In the middle of a vast, bare plain at an altitude of some 13,000 feet above sea level, stands a school with a delightfully oxymoronic name: the Nomadic Residential School. This is in Puga in Ladakh. The wee name of the place is in utter contrast to the immensity of the landscape of which it is a part. One passes Puga by on the way to Tso Moriri lake, the unearthly beauty of which can break the heart. The students of the Nomadic Residential School are all children of the Chang-pa - a semi-nomadic ethnic Tibetan tribe who can, at certain times of the year, be found in some areas of the Korzok village, within which Tso Moriri falls. While the adults of the tribe wander from place to place, following the trail of grasslands for their goats, sheep and yaks, the children remain stationary at the school.
But this is a new development - the school was established by the government in 2007. Most of the children there are first-generation learners. The parents put them in the school in the hope that they will have better opportunities in future. But the guardians also assert with confidence that the children will grow up as nomads even after spending their adolescent years in the residential school.
Talking to the parents and looking around inside their tent-houses, I concluded that for the Chang-pa, itinerancy does not mean the opposite of fixity. They literally carry their homes with them wherever they go; the idea of home - which would be synonymous with stability for some - must be coterminous with the idea of constant motion for them. With my own fixed notions of how a home should look like in comparison to a temporary settlement, I was taken aback by the homeliness of the tents' interiors.
For one, it was gratifyingly warm inside even as the freezing wind howled like a demon at the edges. The tents are woven of yak wool, which not only traps the heat inside but also keeps the tents waterproof till the wool gets frazzled. Sitting on a lovely carpet (also of yak wool) with every conceivable colour in the patterns on the margins, I squinted at the dazzling blue sky framed in the rectangular 'window' knitted into the roof of the conical tent. The sun streaming through the skylight and piercing through the tiny gaps in the knitting showed a living space centred around a stepped altar to the Buddha and his reincarnations.
A tin stove with a chimney going right through the skylight doubled up as the oven and the heater. Then there were the objects of daily use that looked surreal in these surroundings - an LPG cylinder, a bottle of kerosene, a packet of Wai Wai, a solar-powered lamp, a hard lump of bread fired in the oven. The lady of the house, dressed in the typical ankle-length black Ladakhi frock, served us buttered tea, blushing furiously and smiling toothlessly all the while. A child in tattered clothes, who has evidently not yet found a place in the school, peered at the goings-on, half swinging from the pole on which the tent was pitched.
The Chang-pa are desperately poor. Their livelihood depends chiefly on the pashmina goats they tend. They barter the wool for rice or sugar and sometime exchange it for money. The money they get in return for the wool goes nowhere near the astronomical prices the pashmina shawls command in the market. We bought a yak-wool carpet from our hostess, who has woven it herself. After quoting a price and getting it, she went on counting the currency notes with seeming dismay till the interpreter explained the value in some measure comprehensible to her. Currency notes did not seem to be a thing she encounters often in her daily life.
The carpet now lies folded in a corner of our room. Its colours seem to have lost their sharpness under the hazy Calcutta light. But it sits suggesting an alternate reality, of a home in flux in an unforgiving land.
