Big what, he could not say. His mouth hung open, his eyes bugged out; they could have molded a new mask portraying astonishment directly from his face.
Frank laughed. “These are his kind of people.”
“He probably thinks it’s a stack of mirrors,” Charlie said.
“Quit it,” Anna said. “Don’t be mean.”
Charlie and Nick leaned their faces in to take photos of themselves on each side of Joe, eyes bugged, tongues thrust out and down. Hopefully they were not offending their hosts. But looking around Anna saw that the guides were smiling.
“They’re masks that hide your face but show your insides,” Charlie said. “This is what we’re all really like inside.”
“No,” Anna said.
“Oh come on. In your feelings? In your dreams?”
“I certainly hope not. Besides, where’s the good feelings?”
She had been thinking of perhaps the curiosity mask, or the striving-for-accuracy mask, but Charlie gave her a Groucho look and indicated with his eyebrows the paintings on the beams between wall and ceiling, which included any number of improbably entwined couples. Frank was frankly checking them out, nodding as if they confirmed some sociobiological insight only he could formulate, bonobo Buddhism or something like that. Anna snorted, pretty sure that the tantrically horny painters had to have been fantasizing elements of female flexibility, among other endowments. Maybe six arms made it easier to position oneself. Or perhaps there was no gravity in nirvana; which would also explain all the perfectly round tits. She wondered what Joe would make of those, being still a breast man of the first order. But for now he remained too fixated on the demon masks to notice them.
Then they were joined by more scientists from the Khembalung Institute for Higher Studies. There were introductions all around, and Anna shook hands, pleased to see all her correspondents at last, just as shockingly real and vivid as the demon masks. Frank joined them, and for a while they chatted about NSF and their various collaborations. Then Frank and Anna and Nick left Charlie and Joe in Government House, and followed their new hosts through rooms and across a courtyard to the Institute itself, where the new labs that NSF had helped to fund and build were still under construction. Outside one of the rooms was a statue of the Buddha, standing with one hand raised before him palm outward, in a gesture like a traffic cop saying stop.
“I’ve never seen him look like that.”
“This is, what say, the Adamantine Buddha,” one of her pen pals said. “The Buddha is represented in a number of different ways. He is not always meditating or laughing. When there is bad going on, the Buddha is as obliged to stop it as anyone else who sees it. And, you know, since bad things happen fairly regularly, there has always been a figure to represent the Buddha’s response.”
Nick said, “He looks like a policeman.”
Their guide nodded. “Police Inspector Sakyamuni. Who insists that we all must resist the three poisons of the mind: fear, greed, and anger.”
“So true,” Anna said. Frank was nodding also, lost in his thoughts.
“This aspect of Buddha-nature is also the one represented in the statues on the dike, of course.”
“Can we go on it?” Frank and Nick asked together.
“Of course. We’re very near it here.”
They finished their tour and joined the rest of their group outside, on a lawn surrounded on three sides by buildings, on the fourth, to the east, by the inner wall of the dike. The wall was a tilted lawn in this area, bisected by a set of broad stone steps leading to its top. Frank and Anna and Nick followed some of their guides up these steps; Charlie and Joe appeared below, and Joe began to run around on the grass.
On top they emerged into a stiff onshore wind. Out to sea lay a white fleet of tall clouds. A big statue of the Adamantine Buddha faced seaward, hand outstretched. From beside him they had a good view of both sea and land, and Anna felt herself lurch a little. “Wow,” Nick said.
It was as it had appeared from the plane during their approach: the land inside the dike was slightly lower than the ocean surrounding it. It was no illusion; their eyesight and inner ear confirmed it.
“Holland is like this in some places,” Frank said to Anna as they followed Nick and the guides. “Have you ever seen the dikes?”
“No.”
“Some of the polders there are clearly lower than the North Sea. You can walk the dikes, and it’s the strangest sight.”
“So it’s true?” Anna asked, waving at Khembalung. “I mean—it looks like it must be.”
One of their guides turned and said, “Unfortunately it is true. When the land is drained, there is a resulting subsidence. Dry land is heavier, and sinks, and then the water wicks up into it. We have gone through cycle after cycle.”
Anna shivered despite the hot wind. She felt faintly queasy and off balance.
“Try looking only one way at a time.”
Anna tried, setting her back to the island. Under a pastel blue, clouds flew in from the southwest. The sea bounced to the blue horizon, waves with white-caps rolling in. Such a big world. Their guides pointed at the clouds, exclaiming that they looked like the beginning of the monsoon; perhaps the drought would end at last!
They walked along the dike, which was clearly old. A heavy bar mesh at the waterline had rusted away, so that the boulders held in by the mesh were slumping, and in places had fallen. Their guides told them that dike maintenance was done with human labor and the little machinery they had, but that there were structural repairs needed that they could not afford, as they could see. Frank jumped onto the waist-high outer wall, setting a bad example for Nick, who immediately followed it.
Sucandra and Padma came up the broad stone staircase, and when they saw Frank and Nick on the retaining wall they called to them. “Hello! Look, the monsoon may be coming!”
They topped the wall and fell in with them. “We wanted to show you the mandala. Hello, Mingma, you have met our visitors, we see.”
Back down on the dusty grass Charlie and Joe had been joined by Rudra, Drepung, and a group of Khembali youth who were creating a mandala on a giant wooden disk that lay on the lawn. “Let’s go down and see,” Sucandra suggested, and they walked down the steps and out of the brunt of the wind. It certainly felt humid enough to rain.
The biggest sand mandalas took about a week to complete, Mingma told them. Long brass funnels were held by the artists just an inch or so over the pattern, and when the funnels were rubbed with sticks, thin lines of colored sand fell from them. The colorists worked on their knees, scarcely breathing, rubbing the funnels rhythmically, gently, their faces down near the ground to watch the emerging line of sand; then with a quick tilt of the funnels they would stop the flow and sit back and turn to the others, to crack a joke or laugh at someone else’s.
When the design was completely colored in, there would be a ceremony to celebrate the various meanings it held, and then it would be carried to the long shallow reflecting pool in front of Government House, and tipped into the water.
“A real launch party,” Charlie noted.
“It signifies the impermanence of all things.”
To Anna that seemed like a waste of the art. She did not like the impermanence of all things, and felt there was already enough in the world to remind her of it. She liked to think that human efforts were cumulative, that something in every effort was preserved and added to the whole. Perhaps in this case that would be the mandala’s pattern, which would remain in their minds. Or maybe this art was a performance rather than an object. Maybe. What she wanted out of art was something that lasted. If their art did not have that, it seemed like a waste of effort to her.
Over on the other side of the mandala, Joe and Rudra were standing before a group of monks, and Rudra was chanting intently in his deep gravelly voice, a happy gleam in his eye. Those around him repeated the last word of every sentence, in a kind of shout or singing. Joe stamped his foot in time, crying “No!” in unison wit
h the rest of them. He hadn’t even noticed Anna was there.
Then suddenly he took off directly toward the sand mandala, fists clenched and swinging like a miniaturized John Wayne. Anna cried out “Joe!” but he did not hear her. The Khembalis actually made way for him, some of them with arms outstretched as if to create a better corridor. “Joe!” she cried again more sharply. “Joe! Stop!” He hesitated for a second, at the edge of the circle of brilliant color, then walked out onto it.
“JOE!”
No one moved. Joe stood peacefully at the center of the mandala, looking around.
Anna rushed down the steps to the edge of the circle. Joe’s footprints had blurred some lines, and grains of colored sand were now out of place, scattered brilliantly in the wrong fields. Joe was looking very pleased with himself, surveying the pattern under his feet, a pattern made of colors almost precisely the same as the colors of his building blocks at home, only more vibrant. He spotted Rudra, and thrust an arm out to wave at him. “Ba!” he declared.
“Baaaa,” Rudra replied, putting his hands together and bowing.
Joe held his pose, not unlike that of the Adamantine Buddhas, with a kind of Napoleonic grandeur. Charlie, standing now beside Anna, shook his head. “Ya big old hambone,” he muttered.
Joe dropped his arm, made a gesture at all the people watching him. A few drops of rain spattered down out of the low clouds bowling in from sea, and the Khembalis oohed and ahhed as they felt it and looked up.
Joe took off again, this time in the direction of the reflecting pool. Anna rushed around the circle of people to cut him off, but she was too late; he walked right into the shallows. “Joe!” she called out, to no effect. Joe turned and confronted the crowd that had followed him, standing knee-deep in the water. It was sprinkling lightly but steadily now, the rain warm on Anna’s face, and all the Khembalis were smiling. Enough colored sand had stuck to Joe’s feet that vermillion and yellow blooms spread in the water around him.
“Rgyal ba,” Rudra declared, and the crowded repeated it. Then: “Ce ba drin dran-pa!”
“What is he saying?” Anna asked Drepung, who now stood beside her, as if to support her if she fainted, or perhaps to stop her if she started in after Joe. Charlie stood on her other side.
“All hail,” Drepung said. He looked older to Anna, his round face and little mouth finally at home. She had seen that he was clearly a well-known and popular figure here.
Joe stood in the shallows regarding the crowd. He was happy. The Khembalis were indulging him, enjoying him. The warm rain fell on them like a balm. Suddenly Anna felt happy; her little tiger saw that he was among friends, somehow, and at last he stood in the world content, relaxed, even serene. She had never seen him look like this. She had wanted so much for him to feel something like this.
Charlie, on the other hand, felt his stomach go tense at the sight of Joe in the pool. All his worries were being confirmed. He took a deep breath, thinking Nothing has changed, you knew this already—they’re thinking he’s one of their tulkus. That doesn’t mean that it’s true.
He couldn’t imagine what Anna was making of all this.
Standing beside each other, the two of them both felt the discrepancy in their reactions. And they sensed as well that their characteristic moods or responses were here reversed, Anna pleased by a Joe anomaly, Charlie worried.
Uneasily they glanced at each other, both thinking This is backwards, what’s going on?
“Big rain!” Joe exclaimed, looking up, and the crowd sighed appreciatively.
That night the visitors collapsed on the beds in their rooms, even Joe, and slept from the early evening through the night and well into the next morning. It had rained the whole time, and when they went back out after breakfast they found the island transformed; everything was drenched, with standing water everywhere. The Khembalis were very happy to see it, however, so they split up into groups and took off in the rain as planned. Joe and Nick were first taken to the school to see classes and playground games. Everywhere he went Joe was made much of, and he was left free to commune with every demon mask they passed, directing diatribes in his private language at some of them. In the afternoon Nick left his group and joined Anna at the Institute, where she was talking to her pen pals and the other scientists there. Charlie spent his time in Government House, talking to officials brought to him by Padma.
Frank was gone; they didn’t know how he was spending his time, although once in passing Anna saw him in conversation with Sucandra and some of the local monks. Later she saw him on the dike, walking the berm path with Rudra Cakrin. Judging from his talk at dinner, he had also spent time discussing agriculture out in the fields. But mostly he seemed to Anna like a religious pilgrim, eager for instruction and enlightenment, absorbed, distant, relaxed; very unlike his manner back in Washington.
Next afternoon they visited the zoo, located in a big park at the northwest quadrant of the island. Many of the animals and birds of the Sundarbans were represented. The elephants had a large enclosure, but the largest enclosure of all was the tigers’. Many of the big cats had been swept to sea by one flood or another, and rescued by Khembali patrol boats. Now they lived in an enclosure thick with stands of elephant grass and saal trees, fronted by a big pond cut by a curving glass retaining wall, so that when the tigers went swimming they could be seen underwater. Their abrupt foursquare dives and subsequent splayed strokes turned feline grace unexpectedly aquatic, and underwater their fur streamed like seaweed. “Tiger! Tiger! Big big tiger!”
At the end of that wet day they sat in a big hall and ate a meal anchored by curried rice. Nick was served a special order of plain rice, arranged by Drepung, but Joe was fine with the curry. Or so it seemed during the meal; but that night in their room he was fractious, and then, after a long nursing session, wide awake. Jet lag, perhaps. The monsoon rains were coming down hard, the drumming of it on the roof quite loud. Joe began to complain. Anna was asleep on her feet, but Charlie was out entirely, so she had to zombie on, hour after hour, mumbling replies to Joe’s cheerful jabberwocking. She was on the verge of a collapse when a knock came at the door, and Frank looked in.
“I can’t sleep, and I could hear you were up with Joe. I wondered if you wanted me to play with him for a while.”
“Oh God bless you,” she cried. “I was just about to melt.” She fell on the couch and shut her sandy eyes. For a while her brain continued to turn, as her body dove into sleep and dragged her consciousness down with it.
“Nick sleeping. Da sleeping. Mama sleeping.”
“That’s right.”
“Wanna play?”
“Sure. What you got here, trains? What about some airplanes, shouldn’t you have some airplanes?”
“Got planes.”
“Good. Let’s fly, let’s fly and fly.”
“Fly!”
“Hey, those are your tigers! Well, that’s okay. Flying tigers are just right for here. Watch out, here he comes!”
“Tiger fly!”
Anna stitched the meandering border between sleep and dreams, in and out, up and down. Frank and Joe passed toys back and forth.
In the hour before dawn a hard knock battered their door, throwing Anna convulsively to her feet. She had been dreaming of the tigers’ fluid swimming, up in the sky—
It was Drepung, looking agitated. “I’m sorry to disturb you, my friends, but a decision has been made that we must all evacuate the island.”
This woke them all, even Charlie who was usually so slow to rouse. Frank turned on all the lights, and they packed their bags while Drepung explained the situation.
“The monsoon has returned, as you have seen,” he said. “This is a good thing, but unfortunately it has come at a time of especially high tides, and together with the storm surge, and the low air pressure, sea level is extremely high.” He helped the comatose Nick into a shirt. “It’s already higher on the dikes than is judged fully safe, higher than we have seen for many years, and some weakness
es in it are being exposed. And now we have been informed that the monsoon or something else has caused the breaking of ice dams in the drainage of the Brahmaputra.” He looked at Charlie: “These big glacial lakes are a result of global warming. The Himalayan glaciers are melting fast, and now lots of ice dams that create lakes behind them are giving way under these monsoon rains, adding greatly to the run-off. The Brahmaputra is already overflowing, and much of Bangladesh is faced with flooding. They called with the alarm from Dhaka just a short while ago.” He checked his watch. “Just an hour ago, good. It goes fast. The surge of high water will arrive soon, and we are already at our limit. And as you have seen, the island is lower than the sea even at the best of times. This is a problem with using dikes for protection. If the dike fails, the result can be severe. So we must leave the island.”
“How?” Anna exclaimed.
“Don’t worry, we have ferries at the dock enough for all. Always docked here for this very purpose, because the danger is ever-present. We have used them before, when the rivers flood or there are high tides. Any of them can flood us. The island is just too low, and unfortunately, getting lower.”
“And sea level is getting higher,” Charlie said. “I heard from a friend in Antarctica that a piece of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet came off a few days ago. Every time that happens sea level rises by whatever extra amount of water the ice displaces.”
“Interesting,” Drepung said. “Perhaps that explains why we are already at the safety level on the dike.”
“How much time do we have?” Anna said.
“Two or three hours. This is more than enough time for us.” He sighed nevertheless. “We prefer that our guests leave by helicopter in a situation like this, but to tell the truth the helicopter went to Calcutta last night, to bring out the ABC officials to meet you. So now it appears you should join us on the ferries.”
“How many people live here again?” Charlie asked as he threw their bathroom bags into his backpack.
“Twelve thousand.”
“Wow.”
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