| Chuck
Rosenthal
“India and China will
unite to take over the world,” said Dolta. A dark man
with broad shoulders, in his late thirties, he was the owner
of the Holumba Haven outside Kalimpong in north West Bengal.
He took the place over from his father-in-law who still lived
there, a collector of Tanka paintings and Tibetan antiques.
The father-in-law, Deepok Nandlal, had known Rabindranath
Tagore, the Nobel Prize winning poet and essayist who sometimes
wintered nearby at his brother’s, also a Tanka collector.
Roscoe and Dolta sat around a fire in the yard outside the
dining area. Everybody’d been there earlier, drinking
beer, Dansberg Blue or Hit (both brewed in Sikkim and purportedly
unavailable, by law, in Bengal); Roscoe, his lover, Diosa,
their daughter, Jesus, and a dozen students, all a part of
the travel group; all fifteen of them and three middle aged
French, two men and a woman. Jesus told them that she loved
Paris and the woman said, “France is not Paris. You
Americans know nothing of France.”
“You got pretty decent wine,” said Roscoe. He
wore his straw cowboy hat with tons of feathers tucked in
the brim.
The woman looked at him. “Do you know any wine,”
she said, pausing for dramatic effect, “more decent?”
“I was living in Napa during the French vine plague.
All your vines are from California now. Not to take anything
away from soil and climate,” said Roscoe.
“You’ve had Indian wine?”
“It sucks,” said Roscoe.
“A wine cowboy,” said the Frenchwoman. Her companions
chuckled warmly.
French women loved cowboys and they liked to argue and flirt
at the same time. This is one of those unfortunate international
facts which, when said openly, could get you into some trouble.
Anyway, Dolta started to lecture everybody about how the Vedas
were really a justification for racial segregation and the
Mahabharata, the Bhagavad Gita in particular, a justification
of the caste system.
“This is old stuff,” said Diosa, once an anthropology
buff in the Vick Turner days back in Virginia, and went to
bed. And the longer Dolta pontificated, the more his audience
faded away, until it was just Roscoe.
They’d just spent three days freezing their butts in
Darjeeling, once a British rest station confiscated from Sikkim
in 1837, now a part of West Bengal. At a cool 7,200 feet,
the British sent their officers to Darjeeling to recover from
malaria, diphtheria, and everything else, back in the days.
It’s a city hanging precariously on a mountainside,
surrounded by tea plantations and filled with tea shops and
Tibetan antique stores. Like everywhere in India, the booze
sucks. You drink Kingfisher beer there instead of Sikkim’s
Dansberg Blue. In late November it’s cold and wet and
the hotels have no heat and no coffee.
Roscoe hit Darjeeling dead sick and lay in bed for twenty-four
hours shivering and dozing and watching the European Grand
Prix Track & Field Meet from Athens on BBC Sports, which
lasted all day. The BBC didn’t give a shit. They covered
every event in real time, all day. There were a lot of Romanians
and Belgians there, but no Americans. The Belgians swept almost
everything, which didn’t say much for the track meet
but it was better than the ubiquitous cricket tests, if not
as lengthy. In India you have the opportunity to become a
student of cricket, which makes baseball look like a lightning
storm and golf a stock car race, and that’s after you
understand it. In cricket, the fans go crazy when they break
for tea.
Roscoe recovered in time to find out how much money Diosa
saved in the jewelry and fabric stores and to get up at 3
a.m. to drive to Tiger Point for the sunrise. Boy, was that
cold. And mostly they stood around having their pictures taken
with young Bengali men from Kolkata who wanted photos of themselves
standing next to white foreigners, preferably blonde girls;
the Gods bless’em, they were friendly as shit but a
pain in the ass; Roscoe’s feathered straw cowboy hat
was a big hit, though in a pinch any foreigner seemed to do.
“Where from?”
“USA.” You never said America because people didn’t
know what that was.
“London?”
“Near London,” said Roscoe.
This is not cynical. In India you will have this conversation
a thousand times. It is one of the myths of the Information
Age that Americans are the only people in the world who have
no clue where anything is. Almost no one in the world has
any clue where anywhere else is. Sometimes you get the feeling
you could solve international terrorism by just renaming all
the cities.
Tiger’s Point sits over 8,000 ft. in the air and when
the sun comes up behind you it shines on the high Himalayas
to the northwest. They appear suddenly and miraculously, above
the clouds. You have to look up to see them, 28,000 feet up.
You simply can’t imagine what land is doing that high
in the sky.
In Darjeeling, Roscoe had his first real shower in over two
and a half months. And it lasted five minutes. In India, bathroom
water is heated by a Geezer, a small hot water tank that hangs
in the bathroom. If you have electricity, and you probably
won’t, you can turn on the Geezer and heat a few gallons
of water, if you have water pressure, and that’s a long
shot.
Now they were sixty miles (and four hours) east, in Kalimpong,
where there Tibetan guide, Pema, had dragged them to yet another
Tibetan Buddhist monastery with walls painted in the life
of the Buddha, deities from the eighteen hells, and a big
statue of Padma Sambhava, the founder of Tibetan Buddhism.
Like the churches in Florence, after the first twenty or so,
gorgeous, ornate, and exotic as they are, they start to look
the same, even though while in Sikkim Roscoe had studied a
book on Tibetan Buddhist images, attended a four hour lecture
on Tibetan Tantra, read a history of Tibetan Buddhism and
a text on the Tibetan denominations, read a book on Tibetan
Vajrayana, as well as re-reading Thomas Tcherbotsky’s
Central Conception of Buddhism, read a new translation of
Nargajuna’s Mulamadhamikakarika, and he and Diosa met
Khandu Wangchuck, the artist who painted the famous murals
at Rumtek; they toured his personal gallery. If you’re
going to ride a bareback bronco, you study the history of
how he bucks. Nonetheless, the monasteries started to look
the same, though unlike the Hindu and Jain temples, nobody
charges you to watch your shoes.
The I.T. (the British international intelligence agency),
continued Dolta, using their knowledge of India and China
from the days of Empire and by means of the Taiwanese international
mafia, had infiltrated China and India to aggravate tribal,
ethnic, sectarian, and inter-caste dissent, as well as instigate
state secessionist movements. Using their economic might,
they’re importing goods from China and India; this will
create wealthy classes and an even deeper division between
the rich and poor, this in hopes of destabilizing the governments
of both India and China. Under the pressure of ethnic secessionism
and class warfare, China and India will fall apart, letting
the United States and England re-establish political and economic
hegemony over the world. The only way to fight it will be
for India and China to open economic relations, establishing
an open trade border with Tibet, which will become, once again,
like in the days of the Old Silk Road, the pathway of the
greatest economic power in the world. India and China will
unite and dominate Southeast Asia, becoming an empire controlling
four billion of the world’s six billion people. That’s
the future.
“But three and a half billion of them will be poor as
shit,” said Roscoe. He’d traveled through a lot
of India now, and the most advanced form of technology many
villages had was the wheel. And he didn’t own a single
machine made in China that wasn’t broken. They bought
their space program from Russia. Aside from that, how could
two countries like the U.S. and England, who were stupid enough
to invade and get stuck in Afghanistan and Iraq, be sophisticated
enough to engineer the breakup of India and China? What are
you, nuts? Well, geopolitics makes the world go round.
The next day North Korea exploded its first underground nuclear
device, the smallest nuclear explosion in history. Roscoe
figured they faked it. All he could think about was his trip
to Nathu-la, the mountain pass on the India-China border.
Boy, was it cold up there, 14,000 ft. and climbing. From Sikkim
there was only one road to China and like most roads in the
Himalayas it was wide enough for about a jeep and a half at
a time. Unfortunately, it’s two-way traffic. It’s
jungle up to ten thousand feet, drop-offs so infinite that
the height is irrelevant.
In Sikkim there is not a single stretch of straight road,
not twenty yards of it anywhere, ever; though road is a euphemism
for what you travel on; everything is switchbacks with hairpin
turns on cliffs. Old rusted signs dangle from posts. They
say “Road Destroyed Ahead.” And sure enough, the
road ahead is destroyed, a mess of crumbling rubble beneath
a waterfall over a two thousand precipice. It’s the
Indian solution to broken. If it ain’t fixed, don’t
fix it. It’ll just break again. Hang a sign. “Toilet
in disrepair.” “Stairway has collapsed.”
And who could invade this? How? There’s no place to
stand, let alone invade. Just this tiny, winding path through
cliffs. You could defend it with three hundred Spartans.
Nonetheless, as precarious as it all is, the forty kilometers
between Sikkim and China is crawling with soldiers in their
dark green sweaters, black boots, and green or maroon berets;
big grim faced Sikhs, sulking Tamils, brooding Dravidians,
piled in trucks traveling to the border where they’re
packed into mud huts or metal buildings thrown up wherever
there’s more than ten square feet of space. Occasionally
you spot some wind socks floating above a vacant helicopter
pad. Never a helicopter. There must be a million soldiers
up there prepared for the worst, swarming the border, ready
for anything, anything except, well, war. Because very few
of them possess any weapons. Of those that do, many carry
single action breach loaders, vintage WWI. Most of what appear
to be automatic weapons are made of bright orange, cheap plastic;
there’s more frightening weaponry in the Toys R Us.
There are signs on the way up there that say, “Follow
the Old Silk Road to China.” Except it’s not the
Old Silk Road. That road is north of this one, in Tibet. This
road, in the ancient days, wasn’t used to transport
silk, but to export wool to China. It was known as the Wool
Road. But you aren’t going to draw many tourists to
follow the Old Wool Road. Anyway, this is India, where the
relationship of words to the world is tenuous because the
world isn’t really there. Another billboard reads: “The
Road to Nathu La. The Future of India is China.” Something
to ponder for any of us who thought the future of India lay
somewhere to the west.
But the Chinese scare the shit out of the Indians. In fact
they scare the shit out of the Bhutanese, too. Nepali, on
the other hand, are scared as shit of India. Everybody is
afraid they’re going to be occupied the way the Chinese
occupied Tibet and, debatably, the Indians occupied Sikkim
or, for that matter, the Europeans occupied the Americas.
Send in the clowns. There ought to be clowns. The Bhutanese
claim that 50,000 Chinese move into northern Bhutan every
year. Of course that’s way different than the 100,000
Nepali that Bhutan escorted out of Bhutan at gunpoint.
Anyway, about halfway to Tsongo Lake (which is a little bit
like the Los Angeles Angels, because tsong means lake in Tibetan)
you break from the jungle into pine and redwood forest and
then in another ten kilometers onto barren peaks. Behind you
the Sikkimese Himalayas shine white and jagged in the sky,
inexplicably dazzling. Then you hit a tourist trap, two shacks
that hang on a cliff, a restroom attached at the back; you
walk down a narrow stairway between a cliff and space onto
a tiny stone ledge where you release into infinity. Up top
they’re selling woolen sweaters and hats, bottled water,
Coke, peanuts, post cards, bad Indian liquor, Chinese cigarettes,
Budweiser and Pabst made in China, the first imported booze
Roscoe had seen in Sikkim. It tasted a lot like Budweiser
and Pabst, not very good. Of course India doesn’t import
anything, so why here and why Budweiser and Pabst? The place
was packed with Bengali, who are the prevalent tourists of
Sikkim. They regard the Sikkimese as culturally inferior;
the Sikkimese regard them as boorish louts.
Tsongo Lake is almost 15,000 feet up and sits like a blue
jewel in a ring of snow covered peaks. A town springs up,
lining the road on one side, the lake on the other, in the
space between the lake and the road, a lot of young guys,
each with a yak on a rope tied to a ring through the yak’s
nose. The yaks wear worn out English military saddles and
colorful, horizontally striped wool booties on their horns;
they look like Dr. Suess cartoons. Some of those yaks are
about the size of a big pony and some are the size of a bull.
It was early October, sunny and cold, snow from the last storm
front covering the hills.
The town is a bunch of teetering wooden shacks and metal huts
with cheap facades; it makes Deadwood look like Manhattan,
in fact it’s as close as your imagination can get to
the Wild West, with yaks instead of horses and honking army
trucks full of weaponless soldiers bustling up and down the
dirt road, most of them heading to Nathu La, the most miserable
military assignment in India, more feared, it’s said,
than even the Kashmir. You hear guns in the distance. China
is less than a mile away, just over the hilltop. Roscoe wanted
to go the rest of the way but Pema told him only Indian citizens
could leave the town and go up to the pass. The actual border
was disputed and Indian and Chinese troops patrolled the same
territory with orders, in general, not to shoot at each other.
When they parked the jeeps everybody in Roscoe’s group,
Diosa and Jesus included, hit the ground running and ran for
the yaks. Everybody got on a yak and they headed off in a
line for a yak ride around the lake. Roscoe refused to ride
a yak. Roscoe was a horseman and yaks were beasts of burden.
Yak herdsmen carry sticks and whack their yaks and off they
go.
Roscoe stood in front of a bar. A small, young man, his features
were Tibetan, came out on the rickety porch. He wore one of
those multi-colored wool hats with ear flaps. “Drink?”
he said.
“I want to go to the pass,” said Roscoe.
The kid nodded his head sideways, which in India meant yes,
no, or maybe. “Drink?”
The bar had one wooden table with two wooden chairs. No heat,
no electricity, just a small candle on the table. Roscoe paid
10 rupees for a glass of Bagpiper scotch. In India, there
is no bourbon. He walked back out onto the porch. He pointed
up the hill behind the town. “China?” he said.
“Mines,” said the kid.
“Land mines?” said Roscoe.
There was another guy in the bar and he nodded sideways.
Roscoe left the bar and walked up the road toward China. He
left the town and kept walking, brown snowy hills to his left,
clear emerald lake on his right. Military trucks and jeeps
rode by, ignoring him. Jeeps full of Bengali waved and cheered.
They were all full. You couldn’t rent one of these jeeps
unless you paid for every seat and Bengali were notoriously
cheap. Still, Roscoe stuck out his thumb. A jeep slowed to
a stop. They drive on the left side of the road in India,
the steering wheel on the right. A heavy-set man dressed in
Western business clothes, tweed suit and vest, sat opposite
the driver. He motioned to Roscoe who walked over to the other
side of the car. The back of the jeep held a woman and a bunch
of kids.
“You must be Indian to go to the border,” said
the man. He wore glasses and had a small mustache. “You
should be knowing this.”
“No one is stopping me,” said Roscoe.
“There is a checkpoint. You should be knowing.”
Roscoe followed the road a little more until around a bend
he spotted the check point, like most check points in India,
a shack with a stick, vehicles lined up. On the other side,
he imagined, a hundred thousand Indian soldiers camped in
frozen mud huts under the snow, and across from them, a hundred
thousand well armed Chinese, grim, humorless, a single red
star on their fierce berets. Tanks rolling back and forth,
cannons pointed. He looked up the mountain, a tough rock climb
at the bottom, unrelenting sheer cliffs at the top. He turned
and walked back to town.
The lake side of the road had filled with jeeps and cars,
Indians pouring up and down the streets and into the open-air
stalls in front of the shops that sold Tibetan everything,
shoes, hats vests, skirts and dresses made from wool or yak
fur, jewelry, particularly jade, mostly chick stuff. You could
get your picture taken in traditional Tibetan outfits; Roscoe
saw four of the girls from his group doing that. Tea houses
served chai and momos; they used wood stoves heated by yak
poop or butane stoves to cook.
The guys were in the bars, smoking pot and cigarettes, drinking
Dansberg Blue and Bagpiper. Diosa waved to Roscoe from a second
story porch on a building that shouldn’t have had two
floors. She and Jesus were drinking chai and eating momos
with an Irish girl who was moving to Seattle because Ireland
was too expensive. He joined them for a while, then they hit
the shops and Roscoe went back to the bar. He sat on the front
steps with his Bagpiper and Blue. A military jeep rolled up
and the passenger jumped out, a stout officer with a neat
mustache, brown uniform, black boots, maroon beret. He had
a pistol in his holster and carried a superfluous riding whip.
He walked up and stood in front of Roscoe who didn’t
really like police or military people that much, but he had
his passport, he wasn’t doing anything wrong; if he
had to he’d say he was a guru, Indians loved teachers.
Roscoe looked at the officer and the officer looked at Roscoe.
Roscoe wondered whether he was supposed to stand up, so he
didn’t.
“Namaste,” Roscoe said. It kind of means hello
and blessings to you, it’s what Ghandi said before he
got shot.
The officer nodded his head sideways ever so slightly. “I
like you hat,” he said.
Well, Roscoe wasn’t going to give him the hat, not without
a trip to China. Roscoe said, thank you, and went into his
spiel about how he had a sweet little horse and when he went
trail riding he spotted feathers on the trail and got off
his horse and put them in his hat. He took off the hat and
pointed to the stains on top. The brown stains were his real
sweat.
The officer listened. “Where from?” he said.
“California,” said Roscoe.
“London?”
“USA.”
The officer pointed to a striped brown feather on Roscoe’s
hat, with his finger, not the whip. “California bird?”
he said.
“Red tailed hawk,” said Roscoe.
“May I have one?” the officer said.
It was Roscoe’s foreign policy to give a feather to
anyone who asked. He did it in Buenos Aires, Mexico City,
Prague, Paris, and here in India, too. You’d think it
would have left him bereft of feathers but, in fact, people
gave him more feathers than he gave away. Here in India he’d
lost a few hawk feathers, but picked up raven, rooster, guinea
hen, duck, and dove. He fingered the hawk feather. “I
want to see the Chinese border,” he said.
The officer stood passively for a moment. “Have you
had a yak ride?” he said.
Roscoe pointed to the snowy hills behind the lake. “I
don’t want to go there,” he said. Then he moved
his finger to the hills behind him.
The officer nodded his head sideways.
“Land mines?”
He got another nod. Roscoe gave him the hawk feather and he
jumped in the jeep and took off. Indian security was tough
to crack.
Roscoe stood. Diosa and Jesus were shopping. The kids were
all over town. He had time. He walked toward the opposite
edge of the outpost, the Sikkim side, and went up to a herdsman
with a big yak. The kid wore knock-off jeans, sneakers, a
wool hat with flaps, and a fake NY Yankees jacket. Sikkimese
teen-age boys liked to wear stuff that said “U.S. Army”
or “Yankees.”
You don’t pay in advance in India, but Roscoe pulled
out a Rs. 50 note and gave it to him. The kid nodded his head
sideways. He said, “Nice hat.” Roscoe pointed
up the hill. “China?” said Roscoe. “Tibet?”
He got another nod. The kid offered Roscoe a leg up, but Roscoe
waved him off. “You can ride the yak,” said Roscoe.
The kid grinned and started whacking the yak up the hill and
Roscoe followed.
They kept to a narrow path between rocks and scrub brush.
The footing wasn’t bad, except in the shade where the
snow made it slippery. Pretty soon they were around a bend
and the town was out of sight. At that height you tire quickly
and in no time they were stopping every twenty yards or so
to catch their breath, well, Roscoe did, and the yak; the
herdsman breathed heavily but seemed pretty enervated.
“Want to race?” he said.
“No,” said Roscoe. “I’m old. Race
the yak.”
The herdsman’s name was Pema, because everybody in Tibet
is named Pema, and the yak’s name was Derek Jeter.
“You like Derek Jeter?” said Roscoe during one
of the frequent stops.
He got a sideways nod.
“You like baseball?”
“Cricket,” said Pema. “You like Bush?”
“I don’t like Bush,” said Roscoe.
“I like Bush,” said Pema. “Kill Muslims.”
Well, that’s India, or part of it.
“Christian?” said Pema.
“No,” said Roscoe.
Pema pointed to himself. “Christian,” he said.
“You not Christian?”
“Jewish Buddhist,” said Roscoe.
“Ha!” said Pema. “Good one. Want to race
now?”
“Race Derek Jeter,” said Roscoe.
“Always beat Derek Jeter.”
“What about the land mines?” said Roscoe.
He got a sideways nod for that one. The land mines, like everything
else in India, were as illusory as they were real. There were
probably signs on the border that said, “Land Mines
Ahead.” Whoever put up the signs might even have had
land mines to plant, but once the signs were up, what difference
did it make?
Roscoe took off and won the next twenty yards. Pema had to
go back and get Derek Jeter who’d decided not to budge.
“Race again?” said Pema.
“No,” said Roscoe. His chest heaved. His heart
raged. There wasn’t enough air in the air. So for the
next half-hour or so he walked and rested, walked and rested,
panting hard. Steam came out of Derek Jeter’s nose.
Then, as they approached the top, Roscoe heard small arms
fire.
“Chinese,” said Pema. “Practice fight.”
But when they got to the top of the mountain Roscoe stared
over an empty narrow valley with a winding road, then another
mountain beyond and, beyond that, more snow covered mountains.
Not a vehicle in sight. Not a plane or a helicopter. Nothing.
“Where is everybody?” said Roscoe.
Pema pointed into the valley. “Road is China,”
he said.
Well, given that level of evidence, his butt hole could be
China. The firing had stopped. The sky was blue and the yellow
sun autumn low. Roscoe wondered how many fools Pema had led
up there, then pointed to that road. He turned away. There
were six Chinese soldiers standing in front of him.
It’s hard to remember this part clearly, it was too
vivid to remember clearly. They wore uniforms that were that
pukey tan-green color. Helmets, not berets. Five had rifles
that didn’t look like automatics. They weren’t
pointed at him. They held them at their waists. One held a
pistol, square like a 9 mm. He raised it up and put it on
Roscoe’s forehead
.
Roscoe’d had a gun on his forehead before. A Crip did
it to him back in his Venice ghetto days. It made things pretty
simple. You’re dead or your not. He figured being white
and apparently unarmed, they might not want to shoot him.
He hadn’t put his hands up. Slowly, he raised a finger
from his right hand and pointed upward at his pocket. “USA,”
he said.
The soldier went into Roscoe’s pocket with his left
hand and pulled out Roscoe’s passport. He opened it
one-handed, the gun still on Roscoe’s temple, looked
at the passport, then looked at Roscoe, looked at the passport,
then Roscoe. Then he laughed. Roscoe didn’t know why
he laughed. The other soldiers smirked. Maybe it had something
to do with the Tibetan in the Yankees jacket and the yak.
He handed Roscoe the passport and stepped back. He pointed
toward India and said something very curt, likely something
like, Get the fuck out of here. Inexplicably, Roscoe bowed
slightly to him, turned, and headed back down the mountain
with Pema and Derek Jeter.
After a while Roscoe asked Pema, “How often does that
happen?” but Pema didn’t answer him. “Has
that happened before?” Roscoe said.
Pema stopped. He was perspiring and his eyes shifted. He wouldn’t
look at Roscoe. He was shaking, but Roscoe was shaking, too.
“No tell,” said Pema. “No tell. No one tell.”
So Roscoe didn’t tell anybody, not even Diosa. He hadn’t
told her about the Crip either. This time he said he’d
been drinking at the bar and went for a walk. Like the China-India
border, like the land mines, what was the point?
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