At the tawang view pub, there are only dangling conversations. Between Shakira’s manic pelvic pirouetting and Beyonce’s purring, the man behind the LCD projector occasionally takes a couple of minutes to manoeuvre through a maze of video files. Between videos — invariably of female pop stars — conversation picks up, the beer is gulped and cigarettes are lit. Then suddenly the human din is overpowered by what returns on screen. Suddenly it all boils down to Britney’s navel. The men — and there are only men here at the pub — direct crude smoke rings at it; the rings loose form somewhere between table and navel. Like conversations, smoke rings too suffer an abrupt end at this pub in a sleepy Arunachal Pradesh town.

Lobsang is the only person in that room who has his back to all the action. He has been here many times, Lobsang says, since the time Tawang’s first “real” pub opened a couple of months back. “And they mostly have the same videos playing every evening,” he adds. With his friends Tenzing and Dorji flanking him, the last time the trio was here, Lobsang sheepishly recounts, they had got themselves drunk silly, bad enough for them to rule out returning to their parents’ home. “We had run out of money. Therefore, had to take a room upstairs at the hotel on credit,” grins Tenzing, the high school dropout.

I had got introduced to Tenzing earlier in the day at his father’s souvenir shop in the centre of Tawang town. Tenzing lets his Maruti car out on hire and in it we had travelled up to the Tawang Monastery — reportedly the biggest Buddhist monastery in India and noted for being a repository of ancient and rare, gilded Buddhist text. From the town centre, the monastery, situated at an altitude of about 10,000 feet, seemed imposing. From the monastery, the small hutments of Tawang, aptly for a place where Buddhism is the way of life and known as one of the last citadels of old Tibetan culture, seemed like subjects cowering before its presence.

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