CHANGTHANG, THE SNOW DESERT, is no ordinary plateau. Its undulating terrain has confounded the human race ever since they stepped out of Africa and stumbled upon central Asia, unable to fly over the bordering mountain ranges like a flock of geese. What the human mind perceives as an unvanquished distance is all a matter of height, for the Tibetan plateau is higher than the highest peaks of all other continents, and it is still rising. Or so the nomads, the future human inhabitants of this plateau, believe. The snow desert shows no signs of belonging to this earth. It hovers somewhere above.
Within the nomad families, more children perish than survive. Some souls quietly escape the womb even before the mother can realize she has conceived. Compared to all the glorious lives one can lead, the human one is quite a chore.
Tashi Yeshe, for instance, has enjoyed previous lives here, in the snow desert. As the landscape transformed, so did he. He witnessed a lonely dawn at the end of a hundred years, for that is how long the sun didn’t rise after an asteroid hit the earth. His life as an earthworm left him humbled. At a time when three-fourths of all life forms perished, from plankton to the dinosaurs, he had lived on as a worm. In the ice ages, he was deeply attached to herd mentality as a woolly mammoth. During the great melt, he grew courage as a whale, leaving land to wade into water.
In human form, Tashi Yeshe had barely completed three years when he contracted brain fever. His mother was anxious. She feared the fever would swell out from his brain, nibble through his tender spine as if it were a twig, and leap out of that magical spot where the base of the tail once was. That was how most children left. In search of their missing tail.
The nomads had pitched their tents by the sulfur springs—beings that spewed out steam from craters of ice. Outside the black yak-hair tents, snow demons danced in the shadow of the surrounding peaks, lacerated by winds, entranced by the amber-colored steam. The winter, in its retreat, had orchestrated a vigorous whirlpool of snowstorms all across the desert.
Desperate, his parents decided to put him in the care of those they trusted the most. For the nomads, there existed no hidden meadow or settled hearth warmer than a crowded sheepfold. The little one’s mother held him near her chest as his father wrapped them both, layer upon layer. Outside the tent, she braved the unstable depths and heights of snow to reach the pen, a single sheltered hole into which the community had stuffed all their cattle to create an alcove of warmth. The mother dug a shallow pit at the center of the shed, bedded it with blankets of yak hair and pashmina, and lay her burning son down. As she tucked him in, she prayed that the collective heat of the herd would heal him. The boy would have no significant memory of the fever or that winter, except for one. Sweating and shivering at the same time, he dreamed of the strange inhabitants of different cosmic realms. He woke up to find himself surrounded by a thousand eyes, all glowing in the dark. Eyes unlike his own. Shaped like those of beasts and ablaze with evil, for only evil burned brighter than good in the dark. Eyes above his head, behind his head, below his feet, beside his shoulder, torso, and legs. Eyes that burned above him in the sky, whirling like constellations. Peering into the glowing eyes inside him, for they had taken the place of his organs too.
“The ancestors are constantly watching,” his grandmother would tell him. “One day, they will punish us for all the mischief we have committed.” Here they were, all of them, he thought. Staring silently, waiting to rip his body apart for all the times he had shrieked into his grandmother’s deaf ear and replaced her prayer beads with pebbles. He was dead, he concluded.
The cosmic guardians began to hum and bleat, nudging at his blanket and stamping at him with their hooves. A lamb rubbed its belly on his face, warmed by his burning skin. Far from menacing, his ancestors were a playful and cuddly lot.
This early memory would return to soothe him in his final seasons, like the idea of heaven to a weary Buddhist weighed down by the tedious pursuit of enlightenment.
At the age of seventeen, Tashi Yeshe chanced upon army officials offering sacks of grain at the local monastery. The Indian army was recruiting people from the border to protect the borders. In the past, he had seen his father barter pashmina wool, yak hair, salt, and butter with traders in distant Zanskar. But no one had ever bartered himself. Besides earning a regular salary, the boy would be trained and looked after. In the event of his death, his family would receive more money. Raised on generations of hardship, the teenager considered the barter too good to be true. He left the desolate pastures of Changthang to join the Ladakh Scouts as a soldier.
As a soldier-cook, he was sent to Ladakh for his first posting. It would take his regiment twenty-five days to walk from Srinagar, the verdant capital of Kashmir, to the Valley of Blood Apricots, crammed to the southeast of Changthang. Zoji La pass, the gateway to the kingdom of Ladakh, was higher than any in Kashmir but just an ordinary one in Ladakh, the land of high passes. Some of the soldiers began to suffer from nausea, headaches, and difficulty in breathing, forcing their officer to halt the ascent for the rest of the day. The regiment pitched tents alongside shepherds and their grazing cattle. In the evening, they clung to one another like a human herd, generating collective warmth to fight the bitter tunnel of wind descending from the pass.
As the official cook and unofficial butcher, Tashi Yeshe killed three goats that day to feed his ailing, homesick company. He had developed a reputation for precise butchery early on in his training. You could give him any creature—cow, buffalo, rabbit, hen, goat, sheep, marmot, deer, duck, even the mighty yak—and he wouldn’t waste a single feather or fiber. It was as if he could see through the skin and flesh to exactly where the cartilage held the joints together. Under his cleaver, ligaments and tendons remained intact. The skin peeled off from the flesh to reveal hidden designs. Designs that held it all together. Designs where it all fell apart.
As with skin and flesh, the boy had seen through the lush deception of the neighboring Kashmir Valley. The profusion of forests, lakes, people, and pastures was, in fact, a subterfuge. One day, the forests would be a desert and the being, laid bare once again, would reflect upon the spirit.
Two years later, the Chinese army crushed the neighboring kingdom of Tibet and extended the invasion to India. The Indian army was caught napping. Rather than fight a lost battle, some of the soldiers decided to flee. Under his officer’s supervision, Tashi Yeshe took to the wild, pillaging corpses and ransacking supplies from abandoned camps. To remain unnoticed, the group had to keep moving. There were no resources or time to tend to the injured among them. Death was the slow and painful conclusion for those left behind. But he couldn’t just march forward like his seniors. Once everyone else had moved on, he took his kukri and slit the throats of those left behind.
By the end of the invasion, only two of them, the most junior and senior, survived. So they made a pact. The officer would return to civilization. He would declare the rest dead, killed in brave combat. With the soldier’s official martyrdom, his nomad family would benefit from his pension and perks—greater than those awarded to the living. Off the record, the soldier would make his way to Tibet. The land of his ancestors. The land of nomads who migrated from pasture to pasture to accommodate every tribe’s needs.
Tashi Yeshe didn’t fear the Chinese. Nor was he running away from the Indians. He was restless, that’s all. Empty within, restless without. Life, it seemed, could still be rescued, if only he could find himself a shed to sleep in undisturbed.
“Do you know my name?” Ghazala asks her grandson, as she feeds him rice later that night.
Lugging and working the electric thresher was backbreaking. By the time he returned home, he was an exhausted child.
“I know that grandfather called you ‘Ghazal’ when you two were alone. He was very fond of ghazals. Hearing them, reciting them, singing them, memorizing them. That is the only time I heard you being called something other than ‘Mother’ or ‘Grandmother.’ ”
“It was his name for me,” she says, as she proceeds to eat what is left on the plate.
Ghazala considers the existence of a canal running through a thicket nearby a blessing. Hidden among wild trees, she is free to smoke as the clothes soak in soap.
Back home, her vices were an open secret. Everyone in her house knew she smoked and drank. But no one confronted her—a figure worthy of pity, not punishment. Ever since her husband’s death, she had been at odds with herself. Her children attributed it to the unbearable loneliness that follows almost seventy years of companionship. No one could have guessed that they helped her ease a much greater burden. The burden of being free.
Ghazala stops squatting and sits, to rest her muscles, on top of the rocks that prevent the drain from veering. She pulls her headscarf off to feel the breeze, as her hands take a break from scrubbing the grease stains off her grandson’s clothes.
She lights a bidi, eager to continue her wishful conversation with the man with the pearl earrings. For the time kept aside for washing clothes is also the time dedicated to daydreams and ruminations.
“What about clouds?” she asks him.
“What happened to them?” he wonders. “Where have they gone this afternoon?”
“Who are they?” she probes.
“The clouds…” He mulls over it. “They are visions.”
“And the mountains?” Ghazala could have never imagined that mountains like the Karakorams even existed. Stripped of greenery, life, and all evidence of it, each peak exists like a fractured bone or mutilated skeleton, devoid of skin and flesh. She has seen purple, blue, orange, yellow, and pink mountain peaks on her journey here. A few days after they had crossed the Zoji La pass, her grandson took a small detour to show her “the moonscape.” This valley resembled the surface of the moon, he told her. She marveled at the gigantic mounds and the squiggles shaped out of rocks, defying geometry and the pressures of aesthetics. Like this landscape, the moon too, she concluded, was dreamed up by a toddler. A riot of colors and odd shapes, all drawn in a hurry.
“The mountains are the truth,” Apo says. “They are remnants of the truth behind all creation. Precariously balanced, threatening to crumble.”
“And the water that roars in the Indus and sits still in the lakes?”
“Madam, mountains and clouds, truth and visions, all are reflected alike on the skin of water. So are the past and the future. They are all attributes of the present, like the rumbling and the stillness you speak of. Water is an element full of possibilities. It is the present.”
Ghazala likes it when he calls her “madam.” Why did he ask her what her name was? she wonders. And why did she ask him for his, considering she was too shy to call him anything, clearing her throat or fidgeting with her headscarf for his attention.
“Who am I?” she asks.
The man slips into silence. Ghazala stubs out her bidi and returns to washing. The clothes float in the stream like wild weeds. She rinses her feet and sets off with the clothes. She hangs them on branches under a sun so strong, they will be ready to retrieve in the time it takes to smoke one more. She sits down once again.
“You are not a ghazal or a poem or a song,” she hears his voice say. “Nor are you the muse. I know you. You are a poet.”
Ghazala forgets to light the bidi. She keeps it on her lap and tumbles back into the reverie.