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The Donkey Man
A five-day trek by mule across treacherous mountains in the Tibetan plateau
We called him the donkey man. He was thirty, but reticence and a face prematurely wrinkled by the harsh climate made him look forty. He smiled sheepishly; he smoked bidis – rolled leaves of dried grass. He was five feet tall, with green oriental eyes and a brownish complexion. He walked with his hands crossed behind his back, squinting at the mountains – a man of little words. Already he had three children, but he complained that he only had one wife. He didn’t read or write, or speak English; only Padmaparna, my Indian companion, could communicate with him. His chores, besides guiding us and the donkeys, was to fill water from the rivers and keep the kerosene stove alight. He liked his chang – the crude home-made beer brewed from fermented barley – and since it was customary to offer a male visitor unlimited chang, he got drunk every evening during our five days in the mountains.
In northwest India, within striking distance of Tibet, in a quaint Buddhist enclave called Ladakh, it took us five days to walk from Lamayuru to Alchi, up and down dry contorted mountains where the lowest elevation is 3,000 metres. The donkey man, a farmer we had found in Lamayuru, told us that the passage through these road-less mountains constituted Ladakh’s most intense trek, among dramatic and dangerous trails. Unlike most trekkers – who trek with a trekking agency that organises everything for US$25 daily – we opted to organise the trek ourselves so that our money goes directly into the pockets of local peasants and so that we could have access to the natives who knew a native guide. That is how we ended camping in a village every evening, and finding a family to let us into their home to cook and share yarns, while the men, including the donkey man, got drunk on chang.
“I am walking for money,” the donkey man said on the second night. “What are you walking for?”
As he spoke he was knitting the slashes on the soles of his shoes with twine (the next day the sharp slate tore the soles open again), and there were cuts on his feet. The mountains were treacherous – we had been labouring over high passes in dry dusty air and pounding sun, wheezing for oxygen at the high altitude. The villagers, too, led a life of hardship. They lived in mud-houses, a cluster of them in each village, and resigned their fate to the gompa (Buddhist monastery) built at the highest point of the village. The land was made habitable by water channelled from rivers, irrigating a quilt of fields for subsistence farming: they grew rice, coriander, wheat, potatoes, tomatoes, garlic, onions, chilli, pulses, spinach, and reared cattle, sheep, and chicken. To protect their skin from the climate, villagers wore heavy robes, outlandish head-dresses, and oriental tip-rolled-backwards shoes – but the skin on their faces was cracked and wrinkled.
“We’re here as pilgrims,” I answered. “We can only find God here, where the earth and the heavens meet.”
He could understand that, for the Ladakhi Buddhists believe that the mountains were the conduit between the earth and the universe. Chortens – the rocket-like mud stupas pointing towards the sky, mimicking the mountains – had been erected everywhere to strengthen that link between earth and universe.
The next day we negotiated our highest pass, 5,200 metres high, the realm of vultures with eight-feet wingspans gliding overhead. A confluence of 6,000-metres-plus peaks cluttered every horizon, crowding the sky in a way that made it possible to believe that the mountains had wilfully arisen towards the sky. The mountains looked close enough to touch, an illusion of constricting sizes that gave the mountains an intimacy of presence, yet they were distant and heavenly – a perceptive paradox that can be taken as symbolism for the Buddhist idea about the interconnectedness of the universe.
That day the donkey man had been walking in his nonchalant manner, humming the mantras, and we had lost him on the slope until, at the pass, we found him dozing behind a boulder that shielded him from the howling wind. We were breathing in gasps in the thin air, our heads were dizzy. “Bhaiya,” I said, using the Hindu word for brother. “At this altitude we walk together. You stick with us, you walk at our pace.”
“Ya,” he said.
He always answered with an uncomprehending and noncommittal “Ya”. He agreed with everything – he understood nothing. And when we began walking again, we lost him again. By dusk we had began to fear that he might have abandoned us, and then we found him sprawled on the grass on the outskirts of a village, drinking tea and smoking a bidi. I erupted furiously at his reckless abandonment: I bellowed at him and stomped the ground.
That night he was extra attentive, sitting next to me as I cooked, anticipating things I might need, and afterwards washing the dishes. He wanted to share his chang with me – the first time he had offered me some. He asked Padma: “Is he angry at me?” But I was feeling ashamed for loosing my temper, and I found myself also being extra kind. I gave him the largest portion of soup, and a chocolate I had been reserving for myself. I gave him extra clothes for more layers of bedding. “Ya, ya, man,” he bowed.
The stars were the brightest I had ever seen that night, and there were so many of them that if you drew a line from star to star around the edges of the sky you would end up with a profile of the mountains. The air was so clear that I could see the shooting stars burn in a trail of sparks. It was this feature, the superior quality of the light – even during the midday sun the sky remained lurid blue – that helped me understand the Buddhist idea about the emptiness of everything. It was possible to believe that, because the light was so delicate and ethereal that I wanted that moment to last forever, and already I was melancholic for the time when my life would cease to be.
(C) Victor Paul Borg 
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