As if on cue, every dog within a mile started barking. We heard shouting and the sound of shattering glass. They were definitely getting closer, throwing bricks and rocks, breaking windows. What the hell was going on?
In a sickening flash, I remembered: the blackout. Everyone in Kathmandu was supposed to turn off their lights from dusk to dawn, as a memorial to the students who’d been killed last month. Those who didn’t were assumed to be royalists and dealt with accordingly.
We jumped off the bed. Grace raced down the narrow steps to her front door. She threw the bolt and snapped off the outside light. I turned out the kitchen, bedroom, and office lights. Grace ran back upstairs. We crouched together in the far corner of her bedroom, as far from the window as possible.
The pack stopped outside her flat. There was laughing and shouting, and we heard a few heaved bricks fall onto the road until, with an implosive thump, the sodium streetlight was smashed. Then the protesters marched on, chanting and stomping along the packed dirt road. We heard them stop at the construction site at the corner, gathering more bricks. They rounded the corner toward Chabahil, their voices lost beneath the braying of the pariah dogs.
Grace opened the blinds. Glass shrapnel glinted in the street.
“The Nepali idea of a quiet night at home.” She grinned apologetically, as if she were responsible for the melee.
“Life During Wartime,” I shrugged, wondering if there was any confluence at all with the Talking Heads song.
“From Bir to Eternity,” Grace offered.
“A Farewell to Alms.”
There was a pause, filled with background barking.
“The Jana Andolusian Dog,” Grace said triumphantly.
If there was any fallout from my previous announcement, it had dispersed. Still, I felt shell-shocked. “Six fucking days,” I muttered, sitting down.
Grace joined me, and slid her arm around my waist. “You know what that means.”
“What?”
She pulled me toward her. “We have no time to waste.”
Her bed was a genuine improvement over the Pashupati ghat. We lit two candles, undressed each other, and made love for real.
16
Lhosar
THE LAST DAY of February 1990 was the first day of 2117: Tibet’s Iron Horse Year. This was Lhosar. I navigated a swarm of cows, cars, cabs, and pedestrians, locked my CG125 outside the Dharma Voice bookshop, and walked through the entrance gate into Boudhnath. Bells were ringing, and the air was foggy with juniper smoke.
Though I’d be back in America within a week, I was struck anew by the contrast between my two homes. There is a tension that lingers over the United States, a vibration so subtle and so pervasive that we rarely feel it directly. It is like an atmospheric inversion: as much a part of our environment as the radio waves that knit the air, as invisible as the pollen from our flowers. We emerge into it the day we’re born and breathe it while we dream. Most of us spend our entire lives within its umbra, never even suspecting that it exists. As the anxiety that it carries harangues us, we blame ourselves.
But we are not to blame. We are not the sources of this strident signal, but its hapless receivers. I know this because I’ve managed to escape, now and then, from the grip of that malignant broadcast. Imagine a laboratory rat who has spent his entire adult life in a cage where the wired floor supplies a continuous, mild electric shock. After years of this, the rat no longer jumps and dances; his entire being, mental and physical, has adapted to his condition.
One day a fuse in the laboratory blows out, and the grid on the cage floor goes dead. The rat stands motionless, astonished, unable to comprehend this strange absence of baseline stress.
When I visit Nepal, I know how that rat must feel.
I placed my palms together, faced the eyes of Buddha emblazoned above the white dome, and prayed for the well-being of the people I loved. I prayed for my friends in America; they’d be eating dinner now, or watching The Simpsons. And I prayed for Tibet, entering its fourth decade under Chinese occupation. It occurred to me again, as it had so many times during my visits to Nepal, that I was in a place where I could do something that would appear insane in the West: I could stand in the middle of the street, surrounded by fruit sellers and taxis and cows, with motorcycles swerving around me and kids ducking beneath my legs, and pray out loud, with all my heart, without a trace of self-consciousness or an iota of doubt.
NO ONE CAN do everything. At any given moment, any adult individual (assuming a world adult population of five billion) can participate in only 0.00000002 percent of human activity. Even so, I was perfectly happy to be spending the morning at Boudhnath; it had to be the biggest celebration on the planetary calendar.
Pilgrims from all over Asia had converged on Boudha, just as thousands of sadhus had congregated at Pashupatinath four days earlier. Joining the kora, I was amazed by the size of the crowd. A current of humanity flowed around the stupa without beginning or end, a self-consuming snake moving ceaselessly clockwise. The costumes were fantastic: indigo cloaks and crimson silk; intricate striped aprons, the traditional Tibetan chubas, woven of yak wool; earrings and necklaces as thick as kebabs, displaying marshmallow-sized ingots of gold and coral. There were the rich and the poor, babes in arms, gorgeous teenage girls with jet-black hair, crusty old men wrapped in coarse wool. Some of the older pilgrims spun handheld prayer wheels; other ticked off mantras on Tibetan mallas. Seen from above, the purposeful mass of humanity might look like atomic particles, whirling inside an accelerator. At the auspicious instant they’d find their target, and prayers would scatter into the ether like quarks.
Boudha dwarfs Swayambhu; it’s the largest Buddhist monument in Nepal. Devotees from India, Bhutan, Ladakh, Sikkim, and Tibet itself flock to this site, which was once a way station along the ancient trade route linking Lhasa, Kathmandu, and points south. Fifteen centuries on, it’s still the heart and soul of Nepal’s Tibetan community.
No one recalls who built Boudhnath. Two oft-repeated legends, Nepali and Tibetan, share the limelight. The Nepali story is typically macabre, reflecting the ancient kingdom’s fixation on loyalty and duty. Long ago, a devout ruler built a beautiful shrine and fountain just north of Kathmandu. Some generations later (due, perhaps, to a lapse in naga offerings) water stopped flowing from the sacred spout. The king, a religious man, decided to investigate the fountain’s fate. His court astrologers informed him that it would require an offering—human, of course—to get the earthly juices flowing again. The catch was, the king had to sacrifice the most noble man in his realm.
The following morning, under orders from his father, the crown prince arrived at the site of the dry pools. The king had sent him a simple, mysterious command. At the site, the letter said, the prince would find a corpse, wrapped in white cloth. He was to draw his sword and cut off its head at once. The prince saw the body and complied. The instant he did, the fountains flowed again. But when he unwrapped the body, the youth found a terrible surprise: the still-warm body of his beloved father.
The hapless prince, traumatized by his involuntary patricide, withdrew into isolation. After long meditation, he was visited by the goddess Bajra Yogini. She explained the method by which he could atone for his sin: He must construct a huge temple, dedicated to Lord Buddha, on the eastern edge of the capital.
This was not an easy task. As the kingdom was still in drought, creative measures were needed to supply the water used for making bricks. The prince came up with a brilliant idea. Bolts of cloth were unfurled at sunset and left out through the night. Before dawn they were collected, and their moisture wrung out into cisterns. Some still refer to Boudhnath as Khasti: the Temple of Dewdrops.
The Tibetan version is equally far-fetched, but I prefer its focus on self-reliance. Kangma was a pious and clever woman who had moved to the Kathmandu Valley and made a fortune in the goose trade. In gratitude, she decided to build a temple to Amitabh: the Buddha of Limitless Life. All she lacked was the real estate.
Kangma was permitted an audience with the king, during which she requested only as much land as she could cover with a buffalo hide. The king, of course, granted her humble wish. Here, Kanga employed the wits that had earned her riches in the goose trade. She slit the hide something like this:
. . . opened it into a narrow hoop (still in one piece, mind you), and encircled a vast parcel of land.
BY TEN O’CLOCK Boudha looked like a round, white ship festooned with thousands of blue, white, red, green, and yellow prayer flags. The rising tiers of its plinth were packed with Tibetans: gossiping, praying, practicing dance steps, and untangling lines of flags. A six-foot incense burner—a freestanding earthen censer—poured thick, blue juniper smoke into the air. Light breezes spiraled down from the Himalaya, rippling the flags and dizzying the air with the fragrant smoke.
I circled the plinth, keeping the dome on my right. It would be more fun to be here with Grace, but she’d declined my invitation on the inarguable grounds that she’d get more work done alone. When I’d left Hadigaon she was back in her work room, cleaning her cameras. We made some vague noises about meeting for lunch, but neither of us was eager to obligate the other.
There were plenty of other Westerners on the kora: dharma students, tourists, and oddballs like myself. We greeted each other with nods. Most of them were snapping photos like mad. I’d left my own Nikon behind, without regrets. During my travels I often felt like an obsessed collector, roving the globe with a compulsion to record everything I saw. Without a camera I felt free, able to watch events unfold without the distraction of recording them.
One hundred and eight smoke-blackened buddhas and bodhisattvas, all different, occupy small niches on the upper level of the shrine. I stopped at my favorite: a meditating Buddha in the lotus posture, his right hand touching the earth. The visual gulf between this fit, self-assured figure and his Christian counterpart—the tortured Jesus, nailed to a cross—always startled me.
But did it really happen that way? I recalled the musical laughter of a high lama I’d met at a small monastery, a long bus ride north of Lhasa. He explained that Jesus, during his “lost” years, had traveled to what is now Tibet, studying with local saints and learning how to perform miracles. There was no betrayal, the lama insisted; no Last Supper, nor a crucifixion. Jesus had left Judea by choice and settled in Asia. He’d become a respected sage, known as Issa. Such facts were common knowledge in Tibet. “This Issa, long life!” the old lama laughed. “So many students! And some children also, I think!”
A series of low, earth-shaking blasts—the bellowing of dungchen, long copper horns—signaled the start of Lhosar’s climactic ritual. The acoustic waves plowed through the atmosphere, beluga whales of sound. I walked to the edge of the plinth, overlooking the kora, and waited.
By now, all four levels of Boudha’s stupa were crammed with celebrants. What had been a chaotic carousel of humanity morphed into an orderly procession. Six orange-robed monks led the mass of pilgrims, circling the ancient dome with a framed portrait of the Dalai Lama. Four monks supported his image; two others flanked them, holding yellow parasols over the lifelike painting. Tibetans believe that the Dalai Lama is the human incarnation of Chenrezig, the thousand-eyed, thousand-armed buddha of compassion. The exigencies of the modern world have thrust him into a dual role: He is the political leader of Tibet-in-exile, as well as its spiritual guide. Not only that: He’d once taken apart an entire 1931 Dodge, down to the last cotter pin—and put it back together, without misplacing a single washer.
The procession continued, complete with an elephant; where the pachyderm had come from was anybody’s guess. After three circumambulations, the first part of the ritual was completed. It was now time to carry the Dalai Lama’s portrait onto the first plinth, for the customary long-life prayers.
As the monks mounted the stairs, though, they were blocked by a squad of policemen. The nearby Tibetans, curious and astonished, clustered around the monks, the police, and the portrait.
Though I couldn’t hear the altercation, I knew what was happening: a bit of bullying, courtesy of Nepal’s northern neighbor. China had recently learned how easily Nepal’s leadership could be manipulated—and the kingdom’s large, prosperous community of Tibetan refugees was an embarrassment. Despite shrill protests when any foreign power dared “meddle” in China’s internal affairs, Beijing had clearly bought the ear of the palace. The word had come down. Any celebration sympathetic to the Dalai Lama was a tacit and intolerable declaration of Tibetan separatism.
But there were two forces at work here: Chinese outrage and realpolitik. The five Nepali policemen stood among thousands of Tibetans, and let it be said that they never stopped smiling. After a brief exchange, accompanied by much primate posturing and head-wagging, the officers withdrew.
The procession continued up the stars and onto the plinth, where the portrait of the Dalai Lama was placed on a dais. Monks intoned prayers while pilgrims jostled for the privilege of tossing long silk katas over the frame. As this was going on, all the Tibetans around me reached into their pockets and extracted small drawstring sacks or plastic bags. Inside was finely milled tsampa: buckwheat flour, the staple diet of Tibet. Somehow, I’d forgotten to purchase this key ingredient. I felt a tap on my shoulder, and turned to see an old Khampa woman with two sleigh-sized teeth grinning at me. Her breath smelled of chang. She grabbed my wrist in her powerful hand, poured a handful of tsampa into my open palm, and closed my fingers around it. Her smile was a joy to behold.
The lamas completed their prayers on a long, low note. There was a brief lull, the eye of a sonic storm. And then a single, jubilant cry welled up within the crowd, building with the roar of an approaching cyclone:
“aaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhHHHH . . .”
At the exact same instant, everyone—each of the thousands of Tibetans and tourists who covered the tiers of the shrine like ants on a wedding cake—hurled their tsampa into the air. Flour filled the air, a fine and nourishing fog, settling on our shoulders, on our shoes, onto the lenses of Sony video cameras; dusting the eyebrows of the monks; frosting the leather handbags of Manangi women; powdering the black-brimmed caps of the policemen, who seemed giddy with relief. Twenty-one seventeen, the Iron Horse Year, had begun.
HALF AN HOUR later, on the flagstones below the dome, I saw Coal and Clarice. They were standing at the edge of a wide circle of Tibetan adolescents. The young men and women wore jeans, white shirts, and black sports jackets. Rocking from side to side, arms intertwined, they crooned a poignant rendition of “We Shall Overcome.”
I snuck up behind Clarice and put my hands on her shoulders. “Hey, guys! Walk the kora enough times, and you’ll run into your favorite people.”
“It’s wonderful, isn’t it?” Clarice turned around and hugged me. Her loose, blue jacket was covered with tsampa. “Like finding a pin in a haystack. Are you with Grace?”
“Haven’t seen her yet. I assume she’s out there somewhere. With at least three cameras around her neck. She lives for this stuff.”
“Our unofficial historian,” Coal chimed in. “In the old days, she would have done engravings. Woodcuts. Can you imagine?”
“Happy Lhosar, Coal-ji. Have you made any New Year’s resolutions?”
“Never crossed my mind. Have you?”
“Of course. At every opportunity.”
“Well?”
“I resolve to eat more salad, renew my New Yorker subscription, and beef up my collection of Elvis Costello CDs.”
Coal narrowed his eyes. “It sounds like you’ve resolved to go back to America.”
I started, dismayed by my transparency. “Wow. Maybe so. But shit, Coal. It’s brutal to hear you actually say it.”
Clarice shot me a pointed glance. “Does Grace know?”
“I told her last night. She didn’t seem too bothered.”
There was a beat of silence. Coal shook his head, amused by my naïveté. “She’s grown quite attached to you, I’m afraid.”
I turned to Clarice for verification. She nodded. “We’ll all be sorry to see you go. But I think Grace is going to feel rather abandoned.”
“I’m surprised. I get the impression she’s proud of being a loner. We have fun together, but I don’t get the sense she’s overly invested in the relationship.”
“Maybe your next book,” said Clarice, “should be on what you don’t understand about women.”
I nodded. “There isn’t enough ink.”
“You’ve tamed her wild heart,” Coal sang. “Just as I’ve tamed Clarice’s.”
Clarice rolled her eyes. “Oh, please.”
A few tourists had joined the Tibetans, and the singing grew louder.
Deep in my heart
I do believe
We shall all be free someday
Clarice peered around nervously. “I wonder if the police will break this up.”
“Not a chance.” I shook my head. “There’d be a riot.”
“At any rate,” said Coal, “it’s not a brilliant idea.”
“No,” I agreed. “But I’m glad they’re doing it.”
Clarice frowned. “What’s wrong with it?”
“It’s provocative,” I said. “If the Chinese think their noses are being twisted, they’ll tighten the thumbscrews on Nepal.”
“Fuck the bloody Chinese.” Clarice smiled, pleased with herself for swearing. “Such a pain in everyone’s arse. I wish they’d just go colonize the moon, or something.”
“What a lovely thought,” mused Coal. “Gazing at the full moon on a warm summer’s night and thinking, ‘Why, that’s a Chinese colony.’ What could be more romantic?”
“Well, you couldn’t actually see them.” Clarice pulled at the shoulders of her jacket, releasing puffs of tsampa. “Jeff, have you seen the dead body?”
“No,” I said. “What dead body?”
“On the kora. Someone’s body. You should see it.”
Snake Lake Page 16
