Today's major objective is traveling from Kechiperi to the village where Bhim lives, Thapa Dara Busti. Shared jeeps are the most common form of transport in Sikkim, operating on a hub and spoke system, similar to buses or airlines in North America. Pelling is the "hub" while Kechiperi and Dentam (closest town to Bhim's village) are the spokes. The jeep to Pelling doesn't leave till leave till 7AM so at 5AM I take advantage of the early morning silence and go to the sacred lake to get some early morning photos and do some self reflection.
8:30AM finds us in Pelling, the place where tourists go for "easy" views of Kanchenjunga. Easy means the tourists look out their hotel windows and see the big mountain. We do indeed see it but the haze at this time of year quickly obscures it. October is the clearest time of year for good views.
A hotel owner stores my bag at no charge. He makes his money by charging me for internet access, the first in three weeks, and I eagerly plough through pages of emails in the next hour. Bhim and I have time to kill before the jeep to Dentam, so we hike up to the Pemayangtse Monastery. I'm surprised to see a German couple balk at the 20Rs entry fee ($0.50). You spend thousands of dollars to come to this remote location only to quibble over fifty cents? Go figure. In addition to the normal prayer hall and chanting monks, they have many old stone houses in which the monks live. The location also commands a view of the surrounding countryside, including the old Sikkimese capital of Rabdentse.
Returning to the hotel, I have on their balcony. Bhim says he's not hungry, and heads downtown, but I think he is uncomfortable entering, "my world". The hotel restaurant is expensive compared to his norms and the clientele are much different than his usual crowd. I enjoy a great meal, having a beer and basking in the sun before our jeep arrives.
The ride is over the roughest roads I've yet experienced in India, and slows to 10 km per hour at times. The houses along the way are well cared for and the area exudes an air of modest agricultural prosperity. The terrain gets increasingly rugged, with extensive terracing necessary to support farming. Bhim's mother has called in an order to the store nearest their village and our jeep stops while Bhim collects the order. The cellphone is a Godsend in situations like this, saving much walking.
Bhim's younger brother meets us at the Palung Bridge and we divide all my gear between Bhim, his brother and me. You can guess who has the lightest load. The path seems like the stairway to heaven as we keep climbing steps ever higher up the mountain. After thirty minutes, the stairs stop at a small rest point. Bhim shoots me a sly wink as he lights a cigarette, telling me not to mention smoking to his parents as they would not approve. Thinking that this is his last cigarette just before his village, I say, "Is your village around the next corner?"
The reply, "No, it's another hour away," catches me off guard and I think Bhim is joking. I learn soon enough that it's no joke as Thapa Dara Busti is about 8000 feet elevation, 2000 feet higher than the road. Now I know why Bhim's younger brother came to greet us, it would have been a tough slog for Bhim and I to haul all my gear up this hill.
Passing through a small village enroute, Bhim meets one of his sisters. Bhim's father has five sisters and eight brothers, each of whom have their own families. In local parlance, cousins are called brothers and sisters, so you can imagine how many sisters Bhim has. He jokes with me that every girl within miles of his house is a sister so he must look far afield to find a girlfriend.
About an hour later, I'm beginning to grit my teeth and settle in for the long climb over the ridge in front of us, when Bhim announces our arrival. Bhim and his brother let me use their room, while they sleep downstairs in the common room. The bedroom is spartan but comfortable, having two beds arranged in an L shape, with a small table holding a stereo and some knick-knacks. Room size is about 8' x 11'.
The family is assembled downstairs. Bhim's father is 5'-11", very trim and it's apparent that he is very strong with large powerful hands and huge feet. A permanent fixture is his wool toque. Bhim's mother is petite, very attractive and seems the model wife for this area, deferring to the man, but at the same time making things happen. They welcome me warmly and feed me tea and biscuits.
Thapa Dara Busti is a small agricultural community with about 30 dwellings surrounded by heavily terraced fields which are immaculately tended. They grow potatoes, wheat, maize, peas, spinach, brocoli, and cabbage. The only crop not represented is rice, which grows down the hill, by the road.
The Chetri's have one water buffalo with calf, three cows, each with calf, three chickens, six goats, one kitten and no dogs. There are two barrel-shaped bee hives hanging under the eves which are harvested twice per year for honey, an operation done at night when the bees are asleep.
The house is a two story of wood frame construction having walls of woven bamboo mats covered with mud and painted. The ground floor is made from mud and cow dung and must be regularly (weekly?) maintained. The second story floor is made of hand sawn boards. The upstairs contains the bedrooms while the downstairs is a large open community room, which means mostly kitchen.
They have a two burner wood stove, but it is unlike anything in the West. The basic stove is 8" high and made from a mixture of mud and cow dung, having two 8" slots in which wood is inserted and burned. A wrought iron pot stand sits in each of the slots and supports any pots put over the flames. Smoke rises to the ceiling and escapes through holes to the outside where the floor joists are supported by the exterior walls. This is pretty standard construction for all of North India, and depending on wind conditions, it can get smokey inside, but usually the smoke rises cooperatively.
The kitchen is very spare, with the only permanent work surface being the floor. They have a couple of wooden boards upon which they chop vegetables, they also have a couple of 10" diameter stones, 1" thick, upon which they grind their spices. For example, when making masala tea, they first take cardamon seed pods, break the skin off the pods and remove the seeds by hand, putting them on the round stone. Then they take a fist sized stream cobble and rock it back and forth on the flat rock, crushing the spices into fine powder. It works well and is quite efficient in the hands of a skilled user.
A stone hand mill sits in the corner. It consists of a bottom stone, 16" in diameter, 3" thick with a flat top surface that is rough. The stop stone mates with this and has a 1.5" hole in the center, through which maize or other grains are dropped, a handful at a time. The grain is ground between the two stone surfaces (stone ground!) and gradually works its way to the periphery, where it accumulates on the floor and is collected after grinding is complete. The grindings have the same consistency as our corn meal.
For making flour, which is a much finer grind, they use a giant wooden mortar and pestle. The bowl is about 12" exterior diameter and 10" deep. The pestle is wooden rod about 3" diameter which lifted 2' and then driven forcefully into the grain contained in the wooden mortar. They use it for making rice flour while I am visiting. After a few minutes of pounding, they take the pounded grain and put it into a 2.5' diameter flat woven basket (perhaps better called a tray). A skilled operator (Bhim's mother) flips this tray and the crushed grain flies in the air, with the larger particles making their way to the bottom of the tray, while the fines stay at the top. The fines are separated out as they are now flour, while the coarser ground particles are dumped back into the mortar to be ground more finely.
Bhim shows me another device, called a tika, that looks like teeter-totter. Two men push down one end of the teeter-totter with their feet, raising the weighted end into the air while a helper pushes wheat under the heavy end. The men release their feet, the weighted end smashes into the wheat, breaking off the chaff. This gets used at harvest time and only one of them is needed by the whole village.
There are many other tools and farm implements which I don't have time to investigate, including different sorts of knives and a wooden plough that is hitched to their water buffalo.
They make me a fancy dinner with several different dishes and serve me before the rest of the family eat their simple rice and dahl. I explain to Bhim that I feel very awkward being singled out this way and would much rather be treated as one of the family, eating the same food at the same time, even if it is just rice and dahl.
After dinner, I fire up my laptop and show them a slide show of our trekking. Bhim prepped me ahead of time and asked that I remove any pictures showing meat being eaten and any pictures of people smoking. Everyone enjoys the show. Unfortunately my computer stops working after this show and I can't use it for taking notes or processing my photos. It is a major pain and prevents me from keeping my blogsite up to date. I've since had it fixed in the US and will use it on future trips.
-----------------------------------------------
Tuesday April 1 - Thapa Dara Busti
Bhim humor's me by getting up before sunrise and taking me to a good lookout where we can get good views of the valley. As we walk, he is constantly on his cellphone. He tells me that it is April 1 and he has a conversation with one "sister" that goes something like this.
"Tina, your father is deathly ill. He wants to see you before he dies so you need to walk the ten miles from where you are living and go home immediately."
Tina, Bhim's sister, is all tears and asking some incoherent questions when Bhim breaks in.
"Haha! It's April Fools today."
I grin to myself, realizing that Bhim and I are cut from almost the same cloth. I say almost because I can't remember ever telling anyone that their parents were near death.
The early morning photos show houses clinging to steep heavily terraced slopes. You must work hard to make it in agriculture here. Fortunately, the entire population are hard workers, hence people are reasonably prosperous. Money is tight, to be sure, but I don't see any hungry people, and the homes and fields are all well tended.
Bhim wants to show me the Singshore Bridge today. He and his friends keep telling me that the drop, 700', from bridge to water below is the second or third highest in the world. They are all excited by it and I conclude that it must either be brand-new or perhaps it's in the final stages of completion.
We set off at 9:30AM to visit the bridge, collecting a couple of Bhim's friends along the way. I tell them that if there are any old people in the villages on the way to the bridge, they are very photogenic and I would like to get pictures of them. Bhim and his friends do a good job ferreting out all the old people for miles around and I get some good photos as a result. At all the photo shoots, I do my best to get people to smile and look happy. Their natural inclination without this prodding is to look very formal, rigid and serious, very similar to early Native American Indian pictures I've seen.
One consequence of meeting people in the villages is that we are constantly invited in for a cup of tea. It's impolite to refuse, so I have seven cups in two hours, more than my bladder can hold. I think of Mortenson's book, "Three Cups of Tea", and wonder how it would read with, "Seven Cups of Tea", or, "Ten Cups of Tea". I also remember an old movie about wolves, where the main character is living in the wild amongst some wolves and in order to, "mark his territory", he drinks vast quantities of tea to generate enough urine.
Bhim is 18, his two friends joining us (Sam and Barney), are 17 and 19. They are used to going up and down the 2000 feet to the road at least once per day. You can imagine how challenging it is for a 49 year old to keep up with these youngsters. I do my best to keep up and they slow down a bit from their normal pace.
When we reach the Singshore Bridge, imagine my surprise to find a 14 year old suspension bridge which has been recently de-commissioned because the bridge engineer will no longer certify it for vehicle traffic. I'm flabbergasted at the shoddy result my engineering brethren have created and tell Bhim and his friends that the responsible engineer ought to be publicly humiliated to make an example for other Indian engineers. Despite my feelings for the engineer, I join Bhim, Sam and Barney as they spit over the side of the bridge and watch the tiny blobs disappear from view. Funny how this seems to have such universal appeal, like laughing when someone farts.
Sam and Barney (the names they give themselves for my benefit), want their pictures taken in every accessible location on the bridge. It affords me the chance to see the bridge from all angles.
For a snack in the afternoon, we pull down a couple cobs of maize hanging from the eves of Bhim's house, scrape off the kernels and make pop corn. None of this packaged stuff. What a kick! They know I'm also interested in churning some butter so we do that as well. Ghee is what they call butter, and we have it on rice with the afternoon meal. Butter milk is another result of churning and it is delicious. They make me a lassi by boiling some of the butter milk over the fire. Bhim's mother also demonstrates making a bowl from leaves, stitching together many leaves by using fine shards of bamboo as a coarse thread. This is traditionally what the Nepali people have eaten from. Note that this area of Sikkim is populated by people who left Nepal 200 years ago, and the language spoken today is still Nepali.
Bhim heard my comments of not wanting to be singled out with different food at dinner and I eat rice and dahl along with the rest of the family. However, he does give me a knife and fork to eat with. I point at everyone else eating with their hand and do the same.
----------------------------------------------
Wednesday, April 2 - Extended-Family Photo Day
I spoke earlier about the size of Bhim's extended family. Bhim would like to visit as many of them as possible today and have me take their pictures. I promise to send a packet of photos to Bhim in June (I'm running out of time as I write this June 28!) of all his family and many of the other photos I've taken while visiting.
Our first port of call is Melling, a village an hour's walk from Thapa Dara Busti. The walk is through forest that the Sikkim government set aside as a preserve. No development takes place in the forest, and no trees may be cut. The Sikkimese are very forward thinking in protecting their environment and attempting to be as "green" as possible.
The first house we reach is owned by Bhim's sister. We are immediately invited in for tea. The smoke from the kitchen is overpowering and both Bhim and I must escape outside periodically to boost our oxygen levels before another stint in the smoke. We spend an hour chatting before heading to the other end of the village. All the residents take great pride in surrounding their houses with beautiful flowers, including orchids, nasturtiums, and many others whose names I don't know. This love of flowers exists all over northern India.
I feel like the Pied Piper as I walk through the village, ending up with about 15 followers. We go to a lookout point and I set up my tripod and long lens. The villagers are very inquisitive, poking, prodding, and playing with my camera. Bhim can see I'm nervous and asks about it. I tell him the camera costs more than these people will make in a lifetime and can he please pass this along to the folks? I realize as soon as I've said the words that it's a very cheap thing to say. Fortunately, Bhim filters my words appropriately and I lighten up a bit at the same time.
We do the rounds at this end of the village, shooting several more aunts and uncles. Each time we leave someone, I say, "Fairy betoon", or something that sounds like it to me. This is a standard adieu phrase, except I can't pronounce it quite right. The locals howl with laughter and want me to say it again and again. Then they try me with other Nepali words and the guffaws continue. I'm happy to provide some good entertainment at my expense.
On the way out of the village, a couple of older men stop us, wanting their pictures taken too. I tell Bhim that yes, I can do that, but please, NO more tea! He laughs and says its OK, they are older and single and will be glad not to hassle with making me tea.
Bhim's father and older brother, Giwan, have gone down the hill with many of the uncles to carry up pieces of corrugated roofing, to be used to build Bhim a room of his own. Bhim's mother and Giwan's wife are slaving away in the kitchen rustling up an enormous amount of food to feed the hungry men when they arrive. This is like a mini barn raising, in that the community have banded together to help one family, Bhim's, to accomplish an onerous task, carrying corrugated iron up a 2000' hill, that would otherwise take the family days to complete. In return, everyone is fed as much food as they can eat. And believe me, they eat fast and they eat a lot. Two heaping plates of rice each are devoured in minutes. After they eat, they have me repeating Nepali words, causing them to laugh while rolling across the floor on their distended stomachs.
Dinner this evening is Nepali roti. This is made from rice flour (pounded by Bhim) and many spices mixed together and then drizzled into boiling oil. They are shaped like pretzels but a bit softer. Getting the degree of softness correct is an art. They are initially too hard and baking powder is added to the batter until the proper cooked consistency is attained. The roti are delicious.
Before going to bed, Bhim and his father come to my room and present me with a goat's wool blanket, hand-made by Bhim's mother. I'm stunned, and can only mutter some feeble comments that they will be pleased with the photos I will send in June. I spend a good bit of the night fretting about what I can give Bhim in return. I know he was eying my hiking poles. In the end I decide that my headlamp is probably the most useful thing I can give to Bhim. It is useful around the house during the frequent power outages. It is also useful while trekking, both in the early morning and evening. Currently, he either gropes in the dark or lights a candle. The instant light afforded by a headlamp, and the fact that being on your head provides the light where you need it, is sure to be useful. At the same time, it feels like a very lopsided exchange. I sure hope those photos turn out well....
--------------
Observations from my time with Bhim's family. Although they have a fraction of the wealth owned by a typical western family, and don't have any of the modern conveniences which we take for granted (washing machine, in-house toilet, 24/7 electricity, cars, espresso machines,...) they appear to be very happy. It takes them longer to prepare meals, but they use the preparation time to chat amongst themselves, so it is not "lost time". I can't help but wonder whether we in the west have become obsessed with squeezing every minute out of the day and have lost out some of the simple pleasures of life that come from direct communication with others of our species.
Another observation is the degree to which cell phones have permeated the lives of these people, probably endangering the point above. The people Bhim's age in particular, spend a large percentage of their time talking to each other or texting each other. This is, I think, the start of western commercialization starting to erode their traditional way of life. I've seen it happening in remote areas all around the world. The price of progress!
No comments:
Post a Comment