Tag: Laos

The Return

By Paul Mirabile

Jonathan Harper was startled out of sleep by an impatient ringing at the door bell. He rolled out of bed, tip-toed to the sitting-room and peeked through the curtains covering the bay windows. In the dim, moonlit night he perceived a slender, young man dressed in some sort of long robe. He was completely bald. Again the bell rang and rang under the young man’s relentless ringing. Jonathan hastened to the hearth, picked up the poker out of its andiron then quietly moved towards the door. With a quick jerk he unlocked it so as to take the knocker by surprise. The knocker looked stonily at Jonathan’s sleepy, pale face and at the poker.

“Whatever are you doing with that mighty weapon, father?” was that knocker’s first remark. Jonathan stared in astonishment, mouth agape. “Yes, father it’s me, your son Francis. Have you forgotten me ?”

And that was how Francis Harper, the fugitive Buddhist monk, and his father Jonathan, completely thunderstruck, were reunited …

“Quick, come in … come in … At this hour of the night, Francis. And look at you, dressed like a beggar monk. So thin. I hardly recognised you.” Jonathan was in a state of great excitement. Francis sailed in, closed the door and settled on the familiar canopy. He scanned the sitting-room: Nothing had changed.

“You gave me a scare, Francis,” Jonathan resumed, still standing.

“Well, who would be ringing at this hour of the night?” Francis returned in a flat voice. His father hadn’t quite understood the question. He seemed half asleep. “Where’s mum?”

“Who?”

“Mummy … your beloved wife?” Francis pressed ironically. Jonathan stared emptily at him. “Well, is she here, or has she gone to see her boring sister Hazel ? Perhaps she’s out with her lover?” Jonathan winced.

“Don’t be vulgar, Francis, please.”

“Come on, I’m only having you on. Where is she?”

Jonathan stepped forward: “I thought she was with you! She went to find you in Laos a year ago, and I’ve never had any word from her since.”

Francis looked blankly at this father then jumped up. “She’s mad ! Why did you let her go, damn it?”

“I didn’t let her go, Francis; she woke up one morning and off she went leaving me a note.”

“What note? Do you still have it?”

“The note … Yes …” Jonathan shuffled to his bedroom to procure Heather’s note that she had left for him on the chimney-mantle. He handed it to his son. It seemed that it had been wrinkled up into a ball then roughly flattened out.

“Bloody hell! Why did she do that?” Francis gritted his teeth. “It’s such a dangerous place to be for mummy. She has no clue of the dangers : the jungles are infested with disease and wild animals. Food and water are dodgy. It’s another world.”

The son glared at his father then threw himself down onto the canopy, burying his face in his hands.

“I’ve put the police on to it but nothing has come up,” Jonathan defended himself, yet in a contrite tone of voice. “She believed that only she could bring you back to us. But … how did you come back here?”

The question struck Francis oddly. He looked at his father who still stood: “Do put down that poker, you cut such a ridiculous figure.” Indeed, Jonathan hadn’t noticed that he still clenched the poker tightly. He tossed it into the cold hearth. Francis sighed: “Me ? Do you really want to know, father?”

“Of course I want to know, then we can both set out to find mother.”

“No we cannot just set out to find mother. I am a wanted criminal in Thailand and in England. Have you forgotten?”

“Rubbish! How then did you manage to get home if you are wanted by the police?” Jonathan persisted, trotting back and forth from the sitting-room to the kitchen to make coffee and toast muffins.

“That’s a long story,” Francis lamented, crumbling up the letter and dropping it to the carpeted floor.

“Well, we have the whole night, so please, I must know the truth. It’s been a nightmare for me in this house all alone. You know that Andy pops in almost every day to rub salt into my wounds, drinking my brandy and wheeling that mordant wit of his.”

“You mean that you’ve been pissing it up with that halfwit?” Francis snapped.

“No … no, of course not. But he invites himself over and never knows when to leave. How many times have I put up with his drunken effrontery.”

“Well, if I ever see him here …”

“No ! He must not see you; if he does all Stevenage will know and that means the police, too. No. We must find a way to hide you, to keep you safe from the law until this rotty mess is straightened out.”

“Straightened out?” Francis sneered. He eyed his father coldly. ‘Forced’ solitude had wrinkled the old man’s ashen face, had given him the appearance of Gandalf straight out of The Hobbit, all he needed was a grey cloak, staff and floppy hat to complete the portrait instead of his thirty-year old pyjamas. The flesh on his neck had gone flabby and his eyes, colourless, like his thinning, flaky hair. Jonathan finished his coffee: “Please tell me how you left Laos and managed to reach England,” he said in a weak voice, practically beseeching his son.

Francis took a gulp of coffee, he made a wry face: “I haven’t drunk coffee for over twelve years.” Setting the cup down on the settee, he began his tale. And as Francis fumbled to find his words Jonathan observed the metamorphosis of his appearance.

Francis’ face, laboured by years of privations, illness and fasts, had the appearance of rough, sandy stone. His eyes were set deep in their orbits whilst the furrows of his crow’s eyes twitched at every slight movement or sound in the sitting-room. The callousness of his face darkened all its former freshness of youth – that youth he had abandoned in southeast Asia. He swayed slightly in the canopy, nibbling at his muffin, apathetically. Jonathan made some more coffee and toasted more muffins for his enfeebled son. He opened slightly the bay window curtains then finally settled down in his wicker chair.

Francis began lethargically, rubbing his hairless head: “I had been living from monastery to monastery in northern Laos, constantly ill because of the food and water until one day I decided that I had no future in those remote places of worship. Mind you, the religious services captivated me as did the jungle and the snaking, mystical Mekong. The monks were jovial chaps, very respectful and reserved. They offered a soothing solace to my inner and outer sufferings. But I had to leave and return to England. My mind and body ached for familiarity… for mother and for the English language …”

“And your father?” interposed Jonathan, biting his quavering lower lip. Francis looked sadly at his aging father. “I know I haven’t been the best of fathers to you, Francis,” Jonathan conceded, his cheeks flushing red with shame. “But you will acknowledge that I did encourage you to travel to Asia to earn your livelihood. You know, I did not choose my solitude. It was imposed on me.”

“Did we then impose it, me and mummy?” came Francis’ laconic retort.

Jonathan looked dismal, a bit jarred by the remark. He stared at his son through sleepy, spent eyes. Francis laughed: “Of course I’ve returned for you too!” He pursued: “Thanks to my Lao passport procured for me by the Venerable Father, I travelled to visa-free countries. First, I boated it down to Vientiane, then took a cheap flight to Moscow. From there to Cairo, where I renewed my British passport at the embassy wihout any questions asked, although it had expired over six years. Anyway, with my British passport I entered Italy by boat, and from there on used my British passport since European border officials hardly looked at it. To avoid the usual big entries into England I hitched up to the Hook of Holland and took the ferry to Harwich.”

“But hadn’t the border officials suspected anything … your dress?”

“I changed dress in Italy but wore my robe when crossing into England.”

“But your photo?”

“My face has undergone a drastic change, father — haven’t you noticed?” Jonathan had but said nothing. “Anyway, what could they say to a tonsured-headed Englishman who had become a Buddhist?” Jonathan paused, as if reflecting.

“And the money to pay for all these flights, boats and trains?”

“I had my Cook’s travellers’ cheques safely in my money belt.”

Jonathan sighed. “Look Francis, we must not dilly-dally, Interpol may be on your trail at this very moment. No dawdling about, I have to find a place to hide you.”

“Don’t exaggerate, father, please.”

Jonathan sized up his gaunt, emaciated son: “I hope you’re not thinking of turning yourself over to the police.” Jonathan wrung his hands fearfully.

“No, no, I’ve paid for my selfishness and stupidity. Every day and night for twelve years that horrible scene still floods my mind.”

Here it seemed to Jonathan that Francis began to weep quietly. What to do ? What to do ? Comfort him with a fatherly hand on the shoulder ? A paternal embrace ? Or simply a kind, appeasing word ? Jonathan, whilst he observed his son, realised that he had never been a fatherly towards his son. Heather had been right — he thought as he looked on helplessly at his son’s bony, trembling shoulders.

The grandfather clock struck six.

“My God, it’s morning!” Jonathan cried, going to the bay window. “People will be milling about.”

“So what, people always mill about in the morning,” came Francis’ sardonic reply.

“Someone may see you.”

“Through the window? Who will see me father if I stay in the house?”

“Right you are, Francis.”

“And mother?” Francis retorted, a glare of reproach in his cloudy eyes.

“Mother? Why hasn’t she ever written to me? Did you not have any news of her in Laos?”

“Some monks did speak about an old lady with grey hair seen in different boats on the Mekong. That’s about all. It could have been anyone … “

“Anyone? An old, grey-haired lady traipsing up and down the Mekong,” Jonathan cut in savagely. He fell back into his wicker chair. “I have to get you out of England before I tend to your mother. I will act quickly and decisively for you and her.”

Francis stared at his wizen-faced father, and for the first time in his life the young man felt a pang of pride towards him. Yes, a pang of pride because Francis had always believed his father to be a moral coward, a skulker who purposely disavowed, even mocked all his childhood projects, which had gradually raised an emotional tension between them. The clock struck half-past six. The first rosy rays of the sun trickled into the sitting-room with the warm, gay light. At that stroke of the clock Francis truly felt that their generational tension had been somehow lightened.

Francis stood. Jonathan stood. They gazed at each other and an instant later broke out into howls of laughter, laughing like two little boys. They laughed and laughed as they had never laughed before.

Jonathan strode over to Francis and slapped him paternally on the back: “Let’s have a real British breakfast.” Which they did — bacon and eggs, kipper and fresh orange juice which Jonathan squeezed himself.

The doorbell rang. Jonathan jumped out of his chair. Francis hastened to the bay window. It was Andy. “Blast! Into your room Francis and don’t make a sound. I’ll send that bugger packing. How dare he come bothering me at this hour of the morning.”

As Jonathan shuffled to the door, Francis made a bee-line for his bedroom. Jonathan threw it open.

“Well old man, up bright and early, hey?” began Andy in his usual strident, exasperating tone. “How about a little excursion to St Albans this morning ? They have an excellent pub where the food is the best in Hertfordshire.” Andy struck his customary ill-bred pose.

“No thanks, not today Andy, I’m terribly busy …”

“You, busy, Johnny old boy? Come on, mate, we’ll take your car.”

“That goes without saying since you haven’t one,” Jonathan rejoined peevishly. “No, today I must finish some work. You go and tell me how the food is. We’ll see about tomorrow.” He corrected himself. “No … next week ; I shall be popping over to visit my cousin-in-law.”

Andy sensed that Jonathan was lying.

“I see,” and a grotesque smile stretched over his red-spotted, pasty face. “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, hey?”

“What are you insinuating?”

“Oh nothing … nothing, old boy. Have a good time and let me know how things work out.” He gave Jonathan an equivocal wink. Jonathan slammed the door in his face.

“Bloody idiot!” he growled. Jonathan stopped in his tracks. “My cousin-in-law … that’s it ! I’ll send Francis to Mary in Ireland. No one will ever think of searching for him in Ireland.”

Jonathan was all agog. He had found a solution to Francis’ dilemma thanks to Andy’s unexpected visit. He called to Francis who opened the door of his room carefully.

“No bother, the blighter’s gone, and I have a smashing idea, Francis. I have half a mind to drive you to Ireland where the British police will never hunt you down. My cousin-in-law, Mary O’Casey, lives in Waterville. Once we’re there and you’ve met her, I’ll drive back to England, get a flight to Laos and bring mother back home.”

Francis had never seen his father so animated. His shrivelled features seemed to rejuvenate, new blood infuse that puffy, pasty, unshaven Gandalf face. Francis, however, stood at the door of his room, a strange, alien gleam in his eyes. He turned to his father: “You’ve left everything as it was,” he pronounced softly. “Malraux’s La Voie Royale, Maugham’s The Gentleman in the Parlour. My desk … Everything as it was … exactly … “

“Yes, your mother wished it so. Nothing has been touched. The room has been waiting for your return. Unfortunately the circumstances require desperate action that I would never have imagined. We must buckle up, my boy.”

“Ireland?” wondered Francis sceptically.

“Ireland,” Jonathan echoed. “I shall get you there tonight and we’ll be on the Birkenhead ferry for Dublin tomorrow morning. Dress like an average Englishman and use your British passport.”

“What do you mean by an average Englishman, father?” Francis enquired.

“Well … Put a cap on your bald head and dress in English clothes. You’re not thinking of getting into Ireland with your monk’s robe, are you?”

Francis chuckled: “Don’t worry, my days of impersonating a Buddhist monk are over.”

“Were you then not sincere about your conversion?” his father asked rather puzzled.

Francis shrugged his shoulders: “I don’t know. I don’t know who I really am. I seem to have lost all identity of myself by impersonating or embracing so many identities. Now I’m off to Ireland. Will I become an Irishman?” A melancholic smile stretched his bloodless lips.

“Whatever you become Francis you will always be my son.” Francis nodded, albeit the resigned gesture seemed to embarrass his father who eyed his son with genuine sympathy.

“Mary will have you working in the gardens, and you know she has lodgers there all year round. You could help her out in her home. She lost her husband many years ago. A fine woman, she is.”

Francis nodded again and stepped back into his room. He closed the door silently and lay on his bed, his blood-shot eyes fixed on all his books nicely arranged on the shelves. He smiled. Then those sleepless eyes fell on a photo of his beloved Irish setter, Patty. He closed them and thought of nothing … nothing at all. He began to murmur a prayer of contrition in the name of the Enlightened One …

Meanwhile in the sitting-room Jonathan set to work without delay. He had already contacted his cousin-in-law by phone, explaining Francis’ predicament. He related everything to her without any feelings of guilt or mawkish sentimentality. Mary despised sentimentality. She would welcome Francis like her own child — a child she had never herself had.

Francis had fallen asleep. His father woke him at five in the afternoon. They had a large dinner, after which, under the cover of darkness, Jonathan packed Francis’ belongings in the boot — two shirts and trousers, a pair of walking boots and woollen socks, and his favourite books, Malraux’s La Voie Royale, Maugham’s Collected Short Stories, three of Richard Burton’s travel books and T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

They reached Birkenhead in the morning two hours before the first ferry to Ireland. The bored border official hardly looked at their passports. An hour and a half later they were in Dublin. There the Irish waved them through after having taken a cursory glance at their passports. Two hours later they arrived at Mary O’Casey’s homestead near Hog’s Head. They were both exhausted but relieved to have accomplished their mission.

Mary welcomed them with a hearty lunch. She hadn’t seen Jonathan for over twenty-five years. As to Francis, she had seen him once at the age of five or six. Jonathan stayed on several nights. Mary had no lodgers at that time so she was happy to sit at the welcoming hearth, drink her evening brandy and chat with her distant family-in-law. She read about Heather in the tabloids and wished Jonathan all the luck to bring her back home. If the British bobbies couldn’t do it, well, Jonathan would! He nodded, weakly. Francis remained silent.

Three days later Jonathan bid farewell to Mary and his son. It was time to put into action his plan to retrieve Heather from the jungles of Laos. He would obtain his visa for Laos in London, then buy his flight ticket. He promised to keep Francis informed of any developments.

“Good or bad!” said Francis, with a serious face. Jonathan’s cheeks reddened. He didn’t answer, casting a covert glance at Mary. Instead he strode over to his son, kissed him on both cheeks, something he had not done since he was a baby, kissed Mary on the forehead and hastened out to the car. He was gone in a few minutes.

“I hope you’ll tell me some good stories of your travels, Francis,” Mary chirped cheerfully, taking Francis by the arm. “You know, I like a good story round the hearth. I’ll have you know that you’re in the land of leprechauns, banshees and sidhes.” Her greenish eyes twinkled with impishness.

“What are banshees and sidhes?” Francis asked sheepishly.

“Ah! The spirits of the dead, lad. The unquiet dead. But you needn’t bother about them, I chase minions away with my broom.” And Mary broke into peels of good-natured laughter.

Francis worked daily in Mary’s lovely flower and vegetable gardens, and when lodgers arrived he cooked them breakfast and dinner whenever she was at Waterville on an errand. Oftentimes, he accompanied the guests on the loop road where he could again and again admire the blanket bogs. Mary warned him on several occasions, waving a minatory finger at him, never to step foot in the lime-covered homestead. He never did, not because he was afraid of ghosts — his upriver experiences in Laos had hardened him on all fear of supernatural beings — but because he hadn’t the heart to disobey his father’s cousin-in-law, a cousin-in-law, by the way, that he never quite came to comprehend the genealogical connexion. No matter. He felt at home with this charming woman and with her lively lodgers.

Four quiet months elapsed. One late misty Autumn morning Mary handed Francis a letter from his father. It was posted from Luang Prabang, Laos. Francis quickly opened it. As he scanned the almost unreadable scribble of his father’s handwriting his now bearded face contracted and hardened into a stony expression of restrained grief.

“What is it, my lad?” Mary strolled over to him, frightened.

The young man set the letter down gently on the table: “Mummy’s dead, Mary. She died of illness in northern Laos six months ago. Father is bringing her back home for burial.” Mary placed a motherly hand on Francis’ shoulder and spoke a few words of real warmth. Francis stared vacantly through the open front door into the greyish autumn sky.

The first lodger of the morning thumped slowly down the wooden stairway for breakfast.

Paul Mirabile is a retired professor of philology now living in France. He has published mostly academic works centred on philology, history, pedagogy and religion. He has also published stories of his travels throughout Asia, where he spent thirty years.

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Tags British, Buddhist, Cairo, Dublin, England, European, Gandalf, Hobbit, Ireland, Laos, London, Luang Prabang, Maugham, Mekong, Moscow, Paul Mirabile, TE Lawrence, Thailand, The gentleman in the Parlour

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Peregrinations of a Diplomat’s Wife

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date September 16, 2024
1 Comment on Peregrinations of a Diplomat’s Wife

Ratnottama Sengupta converses with Reba Som

“If Washington goes to Dhaka, there’s a chance that Paris might make it to Stockholm. And of course Moscow would be moved to Geneva!?”

Sounds like gibberish? But this is a piece of the speculative conversation on transfers and postings that is regular in the drawing rooms of embassies and consulates, Dr Reba Som found out on her very first posting after her marriage with Himachal Som.

Both were Presidency graduates pursuing higher careers — he in Foreign Service, she on the threshold of a doctorate. But life as the wife of an ambassador wasn’t only about glamour postings, fancy holidays and brush with celebrities. It was a mixed bag of blessings, as the woman who had grown up in Kolkata with a grounding in Tagore’s music would soon conclude. For, there were the dark clouds of life away from ageing parents and school going children; from the comfort of familiar food and mastered language; from developing your potential and crafting your own identity in the world out there.

In recent years we have read accounts of retired ambassadors and career diplomats’ experiences in diplomatic life. In her memoirs, Hop, Skip and Jump; Peregrinations of a Diplomat’s Wife, Dr Som’s is a woman’s voice, abounding in stories and observations about how the spouses keep a brave front in alien surroundings to hold up the best image of her country. In this conversation, she voices outmore about her encounters with racism, with political emergencies and exigencies. In short, about her lessons in a borderless world of multicoloured humanity.

You went to Brazil (1972), then to Denmark (1974), then Delhi (1976), Pakistan (1978), New York (1981), Dhaka (1984), then Ottawa (1991), Laos (1994), Italy (2002). Please share your gleanings from these lands.

The roller coaster ride was a saga of discovery. Travelling across expanses of the planet earth that we had seen only on the pages of geography books and atlases was a great learning experience. I gained an understanding of diverse cultures, imbibed social customs, became proficient in languages, and was exposed to exotic cuisines. At the same time I faced homesickness. Each posting entailed the challenge of uprooting oneself, finding schools for children, and reinventing oneself every time.

A large part of this life was in the years that had no mobile phones, no video calls, no social media, no internet communication. What did you thrive on?

Continents and hemispheres away from home, the only link with family and friends then was the diplomatic bag. The weekly mail service ferried across oceans by the ministry in Delhi contained letters and parcels from home. We were asked to judiciously use the weight allowed to bring spices, tea, condiments, clothing and other necessities. It became a ritual to write long letters and send them weekly by the diplomatic bag to Delhi from where they would be posted to respective destinations throughout India.

Along with letters would come bundles of magazines and newspapers. These brought us news of home from which we were truly cut off. With no television or internet or phone calls, we were in the dark about all news, be it political, social or entertainment. Every week on the bag day we waited anxiously to receive the newspapers – and the letters, which had instructions, news, recipes, advice, gossip. All of these were crucial for nurturing our souls.

One telegram from my father in 1973 carried the cryptic message: ‘Reba, solitary First class.’ These were the MA results of Calcutta University which were out after a delay of two years.

I was most taken up by the understated humour of some of your encounters in your memoir. Please recount some of them.

On our very first posting, to Brazil, not only our unaccompanied baggage but also our accompanied baggage did not arrive. Eventually when the lost luggage showed up, Himachal’s ceremonial bandhgala[1]was steeped brown — in the colour of the gur[2] my mother had lovingly packed in!

In Brazil, we found the people to be fun loving but too flamboyant. They made tall claims that their institutions were the biggest in the world. But reality often proved the claims to be hollow. Such was the Presidential bid to make the tallest flag pole in the world in Brazil’s new capital, Brasilia. A very tall flag mast was indeed built but the huge flag atop it was torn to shreds since the engineers had not factored in the wind speed at that height. Brazilians mirthfully called it the President’s erection!

And at Denmark. we were surprised by a sudden news of our posting to Mozambique. We had long realised that we were mere players on the chessboard of postings – we could be shunted off across continents at the whims of the powers that be. By the same token, a couple of phone calls by the newly arrived ambassador undid the mischief. We were happy to unpack and settle down again. The only guilt I felt was when I met the owner of Anthony Berg chocolates: I had in no time demolished the entire carton of chocolates he had sent as farewell gift!

You are among the few I know who have mothered in different continents. So how different is it to become a mother away from India?

I always felt that the best way to get to know certain nuances of a country’s cultural tradition was to have babies in them. My elder son, Vishnu was born in Copenhagen and Abhishek, the younger one, in New York — and my experiences each time couldn’t be more different.

In Copenhagen, a social democrat country, hospital visits for full term pregnant women were fixed on a certain day of the week. On the preceding day they had to collect their urine in a jerry can and present it for lab examination. I was confounded and not a little embarrassed to meet other mothers-to-be, swinging their jerry cans like designer bags without fail on the appointed day. I learnt only later that, from the urine examination doctors would note the condition of the placenta and not unnecessarily rush patients into childbirth with caesarean and surgical intervention!

In NY, on the day of my discharge, the hospital staff were highly excited because Elizabeth Taylor had come in for one of her facelifts. I could not forgive them their magnificent obsession when, along with a goodbye hamper, they wheeled in a bassinet with a different baby. On my protestation the nurse rudely shouted, “Can’t you read… the tag says Som Junior?” Shocked by the implication I said, I could not only read but also see! And it was not my child. While everyone was looking on in disbelief another nurse wheeled in my little one. The babies had their diapers changed and were put back in the wrong bassinet.

Years later, we discovered in an informal meeting with an American ambassador that Abhishek was indeed an American citizen. Because, at the time of the child’s birth Himachal was posted not to the embassy in Washington but to the consulate in New York. Only consulate children were given the privilege. This discovery, rechecked by State Department Records, gave our son the US passport. It was a windfall as Abhishek went on to graduate summa cum laude from a prestigious management school in the US and enter Wall Street as an investment banker.

I must also share another truth about birthing away from India. Before Vishnu’s birth, my parents had come to Copenhagen. When I was discharged from the hospital I received their care and being fed Ma’s cuisine was the best gift I could have. So, when phone calls came from hospital, followed by visits enquiring about my state of depression, I was totally confused. I realised how many mothers suffered from postpartum depression in a society bereft of nurturing family care.

How could you master languages as removed as Portuguese from Lao and Italian from Urdu? Is a flair for languages the key to this proficiency or the training imparted before each posting?

I enjoy learning languages. My stint at learning French at Ramakrishna Mission Golpark stood me in good stead in grasping Portuguese in Brazil, French in Ottawa and Italian in Rome — all Latin languages. But there was also the hazard of mixing up some phrases and words, so similar yet so different! Like Bon Appetit in French and Bueno Appetito in Italian. Or Amor in Portuguese; amore in Italian and amour in French.

Sometimes though, I accidentally learnt how language travels. My mother had packed in many petticoats to match with my saris but without their cord. We went to a store that promised to hold all we need but all my sign language did not bring what I needed. “Phita is obviously not available here,” I told Himachal, preparing to leave. Suddenly the storekeeper perked up. ‘Fita, si senhora!” he said and produced bundles of cord.

In due time I found out that janala, kedara and chabi – Bengali for window, chair and keys – had travelled from India to become janela, cadeira and chavi.

What did Dhaka mean to one raised in West Bengal – per se the Ghoti-Bangal[3]divide, your roots or the cultural side with Firoza Begum and Nazrul Geeti?

Dhaka was a great posting in so many ways. It was a hop, skip and jump away from my home town Kolkata, with the same language and culture and yet was a foreign posting with foreign allowances!

As you know, there’s a subtle cultural difference in East and West Bengal. Both speak Bengali but in East Bengal, it’s a colloquial rustic dialect while West Bengal speaks its refined cultural form. This formed the infamous ‘Ghoti-Bangal’ divide: Urban Calcuttans looked askance at their country cousins from the East.

The difference extended to the palate. East Bengalis flavoured their dishes with more chillies and West Bengalis, with a pinch of sugar. For the fish loving people, the two iconic symbols are Hilsa and Prawns, for East and West. Emotions soared high in Kolkata when the supporters of the football teams, East Bengal and Mohun Bagan, clashed, after intensely fought matches that spurred deadly arguments and bets.

Given this background, Himachal created a minor storm by announcing to his parents from Chinsurah, Hooghly in West Bengal that he would marry a girl whose parents were from Dhaka and Faridpur in East Bengal. Ghoti-Bangal feud remained the subject of much friendly banter between Himachal and me until we were posted in Dhaka. There, in a diplomatic turnaround, Himachal played down his Ghoti background to announce that his mother’s family was from Chittagong and he was born in the principal’s bungalow in Daulatpur, Khulna, where his grandfather was posted.

To give a bit of Himachal’s family background: Dr Pramod Kumar Biswas, the first Indian doctorate in Agricultural Sciences from Hokkaido University in Japan, had settled in Dhaka as principal of the Agricultural College. His charming daughter Kana won the heart of Dr Rabindranath Som, a veterinarian who weathered the predictable Ghoti Bangal storm to win her hand in marriage.

When my parents Jyotsnamay and Manashi Ray visited us, we couldn’t visit Patishwar in Rajshahi district, where my maternal grandfather Atul Sen had worked with Rabindranath Tagore before he was arrested for revolutionary activities with Anushilan Samiti, and exiled to Kutubdia, an isolated island in the Bay of Bengal. As a headmaster, he had given shelter to Jatirindranath Mukherji, popularly known as Bagha Jatin[4].

It was a breezy day when my octogenarian father revisited Faridpur Zilla School. The colonial bungalow had acquired a fresh coat of terracotta paint. Finding his way to the headmaster’s room, he announced with a lump in his throat that history had been rewritten, boundaries redefined and new national identities forged since 1923, the year he had matriculated.

The headmaster, delving through yellowing files, fished out the matriculation results for that year. My father’s face was that of an excited school boy impatient to show off his prowess: “Look at my maths marks! Oh yes, my English scores were a trifle lower than expected because I had a touch of fever, but look at Jasimuddin’s marks in English! Thank God, he passed it.” We looked around in hushed surprise. This isn’t The Jasimuddin, the beloved poet of Bangladesh? “But of course,” my father responded. “Jasim’s weakness in English was my strength!”

Dhaka was also personally fulfilling as my doctoral studies, which I had carried across three continents, found fruition at last! On another front, I met with success in gaining the confidence and blessings of Firoza Begum, the legendary exponent of Nazrul Geeti.

The songs of Kazi Nazrul Islam were a great favourite of my father. He often hummed those made famous by Firoza Begum. Since I had trained in Tagore songs from age five, I never aspired to master the distinctly different style of rendition. A chance encounter with the golden voice revived this desire. Firoza Begum bluntly refused. When I persisted, she wanted to hear me sing a few Tagore songs.

One morning I mounted three flights of steps, harmonium on my driver’s shoulder, to enter her flat with apprehension. At her bidding, I sang four songs of Tagore. She heard me without any comment, then she asked why I hadn’t been singing for Bangladesh television. My relief was palpable! I had passed her test.

Over the next two years, my weekly classes with her extended well beyond the music lessons to serious discussions on life itself and the meaning of religion. What began as a guru-shishya[5]relationship, transcended to deep friendship. She declined any remuneration and dearly wished that I should cut a disc. This wish of hers came true only when Debojyoti Mishra heard me and decided to record my Nazrul-songs for Times Music in 2016.

Food is perhaps the first face of culture. So please share with us some of your culinary adventures. Or should I say ‘fishy’ stories?

Adventures? I could talk about the chapli kebabs in Pakistan, or about putting samosas in Bake Sales. I could tell you about making rasgullas from powder milk. I could even tell you about our gardener in Laos who merrily collected every scorpion and caterpillar that came his way, “for snacks,” he told me. But let me focus on fish.

The very first party I hosted at home in Brazil led me to seek substitutes for Indian ingredients. Fish of course had to be on the menu, mustard fish at that. I had already learnt from the Brazilian ambassador in Delhi that surubim, being boneless, was the most suited for curries. So surubim it was for months until the day I had to go to the fishmongers – and found it was a monster of a whale!

In Pakistan, traversing the arid countryside of Sind, the train would stop at stations where fillets of pala were being shallow fried on large skillets. Savouring its delicate flavour we went into a discussion on the merits of pala versus hilsa. Both have a shiny silver body with thin bones, both swim upstream against current. The taste of hilsa steam-cooked in mustard sauce is a super delight in both Dhaka and Kolkata. There of course the discussions are on the merits of the hilsa from Padma and Ganga respectively.

In Laos I once called the plumber to ease the draining of the bathtub since the pipe had got clogged. He arrived with a live fish in a plastic bag and promptly emptied it into the pipe. It would eat through the slush as it travelled through the pipe, he assured me!

Post retirement, Himachal settled to honing his culinary skills. Cooking, which he had started in Ottawa, became his lasting hobby. He would shop for fish in C R Park or INA Market[6]. He would pore over cookbooks and plot innovative recipes. “Cooking,” he was quoted in Outlook magazine, “is art thought out with palate.” And his piece de resistance was the salmon baked whole.

Which was your most cherished, or striking, brush with celebrities in world history?

At one of the finest dinners in Copenhagen I found myself seated next to a countess. She invited me to visit her since she lived in the neighbourhood. The next day a liveried man arrived to escort us to an imposing manor house. We were welcomed with sherry and we had to select a card from a silver salver with the name of our partner for the dinner. I was escorted by a handsome young man who floored me when we exchanged names. He was the descendent of Count Leo Tolstoy!

Another memorable encounter was with a person straight out of the history books. I was strolling in a forested park outside Copenhagen. I noticed with a shock that I was looking into a glass topped coffin. The aristocratic face inside had an aquiline nose and a goatee that lent a refinement to the visage that still sported a faint smile. The starched lace collar was held in place by a jewelled button that showed impeccable taste. But the elegant hands tapered off to skeletal fingers, and the feet too had become skeletal.

The plaque at the bottom of the coffin informed us that this was James Hepburn, the Earl of Bothwell, with whom Mary, Queen of Scots had fallen in love. It was a fatal attraction since both were married. But soon her husband, Lord Darnley, the father of her son James, the future king of Scotland and England, was mysteriously burnt down in a manor, and Bothwell was granted a divorce. However, their marriage incensed Catholic Europe, so Mary gave herself up to buy the release of Bothwell, who fled to Denmark.

‘Whoever marries your mother is your father’: this dictum defines the acceptance of whatever political dispensation you are forced to live with, at home or abroad. So how did you cope with a turmoil like Emergency or antagonism in Islamabad?

We had returned to Delhi in the midst of Emergency. We felt some relief to see trains running on time and punctuality being maintained in government offices. Corrupt officers were being hauled up and over-population being addressed. But the atmosphere was sombre and conversations hushed. The deep scar left by the Emergency saw Indira Gandhi being swept out of power the following year.

In Islamabad tension had mounted when I arrived over the imminent execution of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto[7]. Our residence had become the favourite watering hole for Indian and international journalists who knew Himachal from his Delhi days. Animated discussions over drinks were followed by quick despatches typed out on my rickety typewriter. Unending speculations on the unfolding drama had kept us on tenterhooks. Then one morning in April 1979, the phone rang to say, “It’s done.” [8]

How did Italy change your life?

Italy was easily the best posting of my life in embassies, not only because of its rich history. There I found Italian artists painting inspired by Tagore’s lyrics, and singers like Francesca Cassio singing Alain Danielou’s translations. What made them take it on? The question led me to rediscover Tagore.

My singing of Rabindra Sangeet also found recognition in Rome. My first CD album was released there. I was in many concerts. It was so fulfilling when my translation of Tagore’s lyrics into English found appreciation. Tagore himself believed that his songs were ‘real songs’ with emotions that speak to all people. I began translation in earnest. And that led me to write Rabindranath Tagore: The Singer and his Song (Penguin 2009). The book, with my translation of 50 Tagore songs, was considered very useful to many performing artistes who could understand and represent Tagore better in their art forms.

Please tell us about growing up with Tagore.

Like many girls in Kolkata I began learning Rabindra Sangeet from the age of five. Over the years the songs grew on me. The unique lyrics conveying a gamut of emotions spoke to me when I was far away on postings abroad. I continued my practice of the music through the years and felt vindicated when I got the opportunity to perform to appreciative audiences abroad and back in India.

Why did you work on his songs rather than his poems or stories?

There’s something compelling about Tagore songs. Remember that Gitanjali, which won him the Nobel, was a collection of ‘Song Offerings.’ Songs had given Tagore the strength to ride over the tragedies that had beset his life. They not only helped him express his grief over the deaths and suicides in his family, they were also his mode of expressing his frustration over the political situation that obtained then. And he felt his songs would help others too. “You can forget me but not my songs,” he had written.

Did you ever feel the need to jazz up the songs for Western audiences?

Tagore’s songs are like the Ardhanariswar[9] – the lyrics and the music are inseparable. The copyright restrictions that prevailed after this death did not allow translations. And that was a handicap since his music cannot be appreciated without comprehending his lyrics which are an expression of his creative thoughts.

I would say his songs have near-perfect balance between evocative lyrics, matching melody and rhythmic structure. And the incredible variety of his musical oeuvre touches every emotion felt by any human soul, without jazzing up.

Tagore’s songs are the national anthem of India and Bangladesh, and have also inspired that of Sri Lanka. But will his internationalism hold up with the change of order indicated by the recent developments on the subcontinent?

Tagore was known to be anti-nationalistic. He believed no man-made divisions can keep people segregated. He did not agree with the Western concept of ‘nation,’ he was an internationalist who accepted the ideals of democracy – ‘aamra sabai raja’[10], of gender equality – ‘aami naari, aami mohiyoshi’[11]; indeed, in equality of humans. What he wrote in lucid Bengali suited every mood. Georges Clemenceau, who was the Prime Minister of France for a second time from 1917 to 1920, had turned to Gitanjali when he heard that World War I had broken out. Even today people can relate to what he wrote.

How did all the hop skip and jump shape the feminist within Reba Som?

The wives of Foreign Service officers are often seen as decorative extensions of their spouses. People only saw the glamour we enjoyed on postings abroad, not the heartbreaks and disappointments we battled. Despite their qualifications the wives were not allowed to work abroad. Instead they had to be perfect hostesses: clad in colourful Kanjeevarams they had to prepare mounds of samosas and gulab jamuns.

But there was little recognition, appreciation or compensation by the Ministry of External Affairs of all the hard work and struggle they put in. To settle down in different postings in rapid succession. To host representational parties where they had to conjure Indian delicacies with improvised ingredients. To raise disgruntled children on paltry allowances.

Once, as the Editor of our in-house magazine, I had floated a questionnaire to all the missions abroad asking about the changing perceptions of the Foreign Service wives. That had opened a Pandora’s Box. Eventually in response to our requests the Ministry relaxed service conditions and allowed the wives to work abroad if they had the professional qualifications and received the host country’s permission. This was a veritable coup!

My own act of rebellion was accepting the Directorship of the Tagore Centre ICCR Kolkata (2008-13) after we returned to Delhi on Himachal’s retirement. It became a challenge for me to try and get the Tagore Centre on the cultural map of Kolkata, proving to myself and my disbelieving family in Delhi that it was possible!

[1] Somewhat like a Chinese collared coat

[2] Molasses

[3] Ghoti – People from West Bengal state in India
Bangal – People from Bangladesh

[4] Bagha Jatin or Joyotinadranth Mukherjee (1879-1915) was a famous name in the Indian Independence struggle

[5] Teacher-student

[6] Markets in Delhi

[7] Zulfikar Ali Bhutto(1928-1979) was the fourth president of Pakistan and later he served as the Prime Minister too.

[8] Bhutto was executed on 4^th April 1979

[9] Half man half woman

[10] We are all kings

[11] I am a woman, noble and great

Ratnottama Sengupta, formerly Arts Editor of The Times of India, teaches mass communication and film appreciation, curates film festivals and art exhibitions, and translates and write books. She has been a member of CBFC, served on the National Film Awards jury and has herself won a National Award.

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Excerpt

Once Around the Sun: From Cambodia to Tibet

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date April 15, 2024
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Title: Once Around the Sun: From Cambodia to Tibet

Author: Jessica Mudditt

Chapter 20 – In or out?

As I walked the streets of downtown Hohhot in search of a travel agency, I felt further than five hundred kilometres from Beijing. I was still in East Asia, but the capital city of Inner Mongolia had Central Asian influences too, such as the cumin seed flatbread I bought from a hawker with ruddy cheeks and a fur hat. I passed a Muslim restaurant with Arabic lettering on the front of its yellow-and-green facade, and many street signs and shops featured Mongolian script as well as Mandarin. With its loops, twirls and thick flourishes, Mongolian looked more similar to Arabic than Chinese. In actual fact, the top-down script is an adaptation of classical Uyghur, which is spoken in an area not far to the west.

The winds that blew in from the Russian border to the northeast were icy cold, so I was glad to soon be inside a travel agency. It was crammed with boxes of brochures and a thick film of dust covered the windowpanes. Hohhot is the main jumping-off point for tours of the grasslands, so I was able to get a ticket for a two-day tour that began the following morning.

I wasn’t enthusiastic about going on a tour because I preferred to move at my own pace, however there was no other way to access the grasslands. The upside was that I was guaranteed to sleep inside a ger, which is a circular tent insulated with felts. The Russian term of ‘yurt’ is better known. I had read that Inner Mongolia was a bit of a tourist trap for mainland Chinese tourists, but I was nonetheless excited to get a glimpse of the Land of the Weeping Camel.

I walked into a noodle shop and a customer almost dropped her chopsticks when she saw me. The girls at the cash register were giggling and covering their faces as I pointed at a flat noodle soup on a laminated menu affixed to the counter.

Foreign tourists must be thin on the ground in Hohhot, I thought as I carried my bowl over to a little table by the window.

Inner Mongolia was one of the few places that Lonely Planet almost discouraged people from visiting: ‘Just how much you can see of the Mongolian way of life in China is dubious.’ But I was still keen to see what I could.

I ate slowly, enjoying each fatty morsel of mutton. I was pretty good with chopsticks by that point – I’d never be a natural, but I didn’t drop any bits of mutton into the soup with a splash, as I used to in Vietnam.

Hohhot seemed a scruffy, rather bleak sort of city – or at least in the area where I was staying close to the train station. Street vendors stood cheek by jowl on one side of the road, calling out the prices of their wares. The opposite side was under construction and the one still in use was unpaved, which meant that two lanes of traffic had to navigate a narrow area of bumpy stones while avoiding massive potholes and piles of dirt. I saw a motorbike and a three-wheel truck almost collide.

I spent the next few hours wandering around the Inner Mongolia Museum, which has a staggering collection of 44,000 items. Some of the best fossils in the world have been discovered in Inner Mongolia because its frozen tundra preserves them so effectively. The standout exhibit for me was the mammoth. It had been discovered in a coal mine in 1984 and most of its skeleton was the original bones rather than replicas. I gazed up at the enormous creature and tried to imagine it roaming the earth over a million years ago. Mind-boggling.

I admired the black-and-white portraits of Mongolian tribesmen, and then took photos of a big bronze statue of Genghis Khan astride his galloping mount. The founding leader of the Mongol Empire was the arch-nemesis of China, and parts of the Great Wall had been built with the express purpose of keeping out his marauding armies. Genghis Khan must have rolled in his grave when China seized control of a large swathe of his territory in 1947.

What was once Mongolia proper became a Chinese province known as ‘Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region’. This long-winded name is an example of Orwellian double-speak. So-called ‘Inner Mongolia’ is part of China, whereas the independent country to the north is by inference ‘Outer Mongolia’. Nor is the Chinese region autonomous. The Chinese state has forced Mongolians to assimilate. Their nomadic lifestyle and Buddhist beliefs had been pretty much eradicated, and although speaking Mongolian wasn’t outlawed, learning the state language of Mandarin was non-negotiable.

On top of this, the government provided tax breaks and other financial incentives to China’s majority ethnic group, the Han Chinese, if they relocated to Inner Mongolia. Mongolians now account for just one in five people among a total population of 24 million. The same policies of ethnic ‘dilution’ exist in China’s four other ‘autonomous regions’, which include Tibet and Xinjiang, the home of the Uyghurs.

Shortly before I left the museum, I came to a plaque that described the official version of history, which was at odds with everything I’d read in my Lonely Planet.

‘Since the founding of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region fifty years ago, a great change has happened on the grasslands, which is both a great victory of the minority policy and the result of the splendid leadership of the Communist Party of China. The people of all nationalities on the grassland will never forget the kind-hearted concerns of the revolutionary leaders of both the old and new generations.’

I rolled my eyes, snapped a photo of the plaque for posterity, and continued walking.

* * *

I didn’t venture far from my hotel for dinner because I planned on having an early night. I chose a bustling restaurant with lots of families inside and was waiting for a waiter to come and start trying to guess my order when a group of men at the next table caught my eye. They seemed to be waving me over.

Me? I asked by pointing at myself.

Yes, they were nodding. Shi de.

I happily joined the group and introduced myself by saying that I was from ‘Aodàlìyǎ’. I think they were Han Chinese, as they didn’t look Mongolian. I whipped out my phrasebook and tried to say I had come from Beijing, but I was fairly certain they didn’t understand me.

Anyhow, no matter. Ten shot glasses were filled from a huge bottle of baijiu, and I was soon laughing as if I was with old friends. One of the slightly older guys used a set of tongs to place wafer-thin slices of fatty pork into the bubbling hotpot on the table, followed by shiitake mushrooms and leafy greens. As the impromptu guest of honour, my bowl was filled first once it was cooked – by which time I’d already had three shots.

The hotpot was fantastic, and I had to remind myself not to finish everything in my bowl. Bethan had told me that Chinese etiquette requires a small amount of food not to be eaten at each meal. This indicates that it was so satisfying that it wasn’t necessary to eat every last bite. As a kid, it was ingrained in me to finish everything on my plate. I loved food and was generally in the habit of licking my bowl clean, so I had to exercise a certain amount of restraint.

I had just rested my chopsticks across the top of my bowl to signal I was finished when I was invited to go sit on the wives’ table, which was across from the men’s. The women were very sweet and a couple of them seemed to be around my age. I once again tried to communicate using my phrasebook, but I was hopelessly drunk by then. I could hardly string a sentence together in English, let alone Mandarin. I was also beginning to feel queasy from the baijiu, so I gratefully accepted a cup of green tea from the porcelain teapot that came my way on the lazy Susan. After taking some photos together, I bid the two groups ‘zaijian’ (goodnight). I tried to contribute some yuan for the meal, but they wouldn’t hear of it. I curtsied as a stupid sort of thank-you, and then I was on my way.

* * *

More hard liquor awaited me the following day. A striking woman in a red brocade gown with long sleeves handed me a small glass of baijiu as I stepped off the minibus a bit before noon.

‘It’s a tradition,’ she said with a smile, while holding a tray full of shots.

I downed the baijiu with my backpack on and grinned as the backpacker behind me did the same. There were four foreign tourists on the tour, and about eight domestic ones. The liquor gave me an instant buzz, which I needed. I hadn’t slept well and woke up feeling lousy, so I’d kept to myself during the two-hour journey. Even though I should have been excited, I got grumpier and grumpier as the reality of being on a tour began to sink in. Plus, the landscape was not the verdant green steppes I’d been expecting. At this time of year, it was bone dry and dusty. It hadn’t occurred to me to check whether my visit coincided with the low season.

I began chatting to the other tourists. The guy who had the baijiu after me was Lars from Holland. There was also a couple from Germany. I could immediately tell they were pretty straitlaced. Their clothes looked very clean and functional, and the girl refused the baijiu.

The woman in red introduced herself as Li, our tour guide. Then she led us along a path lined with spinifex to a dozen gers. They faced each other in a circle, and off to the right was a much larger ger with the evil eye painted on its roof and Tibetan prayer flags fluttering in the fierce winds. There were no other buildings in sight and no trees.

Li told us to meet inside the big ger in fifteen minutes after we’d put our stuff in the smaller gers she proceeded to assign us. Lars and I would be spending the night in a ger with ‘82’ painted on its rusted red door. There certainly weren’t eighty gers, so the logic behind the numbering system wasn’t clear – but no matter. The German couple took the ger to the right of ours.

These were not portable tents for nomads. Each ger was mounted on a concrete base and I think the actual structure was made of concrete too, and merely wrapped in grey tarpaulins. The door was made of metal and at the top was a sort of chimney structure – perhaps for ventilation. Like igloos, the only opening was the door, and it was pitch-black inside. I located a dangling light switch as I entered.

‘Ah – I love it!’ I exclaimed.

It was a simple set-up, with single beds lining the perimeter and a low table in the middle of the room. Patterned sheets were draped from the concave ceiling. I chose the bed with a framed portrait of Genghis Khan above it. Lars put his backpack next to a bed on the other side. I was happy enough to share a ger with him. He gave off zero sleazy vibes.

‘I might just take a couple of those extra blankets,’ I said to Lars as I piled on a few extra floral quilts from another bed. The wind had an extra iciness to it out on the steppes and I shuddered to think what the temperature would drop to overnight. We zipped our jackets back up and headed out.

I wandered over to the toilet block, which was quite a distance from the gers. I made a mental note to drink as little as possible before getting into bed to avoid having to go in the night. Once I got closer to the toilets, I was glad they were so far away. The stench was unbelievable.

In the female section were two concrete stalls without doors. In the middle of the floor in each was a rectangular gap. I almost gagged. Just a few centimetres away from the concrete was an enormous pile of shit. I could make out bits of used toilet paper and sanitary pads and there were loads of flies buzzing around. Without running water or pipes, the excrement just sat there, day after day, building up. I would have turned and walked straight back out but I was busting for a wee. I held my breath so I wasn’t inhaling the smells. I wanted to close my eyes too, but I was terrified of falling in, so I had to look at what I was doing. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

‘Oh my god, Lars – the drop toilets are totally disgusting,’ I said after I met up with him in the big ger. ‘It’s just a pit of shit without running water.’

‘I know an American girl who fell into a drop toilet in China last year,’ he said.

‘No way,’ I said with a shudder.

‘Yeah. She said it was terrible. She was in a really poor village somewhere in central China and she went to the toilet at night. She couldn’t see that some of the wooden planks had gaps in them – and then one of them broke and she fell in. She was up to her neck in shit. She was screaming for people to come help her. Apparently, it took them half an hour to fish her out, and all the while she could feel creatures writhing around her body. She cut her trip short and had to get counselling when she got home.’

‘I bet she did,’ I said. ‘That’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever heard in my life. The poor girl.’

Just then Li appeared and said we were heading outside to watch horse racing and traditional wrestling after some sweet biscuits and tea. We assembled around a fenced area where there were about thirty ponies tethered to poles. Some were lying down while still saddled.

‘Horses usually sleep while standing up, so these ponies must be knackered – pardon the pun,’ I joked to Lars.

Notwithstanding, they looked to be in reasonably good condition, with shiny coats and no protruding ribs. There were chestnuts, bays and dapple greys.

I heard the sound of hoofbeats and looked behind me. A group of men on horseback came thundering across the steppes. It was a magnificent sight, and any lingering resentment I had about being on a tour melted away.

One of the men rode ahead of the rest. He was wearing a cobalt-blue brocaded tunic and his wavy black hair came down past his ears. He was really good-looking. He approached Li with a smile, said something to her and dismounted with the ease of someone who had probably started riding horses before he learned to walk. Li and the man exchanged a few words – I definitely saw her blush – and then he got back on.

‘Gah!’ he yelled as he dug his heels into his horse’s sides.

The other horsemen followed after him with whoops, leaving a trail of dust in their wake. These Mongolian ponies were only about twelve or thirteen hands, but they sure were fast and could turn on a dime. I loved watching them carve up the dry earth.

Next a group of men on motorcycles appeared along the track. There were quite a lot of them – at least twenty. We formed a big circle, and the traditional wrestling began. I wasn’t sure what the rules were, but it was fairly self-explanatory: one man got another in a headlock and thumped him to the ground. The next man came along and fought the winner, and so on and so forth. The spectators egged on the fighters with what I assumed were good natured cat calls. Everyone was grinning. By the time the wrestling matches were over, the fighters were absolutely covered in dust and the sun was beginning to set. I’m sure it was all staged for our benefit, but it was good fun.

With the seamless orchestration of a tour that has been done a thousand times before, we gravitated to the big ger. Dinner was bubbling away in a large clay pot and it smelled pretty good. There was also a big vat of noodles with black sauce and the ubiquitous Chinese vegetables of thinly sliced carrot, bok choy, baby corn and onion. There was a bottle of baijiu on each table.

We were serenaded with traditional music while we ate. One of the instruments reminded me of the didgeridoo and there was also a violin. I had read that strands of horse mane are used to make violin strings. The male singer had a deep voice that was almost a warble, and it was hauntingly beautiful.

Five men and women emerged from behind a red curtain and began to dance. They wore long-sleeved, billowing satin tunics that were cinched at the waist with embroidered belts. One of the women had a tall hat made of white beads that dangled down to her waist. It must have been heavy. It was a high-energy display of kicks and splits and parts of it were reminiscent of Irish dancing. They twirled their billowing skirts like sufis. The Chinese tourists started clapping in time with the music and then we all joined in. Sure, it was a bit cheesy, but I was really enjoying myself. At the end of the concert, we had photos with the performers as they were still trying to catch their breath.

We were given torches to light our way back to our gers. It was absolutely freezing, so I wore all my clothes to bed. I snuggled into my blankets and pulled them right up to my chin, feeling grateful for the warmth of Bethan’s jumper.

Mercifully, I slept right through until morning and avoided a late-night visit to the shit pit.

When I wandered out of the ger the next morning, breakfast was being prepared nearby. The carcass of a freshly slaughtered sheep was hanging from the back of a trailer. A man was skinning it while the blood drained out of its neck into a big metal bowl. Its head was in a second bowl, while squares of wool were laid out flat to dry on a tarp. A toddler in a puffy orange jacket was playing in the dust while his mother worked away at skinning parts of the wool. What distressed me more than butchery up close was the live sheep that was watching on from the back of the trailer. He presumably knew he was next.

After a breakfast of ‘sheep stomach stew with assorted tendons’ (as Li described it) we headed out for a ride on the steppes. I couldn’t wait to ride a horse again. I’d spent most of my childhood obsessed with horses, and I was lucky enough to have one for a few years, until I got older and became more interested in hockey and parties.

I rode a stocky bay with a trimmed mane that bobbed up and down as it trotted along the path. I looked over its perky little ears. The saddle had an uncomfortable pommel that kept jabbing me in the stomach, but I loved being under the wide open sky. It was a pale blue with just a few wispy clouds. Sheep grazed and crows rested on clumps of rocky outcrops.

I winced at the Chinese guy ahead of me, who was bouncing out of time to the rhythm of his horse’s gait and landing with a heavy bump in the saddle; his oversized suit flapping in the wind and his feet poking out straight in the stirrups. Much easier on the eye was the guide two horses ahead of him. He was every inch the Mongolian cowboy. Dressed from head to toe in black, he wore a leather jacket, cowboy hat and scuffed black cowboy boots. He never took off his wraparound sunglasses and he spoke little. He smouldered like the heartthrob actor, Patrick Swayze.

We’d travelled several kilometres when we came to a building block that was the same greyish brown as the earth. Inside it had a cottage feel. We sat around a table covered with a frilly tablecloth and drank yak milk. As we did, Lars told me about his day trip to North Korea. While in South Korea for a couple of weeks, he had visited the demilitarised zone (better known as the ‘DMZ’), where a ceasefire was negotiated between the two Koreas in 1953. In a military building is what is known as the ‘demarcation line’ – and Lars had one foot in North Korea and another in South Korea. I hung on his every word.

Our conversation got me thinking about how cool it would be to go to North Korea. I was actually quite close to the border. When I got back to the ger, I retrieved my Lonely Planet out of my bag and thumbed to the section titled ‘Getting there and away’, which had instructions for every country that borders China.

‘Visas are difficult to arrange to North Korea and at the time of writing, it was virtually impossible for US and South Korean citizens. Those interested in travelling to North Korea from Beijing should get in touch with Koryo Tours, who can get you there (and back).’

I was pretty sure the cost would be prohibitive for my budget and decided to stick with my existing plan of cutting south-west towards Tibet. Maybe one day I’d get the chance to visit North Korea, but it wouldn’t be on this trip.

Once back in Hohhot, I boarded a train bound for Pingyao. As I watched the apartment blocks pass by in a blur, I thought with satisfaction about the past twenty-four hours. Any visit to Inner Mongolia is problematic, but I couldn’t fault the Chinese tour company. They had made every effort to keep us entertained. Mongolian culture was so new to me that I couldn’t even tell whether something was authentic or staged, but I had seen and done all the things I hoped to during my visit. And, sure, my time there was really brief. But I’d be forever grateful to have seen a part of the world I thought I’d only ever get to see in a documentary.

About the Book: While nursing a broken heart at the age of 25, Jessica Mudditt sets off from Melbourne for a year of solo backpacking through Asia. Her willingness to try almost anything quickly lands her in a scrape in Cambodia. With the nation’s tragic history continuing to play out in the form of widespread poverty, Jessica looks for ways to make a positive impact. She crosses overland into a remote part of Laos, where friendships form fast and jungle adventures await.

Vietnam is an intoxicating sensory overload, and the hedonism of the backpacking scene reaches new heights. Jessica is awed by the scale and beauty of China, but she has underestimated the language barrier and begins her time there feeling lost and lonely. In circumstances that take her by surprise, Jessica finds herself hiking to Mount Everest base camp in Tibet.

From a monks’ dormitory in Laos to the steppes of Inner Mongolia, join Jessica as she travels thousands of kilometres across some of the most beautiful and fascinating parts of the planet.

About the Author: Jessica Mudditt was born in Melbourne, Australia, and currently lives in Sydney. She spent ten years working as a journalist in London, Bangladesh and Myanmar, before returning home in 2016. Her articles have been published by Forbes, BBC, GQ and Marie Claire, among others. Once Around the Sun: From Cambodia to Tibet is a prequel to her earlier book, Our Home in Myanmar.

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Stories

The Wave of Exile

By Paul Mirabile

Mr Richards, employed by the British Council, had been teaching English at a posh, private preparatory school in Thailand for more than four years in the Province of Prachuap Khira Khan in a coastal town named Mawdaung. His first and sixth form pupils enjoyed his humour much more than his tedious grammatical explanations, and Mr Richards had no qualms about this.

Mr Richards taught twelve hours a week which offered him ample time to learn Thai, travel extensively throughout the country, especially up North in the dusk-filled jungles and along the Mekong River shores exploring villages and temples.

The one-storey school, perched high up on the brow of a hill, overlooked the turquoise-tainted Indian Ocean. The large windows of his class afforded pupil and professor much visual pleasure when grammar became too much of a bore, and Mr Richards too weary or hot to break the boredom.

“Now, instead of casting cursory glances out of the windows,” shouted a nettled Mr Richards, one very grey, windy day, “who can tell me what function the word ‘chewing’ plays in the composed word ‘chewing-gum’ ?” All the smiling faces and darting eyes happily translated their perfect ignorance of the answer. However, a minute later, a very pretty girl, one of the brightest in his class, excitedly cried out, “A verb, sir !” Mr Richards gave her a benign smile and shook his head.

“No, no. It is not because it ends in -ing that it is a verb,” he lectured in a paternal tone, so overtly exercised by Mr Richards, and so perfunctorily accepted by the pupils. He scanned the eager heads of the others ; alas none had the desire to crack the enigma. He checked his watch : “Oh well, I’ll let them out ten minutes or so before the bell rings. I have to catch that bus to Bangkok,” he sighed, still waiting for an answer that never came.

“No bother. Tonight think about it and tomorrow morning let me know, right ?” He stood up. “Go on now … down the hill … off to the beach, I’ll give you a treat this afternoon.”

Before he had even finished the word ‘afternoon’ the whole class, besides two girls, grabbed their books and scrambled for the door. Out they stormed, racing downhill towards the shingled beach of the crescent-shaped bay. Mr Richards observed them from the large windows. Their delightful screams made him a bit queasy: he had been told never to allow the pupils out before the bell. He, nevertheless, had done so on several occasions. He shrugged his shoulders, picked up his books and papers from the wooden desk and was about to make for the door when a terrible thundering or roaring sound froze him in his footfalls. He swivelled on his heels and gasped in horror as rolls and rolls of water smashed against the plate glass of the window panes. The violence of the impact threw the two girls to the floor screaming, but besides a few chinks through which spouts of water gushed in, the windows had miraculously withstood the brunt of the tidal wave. For a tidal wave it was, and a tremendous one! The two girls remained lying on the floor, crying but unhurt.

Mr Richards ran to the windows. The waves had receded, but what he espied below on the crescent-shaped seascape, or what had been a crescent-shaped seascape, caused him to fall back and scream involuntarily : “Dear God! There’s nothing left!” Indeed nothing remained: no palm trees, no vendors’ shacks along the shore, no boulders. No shore ! Only a vast ocean that lay several metres below the school, now churning a glaucous thickness under grey, sultry skies, upon which floated a myriad bobbing flotsam: uprooted palm-trees, lifeless cows and dogs, shoals of bloated fish, roofs of straw, pots and pans, planks, bright coloured robes with or without their proprietors’ bodies inside them !

“Bodies !” he cried covering his mouth. “My pupils … Have they all …” He dared not finish his sentence. The two girls stared at him, mouths agape, eyes deorbited. “The boys and girls floating in the water … Dear God they’ve all drowned !” He wept and wailed, stamping his feet, grabbing at his hair. The girls too began to weep and wail.

In an instant he came to himself. “Their deaths are my fault,” he mused. “I let them out too soon … against all school regulations. Blast ! Why did I do that … just today ?” He soon realised that the headmaster would be on to him soon enough; he feared his starched character. And the parents ? They would accuse him of manslaughter. He would be arrested and put in prison, even hanged for involuntary homicide ! He had every call to be frightened …

Taking hold of himself, Mr Richards knew he had to flee very quickly from Thailand before the headmaster and the parents learned about his unpardonable blunder. And they would learn about it soon enough when the panic and hysteria had died down.

He leapt over the still supine girls and rushed out the door. Once outside he noted that the town near the school had hardly been damaged. But below, he caught glimpses of undulating corpses being poled out of the waters by villagers and policemen in pirogues, rowboats or catamarans. The tidal wave had been gigantic. He turned his attention away from the catastrophe and fled home …

He jogged up to his bungalow further up the grassy hill at the edge of town. Speedily he gathered what he could, for the alert would be out for him at any moment … Or, so he believed. A change of clothes, one or two books and his official documents he stuffed into a small backpack, and without locking his door quickly made a bee-line for the bus station, where luckily he managed to jump on a bus for Bangkok. Apparently no one recognised him, nor followed him. He paid the fare, settled into one of the many empty seats and stared stony-eyed out of the window. His red, puffy eyes filled with tears. What a blithering fool he had been ! And now, what had he become ? A fugitive … no, worse, a murderer ! “Dead ! All dead !” rose a ghastly whisper in his ear. He had to get away as far as possible as the scenes of the bloated pupils danced before his bloodshot eyes.

Once in Bangkok he wasted no time. Further North he travelled by bus into the Province of Chiang Rai. There, in a village whose name he hardly recalled, he spent two nights pondering his dilemma, assuaging his jaded nerves, chary of leaving any sign or evidence of his frantic intinerary, thinking only of a plan to save his neck. He couldn’t possibly stay in Thailand, the police surely were now on his trail, or would be very soon. Neither could he return to England: the bobbies would be waiting for him at the airport, ready to handcuff the murderer of over a dozen innocent children !

Then in the middle of a hot, sleepless night it suddenly occurred to him: he would shave his head and eyebrows, don a monk’s robe, change his expensive Russell and Bramley shoes for sandals and set out for Laos. He had travelled widely in Laos and could even speak a smattering of Kra-dai. He had taught in Luang Prabang for three years and had many friends amongst his former pupils, two of whom had entered monkhood in Pak Beng at the Wat or temple Jin Jong Jaeng. “I shall escape naked from the shipwreck of mundane life,” he murmured, smiling inwardly at his little metaphor which he recollected from his childhood upbringing. But would he ?.. Mr Richards sunk into his lumpy bed: the figure of an outlaw, a pariah, a self-exile stood before him like a shadow … a double of himself: -swollen little bodies drift like flotsam in waters, darkly … that fey voice droned above a tumult of incongruous thoughts.

Mr Richards shook his head and said aloud, “To Pak Beng. There I’ll join the sangha[1] of the Theravada monks. There I shall seek spiritual solace, rid my mind and spirit of those drifting bodies of cheerful boys and girls, swept away from the joys of life because I had a bus to catch!” So he hoped.

Yet the obstacles of reaching the temple caused him concern. The Laotian government frowned upon Western spiritual-seekers cluttering their monasteries and temples. He needed a visa. Where would he find a consulate in the North of Thailand ? And would they issue one to a ‘Western monk’ ?

He jumped up from the bed, and as he did his mind cleared of all that tumultuous tossing. He had befriended many of his pupils’ parents whilst working in Luang Prabang, and he knew, by correspondence, and his frequent voyages to Laos, that one of them, Mr Inthavong, had been appointed consul in one of the North Thailand consulates. He rushed down to the reception and asked at the desk where the nearest Laotian consulate could be found.

“You must travel by bus to Wiang Kaen near the Mekong River, sir.”

“Are there any other consulates ?”

“Not that I know of, sir.”

Mr Richards heart skipped a beat; Mr Inthavong must be working there. He had to take the chance.

The next morning the ‘Western monk’ got on a bus for Wiang Kaen, carrying only a small bag for his passport, photos and a bit of lunch. All along the tedious journey to the North-Eastern town Mr Richards prayed that Mr Inthavong would be there; it was his only chance to obtain a visa for Laos.

He reached Wiang Kaen by nightfall, found accommodations at a temple guest house and spent a horribly sleepless night, tormented now by the thought of the failure of his plan, now by the screeching rats and buzzing mosquitoes.

At nine o’clock sharp he was at the front gate of the bright new consulate, a lovely two-storey bungalow-like edifice enshrined by lush gardens carpeted with the most perfume-scented fruit trees and flowers. He rang. The security guard strolled out and sized him up. Mr Richards politely mentioned his friend’s name. The unshaven security guard raised two quizzical eyebrows, but took his passport and photo and left him to ruminate the events that were about to unfold behind that iron barrier, inside the lovely bungalow. It all seemed hours to him as that voice repeated “irresponsible murderer !” Suddenly the security guard stood before him, together with a small, portly man dressed in a suit and tie.

“Can that be you Mr Richards? A bonze? A monk? What have you done? Where is all your beautiful black hair ?” All this was said in imperious tones much to the delight of the monk who sighed in relief: his pupil’s father had recognised him! He wiped the perspiration off his furrowed brow. “Step in, please … out of the heat,” the consul pleaded. So they both strolled into the air-conditioned consulate, Mr Inthavong wearing Russell and Bramley shoes, recently polished, Mr Richards, a pair of worn-out sandals.

Inside the monk was served tea and a bowl of rice in Mr Inthavong’s office, he himself abstaining from joining him since he had already breakfasted. “I’m so happy to see you Mr Richards,” began the enthusiastic consul. “What brings you here, and dressed like that ? Are you really a monk now ?” Mr Richards broke into a tapestry of lies that, as time went by, he himself began to believe: Living so long in Asia had infused his soul with the compassionate virtues of Buddhism, and in Laos, he hoped to pursue his path deeper in the compassionate depths of Buddhahood in order to glean its treasures. The consul smiled like a child does when listening to his or her favourite nursery rhyme.

Mr Richards then got down to business: his visa ! Mr Inthavong nodded, examining his passport and two photos. “You shall have it in three days. Meanwhile, you are to be my guest here, upstairs with my wife and two children.”

And so the first snag had been circumvented. For those three days, Mr Richards, plied with food, drink and homely conversation, had all but forgotten the wave, the floating bodies and merciless whisper … the abominable figure of a self-exiled …

On the morning of the fourth day, armed with a three-month visa, the Western monk set out to cross the Mekong River to Ban Houei Sai on a Nam Ou boat with six other passengers. It had been so long since he had been on the Mother of all Rivers. He inhaled the tropical river air in silent jubilation. As they navigated slowly downstream, his thoughts interlaced with the flecks of foam, wandered back to his days spent on the Mekong at Guan Lei on the Chinese border, where having been temporarily stranded, he finally was welcomed aboard a small six-cabin dai, a Chinese boat, heading for Thailand.

What a voyage! They had anchored by the soundless jungles at night, machetted through them in the evenings in search of mangoes, navigated by bathing rosy water buffalows and by tiny golden stupa-tipped isles. What an adventure! The crew had left him off in a small Laotian village where he made his way to Luang Prabang on one of those blue, wooden box-boats, gliding by stilt-home villages under whose piles lounged or snorted huge black pigs, scenes so reminiscent of Alix Aymé’s paintings[2] housed at the Luang Prabang Royal Palace. Then the real adventure began, upstream on the Nam Ou in a frail six-seater river boat, slowly weaving between treacherous snags and swift cross-currents. He passed the Park Ou caves, Nong Khiaw and Muang Khwa, sleeping in bungalows and eating rice with thick pieces of pork in the pristine territories of the Hmong tribal peoples. Alas, his grand voyage to Hatsa ended in Sop Pong near the Vietnamese border, the authorities refusing him an entry visa to cross Vietnam then back into Laos where he wished to continue on his river voyage to Chao Dan Tra at the Chinese border.

Ah yes, those were the days of freedom … of existential sovereignty. And now ? A fugitive … a prisoner to his own wretched egoism, Mr Richards suddenly felt overwhelmed by a deep loneliness. His mixed recollections were suddenly interrupted by shouts from the shore : they had reached Ban Houei Sai.

Once the formalities were completed, Mr Richards managed to hop on a collective taxi which sped him towards Pak Beng on a smooth road. He reached the town before nightfall, and to his joy he spotted his two former pupils seated on the temple steps. Were they waiting for him ? Indeed they were, thanks to a letter sent by Mr Inthavong who had explained in great detail to the Satu or Venerable Father of the temple-sangha Mr Richards’ religious fervour and enthusiastic intentions to enter monkhood. The consul had added that nothing should be said to the police or to other state authorities of his entry into Buddhahood.

His former pupils, who had grown into full manhood, heads shaven and bare foot, happily led him to meet the Satu Father. To tell the truth, Mr Richards hardly recognised them. But that made no difference. As expected, he deposited a large donation (all the cash he had on him which amounted to some six hundred pounds), then was given three bright new ochre-coloured robes of pure cotton, shown to his splayed window cell, through which he had a slight view of the inner temple gardens, and was told the daily procedures of his initiation as a pha or a novice: collective prayers in the Prayer Hall, breakfast, Sutra readings until lunch, discussion, rest period, an hour or two of manual labour such as gardening, restoring frescoes or termite-riddled woodwork, personal perpetual moving meditations, yoga exercises, then a light meal before the final collective prayer and sleep until the sound of the gong at four o’clock in the morning.

When the two monks had left him, Mr Richards lay back on the straw mat on the earthen floor that served as a bed. He had been given immaculately clean sheets and a pillow. A mosquito net had been nailed to the splayed window. The walls bore no images nor any other colour than a light beige. Putting his hands behind his head he followed the slowly turning ceiling fan with his eyes: yes, his plan had succeeded. No one would ever find him here. Yet he had no reason to rejoice. He would never again see his aging parents seated at the hearth reading or conversing in low voices, his trusty Irish Setter … his friends at the pub. A sharp pain of remorse, or better put, compunction stabbed at his chest. “Dead! Drowned ! All dead !” the whispers hammered at his temple. Would that relentless voice ever grant him respite ? Would anyone ever forgive him ? Only penance. Only the fires of tribulation could scrape away the rust of vice that had corroded his being. A life of contrition would be the most appropriate path for him, the most responsible. Tears again began to well up in his eyes. He fell asleep and awakened to the cascading sound of two or three vibrating gongs.

So began Mr Richards’ initiation into Therevada monkhood. He had to learn the akkara alphabet in order to read the sutras, the Buddhist acriptures. His practice of many languages enabled him to accomplish this in two months. What he enjoyed most was the tham nong or the musical rhythm method which empowers the monks to memorise the hundreds of sutras of the Sacred Books ; it formed part of the didactic games that the bonzes played every morning and afternoon. These didactic games also included dancing and chanting sessions. The ‘western bonze’ adapted quite rapidly to his new lifestyle … his new home … No doubt his last …

As time passed, the rigours of the monastic code, the kindness of all the monks towards him, his slow but steady immersion into the Kra-Dai language and the marvels of the modality of Buddhist life attenuated, to a certain extent, the mortifying effects his spirit and body had suffered since that horrendous wave. Images of the drowned bodies did wake him up in the middle of certain nights, heaving and panting in one sweaty mass of anguish. However, the whispered voice had long since been silenced. His prayers and ruminations served as a watershed for those waves of guilt, an oceanic ointment for his slowly healing wounds. He was so glad to do service at the temple, run errands for the personnel who worked in the kitchen, wash and hang to dry the three robes of all twenty or so monks.

Gradually he succumbed to the beauties of Buddhahood, of attaining inner peace, his mind having all but vacated that remorseful past. His wide struggles between jubilation and despondency, gaiety and sorrow, ecstasy and debasement dwindled to a few chinks of dread. In short, he enjoyed his laborious leisure …

It was his seventh year at the temple. In spite of his three-month visa having expired, the Satu Father allowed him to take up his begging bowl and go into town to beg for donations, and even have a bite to eat at one of the roadside stands if he so desired. Mr Richards beamed with joy. In all those seven years he had hardly stepped out of the temple. He knew nothing of Pak Bent besides several photos that had been left behind by some tourists on the bench of the veranda of the main Prayer Hall.

He strolled about the crowded streets of the main arteries admiring the colourful markets and smelling the cooked food that had once given him pleasure, especially the pork and prawns. He went from shop to shop, his bowl filling with dented coins and frazzled bills. He was about to order himself a vegetarian meal in one of the market eateries when a group of well-dressed men addressed him in broken English. He shrugged his shoulders, prudently. They then spoke in Thai which he feigned to understand a bit. They appeared to be part of a large tourist group. One man placed a five-dollar bill in the monk’s bowl. They spoke very politely to him, and even invited the good monk to their hotel for a bite to eat … vegetarian of course ! The monk hesitated at first, but finally agreed. Who knows, perhaps these good men, quite wealthy-looking, would donate a fine sum to the temple-sangha.

They hailed two taxis and soon stood outside the palacial Le Grand Pakbeng, a sumptious five-star hotel. The finest in Pak Beng. In the lift that shot them up to the Presidentielle Suite, he looked at himself in the lift mirror ; he hadn’t seen his face for over seven years (the temple-sangha had no mirrors) and noted that the corners of his eyes had shrivelled into crow’s eyes. He winced.

ThePresidentielle Suite was fabulously fitted out with an outdoor spa and living area. The majestic terrace looked out upon the rolling Mekong which snaked through the rich greens of the mountainous forests.

The door was slammed shut and locked behind him …

And that was the last time anyone ever saw the monk from the Wat Jin Jong Jaeng, alias Mr Richards.

An investigating detective, sent by the Richards’ family, after a year or two of intense enquiry, believed that their son had been abducted by the group of Thai tourists who had checked into Le Grand Pakbeng. The detective, once learning their names, discovered that three or four of them were the parents of the pupils who had drowned in the terrible tidal wave that struck southern Thailand some nine or ten years back. Alas nothing could be proven against them. What proved very odd was the fact that Mr Richards’ parents had no idea their son had been the cause of the drowned children in Thailand, and even ignored his entry into monkhood, having received no letter from him for over seven years ! The detective had nothing to say about this silence. Nor did he wish to say anything.

The detective concluded in his report to the grief-stricken parents, rather sententiously, that no human being has ever disappeared completely, however altered his or her appearance. This trite remark hardly brought a ray of solace to them.

[1] A monastery or convent of Buddhist monks.

[2] (1894-1989) French painter. She discovered the use of lacquer in her landscape paintings of Southeast Asia.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International

Tags Alix Aymé, Asia, Bangkok, British Council, Buddhist, Chiang Rai, Chinese, France, Guan Lei, Hmong people, Indian Ocean, Kra-dai, Laos, Luang Prabang, Mekong, Muang Khwa, Nong Khiaw, Park Ou, Paul Mirabile, Thai, Vietnam

Stories

Mister Wilkens

By Paul Mirabile

“Indeed, so fierce was this sense of resistance to change, and so universal were the powers ascribed to it, that in reading the Orientalists one understands that the apocalypse to be feared was not the destruction of Western civilisation but rather the destruction of the barriers that kept East and West from each other.”

This unreferenced passage was found upon the mangled body of a certain Mister Wilkens after he had thrown himself from a speeding night express from Paris to Madrid. I, riding on that train, and possessing a peculiar nature for the bizarre, decided to investigate rhe reasons for such a gruesome suicide. Fortunately, upon arriving in Madrid, I ran into the Englishman who had shared the compartment in which Mister Wilkens had been travelling on that memorable night. I had seen him on the railway tracks whilst the train officials searched the surrounding embankments for the body of the poor man. Apparently, it had been Mister Wilkens’ travelling companion who had alerted the officials. He knew why Mister Wilkens had killed himself but seemed rather parsimonious with the details when questioned by the police or the press, feigning that he was about to fall asleep when the tragic event occurred, and was only awakened by a terrible laugh or scream. (Which we shall soon learn was a blatant lie!)

When I met him in Madrid by some extraordinary chance and bought him a drink at the famous beer saloon at the Plaza Santa Anna, made famous by its association with Ernest Hemingway who drank and got rowdy there, I offered the man money to divulge the reason for the suicide to me. He bluntly refused. I explained my idiosyncrasies towards the bizarre and he, smiling a wicked smile, promised to tell me only if I would not submit the story for publication or spread its contents orally to the press, friends or family until he authorised me to do so. As to my offer of payment, he suggested two hundred quid would do! I agreed all agog, albeit the amount of money seemed to be rather steep. In any case, I assured him that I had neither friends nor family, and that I had no great love for journalists. His story, thus, would be perfectly safe with me.

This was how I came to be the first to put into writing the nature of Mister Wilkens and the reasons for his suicide. Now if readers ask themselves how I’ve managed to publish the testimony without breaking my solemn oath, I would then have to elaborate on the unforeseeable and tragic end of my informer (whose name, by the way, I never learned). But that is yet another story. Permit me to recount this one first.

“We were the only two in the compartment.” My English informant began smugly in a slightly high nasal tone while the air smelt somewhat of that Cambridge midnight lamp oil. “I can genuinely recollect at the train station in Paris that his personality was of a sullen, meek sort, one of a man who had fallen hard, got up, but only to fall again. He wore a tragic, tormented face, and if I recall correctly, every two or three minutes suffered an unsightly twitch under his left eye that made the other eye seem exorbitant. Anyway, once we had left Paris far behind, he engaged in the most singular gambit as regards the way in which he sought to enlist my attention : ‘Have you ever travelled to the Orient ?’ The gambit put so bluntly shook me out of my dreamy thoughts. I noted that his left eye began to twitch as if it sought to put me out even before I ventured an answer.

“‘No I haven’t, although I’ve read many travel writers and adventurers’ tales of the Orient.’

“‘Oh really !’ he snorted in overt contempt. ‘For example ?’

“ ‘Well … there’s Marco Polo.’

“He guffawed : ‘He never left his dingy cell in Venice, the seedy bugger !’ I shrugged my shoulders.

“ ‘I have perused Sir Richard Burton[1].’

“He lifted an appraising eyebrow : ‘Yes, a remarkable polyglot and reader of the Oriental heart ; an ethnologist and anthropologist avant la lettre. He was, nevertheless, a man fraught with prejudices and terribly dogmatic. Alas, a man of his times. Yet, his writings do hold much insight, and so humorous at that. Did he not say that England was just a tiny island ? He secretly despised it for he breathed more spacious air in Asia, Africa and Continental Europe.’ He adjusted his badly knotted tie. ‘Go on …’

“ ‘I’ve read all of Alexandra David-Néel’s novels[2]?’ I pursued with an amused air of a child.

“ ‘Ah ! Now there’s an outstanding, pugnacious explorer ! She outstrips them all — except Burton of course — in intrepidity, intelligence, will-power and writing style. Her sarcasm and irony suit my humour, whilst her practice and research into Buddhism bear the seriousness of any so called specialist or expert.’ He smiled a self-congratulatory smile as if he had brought up the name himself. I must admit that I too was pleased at his overt approval; indeed, to have outsmarted the Brits and the Tibetans through cunning and acumen in order to reach Lhasa on foot safe and sound was a fantastic feat.

“My travelling companion lifted his chin for me to continue my enumeration : ‘Pierre Loti[3] ?’

“He snorted : ‘Please be serious, sir.’ And he yawned.

“‘André Malraux[4],’ I jested.

“He threw up his hands : ‘His novels are wonderful, but his Orient is as imaginary as his imaginary museums.’

“‘Pearl Buck[5] ?’ I countered with excessive decorum as if all this were just a parlour game.

“ ‘Hum … yes, she is the only Westerner who really knew China, more so than the American journalists Louis Strong and Edgar Snow. Read her Nobel Prize speech, it’s an incredible lesson in Chinese literature. Yes, Pearl Buck had a genuine love for the East. Her books plunge us into the remotest depths of twentieth century rural China. The Mother is a sparkling piece of penmanship …’

“ ‘I shall not name all the modern travel-writers to the East whom I have read on my train rides, many of whose narratives are quite dull and stereotyped.’ I rejoined, hoping to put an end to this ridiculous ‘parlour game’.

“ ‘So right you are, sir,’ he beamed. He sat back in his seat fidgeting with the buttons on his vest, some of which were missing. ‘I noted, too ….’

“Our compartment door slid open violently. The conductor practically jumped in demanding our tickets. My heart almost jumped with his jump ! Anyway, we dutifully showed them to him. When he had jumped out, so to speak, Mister Wilkens, although unperturbed by all this jumping about, seemed, none the less, beset by something, his eyes staring blankly at the table aside the window where he had placed a shoulder-bag, perhaps because he had lost the thread of our conversation. He looked up and blurted out: ‘You know sir, I spent over forty years living in the East : Turkey, Syria, Armenia, India, China, Laos, Mongolia, not as a conquering dolt, a cosmopolitan snob or a professional prig, but as a pilgrim in quest of my humane origins.’

“My travelling companion was in a state of unusual excitement. ‘Humane origins ?’ I repeated with a soupçon of irony.

“ ‘Yes, humane origins. I see that you fail to grasp the essence of that formula. Humane is another word for Humanism, my dear fellow. Humane defines our human heritage, the fount of our soul and spirit.’

“Just at that moment several French customs officials slid our door open and asked for our passports. When they were examined and returned, a few minutes later the Spanish police entered and inspected them in the same taciturn manner. As soon as these formalities had been completed we leaned back in our seats.

“I sat politely, absorbed in Mister Wilkens’ rather dark comments, exposed with such bursts of emotion. I swallowed every word he said, albeit the digestion caused me great discomfort. Be that as it may, sceptical at first, I grew somewhat more interested as he rambled on, amused at the man’s gyrating gesticulations, wondering, however, if he had gleaned his monologue from a book or from his own experiences as he so pompously pretended. This being said, I did feel a certain fraternal respect for him, although I will confess that he annoyed me with that composed self-sufficient poise. A poise I had stupidly preened in my old university days at Cambridge; you know, the eloquence of words, however boastful and bombastic, hollowing out dismal logic and stale equations. But I was dead sure that if I hadn’t been to Cambridge, this man would have never even addressed a single word to me. He sniffed out his ‘own kind’ ! But of this ‘kind’ I was particularly sceptical and mistrustful, especially of pedants like him. A sentiment of distrust one encounters in people who throw themselves upon you, spilling out their watered down philosophies or immature phantasies during long hours in trains. To be fair though, I did not detect this incorrigible comportment in Mister Wilkens’ hurried, but measured spurts. His words were solid, linked together like the shiny mail-coats of those fine mediaeval smithies.

“ ‘Are you then not content with your many years spent amongst the populations of Asia ?’ It was a mundane question but…

“ ‘Disorientation …’

“ ‘What ? Disorientation ?’

“ ‘Yes, disorientation, sir. Look at the word closely : ‘dis-‘ apart from and ‘orient’ … I am separated from the Orient … my Orient ; like dis-order, out of order, or dis-jointed, out of joint. Or how does disease appeal to you : out of or separated from ‘ease’, or disaster, out of the harmonious movements of the ‘astres‘ or stars ? The Eastern stars of course. Have I made myself understood ?’ He sneezed.

“I nodded without conviction. That pedantic tone, plus his semantic shenanigans unnerved me as well as that left eye of his which had been twitching with each jerky gesture of head and hands. He then began wringing those hands of his like some sort of maniac, gazing at the top berth above me, starry-eyed.

“ ‘Were you there on mission ?’ I ventured, hoping to regain his attention.

“ ‘Mission ? Yes, my mission ; not there, but here in Europe. I must relocate my orientation here in the West, if that is at all possible, given the fact that I am completely disorientated.’ He scratched that twitching eye peevishly. ‘So many languages and cultures studied and taught all gone up in smoke. A tragic fire has set aflame my life since returning to Europe; it has turned all my dreams to ashes. All my written and spoken words wrapped in the flame of a setting sun! And I can assure you sir, no phoenix will ever arise from them. Once disorientated, always disorientated as they say.’ He reached for his shoulder-bag, pulled out a soft-covered book, opening it at random with a look of disdain.

“I must admit that I found it painstaking to follow Mister Wilkens’ histrionic tirade with any seriousness. There he sat, lofty and smile-less, his head swaying listlessly from one side to the other like a puppet. His twitching eye had become intolerable to look at; I turned my head away and peered out of the window. Darkness had mantled the low-lying countryside in a softness that diverted my attention momentarily from those inflamed words. During this dream-like state, the darkness absorbing me within her lush, humid vortex, it seemed to me — though I am hardly a psychologist — that my travelling companion had experienced a traumatic relationship crisis with peoples of very alien values to his own European ones, a crisis that exhausted and put to trial his intellectual and emotional limits, exhausting him of any margin of repartee, driving him to self-accusation, even to self-maceration. His ‘Oriental’ experiences hardly broadened his vision of the world; on the contrary, they left him in an utter state of culpability. I felt that all his monologuing, if I may use that ugly word, was a confession pronounced before the hour of death. This may be an exaggeration, but I did sense that Mister Wilkens had been touched by some unknown madness, perhaps a loss of identification or an explosion of a multitude of identifications with which he could not cope … nor wished to cope! He made weird grimaces, sighed, fidgeted about in his seat, ignoring me completely until the train pulled into a station. Three minutes later we pulled out. Mister Wilkens had not once raised his eyes from that book, which I am sure he was not reading at all.

“If I remember correctly it was a very cold night, the sky, a crisp, obsidian black, the stars, frozen, and the moon, full and bright. I dare say our compartment was so cold that we were forced to bundle up in our overcoats. Mister Wilkens looked up at me several times from his pretended book-reading, though he displayed no desire for conversation. I broke in on him once, rather bombastically, lauding the French railway system. He nodded apathetically, then plunged his pug nose back into those pages. A few moments later the conductor poked his head in to apologise about the heating that, he promised, should be coming on shortly. I sighed in relief for I was freezing.

“Mister Wilkens cast me a cursory glance: ‘Have you studied things seriously, sir ? I mean the things in life, yourself, for example ?’

“I found the question impertinent, but answered, none the less: ‘Yes I have as a matter of fact … including myself,’ I retorted, holding my head haughtily high. ‘I too have travelled widely.’ He snorted. I remember at that point I had taken off my overcoat, for the heating was slowly coming back on. Mister Wilkens, however, kept his on in spite of the beads of sweat rising to the surface of his high, furrowed forehead. He offered no repartee, thumbing nervously through that book of his.

“I thought to retaliate, judging him an unmannerly upstart: ‘So you consider yourself an Orientalist ?’

“He looked up from his ‘perusing’ and stared at me as if I had insulted him with the grossest of four-lettered words. ‘That is an ugly word,’ he sneered. ‘All your years at Cambridge have taught you nothing. Anyway, to answer your question: no, I am not an Orientalist. Alas, as I have just finished explaining, everything has gone up into smoke: to have learned all those languages for nothing… to have undertaken all those voyages for nothing; to have taught and written for nothing ! Do you understand, sir … For nothing …’

“ ‘But …’

“ ‘But what ? Please, don’t pretend to console or pamper me, I abhor puerile commiseration. For nothing, sir. Do you realise that besides this train from Paris to Madrid back and forth, back and forth …’ A woman threw open our compartment door to step in, but when she saw Mister Wilkens’ twisted face and his twitching eye, she gasped and slammed it shut. He scoffed, fell mute and turned to the window.

“Large snowflakes fell. They formed little rims of melting sleet on the window. The wind whipped them about, giving an impression of so many odd geometric configurations. During that uneasy interlude I searched frantically for something to say. I couldn’t bear that slice of silence arching over us, that biting irony of contempt.

“Before I was able to say what I had finally conjured up to say, he burst brusquely into my crowded thoughts: ‘I must tell you a little story about Sandy, a mate of ours at Cambridge with whom we would go out on Saturday nights to “drink up the town” as the Americans say! There we were, a bit tipsy, carousing with the crowd, having a jolly good time, and Sandy, making a perfect bore of himself. So, to enliven the ambience I mustered everyone’s attention to inform them that I had stuck up for Sandy a week ago. Hearing his name suddenly mentioned, he raised his fat face out of the beer mug and looked blankly at me. I turned to Sandy and said : ”Sandy, how ungrateful you are, just think, I stuck up for you the other day, someone said that Sandy wasn’t fit to live with the pigs and I said that he certainly was !” All of us roared with laughter whilst poor Sandy buried his pasty face in the froth of his beer. In fact the whole pub was howling with laughter. It was truly a smashing night out.’

“Mister Wilkens was choking with laughter. He appeared so pathetic to me. He wore such a cretinous smirk on his twitching face. That revolting anecdote of his was cheap and full of childish contempt. Was he doing this purposely to disgust me, to urge me to get up and leave the compartment? He calmed down and eyed me with a sort of conspiratorial smile: ‘Have you ever thought of taking the Leap, sir ?’ He pushed his tortured face forward waiting for an answer. His hysterical tone had shaken me up a bit. I wished only now to be left alone.

“ ‘The leap ?’ I asked, examining him rather warily. It was an odd word which he emphasised with an accompanying gesture of his hand raised high overhead. He noted the tint of circumspection in my voice. He sneered and threw open our compartment window. Stretching his hand out, he caught the flakes of snow that shone in the half-lit wintry night. I made no move. Cold air rushed into the warmth of the compartment. I nodded towards the window. He feigned to ignore me and his sneer erupted into a series of ugly snickers. I snuggled up in a corner and for an instant thought it best to leave him to his madness. It was becoming frightfully cold, and furthermore, his attitude frightened me, his gestures were nervous, erratic. His face, morose, spiteful. He kept tapping his feet and hands, playing nervously with the frayed ends of the cuffs of his shirt. Was it because of the cold or some inner anxiety? I sensed that he was displeased with the tone of my voice and most probably even disgusted with my company, and was undoubtedly endeavouring to communicate it to me. I sprang to my feet to take leave of him. He grasped my shoulder. His fingers were wiry, hard as steel.

“ ‘Yes, the leap, my good fellow. Leaps are like twilights and rainbows, terribly brief. Do you understand who all those peanuts in a jar are ? No, you have understood absolutely nothing of what I have been saying.’ I stood gaping at him, frozen in terror. He released his grip and in one violent movement pushed me aside against the compartment door. ‘You may plead in my favour that I’ve had my day in the sun; I shan’t disapprove of that banality. But tell me, sir, you, so well cultivated, was it all then just fairy dust ? A forty-year timeless fairy tale existence before … before the plunge into this nightmare, waking up into a dank, grim prison of biological and material utility ? Are we all forbidden to accomplish our dreams ? Must we live out our lives in a stifling cocoon of time- and energy-consuming survival of the fittest ? Well sir, yes, I’ve had my day in the bold, rising sun, but it has since sunk …’ Mister Wilkens threw back his head in the most theatrical fashion, grabbed his book, leapt up on to the table aside the window then rolled out of it without uttering the slightest sound. Confounded, I made no effort to stop him. At length, coming to myself, I ran for the conductor. The rest of the story you know.”

When he had finished his account and his fifth beer (which I had been paying for) I again promised him that I would neither write nor mention this unusual event to anyone. I enquired, however, about the book he had been reading or pretended to be reading in the train. My informer said that he had tumbled out of the window with it cradled in his arms, but no one, apparently, made any effort to find it. I paid him, and without another word, he stood and left the beer-hall.

At this point the reader is undoubtedly eager to know why I have broken my vow and have divulged the tragic end of Mister Wilkens. Well, let me record without going into details that a similar tragedy befell my English informer some months ago on the December 9, 1976, on a night train between Paris and Madrid, so reported El Pais[6]. A large photo of him reminded me that I had never asked him his name, and it was only by the photo that I knew it was my informer. Perhaps he, like Mister Wilkens, had also made the leap, although I doubt whether he dabbled in the field of Orientalism. This being said, I hope these suicides are not contagious, and that because of poor Mister Wilken’s embryonic virus, I too have been contaminated by his travelling companion! To look at it from another point of view, however, I have often wondered about that book; that is, Mister Wilkens’ book which he had held in his arms when he leapt out of the speeding train. My guess is that it may be the key in understanding the reason for killing himself, that and the citation found on him, which I have put into quotation as an epigraph to my narrative, and unfortunately –I must confess– whose author I have never been able to discover. I’m sure the key to the mystery lies in that name of the book.

[1] (1821-1890) British military officer, explorer, erudite, writer and polyglot.

[2] (1868-1969) French explorer, intellectual and writer.

[3] (1850-1923) French military officer, traveller and writer.

[4] (1901-1976) French writer, traveller and Minister of Culture under President General De Gaulle.

[5] (1892-1973) American writer, winner of the Nobe Prize for Literature in 1938, born in China.

[6] The national newspaper of Spain (The Nation)

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Tags Armenia, Cambridge, China, French, general De Gaulle, India, Laos, Marco Polo, Mongolia, Paul Mirabile, Pearl Buck, Sir Richard Burton, Spain, Syria, Turkey

Interview

Where Cultures Connect beyond Borders

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date September 14, 2022
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Jim Goodman, an American traveler, author, ethnologist and photographer who has spent the last half-century in Asia, converses with Keith Lyons.

Jim Goodman in Nepal at Dasain being blessed by King Birendra, October 1978.

Jim Goodman is something of a legend in Southeast Asia and Eastern South Asia. His definitive guide to southwest China’s Yunnan province was the most sought-after travel book for any intrepid backpacker wanting to get off-the-beaten-track in the ethnically-diverse province bordering Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar and Tibet. That’s how I first came across Jim, through the well-thumbed pages of his The Exploration of Yunnan. Back then, I marvelled at his ability to venture into areas that were only just opening up to foreign travellers, and the breadth and depth of his knowledge of different ethnic minorities. It was almost 20 years later that I finally met Jim in person in a cafe inside the old city gates of northern Thailand’s Chiang Mai, where he has been based since 1988. Later, on a media trip to the Golden Triangle’s eastern Shan state hill-tribe villages, I saw how Jim’s interactions, appearance (and conversation in ethnic language) endeared him to local minorities.

He has published books in Nepal, Singapore, Thailand, China and Vietnam, and also worked with ethnic minorities, including on textiles with Newars in Nepal and northern east Indian Mizos, and on traditional handicrafts with Akha in northern Thailand. “Besides acquiring new labour skills—I was the dyer and designer—the work gave me valuable insights into the different cultural norms and ways of thinking of traditional societies in this region,” he once wrote. “My writing, research and photography reflect my fascination with history, traditional cultures and ethnic minorities, not just in the ethnologies, cultural studies and histories I’ve published, but in my fiction and poetry as well.”

You were born in the US capital Washington D.C. and raised in the Midwest in Cincinnati, Ohio. Growing up in the US, what do you think contributed to your interest in different countries and cultures?

As a kid I was fascinated by American Indians, especially those from the western plains and the southeast. My father taught Latin American history at Xavier University in Cincinnati. He and my mother were members, later chairmen, of the Foreign Students Welcoming Committee. Every American holiday — 4th of July, Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc — we had foreign guests. They were from India, Nepal, Tunisia, Thailand, Colombia and Nigeria. They aroused my natural curiosity.

How were your first experiences of ‘foreignness’ in the US and then overseas?

I stopped believing in my parents’ Catholicism by the time I was in high school and for the next few years felt like a foreigner in my own family and neighbourhood. In later years, when I was living in Europe or Asia I was always conscious of being foreign, especially in things like double pricing, but I integrated socially enough not to let it bother me. Occasionally, that worked in my favour. In Korea in the 70s, males were forbidden by law to grow their hair over their ears or past the collar. Every four or five months the police carried out widely publicised roundups. But foreigners were exempt.

What was it like growing up in the 1960’s in the US?

It was very exciting. Thanks to the civil rights and anti-war movements it was easy to challenge the system intellectually and practically. The drugs and music, a very new kind of music, also contributed to this sense of the times are changing everywhere and lots of options were possible. It was an amazingly optimistic decade.

How did you come to be in the army, and what was your experience as a soldier in Germany and later South Korea?

I got my draft notice in the summer of 1967, at the peak of the Vietnam War, when 80% of those drafted were sent off to Vietnam after training. So I took the enlistment option, signing up for an extra two years, with one year at the language school studying Arabic. War might be over by the time I finish the course, I thought, and anyway they wouldn’t need an Arabic translator in Vietnam. But the Army inserted a little clause in every contract, “subject to needs of the Army,” that let them do what they liked. When I arrived at the language school, after basic training I was told my orders had been changed. I had to go back and wait for new ones. Eventually they put me in a tank training unit, but by the luck of the draw I was in the company sent after training to Germany, while the other three were dispatched to Vietnam.

In Germany, I served in an armoured unit which was very often in the field. However, this was 1968 and I managed to get a pass to go to Paris in early June and marched down the avenues with the students and workers singing L’internationale over and over. I still know the first stanza, in French. I also met Arab officers from Jordan and Libya and took a month’s leave in the autumn to have my 21st birthday in Beirut. On my first night in Beirut, a South Yemeni staying in the same hotel told me there were three good reasons to travel. The first was to meet the different kinds of people living in this world. Second, was to try the various local foods and drinks. And third, was to appreciate the scenery and historical monuments. I never forgot the order in which he listed those attractions: people first. Throughout my trip, I wore a button on my shirt that said Restore Palestine to the Arab People, which guaranteed a good reception everywhere in Lebanon and Jordan. I was very active politically by then and the following spring published the first anti-war newspaper by a soldier in Europe. That later got me transferred to Korea, the only place there was no organised anti-war soldier activity. In Korea, I was in charge of the Photo Lab, where I learned the basic principles of photography. Also joined rock bands as a singer, so I wasn’t very political in Korea, except for some of the song lyrics.

After your time in the army, how did you get back to Asia?

I was discharged in Seattle in January 1972, went to San Francisco to live and later got a clerk-typist job with General Services Administration. Then my boss recommended me for a low-ranking administrative position. I would have been in charge of the installation of furniture in the California offices of the state’s two senators. Not exactly exciting work, but anyway I had to get a security clearance, starting with answering a questionnaire with things like ‘are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party’ and ‘do you advocate the overthrow of the US government by force or violence’.

I answered no to everything, but within 24 hours the office got back a disapproval of my application “for security reasons”. After that news got out, everybody in the building thought I was a terrorist, and that was before terrorist was a household word. It was doubtless my activity as an anti-war soldier but it meant I would really have no future in my country. I went to Korea that autumn on a one-way ticket without enough money for a round-trip. (I don’t think that’s even possible anymore.) I met other ex-GI’s in Seoul who gave private English lessons, so I did, too. In the second year, I got hired by Language Teaching Research Center, which didn’t use textbooks and so I made up my own lessons. I spent free time among soldiers on the army base and in off-base bars and would listen carefully to their conversations. Whatever they said that I thought my students wouldn’t understand, I wrote down and worked it into my lessons. It was a wonderfully creative job and made me especially conscious of my own language.

What happened for you to leave Korea and ending up almost dying and in jail in Nepal?

My last summer (1976) in Korea, I met travellers who had been to India, Nepal and Southeast Asia. Later that year I got busted for a small amount of grass and, near the end of the year, was expelled from Korea. India and Nepal seemed a natural place to go next. It wasn’t easy in the beginning and once in Calcutta, I got robbed of everything and went over three weeks without eating. I was kind of resigned to dying by starvation but a Muslim street merchant recognised the situation, paid my bills and lent me enough money to get back to Kathmandu. Everything seemed fine but when I finally ate a meal I vomited it all a few minutes later. Body won’t take food, eh? Guess I’m going to die after all. He said don’t worry, wait a little and try again. He had witnessed the same thing with starving Bengali refugees during the break-up of Pakistan. He was right. The next meal was fine and ever since then, I’ve not worried about, for one reason or another, missing a meal or two. I missed meals three and a half weeks and got by.

And you spent some time in jail, not just in Kathmandu but in Korea?

I was three weeks in Korean solitary confinement until my girlfriend bailed me out. Longer, about four months, in the holding centre in Kathmandu, where those arrested awaited trial. I was busted for a lot of hash but charged with both possession, 10,000 rupees fine, and exporting, 100,000 rupees fine (about 70 to a dollar then). I pleaded guilty to possession only. The judge dismissed the exporting charge because the hash was found in my home, not at any border. However, to save face, the prosecutor appealed the acquittal for exporting. The appeal had to go to the special court, which only met once a week, so cases piled up. In Nepal, you don’t bribe the judge. You bribe the clerk to put your case before a sympathetic judge. I wasn’t going to hurry up the case because then I would have to leave the country afterwards. The prosecutor wasn’t going to speed up the proceedings because he still would have no evidence and would lose again. Meanwhile, I was free to continue my Nepal life. For over a year the government’s attitude to me was like a joke. They thought I had figured out how to beat the system. The following year, I became an embarrassment and the year after that, with a new government, it became an issue and I finally got a new passport and left Nepal for a month’s holiday in Thailand.

What took you to Assam, and what made you later leave?

It was one of the few places in India I hadn’t visited yet. It had an interesting separate history from the rest of the country and was surrounded by many fascinating ethnic minorities. My first trip was in the autumn of 1979, when I was paid to take an American woman and her daughter, whose tutor I was, to Darjeeling, Sikkim and Kaziranga, the rhinoceros park in Assam. The Assamese anti-immigrant demonstrations had already begun, so I kept up on news then and afterwards. In 1980, I made two trips to cover the movement for newspaper articles. I only got to visit hill people (Khasi) in Meghalaya, as the other states, and parts of Assam were closed to foreigners. I bought a lot of books about them, anticipating freer travel sometime soon. Instead, I got blamed on my third trip in May by the Delhi government for organising the Assam movement (as if they couldn’t organise themselves) and banned from re-entry.

After moving to Chiang Mai Thailand, what did you concentrate on?

Jim Goodman with a Akha girl in Thailand, 1988

The skills I learned in Nepal were those involving weaving and dyeing. I used natural dyes and designed the patterns for the looms. I had worked with both Mizos from Northeast India, who used a back-strap loom, and Newars, who used a stand-up frame loom, like that of the Thai. I began working with the Karen, who used back-strap looms. But after meeting the Akha, I conceived the idea of making Akha jackets, which were cut like Western jackets, using my colours from natural dyes and bigger to fit Western bodies. I soon dropped the work with the Karen and found enough customers for Akha jackets and shoulder bags to cover the expenses of a modest lifestyle and my research on them.

What made you decide to go to Yunnan and southwest China? When did you go, and what was the experience as the region just opened up to travel by foreigners?

One of the sub-groups I worked with in Thailand, the Pamee Akha, came directly down from Yunnan. I met a relative on one of my trips who was in Pamee to make money picking lychees for a season. He invited me to his village in Xishuangbanna, if I could ever come to China. Not long afterwards a flight opened from Chiang Mai to Kunming. I booked one for July 1992. After a few days around Kunming and Lunan County, I flew to Xishuangbanna and found out from Akha in Jinghong how to find my friend I met in Pamee. After some time there, I returned to Kunming and embarked for the northwest for a quick look that did include the Torch Festival in Ninglang. I couldn’t speak much Chinese then, but in Xishuangbanna, the Akha enjoyed the fact that the first foreigner they ever met could speak their language. People were friendly everywhere and once I started repeating visits for research, I got introduced to English-speaking locals who could assist me.

When you first went to southwest China, did you feel you might be documenting some people whose culture would be wiped out by modernisation, and if so, has this happened?

From the very beginning I felt ethnic cultures were having a true revival but wondered how long that could last, not because of politics, as in the past, but because of the greater exposure to outside modern influences, including mass tourism. Certainly, that has happened, but not to the same extent everywhere. And mass tourism has been more disruptive. Lijiang and Lugu Lake are two obvious examples. I was lucky to have chosen those places to fully research before they completely transformed into tourist traps. In other places, like Ailaoshan, parts of Lincang and Pu’er prefectures and even much of Xishuangbanna, modernisation has been less noticeable and the traditional culture and lifestyles still strong.

What have been some of your most memorable experiences in Yunnan?

After watching two little Lisu girls at Lishadi cross the Nu River on the rope-bridge several times, for their own amusement, without adult supervision, I concluded:

1. It can’t be dangerous.

2. It must be fun.

Next trip to Nujiang I had a Lisu friend in Fugong get me the harness and cable hook. Made my first crossing, just for the fun of it, at Damedi south of Fugong and over the next few years carried my cable hook and rope harness to Nujiang for more rides at more locations.

The other unique, to me anyway, research experience was my repeated visits to Lige village, Lugu Lake. Mosuo culture is matrilineal, the children belong to the mother, but also Tibetan Buddhist and each family has a resident monk. Women were definitely in charge of domestic affairs. At Lugu Lake, my friends, the folks I hung out with, got high and drunk with and had the most experiences with, were mainly women. Many of them introduced themselves to me. I only knew a few men. With every other minority, I only met women because they were my friend’s wives, daughters or sisters, whom he introduced to me. The Mosuo were really special.

From your experiences across Southeast Asia and eastern Southern Asia, what are some of the most interesting things you’ve learnt about hill tribes, their customs, societies, and beliefs?

They are very attuned to nature, with a cultural sense of ecological balance. Most of their festivals are concerned with important junctures in the agricultural work cycle. Their societies are very collective-oriented. Everyone has relationships with everyone else. No one ever has to feel alone.

How has learning languages and assisting local craftspeople enabled you to get inside like an anthropologist?

Learning an ethnic minority language is a clear indication of special interest in them. And they respond very favourably to that. Involving them in handicrafts production shows appreciation of their traditional arts and crafts, like a form of flattery. It also means getting to know them more personally and becoming an accepted part of their existence, making research easy.

What’s your personal approach to meeting new people, and why do you think it works?

As that pertains to my research work I always made clear to the people what my interest in them was and that I was going to write about them. Always had a positive response and when I indulged in their hospitality I followed four rules I set for myself: eat whatever they give me, drink whatever they give me, smoke whatever they give me, and sleep wherever they put me. As a result, I’ve had some really spicy food, very powerful liquor, pretty raunchy cigarettes and even opium and some pretty uncomfortable sleeping conditions. But I figured nothing can hurt me much for a day or so and the effect on them was that they thought I was a great guest. Everything they did for me seemed to work. They didn’t have to make any adjustments.

What’s it like to be the first outsider or ‘white person’ that some groups have seen?

That happened mostly in Yunnan and was never a negative experience. I remember once about to enter a Yunnan village that was definitely off the beaten track and when children spotted me they ran back to the village shouting, “Weiguo pengyou lai!” (“Foreign friend comes.”) And then the adults came out to welcome me. I never found any animosity or impolite, intrusive curiosity anywhere I went. The local attitude seemed to be ‘here’s a chance to make a foreign friend’. Minorities were as curious about me as I was about them. And being American in China or Vietnam, in their context I was a fellow minority person.

For many of the groups you’ve studied and spent time with, they are spread across countries and borders. Are there differences on different sides of the borders, or does close contact mean the groups retain their traditions?

I made my first trip to Vietnam precisely to answer that question. I was researching the terrace builders in Honghe between the Red River and the Vietnam border. Many ethnic groups lived on both sides, so I travelled through the border areas in Vietnam to meet sub-groups I knew in Yunnan. Lifestyles and cultural traits were very similar. The minorities in Vietnam seemed more conservative, more resistant to modern influence, while the same minorities on the Yunnan side seemed better off economically.

Your other interest is Vietnam. What fascinates you about Vietnam?

I was already familiar with Chinese culture when I first visited Vietnam, as well as Southeast Asian culture. It didn’t seem like such a strange place and I was able to discover what was unique about Vietnam, its separate cultural characteristics. The people were uniformly friendly, even though I came from a country that bombed the hell out of it. Yet the Vietnamese I met regarded all that as the past and now it’s different so no time for resentment. I made close friendships there easily (eventually married one) and found new topics to write books about—what was unique about Vietnamese culture, the special history of Hanoi, and how the country became one entity.

Why do you have a fascination and affinity with ethnic minorities, particularly hill tribes?

Hard to really say, but I suppose it was because I like their very different kind of living environment, the way they look and the way they act. Always felt comfortable with them.

How do you feel about the changes that have happened to minorities, such as becoming tourist attractions, or having to move to towns for economic opportunities?

It was probably inevitable. Traditional agriculture, the shifting cultivation type, was no longer sustainable due to population density growth. Roads are better and more numerous, too, so those who do move to cities can still maintain links with their villages. Becoming tourist attractions can be more of a lifestyle change. Everything cultural seems to become a commodity, something to be paid to do. In some places, the culture on display is not even their own. For example, in Sapa Vietnam, many Hmong girls dress up in fancy clothing of the Flowery Hmong because their own Black Hmong outfits are not as colourful or photogenic for tourists, who pay them to take photographs.

When did you know that you wanted to be a writer?

When I first started reading world literature as an early teenager and started fantasizing about one day becoming one of the literary giants.

How do you go about your writing process?

I begin by thinking about it for many sessions, then, when it’s a book or a lengthy article, make an outline and start adding details before I actually write anything. When I do get going I often inspire myself by fantasising what a positive review might say, then add or revise something to justify the imaginary praise.

How has photography integrated with your writing?

Most of what I write requires illustration and some of it was because I had a set of photographs that sort of made a story. When doing cultural research, I photographed anything I thought might be relevant, whether it was photogenic or not, because then I would have a reference. I wouldn’t have to write down or have to remember what I saw. The photo was the record.

Is http://blackeagleflights.blogspot.com/ your main website? Where have you been published over the years?

Yes. It was set up by a young friend many years ago. I don’t make any money from it. It would have been nice to have sold all the site’s articles, but I continue it because it represents my self-image of contributing to the sum of human knowledge concerning the topics I write about. Regarding books, I have had publishers in several cities: Kathmandu, Bangkok, Singapore, Kunming, Hong Kong and Hanoi.

What projects do you have on the go currently?

This year’s project was Peoples of the Mekong River Basin: The Ethnic Minorities. It covers 23 ethnic minorities and over 100 photos, 90% mine. The publisher is World Scientific Press, Singapore and it should come out in or maybe before October. I would like to do one more book, on Lamphun and its first ruler Queen Chamadevi, the most interesting and accomplished woman in all of Thai history. But I have to find a publisher interested before I start work on it.

*Photographs provided by Jim Goodman

Keith Lyons (keithlyons.net) is an award-winning writer, author and creative writing mentor, who gave up learning to play bagpipes in a Scottish pipe band to focus on after-dark tabs of dark chocolate, early morning slow-lane swimming, and the perfect cup of masala chai tea. Find him@KeithLyonsNZ or blogging at Wandering in the World (http://wanderingintheworld.com).

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Tags Akha, Chiang Mai, China, Hmong, Honghe, Jim Goodman, Keith Lyons, Khasi, Kunming, Laos, Mizos, Nepal, Newars, PU'er, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, The Exploration of Yunnan, Tibetan Buddhist, Vietnam, Washington