Tashintso poured us tea and distracted me effectively with idle chatter for some time, until I became increasingly aware of the surreal quality of our situation. There was I, a western girl in full nomad attire, sitting opposite two Tibetan women knitting in police uniform. Whenever their superior passed the office they deftly concealed their handiwork and stopped giggling. Upstairs a policeman was practising the guitar for the evening's party, while I imagined my husband in a cell suffering interrogation under a stark lightbulb. I began to laugh, only gently, of course, but it helped to relieve the exhaustion my anxiety had inflicted and I was grateful for the moment of irony.
After two hours and several cups of tea, Tsedup emerged. He looked fine. He asked me for our passports, which he gave to Tashintso, and spoke a few words to her. Then they laughed and I realised that everything must be all right. 'Come on,' he said. 'Let's go and get some food.'
In the Formica back room of a restaurant we slurped our noodles and he told me what had happened. The sergeant was Tibetan and very amenable, although curious. Once he had established that Tsedup had no political motivation, they had shared tea and enjoyed a long, convoluted discussion about life in the West. Tsedup had paid a small fine and his file had been closed, the 'black mark' removed. The sergeant had even been generous enough to offer to assist us with extending our visas, which we had feared would be impossible here. I was speechless and euphoric all at once and, since we were in a private room with only the buzz of the strip-light for company, I jumped up and hugged him.
We had been spared the third degree and I felt lucky that day. Police dominance of the local community was widely known. But I discovered that later, although policing the population was the responsibility of the local force, there were other important figures in the nomadic community who played a part in maintaining social order.
Tsedup's step-grandfather, Azjung, 'uncle', was something of an éminence grise. For the nomads of Machu, his role was greater and his title more hallowed than any state authority could bestow upon him. For Azjung was a Sky Man.
Nam Nyeur, Sky Man, or ancient man, is the name given to an old person by their people. The title is not appointed, but means that that particular person has come to represent the last of a generation. They bring the past into the present with their story-telling and have remarkable powers of recollection. Since the nomads have no written history, it is the responsibility of the Sky Man to continue the oral history of a people. He is the text. The tradition carries with it enormous responsibility in terms of morality, for it is the Sky Man's duty to resolve domestic disputes among tribes by his wisdom. Most tribespeople carry the stories of their forefathers with them and retell them throughout their lifetime to the next generation, yet Azjung carried between five hundred and six hundred years of stories passed on orally from generation to generation. He was considered particularly sharp and could mediate to solve problems with a superior knowledge of historical precedents, selecting and recounting exact times in history and relating the stories of past events to clarify and resolve a present situation, so that the grieving or avenging parties may know how to follow the right path. He also had the power to set new precedents for future reference, providing the disputing parties both agreed to his proposal. This was nomad law.
Of course, if a story was very old, it might take on mythical proportions, accruing layer upon layer of embellishment from circling around the people of this land. The exact words of a particular figure in a tribe's history could be invented and reinvented, along with their emotions and thoughts, for that is the nature of story-telling. A story-teller must have an audience and the audience must be amused.
Nam Nyeur may also be female and the nature of a woman's wisdom and story-telling may be of a different nature altogether. Whereas a Sky Man tells of conflicts in battle, disputes over territory or livestock, a Sky Woman usually has a female audience and her stories provide more of an insight into intimate relationships. Thus she may tell of marriages, love or family concerns and disasters, and just as the old stories of the Sky Men assume mythical proportions, so the tales of the Sky Women are, in their turn sometimes romanticised. For that is often the nature of women.
On the afternoon of the interrogation we visited the Sky Man. He and Tsedup's grandmother, Ama-lo-lun, lived at the monastery with Tsedup's brother, Cumchok, and his nephew, Tinlee, who were both monks. The monastery stood at the top of a hill above the town at the end of a winding track; it was small in comparison with the palace of Labrang, yet still elaborate enough to suggest its spiritual significance in the community. It sat among a jumble of small dwellings ramshackle and tumbledown, inhabited by the monks, the whitewashed walls propped up by tree-trunks stripped of bark, each with a wooden door, leading to quiet courtyards, books and rooms of contemplation.
We stopped outside one such door in the labyrinth, and as we pushed it open a small brass bell tinkled above our heads. The sound was not enough to alert the tiny aged figure who knelt on the veranda opposite, bent over like a dried piece of leather. Ama-lo-lun continued sorting through a pile of dried flowers, oblivious of our presence, her careful handling of the blue and yellow blooms interspersed with prayer. But as we crossed the bare courtyard and came up the dirt path towards the wooden house we called out to her and she lifted her head, not knowing us for a moment, her pebble eyes squinting. 'Sou ray? Who is it?' she exclaimed, and then as we came closer she remembered: the One Who Is My Heart.
She cried out Tsedup's name and we helped her to her feet as she clucked in appreciation and led us back down the steps of the beautifully made house. It had been built for Cumchok at Amnye's instruction, but Azjung and Ama-lo-lun had their own small hut to the side of the courtyard. It was meagre by comparison: small, with a turf roof and a dirt floor, a sleeping platform, a stove and one window, glassless but covered in dusty plastic, which had weathered and torn at the corner. Dust had settled deep into the skins on the bed and the pots hanging from the wall were soot-stung and blackened. I smelt dried meat, earth and strong tea, as the dented kettle steamed and the fire crackled and spat out the husks of dried grass from the dung. They seemed to have only the barest necessities, a habit that had lingered, no doubt, from two nomadic lives. It is customary now for elderly nomads to settle in a house when their bodies can no longer endure the hardships of weather-beating and work, but a roof over the head does not quell the nomad spirit. Azjung and Ama-lo-lun looked every bit as wild as they sat on the dirt floor in their sheepskin tsarers and served us the bitter, black tea. They were exactly as Tsedup had described them when we were in England. In the years while we waited for his documents he had feared that they would die before his return, but it had not been too late and that day, watching them together, I was moved.
Despite his years, Azjung was a remarkable-looking man: his old skin was taut on his skull, like stretched hide, over cheekbones smooth as stone; beneath his shorn head his brow was as square as the thin line of his mouth, and as he turned to lift his bowl I saw that his nose was not flat at the bridge, as many Tibetans' are, but ridged and aquiline, almost aristocratic. He smiled at me and the deep sockets of his eyes were filled with a dark sparkle.
Ama-lo-lun sat before us fingering her prayer beads, her lips moving rapidly as she mouthed her silent mantra. Her shock of dreadlocked grey hair was woven into two miniature plaits, one on either side of her neck, which protruded rakishly like two stick antennae. Around her neck she wore a tangle of religious adornments: a string of ivory prayer beads, a small, faded silk purse containing blessings, and a piece of frayed, luminous green ribbon given to her by a lama. Her tsarer seemed as old as herself, a crush of matted sheepskin and faded trim, beneath which she wore a soiled, bottle-green sweatshirt turned inside out. Her small face was a lattice of furrows and her green eyes burned, keen and sharp, darting from face to floor to space, observing everything and missing nothing. Occasionally she would laugh, a curiously girlish outburst, and punctuate each sentence, each pause between sentences, with 'Oh, yeah,' muttered through toothless gums.