Returning

Azhang Tundup is weaving his last chali on the roof.  The ten-inch-wide band of heavy white and black goat's wool is stretched horizontally in a twenty-foot-long loop that slowly rotates as you weave. When it's finished the narrow band of fabric will be cut to lengths and sewn together into a heavy over-blanket, like a wall against the cold. Many mornings a new layer of snow covers the weaving.  He just brushes it off and lets the Himalayan sun take care of it.

It took him two years with a herd of seventeen or eighteen goats to spin all of the wool for this chali; he sold most of them the spring we left, and then lost five to a pack of feral dogs from the army camp in Nurla. There won't be wool for another weaving, in his life.  His tall lean figure, walking the dry rocky valleys, comes to mind: whistling occasionally, goat's wool twisting in his fingers as the herd meanders up the stream.

Graciously he accepts our help and agrees to teach us, stretching the rgyu (the warp, forty long strands or so) in interlocking patterns, half of them at a time, first up, then down, hands passing the spuun-bo (shuttle) back and forth each time.  Checking the tension.  Repairing the strands that break with needle and thread.  The spuun-bo is a ten-inch length of finger-thick willow, split where it grips the ends of the three strands of goat's wool that will form the spuun (the weft, or back-and-forth weave).  These three strands are wrapped diagonally around and around the spuun-bo in a neat diamond pattern and slowly released before each pass through the tensioned rgyu.

The goats' wool is smooth but not so soft on the skin.  Finished the chali will be something like seven feet by five, but might weigh twenty pounds. When your host lays this over you in your winter bed, it can be hard to find the strength to come out from beneath it. 

A wooden device like a miniature sawhorse (a bung-bu, which means donkey) stands in front of the seated weaver.  A length of parachute cord looped twenty times around its cross-piece holds half the long strands up.  The other half sag for one pass, then cinching a board called a pari inserted beyond the bung-bu lifts the lower half up and the long strands interchange, the high above the low, for one pass.  Each time he switches, Azhang Tundup fluffs the strands with his fingers to help them separate, and slides between the two sets of strands a smooth gently-pointed piece of wood called a rayi, threading the gap.  Rayi also means sword.  The rayi is three inches wide and one inch thick, and once inserted he turns it vertical and it separates the sets of strands enough for the spuun-bo to pass through.  Then he turns the rayi back to horizontal and with both hands he rams its one flat edge towards his body, compressing the spuun and pulling the loop of weaving ever so slightly around.

We are so glad to be back in Tar.

Unexpectedly, this opportunity arose. A group of documentary filmmakers from South Korea wanted to make an hour-long television program about foreigners living in Ladakh. The chance came to return, and at the same time to reach many people with a view of the life of this place and our own lives and thoughts.  Every single day in Maine, we thought about the village and our friends here. They offered us our plane tickets to come back, and we said yes.

~~~

We finished the walk up to the village in the dusk of the day, made long by our sea-trained lungs. We stopped by the great boulder in front of Abi Dolkar's lower field, before reaching the first doorway; somehow it seemed right to sing first, before speaking. We took out the banjo and began to play Nilza Wangmo's song. Before the song was through Azhang Tundup had come, and Ache Tsering and Dechen Angmo, all laughing, holding our hands, pulling us to their homes for tea and food and sleep. Azhang Tundup walked off with the banjo, to make sure that we would come.

~~~

The next morning we were sitting in the sun with Dechen Angmo and Acho Rigzin, plucking wool from two sheep hides Rigzin had moistened and buried in manure four days before. He was preparing them to become the head of a snga, an upright ceremonial drum. When they were clean we took them across the village to Meme Angchuk, to ask about the next steps. He told us they needed to be worked, a bit, and showed us the wooden frame he'd made. It took six days, he said: like the top eight inches of a barrel, with separate, slightly curved sections joined together into a round perhaps two and a half feet across and eight inches deep, carved and patterned. It stands on a staff four feet high, this one patterned by Rigzin, symmetrical around its form.

Finally Meme Angchuk decided that the hides were ready, and we pulled the first one taught over the face of the snga. This was only to see that it was big enough, and clear. We painted the frame edges with Fevicol (traditional?) and then replaced the hides, loosely, Meme Angchuk pressing down the center into a hollow. A ring around the edge received two strings, inside and out. When the snga was finished Meme Angchuk hung it by a nail in the ceiling to dry and it seemed like a great, wild spirit in the dim of the room, woolly edges of hide framing its blank and solemn face. The next day we saw that in fully drying the hides had stretched taut.  Beautiful.

~~~

We felt some nervousness about opening this window -- about agreeing to come in this way -- and so inviting them and their project to this high, quiet valley.  (Could this film bring tourists here?  In what ways would that be positive or negative?  What kind of relationship are we creating and what will that mean for the Tarpa?  Will these filmmakers have open hearts and be responsible and open to dialogue?)  And it turns out, in our view, that these filmmakers are sensitive, thoughtful artists who are moving with beautiful and penetrating questions.  They critically examine their own processes, thoughts, and ways of seeking stories.  They flew their drone and ran the run-down village generator each night to charge a plethora of batteries, and each day practiced a craft of placing cameras and framing shots and asking questions and delving into stories, hands always on the focus wheel to fine-tune each moment.

It was a new practice for us to be on camera, and to discuss with them and with the Tarpa by way of co-creating this documentary.  Bin, Moon, and Su also learned language, carved spoons from willow wood, and helped stretch a sheep hide for Abi Yangchan to help keep her knees and her back warm.  Through their questioning and with the help of Phuntsok Dorje (Markhapa) who acted as their guide and translator, we were able to have deeper and more nuanced conversations with people in the village, particularly about education and raising children, about traditional medicine, and about the practices of agriculture and how people here value themselves and their skills in these changing times.  Some of this will make it into the film, and we will share access to that when we know how.

A month later now, everyone in Tar knows three new people who care about the life of this place, and who will share a view of this place through their process of inquiry with a broad population in another nation about which we know only little.  We learned that almost all houses in Korea have radiant-floor heating, a very efficient method.  We learned that the US state has a lot of military personnel and weapons in South Korea, and that in the event of a war the President of the United States becomes the effective leader of the nation.  And on the Korean peninsula we learned that face-masks used to be needed occasionally, but for the last five years they are needed every day in order to be outside.  Every day.  Prevailing winds carry the smoke and airborne refuse from major Chinese manufacturing centers across the water straight through Korea.  I hope that all of us these days can make choices and good laws together so that in the future the air can be cleaner, especially for the children there.

We grew to love these new friends.  The visit and the filming are done for now, yet together we are weaving a longer term relationship.  If we are lucky we will see each other again, in Tar and in Maine.

The tv program will air in Korea (subtitled in Korean) this June.

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We learned there is a medicine called dak zhun, "blood of the rock," that leaks from cliff cracks and hardens into black knobs that can be broken off, boiled and taken as a tea to help heal a host of ailments, including flesh wounds, knee and back problems, even broken ribs and bones.  There is a secret origin of this dak zhun.

~~~

Change is moving here.  The television is present in all our friends' households now, where three years ago there was only one.  Many people have smartphones, though there is not yet access to the internet.  In many villages the tractors and rototillers have replaced draught power. In Tar, fewer people in the village means they are able to care for fewer animals; lacking manure, the fields become poorer. In Leh, more and more young people are choosing their own partners, marrying for love. Languages flow into each other -- Ladakhi, English, Hindi, Urdu, Tibetan -- interpenetrating, shifting. The older people say that once they knew what would come in each season; now the weather is harder and harder to predict.

How will future years come to this place?  What are good ways to live here now?  What will be brought about by the complex set of decisions young people make in these decades of change?  What balances and harmonies can be sought between the long, ancient rock of skill and wisdom, and the quickly-flowing global-reaching education that is coming available?  We are asking these questions as we can, trying to learn.  And we find our steps walking a path both unexpected and familiar.