Everything's Swine
The rain may not have dampened anyone's spirits for the Silk Road reopening ceremony up at Nathu La on the Sikkim-Tibet border last week, but it was a big bore. The red carpet slithered on mud and slush. At one point, I feared it might glide over to Tibet. The chairs were wet. The awnings had holes. Puddles collected in front of the armchair put out for the Chinese ambassador to India, Sun Yuxi. A poor jawan was given a plastic mug and bucket and told to scoop out the water from the puddles before the ambassador arrived. The red carpet itself had been rushed from Siliguri in north Bengal at the eleventh hour after it was discovered that the original one was a few feet narrower than the one the Chinese had laid out on their side of the ceremonial arch. Indian dignity was preserved. Well, at least till lunchtime. Tibetan traders attending the ceremony had been invited to lunch at the new trading mart in Sheratung, about 5 km down the mountainside from Nathu La. I dread to think what impression they went back with. Being famished myself because of a staggeringly early start to the day, I had a quick dekko inside the 'building' where luncheon was being served. It was a pig pen. The food was being slopped out like pigswill. The used plates, in classic dhaba style, were being dunked in dirty water before being reissued. I retreated swiftly into the drizzle and slush outside.
Ballads Of Sir John
To liven up the rather dismal atmosphere up at Nathu La, the army or the Sikkim government decided to play piped music. The choice was curious. No stirring patriotic songs or Bollywood hits. Instead, we had Elton John’s Your Song reverberating across the lower Himalayas for this historic event. But I have to say, amid the clouds and biting cold, it was strangely comforting.
The Mule Years
Lakhotia must have been an intrepid young man in his youth. The drive up to Nathu La took us two hours by car. It used to take him, on muleback, two days. "We would start loading the mules at 3 am and leave by 4 am. The mules travelled at around 8 km an hour and we had to keep stopping to let them rest. It was crucial for us to make it Nathu La by 11 am because otherwise ferocious winds would start blowing up on the Tibetan plateau after that time," said Lakhotia. Some Gangtok businessmen made their fortunes purely from supplying fodder for the mule caravans. Lakhotia used to dismantle jeeps and cars, load them onto mules and carry them across to Yatung (around 35 km across the Tibetan border), where his Haryanvi mechanics would reassemble them for sale to Tibetan buyers. Rice was a staple commodity that Tibetans needed. It seems that rice grows in Gangtok because it’s at 5,000 ft. Go any higher—like Tibet—and it does not grow. This is why Tibetans to this day call Sikkim by the ancient name of ‘Denzong’, meaning ‘the valley of rice’.
3.30 am, 14,400 Ft
The drive up the narrow mountain road from Gangtok to Nathu La is breathtakingly beautiful. It’s a sharp, almost perpendicular ascent. Gangtok is situated at an altitude of around 5,000 feet above sea level. Nathu La is at 14,400 ft. And what views on the way. Waterfalls crashing into mountain gorges, valleys full of low-slung clouds and the beautiful Tsomgo Lake that emerges out of the mists at 12,000 ft. The early start was worth it. Luckily, I’d been able to avoid the 3.30 am sadism arranged for the media by government officials. The enormously well-informed and charming editor of Now newspaper, Pema Wangchuk, had offered me a ride in his jeep to the Nathu La Pass with a more civilised departure time. On the way, Pema told me how Silk Road folklore was woven into Gangtok life. One Silk Road trader who used to travel up to the Pass in the 1950s—Motilal Lakhotia—had refused to change the name of his company, despite the Pass being closed for 44 years. It was still called the Sikkim-Tibet Trading Company. Lakhotia, now over 80, was there for the reopening and eager as a beaver to get down to business again.
Not So Charmling
The only thing more offputting than the slop-out that day was the monstrous ego of the Sikkim chief minister, Pawan Chamling. This required that the assembled audience—including Sun Yuxi and Chamling’s Tibetan counterpart—be kept waiting in the miserable cold for over an hour. It can’t have been a traffic jam that delayed him, not on a deserted mountain. Nor can it have been a crisis so early in the morning. Sikkim is, after all, a state that measures 115 km by 65 km with a population of just half a million. It can only have been vanity. Chamling knew that the media had been up on a very cold mountaintop since 6 am. It would have been considerate to have kept his speech short but the man just kept wittering on. I was getting chilblains and starting to hallucinate about a nice cup of tea.