YARUTSE, cont.

VI
That night it was a storytelling circle lit by candles, with the cold night pressed against the window listening with its stars. We were in Yarutse, a one-house hamlet further up the valley. Dorjey and I had the company of Englishman Sir Robert Ffolkes (who lived and worked with the people in these hills for 25 years with various NGOs and is something of a legend among them), and his guide and pony-man Lhopsang, (a man that handles ponies, not a Centaur, you nerds). I sipped chung (a lemony, homemade barley beer not unlike Hefeweizen), and each time I took a sip Lhopsang would top me up. Immediately. It’s how they do it. At some Ladakhi weddings, the chung man carries a stick to poke guests with if they refuse to drink what he pours them. Lhopsang’s a guide from Leh, maybe in his 40s- a natural storyteller with a big laugh that starts in his eyes. And then he laughs so hard that he keels over his knees- like the time the Indian army men in Kargil thought he was Japanese even though he was speaking to them in Hindi.
And between sips of chung he told of the legends of the valley, the stories of Wanla Lonpo, the robber baron who had promised to watch over his people from beyond the grave, and still was known to appear in the voice and the eyes of local farmers and shepherds.
Or the arrogant villager who’d refused to make the customary small donation to a local gompa- the monks were unhappy with it, and soon the villager fell ill with pneumonia. The local healer said that he sensed there was something that needed to be put right; so the villager’s family dispatched a rider to bring money to the gompa. Within a day the villager was fully recovered and healthy again.
I was fortunate to have Sir Robert there because he was a key into the door of these stories and legends because he either knew them already, or could translate what Lhopsang couldn’t make clear in English.
I laughed and listened in the candle’s light to stories from a far-flung place, warm and hazy from homemade brew. Our little hamlet must’ve looked like a star itself, lone and shimmering in the hillside blackness.