Ruit doesn’t remember the pain, only voices raised in alarm, the skin of his left forearm forming a movable crust like boiled milk, and frantic consultations between his parents and neighbors. Finally, he recalls his mother strapping him to his father’s back, and being carried up, up, toward the palace at the top of the world. “All-seeing Buddha,” his father chanted, repeating the puja as he climbed the steep path past the black-and-white mani stones, through a forest of flapping prayer flags affixed to poles, mindful of the son he’d already lost, chanting until his voice grew hoarse: “All-knowing Buddha, let all the winds and suns and soil help the boy be well.”
Diki Chhyoling monastery sat five hundred feet above Olangchungola, chiseled into the canyon wall, an aerie for peculiar crimson-robed creatures who chose to live exposed to the wind and weather. To the right of the path were rhododendron bushes whose small, bloodred blooms thrived, improbably, at altitude. To the left was the windswept river gorge. Ruit looked down when he dared, seeing how close his father placed his feet to the edge of the narrow path, aware that one stumble could send them both on a dizzying plunge. But his father’s footing was sure, a product of his treks into Tibet, carrying paint and fabric and sugar from the plains of India, and returning with yak-wool blankets and heavy sacks of salt, cargo far more unwieldy than a four-year-old son. Ruit felt the wind probing at his thin clothes with sharp fingernails, and buried his face in his father’s long hair, taking shelter within his warmth and strength.
From the narrow veranda on the second floor of his home, Ruit had often watched the setting sun brush the monastery’s gleaming rust-colored walls, throw golden sparks from the stores of treasure he pictured stacked there. From the village, Diki Chhyoling, one of Nepal’s oldest Buddhist monasteries, looked like a vision from the stories his father told, stories of men who became so wise they no longer struggled to eat, or to stay warm, or bothered to live tethered to the ground but floated, at first, inches from the earth, then up between these palaces hanging from the clouds.
When Ruit left the shelter of his father’s hair and was lowered onto a rocky ledge outside the monastery courtyard, his legs were unsteady. From this height, he was confused to see that Olangchungola, the center of the world, where more than seventy families chopped wood and carried water and tended their ponies, yaks, and dzos, had vanished in the canyon’s shadowed depth. Weathered brass urns standing astride the entrance seemed too grand and intimidating to simply walk between. Ruit was disappointed to see that the feet of the elderly monk who invited them inside didn’t float but stepped firmly on packed dirt as he led them through the entrance, held a scarlet curtain aside, and beckoned them in out of the wind.
In the prayer hall of the monastery, Ruit squeezed his eyes shut in terror. Thangkas dense with scenes of earthly suffering hung in the gloom, their details picked out with terrible clarity by sunlight lancing through chinks in the stone walls. Above the dusty Tibetan carpet where his father laid him down, Ruit found one of these paintings too awful to look at for long. A grinning blue-skinned devil, wearing a necklace of human heads, stood tending a pot of boiling water. In it were dozens of people, their open mouths forming howls Ruit could almost hear.
Perhaps that’s why he’d been brought here. His father was always talking about fate, about how past actions predicted your future as reliably as the sun rising over the rhododendrons each morning. “Our fate is written on our foreheads,” Sonam often said. Maybe putting his arm in the pot had stirred the machinery of that fate into motion. Maybe it meant a blue-skinned demon lurking somewhere nearby would now have to finish the job, and boil the rest of him like a potato.
But no demon appeared from the shafts of darkness behind painted columns carved with skulls and snakes. Only a younger monk with close-cropped hair and a kind face. Ruit stared at the framed centerpiece of Diki Chhyoling’s shrine, a mushroom, nearly two feet wide, reputed to have been found in the forest with the words om mani padme om clearly visible on its cap. The monk spread a white silk kata under Ruit’s damaged arm, scooped a ladle into a wooden jug, and smoothed cool yellow yak butter from Ruit’s hand to his elbow. Then he wound the kata carefully around Ruit’s arm, while the older monk dipped a horsehair brush into a stone cistern and, by the light of butter lamps, chanted healing pujas while he shook drops of water believed to have been blessed by Guru Rinpoche himself, showering them down onto Ruit’s uplifted head. Ruit’s arm healed without infection, but the skin remained puckered and discolored, as if a wrinkled rose-hued silk sheath had been permanently fastened to his flesh.
The following year, when he was five, Ruit broke his other arm.
He was attempting to ride the village’s most fearsome dzo. Egged on by a pack of friends, he climbed onto the animal and grabbed the rough hair on either side of its neck. Another boy yanked the dzo’s tail, and the yak-cow hybrid shot forward like it had been shocked, bucking and twisting, galloping down the path of paving stones that divided the village of Olangchungola.
Ruit landed on his right arm and felt it crack against a stone, snapping his forearm cleanly. This time his father wasn’t as worried, or as sympathetic, finishing his butter tea before carrying Ruit back up to the monastery, lecturing him all the way, and during the painful process of having the monks straighten, then set, his arm in bamboo splints, about taming his mischievous impulses.
“I was very, very naughty,” Ruit says, laughing with a hint of pride. “But there’s so little for children to do in a place like Olangchungola. We had no school. And I was too young to work. So we ran around like little devils.”
As Ruit grew older, he realized how fragile life could be in his village. There was a traditional healer who did what he could with medicinal herbs, but the nearest doctor was a six-day walk south, toward India. His parents spoke in short, clipped sentences about his older brother, who’d died before Ruit had formed any memory of him, at age four, from severe diarrhea. Ruit came of age intensely aware that at any moment forces beyond human control could snuff a life out. Ruit’s mother, Kasang, told him about the time his own life was endangered as an infant, when a high fever threatened to kill her second son just months after the loss of his elder brother. She told and retold the story, while stirring tsampa or making his favorite pounded-corn cakes, of how she’d bundled him up in her warmest yak-hair blanket and carried him a day’s walk over the Tiptala into Tibet, to visit the sacred hot springs.
“There, my jewel,” she’d say, breaking the corner off a still-cooling cake for him, her words as smooth and practiced as prayer, describing how she had undressed, lowered herself through the freezing air into the center of the most powerful pool, held him on her lap, and ladled hot water over his pink skin, chanting pujas to Buddha and Guru Rinpoche, and the spirits of the rocks and the sky and the earth, just to be safe, until she felt sure her son would survive. In Olangchungola, as in much of the eastern Himalaya, Buddhist practice is blended with the traditions of Bon, the older, animist faith that had dominated the mountains until the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama were carried north by Guru Rinpoche.
Each spring, when the winter snows that silted the high passes to Tibet shut began to melt and the trading caravans prepared to set out once again, the village would gather in the courtyard of the monastery for the Phutuk festival. The monks would dance, and Ruit’s father, Sonam, would watch them appraisingly, joining in when invited. Like most second sons, Sonam had been sent to study for the monkhood. But the death of his elder brother had brought his career down from Diki Chhyoling to the dusty business of the world. And even though his hair grew out and he wore the black robes of a trader rather than crimson, he knew all the prayers, and Sanduk was proud to see how expertly he danced alongside the monks, how lightly he moved for such a thick and powerful man.
Sanduk watched, enthralled, as the monks, accompanied by drums, bellowing bass horns curved up like elephants’ trunks, and clashing cymbals, chanted the history of his father’s favorite deity, Padmasambhava. Known
to the Walung as Guru Rinpoche, he was the founder of Tantric Buddhism who flew from his home in Pakistan’s Karakoram Mountains to Tibet on a tiger, defeating demons with the power of his awakened mind and wielding his vajra, a five-pointed thunderbolt that eradicates ignorance. Guru Rinpoche had seeded remote villages of the range with monasteries like Diki Chhyoling, the monks chanted, so humans like the Walunga could learn it was possible to free oneself from the cycle of birth and death, rebirth and suffering, and that compassion was the highest human quality.
Other learning, in a village so remote, was hard to come by. Sonam taught his son to write the Tibetan alphabet. The Nepalese customs officer, stationed in the village to levy import duties on caravans coming down from Tibet, taught Sanduk simple math and the rudiments of written Nepali. By seven, Sanduk was watching, fascinated, over his grandfather’s shoulder as he read from sacred scrolls in Pali, picking up a smattering of that ancient tongue. But a child as bright as Sanduk quickly grew unsatisfied with these basic lessons, so a family meeting was convened to decide what to do with this uncontainable boy who caromed from one end of Olangchungola to the other, breaking and burning his arms, like a fledgling Guru Rinpoche attempting to take flight.
Sanduk’s maternal grandfather was Dori Namgyal Ukyab, the village gova, or chief, a bear of a man with a dense black mustache who had hereditary authority to arbitrate all disputes short of murder in the five Walung villages along the Tamor River. There were no roads to the distant capital, Kathmandu, where schools were plentiful, and there was no simple solution. The gova retired to his lha-kang, or “god’s room,” drew a scroll from a shelf, smoothed it flat, and studied it, hoping for inspiration. When he returned to join his family by the fire, the gova leaned down to squeeze his grandson’s plump cheeks, his solid brass earrings dangling like manifestations of his certainty. “Darjeeling,” he said.
Hard trekking over high passes meant courting disaster, Sonam knew from long experience, so he took every possible precaution. With the gova, he consulted the scrolls for an auspicious day to depart. He climbed to a ledge high above the monastery, where he could see the snow peak standing at the north end of the valley, the blade-shaped mountain the Walunga called Throne of the Gods, marking the border where Nepal met Tibet. He stacked stones to form a cairn at the edge of a sheer drop. Seeking guidance, Sonam placed rice cakes on the uppermost stone, then retreated to sit and wait.
He and the boy would face fifteen days of difficult travel to the southeastern border of Nepal, then across into India, and he didn’t know if Sanduk was strong enough to make the trip. He worried that leaving his seven-year-old son in another country to study among strangers, far from his place at the heart of the Walunga, might be too much for either of them to bear.
A raven swooped down from the heights, landed on the uppermost stone, and pecked, authoritatively, at the rice. Sonam stood up, brushed his hands on his heavy black chuba, and started home. The definitive way the raven ate answered the question he’d asked. It was settled.
Sanduk Ruit waited on the balcony of his home. His mother stood behind him, sniffling, clutching his shoulders as his father and his helper, Dharkay, fussed with the straps securing the loads to their yaks. Ruit inspected the small felt shoulder bag his mother had made for him. She’d dyed it red, decorated it with coins and tiny bells, and filled it with cubes of a dried yak cheese called churpa and a freshly baked batch of his favorite corn cakes.
Every possible precaution had been taken. Sonam had seen to it that the lamas chanted pujas for their safe travel and draped white silk katas around their necks to protect them. No one in the Ruits’ home had used a broom in the days before their departure, lest they stir up sluggish demons that might stalk them on lonely trails. Kasang had filled a silver cup with water and set it by the hearth, assuring her son that she’d keep it full for him until he returned, an extravagance in a place where all water had to be carried up from the Tamor. Finally, the yaks coughed and stamped with impatience, and it was time to leave.
“Let the boy go,” Sonam said.
Sanduk looked up at his mother, trying not to cry. Then he looked down at the first store-bought objects he’d ever owned in his life: a pair of drab green canvas sneakers, manufactured by the Chinese military. He put one in front of the other.
They tried to follow the Tamor. But the river twisted down and away from them, a coil of cold smoke, diving out of sight over boulders, hiding where it was blown by the spirits’ breath in the depths of canyons, while they had to follow the trail and climb over gaspingly steep rock headlands before descending into each new valley.
Several times Sonam offered to let his son ride a yak. “It was really hard going,” Ruit says. “Sometimes even for my father. Hour after hour we would sweat, climbing to the top of a stairs of stone only to see yet a steeper one waiting round the bend. Then the cold and wind as we crossed passes was almost more than I could bear.” Sanduk accepted a few rides on the broad, swaying backs of the animals, fragrant with the sacks of roasted barley they carried for the tsampa they stirred over cooking fires. But he saw the pleasure in his father’s eyes when he pushed uphill on his own, and so he refused to ride whenever he was able, laboring up each ridge powered by his Chinese sneakers alone.
“I was worried whether Sanduk was old enough for the journey, and how he would survive so far from his family,” Sonam says. “But he got stronger as we crossed the ranges. And I began to see some of the stoniness of his grandfather the gova in the boy.”
Sanduk studied the delicate way the yaks placed their feet on shifting stones and tried to imitate them. And he watched, but didn’t dare to duplicate, the way his father walked calmly along the crumbling ledges, never leaning against a cliff face for comfort. Sanduk couldn’t keep his fingertips from trailing along the stone walls, and he focused his eyes on his olive-green sneakers. If he let his gaze stumble out to the spray above the river, diving birds of prey demonstrated how far you could fall if you lost your purchase on solid ground.
They spent the first night in a cave his father often used while traveling with his caravans. Sanduk, who had never slept apart from his family, shook with fear after he heard Sonam begin snoring. At daylight, when Sanduk woke to see mist blowing past the cave’s mouth, he discovered he’d wet the yak-hair blanket his father had wrapped around him. He feared what his father would do when he found out. “He could be very harsh, very strict,” Ruit says. “But I think he understood what a leap it was for me to leave home. So he said nothing.” Sonam draped the wet blanket across one of the yaks without a word and let it dry in the sun, an uncharacteristically tender gesture that calmed the boy.
They followed the caravan paths down to Sinwa, a hardscrabble settlement on a muddy bank above the Tamor where flimsy, drafty homes were built of timber and bamboo, and spent a warm night indoors. At Mitlung they left the Tamor, the river at the center of Sanduk’s life, and began a sustained climb out of its valley up a steep ravine. Sanduk had finished his mother’s corn cakes in the first few days, and on rest stops along the climb, leaning on the stone ledges porters had built to support their loads, he searched the bag for crumbs. Each taste, however tiny, of his mother’s cooking made the distance he’d traveled from home feel less daunting.
Three thousand feet above his river, as they finally crested the ravine trail and emerged on a ridge that led to the district capital, Taplejung, Sanduk felt that his life was on the verge of irrevocable change. The storm that broke on their fourth afternoon of trekking, just as they approached town, pounded the point home, with thunderclaps that made the yaks twitch and strain at the leads threaded through their nose rings.
Taplejung, the largest settlement he’d ever seen, was overwhelming. Sheer stone staircases to the upper town ran with rainwater like treacherous man-made waterfalls. Many of the buildings were three, even four stories high. They were whitewashed, with trim freshly painted in bright blues and rhododendron reds and topped with strange tin roofs. More caravans t
han Sanduk could count stamped through the broad streets and squares with a discordant jangling of bells in competing keys. He had to press himself against the towns’ wet walls several times to stay clear of the animals’ horns, until his brown wool sweater was smudged with patches of white.
Many of Taplejung’s people appeared as strange as the town. They were thinner than the Walunga, with darker skin and bright scarlet tikkas on their narrow foreheads. Passing their temples, he heard the brittle, unfamiliar sound of Hindu bells, ringing at a pitch higher than those dangling from the necks of their yaks.
Sanduk was amazed that, so far from home, his father seemed to know almost everyone they passed. Sonam shouted greetings to the Buddhist men at the head of several caravans, who stuck out their tongues politely, a sign of respect to a scion of the gova’s family. And when Sonam led his son into a tea shop to wait out the storm, the proprietor greeted Sonam by name and rushed to hang their wet garments by the fire to dry.
Sipping sweet milk tea from a chipped glass, Sanduk let his eyes rove, taking in unfamiliar machine-made products, foil packets of biscuits and sweets with strange foreign labels stacked in a glass case by the entrance. Across the muddy street, he saw shops stuffed with racks of multicolored machine-made clothing.
Looking at these shopkeepers’ slim-faced children dressed in expensive clothes, lounging under eaves out of the rain, sucking on store-bought sweets, made him self-conscious, for the first time in his life, about the drab homespun garments his mother made for him. His sweater, steaming dry on a peg over the fire, looked like an animal pelt, especially with the mottled patches of whitewash stippling it like the hide of a spotted dzo. But Sanduk took some consolation in the fact that his father seemed perfectly at home, joking and exchanging news with the other customers about the condition of the trail and the most current price the paint and the machine-woven fabric they were carrying up from India would fetch in Tibet. Sanduk searched his bag, unsuccessfully, for one of his mother’s last comforting crumbs and wondered if he’d ever feel at ease in the world outside Olangchungola.
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