I don’t clearly remember when I first heard of Turtuk. Nearly five years ago, when I read that the inner line permit for visitors has been extended up to Turtuk, even then the name was familiar.
Probably this village entered my subconscious over four decades ago when the whole family used to huddle around a small radio during official blackouts, listening to All India Radio bulletins in the winter of 1971. I was seven years old and my father was working in Dharamsala, then a small town of Himachal Pradesh.
It was in the December of 1971 that Indian army advanced in the Ladakh sector and took control of four Balti villages, Turtuk being one of the biggest among them.
I think the name stayed with me since then – may be because Turtuk has a nice ring to it; the consonants and the vowels are immaculately balanced, and the name rolls off the tongue in a very fulfilling rounded way.
Despite this mysterious connection, I also don’t know for certain why it took me nearly three years to visit Turtuk. On the contrary, possibly, I was afraid that the real Turtuk would not live up to the picture of it I that had formed in my imagination.
It was a picture right out of the Garden of Eden – verdant fields ringed by lofty snow peaks; proud trees with their branches bent with the bounty of juicy fruits; carpets of varied flowers stretching on the hillsides; rosy-cheeked children playing with no care in the world and benevolent elders watching over them as they went about their work with a smile on their face. It was an idyllic world.
I was shaken out of my reluctance when I chanced to meet a long lost friend one day and he was full of stories of Turtuk he had visited a couple of months ago. His description of the place more or less matched my imaginary Turtuk. I was left with no excuse… I had to go now. The urge became so insistent that I could not wait for the ‘right season’ to visit Turtuk.
Against conventional wisdom, I embarked on the final stage of my decades-long journey in late November 2013, much after the chilly Ladakh winter had put the approach to Turtuk in a deep freeze. In the meantime, I had managed to convince my wife, Aruna, as well as Sohail Hashmi, a friend and a teacher both, to accompany me.
The three of us reached Leh on a November morning and after spending a couple of days there for acclimatisation, crossed the nearly 18,000-foot-high pass, Khardungla, to descend into the wide Nubra Valley. After spending a night in Diskit, we started on the final 72 kilometres of the journey the next day. The well-metalled road followed the turquoise flow of the Shyok River all through. T
hough officially Turtuk is in the Nubra Valley, but in real it is a different world, both physically and culturally. The sense that you are going into a different world heightened when the valley narrowed down.
There came a stage when it seemed there was no way forward as a wall of peaks blocked the way. Just then, when all hope seemed lost, the road veered off the river and entered into a boulder-strewn stretch. It twisted and turned and managed to find a barely visible passage through the mountains and descended to again catch hold of the Shyok coming from the opposite side.
At this meeting point was the village Changmar with a few houses perched on the rocky outcrops. With its back now firmly to the wide Nubra valley, the route ahead was through a twisted, tortured landscape where the mountains left just enough space for the river and the road to scrape through.
Extreme silence prevailed here; not a bird chirped nor an insect buzzed. The hum of the engine of our vehicle –manned by the indefatigable Iqbal who later took me to Turtuk twice again – and the Shyok were the only two moving objects in the still landscape.
The only human inhabitation till the next 20 km or so was forced, in form of an army post and a police checkpost where our permits were checked. Bogdang, the next village that we crossed after about an hour of such solitude, was the last Indian village pre-1971.
Half-an-hour or so later we crossed the point where the border used to be. A bridge led over the Shyok to our right, leading to one of the many arms of Siachen glacier and prohibited to all visitors. On a ledge overhanging over the river on the other side was a green patch.
“That’s Chalunka,” Iqbal told us, “the first of the four Balti villages taken by the Indian army in 1971.”
A few families now live in Chalunka, but in 1971 when the Indian army reached there, it found not a soul there. The villagers had deserted the village fearing the army and had migrated towards Manthal area near Skardu, the headquarters of Baltistan under Pakistan. They never could come back as after the ceasefire on December 17, the new border prohibited any travel to and fro.
Over the years, as population increased, their land and houses were taken over by people from Turtuk. The Indian army, under Major Chewang Rinchen (he retired a colonel), found the same situation when it reached Turtuk, the biggest of the four villages. The village was empty, and it seemed the villagers had fled in a hurry.
But, unlike those in Chalunka, the villagers here had receded upstream into a gorge that opens up in the middle of Turtuk. It took a lot of cajoling and confidence-building rhetoric by Major Rinchen to bring them out of their hiding place.
Late Colonel Rinchen notes in his memoir, A Legend in his Own Time, that “after a great deal of persuasion, perhaps under fear, thousands of old and young people of Turtuk got down from nullah/ gorge, carrying white flags and shouting Hindustan Zindabad.”
For a couple of minutes we too got the same feeling of emptiness when Iqbal stopped on the side of the road and declared, “we have reached”.
We could see no village – neither people nor houses. It was just the side of a road lined with a few trees, until we spotted a signboard under a tree. Under the legend ‘An appeal for cultural harmony & understanding’, it said, “Dear guest, you are entering the conservative and fragile Balti-cultured areas. So please follow strictly the following instructions for the sake of mutual respect and comprehension.”
The instructions were about length of dresses, display of affectionate behaviour “with your partner in public spaces” and asking for “permission” before taking photographs of people. Clearly, Turtuk was waking up to tourism.
As we were looking at this out-of-place signboard, we saw a couple coming down the hill. They turned out to be our hosts, Hussein and his beautiful wife Jamila (I had found Hussein’s number on internet while planning the trip and it was only after his go-ahead that he’ll host us that we took the plunge). It’s then we realised that we have to climb that hill to reach the village. The two, smiling effusively yet shy, took our bags and started walking uphill with not a crease on their faces. We followed huffing and panting, more so as the climb was unexpected.
“The road goes to Turtuk,” is what we had read in the literature before starting on this journey. The path went up in a number of switches and after hundred metres or so, it took us to a sight which none of us expected. There was a huge plateau in front of us. These were the fields of Turtuk, lying barren at that time of the year (lush with buckwheat crop and laden apricot trees when I went in August last). The village was on the other side, snuggling at the base of a cliff so high that I had to crane my neck to see the top.
We rested at the edge of the plateau, taking in the sight. Below us was the ‘road to Turtuk’ and beyond it the Shyok, now looking like a slender turquoise thread through the narrow valley. The peaks all around were covered in snow.
“You are lucky,” said Hussein, “it has not snowed in the village till now.”
Turtuk, though at 9,600 feet much lower in elevation than Diskit from where we were coming, gets its share of snow in winter. In fact, this altitude permits villagers to raise two crops in a year, possible only in one other place in Ladakh, the Dah-Hanu region towards Kargil.
We walked through the fields to the village. We had by now attracted a large number of rosy-cheeked children who followed us as we made our way through the narrow twisting lanes amidst stone village houses. Many were peering at us from the rooftops which, apart from them, seemed bursting with stored wooden logs, bales of dried grass and cackling hens. Donkeys and sheep roamed around in the fields and the lanes.
Himalayan tree-pies flew around noisily, afraid of neither man nor beast. While women were shy though curious, men greeted us with ‘as-salamu alaykum’.
As soon as we reached K2 homestay, our home for the next couple of days, Jamila got busy in preparing tea for us. Hussein, meanwhile, took upon himself to tell us about the village and its history.
Dating back to the 1200 AD according to him, Turtuk was no ordinary village. Lying on a branch of the famed Silk Route, Turtuk was the gateway to the regions of Baltistan, Gilgit and Chitral as also Yarkand via the Karakoram pass.
The place got its name four centuries ago, according to the legend Hussein narrated to us. Two Turk warlords, Chuli and Yangdrung, looking for a territory to conquer in Baltistan, came here.
“There was an impregnable fort here, and they set their eyes on it,” he said.
“On March 21, when the local ruler and his guards had gone to play polo to mark the advent of the new year (called Navroz with polo still played today on the occasion), the Turks managed to find their way into the fort by climbing down the cliff. The fort was empty as no one had thought an attack possible from above. Once inside, they easily defeated the ruler and his returning forces as now they had the high ground. They then ruled from the fort and the area came to be known as Turtuk,” Hussein explained.
He later showed us through binoculars the bastions of that fort in middle of a cliff near the village. It is out of bounds today; in any case it seemed difficult to reach there as there was no visible path to the ruins.
After tea, Hussein laid out the plan for our visit. It is then we learned that Turtuk was divided into two distinct parts, Youl and Pharol. We were staying in Pharol while Youl, the older habitation, lay on the other side of a rivulet below the ruins of the fort.
The historical section, in the form of a 16th century wooden mosque and a huge residence of the self-claimed heir of the royal family, was in Youl while the ground for polo – an integral part of Balti culture – and the views were on the Pharol side. Pharol also had a monastery-turned-mosque-turnedtemple-turned-monastery above the polo ground.
“Turtuk was Buddhist before it fully converted into Islam – Nurbakshi Shias – sometime in the 16th century,” Hussein said.
With this conversion, the monastery turned into a mosque. It remained so till the Indian army took over in 1971 and converted the mosque into a temple. It was only about a decade ago, after the Kargil war, the villagers and the army decided to give it back its original status of a monastery, according to Hussein. He must know as he is the sarpanch of Pharol!
The monastery was an ordinary structure but had a big surprise in store – it is from here, the only place in Indian territory, that one can see the peak of K2, the second highest mountain in the world after Everest. Only the tip of the mountain can be seen, a perfect steep triangle that tilts at an angle!
We hurried back to our rooms as the sun went down. Not only was it getting cold, but we also wanted to recharge our camera batteries. And as Turtuk has no cabled power supply, it is only after sundown for a couple of hours that the village gets electricity through a generator.
Each household pays Rs 50 a month for these hours of light during which the children study and the women not only prepare food but also catch up on their daily dose of soap operas on television.
When I first went to Turtuk in November 2013, Kumkum Bhagya was the favourite show; in March, during my second trip, Balika Vadhu had taken over; and, in August, Jodha Akbar was ruling the roost in Turtuk.
“What about the men,” I asked Hussein. We don’t get the chance to watch TV,” he said with a laugh.
The next day we spent in Youl, which was linked to Pharol by a wooden suspension bridge over the rivulet. The mosque was indeed worth a visit. Its carved walnut pillars and panels spoke of a rich past. Interestingly, there were many carvings of swastika pattern carved on panels inside the mosque. A wooden tower, the tallest structure of Turtuk, stood padlocked outside.
“There were cases of suicide,” Hussein explained.
Youl is also home to Abdul Karim Khali, a master stone sculptor. His works – a snow leopard pouncing on an ibex carved in relief on stone and sculpted ibexes – can be seen all over hotels in Ladakh. He also makes pressure cookers, teapots, pans, spoons, glasses, et al, in stone!
Then there are a couple of craftsmen who make exquisite brass utensils and attractive wooden walking sticks with brass handles and knobs.
The most precious part of Turtuk is undoubtedly its people – beautiful to look at with their high cheekbones, chiselled faces and flawless complexion and hospitable to an extent that it seems they have risen out of fairy tales. Each time I went, I was plied with gifts – walnuts, dried apricots, apricot oil, all of which they sell to tourists – that too after I had bought the very things from them earlier; that was commerce, this was personal. The children are mischievous, playful and yet innocent; I met two sisters, twins, Amina and Shamina, in class eight, who stunned me with a query in all seriousness – “is Delhi bigger than Turtuk?”
I have been there three times now and each time I came back humbled. Though things are changing with the influx of visitors, the kernel of goodness still exists. The traits that we in the mainland consider ‘impractical’, they wear with such casualness that we seem like boors from a cutthroat world. Suffice to say, I plan to go there again as the real Turtuk is much more than what I imagined it to be.
