Namma Read online

  Namma

  Kate Karko

  Amazon.co.uk Review

  "Namma" meaning bride is the first-hand account of Kate Karko, a designer from London and her husband Tsedup, a Tibetan nomad. The couple met, fell in love and married in India where Kate was travelling and Tsedup was living in exile. After an absence of nine years, four of which were spent in London waiting for the right documents to come through, Tsedup was finally able to return to his family on the roof of the world.

  With very limited grasp of the Amdo dialect, Kate throws herself into life with her new family. She keeps an open mind to all new experiences and approaches her time with the nomads with enduring positivity-not many erstwhile city dwellers would have been able to cope with the complete lack of personal space and the constant smell of burning yak dung. Kate's position within the family group gave her remarkable access to nomadic life in the 21st century and full-colour photographs help bring her descriptions of her numerous in-laws to life. The reader is left with the impression of a beautiful country and a proud people whose cultural heritage is under threat of extinction. Indeed, the reality of nomadic life does not quite match up with Kate's early romantic imaginings:

  The nomads were a tough and diligent people but now the men had been rendered impotent. Because of the fences there was no reason to herd the animals and it was more difficult for bandits to attack an enclosed encampment. Their role in the family had been all but erased. The new laws had tragically accomplished their goal of nomad domestication.

  Given the author's emotional involvement with the family and the many difficulties she must have encountered during her six-month stay with the Amdo tribe, her pervasive objectivity is something of a disappointment. The reader learns very little, for example, about the real impact of her stay on her relationship with her husband or of the more day-to-day frustrations. Despite such minor flaws, Namma remains an absorbing insight into a deeply spiritual yet fun-loving people, written by a woman whose son has become a bridge between two worlds. -Simon Priestly -This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

  Geographical Magazine

  'Fascinating read… a glimmering insight into the nomadic lifestyle inherent to the country'

  Kate Karko

  Namma

  For Tsedup

  who is my inspiration.

  That he may be understood.

  And for the people of Machu

  who gave me so much.

  This book is my way of giving back to them.

  ***

  Family Tree

  NB. All dates of birth are approximate since the nomads use a different method of time measurement and do not recognise birthdays – see p. 274 – Chapter 16.

  Acknowledgements

  With thanks to those who understand. To all of our friends, especially Jemima and Lamakyab who know more than anyone what this book means. To Ells, Chloё and Kats who were part of the adventure. To Tsedup's family for giving me a home. To my family for their love: especially to Dad for his unfaltering support, to Mum for her help with editing and for believing in me, and to Phil.

  But mostly to Tsedup, without whom there would be no book. There would be no Gonbochab. And without whom I would be lost.

  For the background on Shamanism and Buddhism, I am grateful to Alexandra David-Neel, With Mystics and Magicians in Tibet, Penguin, London, 1931; and Keith Dowman, The Sacred Life of Tibet, Thorsons, London, 1997.

  Prologue

  We met in the shadow of the Himalayas. In a place where monkeys ran on tin roofs and flying squirrels leapt like bats from pine to shivering pine. Where the roar of monks' horns from the monastery blasted the summer sky, and glaciers shone like cut diamonds.

  It is so difficult to talk about love, how it all started, but the drama of ours changed my life.

  It was in McLeod Ganj, an Indian hill station, at a roof-top party, full of Tibetans and drunk Punjabis, that I saw a man dance, his eyes closed, long hair swirling in a dervish-spin. Around him the chaos reeled, and he must have seen me looking at him, for he came and sat with me and we looked out at the black night. Then he began to tell me, very carefully, about the great, golden eagles in the mountains of his homeland. He spoke of nature with such integrity, as if he was part of the earth, not just on it.

  I had no idea how he felt about me so I tailed him. He used to sit on the dusty street opposite the Dalai Lama's monastery, strumming a guitar and selling bread he'd made. I diverted my walks so that I would pass him each day, or I would see him stroll down the bustling street from my balcony. Once he brought me an eagle feather.

  Then one morning, in a voice so serious, he told me he'd dreamt of me. Later, in his tiny house, our life began. We took a room in a valley of corncobs, with a cow downstairs who mooed at night. We spent days walking in the forest and swam naked in a pool of melt-water. When we stopped on a rock at night he sang to me. 'From now on there is no yours and mine,' he told me. We would share everything.

  Right from the beginning we were inseparable. We spent hours holed up in our small house talking. He already had a good grasp of English as he had been studying at a school before we met and had quite a few English friends. Despite our different cultures, we discovered we were uncannily compatible. He coaxed out all that had lain dormant in me: he encouraged me to paint, to play music, to speak from the heart. I knew that he had an energy I did not possess and his unbounded enthusiasm for life became the inspiration for mine. I listened as Tsedup spoke of the relatives he had left behind in Tibet, the tribe, the yaks, the mountains. He missed it all.

  He was born by the first bend of the Yellow river, a Tibetan nomad in a yak-hair tent in a nomads' land. At four he rode bareback and shot his father's rifle. At twelve he told his family he wanted to go to school. In the town he watched Kung Fu films and wished he had been born Chinese. At eighteen he escaped to India on foot over the mountains, with some money taken from a box in the tent. He didn't tell his family first – they would never have let him go.

  I was born in the London suburbs, and had a happy middle-class childhood in a free country. I meandered along the well-worn track from school, to university, to art college. Then, one summer holiday, I went travelling: I felt the need for adventure.

  Now here we were in India, across the border from Tsedup's country and four thousand miles from mine. A step down from the Tibetan plateau and a step away from any notion of home. We were in the middle, geographically, spiritually, culturally. Tsedup was in exile; I was just visiting; India was our half-way house.

  Meeting him was unexpected, but I had never been so sure of anything in my life. That summer, I came home, dumped college and worked to save money to go back. In the winter we were together again, my parents worrying for my sanity. Tsedup had only planned a short trip to India, a couple of years to learn some English, and then it would be back to the tribe. He hadn't banked on meeting me and he never made it back over the mountains.

  The year after we met, we were married in India, in a small registry office with plastic plants and a fat notary who muttered, 'Visa marriage,' under his breath as he stamped our certificate. It resembled a sheet of school loo paper (the kind you use for tracing maps in Geography). It had all the romance of an auction. Afterwards we sat and ate noodles quietly. I hadn't told my parents. Even when they came out to see us for a week, we didn't whisper a word. We didn't feel married, not properly. We just wanted to be together and, besides, I wanted them to get to know Tsedup before I broke it to them that he was their son-in-law. A nomad in a family tree is something to get your head around.

  It was hard enough for them to cope with our living conditions. I had spent the whole day cleaning before they arrived, but still my father recoiled when he saw our house. It was beyond him to imagine living
in a room that resembled his garage. From the relative comfort of their three-star hotel on the lip of a cliff overlooking the valley, he helped save us from that 'shocking existence' by writing a letter to the British High Commission in Delhi. In a month we would be interviewed for Tsedup's British visa, which would enable him to live in England with me. My father was happy to use his status at the bank to offer his support, and I was touched. As well as everything else Tsedup brought to my life, he taught me that there was no limit to my parents' love for me.

  After waiting for three months we were summoned to Delhi. We had no idea what to expect. As an exile, Tsedup had had no papers and we had bribed an official to get him an Indian passport. The next morning we dressed in new clothes. At the crowded High Commission, Tsedup was called in first. I passed him afterwards in the corridor, sitting in an armchair smiling encouragingly at me. When I pushed open the door I was pleased to see the Englishwoman sitting behind the desk. At least we could relate to each other.

  She introduced herself. 'Right,' she said, eyeing me coldly through mascara fronds, 'I see eight couples a day, every day. All of them say they're in love. Most of them are lying. If you lie to me once, it will be the last thing you do in this office.' Then she proceeded to interrogate me, rifling through our love letters and photographs, making me recite his family tree, all seven of his brothers' and sisters' names, in order. At the end, I was ashamed of my country. I understood that she had a job to do, but she did it with such cruel calculation that I could have slapped her. I had been living with a man for whom trust and honesty were sacred: nomads don't lie. But she wasn't to know that.

  'I'm going to give him the visa. I believe him,' she said finally, 'but if he ever turns out not to be the nice man he appears to be, you will inform us, won't you? We would be very interested to know.'

  I found Tsedup sitting on the grass outside.

  'We've got it,' I cried, but he was too distraught to care.

  In him she had provoked the desired response, but at a cost. 'You come from nothing. Your family have nothing. You're just using this English girl to get to the West,' she'd said to him. She had no idea how he had suffered, missing his family all these years, or the depth of his feeling for his homeland.

  He had leapt from his chair and, with both fists on her desk, had shouted in her face, 'How dare you insult my family and my country? I am proud of them and I love my wife.' It was his first encounter with a British authority figure and I was sorry that he had seen the ugly side of my culture so soon.

  It was a struggle for a nomad in London, an education for us both, and life had not prepared me for living with the pain of an exile. But I was quick to learn, and so was he. I saw through his eyes. Things that were commonplace became exceptional: an escalator ride; using a knife and fork; sitting on a loo. He was sick in cars, claustrophobic on the tube. He slept a lot: this new land was too alien to face each morning. I had to leave him while I went to work, so it was a lonely time for him. He spent his days in a cloud of nostalgia, preparing Tibetan food, patiently re-creating the smells of his homeland in our small kitchen, with chilli and chives, meat momos.

  We lived in my parents' rented flat in North London, on the top floor on a hill bustling with traffic. The house vibrated when the buses passed. My mother would come up from Winchester on Mondays and Tuesdays to do her psychotherapy course. In the evenings Tsedup and I sat in the bedroom quietly, while her clients cried through the wall. 'Don't they have any friends?' he asked. He would sit and look at the Heath from the back window, desperate for a vista: there were no mountains, nothing to look up at. The streets were closed in. Tsedup felt the world hurrying past him; there were more people in this city than in his whole country. He had dreams about flying, and his father hunting on the Heath, and woke in a sweat, afraid that the police would get him.

  'You are my family here,' he said. 'You're all I've got.' I loved him enough to want to be everything to him, but I was not. Beyond our existence lay another world and a part of him I had yet to discover. Until I saw him in his homeland I would never truly know and understand him.

  He spoke to his parents. It was the first time they had had contact in four years. (No mail had got through between India and Tibet.) Nomads cannot conceive of a life without family, and they had been desperate for news of their son. They rode six miles to the only international telephone in town and waited at a prearranged time for it to ring. The whole family crowded round the receiver. His mother had never used a phone before.

  She cried into the mouthpiece, 'When are you coming home?' But they told him not to come back until he had papers: it wasn't safe. They could not visit him in England. They would need Chinese passports for that and the likelihood of acquiring them was almost impossible. We waited for his British passport, and my father wrote to Tsedup's father, reassuring him that we were taking care of his son. He received a reply on fragile paper in the most exquisite hand, a silk prayer scarf enclosed. Tsedup translated:

  It is almost inconceivable that two families, so very far away from one another, should be joined, as we have been, in the coming together of Tsedup and Kate.

  That was how we felt. I wanted to write to his mother. She was illiterate, but I knew that Tsedup's father would read my letter to her. ‘I miss you and I don't even know you,' I wrote. 'But we are both living under the same moon. When I look up at it I will think of you.' Later she told Tsedup that when he brought me home she would love me as one of her own daughters. She had two; now I had become the third. I had not even met them and yet I was part of them, as Tsedup had become part of us.

  In England he watched TV for the first time, and it became a window through which he could look and learn about all sorts of things – 'From the leader of the country to how to make pasta,' he said. He spent hours watching nature programmes, learning about animals he had never known existed and observing the microscopic lives of insects. The images blew him away: he had always been close to nature, but never that close. Soon we were watching him on the screen: he became a model and actor. They booked him as an Eskimo, a Cherokee, a Mongolian warlord, but never a Tibetan – most people didn't know what that was. They liked his look, they said, exotic. So he played along: the cultural chameleon. He had the English friends he'd known in India and soon they became my great friends too. He even made some Tibetan friends, although there were only a few in the UK. Most spoke the Lhasa dialect of the capital, which was different from the eastern region of Amdo, where Tsedup was from. But he was lucky enough to find a couple of Amdo friends and they became his lifeline, sharing his memories. He was always elated after he'd seen them.

  I found work as a magazine designer and we became more comfortable. One day I broke it to my parents that we were married. 'We have a son-in-law,' my mother cried. We decided to celebrate with those who had helped us through hard times and had an intimate blessing service in a small Hampshire church. It was a joyful day, but we felt the absence of his family. We showed slides of them through the service, to try to make them a part of it, for Tsedup's sake. He saw a picture of his parents smiling inside the tent as he took his vows. The vicar even allowed our Tibetan friends to read a Buddhist prayer. I had never been so moved.

  Gradually he assimilated, but never conformed. That would have meant losing a part of himself. He missed his people and resolved not to live like an Englishman. If there was such a thing as a modern nomad that was what he'd become, he said. He wanted to go home, to live his life between two worlds. Somehow we endured the waiting, the bureaucracy and the indifference. The Home Office would not issue a British passport until he had been in the country four years. We had enormous reserves of hope when the waiting got too much. And we had each other. One day, eating chips in a pub on the Euston Road I handed him the visas. After nine years of waiting he was going home.

  Tsedup had crossed the widest cultural gap I could ever have imagined and survived. Now it was my turn: I was leaving a glossy, society magazine to go to the Roof of the World.
For six months I would live with his tribe as a nomad bride in the Machu grasslands of Amdo. As far as I knew, I was the first western woman ever to have done it. I was making history. My parents wanted to come with us for the first week, to be with him in case there was a threat to his safety and to be part of the reunion. He telephoned his parents to tell them we were coming. His father had ridden back from a three-day hunting expedition. That was all he had wanted to hear, he said.

  One. The Reunion

  He wanted the window-seat. From there he could see the carpet of cloud beneath him and the amber sun falling over the edge of the world. He sat quietly, tracing the ice crystals on the glass outside with his fingertip. It was only a few minutes until landing.

  To reach his remote home we had flown east from London to Beijing and were now on the internal flight westwards to Lanzhou, capital of Gansu province. From there we would travel ten hours by road up to the Tibetan plateau and the grasslands of Amdo. Although Tsedup's family had told us we would be met at the airport, I wasn't sure that they would make it. The Tibetan lunar calendar is different from ours and I wondered if they'd got the right week. My heart hammered like a machine-gun and I struggled to suppress the butterflies in my belly. I glanced at Tsedup, who looked composed, but when I squeezed his hand I felt him shaking.

  As the plane touched down, the lockers sprang open and Chinese businessmen grappled frantically with their briefcases. It was hot in the terminal and the baggage inspector was a pedantic soul. As we struggled to locate the tickets among our belongings, he stared at us suspiciously from beneath a shock of oily hair. I cast my eyes around the modest entrance hall, which was empty. As Dad pushed the last tag into the man's fist, another man approached us, grinning furiously. ‘I am your driver. Come this way, pie-'