We hurtled down a rocky path and even the hill hardy battered jeep groaned in protest. The rain grew stronger and soon lapped at our six pairs of ankles in the old jeep; we soldiered on. It was 1986 and in our usual state of bravado we had decided that on our trekking trip to the mountains, we would get to the Chinese border to, get this: buy erasers and pencils to fill our Donald Duck magnetic pencil boxes. We were early teenagers desperate to acquire coveted Chinese erasers that we could swap for championship striker marbles.
After an exhausting three hour border procedure designed to remind us that we were to be subservient to the vastly superior People’s Republic, we were greeted by its first citizen. It was a mountain dog who with his assorted coterie crossed the borders as their whim took them, if they fancied their chicken steamed or fried they were on the right side of the border and when the call of the curry became too strong to resist, they crossed back into India.
The village was tiny and the track muddy but a few larger houses were freshly painted in white and feted with bright red flags: Government buildings. One of these was the store which our guide took us to. Even then the marvel of Chinese manufacturing engulfed our senses: six different types of pencils, banks of Hello Kitty erasers rejected by American importers sat in empty oil tins, large plaid printed hard covered notebooks sniffed imperiously at us from the sample glass cases and the mercantile communists demanded to know if we were aware of their minimum purchase requirements. They looked rather bemusedly at our individualism as we stepped up to negotiate our own orders, and advised us to club together to meet the minimum.
Out in the street, clutching our purchases in red paper bags the dogs were the only denizens of the village, the locals seemed curiously absent till we spotted a hidden square. The people sat in odd clumps repairing cycle tires and no one talked. There was an odd industrious air that was totally missing the usual jocular and noisy camaraderie ever present on Indian workshop floors. A few vacant and dismissive glances at us were all we merited. The wet towers of tyres and dripping broad hats suggested that the workers had continued working through the rain in this open square. Their stoic silence shushed our noisy schoolboy chatter and we reverted to library behaviour pointing at a stray chicken and whispering at the impressive mounds of cycle tires on display.
We wanted to stop for some lunch but it seemed that lunch was not on offer even for paying foreigners. As we walked through I felt a prickle on the back of my neck and a strange sense of dull hostility from the silent streets and dark doorways along our path. Even the sun seemed to prefer the company of the large clouds which seemed to race northward away from the Indian border. Our guide hurried us on, no doubt eager to make his way back to his cronies at the border with his bag of fermented brew that he had brought out with him after he had slipped into a doorway in a lean to at the back of store. As we drove away, I turned around and saw the dogs’ race alongside our jeep. A narrow eyed child plump cheeked but strangely narrow framed had toddled to the side of our path and a pair of determined hands pulled it out of sight more worried by its observations of us than cleaning the dried stalactites which hung from below its nostrils.
Across the border we were greeted by three urchins, the guide’s cronies and a blaring transistor. The sky was blue, the sun hot and the smell of mustard seed and spring greens on flat griddles was in the air. We tightened our grip on our paper bags to make sure that they did not get contaminated by the pungency of turmeric and cumin, as our precious stash would need to hold onto its aloof and damp desirability in order to trade well. Twenty four years later, when I read this article in today’s Economist http://tinyurl.com/36mng4s I was reminded of that peculiar day.
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