Second Suns

by David Oliver Relin

  When the rain stopped, Sonam stepped outside and addressed a slim man with corded muscles in a gruff, booming voice Sanduk had rarely heard; he realized his father was bargaining. They left their yaks in Taplejung, since they planned to descend nearly to the plains of India and the animals were prone to low-altitude sickness. They departed trailing a train of human porters, who carried Sonam’s great swaying bundles of trading goods in bamboo baskets lashed to their foreheads.

  Beyond the teahouses and shops of Taplejung, the route took them through wild high country, where hours might pass before they’d hear the bells of an oncoming caravan. To fill the time, Sonam told his son stories about the caravan trade. He said he wore his hair long because when he crossed the sun-seared passes into Tibet, the light reflecting off the snow was so harsh that a man could go blind if he wasn’t able to cover his eyes.

  He talked about the crowded cities on the plains of India, of sweltering marketplaces where he bargained for trade goods in snatches of half a dozen languages, of weather so hot the pavement steamed when you spilled water onto it and snow seemed as distant as a half-remembered dream. Sanduk couldn’t form clear pictures of the places his father described, but he reveled in the opportunity to hear him speak at such length. At home, Sonam mostly sat quietly by the fire, sipping warm home-brewed tongba through a bamboo straw while the talk fluttered back and forth between Kasang and his aunts as they cooked and sewed and spun yak hair into yarn. But out here in the new world, the world his father had mastered, he drew comfort from Sonam’s voice, and saw that this sort of conversation came to him as naturally while he traveled as the lowing of his yaks or the cries of birds calling from crag to crag.

  After a week of trekking, an afternoon thunderstorm increased in intensity as dusk approached, stinging them with hail, and Sonam found a rude shelter against the base of an overhanging boulder. They were still high on a ridgeline, exposed to the wind, with no chance of keeping a cooking fire lit, but Sonam decided it was better to stop for the night than face the worst of the storm. He took off the gray felt cowboy-style hat he wore on the trail, pushed it down over his son’s ears, and tightened the chin strap to secure it against the weather as the hail turned to snow.

  They dined on hard kernels of cooked corn and a few precious strips of dried yak meat that Sonam had been saving for an emergency. He explained to his son the gravity of taking any animal’s life and advised him, when living among the lowlanders of Darjeeling, to avoid eating small animals like birds and fish. “Every life counts against your karma,” he said. “Better to use every scrap and strip of one large animal, like a yak, to feed many mouths than to have the death of all these little beings on your conscience for only a few bites each.”

  They walked through the wind and the snow the next morning, and Sonam kept an eye on the boy as he strained to reach the crest of each pass, where lines of fraying prayer flags, strung between boulders scoured clean by the elements, crackled in the breeze, sending appeals through thin air up to the ears of any deity who might be listening. At the top of a fifteen-thousand-foot pass, Sonam searched for a substantial stone and heaved it onto a chorten piled at the apex of the rocky outcrop. “Let the mountain rise higher,” he said as he added a few inches to its altitude.

  From another such pass, Sonam pointed north toward the broad, five-peaked summit of Kangchenjunga, the world’s third-highest mountain. It rose abruptly from shadowed foothills that surrounded it like kneeling supplicants, a divine white wave, forever cresting. “Remember,” he told his son, “whether they fill your head with wisdom or foolishness at school in Darjeeling, never forget you are Walung, that no pass is too high for you to climb, that you come from country like this.”

  On their thirteenth day after setting out from Olangchungola they crossed into India. Sanduk sensed an elemental change in the landscape. For two weeks they’d climbed crest after snow-covered crest, and marched through the waves of hard, dusty hills in between, an endless ocean of rock. Now the trails burrowed down through dense foliage, flecked with the pink and white blooms of giant rhododendrons. Sanduk drank in the comforting, homely scent. Beyond the blossoms, the air itself smelled unfamiliar—warmer, more moist earth than wind-scoured stone.

  “I was seeing everything with wide new eyes,” Ruit says. “It was only when I grew older that I understood what a cold, distant place it was where I’d been born. On that long walk you could really say we were coming down from the moon.”

  To European explorers hoping to survey the ranges surrounding Kangchenjunga, the region had once seemed as inaccessible as outer space. For much of its history, Nepal had been an isolated mountain kingdom, its borders firmly barred to Westerners. Nineteenth-century maps left the region where the Walung—one of Nepal’s tiniest ethnic groups—lived and traded largely blank. In 1899, the English mountaineer Douglas W. Freshfield made the first successful circumnavigation of Kangchenjunga after several other Westerners, like the British botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker, had probed at the area before being turned away by the fragmented jurisdiction of local authorities and the limited utility of travel permits obtained at lower altitudes.

  In the 1903 account of his journey, Round Kangchenjunga, Freshfield seems overwhelmed by the effort of describing the scale and majesty of the Kangchenjunga region. “I am, of course, conscious that my task is beyond me,” he writes. “I must be content to do what I can, to record with all the emphasis I am capable of my conviction that nowhere else on the earth’s surface can there be found, within so small a radius, a combination of tropical luxuriance, sylvan beauty, and mountain sublimity equal to that which meets the eyes … of the wanderer on the woodland paths beyond Darjiling.”

  To Sanduk, this luxuriance was as exotic as the ice-encrusted landscape of his homeland appeared to foreigners like Freshfield. He followed his father until they emerged, at sunset, from a tunnel of flowering trees into a vision so strange he had to tug at the sleeve of his father’s fur-lined chuba and beg an explanation.

  “Tea,” Sonam said.

  Late, low-angled sun lit the new world so that it pulsed with colors stronger than Sanduk had ever seen. Soft forms in the shape of eggs, with the breadth of boulders, in every conceivable shade of green poured downhill, thousands of them, more, far too many to count, spilling over the contours of the hills as if the foliage had transgressed against the laws of nature and flowed like water, seeking lower ground. These bushes seemed randomly spaced, until Sanduk noticed that they marched in deliberate, disorderly lines to the horizon. The plantation seemed too vast an undertaking to have been made by human hands.

  “The Britishers planted these,” Sonam said, plucking the tiniest leaf from the top of a shrub. He held it out on the tip of his callused finger for his son to inspect. It was palest green and barely the length of his fingernail. “They call these young leaves ‘golden tips’ and claim they are the tastiest sort of tea. I don’t know about that, but for the price of a few sacks of these, you could buy a strong young yak.”

  Leaves the price of yaks. Plants streaming downhill like water. A world larger and more confusing than he’d allowed himself to consider. None of the rules he’d learned in Olangchungola applied. As darkness fell, even the stars seemed to change their behavior. Instead of appearing, one by one, at the top of the sky, as Sanduk watched, entire unfamiliar constellations flickered on at once, showering across the lower hills like sparks from a windblown fire.

  “Until that moment,” Ruit says, “I’d never seen an electric light.”

  He walked between the rows of tea bushes, behind his father, too confused to form the questions he wanted to ask, his fingers trailing along the golden tips, wondering what, other than a yak, they might be worth.

  At full dark, they stepped onto level ground and the tea trail broadened into a track as wide as a dry riverbed. In the gloom just ahead, Ruit saw an unfamiliar structure raised up off the ground on large round, rubber supports that reminded him of something he’d once seen in a tatte
red Indian magazine. People sat on its low, wide roof. Sonam paid the porters and had them lift their bundles up to obliging hands. Then he grabbed his son under the arms and hoisted him up onto the roof as well. In the darkness, kind strangers helped settle him comfortably on sacks of bedding and barley, and his father heaved himself up at the boy’s side. It seemed a crowded place to spend the night, but at least, after fifteen days of crossing the high passes, he was finally warm.

  A small explosion—the engine starting—shook them, and then, so slowly he hardly noticed, then gathering speed, the shadowed world began sliding past. The elderly cargo truck approached a cluster of electric lights surrounding a tea shop, and Sanduk Ruit could see clearly that even though they were rolling uphill, no animals were pulling them along. He laughed aloud at the sensation of riding in his first motorized vehicle. And despite his fear of the unfathomable new life he found himself hurtling toward, he leaned back into his father’s arms, raised his face into the balmy wind, and began to enjoy the ride.

  Stones on Your Chest

  [The Bhoteea] are good-humoured and amiable-looking people, very square and Mongolian in countenance … but all are begrimed with filth and smoke … [so] that their natural hues are rarely to be recognized. None had ever before seen an Englishman, and … they seemed infinitely amused at my appearance and one jolly dame clapped her hands to her sides, and laughed at my spectacles, till the hills echoed.

  —Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, Himalayan Journals, 1854

  The first Western face Sanduk Ruit ever studied up close belonged to Father William Mackey, headmaster of the St. Robert’s School in Darjeeling. “His skin was very, very light, like the color of cooked rice. He had large, round blue eyes, white hair, and shaggy eyebrows. I remember thinking he looked like a monkey,” Ruit says, laughing, “and I wondered if all foreigners were so strange and ugly.”

  Darjeeling in 1961 was sliding into a state of genteel neglect. The British, who had finally succumbed to India’s long struggle for independence, had abruptly abandoned control of the country in 1947. The hill station the colonial administration had built as its summer seat of government, to escape the broiling heat of the plains, was no longer a center of scurrying bureaucrats beholden to London, lunching over gin fizzes and clinging to the British class system at fancy dress balls. But the fading splendor of the hilltop town, the Tudor-style villas, and the lush lawns and gardens that had been planted to make lonely colonial officers and their wives feel closer to the English countryside than the dusty streets of Delhi were more than enough to awe seven-year-old Sanduk Ruit.

  Sonam inspected the plain wooden dormitory his son would share with the other students and, satisfied to have installed him there, promised to look in when his travels allowed. With a curt, manly squeeze of Sanduk’s shoulders, far different from his mother’s clinging farewell, Sonam said good-bye.

  “When my dad left me alone I really felt desperate, you know,” Ruit says. “The electric lights and the buildings that looked like palaces made me feel funnily strange. For the first weeks I didn’t say a thing, just tried to follow the others. I felt like a misfit. I felt this really is not my place.” For most of his first year at school, Sanduk was acutely conscious of his outsider status. The other boys at St. Robert’s were the sons of the local clerk and merchant class; their fathers had worked alongside the former British administration. They mocked Sanduk’s country accent, his broad Tibetan features, and, most of all, his homespun clothes. “They called me ‘Bhotia,’ which simply means someone originally from Tibet,” he says, and you can still hear an echo of the wounded boy in his voice. “But the real sense of the word to them was something like ‘stupid, smelly hick from the mountains who rarely bathes.’ ”

  Father Mackey was a Jesuit priest born and ordained in Montreal. He quickly mastered Nepali, the language most widely spoken across the foothills of the eastern Himalaya, after his posting, in 1946, to the mission in Darjeeling. When he noticed his newest student struggling, he became Sanduk’s mentor in the manners of town life, and his protector from cruel classmates. Seeing how mercilessly the boys teased Ruit about his clothes, he purchased leather shoes, a pair of cut blue and maroon trousers, and a V-neck sweater for him, from his own modest salary. “There were some very fancy schools in Darjeeling,” Ruit says. “My dad couldn’t afford those. St. Robert’s was just sort of middle-of-the-pack. But Father Mackey looked after me, and I don’t know that I would have had a better education anywhere else.”

  During school holidays, when the other students returned home to their families, all the bunk beds but Sanduk’s stood empty. The first Christmas break he spent forty-five days as the lone occupant of St. Robert’s dormitory. Father Mackey looked in on him regularly, ate meals with him, steered him toward books in the school’s well-stocked library that he thought likely to distract a lonely boy, and took him on long walks through the hilly streets of Darjeeling. They’d stroll through the Mall, the colonial architects’ attempt to transplant a London high street seven thousand feet up into the Himalaya, or sit on a bench devouring the local specialty—cream rolls—in crowded Chowrasta Square. Mackey would pick out individuals among the masses of humanity moving past, teaching Sanduk to distinguish a Gurkha soldier (a long, curved kukri knife worn at his waist) from a South Indian tea picker (skin so sun-baked it seemed to absorb light) from a Bengali tourist up from Calcutta (arms full of shopping bags) from a Bhutanese businessman (dressed in a cotton plaid robe called a gho, knee socks, and polished dress shoes).

  In 1959, two years before Sanduk trekked to school, another young Buddhist, disguised in the simple clothes of a commoner to elude Chinese sentries, had survived his own dramatic journey over high passes to India. The Fourteenth Dalai Lama had fled to escape the brutal Chinese occupation of Tibet. He now lived at the seat of the exiled Tibetan government in Dharmsala, which, like Darjeeling, was a hill station the British had built to escape the broiling plains.

  By the fall of 1962, long-simmering border tensions between India and China threatened to boil over into war. Chinese troops advanced from Tibet, which Peking had begun referring to as simply a southern province of China. They crossed disputed borders and took up mountaintop fighting positions overlooking India. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru responded by ordering his troops into position at altitudes of up to sixteen thousand feet in the eastern Himalaya.

  On October 14, the People’s Daily newspaper, an instrument of the Chinese state, issued the following warning in an editorial: “It is high time to shout to Mr. Nehru that the heroic Chinese troops, with the glorious tradition of resisting foreign aggression, can never be cleared by anyone from their own territory. If there are still some maniacs who are reckless enough to ignore our well-intentioned advice, well let them do so. History will pronounce the foolishness of using the lives of Indian troops as stakes in your gamble.”

  The following month, from his dormitory window at St. Robert’s, eight-year-old Sanduk Ruit could hear the rolling thunderclaps of artillery and see flashes that lit the northern sky like heat lightning, as the superior Chinese forces advanced farther into India. Darjeeling authorities ordered a nightly blackout and curfew, fearing they could be the target of Chinese bombing raids. Sanduk lay in bed, telling himself to be brave but failing more often than not, imagining that every phantom nighttime noise was the roar of approaching bombers. And he longed for news about the safety of his family.

  “That fall, I tried to keep my mind on my studies, but all we could talk about in Darjeeling was war,” Ruit remembers. “And everyone was of the opinion that the Chinese were stronger, that they had more modern weapons and machineries. We felt they could rush down and sweep over us at any time.”

  But Ruit’s most vivid memory from his five years at St. Robert’s was a long, miserable Christmas break the winter he was nine and developed an abscess on his back. Father Mackey was out of the country, and Sanduk spent two weeks in a Darjeeling civil hospital without a single visitor, shaking
with fever, frightened by the frequent injections, and numbed by pain that always seemed to peak in the middle of the night, when he’d lie with his eyes open in the dark ward, feeling so far from home, so exiled from intimacy, that he struggled to remember the faces of his family. “That was the lowest point of my life,” Ruit says. “I felt like I was buried on the bottom of the earth. But that time made up a big part of what I am. I’ve really got some iron in my ass. I’m tougher and more stubborn than most people.”

  Also smarter.

  Today, to remark that Sanduk Ruit is intelligent is as obvious as noting that the sun emits light and heat. But even as a boy learning to write Nepali, a language he’d mastered only in its spoken form, while simultaneously studying English, Ruit was an enthusiastic sponge for the education that hadn’t been available in Olangchungola.

  Sports helped him earn the respect of his peers. The St. Robert’s campus possessed one of the rare flat expanses in the tilting region of Darjeeling. And on its small, dusty playing field, in full view of the mountain his father had instructed him never to forget, Sanduk earned a reputation as someone who wouldn’t be pushed around. Exchanging elbows with older boys, shouldering them out of the way as he fired shots at the goal during scrappy games of soccer, Sanduk remembered Sonam’s exhortation that he was Walung, that no path was too steep for him to climb.

  On fine days between the monsoons, he could see Kangchenjunga’s summit clearly from the St. Robert’s campus. Through a trick of the atmosphere, its ice and stone staircases could seem achingly close. But those fifteen days of trekking had been imprinted on Sanduk; he knew precisely how far he was from the home where his father had been forced to pull him from the arms of his mother. And though he recalled how cold it could be in his family’s house, it flickered in his imagination as the world’s one source of dependable warmth.