I nodded. I knew that the monastery at Samye was revered as Tibet’s most ancient center of learning. Almost a thousand years ago it had been the central clearinghouse for Buddhist teachings streaming in from India, a place where the early translation teams had worked to recast the Sanskrit texts into a form of Tibetan that had been constructed for this purpose.
“At the time of my visit,” he continued, his Hindi marked by a distinctly Tibetan accent, “Nortul Rinpoche was also there on a pilgrimage. He had walked to Samye from his monastery in eastern Tibet in order to do a retreat at Chim Puk—a meditation cave not far from the monastery. He had been in the cave for several months, I think. But the very day I arrived, he finished his retreat and came to the monastery for a brief stay.”
Dorje Sherap went on to tell me how, in that first chance meeting, the two men passed four or five days in each other’s company, engrossed the entire time in conversations that clearly left a strong impression on him. Back in Lhasa he had puzzled over the memory of this unusual Nyingmapa lama. Here was an old man from an unknown, provincial monastery—somewhere out in the boondocks of Kham—who was deeply conversant in a genre of literature rarely studied but held in the highest esteem among the intellectual elite at Drepung.
“I had never before encountered such unpretentious erudition. He is a great scholar, with a remarkable knowledge of Indian Mahayana doctrines. But he is especially interested in sherchin—you know? What is the Sanskrit?”
“Prajnaparamita?”
“Yes, yes,” he nodded. “That is it. What you are yourself now reading. These texts, they are very important for his practice.
“When we parted at Samye,” he continued, “there was no reason to expect we would ever see each other again.”
And they wouldn’t have if not for the violent upheaval of 1959 when the Chinese army clamped down on Tibet.
“I remember everything.” The geshe pressed his lips together. “Everything. From the moment the Chinese army first entered Lhasa. We had just finished morning puja when we heard, from the streets below, the faraway sound of canons and guns. Shortly after this some laypeople came to the monastery and told us that the Chinese were killing monks—that we should all leave Lhasa immediately. I and some of the other senior students went to the abbot. He told us we should do as they said and go quickly into the country. There was no time to prepare. I left with ten others, in a small group. We assumed that the fighting would be over in a few days, and that we would then return to our old life. I took with me only one thing—a copy of Tsongkhapa’s Lamrim Chenpo—a text I was studying at the time. I still have it. It is all I have from Tibet.
“When we reached the first village, the people told us that the Chinese had already been there and they might return at any time. It was not safe. They told us we should go farther into the mountains. So we went on walking. And everywhere we went people told us, ‘Do not stop.’ Still, two old lamas were with us—one of them my teacher—and they were unable to continue. I did not want to leave them behind, but my teacher insisted. He would not allow us to stay with him. We left him and the other lama with a family of nomads who were camped high in the mountains. They gave us some tsampa and balep to carry with us to eat, and we continued on to India. By this time we were only a few days from the border, but the crossing was not easy. The pass was very high. Snow was falling. We slept huddled together at night, changing positions frequently so that some of us could be in among the others for warmth.”
Dorje Sherab and Nortul met for the second time in a refugee camp set up by Nehru’s government to accommodate the influx of Tibetans streaming across the border at Misamari, near Tezpur in the North Indian state of Assam. Here the two men were thrown together again under circumstances quite different from the tranquil security of Samye. This time their paths crossed in a place that still conjures up nightmarish memories among the generation of Tibetans who were forced to flee from the Chinese. Thousands of them were marooned there in the jungle, oppressed by the low altitude and monsoon heat, by the swarms of malarial mosquitoes. Fetid water and lack of adequate latrine facilities contributed to an epidemic of hepatitis among the displaced men, women, and children who camped there waiting to be redistributed. It was a time of sickness, of uncertainty and apprehension, a time of endless waiting.
“When we arrived in Tezpur, I was taken to a large tent with bunks, and there he was: Nortul! He had walked all alone from Kham. Of course, I was very surprised to see him again. It was in the camp where I learned what little English I know. Nortul and I studied the language with an old British lady. We were there together for over a month before I was transferred to a settlement in South India.”
Once again he and Nortul parted ways. And that would certainly have been the end of it, if not for one further, very recent development.
It was obvious from what Dorje Sherap told me that since arriving in India, he had established a reputation as an eminent scholar. When plans took shape for the founding of a new Drepung Loseling Monastery in Karnataka State, he had been among an elite core of intellectuals recruited by the Dalai Lama to help. The previous fall—just about the time I moved to Banaras—he had been sent north as an emissary of the abbot of Drepung to assist with the creation of the Institute for Higher Tibetan Studies in Sarnath. In this official capacity he had traveled to the Indian capital only a few weeks before we talked. The purpose of his visit was to confer with librarians at Delhi University regarding several crates of Tibetan texts that had been in storage there since the time of the Sino-Indian border conflict in 1962. The university had no use for such materials, and arrangements were underway to have them donated to the Institute in Sarnath. The boxes had lain neglected for all these years in a storage facility, uncatalogued and, in point of fact, unopened. Or at least this was what the geshe had been told by his abbot. But when he actually arrived at the university library in Delhi, he was startled to hear that someone else had apparently gotten there before him.
“I knew nothing about this,” Dorje Sherap exclaimed. “Nothing at all. The arrangements certainly had not come through our office at Drepung.”
The director of the library told him that only a few weeks before, an old lama had appeared at the library one afternoon and produced an official letter of introduction signed by someone at the Ministry of Home Affairs authorizing the bearer to inspect the contents of the crates from Ladakh before they were released for shipment to Sarnath.
According to what the librarian told Geshe Sherap, since his arrival the mysterious lama had apparently been working nonstop. Every morning when they came to open the building, people from the library staff found him waiting outside the door, an enormous flowered thermos of chai suspended from one shoulder by a plastic strap; every evening at closing he was escorted out. Or rather, this had been his schedule prior to when he had somehow managed to get himself locked in for the night. One evening the peon assigned to the task of fetching the lama had apparently neglected to do so. No one realized this mistake until the next morning. When the lama didn’t show up at his usual post outside the main entrance to the library, the director went to check and found him in the basement, still sitting at the table where he worked, brooding over a stack of long, narrow woodblock prints. The most astonishing part, however, was not simply that this enigmatic Tibetan monk had been at it for almost twenty-four hours without any break but that he appeared to be completely unaware of how much time had passed. He thought that the library was only then closing for the night.
This story made the rounds, and the monk’s assiduousness won him the affection and respect of the library staff. After that incident, he was permitted to remain overnight now and again at the discretion of the director.
Naturally enough, Dorje Sherap was curious to make the acquaintance of any scholar so diligent as this. He was escorted down into the storage facilities, where he saw a squat man in shabby robes that had obviously been restitched and repaired countless times over the years. The old fellow
was at that very moment working away with a pry bar, laboring to open yet another crate, but when the two men entered he looked up from his work. Imagine the learned geshe’s surprise when he recognized the same Nyingmapa lama he had first met at Samye almost two decades before. Geshe Sherap made a point of telling me that he had himself immediately recognized Nortul, whose appearance and demeanor had not changed in the slightest over the intervening years.
“I will never forget this lama,” the geshe said with conviction, as he leaned forward to offer me more chai. “He is a very intelligent man.”
He finished pouring and paused, as if weighing how best to continue. And then, for no apparent reason, he abruptly switched from Hindi to heavily accented English. “But you must understand . . .” Still bent over my full cup, the thermos held aloft, he looked me square in the eye and lowered his voice. “Nortul Rinpoche is eunuch.”
I stared at Dorje Sherap, who returned my blank look with a portentous widening of his own eyes.
The smell of tukpa wafted up through the bars of his open window. Lunch was being prepared in the courtyard. From the temple nearby I heard the monotonous drone of chanting, the clear ring of a bell used in tantric rituals.
For God’s sake, I remember thinking, why is the man telling me this? The sudden shift out of Hindi had taken me by surprise. But this business about Nortul Rinpoche being a eunuch was something else altogether. I was aware of such practices in China, where beginning around the eighth century, emperors retained castrated slaves as guards in their harems. This had apparently continued up until the end of the Ching dynasty in 1912. In fact, I had read somewhere that as late as 1960, there were still a small number of Ching eunuchs living in Beijing. And then, of course, there are the Hijra in India, who undergo ritual castration in an operation called—bizarrely—nirvan, the Hindi for nirvana. But I had no idea until this moment that the custom played any part in Tibetan culture.
“You mean . . .” I, too, switched to English now, and the words felt weirdly intimate. I waved two fingers more or less in the direction of my balls and snipped them open and shut, like scissors.
He raised one eyebrow a bit, contemplating the significance of my gesture. After a second or two he repeated exactly what he had just said, this time shaping the English syllables with extreme care, in an obvious effort to drive his point home. “Nortul Rinpoche is eunuch.” As before, he laid considerable stress on the last word. His tone was decidedly ominous. “I want only warn you.”
He tipped the thermos upright, shoved in the plastic cork, and drove it home with a swift thump from the heal of his palm. Once secure, it was replaced on the table.
I let my hand drop to my lap in astonishment. “Warn me?”
“Yes,” he replied. “This lama, he like play funny trick sometime.”
“What kind of funny trick?” I hadn’t the slightest idea what he was talking about.
“Drupnyen kind of trick. You know?” He studied my face, perhaps trying to determine if I grasped his meaning, which I did not. “Is many years alone in cave.” He folded both hands in his lap, one palm on top of the other, and sat up straight, back rigid, as if meditating. “Big yogi power.” His jaw hung slack, eyes wide open and staring blankly out into space, as if he were gazing right through the wall. The effect was disturbing.
I nodded dumbly, unable to imagine any other response.
“Eunuch, yes. No doubt. But good scholar. Very good scholar. And in Delhi he tell me very interest in learn English. He speak more English . . .” He hesitated, apparently unable to find the right expression. “Uh, more English . . .”
“More English than you?” I interjected.
“Yes, yes,” he nodded vigorously. “More than you. Rinpoche speak English good, but still he very interest learn more. You go Delhi and see him. I give you letter.”
He reached over and picked up a pen and paper from the table and set down a short note in Tibetan introducing me to Nortul Rinpoche, which he folded carefully and thrust into my hand, gently pressing my fingers closed around it.
31
HOLI, THE GREAT INDIAN FESTIVAL of renewal, is celebrated every year on the vernal equinox in March. It is one of the archetypal “spring fertility rites” documented, most famously, by Sir James Frazer. In Europe, as Christianity supplanted earlier pagan cultures, the cruder elements of the old symbolism were displaced by the Easter story of Jesus’s death and resurrection; nowadays all that remains in the West of that long-forgotten past are bunnies and colored eggs. In India, though, Holi still proudly bears the marks of its prehistoric origin in a complex of rituals invoking blood, sex, and death. It is a day where normal social hierarchies are turned on their head, a day, I was told, when caste and gender discrimination is overturned and people are free to meet as equals and friends.
I had first experienced Holi the previous spring, when I was living in the rented room in New Delhi. Mahmud urged me to go to the old city, where—according to him—the holiday was celebrated in proper style. “In my neighborhood,” he boasted, smiling broadly, “on the day of Holi the women beat the men.”
“But why would they do that?” I objected. Without waiting for his answer I continued, “And anyway, it’s not a Muslim holiday.” In a seminar on Hindu festivals at Chicago, we had read an article explaining that Holi is associated with the worship of the Hindu god Krishna.
“Go there and see for yourself,” was his laconic response.
So I did. Just after sunrise on the morning of Holi, I caught an auto rickshaw to Old Delhi.
I had the driver take me around behind Jamma Masjid and drop me off at the entrance to one of the many narrow alleyways that wound their way deep into the bowels of the neighborhood near Chandni Chowk. Normally, even this early in the day, there would have been people everywhere, but on this particular morning—the morning of Holi—the streets were uncannily quiet. I set off, somewhat apprehensively, into the labyrinth. I had been walking for maybe three minutes when, no more than a hundred feet ahead, four women rounded a corner. They were dressed in salwar kameez and carrying knotted ropes. One of them immediately spotted me. I saw her stop short and grab the arm of the woman next to her, pointing in my direction. And then they were running toward me, cackling hysterically and twirling the ropes over their heads like rodeo cowgirls. I had no idea what I was supposed to do, so I stood there smiling stupidly in anticipation of an interesting cross-cultural experience.
Within seconds the women surrounded me and lashed out with their ropes. I ducked low and threw up my arms in an effort to protect my head and face. The coarsely woven hemp fell hard across my thin cotton shirt, the knots biting painfully into my flesh. It was like having BB guns fired point-blank against my exposed back. I involuntarily cried out—playfully, at first, but very soon in dead earnest—for them to stop. In response to my protests, the four women closed ranks, forming a tight circle with me at the center, all of us revolving around in some mad contra dance as I dodged and shuffled to avoid the stinging blows. At last I shoved them aside, pushing my way violently through the ring, and sprinted back in the direction I’d come. I made it to the open street and kept running, without looking back. At the taxi stand across from the Red Fort I caught a motor rickshaw back to New Delhi. For a good week afterward my flesh was ornamented with ugly, red welts, souvenirs of my first Holi.
Now, in Banaras, I received repeated assurances that ritual beatings were not part of the celebration. Quite the contrary. Everyone told me that the women of the holy city did not dare to go out in public on the morning of Holi; the streets were too dangerous for any female of marriageable age.
In the weeks leading up to the festival in Banaras, I watched with interest as massive piles of combustible materials accumulated in the center of every major intersection in the city. Scraps of lumber and the splintered limbs of saplings were heaped up along with broken furniture, old tires, and various other detritus—anything vaguely flammable was tossed on.
Every child in the
city was anxious to tell me the story of Holika, the evil daughter of King Hiranyakashyap, how she had accidentally cremated herself in the attempt to murder her husband. Some people said that her effigy would be fixed atop the fire on the eve of Holi. Others insisted that it was not Holika but Putana who would be sacrificed to the flames. Putana was a witch who had tried to kill the baby Krishna by offering him her breast filled with poison milk; the divine infant had sucked her dry, and the elated villagers burned her carcass. There were other stories as well, all sorts of fanciful tales about villains and hubristic demigods. No one seemed to really care that the various accounts didn’t match up. The point was simply that there would be bonfires all over the city and crowds of people watching as someone went up in flames.
As Banaras prepared for Holi, All India Radio blared from every chai shop, the voices full of nothing but the coming election and how it would bring an end to Indira’s Emergency. And then, in mid-March, we heard that two shots had been fired at Sanjay Gandhi’s jeep. He was campaigning somewhere in the rural areas north of Delhi when the attack took place, and despite his entourage of guards, the shooter somehow managed to escape. Surprisingly, everyone I talked with was convinced that this apparent assassination attempt had been staged by Indira herself in order to gain sympathy for her favorite son. If so, then the plot failed miserably; people now seemed to hate the man even more than they had before.
One afternoon, riding my bicycle through the busy intersection at Belapur, I noticed that a rustic human scarecrow had been fastened upright atop the mountainous pile of accumulated combustibles. Affixed to its face was a plastic mask with Sanjay’s trademark bushy sideburns and square black glasses. There he perched, high above the snarl of traffic, a man of stuffed straw dressed in white kurta-pajama, his head tilting ineffectually to one side, arms drooping in the afternoon heat.
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