TONGBAS
AND MOMOS

First you see the vultures.

You are a land animal, and most of the time you are looking near your feet. Hence from out of the infinite expanse of the cloudless sky you do not see them coming. A shadow ripples over the grassy plains and the infinite green is plunged into sudden black. You look up, and behold! – Dark wide wings, buoyed by the vicious wind that rips through the grassy hills, birds of prey fill the sky, hundreds of them! Descending from all directions onto this small Tibetan hill.

Some latent instinct, inherited from the time when we were still small scuttling mammals, whispered to me to go hide in some small hole I should have pre-burrowed. There is no way to describe the irrepressible power of these ancient creatures gliding low and slow over me. I felt their power pressing me to the ground, and my existence felt miniscule and miserable. My kingdom for a helmet! There were too many birds of too uncomfortable sizes crowding up too small a patch of sky. The vultures however flew past me, oblivious to their own magnificence, and as they land they callously discard their own grandeur, a curved grey beak, two beady eyes, frumpy piles of dirt as they waddle and squat around the faded prayer flags.

They came here every day. It was time for a traditional Tibetan funeral, and for these birds, it was feeding time.

We came all the way to the eastern edge of the border of the autonomous region of Tibet, to the Tibetan town of Seda to experience a sky burial. But first, there was the problem of getting there.

For 14 hours or so, starting from the city of Chengdu, we travelled west into Tibetan territory. Bare and brutal hills flanked our left and the roar of a murky river echoed out of a dark valley on our right. At one point we reached a muddy slope that was too steep for our bus to tackle, and someone had to call in a bulldozer. The driver tied a metal chain to the bonnet of the bus and the bulldozer dragged us up, one side of the bus scraping by the razor edge that plummeted to the river below.

Halfway through the journey we stopped for dinner, and we were served rice and yak milk tea. Yak milk tea is a pillar of Tibetan cuisine. As its name suggests, it is made primarily from the milk of yaks, mountain cousins of buffalos, great shaggy nonchalant looking beasts that behave like small, hairy tectonic plates. When you enter any Tibetan dwelling, it is basic courtesy for the host to offer the guests yak milk tea. The protocol went like this:

First the Tibetans will ask you to wait, as they must first finish throwing uncooperative screaming baby yaks into a pen. They then ask you if you would like to have some tea. Some of them have jewelled daggers by their belts. You reply yes, why not, you would love to have some! They nod, pull out a brick of dried tea leaves from the rafters of their roof, and spend a few seconds slapping off its luscious coating of dust. They crack a chunk off it and dump it into boiling water, and as the vile brew storms in the pot, they go about searching for all kinds of seeds and spices to add to it. From the bottom of their bed they drag out an oil canister, where they store their much prized yak butter. With an unconcerned flourish they whip out the dagger and cut off a piece, flinging it into the mix.

You ask them how they make the butter. They point to the washing machine in the corner of the hut. Extra spin, for extra flavour.

The cup is laid in front of you and there is no turning back now. These yak-throwing Tibetans are hardy folk; they run up mountains in hailstorms. Soft city dwellers and our instagram ways are but prey to their whims. You drink it – slightly salty, slightly chewy due to some stubborn, un-melted butter, a troop of motley mountain flavours singing hoary songs as they churn and froth and march down deeper down your throat. Some bits of yak hair float on the froth, or you could just be imagining things. Your hosts nods sagely at you as finally, the cup empties. A weak prayer wafts from your trembling lips; but your God is not there at the bottom of this tea cup. No matter – you have passed the manly rites. Dusk descends over snowy peaks. Sunset shadows slide through the rolling mist.

And finally, after all that, we came to the town of Seda itself.

Seda is essentially a mess of shacks that are built around a Buddhist academy. Teenage monks in the academy sit hunched over their scriptures wearing earphones plugged into mp3 players. I doubted the scriptures they were reading were so entertaining to warrant the magnitude of their smiles, so there’s a chance they were listening to some gangsta rap or some other non-Buddhist heathen trash. The main inner yard of the academy was a supposed self-study room, but on its green carpet, scriptures lay forlorn and happily forgotten as the young disciples wrestled and gossiped over pictures of other monks on their android phones. .

Above the academy, a monk was carrying a kid around a stupa ringed by prayer wheels. It is an act of prayer to circle a stupa, and that spinning prayer wheels is the same as chanting the prayers inscribed. The dad had been running before I arrived at the stupa and he had passed me a dozen times. The kid, we came to realize, was dead; his head bobbed lifeless, wrapped in a plastic bag. A blur of red, and the father’s monk robes disappeared around the bend. None of the other pilgrims seemed bothered by this – Tibetans may well have a less stressful outlook regarding matters of life and death.

The next day, we went up to the sky burial site. Sky burials happen daily; and the vultures were already familiar with tradition. As midday passed into afternoon, more and more vultures gathered as an expanding brown mass on the hilltop.

From a distance down the hill came running up a group of monks, their robes billowing red and gold. A small tuft of hair popped up and down on the back of the monk panting his way up the hill.

And the dad carried his dead child and climbed up to the sky burial pit. He placed his son onto a black stone slab. Monks gathered on the slopes, om mane padme hom, their chants a steady drone. A monk moved in with a knife, what he exactly did obscured from us. The vultures slowly waddled nearer down the slope, and monks moved in to block them, waving the vultures away. The professional’s work was not yet done. Green grass and saffron robes swayed in the breeze. Finally the monks moved aside, breaking off the cordon. The vultures surged like a brown earthly wave down the slopes into the pit, kicking up a terrible cloud of dust, a mess of wings and earth wrestling among the monks. The grieving family stood at the edge of it all, vultures fighting right at their feet.

In Seda, a monk told us that in Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, the body is impermanent and becomes meaningless upon death. Upon death, it becomes an act of generosity to relinquish one’s body to the vultures as food. As the body is fed to the sacred vultures, the deceased returns to the cycle of reincarnation.

Soon the sacred birds all flew off. They drifted in the air currents, disappearing into the mountains and clouds. Somewhere among us, among the snow peaks and the prayer flags of his ancestors, a child is born.