When Yangjore wakes at dawn he comes to look for me. He finds me in the trap: a well in the ground in which shepherds put one of their herd to bleat, a lure for snow leopards. Having leapt in and eaten its prey, the snow leopard can’t get out. It might be stoned to death, or simply left there to die.
Yangjore gives a shout when he looks down and sees me at the bottom of the trap. I am curled up with a living leopard; her long, muscular tail encircles me. We are both sprinkled with snow but she keeps me warm.
‘Ani-la,’ Yangjore sounds frantic. ‘Ani-la!’
I smile to reassure him. The snow leopard wakes up also and stretches herself in the cramped space, pushing down on her front paws and waving her haunches in the air.
‘She was cold,’ I tell the shepherd. ‘I couldn’t leave her here alone.’
He reaches down to help me up.
‘We have to help her out as well,’ I say. He starts, stepping back and shaking his head. Yangjore is going to be no help, I can tell. I link my hands to create a step. The leopard tentatively rests her big front paws on them.
‘Jump,’ I say to the leopard. She looks at me plaintively. ‘Jump!’ I say louder, but she falls back onto all fours.
Now I kneel and bow before her. I link my hands once more. Her chest rumbles with a magnificent titanic purr, then she puts one back foot on my hands, one on my back, and uses me as a springboard to leap out of the well. She bares her teeth at the shepherd; hisses faintly. Then she leans down to me and licks my cheek before bounding away. I put my hand to the place on my cheek where her tongue, rasping, has drawn blood.
*
I move on. I sleep in monasteries. I sleep in guest houses. One cold night, a night so cold I think I might freeze to death, I sleep under a rock and cover myself with snow. I walk through high meadows of wildflowers where yaks graze beside me. I side-step the thick velvety stars of edelweiss, tiny sharp-petalled and white against green moss. I follow rainbows to their source, wading through rivers where the fierce current might pick me up, light as a leaf on the water, before my bones are shattered against the rocks. At night, if I listen carefully I hear the cries of birds as they migrate north on highways of wind. I walk past mountain lakes so clear I can’t tell if I’m looking down ten feet or one hundred. In one lake I see human skeletons lying so close to the water’s surface I can reach down and touch them.
These are some of the places I walk to: Rolwaling, Khumbu, and Junbesi, are their names not beautiful? I have travelled where names are poetry and the air so thin it makes your heart flutter; where it is impossible to tell the terrain of my dreams from the ground beneath my feet.
I walk, finally, to a place near the caves of the Seven Immortal Sisters and build my room there, digging out the back of a cave. It measures ten feet by ten feet; the floor is rammed earth and I have one small window for natural light. At night I hear the roar of yetis but otherwise my retreat is silent. I can write, but not speak. I look at this O in the belly of a mountain, then name it Mother-Daughter Cave.
My light comes from butter lamps. I have a tiny fireplace where I make myself tea. I eat once a day and it is here, where I have so little food, that hunger releases me. When I meditate there are moments, as I was promised there would be, when my mind feels like a limitless ocean. I hover on the edge of emptiness; on the edge of understanding, of knowing, in my heart and cells, that nothing exists except in relation to other things. I, by myself, am empty of meaning. There are seconds and hours when I detach from my ego and feel only bliss. Other times I remember conversations I had ten, twenty, thirty years ago. I try to let the words rise up and go but instead they rattle around my skull. My back hurts, my knees ache. My husband walks for weeks through the mountains to wish me happy birthday and bring me cake, but he is a distraction. I write a note asking him to leave me alone.
My meditations become longer. Easier. Harder. The walls of my room fall away and I sit on the top of a mountain on the edge of the world. I see that I am part of everything: good, bad, plant, animal. The rocks, this room, the snow around, they are, it is all, me also. Snow clouds descend and swallow up my mountain; in the morning the sun lights up the snow peaks, red and gold like so many fires. Rainstorms sweep across the valley. The sky is never still. My hair grows, is shaved, and grows again. I am drinking tea when a tooth crumbles in my mouth. I spit it into the palm of my hand and see that I am decaying.
I meditate on the suffering of my mother, father and dear friends. My child. I meditate on deities that Lama Gyatsho considered antidotes to anger and as I visualise Yamantaka my vision shifts and grows. I draw him into me in a wave of red light and heat. I have not expected the pain, yet another birth. Bone forces its way through my flesh. I—no longer I, no longer she—he fills the small room she has spent so many months in.
Do I imagine this? Skulls, eight of them, sprouting from his neck and shoulders, horns springing from his head. He sees the monastery and village below, he moves down the mountain paths until the plains of India spread before him, green after the rains, the mountains rising like a vein through the centre of the land, he sees millions massacred as the country is split in two. He strikes the ground with his palms, he beats the earth with his feet. From one of his many faces he sees the deep mountain passes behind him carving through to Tibet, the atrocities that have been committed, that are committed still, he sees vultures circling slowly over the place where bodies are cut up and left for sky burial; stamping into China he takes in the sweep of it, its three thousand miles of Wall and the skeletons of those who built it lying in ditches alongside; he runs until he is astride Japan and hundreds of thousands of souls fly up, like cranes lifting into the air at sunset, his strides are enormous, he walks across Europe as Anna once walked, nestled deep in its longest of nights, black, cold; he looks to his right and sees the ice caps, their endless curves, glowing strangely, grey, in the half-light; he moves back down to the south and west where plumes of smoke thick with blackened bodies drift heavily into the air, sees Dresden, London, bombed before his eyes, it happened then, it is always happening, the past is never done.
He moves across the ocean and slips along the Trail of Tears, a great race undone and railway lines spread like capillaries from east to west; the Rockies become the Andes and the land’s end shatters into tiny islands, an archipelago, a thousand stars; he dives under; deep into the Atlantic icy cold he follows the sea’s bed then rises, aloft, watches a shark soar into the air to catch a sleek seal that twists and turns in its mouth; over this continent he sees devastation as whole populations rise to battle, he sees starvation, disease, infinite herds of animals look for water; he skates over the Indian Ocean, he sees the shadow, hears the echo, of an older India hidden under the sea; he sees a continent worn flat, hears the screeching cries of crested birds; he looks right to view the curve of the earth, polar ice luminous in the endless sun; he follows the islands of the equator, slips along the Java trench to the Bay of Bengal, Calcutta and the streets I know well, over Darjeeling my old home, up to the mountain path I walked to get me to—this.
My tiny room where I am sitting, now.
I touch the place where my shoulder and neck meet in search of proof (some splintered bone perhaps) of what I have been.
My dying begins a few weeks later. I have hoped—even at the end I cling to that emotion—that knowing what was to come would make it easier. It does not.
I leach and sweat; I burn, then shiver, lying in my vomit and shit. The greater the pains in my chest become, the less solid things are. I let go of it all, the last of it, the muck of bad decisions, my karma: all purged from me. The world begins to disappear, like the breath-haze on the mirror.
An hour passes, or a month, or perhaps it is like this: I sit for one second and eternity both. I am beyond shit. I am beyond thirst. The heat that has been flickering at my body like the fires of hell turns to ice. My feet become cold then the ice moves up my legs, to my gut, and chest. I shake.
So beautiful, so
terrible. My love accelerates and expands, I feel it pouring from me; hear Ana-Sofia, her cries muffled, away in the distance. I feel the touch of her delicate baby hands and a sudden enveloping desire that she will be all right. Not just Ana-Sofia. Nor Saskia, Papa, Ellie or Nikolay, but everyone: the man I almost murdered, the soldiers who strangled my city, the enemies of those I’ve loved, the killers in this world, people I have never known: I wish that they all be free. The light merges into the sound that has echoed through the centuries, oh the love I feel for my mama for my daughter, who would have guessed there could be so much of it? This love flares bright, magnesium bright, my last glorious flare of thought. I am burning up, sparks rain from me; I witness the explosions of the dying fire before water comes. I am being put out.
The pain is terrible, a white-hot vice around my chest. My guru is with me now, he and Lama Dorje both, they chant:
Now when the bardo of the moment before death dawns upon me,
I will abandon all grasping, yearning and attachment, enter
undistracted into clear awareness of the teaching,
and eject my consciousness into the space of unborn mind;
as I leave this compound body of flesh and blood
I will know it to be a transitory illusion.
No breath.
I crack open. I am gone I am dying I am dead. No body now is full of white shimmer red haze, all light gone I fall into the black a second a month an eternity, infinity, then here in clear light calm ocean sky where it is luminous
in the space between
I make my next choice
Acknowledgments
I spent an inspirational month at the Kopan Monastery (http://www.kopan-monastery.com) in 1997 and returned to its library in 2003. My debt to Kopan and the organisation it sired, FPMT (the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition—www.fpmt.org) is great. The library at the Tushita Centre in Dharamsala, India (http://www.tushita.info) was useful, and its staff generous. I would also like to thank Wisdom Publications (www.wisdompubs.org), a publishing house dedicated to making available authentic Buddhist works for the benefit of all. They publish translations of the sutras and tantras, commentaries and teachings of past and contemporary Buddhist masters, and original works by the world’s leading Buddhist scholars. They are a nonprofit charitable organisation, and all profits are reinvested into the creation of new works.
I would like to thank the Varuna Writer’s Centre for providing the space to write an early draft of this novel.
I would like to thank AsiaLink, Arts Victoria and the Australia Council for the Asia Link grant I received in 2005 which gave me the opportunity to spend two months in Sri Lanka to write a draft of the novel, and one month in India to research it. I would like to thank the Pemberley International Study Centre in Haputale, Sri Lanka (www.pemberleyhouse.com) for providing me with the space to write for one month of that time.
The following people have discussed ideas, events and words I have been researching in the development of this novel; or been kind enough to help in other ways. None of them are in any way responsible for any flaws in the final work: Brian Coffey, John Cunningham, Robert Dessaix, Dick Jeffrey, Adele Hulse, Adrian Feldman, Monica Joyce, Patrick McGilligan and Charles Perry.
The following friends and colleagues were kind enough to read drafts of this novel and provide much needed feedback: Donica Bettanin, Kate Cole-Adams, Saul Cunningham, Jenny Darling, Jane Gleeson-White, Monica Joyce, Philippa Hawker, Helen Murdoch, Virginia Murdoch, Gaby Naher, Adrienne Nicotra and my mother, Sari Wawn.
My debt to my editor at Text Publishing, Amanda Brett, is enormous, and my gratitude great.
May all good merit generated by the writing of this novel be dedicated to the benefit of all sentient beings.
Notes
Every effort has been made to trace the original source material contained in this book. Where the attempt has been unsuccessful, the publisher would be pleased to rectify any omission.
Chapter titles
‘sing my own death’ and ‘I tickle the Bodhisattva and salute the new sunset, home riding home to old city on ocean’ comes from ‘Beginning of a Poem of These States’; ‘O mother / what have I left out / O mother / what have I forgotten…’ and ‘With your Death full of flowers’ come from ‘Kaddish’; ‘Here at the atomic Crack-end of Time XX Century’ comes from ‘A Methedrine Vision in Hollywood’; Collected Poems: 1947-1997 by Allen Ginsberg, Harper Collins, 2006: 380, 234, 235, 388.
‘And who is the author, and who is the hero’ comes from ‘Poem Without a Hero, part Two’; ‘Your eyes are heavy, as if outlined /With thick, black India ink’ comes from ‘Fragment’; ‘In unprecedented darkness the city is drowning’ is from ‘Leningrad Quatrains’; ‘And the moon move like a pendulum’ comes from ‘ In the Fortieth Year’ from The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, translated by Judith Hemschemeyer, edited and introduced by Roberta Reeder, published in Great Britain by Canongate Books, 1997: 567, 139, 678, 423.
‘Holy flowers floating in the air, were all these tired faces in the dawn of Jazz America’ comes from Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Penguin Books, 1991: 185. Used by permission of Inc. Sterling Literistic.
‘You understand, there is no proof / this actually occurred’ is a quote from Ruth Fainlight, ‘Sugar-Paper Blue’, Sugar-Paper Blue by Ruth Fainlight, Bloodaxe Books, 1997: 71.
‘Budger of history Brake of time’ comes from the first line of Gregory Corso, ‘Bomb’, The Happy Birthday of Death, City Lights, 1960.
‘I had no name for India’ and ‘Not to be afraid of anybody or anything anymore’ are from Indian Journals by Allen Ginsberg: 43, 29. © 1970 by Allen Ginsberg. Used by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc.
Lyrics
‘Square-cut or pear-shape, / These rocks don’t lose their shape / Diamonds are a girl’s best friend’ is written by Jule Styne and was performed both on Broadway and in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 1953.
‘when I awake you’re out of sight / darn that dream / darn your lips / darn your eyes / they lift me high above the starry skies / then I tumble out of paradise…’ ‘Darn that Dream’ was written by Jimmy van Heusen and Eddie DeLarge (c. 1939), and recorded by Miles Davis on Birth of the Cool, 1950.
‘I can’t give you anything but love / Baby / That’s the only thing I’ve plenty of / Baby’. ‘I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby’, music written by Jimmy McHugh, lyrics by Dorothy Fields, 1928.
‘I was alone, I took a ride, / I didn’t know what I would find there / Another road where maybe / I could see another kind of mind there’. Lennon & McCartney, ‘Got to Get You into My Life’, Revolver, 1966.
Quotations
‘The souls of all my dears have fled to the stars’, comes from Anna Akhmatova, ‘The Return’, Poems of Akhmatova, edited by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward, Mariner Books, 1973: 127.
‘This summer, the youth of the world are making a holy pilgrimage to our city, to affirm and celebrate a new spiritual dawn…The activity of the youth of a nation which has given birth to Haight-Ashbury is a small part of a worldwide spiritual awakening’, was quoted in Charles Perry, The Haight-Ashbury, Vintage, 1985: 192.
The following quotes are from Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. ‘You address nothing in my breast, you touch nothing there. I don’t care for what you say at all. I have try to warn you of this; now, have I not?’; ‘I was abroad! Far out of reach; prettier than ever; admired by all who saw me. Did you feel that you had lost me?’ and ‘I love you. How shall I say it? Against promise, and reason and hope.’
The Hell Realm teaching, on p. x, in part, from a teaching quoted from Shantideva’s teaching, Lab-dü, by Lama Zopa, in teachings given during a Vajrasattva Retreat. (This teaching can be found at http://www.lamayeshe.com/lamazopa/tvr/tvr_39.shtml.)
chive.
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