by Ruskin Bond
Much more familiar were the rodents—the same rodents that ate the cabbages and peas Tenzin Palmo attempted to grow in her garden. They came into her storeroom trying to get at her grains and dried vegetables and again Tenzin Palmo adopted a curiously friendly attitude toward these intruders.
“They were mostly mice and hamsters and in the autumn there were an awful lot of them. They were terribly sweet. Sometimes I used to trap them in a cage and then take them outside and let them go. It was very interesting watching them because each one you trapped had a different response,” she said, hinting at the Buddhist belief that animals, since they possess minds, are subject to reincarnation like the rest of us. In this respect it was perfectly logical that animals could well be former or future human beings in the endless stream of becoming and unbecoming.
“Some of them were frightened and would cower in the corner of the cage. Others would be very angry and roar and try and rip the cage trying to get out. Others would put their little paws on the bars and push their noses through and look at you and allow you to pet them. They’d be so friendly. Each one had completely different reaction,” she went on.
“Then there were the martens, which look a bit like weasels, only prettier. They were gray with a white front, huge eyes, and a big bushy tail. There was one that used to slide open the window, get inside my storeroom, and head for the saucepan which had my bread inside wrapped in a cloth. This marten would take off the saucepan lid, unwrap the cloth, and then eat the bread. It wasn’t like a rat, which would just gnaw through the cloth. Then it would proceed to unscrew the plastic lids of the containers holding the fat, pull off the zinc covering, then eat it. It was amazing. Everything I had it would undo. I tried putting food outside for it but this would often get frozen and the marten would look so let down. I read somewhere that if you can catch one when they’re young they make excellent pets because they’re so intelligent.”
Another visitor was the little stoat which she caught sight of in her garden. It was about to run away when it obviously thought better of it and bravely decided to approach Tenzin Palmo instead.
“It came trotting all the way up to me, stood there, and looked up. It was so small and I must have been enormous to it. It just stood there looking at me. Then it suddenly became excited. It ran back to the fence and began swinging on it, hanging upside down and looking at me all the time to see if I was still watching—like a child.”
If the animals never frightened her, there was an occasion, just one, when man did. Then it seemed that her breezy optimism that no male would bother to climb that high to harm her was sadly misplaced.
“It was during a summer when a young boy about fifteen or sixteen years old came by with his flock of sheep. He was extremely strange. He would sit on this big boulder near the cave and look down on me. If I smiled at him he would just glare back. One morning I discovered the pole with my prayer flag on it had been thrown down. Another time the stones in my spring had been moved so the water no longer flowed. Then the window to my storeroom was smashed, although nothing had been taken. I was certain it was this boy and worried because he had an infinite amount of time to sit there thinking up mischief. He could do anything he wanted! I felt very vulnerable,” she recalled.
She was so worried, in fact, that she called on her old friends the Dakinis, praying to them in her familiar way:
“Look here,” she said, “this boy has obviously got a lot of psychological problems, so please do something to change his mind and help him,” she prayed.
As usual, the Dakinis took up Tenzin Palmo’s challenge.
“A couple of days later I found on my gate a bunch of wildflowers. Then when I went to my spring, not only had it been repaired but it had been put back together so much nicer. After that, when I saw the boy he gave me a nice smile. He was completely transformed. Dakinis are very powerful,” she added.
And so Tenzin Palmo, the girl from Bethnal Green, learnt to live in her cave watching the seasons come and go. As the years went by life took on its own rhythms.
“In winter, which lasted from November to May, the blizzards made it particularly difficult. There would be these great big snowdrifts which I had to clear from above the cave with a shovel. That meant I had to walk through them. It was very physical work and not very good for the back. I had to throw the snow over the top of the cave. It took days sometimes. I would just finish and then it would snow again. I would do it over and over again. It had to be done for me to be able to get to my wood pile. The first snow was nice but after months and months of it I’d be saying ‘Oh no, not again.’”
“The first signs that spring was on its way were these little rockflowers, very delicate, which would appear usually while it was still snowing. I could spend hours looking at them. Actually, spring was for me the most difficult time. The snow would thaw and come seeping through the cracks of the cave, flooding it. I could actually watch streams of water running down the walls soaking everything. I had sacks to mop it all up, which I would then have to dry and use again. I used to have to lay everything out in the sun to dry out. Even my meditation box, which was above the ground and lined with layers of cloth, would get damp. It was a real nuisance. You’d dry everything out, put it back, and then it would flood again. Outside, everything got really muddy. One of the questions which Khamtrul Rinpoche had asked me when he was vetting the cave was whether it was wet. I said no because I honestly thought it wasn’t. If he had known how damp and musty it got he might never have agreed to let me live there,” she conceded.
By the end of May Tenzin Palmo could begin to garden, planting her vegetables and flowers—cornflowers, marigolds, calendulas. She enjoyed gardening even though it demanded much fetching and carrying of water. For the last three years of her solitary retreat someone sent her a packet of flower seeds from England and much to her amazement they flourished in that foreign soil, transforming her Lahouli cave into a cottage garden.
“There were dahlias and night-scented stock. So beautiful! But I was the only one to see them,” she said. By full summer the entire landscape had turned green—the fields, the valleys, and the willow trees planted by the Moravian missionaries to halt the erosion of the landslides. “Now, you could burn sitting in the sun while the part of you in the shade would still feel chilly,” she said.
In summer the birds started coming back: the choughs, a red-legged crow, were regular visitors. She would watch them perform the beautiful aerial dances for which they are famous, and would sometimes cut pieces off a mat to provide nest furnishings for them. Once, one evening when she was coming back from a rare visit to the village, she came across an extraordinary scene.
“As I turned a corner I saw hundreds upon hundreds of vultures sitting in circles. They were grouped on the boulders, on the ground, all around. It was as though they had come together for a meeting. I had to walk through the middle of them! There was nowhere else for me to pass. Now these birds are big, about three feet high, with hooded eyes and strong, curved beaks. I took a deep breath, started saying the OM MANI PADME HUNG mantra, and walked right through them. They didn’t even move. They just watched me out of the corner of their eyes. Later I remembered that Milarepa had had a dream in which he was a vulture and that among Tibetans these birds are regarded as extremely auspicious,” she recalled.
With autumn the world around her was transformed into a blaze of brilliant color. It was spectacular. “The mountains in front of me turned blood-red crossed with lines of dazzling yellow—the willow trees whose leaves had turned. Above these were the snow mountains soaring into the bright blue sky. This was the time when the villagers would harvest their crops. I could hear them from my cave singing in the valleys below as they worked their yaks.”
A letter home to her mother dated May 8, 1985, when she had just begun her long three-year retreat revealed how easily she was managing with her difficult situation, and how, despite her extreme
isolation and singular way of life, others were not forgotten:
Dearest Amala [Tibetan for “mother”],
How are you? I hope that you are very well. Did you have a nice stay in Saudi?
No doubt you have written but Tshering Dorje hasn’t been up so there has been no mail. He is rather late and I hope that this is only because of being busy with plowing and other field work. He did come up in early March, as the SP [Superintendent of Police] had brought new forms to be filled out for the visa. Fortunately this year there was not too much snow and February was so mild that most of the snow at that time had melted (it snowed again later, of course). However, poor Tshering Dorje has now developed arthritis in both knees and can only hobble around painfully with a stick—so imagine having to come all the way up to the cave through the snow just so I could sign some papers! He should have forged my signature. Anyway I do hope that his bad knees are not the reason for his not coming now. Lahaul is all up and down and also TD earns his living by leading trekking parties in Ladakh and Zanskar so this is really a big problem for him.
Here everything is well. This morning I planted out potatoes and more turnips. The weather is still rather cold and it snows from time to time but my cave is not as wet as usual because there was never a really heavy snowfall at one time. My water supply happily kept running all through the winter though it got covered in a canopy of ice every night. What a joy to have water so close by and not to have to bother with melting snow. This also saved on wood.
So the winter was quiet and pleasant and February so mild and gorgeous that in Keylong they had rain! (The weather made up for it in March and April!)
My hair is getting long and falling out all over the place. A great nuisance—no wonder the yogis just mat it.
Because of being in retreat and Tshering Dorje only coming up twice a year you must not worry if there are long intervals between my letters. I can no longer go down to Keylong to post them. Tell May that I wore her sweater (and yours) all winter and indeed still have them on. They have been very useful, so many thanks. Stay very well, All my love, Tenzin Palmo.
For all the physical hardships she endured, the misgivings of others, and the prejudice against her gender attempting such a feat, the truth remained that Tenzin Palmo in her cave was sublimely happy.
“There was nowhere else I wanted to be, nothing else I wanted be doing. Sometimes I would stand at the edge of my patio and look out across the mountains and think, ‘If you could be any place in the whole world, where would you want to be?’ And there was nowhere else. Being in the cave was completely satisfying. I had all the conditions I needed to practice. It was a unique opportunity and I was very, very grateful.”
* * *
MOUNTAINS IN MY BLOOD
Ruskin Bond
It was while I was living in England, in the jostle and drizzle of London, that I remembered the Himalayas at their most vivid. I had grown up amongst those great blue and brown mountains; they had nourished my blood; and though I was separated from them by thousands of miles of ocean, plain, and desert, I could not rid them from my system. It was always the same with mountains. Once you have lived with them for any length of time, you belong to them. There is no escape.
And so, in London in March, the fog became a mountain mist, and the boom of traffic became the boom of the Ganges emerging from the foothills.
I remembered a little mountain path which led my restless feet into a cool, sweet forest of oak and rhododendron, and then on to the wind-swept crest of a naked hilltop. The hill was called Clouds End. It commanded a view of the plains on one side, and of the snow peaks on the other. Little silver rivers twisted across the valley below, where the rice fields formed a patchwork of emerald green. And on the hill itself, the wind made a hoo-hoo-hoo in the branches of the tall deodars where it found itself trapped.
During the rains, clouds enveloped the valley but left the hill alone, an island in the sky. Wild sorrel grew amongst the rocks, and there were many flowers—convolvulus, clover, wild begonia, dandelion—sprinkling the hillside.
On a spur of the hill stood the ruins of an old brewery. The roof had long since disappeared, and the rains had beaten the stone floors smooth and yellow. Some enterprising Englishman had spent a lifetime here making beer for his thirsty compatriots in the plains. Now, moss and ferns and maidenhair grew from the walls. In a hollow beneath a flight of worn stone steps, a wildcat had made its home. It was a beautiful gray creature, black-striped, with pale green eyes. Sometimes it watched me from the steps or the wall, but it never came near.
No one lived on the hill, except occasionally a coal burner in a temporary grass-thatched hut. But villagers used the path, grazing their sheep and cattle on the grassy slopes. Each cow or sheep had a bell suspended from its neck, to let the boy know of its whereabouts. The boy could then lie in the sun and eat wild strawberries without fear of losing his animals.
I remembered some of the shepherd boys and girls.
There was a boy who played a flute. Its rough, sweet, straightforward notes traveled clearly across the mountain air. He would greet me with a nod of his head, without taking the flute from his lips. There was a girl who was nearly always cutting grass for fodder. She wore heavy bangles on her feet, and long silver earrings. She did not speak much either, but she always had a wide grin on her face when she met me on the path. She used to sing to herself, or to the sheep, to the grass, or to the sickle in her hand.
And there was the boy who used to carry milk into town (a distance of about five miles), who would often fall into step with me, to hold a long conversation. He had never been away from the hills, or in a large city. He had never been on a train. I told him about the cities, and he told me about his village—how they make bread from maize, how fish were to be caught in the mountain streams, how the bears came to steal his father’s pumpkins. Whenever the pumpkins were ripe, he told me, the bears would come and carry them off.
These things I remembered—these, and the smell of pine needles, the silver of oak leaves and the red of maple, the call of the Himalayan cuckoo, and the mist, like a wet facecloth, pressing against the hills.
Odd, how some little incident, some snatch of conversation, comes back to one again and again, in the most unlikely places. Standing in the aisle of a crowded tube train on a Monday morning, my nose tucked into the back page of someone else’s newspaper, I suddenly had a vision of a bear making off with a ripe pumpkin.
A bear and a pumpkin—and there, between Goodge Street and Tottenham Court Road stations, all the smells and sounds of the Himalayas came rushing back to me.
*1 Written in praise of the Himalayan snows, this essay has been excerpted and translated from Thele Par Himalaya (1968).
*2 Excerpted from Swami Vivekananda on Himself (1963).
*3 Fragments from the life and quest of Swami Haridas, a sadhu wandering in the western Himalaya, as recorded by Rahul Sankrityayan; excerpted and translated from Ghumakkad Swami (1958).
*4 The account of a 1973 expedition to the Crystal Mountain, Mount Kailash, to study wildlife, and as much a spiritual journey as a field trip, The Snow Leopard (1978) is a classic of Himalayan writing.
*5 See David Snellgrove, Himalayan Pilgrimage (Oxford: Cassirer, 1961).
*6 Ibid.
*7 David Snellgrove, The Nine Ways of B’on (London: Oxford University Press, 1967).
*8 Selections from The Heart of Nature, or the Quest for Natural Beauty (1921).
*9 Excerpted from A Journey in Ladakh: Encounters with Buddhism (1983).
*10 In 1976, Diane Perry (Tenzin Palmo) secluded herself in a cave in Lahoul at a height of 13,200 feet. She spent the next twelve years there seeking enlightenment. This essay describes how she found the cave, and her life as a seeker.
LIFE
“What is it like to live with such beautiful mountains?” I once asked Vid
hya earnestly.
She looked up, looked back at me, and laughed. “They’re just there,” she said.
* * *
A NIGHT IN A GARHWAL VILLAGE
Ruskin Bond
I wake to what sounds like the din of a factory buzzer, but is in fact the music of a single vociferous cicada in the lime tree near my window.
Through the open window, I focus on a pattern of small, glossy lime leaves; then through them I see the mountains, the Himalayas, striding away into an immensity of sky.
“In a thousand ages of the gods I could not tell thee of the glories of Himachal.” So confessed a Sanskrit poet at the dawn of Indian history, and he came closer than anyone else to capturing the spell of the Himalayas. The sea has had Conrad and Stevenson and Masefield, but the mountains continue to defy the written word. We have climbed their highest peaks and crossed their most difficult passes, but still they keep their secrets and their reserve; they remain remote, mysterious, spirit-haunted.
No wonder, then, that the people who live on the mountain slopes in the mist-filled valleys of Garhwal have long since learned humility, patience, and a quiet resignation. Deep in the crouching mist lie their villages, while climbing the mountain slopes are forests of rhododendron, spruce and deodar, soughing in the wind from the ice-bound passes. Pale women plow and laugh at the thunder as their men go down to the plains for work, for little grows on the beautiful mountains in the north wind.