, kind, slight man from Changthang who works at the bank in Tingmosgang. It is a joy to see them quietly creating a life together, helping each other,
And grief, and grief– we sit with Abi Tsewang and she tells us she has spent the past year in Delhi in the hospital. She takes off her hat to show us her hair, now a couple of inches long. I remember her long grey braids, bound together at her waist.
“I lost all of it,” she tells us, touching her head, her eyebrows. “This just grew back.”
She tells us the pain was here, in her solar plexus– she never says cancer. The pain is gone, but she is still weak. She’s not supposed to carry heavy things. It’s difficult for Meme Rinchen, she says. She was very sad in the hospital, praying to come home. She has been back from Delhi now only a couple of weeks.
We go to the gongma– Ama is coughing, sits down many times to rest on the way up. We sort through things in the house. No one has been there but the mice for a long time now. She shows us piles of pruned apricot branches we can burn. “Aba is at the Thang. Konchok is in Leh. I am alone– I couldn’t plow,” she tells us, and we know she feels it as a failure. “We didn’t take out any manure these last three years, it’s all still just there.”
She is too tired to gather leaves as she had planned. We tie up heavy sacks of dry dung to carry down for her; we have to fight hard to keep her from taking a load of wood. Even descending, she stops often to rest and cough.
____
Jason is sick in the night and wakes weak in the morning. I go down to the Thang alone, carrying food and chang and other things to the ones working on the yura there. I don’t like it, and yet– it feels sweet to be in the sun, working, all together. It’s hard, skilled work, but with so many hands there is also rest. I leave after some time, go sit and drink tea with Aba Stanzin, give gifts. It is a joy to see him; the house feels big, fancy, new, desert suburbs above the river. Also, he is planting trees, grafting apricots and apples.
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The journey was too much for me even after two weeks of acclimatization, and I am sick the next day. Jason and I are both weak, able only to drink hot water, eat a little dry bread, and move very slowly. And also– we walk up to our little home in the gongma during the warmth of the day and put things out in the sun to air. We walk with Babalu, a sweet fierce dog who lives on a chain. He is free much more when we are here. He is wild with joy, and his joy is our joy too.
On Sunday I wake in the dark before dawn and watch the stars over the ridge as they fade, feeling better. Ache Tashi arrived back to Tar late the night before. We go to meet her after we drink tea, together again for the first time in years. She is in her small, warm kitchen with Meme Tundup and her son Dadul. She greets us with incredible love and joy, puts small warm bowls of soup in our hands. We start to talk about the years that have gone by, and she speaks to us about Abi Yangchan’s death.
Family had come to visit from Leh– they had Covid, but didn’t know it. It was June, vaccines had just started to move through India. Everyone left to return to the city, and Abi Yangchan and Azhang Tundup grew sick, and sicker– Ache Tashi was alone. No one could come. Abi Yangchan passed away but her body remained, there in the room where she had lived all the years since her children were grown. Meme Tundup was in the glass room, so sick; Ache Tashi was afraid. She brought him food, tea. Somehow she did not get sick. Somehow Azhang Tundup recovered. At last, after many days, help came– family from the village across the valley. They carried the body to the cremation ground. “It was very difficult,” she tells us, a ghost crossing over her face.
She fills a great steel pot with wheat flour, other bags of flours of roasted barley and peas. Brings turnips and potatoes, and a loaf of bread with yal, a tiny butter blessing in the center. “Whatever you need, I’ll give it to you,” she tells us. “This is our wheat flour– no one else planted wheat these two years, but I did! I didn’t want to.” She plays out the scene with her wild comedic grace. “Meme Tundup said, ‘Plant it!’ I said ‘No!’ He said ‘Plant!’ I said ‘No!’ He said ‘PLANT!'” She shrugs. “So we planted.” She loads the heavy pot into a basket, making sure that it will balance.
“Do you need blankets?” She sends Meme Tundup to bring a chali, which is a blanket of handspun and woven goat’s wool. We have witnessed the effort of weaving once, and can only imagine the labor of spinning. Meme Tundup would spin as he walked with his herd in the mountains. We try to refuse. “He has 20 or 30!” She tells us. “20 or 30 chali. No one to wear them. We are all mistaken in our minds.” She touches the synthetic fabric of the shalwar khameez she wears. “We don’t know gold from brass.” We hug her again– she will return to Leh with Dadul this afternoon. It is rare that she is in the village, these days.
We leave with our heavy burdens of nourishment and warmth and walk up to the gongma again. We sweep– the accumulated dust and dirt of three and a half years, sorrow of our own absence and elders for whom it has all become too much to care for. The work of it feels intense, and powerful too– at last it is empty, clear. The sun sets behind the ridge for the day, though it is only late morning. We cross the stream to the terraces of apricot orchard, where the sun is longer. We build a fire, drink water.
Water grows warm in the great round-bellied pot perched on three stones and we begin washing, touching each cup, bowl, container, spoon, each tangible part of our life there. It takes the whole length of the sun for three days, but at last we have made it clean, ready. “Khangpa chospina?” people ask each day when we return to Tar. “Have you made a home?”
Finally, again, we have.
