I can’t tell you how lucky I felt to have witnessed something so special. These performances have been going on for one thousand years.
The north Indian state of Ladakh is almost out of this world. At a staggering altitude, intensely remote, and with a culture mostly unchanged for centuries, it drew me in and captivated me. My Dad told me that when the state borders were first opened in 1976 and tourists trundled in, Ladakhis left buckets of water out for the cars and buses overnight, thinking the vehicles were animals that needed to quench their thirst.
Things have since changed since then, although I presume the changes are concentrated in the capital, Leh (pronounced Lay). Alongside ancient temples, prayer wheels, and monasteries, there are hotels, tourist offices, and rug shops. There is electricity (mostly) and Internet (sometimes). You can eat pizza baked in a clay oven, buy Harry Potter books, and haggle over the same tchotchkes you see throughout India. I even met a British couple who lived five miles from where my father works.
The combination of the religious, ancient atmosphere of the town and the clear spread of development and tourism gave the place a strange dissonance. But I don’t want to imply that the changes are bad, or that character is being stripped from a “magical” place.
I think that talking about preserving a place’s ‘magic’ risks trapping its people in a bubble and depriving them of the income and luxuries that others enjoy — and for no good reason.
I stayed with the wonderfully named Mohammed Ali, who I had last “met” when my parents, Mum pregnant with me, honeymooned in his hotel. He and my Dad went way back, so not only did he charge them nothing, but he also brought my Mum fruit every day to help with her pregnancy; despite over twenty years passing in the meantime, I was greeted with just as much warmth and kindness. He had sold his hotel, so I stayed in his house with his wife, three children, and two grandchildren. I can’t tell you how nervous I was, but when I first met him he touched my hands gently and said, ‘of course, I have only Indian toilet, not Western toilet. If you prefer, you can stay in my friend’s hotel, I will not mind’ — and I reckoned that anyone as considerate as that was probably going to be okay.
I was welcomed like a daughter, was given unbelievable amounts of food, and hurdled the language barrier by making firm friends with Risa, Ali’s two-year-old grandson.
(Well… he shot me a lot with his toy gun, locked me in the outside bathroom once, and locked me in my room when I was about to leave, which I took as a sign that he was sad to see me go.)
The first challenge for anyone visiting Leh is its 3500m (11,000 ft) altitude. I am both chronically unfit and had never experienced altitude before, so I was astonished by how much the change affected me physically and mentally. The slightest incline had me wheezing, I was weak and pale, and I had constant nosebleeds. But I wasn’t going to let it keep me from my adventures.
On my third day, on the advice of my beloved guidebook, I got up early and climbed up to investigate Leh’s ruined palace. Attempting to climb the rough hillside to the entrance without breakfast was a mistake — the only way I found the strength to clamber up was by pretending that I was Frodo and I had to destroy the One Ring. The palace housed the Ladakhi royal family from 1600-1900 before it was sacked, an onslaught which has still not been repaired. Early in the morning, it was also poorly lit, so I had to pick my way through gloomy corridors. Ancient grinning Buddhas loomed out of the darkness, and I stumbled across balconies and was staggered by the views.
As further demonstration of his hospitality, Ali also took me out in his car each day to see the sights further afield. Not only was it really kind of him, but I think he enjoyed having someone who didn’t mind him chain-smoking! We went to Stok Palace and Spitok and Stok monasteries, all of which I suspect he’d been to hundreds of times before — and as a devout Muslim, I assume that they passed him by a little bit. I tried to play it cool, but inside I was very overexcited.
I got to investigate monasteries’ storerooms with an electric torch, peeking beneath cloths to look at statues that were one thousand years old, only uncovered for festivals. (The old wood smelled amazing). I got to sit and listened to red-robed child-monks recite ancient mantras in Sanskrit, led by their elders. (When they saw me they stopped to point and giggle and were shushed and chastised). I saw horns made out of human thigh bones. And I saw a 45ft Buddha statue that the Dalai Lama himself visited and said he didn’t need to consecrate, because its beauty was so great that that itself made it holy.
I mean, wouldn’t you get overexcited if you saw those things?!
Despite my above comment about Ali, he certainly appreciated the beauty of the landscape that surrounded us. After I had finished exploring Tikse monastery (with the giant Buddha) and we were driving home, he suddenly stopped the car and pointed. I looked over: and saw the below image. I had to re-take it three times before he was satisfied. Thank you, Ali, for giving me one of the best photos of my five-month trip.
The best moment of my time in the town was something that very few people have been able to see: a chaams dance. These ritual dances are usually only held in deepest winter, when Ladakh is closed to tourists, but I was lucky to be around during the Ladakhi Cultural Festival, so a special, truncated performance was put on. Lamas (Buddhist priests) wore masks representing evil or demonic spirits, and were ceremonially defeated to the sound of other monks’ ritual chanting of Buddhist mantras. The dancers writhed and stamped and held hands to spin around as the chanting went on and on hypnotically. A bored-sounding woman described the action in broken English for us white tourists.
I was sitting behind some French tourists who did a crossword and muttered loudly throughout, but further to my left were some old Ladakhi women, who watched reverently and span miniature prayer wheels (which are inscribed with mantras, and to spin them clockwise increases the amount of good karma in the world). A high lama of the Yellow Hat sect of Buddhism was at the top of the steps to bless proceedings, and a photo of the Dalai Lama was beside him.
I can’t tell you how lucky I felt to have witnessed something so special. The performances have been going on for one thousand years.
On Top of the World in Leh, Ladakh
No comments:
Post a Comment