Sic Semper Sikkim

Sikkim, in the Himalayas, is now a democracy, one of the youngest in the world. Its first election was in 1953, and its first law in 1955, but, in these few years, the alert Sikkimis have learned not only the outward forms of democracy but many of the realities, subtleties and secrets which, to us in the civilized world, are almost its very soul – parties, platforms, partisan strife, mudslinging, muckraking, windbags, windfalls, major parties, minor parties, pull, plums, padded payrolls, stuffing, roughing, raucous caucuses, brass spittoons in smoke-filled rooms, bosses, losses, lobbies, gobbledygook and gerrymandering, among others. True, some of these practices are not very widespread, but then again, neither is Sikkim itself, its area being 2745 square miles, a bit more than Delaware's. Only a single case, respectively, of stuffing and roughing have been reported in Sikkim. On election day, 1953, a number of voters were roughed up in Psensang, a village, and a ballot box was stuffed in Lhachen, not far away; also it was done inexpertly, and when the ballot box was opened, the ballots were in a wad, and it's clear that Sikkim has further (continued on page 58)Sic Sempen Sikkim(continued from page 55( to go in this particular art. On the credit side, the two major parties, the Nationalists and the Congress, have already struck the perfect attitude of mutual vilification, and the Sikkimi gerrymander puts even New York State's to shame; the Nationalists, who got a fifth as many votes as the Congress, have just as many seats in the Sikkimi Senate. As for lobbies, the most powerful are the landlords'. They held up the Rent Control Bill in 1953, 1954 and most of 1955, but it got on the floor in 1955 and it passed. The first law of Sikkim is a model of the democratic idiom. A random sentence is this one: "Where the landlord recovers possession of any premises from the tenant by virtue of a decree obtained under section (5) and the premises are not occupied by him or by the person for whose benefit the premises were acquired within two months of the date of vacation of the premises, or thorough overhauling is not commenced within one month of the date of vacation of the premises by the tenant, the Sikkim Durbar may let out the premises on a standard rent."

The symbol of the Congress is a ladder, and that of the Nationalists, a swastika. Other than this, which I admit is superficial, at best, I couldn't find any differences between the two. After a few days in Sikkim, I got hold of the platforms, but these, as I should have expected, were no help, for the Nationalists promised roads, bridges, hospitals, schools, and a fair rent, and implied that the Congress "stoop low, and hurl abusive and vulgar languages," while the Congress, for their part, promised roads, bridges, hospitals, schools and a fair rent, and saw little good in the Nationalists. Both, in their platforms, warned me of "the wrong views associated with a wrong candidate," or words to that effect. Having read all this, and being none the wiser, I went to the Sikkimi capital and buttonholed the chief secretary, a sort of prime minister there, who said, "On the whole, the parties are identical," but that I shouldn't noise it about. Down the hall, he suggested, I could find the national chairmen of both, working in their office.

"In their offices?" I said.

"In their office," he replied, and while he went back to his papers, I hurried down the hall, and I saw, indeed, that Mr. Sonam Tsering, of the Nationalists, and Mr. Kashiraj Pradhan, of the Congress, worked in the very same office, side by side. The office itself was cold, dark and lackluster; and so, indeed, was Mr. Tsering; his clothes were shapeless and olive drab, and he might have passed for a yak-driver in the nearby mountains of Tibet, while Mr. Pradhan, at the other desk, was dressed in chic orange jodhpurs and a white cutaway. All the while, a bunch of ward heelers and party hacks hurried in and out, whispering, of necessity, to Mr. Tsering and Mr. Pradhan, who kept busy, otherwise, by reading the morning mail and writing denunciations of one another; from time to time, they stopped to gossip, or to offer the other a cup of tea. Really, this was a fine state of affairs, I thought, and yet, I also thought, it wasn't unlike the state of affairs in our country, or at least in the State of New York. As a newspaperman, I used to cover the New York Senate, and there, too, I remembered, the Republican and the Democratic leaders sat side by side, and seemed the very best of friends. Both of them were named Mr. Mahoney. When a critical bill was on the floor, Mr. Mahoney (R) would rant and rave, accusing the Democrats of all but rape and latrocinium, a favorite phrase of his being, "Shame, I say unto you, shame!" Then, Mr. Mahoney (D) would stand up, revealing that the Republicans, in turn, were remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kind-less, etc., villains. This done, the Mr. Mahoneys would congratulate and slap each other on the back, saying it would look swell in the late editions. We newspapermen never wrote about these perorational embraces; it wasn't part of the game, and, I suppose, this is the first the New Yorkers know of it.

In Sikkim, too, the electorate doesn't know of the camaraderie of the Nationalists and the Congress; it is convinced that one of them is "high and noble ... invariably" – in the words of the party platforms – and the other a pack of thieves. Just which is which, is an easy matter: in Sikkim, the 90,000 Nepalis vote for the Congress, and the 20,000 Bhotias vote for the Nationalists. The Bhotias are Buddhists, yellow, and speak an Indo-Chinese language that looks like this:

The Nepalis are Hindus, also yellow, but speak an Indo-European language that looks like this:

The Nepalis are immigrants, while the Bhotias, to their way of thinking, came over on the Mayflower.

The minor parties of Sikkim are certainly an odd lot, but at least I know what they stand for. The Monastery Association stands for the monasteries, and the Scheduled Castes League is plumping for the untouchables; the Prajasameelan, which is the major minor party, and which, in 1953, got almost as many votes as the Nationalists but, because of the gerrymander, has no seats at all in the Sikkimi Senate, wants to unite with India. Now, Sikkim is independent, with a maharajah as the chief of state, but India runs its defenses, communications and foreign affairs, and, at Sikkim's suggestion, has sent an Indian there as a kind of city manager – Mr. N. K. Rustomji, the Dewan of Sikkim (also, you may call him the Divan of Sikkim, if that's your idea of fun). While I was in Sikkim, I had the pleasure of meeting the Dewan, but I never met the maharajah, an alcoholic, who isn't shown to visitors. No head that wears the crown hangs heavier than that of His Highness, Sir Tashi Namgyal, Knight Commander of the Star of India, Knight Commander of the Indian Empire, Maharajah of Sikkim. A number of years ago, his wife, the maharani, took a vacation in Lhasa, Tibet, her home town, and shacked up there with one of the lamas, a reincarnation of Buddha; back in Sikkim, she had a baby and was banished to a palace in the suburbs. The maharajah hasn't seen her since. (The Maharajahs of Sikkim, like the Princes of Monaco, have seldom got along with their wives, I'm afraid. One of them married a girl so ugly that he left his throne, fleeing the palace in disguise.) Then, in World War II, the maharajah's eldest son, the crown prince, died in a plane crash, and the Maharajah of Sikkim took to whiskey. Today, his only joy is painting, but he has the shakes, and his work is like Jackson Pollock's. The Sikkimis don't talk of him much.

Sir Tashi Namgyal, the maharajah, played the part of King George III in the democratization of Sikkim. A certain Mr. Tashi Tsering, no relation, was the George Washington of it, and, between the two, there was sort of a revolution, with 5000 Sikkimis marching on the maharajah's palace. Some day, I suppose, the Sikkimis will have this as Independence Day, telling their children of minute men, Paul Reveres and Patrick Henrys, who cried liberty or death, or of their Sikkimi counterparts – that, for the history books, but for the present, alas! The revolution was in 1949, the memory is fresh, the truth is inglorious. The truth is that Mr. Tashi and his 5000 insurgents went to the palace one fine day, shouting, "Our demands must be met"; the maharajah came to the window, and, "Our demands must be met," they shouted again.

"What demands?" said the maharajah, a bit bewildered by it all.

"Our demands," said the people. "They must be met!" The awful fact is that none of them, except Mr. Tashi, had any idea what the demands were, (continued on page 71)Sic Semper Sikkim(continued from page 58) or what the hell they were doing at the maharajah's palace; it's just that everyone else was there, that's all. Presently, the maharajah, trying his best to get onto solid ground, sent his sons outside to talk with the revolutionaries. "What are your demands?" said the Maharaj Kumars, and were told, in no uncertain terms, "Our demands must be met!" The Maharaj Kumars hurried back to the maharajah and shrugged.

Well, things were getting ticklish, but the Maharajah of Sikkim rose to the occasion. "People of Sikkim!" he cried from the window, as far as anyone can remember, "I have heard your demands, and they shall be met! Oh, I promise it!" With a thousand hurrahs, the crowd broke up and the maharajah left the window, more certain than ever that the bottle was the only way. Later, however, he was visited by Mr. Tashi, who said the demands were land reform and free elections, and, rather wearily, the Maharajah of Sikkim acquiesced.

Since then, things have been buzzing. Sikkim got a Dewan in 1949, its people got to vote in 1953 and a five-year plan got started on April 18, 1955 – a day the Dewan said was "eventful" for lovers of freedom everywhere. ("In Bandung, the representatives of the Asio-African countries are, on this same day, commencing their deliberations, so that the forces of peace and order may be strengthened throughout the world. And it is today that His Highness is presenting to his people the Sikkim Development Plan.") The plan has a rosy future for Sikkim, with fertilized, chemicalized, non-insectiferous farms in every valley, with forest rangers gazing at acres of woods and fish-full lakes, with power dams on the Tista and Rangenokhu rivers and mills, wool presses, canneries downstream, with coal, copper, graphite, gypsum rolling from the hillsides, and twice as many roads, and twice as many hospitals, and twice twice twice as many kids in school, taught, too, by teachers who went to school – a land of plenty, of happy people. The job has begun (notably, by a badminton court for the bureaucrats). How the Sikkimis will take to this, however, is anybody's guess, for they can't even read the Rent Control Law, the first fruits of their democracy. The Sikkimis, after all, are a simple folk, farmers and hill-people, and it isn't easy to tell them, as the Rent Law does, that "any person contravening, attempting or abetting the contravention of any of the provisions of this act shall be liable to a fine which may extend to Rs. 5000/-, in default six months' rigorous or simple imprisonment." Perhaps, when they hear enough of this gobbledygook, the Sikkimis will again rise up, marching to the Sikkim Senate and shouting, "Our demands must be met!" (The ancient laws of Sikkim may have been harsh, but at least they were readable. They said the five crimes were matricide, patricide, lamacide, making mischief among the lamas and hurting good people, and added, "For the above offenses, punishments are inflicted, such as putting the eyes out, cutting the throat, having the tongue cut out, having the hands cut off, being thrown from a cliff and being thrown into deep water.") On the other hand, the Sikkimis are rather used to mysticism, and many of their Buddhist rites — their prayer, om mani padme hum, for instance – mean nothing at all to them. Perhaps, in the end, the Sikkimis will worship the Rent Law, too. Myself, I don't even want to guess.

The right pronunciation of Sikkim is "sik-kim," as to a dog. It means "the new house." To the west of Sikkim is far-flung Nepal; to the north is Tibet, a puppet of Communist China; and to the east is Bhutan, a kingdom so hard to reach that Mr. George J. W. Goodman, who wrote a novel, The Bubblemakers, about an expedition there, couldn't get his expedition farther than St. Louis, Missouri. So far, Sikkim, in the middle of all this, apparently is the world's end; but south of it is India, and I myself was in a Pan American clipper one day, in Sikkim the next. From Darjeeling, India, to Gangtok, Sikkim, I went in a taxi, a wild and awe-inspiring ride. Always, the taxi was in the clouds; as it crawled into the Himalayas, fog and drizzle swirled about it, but I got a glimpse of the wet, green hillsides, terrace on terrace, of monkeys on the devious roadway, of Himalayan condors with 10-foot wings, and, occasionally, of that terrible white mountain, Kanchenjunga, the highest in Sikkim, the world's third. At a river, I crossed the border, and then the taxi clambered up to Gangtok, the country's capital, and to the maharajah's red-and-gold palace on a skyline ridge. From there, I looked down, right and left, as from an airplane, at hundreds of green square miles of Sikkim – patches in the sunlight, patches in the rain.

The road I had traveled, a bridge at Hong Kong, and Panmunjom, Korea, are the only openings in Communist China's curtain. On this road, China will invade India, if at all; today, it is trodden, and peaceably, by the tall, party-colored Tibetans and their jingling mule trains, traveling south with yak-wool, to be made into blankets, Santa Claus beards and automobile floor mats, and north again with Western things. In Sikkim, the Tibetans stop at caravansaries, where, at night, they sing of love and dance with their womenfolk, they gamble and they drink of such Tibetan delicacies as hot socha and chang – the socha being a popular nonalcoholic beverage made of tea, salt, yak-butter and borax, and the chang being a kind of fermented barley; the Japanese would call it sake. (As for socha, I think the Japanese would call it socha: it's their word for "bad tea.") A Tibetan has 50 cups of socha a day, and he's sure to agree that it hits the spot. Otherwise, he is like any other tourist, for once he has sold the yak-wool, he buys a Leica and he roams the colorful parts of Gangtok to snap the natives — in Modern Tibetan, there are words for "camera," "develop" and "print." Many things have changed in the Forbidden Land, in this 20th Century. Now, a Tibetan who takes the desolate, age-old trail to Gangtok, Sikkim, needs a passport and those who forget them, or think they're a kind of newfangled throwaway, are being heavily fined; and at the Sikkimi-Tibetan frontier, at 14,000 feet in the Himalayas, a customs agent, a photographer and a fingerprint man shiver, blow on their knuckles, and wait.

The Maharajah of Sikkim is a Tibetan, but the common folk, as I've said, are Bhotias and Nepalis, and, as I've also said, there is some friction between the two. According to the Bhotias, the Nepalis are people who just got off the banana boat; and they hint darkly that the Nepalis are un-Sikkimi. All right, and so are the Bhotias, say the Nepalis, for no one is really a Sikkimi but the Lepchas, just as no one is really American but the Indians. The comparison, I think, is well taken, for the Lepchas are the Vanishing Sikkimis. A hundred years ago, the country was theirs; a dozen years ago, 25,000 were left; now there are 15,000 and as for the future, the Sikkim Development Plan tosses them off, saying, "Their leisure hours could be usefully employed in making rugs, tweeds and blankets." One can imagine this having been said about the Navahos.

Why the Lepchas are not able to propagate themselves is something of a mystery, for they certainly are tryinghard – this, at any rate, being the finding of a British anthropologist, Mr. John Morris, who went to Sikkim in 1937 and said the Lepchas are obsessed with sex. (The Lepchas say that Morris is obsessed with sex.) What's the matter, apparently, says Mr. Morris, is that the Lepchas get obsessed a little too early in life, being tuckered out when it's time for children. Among the Lepchas, he reports, a girl is used to losing her virtue at 10, being seduced by an older man, and after that she may sleep – nay, she must sleep – with her older sisters' husbands' younger brothers, her older sisters' husbands' brothers' sons, and, after she is married, her husband's or husbands' (the Lepchas are polyandrous) younger brothers and his or their older brothers' sons, which, in the close-knit communities of Sikkim, are half the people in town. On a journey, she may sleep with anyone at all – just the opposite, of course, of the custom in our own country; the Lepchas are hard put to understand the Mann Act. By the time a Lepcha is married, she has known, and rather intimately, the lion's share of the wedding party, and so there is a note of jollity at these affairs that is usually lacking in Christian ones. The bridegroom joins in the general mirth. "Now," he is told, as the bride is given away, "here is a little egg for you."

"Isn't this egg a bit stale?" he replies – not at all chivalrously, we would think.

"Well," one of the guests puts in, barely containing his merriment, "the fact is that I've carefully shelled the egg, so it'll be easier to eat."

When the guffaws die down, the groom retorts, if he's being on his toes, "Quite so. But, it is clear the egg hasn't been freshly shelled." By now, everyone at the wedding is in stitches, and tears are rolling down their cheeks – except, of course, for the egg herself, who is hiding her head coyly, thinking, perhaps, of the tender nights in store with her brothers-in-law and nephews. There isn't any divorce among the Lepchas. As Mr. Morris says, it just wouldn't serve any purpose.

In Lepcha Land, the religion is Buddhism, but many other things are mixed in, including a dash of the Old Testament. The Lepchas are said to believe in the Flood, it raining in the Himalayas for 15 days (in the Himalayas, a rainy day is like two or three of them anywhere else), and a single Lepcha and his wife escaping, in an ark; there is also a legend of Babel. Among the beliefs that are neither Buddhist nor Old Testament, fish nor fowl, are the satanic Mungs, the seraphic Rums and the human Muns, who, by putting an egg to their foreheads, see the future, and one belief that is fish, fowl and everything else under the sun is Go-sum, a salmagundic idol. Chiefly, a Go-sum is made of dough, but its navel is a turtle, its tail is a snake, and its sides are feathered with chicken feathers; there is butter in its hands, butter on its head and a feed-bag at its mouth, and round about are cups, cones, lamps, snakes, sausages, men, women, Mungs, Rums and other gods, all of them made of dough, as well as raw meat, red sticks, bamboo slivers, tufts of wool, and wooden labels. All of the foregoing is sprinkled with blood; then it is thrown to the dogs, who eat it, supposedly curing the sick. For childbirth, the Lepchas write an abracadabra on a piece of paper, roll it into a pill, coat it with butter and give it to the expectant mother to swallow. In Nepal, the people use railway tickets for this, but the age of science has yet to come to Sikkim.

Buddhism itself, as practiced by the Lepchas, and by the Bhotias, Tibetans and the Maharajah of Sikkim, is a religion of mysticism and mumbo-jumbo, the barest hint of whose profundity is seen, for instance, in its idea of the universe – seven concentric whorls of golden hills, intersticed by seven concentric oceans and environed by an iron wall that is 3121/2 miles high and 3,602,625 miles long. At the heart of this religion, in day-to-day practice, are those enigmatic words om mani padme hum, which the Sikkimis murmur as they walk, as they work, as they tell the 108 beads of their rosaries; too, om mani padme hum is written on prayer wheels and flies to heaven, it is said, with every clockwise spin. In Sikkim, the prayer wheels abound, and lamas and laymen never miss a chance to spin them. While I was there, I shared a bungalow with such a lama, a certain Bhikshu Sangharakshita, of Kalimpong, India, who also was on a visit, and also knew English; and one afternoon I asked him to explain, if he would, just what om mani padme hum is all about. The lama was sitting at the front of his bed, crosslegged, dark and hollow-eyed, his yellow robes glimmering in a shaft of light; he began by saying that certain experiments, now being made in India and the United States, indicate the words om mani padme hum are vibrating at 250,000 times per second – and that is where he lost me. The lama went on, however, to say that the universe, too, is vibrating, and that a person who says om mani padme hum again and again will, presently, vibrate in time with the universe. I listened to this patiently, and then I told the lama he was getting ahead of me and would he simply translate the words? "Of course," he said; mani means "the jewel," and padme is "in the lotus," and om and hum, which the dictionaries give as "oh" and "amen," really mean nothing at all, but are there because they vibrate. The jewel in the lotus, he said, is Buddha in the universe; also, you can look at the universe as being wisdom (jewel) and compassion (lotus), or, from another point of view, the absolute world is a jewel and the relative world, a lotus. That the jewel is in the lotus means the absolute world is a potentiality in the relative world, or that being a Buddha, "an enlightened one," is a potentiality in you and me. It really means a lot of things, the lama said, like the Chinese yin and yang, Om mani padme hum is a popular prayer with the laity – in fact, the only one they use — but the lamas know quite a few others, including om arapatsanadhi and om tare tutare mama ayur punyedsanyana pusphpita kuru swaha. A Sikkimi, in his lifetime, may say the om a hundred million times – yet never know what it means, for the words are in Sanskrit, a language as dead as Latin. This didn't seem to bother my friend, the lama. "It's the vibrations that count," he said.

In Sikkim, the Buddhist religion was unheard of until the 17th Century, when it was brought there from Tibet and by a Tibetan lama, a certain Lhatsun Ch'em-bo. "Lha-tsun Ch'em-bo" is really a title, meaning "the great reverend god"; his given name was Kun-zan Num-gye, or "the entirely victorious essence of goodness," but then, too, he may properly be called Lha-tsun Num Kha Jig-may, which means "the reverend god who fears not the sky," because he can fly, He-ru-ka-pa, which means "the naked one," Kusho Dsog-ch'en Ch'em-bo, which means "the great and honorable Dsog-ch'en," which, in turn — enough of this, because, what is more important, his name was mud in Tibet. In 1648, Lhatsun showed up in Lhasa, demanded an audience with the Dalai Lama, and, having been ushered to the throne of that august divinity, proceeded to punch him in the nose and vomit on the floor. Lha-tsun insisted it was sort of a magic charm, but the rest of the court were rather upset, and I can't believe they were taken in. Anyhow, we find Lhatsun in Sikkim soon afterwards. There, he preached a kind of Tibetan Buddhism – red-cap, as distinguished from yellow-cap – converted the Lepchas, founded a lamasery and, last but certainly not least, founded Sikkim, for he gave the Lepchas a maharajah, their first. This person, too, was a Tibetan, Namgyal; and all the ensuing maharajahs, including Sir Tashi Namgyal, are his descendants and all of them have married Tibetans, to keep the blood pure.

What I remember most about my trip to Sikkim is the night that Mr. Rustomji, the Dewan, asked me over for dinner. That was on June I, when the monsoon was supposed to begin – and it did, with a vengeance. In an hour, an unbelievable amount of rain lurched out of the sky, splashing into the bungalow where the lama and I were putting up, soaking the beds and floorboards; outside, the Sikkimis put their umbrellas up, hurrying home. To me, there was something very odd about an umbrella in the Himalayas. I quite expected the people to use coveralls of yak-wool, or nothing at all, perhaps; but in the monsoon season, the Sikkimis always go with an umbrella over their arm or hanging from their collars, in back of the neck. In a way, it is like an Arab who wears sunglasses, which many of them do.

Anyhow, I waited till the rain let up and then walked to the Dewan's home, up on the skyline ridge. There I'm afraid that I was received as Alice in Wonderland was, by the Mad Hatter. No one answered the door and, after knocking and hallooing for a minute or so, opening it and going inside, I found the Dewan of Sikkim at tea, playing bridge with his mother, his sister and a fourth party, a Sikkimi, and none of them saying a word to me. For a while I sort of stood there, feeling like the man in Philadelphia who doesn't read The Bulletin but realizing, of course, that the Dewan of Sikkim didn't mean to be rude; it's just that bridge is bridge, even in Sikkim. After the hand had been played, and argued, the Dewan said hello, introduced his family and, pointing to the fourth, his partner, said, "You know the Maharaj Kumar, don't you?" I answered that I didn't and the Maharaj Kumar and I shook hands. The younger son of the maharajah is tall, dark and handsome, with hair like Senator Kennedy's; he wore a blue turtleneck sweater and a blue sport shirt, which hung out, American-style, over corduroy pants; his English was perfect. He said he had graduated from Oxford.

After a few more bridge hands and a few more arguments, the five of us adjourned to the living room and we sipped brandy as the Dewan of Sikkim, an avid collector of things, showed us what he had picked up in Sikkim. Presently he began to talk of Sikkim's history. In the distant past, he said, the maharajah was not called a maharajah but a gurgle or pope and, he added with tongue in cheek, "I was thinking of bringing the title back."

The Maharaj Kumar, who was sipping a brandy, just about gagged. "What?" he cried, a look of horror on his face.

"Sir Tashi Namgyal, the Gurgle of Sikkim," said the Dewan, trying the words on his tongue. He was enjoying himself hugely although, to my way of thinking, the Dewan, or Divan, was hardly one to talk.

Desperately, the Maharaj Kumar turned to me and said, "What if some-one called you the Gurgle of Sikkim?"

"Frankly," I said, "I'd ask him to step outside."

"Precisely," the Maharaj Kumar glared at the Dewan, and then he saw it was all in fun. "Anyhow, I won't be a gurgle. It'll be my brother," he said.

"The other Maharaj Kumar," said the Dewan's mother.

The son of the maharajah looked at me impishly. Then he said, "My brother's a reincarnation, you know." He seemed to find this very amusing, which maybe it is.

"Oh?" I said. "Who of?"

"Heaven knows. Of his late uncle, I suppose."

Here we were interrupted by the Dewan who had been chuckling to himself up to now and muttering gurgle, gurgle. "This Maharaj Kumar is the Development Commissioner," he said.

"Is that a political plum," I asked, "or are you really very busy developing and commissioning?"

The Maharaj Kumar made as if he were shocked. "Oh, dear, if it weren't for my guiding hand," he said, "the country would fall apart."

"Yes," said the Dewan, smirking. "He works very, very hard."

"Work, work, work," sighed the Maharaj Kumar.

"He wakes," said the Dewan, "every morning at four o'clock and, after the usual devotions, he falls diligently to." Then, the Dewan of Sikkim and the Maharaj Kumar laughed and laughed, until their laughter filled the room — two politicians, it seemed to me, playing their little game and having their little joke, but, when you get down to it after all, doing a hundred times more for the Sikkimis than a hundred long years of maharajahs.