Soul Identity

by batchelder, dennis

  Tenzin smiled at him and they conversed for a moment in Ladakhi. Then the man entered the gazebo, grabbed a handle on the prayer wheel, and walked clockwise around the tiny room. When he finished his loop he gave the wheel a spin and headed off.

  “All day long that wheel gets spun.” Sheela nodded at an old lady sitting in the sun. “She has her own personal prayer wheel in her hand.”

  I watched her spin her wheel with one hand, finger her rosary with the other, and move her lips in prayer. “She’s pretty coordinated,” I said.

  “She should be,” Bhanu said. “She does it all day long.”

  “What’s the prayer she’s saying?” I asked Tenzin.

  ”Om, manni padmi ho. One time, one bead. One hundred eight beads in rosary. She saying one hundred eight rosaries every day.”

  I gestured at the gazebo. “Every town has a prayer wheel?” I asked him.

  “Every neighborhood,” Tenzin said. “Our way of life in Ladakh.” He pointed to a shack next to the gazebo. “We getting food here.”

  “What do they serve?” I asked.

  “Only two Ladakhi dishes. Momo, which are dumplings. You get them steamed, fried, or half fried. Fried is best. Also thukpa, which is noodle vegetable soup.” He motioned us toward the door. “You please eat. I finding something warm for you to wear.”

  The four of us sat at a small table and drank the thukpa right out of our bowls. I picked up a momo with my fingers. “All the food has the same bland taste,” I said.

  Bhanu snorted. “The guide books rave about Ladakhi food, but it’s got no spice at all.”

  Tenzin came in carrying two shawls. “Yak wool. Very warm. After you eat, talk to store owner.” He pointed out the door at a building across the street.

  Val and I put on the shawls, and they did take the edge off the bitter cold.

  We paid the bill, walked across the street, and negotiated for the shawls. Then we got in the car and continued to Lamayuru.

  “We almost arriving,” Tenzin said after another hour of driving. He pointed. “Lamayuru gompa there.”

  We looked up. The town was ahead of us, and a set of large buildings were nestled on the hill above.

  When we reached the town, Tenzin parked next to a prayer wheel. He pointed to a small path. “Up that hill is gompa. Lama living there.”

  We walked up the hill. After fifty yards, I held up my hand. “The oxygen is too thin,” I said, panting. “I have to catch my breath.”

  We rested and admired the view of the mountains around us. After a few minutes we continued the rest of the way up. We followed a path that led us between two buildings. We climbed another set of stairs and stood in a large courtyard in the middle of the gompa.

  A monk in a red robe came up to us and showed us a receipt book. Bhanu spoke with him. “Scott and Val must pay a suggested donation amount,” he said. “It’s fifty rupees each.” He pulled out a hundred rupee note, and the monk detached two tickets.

  “Thank you for your donation to our building and restoration fund,” I read. I looked up and smiled at the monk. “Glad we could help.”

  “Tok jye shye.” The monk bowed.

  “What did he say?” I asked Bhanu.

  “I think thank you.”

  I turned to the monk. “Julay. We are looking for Lama Tinless Tiksey.”

  The monk said something to Bhanu, and Bhanu replied. The monk launched into a long speech, and Bhanu nodded his head.

  “The lama is not receiving visitors today,” Bhanu said. “He wants us to come back next week.”

  The monk walked away.

  “Get him back here,” I said.

  Bhanu called out, but the monk kept walking. He reached a door on the far side of the courtyard, and he used a key on a chain around his neck to unlock it.

  “Excuse me!” I hollered.

  The monk had just opened the door. He paused and looked at me.

  “I have a personal invitation from the lama,” I called.

  The monk shook his head and walked through. He closed the door behind him.

  Bhanu shouted something. “I translated it into Hindi,” he said to me.

  We stared at the door. It opened a minute later, and the monk came out. He walked up to Bhanu and said something.

  Bhanu turned to me. “He wants the invitation.”

  I handed the code sheet with the comment to the monk.

  The monk bowed, took the paper, and walked back through the door. He closed it behind him.

  I looked around the courtyard. “We paid our fifty rupees. Why not see the temple while we wait?”

  “That would be nice,” Sheela said. “We have to leave our shoes here.” She and Bhanu bent down and unlaced their boots.

  Val and I slipped off our sandals and stood barefoot on the cold paving stones. “I hope there’s carpeting,” I said.

  Sheela smiled. “I’m sure it has a mat.”

  We stepped through a door and into a large room. Low benches and tables sat in rows on our left. Tall glass-fronted cabinets stood along the right wall.

  I walked up to the cabinets. “Look at all these old books,” I said.

  Another monk came out of the shadows in front of us. “Our gompa is very lucky to have three complete sets of Buddha’s writings,” he said. “Each set is one hundred and eight books. These books are hand written and are hundreds of years old.”

  I looked at the monk. He stood five feet tall and wore a red robe. He was barefoot, but the cold didn’t seem to bother him. “It doesn’t look like anybody reads them,” I said. “They’re covered in dust.”

  “These days we use digital files and the Web, which make sharing information more efficient. There’s not much need to go back to the original books.” He sighed. “That is a shame, because these books are illustrated with beautiful pictures, delicately drawn in rich colors.”

  “You can learn a lot when you look back in time,” I said. I ran my finger down some carvings on the cabinet door. “Things you wouldn’t understand from just seeing the words on a computer screen.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “Welcome to our gompa. Please let me know if you have any questions.”

  We walked to the far end of the room. In front of us we found an open area. On our left we saw a grand scene painted on the wall; lots of people and dragons and trees, but I couldn’t make out the story. I looked at the wall on the right. Somebody had painted images of Buddha in three columns of nine. Dust-covered gold Buddha statues filled a cabinet next to the wall.

  We walked toward the open area. “Whoa,” I said.

  Val stood next to me. “Incredible.”

  The room ended with a long wooden railing. We stood on a balcony that overlooked a huge hall dominated by an enormous statue of a seated Buddha. The floor of the hall was at least thirty feet below us, and the sky-lit ceiling was another fifteen feet up. We looked directly into the Buddha’s large face.

  Bhanu stood next to me. He pointed to a stairway barely visible in the corner. “Want to go down?” he asked.

  We headed down the stairs and walked clockwise around the statue. Bowls of fruit lay on tables. Various coins and notes were scattered around. I looked into one of the bowls and saw more coins and jewelry lying under the fruit.

  The little monk had followed us down the stairs. “It’s considered auspicious to leave a gift of the smallest note in your wallet,” he said to me.

  “How auspicious?” I asked.

  He nodded at the bowl. “Give it a try.”

  I opened my wallet. I had spent my last rupee notes on the shawls; all I had were hundred dollar bills. “Can you break a hundred?” I asked him.

  “That’s not auspicious,” Val said. “That’s cheap.”

  I sighed and took out a hundred dollar bill. “This had better be super auspicious.” I dropped it in the bowl and looked at the monk. “Am I supposed to make a wish?” I asked.

  The monk smiled. “I already know what you want.”

  I raised
my eyebrows. “Can you read my mind?”

  He shook his head. “No, but I can read my ten year old code.” He held up the sheet of paper I gave to the other monk in the courtyard. “It’s about time somebody found this. I was beginning to think you guys would never come.”

  twenty-three

  We sat on the carpeted floor in Tinless Tiksey’s private quarters and sipped tea from ancient golden bowls. Tinless gave Val and me wool socks to wear, and for the first time all day I felt warm.

  I set my bowl down on the floor. “Tinless, I’m really struggling to believe your story,” I said.

  “It seems rather fantastic, doesn’t it?”

  “It does. You said that a young man forced you to do the Soul Identity work.”

  He nodded.

  “But you went to SchmidtLabs in Hyderabad, and then you flew to Boston with Hans Schmidt,” I said. “That doesn’t sound forced.”

  “It might be that I need to some more details to my story.” He stood up and clasped his hands behind his back.

  “Start at the beginning again,” I suggested. “You were here in Lamayuru, and a new monk had just joined your gompa.”

  Tinless nodded. “Yes, a very interesting monk. A young Western monk. That was twelve or thirteen years ago.”

  “Why would a foreigner join your gompa?”

  Tinless shrugged. “He had recently lost his grandfather and his parents. He claimed to be seeking out a path through life, and he had chosen Buddhism as the way. He told me that he came to Ladakh to find peace.”

  “And you welcomed him in,” I said.

  “Of course we did. He was devoted, friendly, and interested in learning our traditions. He helped me finish my reorganization of the monastery finances, we put the lama incarnation genealogy online, and together we digitized and published the gompa’s manuscripts and artwork.”

  Bhanu held up his hand. “Lama Tinless, can you tell us the monk’s name?” he asked.

  “Fred Antere,” Tinless said. “But here in the gompa we all called him Red Tree.”

  Fred Antere was speaking at WorldWideSouls on Saturday. I looked at Val and put a finger to my lips. Might as well be careful.

  She gave me a nod. “Why Red Tree?” she asked Tinless.

  He smiled. “In his monk robes, he looked like a tall red tree. But he named himself. Now that I think about it, it’s really just words made from the letters in his name. A piece of him, but not all of him.” He sighed. “Which, we found out later, was all we ever had.”

  Tinless stuck his head out the door of his quarters, then pulled it back in and turned to me. “I fell in love with Red Tree. We all did.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “Not that kind of love,” he said. “But Red Tree was special to all of us here at the gompa.”

  “Now you said it went bad. What really happened?” Sheela asked.

  Tinless walked to the window. He used his thumbnail to scrape away some frost, then peered outside.

  What was he looking for?

  We waited for him to continue. After a couple of minutes he faced us. “Six months after he arrived, Red Tree came to me. We sat right where you sit and drank tea from these bowls.” Tinless sighed. “And then he ripped my world apart.”

  “What did he do?” I asked.

  He looked at me. “Red Tree had collected a set of compromising photographs of most of the monks in the gompa. Including me.”

  “Compromising?” Val asked.

  Tinless sat down on the mats and crossed his legs. He arranged his red robe to cover his knees. “Life in the gompa is lonely. Over the centuries, we’ve learned to handle this through various diversions. We don’t expect the outside world to understand, or condone, what we do.” He shook his head. “But exposing our activities to others would destroy our gompa.”

  I didn’t know, nor did I want to know, what kinds of compromising activities the monks in the Lamayuru gompa engaged in.

  “He blackmailed you.” I said.

  Tinless nodded.

  “And that’s how you ended up at SchmidtLabs.”

  “Yes, and you know the rest of the story. Red Tree knew about the work at Soul Identity. I helped Hans Schmidt get it.” He sighed. “And I inserted the matching code change, and the build override, when Red Tree told me to.”

  “So who wrote the bad code?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “I assume Red Tree did the coding—it wasn’t me.”

  “Do you know what the code did?”

  Tinless looked down. “I do. The lamas of Soul Identity—”

  “We call them overseers,” Bhanu said.

  Tinless nodded. “Sorry, I had forgotten,” he said. “No true overseers at Soul Identity will be found as long as that bad code is active.”

  “That would be like somebody eliminating the lamas in this gompa and installing their own.” I said.

  He sighed. “Yes, it would. Though it would be much harder to do that to us.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  He stood up and opened the window. “Let me show you something outside.”

  Val and I came stood. The cold wind stole the warmth I had just restored.

  Tinless hung out his arm and pointed down. “You see the stupas below us?”

  I looked out at the stone structures that we had seen dotted over the countryside. “That’s what they’re called?” I asked. Some of them were mortar-coated and painted white; others had deteriorated into loose piles of rocks. Each stupa stood between five and fifteen feet tall.

  He nodded. “Do you know why we build them?”

  I shook my head.

  “After we lamas are reborn, we recognize our stupas and gain memories from our previous life. It’s our way to connect our lives together,” he said. “They are the bridges between our past, present, and future.”

  “Soul Identity has bridges too,” Val said.

  He nodded again. “But our bridges trigger memories, and yours do not. Ours are mystical and harder to prove, and yours are scientific. Yours leave no doubt as to a matching identity, but they do not tell you what it means to be connected.”

  “We store memories in our depositary, to pass on to future carriers,” Val said.

  “But then you rely on others to lay faith on top of your science.” Tinless shook his head. “I feel sorry for Soul Identity members. They are convinced in the bridges, but they have no tools to benefit from them.”

  “Is that why you helped to sabotage the matching program?” I asked.

  “I only helped so Red Tree wouldn’t destroy our gompa,” he said. “What we did was wrong, and I am sorry.” He closed the window after taking another quick peek below.

  We sat back down. Tinless poured more tea.

  Bhanu cleared his throat. “What happened to Red Tree?”

  “He came to Hyderabad, and stayed in my apartment while I spent the days at SchmidtLabs. We installed software that allowed him to program from the apartment. I know Hans Schmidt thinks I’m a genius, but Red Tree did most of the work.”

  Tinless frowned. “Each night in the apartment I listened to Red Tree rail against Soul Identity. When we completed the matching code, he became unbearable, and spoke of nothing other than his plans to destroy your organization.”

  It was a bit surreal, sitting on a floor high in the Himalayas, sipping tea out of golden cups, and learning from a Buddhist monk how he was blackmailed by a scheming, revenge-filled teenager.

  “He shared all his plans?” I asked.

  “Yes, but I’m sure you know them too.” Tenzin wore a sad smile.

  “We know,” I said. “The names are mostly anagrams. Red Tree is Fred Antere, and Fred Antere is Andre Feret. He was trying to become the only overseer.” I didn’t mention the WorldWideSouls connection.

  Tinless nodded. “I think that sums it up. Now please excuse me for a moment. I have something that may help you stop him.”

  After he left, I asked the others, “Do you think he’s telling th
e truth?”

  Sheela nodded. “I think so. Though there seems to be more than what he’s shared.”

  “We just have to ask the right questions,” Bhanu said.

  “Guilt seems to work,” Val said. “We got our best answers when we told him how much he’s hurting Soul Identity.”

  Tinless returned with a photograph. “Red Tree removed all pictures of himself before we left for Hyderabad, but later a tourist sent me this in a thank you note.” He passed it to me.

  Two white middle aged ladies in shorts and baseball caps stood with Tinless and a tall, slender young man draped in a red robe. In the background a young child was spinning the gompa’s prayer wheel.

  I looked at Val. “Is it Andre Feret?”

  “That’s him.” She sighed. “So what else, Tinless? We’ve got a real mess on our hands now. Have you told us everything?”

  “What else can I tell you?” Tinless looked distressed. “When Red Tree flew to Massachusetts for his own matching, I did my best to block the deployment of the new software.” He shook his head. “I convinced Hans Schmidt that we needed a few extra weeks of testing, but it wasn’t long enough.”

  I remembered George telling me that Feret had to stay several weeks in the guesthouse. “He outlasted you,” I said. “Feret claimed he had an eye infection. He must have been waiting for the program to get in place before he went to the match committee.”

  Tinless nodded. “He was, and then he called me up and warned me that if I played any more games, he would release the photos and destroy the gompa anyway. So I resigned from SchmidtLabs and returned to Lamayuru.” He turned to Val. “I am sorry for the pain I have caused your organization.”

  “Me too, Tinless.” She stared directly into his eyes. “Why didn’t you find a better way to warn us?”

  Tinless looked at the floor. “I did put the comment in the code, and you eventually did find it. I send postcards to Hans Schmidt every year, asking him to come up here to visit.” He met Val’s gaze. “Red Tree has two monks stationed here. They watch me constantly. My phone lines are not private, I have no access to email, and I cannot make a trip without them knowing.”

  Sheela frowned. “Tinless, what’s going to happen now? Surely those monks know we’re here.”