At the Photeng Shaman's

Day 1 

A 6am start saw me to the bus terminal where I was met by Tashi, my guide on the trek. The journey on the decrepit full bus was a blur as I very deliberately put myself to sleep and out of my misery for the four hours it took to get to Barhabasi, a dusty, dirty, polluted, dishevelled town that marks the start of the 3-day walk to Bigu Gumpa (Bigu Monastery).

Straight off the bus, we walked for 3 uneventful hours through clusters of dirty houses and garbage ridden hillsides. Crisp and biscuit foil and plastic bottles and bags littered the ground and the pathways. It was depressing to see that. It left me musing about the right of these people (any people) to enjoy "civilised" goods at the cost of destroying their world. 

The walk might have been dreary and uneventful but it was still hard enough for my legs and lungs to incessantly and rudely question my sanity. Was I completely out of my mind? Why was I doing this? What was I trying to prove? What was wrong with a lovely beech in Thailand? I'd like to say that over the days of the trek I got used to walking and that my body stopped screaming at me, or that I stopped freaking out at the heights. Alas... 

On this first walk I observed Tashi, my guide. At 27 years old, doing his masters in Sociology, he is a short man with the dark hair and skin of his Tibetan ancestry. At this point he seemed nice enough, if only a little quiet and distant. I asked him what he wants to do once he graduates. "I don't know. In Nepal you can't think ahead. It's not like this." I found a hopelessness in his words and tone that made me sad. 

That night we stayed at our porter Sunil's house. He and his wife run a clean lodge. Basic, with wooden floors, wooden beds with mats and a clean outhouse. We ate in their lounge-cum-grocery store, with their customers coming off the fields in their mud-crusted clothes, lingering to stare at the foreigner. I found it as fascinating to observe them, as they did me. 

A tall lanky woman, carrying half the earth from the fields in her clothes and hair squatted down and asked for some provisions. 2 eggs, a small amount of sugar. She paid and checked her change. She then got a packet of biscuits and once she had enough change left she also asked for something else. The dreg ends of a tobacco sac was poured into her apron. Still she had a bit of change back and she bought 4 loose cigarettes. She handed one to another female customer and the two of them lit up. They smoked their cigarettes in the way I had seen other women on the road that day. Holding it between thumb and forefinger, with the cigarette on the inside of their palm and taking deep slow drags. 

By 7.30pm I was tucked into my sleeping bag. I slept well and woke up bright-eyed and bushy- tailed raring to go unto Photeng and meet the Shaman.

Day 2: to Photeng

The villages we walked though that morning are a 2-6 or 7 house affairs. Stone and wood and compacted blond red earth. Poor as dirt by our Western standards. The people wear dirty disheveled clothes, toiling on the corn terraced fields, caring for  their animals or carrying wood and vegetation they harvest from the mountain, a well as cutting slade slabs out of the mountain side to sell or to build their own houses.

The Mountain Children 

The children hang out. They are really grimy, with layers of dirt and dust already well engraved in their young skin. Their clothes are torn, mismatched and if they ever had any colour, they are now a uniform gray with dust and accumulated dirt.

They play everywhere these children. In the dirty, sludgy riverlets that come down from the mountains, in the piles of accumulated plastic and garbage, on the egse of the paths with rocky ravines running deep, way below. They are often far from any house or any adult supervision. They carry slegse hammers for breaking stones and big sickle knives for chopping down vegetation. They shout "Namaste"  or "hello" and "what is your name" repeatedly and obsessively like parrots and they obediently pose for photographs, asking for nothing in return. They break into big smiles when you give them a sweet and show them the photo you just took of them.

 I wondered time and again what the future holds in store for each of these kids. More of the same as their parents? An escape to Kathmandu or another city that still spells hard work and hopelessness? Will any of them really have a chance of a different life? The pervading sense I had, seeing them playing perilously on the cliff side and working hard at collecting firewood and stone, shepherding goats and yaks,  is that in these parts, life is cheap. 

To begin with, the view on our trek was  as gray as the soil, with hardly any trees or greenery. The higher we walked though, the world changed and we begun  to come across lush green vegetation and the occasional beautiful red rhododendron,  punctuating the brown and green of the trees and the dusty earth,  like spots of blood. 

The first sign of trouble with Tashi had already appeared by this stage. He told me that the nuns at Bigu would probably have not a lot of stories to tell and the Rinpoche was still in India. Ehm...what was I walking the next 3 days for then?  Oh, and by the way, there might me a group of Germans coming to learn from the Shaman the next day and so we might not be able to stay in Photeng for the planned 3-4 days. Excuse me? But that is great news, no? I can observe, right? Wrooong! I got the first silent treatment and the typical non-committal Asian "we'll see". Right! Ok, go with the flow...

At the Shaman's

The Shaman's stupas

Five hours later, around lunchtime, we arrived at the Shaman’s house. We were to be his guests.  The house was on the ”road”, i.e. the dirt track that snakes around the mountain. A stone house with wood beams painted blue. It perches over  lush green terraces of corn and rice.  Buddhist flags run off wooden poles that have bunches of flowers and feathers on the top. A public tap running with mountain water sits  10 metres away and is used for water to cook, wash the dishes and for the family to wash themselves. I saw them wash their feet and hands and face and still no grime shifted.

Beds

Inside, the long, low ceilinged, oblong room  is kitchen, living room and bedroom all at once. At the left of the door, the hearth is burning with wood all day long, giving heat and permeating everything with smoke. This is where the mother, the Shaman’s wife,  cooks for the family. Shelves behind the hearth house pots and pans blackened by years of soot and plastic tubs of spices. Round thin reed mats provide seating for the family to eat and warm up. On the other three sides of the room there are 4 wooden cots covered with thin carpets. Rolled up mats provide the bedding the family sleeps on. The floor is wooden  and so is the double ceiling that affords them storage space for corn and other necessities. There are a few narrow square windows, mostly shuttered up. It is dingy inside even when the sun is blazing outside. The toilet is outside. A low tiny room with a hole on the floor and a bucket of water. Reasonably clean; then again, my sense of cleanlinessshifted considerably since I arriving in Nepal. 

We were greeted with warm smiles,  a cup of sweet tea and boiled potatoes that you dipped in salt and a red hot spice; a common mid-afternoon snack in these parts. We sat outside in the sun, peeling and eating potaties and watched the Shaman’s 3 little sons Pimsang, Dawaupungo and Nimpolden, 11, 9 and 7 respectively, play with the puppy and the young goat…and of course football!  They are sweet little boys, well behaved, courtecy of their strong willed mother who reared 5 sons. She bosses them-and the Shaman-  about to fetch wood or water, clean up the dishes, cut herbs, feed the animals...

The animals here, dogs and goats, at least the baby ones, are treated as part of the family.  Petted and cuddled, they enter the house at will.

At one point the mother picked up the puppy and a cleaver. She was fingering its tail. No one was alarmed. Except me. "Surely not" I thought. "I must be misunderstanding." She asked one of the boys to bring her a piece of string which she tied tightly a centimetre from the end of the puppy’s tail.  I hopefully wondered if there were knots in its fur that she needed to cut out. Still, I asked Tashi, if she was really going to cut the puppy’s tail. "Yes, it makes it stronger or something"  he mumbled dismissively. I
begun to feel sick, trying to hide my horror.

Unceremoniously, she put the tail on a block of wood and brought the blade down. I am not sure if I yelped first or if the puppy did. It ran away with the string still attached to its tail. Everyone laughed.  One of the boys picked up the chopped off tail bit and chucked it  over the side of the wall. I was mortified. But I was the only one…

Later on,  sitting around the hearth, we had a meal of rice and a thin watery curry.  I imagined the ingredients: turmeric, tiny chunks of potatoes, dill and chives. Pretty tasty, even as I worried about the germs that I was eating along with it. 

Shaman. his wife and me

My side of the room

When time for bed came, not so long after, I was allocated a bed. Tashi and the porter and a random  stranger, whose role I never deciphered, slept on the other cots. The parents went to a little room next door. The three boys laid a mat on the floor, lay down as close to each other as possible, covered themselves with a blanket  and fell asleep like bugs in a rug.

Bugs in a rug

I was warm in that room. Too warm in my arctic leeping bag. I doggedly kept the zip done up though, expecting mice and cockroaches to attack me...and I kept pace to the tik-tok of the annoying clock just above my head on the Buddhist altar.

I slept surprising well!

Talking to the Photeng Shaman

Earlier that afternoon, Tashi and I went with the Shaman to his meditation room. It is underneath the house, one terrace below.  A square room with low ceiling, packed earth flooring partly covered by dirty carpets off which the Shaman distractectly kept picking long white hairs. On the far side sat an altar with faded silk flowers, pine branches and various implements. Above it all on the wall hung scary faced wooden masks, prayer beads, white silk budhist  scarves, a bell necklace and big photo of  the Shaman’s father, an apparently very famous and powerful Shaman in his time.

Shamanic tool

Bear bone used a bugle

My first question was what makes a Shaman. He said that in his everyday life he is just an ordinary man. Indeed, he looks as indistinguishable from the next Sherpa as all from each other. There is nothing about him that would clue you in that you are encountering a Shaman. A blue anorak, blue trousers, flip flops on dirty feet and a Nepali hat. A family man of five sons  in his late 30s, a farmer indistinguishable from any other farmer I came across in the last two days.

Apparently, he “becomes” the Shanman when it is required, through meditation and ritual. He meditates on his 13 successive guru ancestors and on the gods that he needs to channel, depending on the ailment he is trying to cure. Then the spirit of the god enters him and he gains shamanic powers to cure. However, he is quick to point out, one key condition is that the ill person actually needs to believe that they can be cured by the Shaman and his powers.

He told me a few shamanic stories, but I suspect a lot of the colour and nuance was lost in translation, rendering them meaningless ramblings.

When I finally broached the Death subject, his response was clear. After death it is the job of the Lamas, not his. Way to go Tashi for arranging for me to speak to the Shaman on death!

Puzzled about his relationship with the Lamas, I probed further. His religion, like a lot of the villagers' in the area is a functional mixture of Buddhism, Hinduism and Shamanism. It explained the Buddhist scarves and flags as well as the  pictures of god Shiva.  And why not? Their lives are at the mercy of the elements. They live in nature and at nature’s mercy. If they can find comfort and support by a melange of religious beliefs, good for them I say!