At the beginning of September, I settled for a couple of weeks in the Himalayas in northern India. I was there to give a few contributions at a conference on local economies. “Where exactly in the desert sand of this life is the line drawn that separates fiction from non-fiction?” — that thought occupies me as the Airbus 320 prepares to land at the airport of Leh. I’m not quite sure why I begin this text with that thought. What I actually want to write about is the human urge for order — and its connection to totalitarianism.
The plane weaves its way between mountain peaks that disappear into the clouds on either side. The ochre-grey rock of the Himalayan giants sometimes seems to come alarmingly close to the dipping and swaying tips of the wings. It feels more like stunt flying than commercial aviation. Just before the plane drops onto one of the highest public airstrips in the world, we’re informed that, should we feel the need to vomit from lack of oxygen right after landing, we can make use of the plastic bag in the seat pocket in front of us.
Leh airport stands at 3,500 meters, in what can best be compared to a majestic lunar landscape — a cold desert above the tree line. The building itself is nothing but a series of barracks, where tourists gasp for air in the thin atmosphere and hope they won’t fall prey to altitude sickness. A rickety conveyor belt bravely rattles its loads of suitcases inside. I drag off my large green suitcase, skip the long queue in front of the three sparse toilet doors, step out onto the asphalt square at the main exit, and after some searching, find a taxi to take me to the Slow Garden Guesthouse.
The first images of the Himalayas pass like a film across a taxi’s window smeared with grease marks and dust, accompanied by a soundtrack of incessant honking. The view shudders to the rhythm of a road full of potholes, flanked on either side by unfinished sidewalks, heaps of stones, and leftover construction debris.Behind them rises a strip of houses and shops built from grey-brown cement blocks. Their fronts are often completely open, with segmented gates that are pulled down at night. Why all this honking from the taxi driver? I observe his weathered face beside me. There is no sign of irritation or frustration.
We approach the center of the city. A mass of pedestrians moves through the streets like a sluggish bloodstream — along the sidewalks and right through the middle of the road. Cows, donkeys, and dogs trudge resignedly along in this procession of everyday life. The crowd moves organically, parting for the honking taxi like a murky Red Sea before an ordinary Moses.
What do the animals eat in this desert of cement and asphalt? Cardboard and plastic, I am told time and again. A single blade of grass is a feast. After a few days in Leh, I begin to recognize certain animals as I wander the streets — the leather-colored dog with the black muzzle, the cow with a white patch on her chest that lies down each noon beside a car at a construction site, the five donkeys that seek out a terrace where they can huddle together for the night. I greet them and sometimes try to touch them with my fingertips. Together we wander, lost in thought, along this path of life — unknowing, moving toward a destination we dream of but cannot conceive.
They tell me that the cows are fed a little in winter, because they give milk. The bulls, dogs, and donkeys must fend for themselves. They often die in the winter ice, somewhere beneath a canopy or against a garden wall, while the mountain peaks that rise above the city stand as silent and unyielding witnesses to the end of their inglorious existence.
During the past four days, it has rained as much as it usually does in several years. The mud bricks used for building here cannot withstand it. Left and right, walls have partially collapsed; roads are impassable because of fallen bridges. Here and there I see gaping holes in walls, some roughly covered with tarpaulin. I look inside living rooms with tottering furniture — grayish burrows from which eyes peer out above incomplete rows of teeth.
“Are you happy here?” I ask the taxi driver. “Of course, Sir!” he replies. I glance at him hesitantly. His face radiates. Their shuffling gait and their chatter as they stand before their stalls or lay bricks with mud — the Ladakhis have nothing compared to me. But they have far more time — time to do nothing. Time to Be. “Through everything you possess, you are possessed,” Nietzsche once said.
Helena Norberg-Hodge, the economist who invited me to her conference in the Himalayas, tells me a few hours later about the time when she first arrived here, fifty years ago. There were no paved roads, no electricity, no running water. In the meantime, the people of Leh have been rescued from their pitiable condition. Now there are basic utilities, and owning a mobile phone is more the rule than the exception. The number of suicides has risen, over that half-century of modernization, from one every twenty-five years to one per month.
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