Into the Hidden Valley: A Novel

By Stuart Blackburn

As the British Raj begins its expansion towards Tibet, the remote Apatani valley on the Indo-Tibetan border becomes a flashpoint. George Taylor, an up-and-coming officer in the Indian Civil Service, leads the first expedition into the valley and recommends setting
up a base nearby, as the Apatanis are a ‘friendly tribe’. During

• Language: English
• Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books
• Release date: Nov 17, 2015
• ISBN: 9789385288913

Stuart Blackburn

Stuart Blackburn first travelled to India in 1970 as a Peace Corps volunteer. He received his PhD from Berkeley in 1980 and taught at SOAS in London for many years, with visiting professorships at Heidelberg, Berlin and back at Berkeley. He is the author or editor of more than a dozen books on oral tradition, culture and literature, mainly in South India but also in Northeast India, where Into the Hidden Valley is set. His first novel, Murder in Melur, was published in 2014. He lives with his wife in Brighton, England.

Book preview

SHILLONG 1910

Charles Taylor stood in the graveyard of St. Mary’s church and read the words newly cut into the headstone:

Sacred to the memory of George Taylor, Deputy Commissioner

Rtr, killed in the earthquake of 6 September 1910, aged 49 years

Brief life is here our portion,

Brief sorrow, short lived care;

The life that knows no ending,

The tearless life, is there

Behind him lay the ruined church, with only its tile roof intact, though it was splayed wide atop the rubble. Heavy stone blocks, scattered to some distance when the building collapsed, were piled together as if swept up by a broom. The carriageway that curved from the road up to the church had also been cleared, with debris laid on the grass verge, and it was down this gravel path that he began to walk back to the bungalow, where he now lived alone.

Charles thought about the words as he passed the pine trees still dripping with rain. His father’s life had not been particularly brief, nor was it sorrowful, and he’d hoped that it would not be tormented by grief in the hereafter. But he wasn’t sure.

That morning Charles had looked through the writing box that held his father’s private papers. He’d found a photograph he’d seen before, taken when his father was still alive. It was his favourite, showing him with his head cocked to one side, peering out towards the camera from underneath a beret. On his lap lay a writing box, opened and ready for use. Opposite him a tribesman bent forward, face half-hidden, speaking to others around him. He was covered in a large shawl, with only his machete sheath visible, dangling by a cane-rope. In his right hand he held several small pieces of bamboo. The officer and the shaman sat across from each other, cross-legged on the cold ground, almost within touching distance.

On the right, a dozen Indian soldiers stood with rifles, their pillbox hats secured by a leather chin strap. Some wore boots and knee-length tunics with shoulder capes, while others were barefoot and clad in thin jackets and trousers. On the other side, British and Indian military officers in peaked caps and turbans formed a protective semi-circle around their seated colleague and his interpreters. Beyond them, in the middle distance, tribesmen squatted, their bodies swathed in shawls.

These men—British, Apatani, Nyishi, Assamese, Sikh and Gurkha—appeared on a grassy hillock surrounded by paddy fields. A line of trees ran off to the left, and the line of a mountain slope rose on the right. But the eye was drawn towards the tight knot in the centre. Though the rifles were upright and the machetes sheathed, tension showed in the figures straining in towards the two men brought face-to-face, inside a valley in a far corner of empire.

Charles held the photograph closer and studied his father’s face, with its slightly startled expression beneath the beret. Was that a smile or a grimace? It had been, he knew, a long, drawn-out negotiation, days in fact. Someone, not his father, had written ‘The Palaver’ across the bottom of the small photo. That’s when it all began, Charles said to himself. It was the first time the British had entered the Apatani valley, and it led to a second expedition four years later, when his father crushed a rebellion in the same valley. After that, he’d become something of a hero.

Replacing the familiar photograph in his father’s writing box, Charles noticed something he hadn’t seen before. A notebook. It contained his father’s personal diary of that second expedition in 1894. And when he’d finished reading it, he could only stare straight ahead, numb with disbelief.

1

When the P&O steamer left the Royal Albert Dock it was evening, and George felt little more than a gentle pull as the tide took him away from England. Only the next day, in the Bay of Biscay, did he grasp the fact that he’d left home for good. He’d lived by the sea all his life, but now water surrounded him on all sides, with no land in sight. I’m cut adrift, he said to himself with a silent chuckle. No more pretending for The Hermit.

But the years of deception, practiced to avoid humiliation in front of his college friends, meant that he still retreated. During the four-week voyage to Bombay, George made few acquaintances. Rather than play card games and drink in the bar, he preferred to sit on deck and watch the flying fish or study his Bengali grammar. Every now and then, he put the book down and let a smile cross his face. I’m an ICS officer, he thought. Don’t have to explain myself to anyone.

At night a band entertained the British contingent in first class, mostly planters, businessmen, military and civilian officers, some with their wives and children, but George didn’t make an appearance. He hadn’t brought evening clothes and wore soiled linens since one couldn’t wash clothes on board. Though he passed pleasantries, the only person he talked with was his cabin mate, a young Scot missionary on his way to south India, who supplied him with Jamaica ginger when he got seasick during the first week. Even with him, he maintained his distance and never spoke of personal matters. He had more affinity with the Parsi merchants, who kept to their rooms except during meals.

After Suez and the coal stop at Aden, the broiling heat broke down barriers, and George surprised himself when he joined in the endless chatter about how to keep cool. Like the others, he took to sleeping on the wide deck for the last leg of the journey, men on one side and women on the other, separated by a makeshift curtain of sails.

When the SS Ravenna reached Bombay, gliding past the scalloped beach of Back Bay, around a thin spit of land and easing its long hull into the harbour, George’s blue eyes blazed with excitement. The lush green hills and impressive-looking seafront became even more spectacular as he approached shore in a little bobbing boat. Making his way along the bustling quayside, he collected his trunk and climbed into a four-wheeled carriage driven by a bearded man with a turban.

Strange, he thought. I’m acting like everything’s normal. Like I’ve done this every day of my life. But as the carriage trundled down dirt thoroughfares, past sprawling military encampments, beneath high gothic buildings and into bazaars with horse-drawn trams and bullock carts, his mind raced to keep up with his impressions.

After buying provisions for his onward journey, he spent one night in a boarding house and wrote his first letter home. He addressed it to his father c/o Mrs Fawcett and knew that his sister would have to read it aloud to his parents. In it, he provided his family with details of the sea crossing, mainly ports and dates, mentioned the hot weather and assured them of his good health. Then he opened his notebook.

That, too, had been Mrs Fawcett’s idea. ‘You ought to write down the things you see out there, George,’ she said when she presented him with a handsome leather-covered notebook. It turned out to be too large to carry on his person, so he bought himself a cheaper, cloth-covered one in London. The size of a slim book, it slid into his front trouser pocket.

Before the voyage, he’d never written anything outside school, not even a letter. But after a week at sea, he began to make short entries and found that he looked forward to it every evening. A private record, only for himself.

That night, his first in India, he wrote:

The harbour at Bombay was crowded with ships at anchor. ‘A forest of masts,’ as the poets might say. I counted forty, mostly ours. What a bustling city! The streets are filled with Indians in dhotees and sarees. Some are Mussalmen, I believe. Anyway, their faces are very dark indeed. Dirt and beggars, of course. In the European quarter the buildings are magnificent, esp. the High Court. Like old BC, but much more ornate. Still, all very odd, this grandeur in the tropics.

The train journey from Bombay to Calcutta stretched to four days in the brutal heat of early June. His compartment was the size of a horsebox, with bare bunks and no washbasin. He would have raised the small, grimy window but for the dust and flies that would have entered. Opening the carriage door at a station stop, he met a wall of heat, and if he stepped onto the platform, he was wrapped in a blanket of desiccated air. He was not consoled when told it was dry heat with little humidity.

Travelling across the Deccan and north India, George saw little to cheer him. Bony cattle and half-naked men formed tableaux on a cracked and rutted land. Scouring the scenery, his eyes widened when he spied a hill fort, but the rock face and ramparts did not match the palaces he’d imagined. Even the forts with towers and domes struggled to free themselves of the craggy landscape. Only when the train rattled over a wide and dry riverbed, with trees on both banks, did he feel a faint ripple of air.

His own reserve contributed to the stifling atmosphere in the compartment. ‘Don’t mix too freely with the Anglo-Indians, George. It just won’t do,’ Mrs Fawcett had advised. Beyond the requirements of civility, he spoke little to the railway engineer and two army officers travelling with him. Nor did the others talk much among themselves, except for the officers, who communicated in a series of chuckles and snorts.

As there was no inside corridor connecting the compartments, passengers had to get off when the train stopped and walk along the platform to the dining car. Anywhere else this shared inconvenience might have prompted an exchange of complaints and a temporary unburdening, but these four men suffered in silence. Even in the dining car, they chose to sit with people whom they hadn’t met in order to avoid speaking.

At Allahabad, everything changed. George’s three fellow travellers disembarked, and a moustachioed gentleman bounded into the carriage.

‘Where’re you from, sir, if I may ask?’ the man enquired as soon as he settled down.

‘Sussex, sir. Brighton.’ It was out of his mouth before he knew it, and he ground his teeth in defeat.

‘Oh, yes, by the sea, by the sea,’ the newcomer said, lighting his briarwood pipe. ‘She sells seashells by the seashore, doesn’t she?’

‘Excuse me…’

‘And where are you going, Mr…?’

‘Taylor. George Taylor, sir.’

‘Where to, Mr Taylor?’

‘To Calcutta.’

‘Yes, that much is obvious. After Calcutta?’

‘Assam.’

‘ICS, then?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I see. Where in Assam?’

‘Tezpur, sir.’

‘All the way from Brighton to Tezpur, eh? I suppose your family’s also in Brighton?’

‘No. I mean yes.’

‘Your father…?’

‘He…he’s in the City, most of the time. My mother lives in Brighton.’

‘Married?’

‘No.’

‘I see,’ said the man, eyeing George with more interest. ‘Tezpur. Not much scope for a young man there, you know. Dances, parties, girls, that sort of thing.’

When George didn’t reply, the man continued, ‘Still, lots of hunting and fishing, from what I hear.’

‘Yes, I’m keen on that,’ said George, though he had never hunted in his life and had no intention of beginning. Fishing, of course, he might try.

‘And wild savages, too,’ said the man with a wink and promptly fell asleep.

George arrived in Calcutta the next day, slept at the Bengal Club and began his formal business at the Secretariat in the morning.

Extricating himself from the box-like palanquin, he smoothed down his white linen suit and squinted into the piercing light. In front of him a building rose up five storeys high, fronted by a flight of stone stairs leading to a portico of ionic columns mounted by a triangular pediment. Commanding the north side of a prominent square, it was more fortification than opulence. ‘A British pyramid among palm trees,’ he wrote in his notebook that night.

At first, the twenty-year-old felt diminished by such ambition in the perishable tropics. As he mounted the steps towards the grand entrance, however, George straightened up and threw back his shoulders. He paused on the top step. Here was the throne of empire, and he was to be part of it. It wouldn’t be much, he knew, but the prospect took his breath away.

Passing through the open doors, he managed not to show surprise when the Indian soldiers on either side greeted him by slicing the air with their hands. He wasn’t wearing a uniform—ICS men didn’t, he learned—but he was English. Within half an hour, he had located the Assam section, a set of connecting rooms on the second floor, and presented himself. When the Bengali clerk rose and saluted, George started to return the gesture but checked himself just in time.

His audience with the Under-Secretary was disappointing. George had looked forward to a thorough briefing, perhaps a few confidences, some kind of initiation rite. But the thin Scot he met merely offered a handshake and marched him through the regulations without breaking stride. He stamped his papers, gave him a chit to collect a month’s pay and told him to go to the central hospital to obtain a medical certificate.

‘And one last thing, Taylor,’ he said. ‘You’ll need a revolver. Or a rifle. Or both.’

‘A revolver, sir?’

‘Umm. It’s regulation for our officers in Assam. Trouble with the hill tribes there, you see. Has been for decades.’

George looked at him.

‘Don’t worry. Mostly skirmishes and raids, that kind of thing.’

‘But…a gun?’ George stammered.

‘You can probably get one at the nearest police post. Where’re you going again?’

‘Tezpur, sir.’

‘Right, Tezpur. There’s a post in the town itself. Mind you, it’ll probably take a few months, and I wouldn’t want to guarantee that it’ll work properly.’

‘I see,’ said George.

‘Take my advice, Taylor. Buy one for yourself. Here in Calcutta, before you go upcountry.’

George spent several days in Calcutta, dodging the onset of the monsoon, sightseeing and shopping. Everything, except the revolver, he bought at the Great Eastern Hotel facing the expansive Maidan in the centre of town. There he watched a procession of carriages with liveried servants and colourful trappings that might have been rumbling along the seafront in Brighton. Even the cream-coloured mansions reminded him of home. The familiarity was disorienting because everything else was so different in the imperial capital with its dhotis, saris and strange languages.

In the side streets he saw bodies hawking wares, beggars waving their stumps and rows of stinking hovels. The last of these eyesores George wanted to pull down. They spread infectious diseases, he said to himself, in his best imitation of an official voice. For the wretched people themselves he had no plan, unless it was that they might be swept away by an epidemic.

In the evenings, he retired to the Bengal Club with its high-arched porticos, fluted pillars and sweeping balconies. Seated in a white wicker chair in the conservatory, he looked out over extensive gardens screened by sheets of rain. All around him, he heard the hushed tones of men who had no need to raise their voices. The steady flow of words, bubbling over into laughter before falling back to a murmur, put him at ease. Glancing around, he opened his notebook and wrote:

Most people in England know nothing about India. It really is a splendid country. Surely ‘the jewel in the imperial crown,’ as they say. It has an ancient civilisation—Sanscrit is far older than our Anglo-Saxon tongue—and now it has British government, law and education.

That our small island should have come to possess this vast country is a thing of wonder. And that I should play a part in this glorious enterprise is more wondrous still.

Mine will be a minor role, of course. I want only to do my duty and to do it well. With a sense of fair play.

2

Gyati straightened up to adjust a strip of his cane belt that was biting into his waist. Folding it back in among the other strips, he smoothed down his loincloth, pulled the thin cotton shawl around his upper body and bent forward to drag the wooden sled through the muddy field. The cane-rope dug into his hands as he pulled the hollowed-out tree trunk, made heavier by its load of wet earth. It was an early February morning, the valley was layered with fog and he was cold.

At one end of the field, young boys cut chunks of earth from a high bund and piled them on the sleds. Gyati and the older boys then dragged the sleds across the field, where a team of girls scooped up the moist soil and flung it against the wall of a low bund. All day long they would cut the earth, pull the sleds and build the bunds, high enough and thick enough to hold the water that would later flood the fields.

This was Gyati’s patan, a work-group of about twelve boys and girls formed through ties among their parents. All over the valley, especially in late winter and early spring, these groups worked in rotation, a few weeks in each family’s fields. Gyati didn’t much like the work, but he had little choice.

By mid-morning, the fog had burned off to reveal a mosaic of paddy fields covering every inch of the valley. Having pulled his mud-laden plank across the field one more time, Gyati paused to look around. The encircling mountains were sketched in an inky grey, but in an hour or two he would see their blue-green forested slopes. For now he contented himself with tracing the uneven line where the mountain ridge met the sky. He was unsure of what lay beyond that rim, though he’d heard of swift rivers and a shining lake that blinded anyone who looked at it. Sometimes in the northern distance, he could see the snow peaks of the high Himalaya. That was Nyime, the land of the ancestors.

To the south, several days away, lay Assam, the land of the halyang, the outsiders. That’s what he’d heard, though he knew nothing about them. Nobody knew very much, for the halyang had never breached the green barrier of forested mountains that protected the valley.

Lowering his gaze, Gyati scanned the perimeter of the valley, where seven villages nestled between paddy field and rising slope. Four on the eastern side, including his village of Hari, and three more on the west, each surrounded by bamboo groves and family gardens. This was his world, the Apatani valley, a fertile bowl five miles long and three across, where everything was held close by the mountains, like a child in its mother’s arms.

‘Hey, Gyati! We haven’t got all day,’ called one of his work mates. ‘And even you can’t stop the sun from setting.’ The others laughed. They all knew he was different, detached and, even at sixteen, full of stories and ideas.

‘All right,’ Gyati answered and fished out the cane-rope that lay in the mud. As he strained forward, though, he was thinking about how someone might, in fact, revive the dying sun. He’d heard a story about seven suns shot down with arrows to cool the earth, one of which had returned as the moon.

When it grew dark, Gyati and his patan stored the sleds next to a granary and walked home. Moving single-file on top of the narrow bunds, they reached the entrance to Hari and began to climb the path that led to the centre of the village. Hari was the oldest of the seven settlements. That’s what his uncle had told him.

Having crossed the Himalaya from Tibet, the ancestors had separated into various tribes and taken different routes, following the course of the Siang, Siyom and Subansiri rivers. The Apatanis took the last of these, and five of its clans, including Gyati’s Hage clan, had struck west and crossed the fast-flowing Kamla. From there, it was only a day’s trek through the forest to the eastern side of the mountains and down into the hidden valley.

Gyati scrambled up the notched tree-trunk ladder to his front porch. The small, rectangular house rested on a platform of bamboo flooring supported by thick hardwood posts. He pushed open the wooden half-door and ducked inside. The undivided interior was centred on a hearth, where a pot boiled with a mixture of wood shavings and leaves to feed the pig. Sitting down by the low fire, he let his mud-splattered shawl fall from his shoulder and rubbed his hands together.

‘Any rice-beer?’ he asked.

‘Umm. But it’s cold,’ his mother said from a corner, where she was pounding paddy with a heavy wooden pestle. Standing beside her, his sister pursed her lips as she guided unhusked grains into a scooped-out tree stump that served as a mortar.

‘I’ll heat it up,’ his sister said and moved towards the hearth.

Meat and firewood were drying on racks hanging above the fire, and half a dozen animal skulls were displayed on a wall as mementos of feasts. There were no windows and no furniture, aside from two low stools stacked against another wall.

‘There you are,’ said his father, bending himself in through the door- frame with an armful of firewood. ‘Go get some more,’ he said in a soft voice. ‘Hardwood, not bamboo.’

After a meal of reheated rice and spinach leaves, they all lay down to sleep. Gyati and his father aligned their bodies along sides of the square hearth, while his mother and sister slept next to the walls. It was nine o’clock. A pig grunted beneath the house and chickens clucked away in baskets, where they’d been placed for the night.

‘Everyone asleep?’ The words were barely audible as a thick-limbed figure crashed in through the unlocked door. It was Bear-Lalyang, Gyati’s uncle.

‘Not anymore,’ said his father.

‘You eaten?’ his mother asked.

‘Just come from Talo,’ his uncle said, ignoring the perfunctory question.

Bear-Lalyang sometimes travelled north towards Tibet but mostly south to Nyishi villages, such as Talo, on the way to Assam. That was a little unusual—not many Apatanis