Wow. It has been a month! A little over actually and I could apologize but that’s getting old, so I’m just gonna say Wow how time flies when you’re having fun!
Most of it has been fun actually. Well, okay, there was that gallbladder attack and the emergency run into Mandi for medicine at 2 a.m. and that wasn’t so delightful really, but it did allow Yab and Nyondo to encounter and scare off an enormous snow leopard on the road down the mountain, something you don’t see every day. And there were other passings which I shall give due respect to in a later post, but, for the most part, the last 5 weeks have been pretty jolly here in old Tso Pema.
Our family appears to have inaugurated a local tradition the year we first arrived, by deciding to throw a party in late December that would add some of our Western holiday traditions into the mix of Hindu (Diwali) and Buddhist (Losar) celebrations that break up the winter cold and monotony. We hadn’t actually thought to do any serious Christmasolstikwanzahanuukafestivus whoop-de-do this year. All of us were kind of tired as December rolled around and both Nyondo and I have been sick a lot this year so we rather just assumed we could skip noticing the day(s) leading up to secular New Years. But no. As the month progressed, our friends in the various communities began asking us when the party would be. Not “if”, but “when”. It does seem that, up here where the days are pretty short and the need for entertainment pretty great, once you do something two years in a row, taking a third year off is not an option. When the yogis from the caves at the top of the mountain began saying, “oh don’t worry about cooking, we’ll just turn up with food on Injie Losar” we KNEW we were in trouble and there was going to be no backing out. Because the monks and nuns and other practitioners up there really have no clear idea of which day “Injie Losar” falls on (small wonder since there isn’t actually any such holiday.) Which meant that people would be turning up randomly bearing food, drink and good cheer - usually just about the time one of us was getting out of the shower around daybreak. Which meant lots of little parties - before coffee in the morning - instead of one planned and expected event. We quickly got motivated and started planning.
Now remember, if you’ve been following this blog for any time, that we’re living up in Himachal Pradesh, in the Indian Himalayas. This tiny town, called Tso Pema by the Tibetans and Rewalsar on the Indian Maps, is built around the five block circumferance of Lotus Lake, a place sacred to Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists alike. Because of that, it’s a place of pilgrimage and, although out of the way in the extreme, becomes a crossroads of sorts, a meeting point for the many diverse cultures that occupy these mountains whose highest peaks are known as The Roof of the World. Some of those people have very little interaction with outsiders, especially those from far away places. There are tribal people from Kinnour and Lahoul and little crevasses in the mountains without names. There are Indians - some who have been to or through the cities of the south and the plains and speak broadcast Hindi and others whose families have farmed the same tiny plots of monkey-infested hillside for thousands of years and speak a dialect that resembles Hindi the way modern Italian resembles Liturgical Latin. Those are my neighbors, up here in Doh, the farming village where our house stands. Then there are the bright-eyed, free-spirited Ladakhis from the northern borders, people whose country was an independent kingdom until within my lifetime. Tibetans from all over the Land of Snows have come here in their exile. Their dialects are as varied as the Indians, though Khamkye is the most common in this town (and the one I speak.) The Tibetan refugees, many of whom are nuns and monks and yogis, make up a large minority of Rewalsar’s changing population. And there are always a few travelers from the west, come to see the sacred lake and/or learn from the various lamas, scholars, pundits and saddhus who live and teach on the mountainside.
It’s a diverse bunch and, largely, each group keeps mostly to themselves. Part of that is language, part of it is culture and there is always the combination of habit and fear of strangers to keep neighbors from really getting to know each other. Even among the Indians, the old, (now illegal) division of castes still divides people and neighborhoods. The younger Indians, even from the villages, pay less heed to the caste system than their elders, but, while people may do business together, they don’t always socialize outside their own caste or their own race, religion, customary ways of doing things.
We’ve been really fortunate to be able to step outside every one of those divisions in a way that most of the ex-patriots and dharma students passing through never have an opportunity to do. We have good, close, well-loved friends in every corner of this town, from the beggars and drunks to the scholars and lama, from the working-class Brahmins who maintain strict dietary standards to the nouveau riche lower caste merchants, we’ve made friends with people - nice, decent, interesting, funny, warm, huggable, vulnerable, vital people. And we invite them all to our house so, of course we invite them all to our parties. Somehow we get away with it. I’ve got various kinds of speculation as to why, but I’ve also got all these pictures I want to post and the pictures win over pontification. I’ll just say that all our friends came and partied with us and with each other, broke bread, raised glasses, laughed, sang and danced together in our home. One of the proudest moments came at the end, as people were saying goodbye. Not just one, but several of the Indian businessmen and women took us aside and thanked us for our hospitality and said quietly, “you don’t know what you’ve pulled off here. This never happens here, it just doesn’t. Not only the different racial and religious groups - sometimes we do civic things because we have to, but the different classes and castes. You don’t know what a big deal it is that everybody came together and it worked. It actually worked.” Huh. Why wouldn’t our friends all get along? Sometimes we are so used to coming from a melting pot that we’re positively dense. But it worked. It really did. I guess that’s why we had to have the party. We’ve got to keep up the tradition because it works.
Having a “Western-style” party means serving western-style food. Which definitely means preparing it ourselves as there is no place to purchase most of what we wanted to serve. We learned our lesson last year about what kinds of food work for this crowd and what is just too strange or too unpalatable to Asian tastes and farmer’s mental concepts to be enjoyed. However, even keeping it fairly simple and sticking to those foods which we were pretty sure would be enjoyed, was a LOT of work. Because, not only isn’t there a nearby Safeway or Tesco’s from which to buy things like hummus and pitas, cream cheese onion dip, pizza or even peanut butter and jelly - in this Himalayan town a day’s drive from anywhere, you pretty much have to make the basic ingredients from scratch. I did not expect this year to be unable to find peanut butter locally and thus to spend an afternoon cleaning, roasting and seasoning raw peanuts and then grinding them to make our own peanut butter. Bread I was prepared to bake and pizza dough. And brownies, cookies, banana nut breads, all the western leavened goodies that I’m particularly skillful at concocting. But hummus has to be made from raw chickpeas and sesame seed, from cloves of garlic and the juice of local lemons. Grilled polenta is a fairly easy dish, always well-received once people here try it. But I have to take the dried corn kernals I got from the neighbors and grind them before stirring the meal into boiling water. Someone has to chop the herbs and the chilies and the garlic that seasons each slice. We have to make the cheese from the buffalo milk we get each day and hang it and season it. Oh yeah. I had to make the mayo for the deviled eggs. All these things in order to create a buffet that would take about an hour to whip up after running through a local supermarket. Which is one very good reason why I haven’t posted in so long. I was cooking. For rather a lot of days. And then, once the party was over, we were cleaning up and resting up. We just got the last of the decorations down off the ceiling fan yesterday as a matter of fact!
However the food turned out great. The main thing was… pizza. Real pizza. My first ever job back in high school was in a family owned Italian restaurant in Chicago. I know how to make pizza. And I made 16 of them for this party:

baked in my little electric oven:

and lined up to be reheated and recrisped before serving:

But it was hardly the only food we served:

Asi Dolma is somewhere in her 80’s by now. She walked out of Tibet in her 60’s and this was her first pizza. She really got into it. I mean really. Six pieces of “that flat stuff. It’s really good!” I wonder if getting a nun addicted to Italian food is bad karma?

Our friends came:



They ate and drank and schmoozed with each other. They came from all over, even the ex-pat crowd was a United Nations crew. The pretty girl seated on the far right of the bench won this year’s prize for coming from the most unusual place: her name is Lena (the “other” Lena in this town) and she is from Estonia.



There were all the things that make a good holiday party in addition to too much food and drink.There were decorations:

Pretty girls:

Eligible bachelors:

Cute kids passed from hand to hand for huggles:

Or trying, as our young friend Jyoti did, to sneak as much sugar as possible - which is hard when you’ve already won the prize for the loudest, sparliest handknit sweater AND the most stitches for a head wound in a single week:

There was dancing to the latest Bollywood tunes:

Since I can’t dance, I played DJ.


And managed cleverly not to get a single picture of myself taken since I retained custody of the camera.
Good times. Now can I sleep until Losar?