Chapter 13
Meshram was a Bhotia. The Bhotias are traders by professions, they move about the hills of Garhwal and Kumaon with their pack donkeys laden with salt and sugar and other useful articles of commerce, and make these commodities available to the remotest hamlet. In appearance they are quite different from other dwellers in the Himalayas, being of obviously Mongoloid stock but without any kinship with the Tibetans or the Gurkhas, being usually short and dark. They speak their own language, though they are proficient in many tongues, follow their own customs and lead the life of impoverished nomads, much as they have done for thousand of years. Meshram differed from his fraternity in one respect however, he supplemented his income from trade by spying for the Chinese.
Cross border trade between India and Tibet is mostly a thing of the past. There are one or two passes where a trickle is allowed, but only under the watchful eyes of the border guards of two opposing armies. It was not possible for Meshram therefore, to load his donkeys, take them across the border through the passes, and hand over whatever information he had to the Chinese side. Nor was it possible for him to use a transmitter, cached away in some secret location. Radio traffic across the border is non-existent and what there is, is intensively monitored. Quite apart from this there is the difficulty of training an illiterate Bhotia trader in he use of sophisticated radio equipment, not to speak of the complexities of using a cipher.
Meshram used a more ingenious and at the same time simpler method. He used homing pigeons to carry his messages across the Himalayas to the Chinese outpost on the other side. The payments that he collected were sent back in the same way, in small packets tied to the pigeons' legs.
It was in this manner that he reported the arrival of a Tibetan lama and a Tibetan girl, as he thought, at the army camp. And a while later, it was through the same channel that he sent word to the Chinese Major who was in charge of the outpost on the other side about the training in hang-gliding that was being imparted to the these two strangers by a Colonel of the Indian army.
Major Wang Wei, of the 54th regiment of the PLA was in command of the detachment deployed to guard the border at the point in question. This particular posting was not looked upon with favour by the bright sparks of the PLA. It was very remote, far from the hot spots usually visited b senior officers. And it was a quiet section of the border, the steepness and size of the mountains made aggressive patrolling and border incursions impossible. This meant that an ambitious young officer had no chance of impressing his superiors either through flattery or by showing special aptitude in shadow warfare. All of which meant that the rising young blades of the army did their best to avoid a posting here.
None of this made any difference to Wang. He was without ambition, being quite satisfied with his status as a Major in the army, which gave him a tremendous cachet in the village where he had been born in a peasant family. He did not mind the boredom and the lack of excitement. He did his job with dogged persistence and thoroughness and if he was sometimes slow he was at the same time meticulous. It was to Wang Wei that Meshram sent his homing pigeons. Wang Wei retrieved the two messages and sent the spy the prescribed payment, in India rupees of course, and then pondered over his next course of action. He took his time pondering.
On the face of it, this information appeared to be worthless like most of the other information that the spy had sent. Still it was somewhat unusual for an Indian army officer to train a Tibetan lama in the use of hang-gliding. It was so unusual that it struck even Wang Wei as something out of the ordinary. After thinking over the matter for a week, he decided that he must send this information to his commanding officer, Colonel Chu-Teh who was stationed at Gartok.
The Colonel, unlike Wang Wei was an ambitious man, eager to prove his worth to his superiors and rise to-eminence in the army. It was he who had planned the exercises, code named Dragon's Tail, which had sent jitters through the Indians on the other side. ( Or so he claimed.) He was already one of the youngest Colonels in the PLA and if things went his way, there was no reason why he should not one day ride though the gates of the forbidden city in a black army limousine with a general's pennant flying over the bonnet. He was intrigued by the information supplied to him by Wang Wei.
"Why should the Indian army spend time training a Tibetan 1ama in hang-gliding?", he asked his adjutant.
"Couldn't say sir, it seems absolutely silly."
"No it isn't silly. There is something underfoot here, something that does not bode well."
The Colonel did not think well of his Indian adversaries. In fact he held them in contempt. India, to his mind, was a nation divided by caste and religion and emasculated by its capitalistic system. Its history was a record of successive military defeat and political subjugation by foreign powers. But he did give the Indians credit for one thing- devious cunning. He was sure they were up to no good and this hang- gliding business was another move in the twilight espionage war that the Indian side continued to conduct after its military defeat in 1962.
"Well, alert all units to watch for border crossings by strangers. Keep watch on known sympathisers and members of the Tibetan underground. If these Indians want to send people across the border in hang-gliders, we should be prepared to receive them properly, with tracer and machine gun fire."
He also decided to send a copy of the report sent by the Indian spy to his immediate superior in Lhasa and a copy. separately to army intelligence in Peking. You never knew when your foresight might be rewarded.
Unfortunately for the Colonel, Wang Wei's dithering had deprived him of laying out a proper reception party for the intruders. By the time this news was brought to him, Mary Joe and Lobsang were already in Tibet.
