Vikram Seth ~ "From Heaven Lake: Travels through Sinkiang and Tibet"

This is not going to be a proper blog post. I am re-reading the book for my M.A. exam which I had read for pleasure the first time. Thus not really the best of times for writing a post. I am also naturally lacking time. Over and above that, I tend to get sycophantic whenever Seth enters the scene. And that will hardly do. So I just want to restrict myself to jotting down some lines and passages from the book as I read on. Seth is one of the few writers I know who provides abundantly quotable quotes without their sounding cliched and timeworn. He says things which are both thought-provoking and identifiable (if not so together all the time) and along with that he makes "high-brow thoughts" sound so peppy that they also succeed in providing "low-brow fun".

There! What did I say?! Calling myself sycophantic wasn't just about word-play. It is how I feel about the man. The writer. And the man. And that is not just my fancyflying. His non-fiction writing have a deep personal timbre and allows us access to more than the writer.

Uf! Did I not say I will only put down quotes?

*closes flap*

--------------------------------

The tenor of this trip, though, is beginning to worry me. It is well-organised - the transport, the board, the accommodation, the guides, everything that would be time-consuming and expensive for individuals to arrange has been thought of. (...) Yet the comfort of being cushioned from these practicalities has brought with it restrictions of two kinds.

The first is inherent in group travel, indeed in any form of organised group activity - a discipline, a punctuality, imposed upon the participants. Every minute I am late for the bus means fifteen wasted person-minutes for the group as a whole. It will not do, I realise, to stare at a stone when Claire and Carlo and Midoragawa and John and Wolfgang and ten others besides are slowly vaporisng in the bus.

~~~

It is my last evening in Nanjing, and I go out with Claire - she has not yet left for France - to the Shuang Men Lou Hotel for dinner. I wear Chinese clothes, as I have during much of the summer, but now that I have had my hair cut and have Chinese spectacles, the guard at the gate challenges me.

'Stop, comrade.'

I keep on walking. He runs up to me and holds me by the shoulder. 'Didn't you hear me? What unit are you from? You can't go in there.' It is dark, so he cannot see my features too well. Claire walks up to me, and we smile. The guard looks abashed, but I am pleased that with my loss of hair and gain of spectacles I do not now appear too emphatically un-Chinese. If I need to stress my foreignness I will fiddle with the knobs on my digital watch.

~~~

Romantic retrospect aside, the night spent in the truck is distinctly unpleasant. We are cramped and cold. The much-vaunted heating of the truck is ineffectual. The wind prises through the cracks in the sides of the windows, and penetrates us to the bone. My feet are moist in my shoes, yet to take my socks off is to chill my feet even further. We take every warm item of clothing out of our bags and swaddle ourselves into immobility. The sheepskin on the seat cuts out a bit of the cold rising from below. We share a blanket and Sui, before he goes off to sleep, makes sure I get a generous part of this. He then drops off to sleep, and tugs it away. He jockeys for space, and I am forced to lean forward. He begins to snore. To make it all worse, both he and Gyanseng sleeptalk. They have told me that before that I do, too, but I've never noticed it. What I do notice, however, late at night, with my two territorially acquisitive companions wedging me forwards, is that I have started talking to myself: naming the constellations I can see move across the mud-stained windscreen, interviewing myself, reciting odd snatches of poetry. I also notice that I am hungry, which is curious, because during the day I was not; and itchy, which is to be expected after so much unwashed travel; and sleepy, though I cannot sleep for cold and headache and discomfort; and, alas, bored out of my mind.

When things get really bad, I imagine myself in a darkened room, up to my shoulders in a tub of hot water, with a glass of Grand Marnier beside me and the second movement of Mozart's Clarinet Quintet sounding gently in my ears. This voluptuous vision, rather than making my present condition seem even more insupportable, actually enables me to escape for a while from the complaints of my suffering body.

~~~

Next morning I walk across People's Street to buy a map of Lhasa at the bookstore. Inside, between 'literature' and 'technology', is an altar to Mao: a white bust of the Great Helmsman, surrounded by a low semi-circular wall of his maroon-bound books, with flower vases at each end. Huge red quotations from his works hang on the walls. As I stare at this shrine (the remnant of a past age; one no longer sees such monstrosities in the rest of China), I feel a sudden weakness in my legs, and almost collapse, so that I have to support myself against a counter. The shop assistants are alarmed at what must look like an overpowering spiritual revelation. They offer to escort me back to the guest house. I am all right, I insist. The guest house is just across the street.

But I am not all right. I have barely got back to my room when I collapse on the bed. All the old symptoms of headache, nausea and shortness of breath are back, together with an attack of diarrhoea for good measure. I have over-exerted myself, and have drunk too much alcohol; both unwise at this altitude. I order myself to spend a day in bed, and to suppress all exploratory instincts.

~~~

I spend the day writing postcards: this seems a surreal activity in Lhasa, but then the guest house attendants are playing frisbee outside my window and whistling 'Santa Lucia'. I look over a book I bought in Dunhuang: Everyday Language for Hotel Personnel - 1000 English Sentences. Tourism is now a big thing in China: new five-star hotels are going up in several cities, under collaboration contracts with foreign firms. The book includes sentences like 'I want to have a manicure,' and 'Please curl the hair on the temples towards the front, curl the hair on the sides outwards, and make the hair on top higher.' 'There are some cockroaches in this room; please clear them out immediately.' 'It is a misunderstanding, I am afraid. The Chinese people and the Japanese people are very friendly towards each other.' On that cheerful note I close that book and open my Lao Tzu.

~~~

I ask to be dropped off near the Norbulingka Park. Today is Thursday and I had hoped that the palace itself - the summer residence of the Dalai Lama - would be open. But it looks deserted. I am wandering around glumly when a small tourist bus draws up, and a door in the side of the palace wall opens. About fifteen mainly American tourists step out and are drawn in beyond the wall. I glimpse a garden beyond, and slip in with the rest of them, though I now look incongruous in my Chinese outfit and am afraid of being thrown out. Luckily I have my Nikon with me, so I flourish it furiously, taking photographs of unworthy cosmos and wilting dahlias as if my life depended on it. The Chinese guide seems puzzled but does not for the moment question my credentials.

~~~

The manager introduces me to Wu, the driver. He is about forty, Han, of average height, and from his expression, of more than average irritability. (...)

Our plan is to get to Shigatse tonight, and tomorrow through Nilamu to our destination, Zhangmu. The truck squeals and rattles continuously; it is also given to spasmodic attacks of wheezing. Wu has many of the attributes of the vehicle. A continuous patter of grumbling is broken only by jolts of exasperation bordering on frenzy. To some extent this is understandable: living with a truck one of whose doors swings open at odd moments, whose windows won't wind up, which has neither windscreen wipers nor rear-view mirrors, and which makes such an unnerving racket is, no doubt, an affliction. (But it is not, for instance, like living with an incompatible spouse; the faults are corrigible, and I can't understand why Wu hasn't corrected them.) I tune out his comments after a while; we communicate through a series of cigarettes from each other's packets.

~~~

The actual border with Nepal on this bank of the river is still some hours away. We walk at a fair pace: Tenzing steadily, step after step with great deliberateness; Jigme in a comfortable mixture of speed and rest; I in alternate modes of hyperactivity and collapse. We leave the road for a few minutes after Zhangmu to climb a steep track: we climb and climb until I can bear it no more. It is sunny, and a little before noon, but the path is still exceedingly slippery. My rubber-soled tennis-shoes and too-flexible green bamboo walking-stick make a hazardous combination. Whenever I slip, Tenzing views me balefully. He speaks no English or Chinese, I no Tibetan or Nepali. When the strain of silence becomes too intense, he breaks into an improvised Hindi - garbar karta hai, ekdum slip (make confusion, completely slip); or rasta bahut badmash (path very rascal) - which proves something I have often thought: that those who don't know a language properly are often most expressive in it. I remember an Italian friend who once asked me whether I planned to go by road or by 'the fluvial way'.

~~~

A woman wearing a sari is washing clothes in a small stream. She looks up at us as we cross. The forest continues beyond. Suddenly a man steps out from behind a tree.

'Stop,' he says to Tenzing. 'Put that bag down.' He speaks in Nepali. I look at him, wondering what this is all about. Tenzing and he stare at each other. The man doesn't look like a robber; besides he isn't armed.

'Who are you? What is your business with us?' I ask him in Hindi. 'The luggage he's carrying is mine.'

'I am a Government of Nepal customs officer,' replies the man in excellent Hindi. 'I must check your luggage. Are you an Indian citizen?'

'But I didn't know we had crossed the border,' I say.

'That stream there, that's the border. You've just crossed it.'

'That... ?' I look back at the stream. The woman is wringing out clothes over the water. Her soap lies on one rock, her washing on another. She couldn't care less which country she is in. This is the first time a customs officer has stepped out from behind a tree to announce himself.

~~~

I give in. I open my bags by the forest path, and lay my books, clothes and camera on the stones, while the man looks interestedly on.

'You smoke a lot of cigarettes,' he comments. Several packets of 555 and two of Zhonghua lie among my possessions.

'Oh, I don't really smoke,' I say. 'These cigarettes are for other people.'

The officer does not object to anything I am bringing in with me. 'Let me help you put these things back,' he says. As he puts the articles in one by one, he casually places a packet of Zhonghua aside on the rock.

I get up to go, and equally casually pick up the packet and put it into my pocket. I am taking the Zhonghua back home specifically for my brother. The officer would have done better to have chosen a packet of 555s.

~~~

We touch down in Delhi at noon. The customs officer looks dubiously at the rice sack I am carrying over my shoulder and at the bottle of Glenfiddich I hold in my hand.

'Anything to declare?' He looks at the bottle.

'No. I got this at the duty free shop in Kathmandu.'

'Please open that... thing.'

I place the gunny bag on the counter, and take out the objects inside, one by one, like Santa Claus. He passes his hand gingerly over the stone with 'Om mani padme hum' inscribed on it. He taps my soap-box thoughtfully. The photographer-bear goes through its paces, raising his camera and flashing away at the other now perturbed passengers. The customs officer looks at the bear with distaste.

'All right. You can go.'

[Finished on October 2, 2008.]

______________________