by Asra Nomani
This young monk invited me into the small kitchen as I was stepping through the Rinpoche’s door to leave. A Polo toiletry kit sat on one shelf. Empty egg cartons on another. I had to share this find with my fellow dakinis. Lucy and Esther returned with me to meet him. He had studied in the western Indian state of Karnataka, thousands of miles from here, but he was from a village called Kibber, just seven miles from Ki. Part of the overland salt trade centuries ago, Kibber is considered the highest inhabited village in the world, at thirteen thousand feet, although a nearby village is a rival to that title. Our monk friend taught me another word: dukh, meaning “suffering.” His mother, he told us, died when he was twelve years old. He was so consumed in dukh he became a monk, confirming my theory that many of us turn to the spiritual path because we’re really sad. That last morning, we didn’t see our young monk’s face in the sea of maroon robes as we settled into a space beside a tree.
The Dalai Lama guided us through a meditation in which he talked about a mandala that monks had been creating since the start of the initiation, delicately using colored sand to create intricate designs with images of deities and other symbols of Tantric Tibetan Buddhism.
“Imagine now entering the mandala,” the Dalai Lama said. At that moment, heads turned upward for the sweep of a rainbow over the gompa and the drift of a cloud through the rainbow.
The Dalai Lama continued. “Enter from the eastern door. Repeat mantra. Circumambulate three times.
“You see the many deities. Imagine yourself as Kalachakra by going to the principal deity. Fold your hands. Then, say the mantra.” I didn’t know the mantra. “Imagine giving the deity flowers.” He joked that once when he guided students through a secret mantra, “I saw the curtain open, so I said, ‘One of you should stand up and close the curtain.’ All repeated what I said.” He laughed hard at his own joke. In fact, he giggled.
The Dalai Lama invited us to enter the secret mandala created by the monks. Witnessing it would be a step toward liberating ourselves from negative feelings. “Make your life meaningful.” His words echoed my father’s guidance to me over the years. “You should develop the wonderful view of bodhichitta,” the Dalai Lama told us. “You will be able to help others and fulfill your goals even if you are a nonbeliever. Try to benefit others. Especially try to help others who are weak and suffering.
“You have come to such a remote place, so after receiving this Kalachakra initiation you will have to make the effort to continue the practice of bodhichitta and the meditation on emptiness.
“Buddha has said, ‘I have shown you the path to nirvana, and it is up to you to follow it.’” Birds swooned overheard in a blue cloudless sky above the monastery. The hum of the monks filled the air. My mind wandered to the places where I found calm. The West Virginia forest monastery. The meditation room with Safiyyah. Nurturing Jaz and her babies.
I was sitting with Esther and Lucy on the grassy lawn that had become our home many of these days. Before we knew it, the Dalai Lama was gone. A voice over the loudspeaker told us we could form a line to see the mandala handmade by monks using colored sand. The monks went first. Before we knew it, they shoved and pushed and scrambled up the steps that led to the room with the mandala inside. The scene quickly disintegrated into insanity. Indian police officers in street clothes hit long sticks into the air above the monks’ heads. One smiled as he thrashed into the air to wave the monks back.
Tibetans then tumbled forward. The stampede turned into a virtual riot. Mothers tossed wailing babies into the air for the Indian police officers at the base of the stairs to pass to the officers up the stairs. Nothing in the air felt sacred.
I stood on our small lawn of grass and watched the stampede in amazement. A familiar face slipped toward me, Barbara Sansone, a spiritual tour guide from Mill Valley, California, outside San Francisco, whom I had met before departing for Kathmandu at the very start of my journey. She was the first person who spoke the word Kalachakra to me. She wasn’t enjoying this chaotic scene. She disappeared.
I pulled a large women in Tibetan dress up a stone wall to the safety of the grassy lawn. I looked behind me. A thin old Nepali man with a weathered face was lying on the grass behind me, his head in the lap of a foreign woman who was plaintively throwing her wide eyes into the air searching for help. “Water! Get water! This man is dying!”
No one came forward to help. Everyone seemed more interested in seeing this blessed mandala. I crouched by the man’s feet to wait for her instructions. “Rub his feet!” she told me.
I rubbed his feet. I felt him contract his toes in the palms of my hands. I told the woman, as she rubbed water on his forehead, “He responded!”
His eyes were glassy. His face was calm. There was a shine to his skin. He was still. A moment passed. The woman looked over at me. “He is dead.”
We said nothing, but we both felt as if we were poles of female energy guiding the man into death. As I thought about it, I knew my reflections were something I probably would have mocked a year earlier had I heard someone else expressing them. But this was the first time death had literally slipped through my fingers. The woman’s left hand was on the man’s silvery head. She extended her right hand toward me. I extended my left hand toward her. My right hand was on his feet. We clasped hands, creating a circuit between the man and us.
I studied the man now. His face was thin and leathered. He had wrapped mala beads around his left wrist next to a watch. He wore bright sweatpants below his trousers. We searched for an ID and found a hidden wad of 500-rupee notes inside a secret pant pocket. He wore a long-sleeved blue sweater with a ski pattern of zigzags and dots across the chest. We slowly eased his arms out of the sweater so a doctor could check his heart rate. We unbuttoned a shirt he wore with a white tank top underneath. The woman introduced herself to me as Isabelle.
I continued looking for ID cards. I found only a red ribbon from the initiation and a nut. Isabelle asked two Buddhist nuns to do a puja for the man. They told her they didn’t know what to do. We suggested to a Buddhist monk who finally came by, after Isabelle’s requests for help, that maybe the man should be taken somewhere calm for his body to lie in rest. The monk returned to tell us that all the rooms in the gompa were taken by Lamaji, the Dalai Lama. Isabelle and I looked at each other in disbelief.
The monks had found a friend of the man’s son. “He is a Sherpa,” the man told us. Some men arrived to carry the body. Isabelle and I walked with them. We were stunned to see them take the Sherpa’s body into a dusty storeroom below the balcony on which the Dalai Lama had preached. Indian tea crates were scattered about. Some orange rope had been thrown idly on the ground. The room was littered with old butter cans and was filled with the smell of ghee, butter fat used for cooking. The Sherpa’s son appeared. He was a young man in a pinstriped jacket and pants. Though the pinstripes didn’t match, he had dressed up for this important last day of the initiation. I told him, “Your father died with Shanti.” Shanti means “peace” in Sanskrit.
The Sherpa’s son knelt next to his father and wept. From the storeroom, they carried the body of the Sherpa on a chador, a sheet, up to the balcony on which the press had jammed to watch the Dalai Lama and moved his body into a room at the end. They passed a now-orderly line of people waiting to see the mandala. Thin maroon cushions and chadors lay strewn in the courtyard. Monks trickled inside the Sherpa’s room to chant prayers. His son walked in. Isabelle’s and my job was done.
I came downstairs. The masses had left. A boy lay on the dusty floor. A man in an open-collar shirt leaned over him with a stethoscope while a bushy-haired, bearded man watched. The man with the stethoscope was Dr. Tsetan Dorji Sadutshang, the chief medical officer at the Tibetan Delek Hospital outside Dharamsala, and part of the Dalai Lama’s entourage. The boy had just had his second seizure of the day. Still, the boy’s uncle, the bushy-haired man, wanted to carry him to the mandala.
“Maybe it will cure him,” he said hopefully.
T
he doctor knew about the Sherpa who’d just died. The doctor said Buddhists leave bodies alone after death to lie peacefully so that consciousness can escape from all areas. “Westerners want to move so quickly. In Buddhism, we believe you leave the body to rest, to give time for namshe, consciousness, to leave the body.”
I wondered if Isabelle and I shouldn’t have pushed to have a respectful place for the Sherpa, considering the room of ghee where the monks took his body. The sky as a ceiling certainly would have been a better place for his son to find his father. The Sherpa’s death gave me my greatest lessons at the Kalachakra. I saw little compassion expressed as monks and Tibetans literally ran over each other in their rush to see the supposedly magical mandala.
“Only 40 percent of the people know why they are here,” the doctor told me. “The others are here for trade.
“Do they come to eat or because of devotion?” he asked.
To me, the stampede to the mandala was just another reflection of folks chasing superstition. The Tibetan doctor stood over the boy’s curled body and reflected on the Kalachakra ceremony. “So many come just to see the mandala. They think they are going to get enlightenment from the mandala. That is why Lamaji said that deity worship is not important. You must live compassionately.”
The doctor didn’t shrug off the importance of the boy seeing the mandala. “By seeing the mandala he may gain some merits. It’s a very auspicious mandala.”
The gray-haired uncle bundled the boy into a red shawl. The boy’s pants were dusty from the day’s two seizures. Dust and noise were all around us. Thin mattresses lay adrift, cluttering the courtyard. Monks on the way to the mandala passed out nuts and yelled, “C’mon. C’mon. Move quickly.”
They nudged the uncle with his nephew on his back to move quickly. I looked at the boy to see if he was moved by the spiritual powers of the mandala.
He was fast asleep.
CHAPTER 11
From the Bay of Bengal to a Train Berth
DARKNESS DESCENDED upon us on a remote island in the Bay of Bengal, hundreds of miles off India’s southeastern shoreline.
Lucy, Esther, and I had traveled from one of India’s highest peaks to its farthest island outpost, so far from India we were just a skip away from Thailand. We were searching for a personal abandonment that we hadn’t found in the daily teaching schedule and initiation rituals in the Himalayas. Esther and Lucy were discussing eggs with the hotel manager at the government lodge where we were resting for the night in the city of Port Blair, capital of the Andaman Nicobar chain of three hundred richly forested tropical islands. We were going to take the sunrise ferry thirty miles northeast of Port Blair to a tiny spot called Havelock Island. On an airport shuttle bus ride in Chennai, an Australian businessman had pointed us to the island. “Beach Number 7. Nothing like it.”
“We’d like three boiled eggs please for breakfast to take with us,” Esther told the manager.
“That’s not possible. You’ll have to have four boiled eggs.”
“Why? I don’t understand.”
“That’s the rule.”
“Why?”
He finally said, “It’s government. Eggs can only be made in pairs.”
Lucy stared at him. “So basically the government is saying that we have to have four eggs?”
“Yes.”
“I know. You make four eggs. We take three eggs and you keep one egg.”
“No.”
We boarded our ferry with four hard-boiled eggs, a reminder of the rigidity of culture here. The native people were all indigenous tribals not ethnically part of India. Marco Polo was one of the first Western visitors here. A Maratha admiral, Kanhoji Angre, fought the British off these islands until his death in 1729. After that, the islands became known as kala pani in India, or black water, because those who came here hardly ever returned. The British annexed them in the nineteenth century and turned them into a prison colony for the freedom fighters who were battling for India’s independence from the British. They began construction of a circular jail in the last decade of the nineteenth century on Port Blair and finally finished construction in 1908. Many of the inmates were executed, only sometimes after a trial. Lucy, Esther, and I passed the jail in a drive across Port Blair, but these two cousin-sisters, born of a British mother, carrying British passports and peppering their conversations with British vernacular, had no interest in seeing this vestige of colonial power. We didn’t have any plan except to find Beach Number 7. I fancied Lucy, Esther, and me as modern-day female Marco Polos, venturing into a place where few Indians even went.
Our fourth egg went to a ravenous litter of puppies that whimpered outside our door at Dolphin Yatri Niwas Complex, cottages by the sea on Havelock Island.
Havelock Island covers sixty-two square miles with bullfrogs that were the melody of the night. Bengali settlers inhabited the northern third of the island, since the rest was filled with tropical forest. Each village had a number. The boat docked at the jetty at Number 1. We spent our first night at a government lodge. A bus could have taken us to Beach Number 7, but we set out on foot, the bus bouncing past us with newlywed Indian couples inside. We discovered on this island an ease in walking not found in the urban centers, where we had to deflect stares and Eve teasing. The three of us together were a shakti force emboldened by our fearlessness and our free spirits.
Children whose names I couldn’t distinguish because they were so long bounded out of their houses and yelled to us with the little English they’d picked up from travelers before us. “Hellow! What is your name?” Women with teeth missing smiled at us. We walked past coconut groves and sparkling fluorescent green fields sunk in water. Two water buffalo submerged in water allowed me to understand why these animals earned their names. We passed chai shops, turning right to go to Beach Number 7. The back of my left knee ached from this six-mile walk, but my breath went deep into my belly from the sheer purity of the moment.
Lucy strode with an efficiency and silence that gave her an aura. I asked her, “What do you get from India?”
“The answer would be quite a monologue.”
“We have the time before we find Beach Number 7.”
“To me, India is grounding. The person I’m with is important, not the place. It isn’t a special spirituality or sentimentality about India that affects me. I don’t like to believe in sentimentality. But India is like the mother earth. In India, it is just about being. It is about existence.”
A warm wind kissed our cheeks. We slowed to share the road with a passing bus labeled “Shivashakthi,” with locals inside who were jostled whenever the bus hit one of the many potholes of muddy water dotting the tarred road. It swept by on its rounds many times during our walk. Mopeds whizzed by.
Locals called Beach Number 7 “Radhanagar.” Radha was the favored consort to Lord Krishna, the god I grew. I grew up thinking of him as the playboy of Hindu gods. He cavorted with gopis, goatherders, stealing their clothes while they bathed along riverbanks, loving each one of them passionately but lavishing his greatest attention on a goddess named Radha. We approached the beach that bears her name and saw a stunning sight: the waves of the Bay of Bengal crashing against the sands.
Lucy and I looked at each other. “Let’s go!”
We skipped into the waters, drenching our clothes but relishing the coolness against our skin, a pure expression of Tantric sensuality. I felt a lack of inhibition I’d never felt in India. These waters, once known as symbols of imprisonment, were a healing experience of freedom for me. Off the beach sat a tropical forest of trees. Like three fearless dakinis, we slipped into the forest at dusk. The trees towered over us. Darkness descended. Anything could happen. We saw a light.
“Hello! Hello!”
“Hello!” The answer came.
A beaming man greeted us and guided us into a large kitchen where a wood stove blazed. We were at the Jungle Resort at Beach Number 7 with posh huts and tree houses. The cook pulled a delicious impossibility of
a birthday cake out of a mud stove for the owner’s sister. Kittens tumbled over each other. It was a beautiful place in spirit and in nature.
We retraced our steps, a flashlight our spotlight upon our new world. Bullfrogs along the side of the road sang like a choir of tenors. The Jungle Resort manager drove by on a scooter and offered us a ride, along with a friend, also on a scooter. Lucy and I jumped on the back of the friend’s Bajaj Classic. Esther jumped onto the manager’s bike. The leaves above cast occasional shadows in the moonlight. The headlight captured the monsoon raindrops, but to me they were diamonds showering from the heavens upon us. “That’s your father sending those to us,” I yelled to Lucy, over the sound of the engine. “He is telling us that we’re doing the right thing. He supports us.”
“That’s beautiful,” she whispered, behind me.
“This is why we came here,” I said to Lucy. “This is India. You keep going and going for one beautiful moment.”
Beach Number 7 and Havelock Island gave us a freedom I didn’t know could be enjoyed in the land of my birth. Maybe it was the spirit of an island people free in a place that used to shackle prisoners. Residents said Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs lived here without the divide found on the subcontinent, intermarrying and worshiping together at the shrines of saints. We moved to the Jungle Resort, throwing ourselves every day into the Bay of Bengal’s waters, the beach ours alone except for occasional local fishermen who walked by without disturbing us. A female dog with a limp kept us company. Lucy and Esther plunged fearlessly into the waves. I followed them a little more cautiously, my fear of water still holding me back, in a brown Lily of France bra and Gap underwear made see-through by the warm waters. We were like Radhas without need of any Krishna.