Into the Mountains - Part III

In the middle of our week in Leh the wedding took place. It was an unconventional event: neither legal nor religious and was very carefully planned. It took place under a multi-coloured, patterned marquee set up on a completely flat piece of ground surrounded on all sides by streams of the Indus, one of India’s three holiest rivers. We reached the island by clambering across a series of small, flat, and rickety plank and pole bridges that lay across the gurgling water. The ceremony and lunch that followed it lasted about two hours while the mid-day sun blazed down on the marquee and we the guests lolled on fat pillows and soft mattress laid out to form three sides of a square under the canopy. After lunch the thirty strong party piled into a veritable fleet of big 4x4s and set off back to Leh.

But the wedding was not the only event we celebrated in Leh. On the Thursday it was Dani’s birthday and we were determined to mark the occasion with pizza and beer; so that’s what we set out to do in the evening. The first ‘garden restaurant’ that we decided to stop at was the Flambe (these restaurants lined the winding road into town from our hotel and ranged from blatant tourist watering holes serving ‘Chinese, Maxican, Israelian and Continental’ food, to more serious and reassuring eateries with narrower culinary tastes). We were after beer, not food, and the attentive waiter didn’t fail us despite the restaurant not having a license. He poured a large Kingfisher into two cups in order to hide the contents and we sat outside under a tree decked with fairy lights, almost the only people there; the muted roar of a fast running stream behind the back wall of the garden providing the background ambience. We moved on from the Flambé after that one beer and next stopped at a rooftop restaurant in the town centre. Here we ordered more Kingfishers (thinking: to hell with the inflated price tag) and gorged ourselves on thick based pizzas heavy with tomato sauce, onion, herby melted cheese and scorched peppers. It was heavenly. In between mouthfuls we reminisced and swapped stories, laughed about old jokes and embarrassments, and occasionally looking up at the open, inky night sky and the bright dots of stars.

The day before we left Leh we had the opportunity to visit another Gompa, this time accompanied by another of the wedding guests, a Christian Delhiite who was studying for his PhD in the US, and one of the other guests at the Oriental Guest House, who taught ‘band’ at the American School in Bombay. This man was in his forties and from the US. He lived a life apparently largely cut off from the reality of Indian existence around him, traveling from the culturally American school to his hugely expensive accommodation every day.

We hired a taxi and set off for Thiksey Gompa late in the morning. The monastery at Thiksey tops a small hill of grey rock and scree, and sprawls down its sides with squat, square buildings that have white painted walls and dark, square windows. These look out onto a valley floor of flat green pasture dotted with white boulders and the odd thin tree, at the edges of which are rocky ridges that rise up to the high mountains forming the valley. The Gompa is the headquarters of the Gelugpa Tibetan Buddhist tradition in Ladakh and is about 600 years old. Entering the Gompa via a series of white washed steps, we stopped to admire a high-ceilinged prayer hall painted in intricate patterns of bright, rich reds, blues and yellows, in which a red robed monk sat silently by the door, before proceeding on up to the central courtyard, or Choera. This was a perfect rectangle, flat and dusty, and kept from view of the valley by a wall which on the courtyard side supported a slanting roof over a broad colonnade. On the hill side of the open space, used for dramatic ceremonies during Buddhist festivals, and to our right, were steep steps up to the second storey of a high-sided building. Climbing these stairs and stepping in through an open doorway, past carved wooden pillars, we were confronted by a huge head of Buddha; golden and serene looking, supported on a slender neck and broad shoulders. From the ground floor of the building the figure, perhaps 30 ft high, reared up to nearly touch the ceiling of the second floor. At shoulder level to the statue, we walked round a balustraded gallery, marveling at the figure. The Maitreya’s face gleamed dully, its eyes staring blankly out of the room’s open windows to the sun-baked valley beyond.

Returning to the hot courtyard by the steep stone steps, we turned this time to the left end of the space, where more steps lead up to an open platform from which we could access, through a roofed portico, the Gompa’s Assembly Hall, the Dukang. Inside the dimly lit hall the afternoon prayer service would shortly begin, so we slunk in, shoeless, and explored the room from the walls. Making our way slowly around the room, we reached a door at the back that intersected floor to ceiling cabinets of the kind we had seen at Spituk. Through this door and down a single step was an even darker room in which four or five almost man-size figures stood in a row. There was an orange hatted llama, smiling broadly, and a fierce, snarling manikin, the spear in its hand surmounted by two human heads and a grinning skull. The walls of this ante-chamber were a grimy orangey-brown and uneven. Behind the row of figures were wall paintings of flayed animals, the skins depicted dripping blood. In the half light we could also make out the occasional painting of a man’s skin, the features of the face frozen in terror. The room was heavy with pungent incense. As we stared at the walls in horrified fascination, a commotion began in the main hall that drew us back into the larger space. Near where we stood by the glass-fronted cabinets was a seat, reserved for high ranking Buddhist clergy and the Dalai Llama, that was raised to almost shoulder height. Opposite this small throne and sat behind a low bench was an elderly monk with a stubbly, round head, who had started to recite mantras into a battered microphone.

Leading from where the monk sat crosslegged and bent-backed opposite the throne were long straight benches, perhaps six in a row at 90 degrees to the bright upright triangle of the entrance doorway. At these benches sat more monks, the oldest nearer the door to the ante-chamber, the younger, and novice monks as young as 10 or 11 years old, closer to the entrance. We sat down to one side of this bright doorway as the prayer service began in earnest. Sitting there crosslegged on thick rugs we had a perfect vantage point from which to observe the ceremony. At first the youngest monks, just young boys with bright smiles and shaved heads, almost swamped in their dark red robes, took around large metal kettles and poured out tea for their elders. This was done with a hasty lack of reverence which aroused no complaint. Next an older monk wearing a yellow hat with a long, curved tip hurried into the room bearing a brazier from which incense poured in grey clouds. The monk swung the metal object this way and that as he rushed down the aisles, finally halting when every part of the hall had been covered. Now the elderly monk’s chanting, coming to us from crackling speakers fixed high on the narrow wooden pillars of the hall, increased in intensity and the rest of the monks became more focused.

On the two benches running down the centre of the hall were large flat drums, their skins a dark, leathery brown, suspended by rope that kept them from swinging when hit. On each bench there were two drums and in front of them sat monks with curved drum sticks. From the cushioned end of each stick the wood formed a question mark, the base of which the monks held tightly. As the chanting increased in volume still, each of the four monks suddenly poised and then in unison they stared to pound the flat faces of the drums in front of them. With their other hand, each also picked up a white conch shell and blew into it with long breathes. The cacophony from these instruments lasted for about a minute, the drums pounding and shells blasting eerily away, the sound bouncing off the walls and ringing in our ears. Then suddenly, with one or two muted last breathes from the shells, the chorus stopped and the hall returned to the crackling chanting of the elderly monk alone.

This explosion of sound happened again and again, until we felt we had seen and heard enough. But before we roused ourselves from the floor and stepped out into the sunlight, a monk came round with a metal vessel. In it was water, earthy and oily, which we were to first sip and then smooth over our heads. For this we each received a small amount in our outstretched cupped hands. This done, we eased ourselves up and moved back out to the portico. I felt that we had witnessed something mysterious and archaic, and I wondered how many times those blaring shells had sounded across the valley in front of us. Perhaps on the plain far out on the valley floor the sound could be heard by animal herders and other local inhabitants, who hearing the familiar sound might glance up at the angular shape of the distant monastery and know it to be a certain time of the day. With the wonder of the service still in our heads we made our way down through the complex and negotiated the flights of stairs to the exit.