Silk Road Summary in English
The narrator was leaving Ravu and heading towards Mount Kailash to complete the kora. It was in the early hours of the morning that they were set to leave. Lhamo gave the narrator a long-sleeved sheepskin coat, which all the men wore, as a farewell present. Tsetan assessed him as they got into his car. They took a short cut to get off the Changtang. Tsetan knew a route that would take them south-west, almost directly towards Mount Kailash. It involved crossing several fairly high mountain passes, he said. Going that way would not be a problem if there was no snow but that one could never know till one reached there.
From the gently rising and falling hills of Ravu, the short cut took them across vast open plains, dry grazing land, with nothing in them except a few small antelopes. Moving ahead they noticed that the plains became more stony than grassy. Here they saw a herd of wild ass that were racing around and of which Tsetan had told them even before they appeared.
The drive again became steep. They crossed drokbas tending their flocks. Thickly clad men and women stared at their car and at times waved at them while the sheep would turn away from the vehicle. They passed nomads’ dark tents pitched in the isolated places usually with a huge black dog, a Tibetan big, smooth-haired dog guarding them. These dogs would observe them from a distance and as they drew closer, they would rush towards them and chase them for about a hundred metres. These hairy dogs were pitch black and usually wore bright red collars and barked angrily with enormous jaws. They were absolutely fearless of their vehicle and would run straight onto their way. Tsetan had to brake and turn sharply to avoid them. It was because of their ferocity that these Tibetan mastiffs were brought from Tibet to China’s imperial courts as hunting dogs.
As they entered a valley, they could see snow-capped mountains and the wide river but mostly blocked with ice that was sparkling in the sunshine. As they moved ahead, on their upward track, the turns became sharper and the ride bumpier. The rocks around were covered with patches of bright orange lichen. Under the rocks, seemed unending shade. The narrator felt the pressure building up in his ears so he held his nose, snorted and cleared them. Just then Tsetan stopped and the three of them—Tsetan, Daniel and the narrator walked out of the car.
It continued to snow. The snow that had collected was too steep for their vehicle to scale, so there was no way of going around the snow patch. The narrator looked at his wristwatch and realized that they were at 5,210 metres above sea level.
The snow didn’t look too deep, but the danger was that if the car slipped it could turn over. Tsetan grabbed handfuls of soil and threw it across the frozen surface of ice. Daniel and the narrator stayed out of the vehicle to lessen Tsetan’s load. He backed and drove towards the dirty snow, and with no difficulty the car moved on. But after ten minutes of driving, there was another obstruction. Tsetan assessed the scene and this time he decided to drive round the snow. It was a steep slope scattered with big rocks, but Tsetan got past them. The narrator checked his watch again; they were 5,400 metres above sea level and his head began to ache terribly. He gulped a little water for relief.
When they reached the top of the pass at 5,515 metres, they noticed large rocks decorated with white silk scarves and ragged prayer flags. All of them took a clockwise round them as is the tradition and Tsetan checked the tyres on his vehicle. He stopped at the petrol tank. The lower atmospheric pressure was allowing the fuel to expand.
The narrator was soon relieved of headache as they went to the other side of the pass. At two o’clock, they stopped for lunch and ate hot noodles inside a long canvas work tent, put up beside a dry salt lake. The plateau was covered with spots of salty desert area and salt lakes, leftovers of the Tethys Ocean, which surrounded Tibet before the steep climb. Here there was a lot of activity, men with pickaxes and shovels were moving around wearing long sheepskin coats and salt-covered boots. All of them were wearing sunglasses against the bright light of the trucks as they came laden with piles of salt.
By late afternoon they reached a small town, Hor, back on the main east-west highway that followed the old trade route from Lhasa to Kashmir. Daniel took a ride in a truck and went to Lhasa. Tsetan and the narrator bade him farewell.
Hor was a gloomy place covered with dust and rocks and devoid of vegetation. It was scattered with a lot of refuse that had gathered over the years. It was regrettable as this town was on the shore of Lake Manasarovar, Tibet’s most honoured lake. Ancient Hindu and Buddhist study of the universe pinpoints Manasarovar as the source of four great Indian rivers: the Indus, the Ganges, the Sutlej and the Brahmaputra. Actually, only the Sutlej flows from this lake, but the headwaters of the others all rise nearby on the sides of Mount Kailash. They had tea in Hor’s only cafe which, like all the other buildings in town, was built from badly painted concrete and had three broken windows but they had a good view of the lake through one of the windows.
After half an hour’s stop, they drove westwards out of the town towards Mount Kailash.
The narrator was surprised to see Hor because it was absolutely different from what he had read about it. Ekai Kawaguchi, a Japanese monk who had been there in 1900, was so stirred by the holiness of the lake that he burst into tears. A few years later, the place had a similar effect on Sven Hedin, a Swede visitor.
They reached a guesthouse in Darchen after 10.30 p.m. They were 4,760 metres above the sea level. It was a disturbed night. The narrator had terrible cold because of the open-air rubbish dump in Hor. With his nostrils blocked he found it difficult to breathe. He was tired and hungry and thus started breathing through his mouth.
But barely had he slept when he woke up abruptly. His felt a peculiar heaviness in his chest; he sat up and cleared his nasal passages. He felt relieved but the moment he lay down he intuitively felt that something was wrong. He was not breathless but simply could not sleep. The fear of dying in his sleep kept him awake.
The next morning Tsetan took him to the Darchen Medical College. It was a new building that looked like a monastery from the outside. It had a very solid door that opened into a large courtyard. In the consulting room was a Tibetan doctor who did not have the equipment that a doctor would have. Clad in a thick pullover and a woolly hat, he listened to the narrator’s symptoms and said it was because of the altitude and cold. He assured the narrator that he would be fine and gave him a brown envelope stuffed with fifteen screws of paper that contained brown powder that tasted like cinnamon. He was asked to take them with hot water. The narrator did not like the look of the contents but took them anyway. He slept very soundly.
When Tsetan was assured that the narrator was going to be well, he left him and returned to Lhasa. As a Buddhist, it didn’t really matter if the narrator died but he thought it would be bad for business. After the narrator got his rest and a good night’s sleep, Darchen didn’t look so awful. It was still dusty, and had heaps of rubble and refuse, but the bright sun gave him a view of the Himalayas. He saw the snow-capped mountain, Gurla Mandhata, with a small cloud hanging over its peak.
The town had a few general stores selling Chinese cigarettes, soap and other basic provisions, as well as the usual strings of prayer flags. In front of one, men collected in the afternoon for a game of pool on a strange table in the open air, while nearby women washed their long hair in the icy water of a narrow brook near the guesthouse. Darchen felt stress-free and slow but for the narrator this was a major disadvantage. There were no pilgrims. He had been told that in the peak of the pilgrimage season, the town was full of visitors. That was the reason for his being there in the beginning of the season, but it seemed that he was too early.
One afternoon he sat with a glass of tea in Darchen’s only cafe thinking about the paucity of pilgrims and the fact that he hadn’t made much progress with his self-help programme on positive thinking. After some contemplation, he felt he could only wait. He did not like the idea of going alone on a pilgrimage.
The kora was seasonal because parts of the road were likely to be blocked by snow. He had no idea if the snow had cleared, but he saw the large pieces of dirty ice on the banks of Darchen’s stream. From the time when Tsetan had left, he had not met anyone in Darchen who could answer even the basic questions in English till he met Norbu.
The narrator was in a small, dark cafe with a long metal stove that ran down the middle. The walls and roofs were covered with multi-coloured sheets of plastic that is made into shopping bags in many countries. Plastic is one of China’s most successful exports along the Silk Road today. He sat beside a window so that he could see the pages of his notebook. He also had a novel with him. Norbu saw the book, came to him, sat opposite and asked the narrator if he was ‘English’. They stated a conversation. The narrator could make out that he did not belong to that place as he was wearing a windcheater and metal-rimmed spectacles of Western style. He told the narrator that he was a Tibetan, but worked in Beijing at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in the Institute of Ethnic Literature. He, too, had come to do the kora.
Norbu had been writing academic papers about the Kailash kora and its importance in various works of Buddhist literature for many years, but he had never actually done it himself. When the narrator told him what brought him to Darchen, he was excited and wanted to work with him as a team. He soon realized that Norbu was as ill-equipped as him for the pilgrimage. He kept telling the narrator how fat he was and how tough it was going to be for him to walk. He wasn’t really a practising Buddhist, it became known, but he had enthusiasm and he was a Tibetan.
Although at first the narrator had thought that he would make the trek in the company of religious people but then felt that Norbu would turn out to be the ideal companion. Norbu suggested that they hire some yaks to carry the luggage, as he said it was not possible for him to prostrate himself all round the mountain as that was not his style, and anyway his tummy was too big.
summary in hindi
वर्णनकर्ता रावू को छोड़कर कोरा पूरा करने के लिए कैलाश पर्वत की ओर जा रहा था। सुबह के शुरुआती घंटों में उन्हें जाने के लिए तैयार किया गया था। ल्हामो ने वर्णनकर्ता को एक लंबी बाजू वाला भेड़ की खाल का कोट दिया, जिसे सभी पुरुषों ने विदाई के उपहार के रूप में पहना था। टेसेटन ने उनकी कार में बैठते ही उनका आकलन किया। चांगतांग से निकलने के लिए उन्होंने शॉर्ट कट लिया। त्सेतान एक ऐसा मार्ग जानता था जो उन्हें दक्षिण-पश्चिम की ओर ले जाएगा, लगभग सीधे कैलाश पर्वत की ओर। उन्होंने कहा कि इसमें काफी ऊंचे पहाड़ी दर्रों को पार करना शामिल है। यदि बर्फ न होती तो उस रास्ते से जाने में कोई समस्या नहीं होती, लेकिन जब तक कोई वहाँ नहीं पहुँचता तब तक उसे पता नहीं चल सकता था।
रावू की धीरे-धीरे बढ़ती और गिरती पहाड़ियों से, शॉर्ट कट उन्हें विशाल खुले मैदानों, सूखी चरागाह भूमि में ले गया, जिसमें कुछ छोटे मृगों के अलावा कुछ भी नहीं था। आगे चलकर उन्होंने देखा कि मैदान घास से अधिक पथरीले हो गए हैं। यहाँ उन्होंने जंगली गधों का एक झुंड देखा जो इधर-उधर दौड़ रहा था और जिसके बारे में सेटन ने उन्हें प्रकट होने से पहले ही बता दिया था।
ड्राइव फिर खड़ी हो गई। उन्होंने अपने झुंडों को चराते हुए ड्रोकबास को पार किया। मोटे कपड़े पहने पुरुष और महिलाएं उनकी कार को घूरते रहे और कभी-कभी उन पर हाथ हिलाते रहे जबकि भेड़ें वाहन से दूर चली जाती थीं। वे आम तौर पर एक बड़े काले कुत्ते, एक तिब्बती बड़े, चिकने बालों वाले कुत्ते की रखवाली करते हुए खानाबदोशों के अंधेरे टेंट को अलग-थलग जगहों पर ले जाते थे। ये कुत्ते उन्हें दूर से ही देख लेते और जैसे-जैसे वे करीब आते जाते, उनकी ओर दौड़ते और करीब सौ मीटर तक उनका पीछा करते। ये बालों वाले कुत्ते पिच काले थे और आमतौर पर चमकीले लाल कॉलर पहनते थे और बड़े जबड़े के साथ गुस्से में भौंकते थे। वे अपने वाहन से बिल्कुल निडर थे और सीधे अपने रास्ते पर भाग जाते थे। सेटन को उनसे बचने के लिए ब्रेक लगाना पड़ा और तेजी से मुड़ना पड़ा। यह उनकी उग्रता के कारण ही था कि इन तिब्बती कुत्तों को शिकार कुत्तों के रूप में तिब्बत से चीन के शाही दरबार में लाया गया था।
जैसे ही वे एक घाटी में दाखिल हुए, वे बर्फ से ढके पहाड़ और चौड़ी नदी देख सकते थे, लेकिन ज्यादातर बर्फ से अवरुद्ध थे जो धूप में जगमगा रही थी। जैसे-जैसे वे आगे बढ़ते गए, उनके ऊपर की ओर जाने वाले ट्रैक पर मोड़ तेज होते गए और सवारी ऊबड़-खाबड़ हो गई। चारों ओर की चट्टानें चमकीले नारंगी लाइकेन के धब्बों से आच्छादित थीं। चट्टानों के नीचे, अंतहीन छाया लग रहा था। वर्णनकर्ता ने महसूस किया कि उसके कानों में दबाव बढ़ रहा है इसलिए उसने अपनी नाक पकड़ी, सूँघा और उन्हें साफ किया। तभी सेटन रुक गया और उनमें से तीन - सेटन, डैनियल और कथावाचक कार से बाहर चले गए।
हिमपात जारी रहा। जो बर्फ जमा हुई थी, वह उनके वाहन के लिए बहुत खड़ी थी, इसलिए बर्फ के ढेर के आसपास जाने का कोई रास्ता नहीं था। वर्णनकर्ता ने अपनी कलाई घड़ी को देखा और महसूस किया कि वे समुद्र तल से 5,210 मीटर ऊपर थे।
बर्फ ज्यादा गहरी नहीं दिख रही थी, लेकिन खतरा यह था कि अगर कार फिसली तो पलट सकती है। त्सेटन ने मुट्ठी भर मिट्टी पकड़ी और उसे बर्फ की जमी हुई सतह पर फेंक दिया। सेटन के भार को कम करने के लिए डैनियल और वर्णनकर्ता वाहन से बाहर रहे। वह पीछे हट गया और गंदी बर्फ की ओर चला गया, और बिना किसी कठिनाई के कार आगे बढ़ गई। लेकिन दस मिनट गाड़ी चलाने के बाद एक और रुकावट आ गई। त्सेटन ने दृश्य का आकलन किया और इस बार उसने बर्फ के चारों ओर ड्राइव करने का फैसला किया। यह बड़ी चट्टानों से बिखरी एक खड़ी ढलान थी, लेकिन सेटन ने उन्हें पार कर लिया। वर्णनकर्ता ने फिर से अपनी घड़ी देखी; वे समुद्र तल से 5,400 मीटर ऊपर थे और उनका सिर बुरी तरह से दर्द करने लगा। उसने राहत के लिए थोड़ा पानी पिया।
जब वे दर्रे के शीर्ष पर 5,515 मीटर पर पहुंचे, तो उन्होंने सफेद रेशमी स्कार्फ और फटे हुए प्रार्थना झंडों से सजी बड़ी-बड़ी चट्टानें देखीं। उन सभी ने परंपरा के अनुसार दक्षिणावर्त घूमा और सेटन ने अपने वाहन के टायरों की जांच की। वह पेट्रोल टैंक पर रुक गया। कम वायुमंडलीय दबाव ईंधन के विस्तार की अनुमति दे रहा था।
जैसे ही वे दर्रे के दूसरी ओर गए वर्णनकर्ता को जल्द ही सिरदर्द से राहत मिली। दो बजे, वे दोपहर के भोजन के लिए रुके और सूखे नमक की झील के किनारे रखे एक लंबे कैनवस वर्क टेंट के अंदर गर्म नूडल्स खाए। पठार नमकीन रेगिस्तानी क्षेत्र और नमक की झीलों, टेथिस महासागर के अवशेषों से ढका हुआ था, जो खड़ी चढ़ाई से पहले तिब्बत को घेरे हुए था। यहाँ बहुत चहल-पहल थी, फावड़े और फावड़े लिए आदमी भेड़ की खाल के लंबे कोट और नमक से ढके जूते पहने इधर-उधर घूम रहे थे। नमक के ढेर से लदे हुए सभी ट्रकों की तेज रोशनी के खिलाफ धूप का चश्मा पहने हुए थे।
कोरा मौसमी था क्योंकि सड़क के कुछ हिस्सों के बर्फ से अवरुद्ध होने की संभावना थी। उसे इस बात का कोई अंदाजा नहीं था कि बर्फ साफ हुई है या नहीं, लेकिन उसने डार्चेन की धारा के किनारे गंदी बर्फ के बड़े-बड़े टुकड़े देखे। सेटन के चले जाने के समय से, वह डारचेन में किसी से नहीं मिला था जो नोरबू से मिलने तक अंग्रेजी में बुनियादी सवालों का जवाब दे सके।
वर्णनकर्ता एक छोटे, गहरे रंग के कैफे में था जिसमें धातु का एक लम्बा चूल्हा था जो बीच में नीचे की ओर चलता था। दीवारों और छतों को प्लास्टिक की बहुरंगी चादरों से ढक दिया गया था, जिसे कई देशों में शॉपिंग बैग में बनाया जाता है। प्लास्टिक आज सिल्क रोड के साथ चीन के सबसे सफल निर्यातों में से एक है। वह एक खिड़की के पास बैठ गया ताकि वह अपनी नोटबुक के पन्ने देख सके। उनके साथ उनका एक उपन्यास भी था। नोरबू ने किताब देखी, उसके पास आया, सामने बैठा और वर्णनकर्ता से पूछा कि क्या वह 'अंग्रेज' है। उन्होंने एक बातचीत की। वर्णनकर्ता यह पता लगा सकता था कि वह उस स्थान से संबंधित नहीं था क्योंकि उसने पश्चिमी शैली का विंडचीटर और धातु की रिम वाला चश्मा पहन रखा था। उन्होंने कथावाचक को बताया कि वह एक तिब्बती थे, लेकिन बीजिंग में चाइनीज एकेडमी ऑफ सोशल साइंसेज, इंस्टीट्यूट ऑफ एथनिक लिटरेचर में काम करते थे। वह भी कोरा करने आया था।
नोरबू कई वर्षों से कैलाश कोरा और बौद्ध साहित्य के विभिन्न कार्यों में इसके महत्व के बारे में अकादमिक पत्र लिख रहे थे, लेकिन वास्तव में उन्होंने इसे स्वयं कभी नहीं किया था। जब कथावाचक ने उसे बताया कि वह क्या लेकर आया है, तो वह उत्साहित था और एक टीम के रूप में उसके साथ काम करना चाहता था। उन्होंने जल्द ही महसूस किया कि नोरबू तीर्थयात्रा के लिए उनके जैसे ही बीमार थे। वह कथावाचक को बताता रहा कि वह कितना मोटा है और उसके लिए चलना कितना कठिन होने वाला है। वह वास्तव में एक अभ्यासी बौद्ध नहीं थे, यह ज्ञात हो गया था, लेकिन उनमें उत्साह था और वे एक तिब्बती थे।
हालाँकि पहले तो वर्णनकर्ता ने सोचा था कि वह धार्मिक लोगों की संगति में ट्रेक करेगा लेकिन फिर लगा कि नोरबू आदर्श साथी बन जाएगा। नोरबू ने सुझाव दिया कि वे सामान ले जाने के लिए कुछ याक किराए पर लेते हैं, क्योंकि उन्होंने कहा कि उनके लिए पहाड़ के चारों ओर झुकना संभव नहीं था क्योंकि यह उनकी शैली नहीं थी, और वैसे भी उनका पेट बहुत बड़ा था।
