Ten. Holiday

There had been an accident. Tsedup was in hospital. I searched Rhanjer's face as he tried to explain. Tsedup hadn't come home to the tent the night before. I had assumed that a day out with his teenage brother had disintegrated into a piju-potent sleep as I had stood in the twilight tying up the yaks, looking at the road. I made excuses for them: it was best that they had stayed in the town: Tsedup was a novice motorbike rider and it had probably been too dark to make the return journey.

That night I had a nightmare about a mutilated dog and woke in a sweat to a yak head-butting the tent. As I crept outside into the dawn, it had thundered off with a sharp thwack of the tent rope. At breakfast, we heard the familiar buzz of a bike-engine and I thought it would be my husband. It was not. A messenger had come from town. We should leave now. Amnye said the dog dream had been a sign. I felt sick as I ran to our white tent for my bag.

I sat numbly on the back of Rhanjer's bike. I hadn't really understood much of what he had said to me in the tent. How serious was it? It was so difficult at times like this, not speaking the language. It was easy to get confused or worry needlessly, I reasoned, but a sense of panic was rising in my gut. I felt powerless. At home in England I would be able to cope with a crisis. I understood how to get help, where to go, how to try to make things better. Here I was lost. I was completely reliant on Tsedup's brothers. I knew they were protective and well organised – it was the Tibetan way: when all around you appeared to be chaos, there were always forces at work to pull the whole thing together at the last minute. Everyone relied on each other. I prayed that everything would be all right as we sped along the road above the river valley. The river glistened as usual. The sun shone as usual. But everything might have changed.

We arrived at the hospital to discover that Tsedup and Gorbo had been discharged and were directed to an outbuilding. That was a good sign, I thought. There was a row of small bungalows under some trees at the back of the hospital, where the doctors lived. The bikes tore up the gravel as we skidded to a halt. Rhanjer and Tsedo led me inside. It was the home of a relative, a Tibetan doctor at the hospital. He was bent double, cleaning some bowls under a dripping tap inside the glass porch. Geraniums stood along his shelf. Inside it was dark. The first person I saw was Gorbo. He sat in a chair, attached to a drip, his face stitched and caked in bloody scabs. He was wearing an eye-bandage and looked at us sideways through his good eye as we walked in. I gasped. Tsedup sat on a bed to our side, his own face battered and scarred, with black circles beneath both eyes. On the floor, covered by a blanket, lay the inert body of our friend Tsempel. For a moment I thought he was unconscious, but as he raised his head to gasp his greeting, he revealed a lack of front teeth. I was in shock.

'It was dark. Three of us on the bike… drunk… a concrete block in the middle of the road… lights didn't work… over the handle-bars… thought he was dead…' Tsedup was mumbling the story through bruised lips. It seemed that he was all right and I was relieved, angry and sorry for them all at the same time. I wanted to scream at Tsedup for being irresponsible, but I shut up and braced myself for Rhanjer and Tsedo to chastise him instead, as older brothers did. But they all started laughing. Even the doctor was in stitches.

'It's not funny.' I glowered at Tsedup. 'Your brother is bad,' I said to Gorbo.

'Shagga. He's good,' he said loyally, grinning through the dried blood.

No one was listening to me.

The men went out and bought some beers, then sat on the steps of the porch as Tsempel lay sedated on the bed and Gorbo slept in the chair. I relented and joined Tsedup and the others when I had cleaned some blood off the casualties' faces. As I drank my beer, Tsedup cast me sheepish glances. Of course I could forgive him. I could forgive him anything when he looked at me like that. I was just thankful that he was alive.

Later that day we brought the two brothers home in a three-wheeled tolla. Strangely they hid under their tsarers as we drove through the town. I realised it was a ploy to prevent idle gossip. If they were spotted, a rumour might circulate that they had been in a fight. It would be wrong to disgrace the family. Annay and Amnye had not been to the hospital and would be waiting anxiously, I thought. Annay will cry. Amnye will scold. When we finally pulled up outside the tent in the late-afternoon sunshine, they came out laughing with relief. I was having a tough time predicting people's responses. They seemed to make light of everything. It must be the nomad way. Or so I thought.

When I had got over the shock, I realised that Tsedup had precisely five days to recover before our friends arrived. Ells and Chloё were coming to see us from England and we were due to pick them up in Labrang by jeep. Tsedup spent the next few days lying in the tent next to Gorbo; we nursed them and watched their faces emerge from under the purple, green, then yellow bruising. Each morning, noon and night I bathed Gorbo's swollen eye and it gradually deflated from the size of half a tennis ball to normal. He insisted on picking off his scabs, which left his skin covered in pink patches. Then I was given the unenviable task of removing his stitches. He wouldn't go back to the doctor; he wanted me to do it, he said. They seemed to see me as a Florence Nightingale figure. Still, I found that removing stitches was much easier than I had thought and even quite pleasurable. As I worked, I teased him about our friends arriving.

'Your bride is coming!' I said. 'Ells wants a husband. She'll give you a big kiss!'

He recoiled, then grinned mischievously. 'I'll hit her with the lump of steel I use to hit the dogs with,' he threatened. Girls were still a mystery to Gorbo, but he had to appear knowledgeable and stay cool. I knew all about this from having a brother, and Gorbo reminded me of Phil in his younger days. He had the same sharp tongue and challenging twinkle in his eye.

Oddly Gorbo and Tsedup's adventure had brought them closer together. They lay chatting and laughing in the tent together while Annay fussed around them. Tsedup had left for India when his brother was only four and now he was getting to know him. They were proud of each other.

One morning we were invited to Tsedup's uncle's tent.

'You go,' Tsedup said. ‘I can't, because it'll make my scars worse.'

'Why?' I said, not quite happy to go alone, and wondering what on earth he was talking about.

'Because I have to bite a chunk out of their fireplace,' he stated matter-of-factly.

I'd heard it all now. 'What?' I exclaimed.

'I can't be bothered to go through with all that,' he replied lamely.

'You and your bloody superstitions!' I stalked off leaving him frowning after me.

But I had been unfair. Later, in more generous spirits, I would learn that it was indeed as he had said. According to nomadic custom, he was forbidden to join me unless he performed the ritual of biting a chunk out of his uncle's fireplace: the jib, fireplace, was protected by the family deity, which might be offended by his fresh scars and cause the family bad luck. If he bit the fireplace he would be demanding his rightful protection from the deity; his scars would not get worse and the family would not be punished. When he was feeling better, he performed the ritual at Annay Urgin's tent next door. He entered, and before he said a word, he knelt down and bit a piece off the front of the clay fire and spat it into the ashes.

On the fifth day, when Tsedup was sufficiently rested, we rustled up a jeep from the mayor of the tribe to take us to Labrang. Ells and Chloё wanted to sample a couple of weeks of nomad life for themselves. They had been Tsedup's English teachers when in India and were among our closest friends – and I was looking forward to having a girlie chat. I sat in the back, bouncing through the landscape. We moved through lush green mountains to arable lowlands, where farmers were busy harvesting, past rows of momo-shaped barley bundles, beside which men and women scythed the crops and sat under umbrellas in the hot sun. We drove through villages of clay-built hovels and changed down a gear to negotiate the mass of yellow straw spread on the road by the farmers. Meanwhile, piglets scurried on to the verge and a lazy horse refused to move from its resting place in the middle of the road. I ducked down in the back when we passed through the town where we had previously been stopped by the police. Then we passed rows of ploughed soil and planted steppes, a satellite dish balanced on a rickety stone house, clay settlements and strings of rain-washed prayer flags, patchwork hillsides, cattle corrals and holy mountain upon holy mountain, with ndashung standing sentry on each peak. We crossed white picket bridges and glistening streams, passed nomads wandering on the long, open road, and lethargic Chinese road-workers feigning industriousness with cocked spades and copious tea-breaks.