The Second Rule of Ten

by Gay Hendricks

  I refrained from putting a tic next to that item.

  Now that I had a loose understanding of the code, I tried to piece together a few other tasks. Charlie, or R.M., had one more assignment—Pista la mula: R. M.

  Watch the mule.

  I found another reference to this “mule,” Descarga la mula: los primos. Not too hard to translate. Raul had been ordered to watch for some carrier of goods, at which point “the cousins” would unload them.

  I circled both items, as well as another interesting tidbit on page one: Distribuir los golosinas: A. A. Hand out the candy? Subtle, boys.

  I scanned the list for any other errands for “B.P. solo” and sucked in my breath.

  Dar la vuelta - ¡Vindicacion!: B.P. solo.

  The first part of the translation was weird—something to do with turning ones back, maybe? But I didn’t need a dictionary to translate ¡Vindicacion!. And whatever B.P. was supposed to vindicate, he’d done so successfully. Two big tics next to that one. I was half expecting a smiley face, as well. I jotted down my thoughts, and tucked the contents away for future reference.

  We had a short layover in Bangkok—just enough time for me to enter the terminal, send off my e-mails, and stretch my stiff muscles before returning to the plane for the second leg of the trip.

  There was a new flight crew. I was sorry to see Dok go, but another stunning flight attendant soon came down the aisle with a drinks cart. I asked for two minibottles of Merlot, hoping they’d knock me out for a few more hours of sleep. The wine, plus residual fatigue, worked like a charm. Next thing I knew, my new Thai guardian was lightly shaking my shoulder. I just had time to brush my teeth and drink two cups of fresh-brewed, hot Thai tea before we began our descent into the dusty madness of Delhi.

  New Delhi’s multibillion-dollar airport may look like a modernistic sprawl of glass and steel, but its true identity is naraka, the hell realm. The customs area was a milling swarm of sweaty humanity. My first inhale captured a breath-holding mixture of curry, diesel fuel, urine, and hair pomade, accompanied by a mind-searing din of screaming children, angry tourists, bellowing baggage handlers, and, oddly, a small brass band blaring out welcome music, no doubt for some incoming, corrupt Indian politician.

  I had added International/Asian service to my iPhone before I left LAX. I called Heather’s number, got her voicemail, and held up the phone to give her the latest soundtrack of my life. I told her I’d give her another call when I could.

  My plane had landed in Delhi a half hour late, making for a very tight connection to the Kingfisher puddle-jumper to Dharamshala. This was going to take some maneuvering. I studied the seething crowd as they awaited permission to enter. As a boy, I had waited in these endless lines numerous times, shuttled as I was between parents and countries. But rather than using the interminable waits to practice equanimity, I had instead honed my resentment, as I observed over and over again that a privileged few always seemed to jump the lines. Soon, a pattern emerged.

  As anyone who lives in India will tell you, where there is a want, there is always a “fixer,” whether he be in charge of train schedules, chapatis, or even ganja at a hippie temple. All I had to do now was ascertain where the fixer was. I already knew how to speak his language—it was universal.

  The restless masses funneled into the narrow customs booths, where officials inspected passports and other paperwork with glacial precision. I waited and watched from the back of the room until I noticed a dark-complexioned man dressed in a three-piece suit and wielding expensive luggage, visually scouring the long row of officials. Watched as he caught the eye of one thin, balding man with a long face and precise moustache, also wearing a dark business suit, standing behind the row. Three-piece suit gave a small nod, and moustache-man hurried past the crowd, to his side. Gotcha.

  Their business concluded, I moved into the fixer’s line of sight. I bowed. In a moment, he was in front of me, his long face giving nothing away.

  “We haven’t met,” I said. “Inspector Tenzing Norbu. From Los Angeles.”

  His eyes widened slightly. “Jay Gupta, at your service.”

  “Mr. Gupta, I am traveling on a mission of great importance to Dharamshala, the seat of His Holiness the Dalai Lama.” First rule of working with the fixer? Drop a name. Strictly speaking, I was telling the truth, as well, because I was going to Dharamshala on an important mission and it is the seat of His Holiness. Mr. Gupta didn’t need to know the undertaking was important only to me, and that Dorje Yidam was three monasteries up the road from His Holiness’ headquarters.

  He bowed back. “It would be my pleasure to assist you in any way possible.” Only a trace of Indian singsong spiced his precise Oxford English.

  “I wonder if I could engage you to help me move through customs quickly,” I said. “My flight leaves in half an hour.”

  “Of course,” he said. “It would be my great, great pleasure.”

  Two greats. That meant it would cost more than I’d estimated.

  This was confirmed when Gupta waved at the line of officers. “These men see their brothers and sisters making fortunes in high-tech jobs. But do not they, too, have a value in this world?”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “And who would not choose to honor those who serve, so that when they go home at night, it is with a deep sense that their worth has been appreciated?”

  He leaned close. “Three hundred U.S. gets you out the door and to your connection in ten minutes or less. I will, of course, make the appropriate distributions.” I was guessing that meant two-thirds for him and the remaining third spread among the other worthies.

  “Deal,” I said. He spun on his heel and walked briskly toward a senior inspector, overseeing the 20 or so others dealing with the throng. They had a short whispered conversation, and he beckoned me over.

  I was at the Kingfisher gate with enough spare time to down a cup of vendor chai. Soon we were bucking severe up-and-down drafts of the Himalayan foothills for a white-knuckling hour before landing with a bump.

  I stepped outside and took several deep breaths. I may have landed safely, but my stomach continued to lurch and my chest to tighten. The real danger still lay ahead.

  I climbed into a taxi for what I hoped was the final leg of my journey. The airport is about ten miles from the town. I stared out the window at the lush forests and jagged peaks. The route is simple, basically two turns and you’re there, and soon we had reached the suburbs. We buzzed through lower Dharamshala, past local government buildings and schools, and headed uphill for the other government seat, the exiled one. We slowed to a crawl, weaving between scooters, buses, monks, and tourists, all jostling for space in the sprawling but narrow hill village of McLeod Ganj, home to His Holiness for more than 60 years. Tibetan snow lion flags snapped from every hotel roof and shop window, announcing beds and spiritual trinkets. I felt for the wide-eyed backpackers who had trekked here from all over the world, no doubt looking for tranquility. Their stunned expressions reminded me of the early-rising tourists standing in the heart of Hollywood, looking for stars and finding hookers. My own eyes widened as we passed café after café boasting Internet connections. Everything changes.

  We rounded a bend. There it was, nestled in the hills, backed by mountains. Butter yellow walls, curved turrets, flapping flags. Half a mile, and light years, away.

  “Let me off here, please.”

  I set my shoulder bag down and leaned against a pine tree, breathing in pure mountain air still scrubbed clean by September’s late monsoons.

  I remember this smell.

  I shivered. I pulled out my fleece and zipped it on. A small blue-gray cat hair clung to one sleeve. I left it there.

  I walked up the hill to find my friends and face my demons.

  CHAPTER 21

  I pushed open heavy wooden double doors, the same brick red as the steps leading up to them. I entered a dim, deserted foyer—afternoon classes were in session. I almost buckled under the sensory assault—the mu
sty scent of yak-butter candles, the thick mantle of dread—and I reached for one wall to steady myself. I’d spent half my life here, and I still felt lost and alone, and anything but at home. A shimmering veil of darkness dropped over my eyes. I ducked my head below my knees and breathed deeply, waiting for it to dissipate.

  I heard him before I saw him—the familiar, ponderous footsteps, perhaps a little slower, but no less relentless. Father.

  I raised my head to look. I was wrong. This man was shrunken and stooped and, like Julius, propelled himself with the help of a cane. He was thin to the point of emaciation, and a grayish pallor clung to his skin like mold.

  No.

  A sharp, dark jab, somewhere between pain and anger, bit into my heart. Father. The last time I saw him walk this hallway, he was a giant, trailing a wake of threat and judgment. Now I towered over him. But his eyes glowed with the same ferocious fire, and as he rested both hands on his cane to observe me, his face seemed to shift into the same expression of suspicious irritation, as if once again I had interrupted him from something more important. The pain inside intensified. The wound may have had years to heal over, but it felt fresh—I was a 13-year-old boy, who had just lost his mother and knew his father didn’t want him.

  “Father.” My touch to the forehead was so slight as to be imperceptible. Even so, I regretted it.

  “Tenzing.” He returned my gesture with an even slighter dip of his chin.

  So. It begins again.

  He smiled. “I woke up today feeling I might be receiving a visitor. I had assumed it would be Rinpoche. Now I see it is you who has showed up.”

  A grenade of rage exploded in my belly. You never bothered to show up for me. You didn’t show up when she died. You never even acknowledged her passing, or my pain. I was just a child! Intense heat rippled throughout my body. My armpits flooded with sweat and the back of my eyeballs burned.

  “Will you take tea?” he asked.

  I nodded, unable to speak. He pulled a cord by the wall. Somewhere down below, a bell rang. He gestured for me to follow him. I did.

  Entering his office was like stepping into a time warp: nothing had changed since the day I’d left. Even the dust motes’ dance was the same. My father, wincing, lowered himself onto a wooden chair next to the window. I sat opposite, on a square meditation cushion on the floor. I looked up at him. Years of mindfulness practice evaporated. I was caught in a churn of feelings.

  A young monk walked inside, bowed, and delivered a tea tray. Same chipped tea pot. A lump of yak butter and a salt shaker flanked two cups. Same cups.

  “Tibetan or English?” my father asked, his eyes boring into mine. It felt like a test.

  “I’ll have what you’re having,” I said. He filled the cups with tea, and stirred a spoonful of yak butter and a pinch of salt in each. He pushed one cup in my direction. Picked his up, and slurped noisily, following up with a drawn-out “Ahhh” of satisfaction. I sipped and was happy not to gag.

  My father’s voice was amused. “You’ve lost your taste for the old ways.”

  “Maybe I never had one to begin with.”

  My father set down his cup. “Why did you come back?”

  “You mean why, when you put so much effort into throwing me out?”

  His voice was mild. “The front door is never locked. You walked out of it voluntarily thirteen years ago. Nobody forced you to leave, and as far as I know, nobody forced you to return.”

  I was suddenly overtaken by an urgent need to lie down and sleep. I was so tired of fighting. My father’s stubbornness was monumental, my resistance exhausting.

  Breathe, Ten. Breathe.

  I inhaled deeply and exhaled fully. My father observed me, his face impassive. I tried to release my own stubbornness with the long exhale. I had wasted so much time waiting for my father to change. I would try not to waste a moment more.

  “I didn’t come here because of you,” I said. “I came here because of Yeshe and Lobsang. I still link up with them, or at least I did until a couple days ago. When I reached out to them during meditation I found the connection broken. An image of you stood in its place.”

  A slight smile played at the corners of my father’s mouth. To my mind, it was condescending. “So, still meditating?” he asked. “Still playing at sgom rgyab?”

  How dare he? What gives him the right? I wasn’t here to discuss my meditation practice. As far as I was concerned, he had lost the right to know. “I’d like to see my friends. Now, please,” I managed to say.

  My father turned to look out the window. “They’re gone,” he said, fixing his eyes on the snow-capped crags. “Sent away. I’m sorry.”

  “Why?”

  “Ah. Why. That is an interesting question,” he said.

  “What have you done with them?” I spat out the words.

  He shifted his gaze back to me. “As the years passed, with no word from you, not one, I finally accepted you had left all of us absolutely. Then I discovered you hadn’t, not really. I found them, you see; all those letters you’d sent to Yeshe and Lobsang over time. Pages and pages filled with descriptions of your new life. So I sent your friends to a simpler place, where they would not be distracted. I told myself it was better.”

  “Where?”

  “Over the border,” he said. “The old country.”

  “Tibet?”

  “Yes, to Dip-Dorje. It’s still home to twenty of our monks. Twenty-two, now.”

  Dip-Dorje. Our original monastery. When we were kids, Yeshe loved to locate it on the old map of Tibet hanging in one of our classrooms. He would find Lhasa, place his finger on Potala Palace and move it up a few inches to the hilly region that lay north. The map showed where our centuries-old monastery lay, but not what happened to it in 1959, when all of Tibet was “liberated” by the Chinese Red Army. Along with thousands of others, our temple was ravaged, and any surviving monks joined the massive spiritual exodus to India. Dip-Dorje lay in ruins until right around the time I’d left for America, when word trickled in that local volunteers had begun reconstruction. My father and the other abbots had dispatched a few brave lamas to reopen the monastery as best they could, given the watchful eyes of the local government. But that was a decade ago, before the recent crackdown.

  “The Chinese allow such things?” I said. “Monks can go back and forth? It is safe?”

  “No,” he said. “Not back and forth. Not safe. Our relations with the Chinese are no better. Now that His Holiness has half retired, perhaps worse.”

  I stared at this shrunken version of my father. Smaller, but no less vindictive. “And still you sent Yeshe and Lobsang? How could you do this to them? I always knew you to be a cold man, Father. Cold and angry. But never unfair.”

  “Unfair?” He shook his head. “Such a Western concept. The spiritual life, like any life, is neither fair, nor unfair. Life just is. And our feelings about its fairness are completely irrelevant.”

  I wanted to throttle him. Then, like a pendulum, a deep ebb tide of fatigue again replaced the flow of anger. My father, too, seemed to slump under the wear of this ridiculous dance between us. He leaned back and closed his eyes. I blinked. His skin was giving off a faint pulse of grayish-green energy, like a discharge of poison.

  He isn’t well.

  “Father . . . “ I started, just as he opened his eyes, and said “I’m dying, Tenzing.”

  My body was kneeling next to his before my mind had fully registered the words. He took off his glasses, exposing brackish eyes.

  “But . . . “ My own stung. “You can’t . . . “

  He put his glasses on again. “I’ve got a cancer, deep inside. I cannot fight it—it’s stronger than I am.”

  “Where?”

  “I think they call it ‘prostate’ in the West.”

  “But that’s good, then. There are treatments.”

  His smile was weary. “There’s no treatment for karma,” he said. “No pill, although I’m sure your drug companies would disagree
.”

  Now they were “my” drug companies. I am his metaphor for all things Western and therefore wrong. I pulled back from heading down that sour alleyway. Not now.

  Next came panic, irony fast on its heels: No one prided himself more than me when it came to the subject of death—accepting it, allowing it, helping others to deal with it. But this? Not my father. “I don’t know what to do.” I said. My voice broke.

  My father touched the back of my hand. I almost flinched, though whether from fear or disgust, I couldn’t say.

  “Tenzing, do you remember what I told you when you left?”

  “Every word. You said I had shown once again that my commitment to the Dharma was insufficient.”

  “That’s right, son.” He sighed. “I’m sure I meant it at the time.”

  Son.

  A tiny heart-space opened, and a droplet of hope formed inside. I hardened around it.

  “You meant it,” I said. “I’m sure you still do.”

  “Tenzing, please. Look at me. Not who you think I still am. Me.”

  I forced myself to look. And saw a fearsome monster that would live forever, claws eternally dug into my heart.

  “Let it go,” he said.

  And saw a frail man, old before his time, with little of it left.

  I had fought against this person for my whole life. He had a permanent outpost inside me. Because he is your father. To eliminate him completely was to kill myself. Because you are his son. My body was the living host of his presence, and there was no way to root it out without jeopardizing the rest of me. Because we live in each other.