The Godfather of Kathmandu

by John Burdett

  Exactly as I was thinking this thought, Tietsin focused on me with such intensity I experienced it as a passing headache. I looked up in astonishment at that rugged face, which betrayed no loving-kindness. Indeed, for that moment it did not seem human at all; perhaps it wasn’t. Then he looked away again.

  After his unusual account of Tibetan history, Tietsin’s summary of the principles of Buddhism was surprisingly standard. He took us through explications of the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha in the usual order, simplifying for the farang audience. When he’d finished, everyone clapped politely and started to leave. I watched them, five white women and three white men, all of them under thirty. I could not tell if they were European, American, or Australian; they all looked innocent enough: travelers without commitment. Maybe Tietsin was aiming his discourse at the people they would be a couple of lifetimes hence. None of them looked like they were going to rush to ordain as monks and nuns. All of a sudden I was alone with the Doctor himself, who was staring out the window at the two great eyes on the stupa and ignoring me. I coughed.

  He turned with a grin, came over, and twisted a chair around so he could sit and stare into my eyes. Finally he held out his right hand, the one with the missing fingers, and clasped my own between the two remaining digits. He held on until I had to tug to get my hand back. Those remaining fingers were extra strong. Now he jerked a chin at me, daring me to speak.

  “Did you lose your fingers when you crossed the mountains to Dharmasala?”

  “No. I lost them in Chamdo.”

  “I have no idea where that is.”

  “Extreme east of Tibet. Where the Chinese started the invasion.”

  I found myself nodding slowly while information I had absorbed in a vague way years ago began to filter through the memory cells. Somewhere the biocomputer was going through its elaborate calculations, which ended with a brief flash of inspiration on my part. “You were in the resistance?”

  He inhaled deeply, then exhaled. “Thousands of us voluntarily disrobed so we could fight for our country. It didn’t seem such a stupid thing to do; after all, we had America on our side, in the form of the CIA.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I read about it somewhere. You were betrayed.”

  He shrugged. “You could put it like that. Or you could simply call it a flaw in democracy. America voted for Nixon.”

  I remembered now. The president with the meatloaf mind saw China as a useful counterbalance to the Soviet Union—and to hell with human rights, which, as a part-time burglar himself, he’d never had any time for anyway. As soon as he got into power he ordered the CIA to hold back on support for the Tibetan resistance.

  “But you must have been very young,” I said.

  “Fifteen. I’d already been in the robes for seven years. When I heard that my father and all the men in my home village had gone to fight, I joined the other monks who disrobed at that time. Of course, the Chinese slaughtered us. But that wasn’t the point. Was it?” He stopped, waited for my question.

  “You escaped to Dharamsala?”

  He puckered his lips. “Maybe it’s better you don’t know what I did next.” Another pause. “Sure, in the end I got to Dharamsala, paid my respects to His Holiness, accepted his gracious offer to find me a place in a monastery there so I could continue my religious studies.”

  Again a pause, as if he were calculating exactly how much information to let out. “But when the time came to take my vows again, I couldn’t do it. In my soul the Chinese had replaced the Buddha with hatred. Things that happen when you’re still young are hard to overcome.” He sighed. “So I found a girl.” He smiled. “Or, I should say, a girl found me. A Westerner, of course. A natural born do-gooder, which is the same as saying someone blind to their own badness. It was her notion that love and marriage would heal me. I believed her. I was so new to the West, so disillusioned with everything else, I assumed she had the right answer. That’s how naïve I was.”

  He looked at me with a comic expression. “I had a well-trained mind from my monastic studies, so I went through the usual third-world thing of collecting qualifications. I ended up with a doctorate in Tibetan history—really useful for joining corporate America, right? Naturally, love and marriage failed in the end, as they always must. The wife who would have died for me on day one was starting to think about having me bumped off by day one thousand. I had been brought up to take vows seriously, so there was no way I was ever going to leave her.” Here he let a few beats pass while he contemplated me. “But when the self-righteous, hypochondriacal, self-pitying, life-fearing, man-resenting, competitive, criminal-minded, infantile bitch dumped me I wept with relief. Thank Buddha there were no children.” He held up both hands, one deformed, the other whole. “Me voilà.” He cocked an eyebrow.

  “You are a misogynist?”

  “Nope. It can happen to anyone. Let’s say the aspect she offered of her multifaceted humanity was pretty unvarying toward the end.”

  I stopped short. “The whole of humanity is that bad?”

  “Actually, I was going easy on her. And the rest of us. I left out ‘homicidal.’”

  It would be a characteristic of his conversation that I seemed frequently to find myself at the receiving end of some kind of spiritual revelation when I thought we were having a normal chat. He leaned closer to me to whisper, “Do you really think that in the future it will be nations alone fighting for scarce resources? Don’t be so naïve, we’ll be fighting each other, all against all, down to the last square inch of commercially viable dust. Actually, that is what we’re doing already. Without spiritual aspiration we revert, do you see? Not merely to the monkey state, that wouldn’t be so bad. No, all the way back down the evolutionary spiral. Those are the stakes. How would you like to be worker number ten million and twelve in a termite nest?”

  Something about Tietsin made you feel he wasn’t just shooting his mouth off; it was as if he were reading from a text in the sky. I badly wanted to change the subject.

  “You speak French?”

  “French, English, Tibetan, Hindi, some Thai.” He paused. “And Chinese. When your karma is that of the Homeless One, you’d better learn to be a linguist.”

  I remembered that “Homeless One” was a technical expression for a Buddhist monk.

  It was at that moment I experienced for the first time a sensation which was to repeat itself a number of times in my association with him. It was a curious feeling that I was about to faint, then just at the moment of loss of consciousness a wave of energy flooded my mind and I recovered in what can only be described as a higher form of consciousness. I knew two things: that this was something Tietsin was doing to me deliberately, and that the exercise of such powers was strictly forbidden to genuine Buddhists.

  All this time he had been watching me curiously, while the assemblage point of my mind hovered somewhere above the top of my head and sensory import became pleasantly blurred, as if the five senses didn’t matter anymore.

  Now he stood up and gave a great big benevolent smile which effortlessly wiped away the heaviness of the previous moment. “Let’s get out of here,” he said, and, limping, led the way down the stairs. I had to follow slowly, so as not to lose my balance, but the sensation was at all times seductively pleasant.

  “We watched you yesterday, when you came with that Hindu with the rag around his head. We were very impressed. Without seeming to think about it, you started at the most easterly point of the stupa, walked around it exactly three and a half times, carefully turning every prayer wheel, which brought you up at exactly opposite the point where you started: west. When that old lady approached you for money, you didn’t stick to the letter of the law but showed compassion over and above strict dharma and gave her rather a lot of dough. You are a terrible romantic, therefore: you broke the law for love. That makes you a high security risk on the one hand—and a dreadful sucker—but a sympathetic fellow traveler on the other. Let’s say you already passed our interview yester
day, there’s nothing more about you we need to know. So this day is your opportunity to interview me. Fire away.”

  I tried to say, Interview you?, but the words would not come out. We had reached the bottom of the stairs and turned right toward the great stupa, but all the people were gone. I gasped.

  8

  There is nothing magical about telepathy; it is merely one of those faculties our ancestors developed to a certain point before discarding it in favor of something more reliable, like answering machines. I had never experienced it in anything but the most atrophied form—Chanya and I were occasionally telepathic, usually reading each other’s minds with regard to things that didn’t matter much; I had never seen anything like this.

  For a start the stupa had changed color. It was black. The eyes were an intense, angry red; a great, exaggerated burst of enraged lightning was emerging from the steeple; it was night; a bloated full moon hung in the eastern sky; and, weirdest of all: nothing was happening. I mean, there was no movement. I was looking at a mental painting, an internal snapshot which Tietsin had transferred to me. Later, once the initial amazement had subsided, I would penetrate to a deeper and still more disturbing meaning: this was how Tietsin saw Buddhism, the world, life. Or, you could say this was a picture of his soul he was showing me.

  The moment evaporated, the sun came back out, the stupa was a brilliant white again and surrounded by pilgrims in burgundy robes and tourists in shorts and sandals and jolly souvenir shops, and Tietsin was staring at me with that curious look on his face. “Interview over?” he asked with exaggerated courtesy. “Let’s take a stroll. We’ll be like spies in those Cold War movies who have to conduct their negotiations in open places where there are no microphones and anyone following us would be conspicuous.”

  I spared him a wild-eyed glance as I followed. “Would you mind telling me how you did that? I mean, excuse me, but for a moment just then you took over my whole mind.”

  He shrugged. “Blame my meditation master. I was a star student before I disrobed. There was stuff he showed me that shouldn’t really be shared with a teenager. To this day I don’t know if he passed on those advanced initiations because he thought I would be a lama, or because he knew the Chinese were coming and there was no time left for niceties, or because he was the kind of master who didn’t give a shit, which is supposed to be the best kind. Obviously, for whatever reason he felt he had no choice but to risk my sanity.” He gave me a quick glance. “Nothing is ever as simple as it seems. Come, let us make merit.”

  I followed his uneven gait around the stupa, spinning the prayer wheels as we went. He had a specific technique, a professional’s handiness with the brass. I was less adept.

  After the first nine wheels, Tietsin said, “Whoever is angry, harbors ill will, is evil-minded and envious, whose views are delusive, who is deceitful, he is to be known as an outcast.”

  I tried to remember where I had heard that before. Surely it was nothing less than the Vasala Sutra? I said, “Whoever destroys life, whether bird or animal, insect or fish, has no compassion for life …”

  “Whoever is destructive or aggressive in town and country and is a known vandal or thug …”

  “Whoever steals what is considered to belong to others, whether it be situated in villages or the forest …”

  “Whoever, having contracted debts, defaults and when asked to pay, retorts, ‘I am not indebted to you’ …”

  “Whoever is desirous of stealing even a trifle and takes such a thing, having killed a man going along the road …”

  “Whoever commits perjury either for his own benefit, for that of others, or for the sake of profit …”

  “Whoever has illicit affairs with the wives of his relatives or friends, either by force or through mutual consent …”

  “Whoever does not support his father or mother, who are old and infirm, being himself in a prosperous position …”

  “Whoever strikes or abuses by words either father, mother, brother, sister, or mother-in-law …”

  “Whoever being asked for good advice teaches what is misleading or speaks in obscure terms …”

  “Whoever having committed an offense wishes to conceal it from others and is a hypocrite …”

  “Whoever having gone to another’s house and taken advantage of the hospitality there does not reciprocate in like manner …”

  “Whoever deceives a priest, monk, or any other spiritual preceptor …”

  “Whoever abuses by words and does not serve a priest or monk coming for a meal …”

  “Whoever, being enmeshed in ignorance, makes untrue predictions for paltry gain …”

  “Whoever exalts himself and despises others, smug in his self-conceit …”

  “Whoever is a provoker of quarrels or is avaricious, has malicious desires, is envious, shameless, and has no qualms in committing evil …”

  “Whoever insults the Buddha or his disciples, whether renounced ones or laymen …”

  “Whoever not being an arhat pretends to be one, he is indeed the greatest rogue in the whole world, the lowest outcast of all …”

  “Thus have I exposed those who are outcasts …”

  “One does not become an outcast by birth, one does not become a Brahmin by birth. It is by deed that one becomes an outcast, it is by deed that one becomes a Brahmin.”

  The celebrated sutra had taken us one half turn of the stupa. We had started in the west, I suppose because Tietsin wanted to finish in the east. He was silent for the whole of the second turn of the stupa, then he said, as he spun the wheels with particular vigor, “I guess we have a deal.”

  “I guess. How much can you ship?”

  “Our movement needs forty million dollars. Whatever will get us that sum, we’ll ship.”

  “Your movement? Is it political?”

  “Sure. We’re going to invade China.”

  “What with?”

  He stopped short, as if the question surprised him. “With the inexorable power of Tantra, of course.”

  I assumed this was some kind of macabre Tibetan joke; we were talking, after all, about a Communist republic which suppressed religion wherever it could, so I focused on the practical issue. “How can you do what no one else can do and export so much at one time?”

  “Contacts and know-how. The stuff is shipped raw from Afghanistan into Waziristan, that is to say tribal Pakistan, where it is processed. From there it is moved to Ladakh, which used to be known as Greater Tibet, all under our supervision. People forget, Buddhists were active in that part of the world for a thousand years before Mohammed. Our contacts predate Islam. From Ladakh we ship it directly into Chinese-occupied Tibet. That’s the key. Tibet is mostly pure emptiness, and anyway our people are the only ones who can tolerate the climate—the Chinese all get very frail at that altitude, especially when stationed outside of Lhasa, where there are no hospitals and no oxygen bottles. We have total free rein. No one can stop us.”

  “Does the Dalai Lama know?”

  Here Tietsin stopped. It was the first time he had frowned at me. “Of course not. His Holiness is the greatest living Tibetan. Actually, he is the greatest living human being, he is the incarnation of Avalokiteshvara, but his mission is not to save Tibet. He has invaded the world instead. Anyway, he has said he will not reincarnate, or if he does it will not be in Tibet. Do you understand what that means?”

  “You and your movement are left to defend it on your own?”

  “No, we’ve already lost it. I and my movement are going to take it back on our own. From under the noses of two billion Chinese.”

  “How many lifetimes will it take?”

  “That is the only unknown in the whole equation. It is also irrelevant.”

  My next question, obviously, involved the sensitive issue of morality. However worthy the cause, Tietsin was involved in shipping poison in bulk. I didn’t need to ask it. He said, almost apologetically, “I follow my dharma. That’s all I can tell you. At the end of the day
I am is an unfathomable mystery.”

  We had come to a stop, our three and one half turns of the stupa were complete. We had landed in the east. As we shook hands and he gripped mine with those two fingers, Tietsin said, “We’ll ship it to any address in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, or Burma. We’ll talk about offshore bank accounts nearer the time. We prefer to use Lichtenstein.”

  I was about to take my leave, but those two fingers of his were pressing into my palm, refusing to let go until I looked into his eyes. Naturally, he had one more spectacular little trick to play that day. I saw it again, in each of his eyes this time, in perfect miniature clarity: the black stupa, the lightning, the rage.

  “Nice meeting you,” Tietsin said, and turned to make another tour, spinning the wheels as he went.

  I should have let him go, but instead, in my ignorance, I stared after him, willing him to come back. So he did. Now he was standing in front of me again, rolling his eyes back, as if he hated having to preach but felt he had no choice. “There’s only one real instruction. Forget the Eightfold Path if it doesn’t apply to your situation. Be one of those who travel to the Far Shore. The Buddha doesn’t give a broken alms bowl how you get there, just do it before it’s too late. There isn’t a lot of time left. That’s all I can tell you.”

  Then he was gone.

  9

  When the how-to publishers produce a handbook for aspiring consiglieres it will emphasize the wisdom of getting the hell out, once the main deal is done. Any good mafioso would have gotten on the next plane, right? Even a mediocre, 9-to-5 type of consigliere would have done so. Even a tenth-rate thug who operates on animal instinct would have known to go to the Thai Air offices on Durbar Marg and have them change the ticket so he could leave that same day and rush back to Colonel Vikorn with the wonderful news that we could expect to receive however many tons of poison for retail within the next month, probably enough to put our main rival General Zinna out of business—wouldn’t he? And did I?