To a Mountain in Tibet(4)
The family is so poor that at night they can offer us only a little of the heavy local rice. We mix it with our own lentils and spinach, and offer biscuits, and so combine our hospitalities, while Lauri’s wife presides with her ladle and tureen, and the children cluster behind her, and Iswor translates our soft, fragmentary exchanges.
Lauri is alert and rueful: the brutal facts of his region’s isolation have long ago dawned on him. ‘The trouble is we have no education,’ he says. ‘Only that would save us. It’s too late for my father and mother–you see them–and it’s too late for me. I’m thirty-five. My wife too, she is quite uneducated.’ She smiles faintly. ‘But my children go to school now. We have hope for them, and for the boy. But five children is too many. We had them again and again.’ He rolls his arms, laughing. ‘But now at last we have a son! With us the girls marry and go away, but the sons stay. The son sees you through old age.’ In the nearby villages, he says, the birth of a boy is greeted by a fusillade of buckshot; the birth of a girl, by silence.
In the dimness shed by a single bulb, fed by the village solar heater, his children sit cross-legged against the wall behind him, and stare out with the importunate sweetness of children in famine posters. The oldest girl, who was perhaps welcomed, wears a once-beautiful apple-green dress, embroidered with pink leaves and flowers; but the others descend in deepening rags and disappointment, until the miraculous fourth child–the boy–then plummet again to a tiny, simian girl with streaming nose, wearing the last cast-offs.
‘Will the girls’ marriages be arranged?’ I ask. ‘What if they fall in love?’ Already the eldest showed a wilful spark.
Lauri says: ‘That will be all right. That should be the way now, the new way. We won’t mind what caste they choose either.’
‘It’ll be expensive.’
‘Yes, of course, the bride should be given away with money. But if the family’s too poor…then nothing.’ He looks at the ground.
Caste was outlawed in Nepal forty years ago, Iswor whispers. But of course it continues in everyone’s minds. These people are Thakuri, I know, proudly linked to a medieval dynasty of Nepalese kings. A shockingly simplified sketch of Nepal’s ethnic jigsaw might divide the country into two peoples: the Nepalese lowlanders of Indian intrusion, and the resistant, Tibetan-related highlanders, to whom we are ascending. But whatever once coupled the Thakuri with wealth, it has long gone.
Winter is the worst time, Lauri says. For days the snows coop the villagers in their fort-like houses, while they burn firewood and wait. His rice field was not enough to sustain his family, so they have built a shack by the track above the village, hoping to sell things. It stocks some toothbrushes and a shelf of canned drinks. And they have a cow.
I fear for them. Their girls, in this world of village exogamy, may marry far away, and their son looks sickly. Yet not all the region is so poor. ‘There are men who have two wives here, even more,’ Lauri says. ‘Their first marriage was probably arranged, the second made for love. So they keep two houses, one for each. My brother is one of them. He’s happy.’
Tentatively, imagining a new cause of his poverty, I ask: ‘And you? You have other wives?’
‘No. I will only have this one.’
I ask softly: ‘It was a love match?’
She touches his arm. They sometimes smile at one another.
‘No, it was arranged.’
She is oddly beautiful. Poor food has left her slender after five children, and although her cheeks and forehead show the dents and scars of accidents, her features are delicate and regular. Only when her mother-in-law passes near her do I see with a shock what she may become. Eerily they share the same facial structure, but the old woman’s skin is ploughed by vertical ridges, and her mouth hangs slack. Both women show dainty, level teeth, and the older’s golden jewellery is echoed glittering round the younger’s throat and face. But all the frailer ornaments the daughter-in-law wears–her eggshell-blue choker and coils of crimson beads, the coral necklace gleaming in the cleft of her torn dress–have long ago dropped from the older woman, if she ever owned them.
Now her daughter-in-law is gaily ladling out fresh rice, her laughter like a squirrel’s chattering, while the oldest girl–with the same haunting, regular face–peers over her shoulder, and the old woman mutters alongside with an anger so fierce and private that it becomes intrusive to look at her.
Later I go out into the clear night. It is still warm. The monsoons are late this year, and have not yet hit the Kathmandu valley, let alone up here. On the fringe of Lauri’s ground, by a brushwood corral where the cow sleeps close to the cliff edge, stands a white-plastered turret, perforated by little holes for offerings, and stuck with a rusty trident: the family shrine. Its only gifts are chunks of local marble laid outside its niches. In the starlight it looks like a pallid dovecote.
Who is worshipped here? I wonder. But when I ask Lauri, he sinks into a vague, confusing answer. The Hindu pantheon of his people mingles with other, more shadowy powers. He speaks uneasily of Masto, an ancient shamanic god, or family of gods. Masto cannot precisely be identified. No images depict him, but sometimes, through a medium, he dances and speaks.
‘Three times a year our family gathers for a ceremony at the altar,’ Lauri says. ‘At time of the full moon. Then my father leads us in worship…’