Namma

I learnt not just to look, but to see. As I walked in the grassland the next day, I beheld the indefinable strength and solidity of the omnipresent mountains, which seemed like benevolent ancestors contemplating with amusement the scurrying descendants beneath them. Their sunny slopes betrayed a more sinister aspect and their shadows seemed darker. They held curious forms. To the north, they resembled slumbering figures with hulking shoulders slunk into the pit of the land; their valleys and ridges, flesh folds and backbones rolling over and into each other, settled and still. To the south, they receded in waves, peak after trough, until the last visible tips faded into a dusky blue, leaving us behind in their wake. I had never had a true sense of scale until I came here. How frail the tent appeared against this background. Nothing more than a wind-teased flap of black fabric supported by spidery legs that could scuttle away in an instant.

This was my home.

Six. Visit to the Sky Man

We had been in Machu for almost a month when we were summoned to the police station. It was the moment we had both been dreading. Leaving the country surreptitiously, as Tsedup had, could incur a serious penalty or worse. We had heard of others who had returned and been temporarily imprisoned. We had no idea what to expect. I said a silent prayer the night before that no harm would come to him.

The next morning we pulled into the forecourt of the police station, which was the first building on the tarmac road into town. It was of the usual concrete variety, three storeys high, glass-fronted, with the scarlet and gold emblem of the police force hung above its pillared entrance. The third floor was shielded by a large net curtain and was reserved for karaoke parties. The place breathed boredom. Apart from a builder toiling leisurely in the corner of the yard, there was no one in sight. We got off the bike and I followed Tsedup up the steps into the cool of the entrance. It smelt of dust, and I was surprised and momentarily delighted to see Tashintso. She sat in the dark reception room behind a sheet of glass on which were written various scarlet characters in Chinese and Tibetan. She wore her conscientiously pressed dull green police uniform, and a coquettish smile. 'Cho demo,'' she giggled in greeting, as we took seats in the black plastic armchairs opposite her kiosk. Beside her sat another young woman, identically dressed, who smiled shyly at me from beneath her permed fringe. A pile of paperwork sat neatly at the side of their desks, which were otherwise bare. Tashintso came round from behind the glass partition and said something to Tsedup, then she disappeared out of the door and I could hear the clump of her heavy high-heels down the corridor.

'Will they want to see me?' I asked Tsedup, taking advantage of the last few moments alone. ‘I have no idea what to say.'

'Just leave the talking to me,' he said.

But I wasn't reassured. What if they wanted to see us separately? It was like our interrogation at the High Commission in Delhi all over again, but this time more serious. However, I hadn't realised that I would be excluded from the grilling, simply because no one spoke English. A few minutes later Tashintso returned and signalled for Tsedup to follow her. He left, and I sat chewing my lip and studying a calendar with a picture of a tree in blossom beside a lake. The scene did little to pacify me and I imagined that the young policewoman sitting across from me would confuse the thudding of my heart with the thumping of her rubber stamp on the crisp white sheets before her. The main responsibility of the office appeared to be the endorsing and renewing of identity cards for the local population. She stamped face after face. The blood pulsed in my eardrums. My palms stuck to the chair.

Soon Tashintso returned and put on the kettle to make me a cup of tea. It seemed a ludicrously civil thing to do at the time and I felt slightly more at ease. She beckoned to me to come round the back of the screen into their small section where she drew up a chair for me and then pulled out her knitting from the drawer under her desk. As if this were a signal, the other policewoman stopped her stamping and took up her needles from a stool by her knee. Then Tashintso struck up a conversation with me as the pair of them clicked away. She was fashioning a brown tank top with a rather intricate pattern for her husband, and her partner was putting the finishing touches to a fluffy blue jumper for her baby son. The corridors were silent and Tashintso's sporadic giggling and the relendess tick-tick of the needles echoed down the halls. I wondered in what deep recess Tsedup was cornered and strained my ears for a voice. But I heard nothing, except the twang of a plucked guitar string in the karaoke room upstairs and a gurgle as the kettle began to boil.

Tashintso poured us tea and distracted me effectively with idle chatter for some time, until I became increasingly aware of the surreal quality of our situation. There was I, a western girl in full nomad attire, sitting opposite two Tibetan women knitting in police uniform. Whenever their superior passed the office they deftly concealed their handiwork and stopped giggling. Upstairs a policeman was practising the guitar for the evening's party, while I imagined my husband in a cell suffering interrogation under a stark lightbulb. I began to laugh, only gently, of course, but it helped to relieve the exhaustion my anxiety had inflicted and I was grateful for the moment of irony.

After two hours and several cups of tea, Tsedup emerged. He looked fine. He asked me for our passports, which he gave to Tashintso, and spoke a few words to her. Then they laughed and I realised that everything must be all right. 'Come on,' he said. 'Let's go and get some food.'

In the Formica back room of a restaurant we slurped our noodles and he told me what had happened. The sergeant was Tibetan and very amenable, although curious. Once he had established that Tsedup had no political motivation, they had shared tea and enjoyed a long, convoluted discussion about life in the West. Tsedup had paid a small fine and his file had been closed, the 'black mark' removed. The sergeant had even been generous enough to offer to assist us with extending our visas, which we had feared would be impossible here. I was speechless and euphoric all at once and, since we were in a private room with only the buzz of the strip-light for company, I jumped up and hugged him.

We had been spared the third degree and I felt lucky that day. Police dominance of the local community was widely known. But I discovered that later, although policing the population was the responsibility of the local force, there were other important figures in the nomadic community who played a part in maintaining social order.

Tsedup's step-grandfather, Azjung, 'uncle', was something of an eminence grise. For the nomads of Machu, his role was greater and his title more hallowed than any state authority could bestow upon him. For Azjung was a Sky Man.

Nam Nyeur, Sky Man, or ancient man, is the name given to an old person by their people. The title is not appointed, but means that that particular person has come to represent the last of a generation. They bring the past into the present with their story-telling and have remarkable powers of recollection. Since the nomads have no written history, it is the responsibility of the Sky Man to continue the oral history of a people. He is the text. The tradition carries with it enormous responsibility in terms of morality, for it is the Sky Man's duty to resolve domestic disputes among tribes by his wisdom. Most tribespeople carry the stories of their forefathers with them and retell them throughout their lifetime to the next generation, yet Azjung carried between five hundred and six hundred years of stories passed on orally from generation to generation. He was considered particularly sharp and could mediate to solve problems with a superior knowledge of historical precedents, selecting and recounting exact times in history and relating the stories of past events to clarify and resolve a present situation, so that the grieving or avenging parties may know how to follow the right path. He also had the power to set new precedents for future reference, providing the disputing parties both agreed to his proposal. This was nomad law.

Of course, if a story was very old, it might take on mythical proportions, accruing layer upon layer of embellishment from circling around the people of this land. The exact words of a particular figure in a tribe's history could be invented and reinvented, along with their emotions and thoughts, for that is the nature of story-telling. A story-teller must have an audience and the audience must be amused.

Nam Nyeur may also be female and the nature of a woman's wisdom and story-telling may be of a different nature altogether. Whereas a Sky Man tells of conflicts in battle, disputes over territory or