‘There is a special ritual, but it is a heavenly secret, I cannot read it out to you. I only recite it in my heart. But through the ritual, I can change the way the clouds are moving so they won't form a mass. Or if they do, I will blow this conch at the right moment. As soon as the deities hear it, the clouds disperse. But you can only use this when it is really critical, and you cannot blow it more than five times.’
‘What if the weather is really bad?’
‘As a last resort, I fan the air with my lama robe, and then throw the robe into the air. That will definitely stop it.’
‘How long did it take you to master the whole ritual?’
‘I started learning from Mila when I was seventeen, and I've practised for eleven or twelve years. Before then my grandfather was the hailstone lama in this area, and my great-grandfather was also a hailstone lama.’
‘Is there anything that the villagers have to do to help?’
‘There is a custom that once the shaman controls a field, if a woman or a sheep walks into it, it is a bad omen for hail. That is why, after dusk, women are not allowed to come near the fields and sheep are all kept inside.’
‘What is the possible retribution from the gods if you are causing them so much trouble?’
‘If my ritual and mantra have worked against the heavenly gods, they will need a rest for several years. This is me committing a sin really, and I will be punished, perhaps by living a few years less.’
I hesitate, but in the end I ask Tseten about the fee for his anti-hail services. He says that when the crops were safe from hail, each of the ninety-six households in the village would give him a portion of their harvest, totalling roughly 500 kilos of barley. I do a quick calculation: a kilo of barley sells for 1.5 yuan, which is 10 pence. That means he would have earned about £50 — not much for six months' hard work. He made less than Dondan and Yangdron.
‘Oh, but I did four other villages apart from our own, including one seventy kilometres away,’ he tells me.
‘Do they telephone you when a hailstorm is coming and you go over there?’
‘No, I only have to stand on the roof of my house to see the direction the clouds are heading. I am connected to the fields with the batons, remember?’
But does Tseten possess considerable powers, or has the village just been lucky? I cannot help remembering a funny story I read in The People of Tibet by Charles Bell, written in the 1920s. Bell was briefly the British trade agent in Gyantse, and later became a confidant of the 13th Dalai Lama. He was informed by a highly placed lama official that hail was not allowed to fall on the Potala, the Dalai Lama's palace. ‘Hail is believed to fall chiefly in countries in which the inhabitants are quarrelsome, or in which many illegitimate children are born,’ Bell wrote. But while he was in Lhasa, the unthinkable happened — a storm brought hail to the Dalai Lama's palace. The two lamas charged with warding off the hail were immediately sacked — for negligence, Bell claims, too polite to say explicitly that their mantras were not up to the task.7 Tibetans believe that the successive Dalai Lamas are the incarnations of the God of Compassion. If hail falls even on the Potala Palace, what chance do mere mortals' villages have?
An unemployed hailstone lama? It was slightly hard to fathom at first, but now I can see Tseten has lost a considerable income, nearly 2,500 kilos of barley. I feel for him. We have filmed him treating patients, but in the last couple of weeks very few have come; with the harvest on the way they will only do so in an emergency. And almost all other ceremonies and rituals — marriages or house buildings — are on hold until the harvest is over. Tseten really is unemployed in what used to be his busiest months of the year.
A few days after we recorded Tseten's ritual, the rain finally stops. The Rikzin family and all the villagers swarm into the fields and start the harvest. They are so obviously relieved after all the weeks of tension and anxiety. It is great for us to be filming outdoors again, with the postcard blue sky, everyone singing, the sickles swinging, the grain being tied up, and the tractors and carts taking it home.
Soon Yul Lha seems to change his mind, and the clouds are gathering again over the mountains. I decide to try to film the gun in action. We find it, painted green and mounted on a cart in a big open barley field, its long thin barrel pointing at the sky. It is manned by four gunners, all of them dressed in khaki fatigues. They are farmers from surrounding villages — one of them is Tseten's neighbour. I ask them about their job. They tell me that they have been trained by the Gyantse County Agriculture and Animal Husbandry Department, and that four different villages share the cost of their salaries and the shells they use. Despite the villagers' mounting concern, the gunners have not yet concluded that the clouds are a threat. In fact, not a single shot has been fired all summer. They are only too pleased when we ask them to demonstrate their skills for us on camera.
We pay 240 yuan, about £17, for four shells. While they are loading the shells with military precision, we ask them how they feel about the gun. ‘It's very powerful,’ one says enthusiastically. ‘Five or six minutes after we fire it, the clouds disappear, the sky is blue. You'll see for yourself.’
‘And how do you feel about a hailstone lama like Tseten?’
‘In the old times, before we had the gun, we relied on the hailstone lama. Now we have the gun, we don't need one.’
‘It is a good thing, too. The lamas took far too much of the villagers' crop as their reward,’ another gunner says.
‘But did Tseten or other shamans do a good job protecting the village from hail?’ I press them for a clearer answer.
‘The gun is definitely effective. Let's watch the demonstration,’ the first man replies.
The clouds look heavy and are covering the hills. The gunners turn the wheel to get the right elevation, adjust the direction of the barrel, and fire. The bang is loud, but it is like wailing without tears — no rain comes, and I cannot see that the clouds have noticeably dispersed. Perhaps the aim was faulty, or perhaps we should have waited for the clouds to move closer.
While they reload, my mind flashes back to Tseten demonstrating the hail ritual in his prayer room. He was doing it for our film, but I could not have told that from his demeanour — he was totally immersed in his communication with the gods, whether or not they were listening. His whole life has been spent working for the villagers as an intermediary between the known and the unknown. Now the unknown is being pushed back even here. Tseten has lost his most important job; I wonder what else will be taken away from him.
Tseten said his family is keen to pass on the shaman tradition to one of the children, but I suspect we might have seen the hailstone lama's last performance in this valley.
A second bang interrupts my thoughts. The shell explodes closer to the clouds, but still with no result. Either the gunners need more practice — this is only their first outing this year because the shells are expensive — or the gun is not very effective. ‘If you don't believe us, ask the villagers. A few years ago, the gun drove away the clouds, but other villages got hailed on,’ they hasten to assure me. ‘And the technology will get better. Some countries use planes or missiles now.’
Before we say goodbye to the gunners, something suddenly occurs to me: how did the villagers cope with hail during the Cultural Revolution, when shamans were forbidden to practise and when there were no guns?
‘They put dynamite on the mountain tops and set it off, hoping the explosions would disperse the clouds,’ one of the gunners says with a laugh. ‘Or they relied on Mao's Red Book.’
‘What? How could that save them from hail?’ I ask in disbelief. I remembered seeing a photograph from the 1970s: Tibetan peasants from a production brigade carrying portraits of Mao on sticks, and pushing them into the ground on the edge of a field, while they recited passages from Mao's Little Red Book. I had assumed