Second Suns

by David Oliver Relin

  The first time he returned, the steep trails and frigid passes he trekked over alongside Sonam’s caravan seemed less formidable, made less of an impression than the raggedness of the travelers they passed and the poverty of the villages where they stopped for tea. Sanduk was pleased that his years in Darjeeling hadn’t made him weak, that a growth spurt and fierce games of soccer had instead strengthened him. He prided himself on keeping up with the fast pace his father set, refusing his offers to rest or ride a yak. As he scrambled over boulders high above the Tamor, and got his first glimpse of the familiar blade of Throne of the Gods thrusting up at the end of his valley, he could think of nothing but his mother, and the last hours of the trek seemed interminable.

  Three years after she’d reluctantly let go of him, Kasang crushed Sanduk in a hug, then stepped back to look at the way the world had changed him. He was taller; his face was broader and had hardened, his features now resembling those of her father the gova. He wore stout store-bought leather shoes and a machine-made sweater. And for a moment, on the veranda of her home, she felt shy in the presence of her own son, before wrapping him in another embrace and shooing him inside to the table, where she’d placed a plate of his favorite corn cakes and the silver cup of water she’d never allowed to stand empty throughout his absence.

  His sister Yang La knelt by his side as he ate. Was it true, she wanted to know, her long braids swinging prettily as she peppered him with questions about Darjeeling, that there were fashionable foreign women, not nuns, who wore their hair as short as men did? She’d seen photos in a magazine that had traveled all the way to Olangchungola from India. Sanduk said he hadn’t seen anyone like that, but he described the parade of every imaginable human type he’d watched passing through Chowrasta Square as he’d sat on a bench eating a cream roll.

  “What’s a cream roll, Sanduk dai?” she asked, and he described the sweet cream swirled inside a brittle pastry, like a lukewarm ice cream cone, well suited to the chilly climate of Darjeeling. Yang La was only two years younger, and they’d always been the closest of the six siblings, with an easy, teasing camaraderie. But Sanduk was pleased to note that she addressed him respectfully as “elder brother.” He wriggled his toes in his leather dress shoes, conscious of how such a small symbol of status could make such a large impression in a place as remote as his home.

  Some things in Olangchungola had remained the same. Broad prayer flags still hung from tall poles in the center of the village, shivering in the biting wind. The framed portraits of the king and queen of Nepal, Guru Rinpoche, and the Dalai Lama still hung over the family shrine. But fresh from the comforts of lowland life, he was struck by the harsh facts of existence at ten thousand feet. The village was wilder and shabbier than he remembered. Nearly everyone who greeted him seemed to have a cough or a chest infection. The Diki Chhyoling monastery, which had once seemed a grand palace at the top of the world, looked like a pile of rocks stacked on a hillside compared with the imposing colonial administration buildings and Gothic churches fitted out in carved-stone finery that formed the backdrop to his days in Darjeeling.

  What Ruit doesn’t remember is noticing the blind people who were surely there, struggling to navigate the steep paths of the village with walking sticks or the aid of a relative’s arm. They were so common, so much a part of the landscape, even in Darjeeling, that he paid no special attention to them.

  He did see that both his mother and father had obviously aged after only three years of his absence. Some of that could be ascribed to the beating inflicted on villagers who lived exposed to the elements. But Sanduk learned that other factors weighed down his family’s well-being.

  The stoicism of Sanduk’s people, like so many who call the high villages of the Himalaya home, their uncomplaining acceptance of fate, is as much a part of their makeup as their broad Tibetan features. The village, Sanduk was told in a matter-of-fact manner, had been dealt several debilitating blows. The year before he’d returned, a flood from melting glaciers had torn through the Tamor valley, sweeping a dozen of Olangchungola’s houses nearest the river’s edge into the gorge but sparing their occupants, who’d had time to gather what they could while the river rose. Most worryingly, Sonam explained, trade with Tibet, the lifeblood of their culture, was threatened by events on the Tibetan side of the nearby border.

  In the late 1950s, the anthropologist Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf had visited Olangchungola while researching his book Himalayan Traders. He’d concluded that the trade route from Lhasa, Tibet, all the way to Calcutta via Olangchungola was the most profitable in the eastern Himalaya, surpassing the path through the Khumbu, the homeland of the Sherpas to the west. He’d been surprised to find that residents of Ruit’s village cultivated hardly any crops, depending on profits from trade to purchase their food at lower altitudes.

  In 1848, the first Westerner to visit the settlement, the botanist Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, a colleague of Charles Darwin’s, also found Olangchungola unusually prosperous. The settlement he referred to as “Wallanchoon” was, he wrote, “a populous village of large and good painted wooden houses, ornamented with hundreds of long poles and vertical flags, looking like the fleet of some foreign port; while a swarm of good-natured, intolerably dirty Tibetans, were ko[w]towing to me as I advanced.”

  A century later, free from the colonial condescension of Hooker’s era, Fürer-Haimendorf found Ruit’s people gracious hosts, and he admired the village, with its fluttering prayer flags and water-driven prayer wheels; he called it “a flourishing center of Buddhist culture.”

  But in the high villages of the Himalaya, fortunes can change as suddenly as the weather. The Chinese opened and closed their border posts unpredictably. And if the passes to Tibet were shut by barriers more formidable than snow, Olangchungola wouldn’t remain a flourishing center of anything; its survival was, at best, uncertain. The gova called another family meeting and decreed that if the situation worsened, his offspring should disperse and move down to safer altitudes, where their livelihood wouldn’t be at the mercy of shifting Chinese policies.

  Back in Darjeeling, Sanduk was nearing the end of the 1966 fall semester when tensions between India and China flared up once again, in the form of brief but violent exchanges of artillery that he could hear pounding the hills north of St. Robert’s. The solid figure of Sonam, in his battered gray cowboy hat, appeared in the doorway of Sanduk’s dorm room just in time for the end of the term. Sanduk was so relieved to see his father that he almost ran into his arms like a child, but he caught himself, grasped his father’s shoulder instead, and asked for news of the family. Sonam said everyone was well but that the unpredictability of the Chinese made life in Olangchungola unmanageable. He said while the rest of the family was preparing to move to property they owned at a lower altitude, he was taking his son to a new school someplace safer but almost unimaginably far away: the capital of their own country. “My dad was anxious that my schooling not be interrupted,” Ruit says. “So we threw my few little things into a sack and left almost at once.”

  Sanduk left St. Robert’s with passable English, a polished command of written Nepali, and a good stock of information about the world beyond the Himalaya—if not through experience, at least by exposure to worlds spun by the words of Jack London, Charles Dickens, and William Shakespeare.

  Sanduk Ruit wouldn’t be the only student from the far reaches of the Himalaya to benefit from the priest’s passion for education. Before Ruit left, Father Mackey accepted an offer from the “Dragon King” of Bhutan to move to that most isolated mountain kingdom and reform its rudimentary education system. After learning that modern dentistry was not yet practiced in Bhutan, Father Mackey proved how thoroughly he planned to immerse himself in his new mission: He took the precaution of having all of his teeth pulled and getting fitted for dentures before departing.

  Mackey spent the final thirty-two years of his life in Bhutan, where he became known as the father of its secular education system. With the
enthusiastic support of successive generations of Bhutan’s royal family, he helped transform a country with little more than a scattering of primary schools into a far more literate society, complete with an integrated system of primary, middle, and secondary schools. When he died, in 1995 at the age of eighty, he did so as a national hero in his adopted homeland.

  Sonam paid for a ride on a transport vehicle traveling south. They sailed down, mile after mile, through the sea green swells of tea plantations, until the road became level and straight. As the truck rolled across a bridge straddling the calm, lake-like expanse that his Tamor River had become where the mountains met the plains, Sanduk felt something entirely new: heat. Heat of the prickling, probing, inescapable variety. Down at sea level, the sun, so welcome during its short transit across the shadowed river valleys at high altitude, became a foe.

  Traveling west, along Nepal’s southern border, passed off from truck to bus to British army jeeps packed with far more people than they’d been designed to carry, talking to his father to pass the hours in bus stations where the air was so hot and still that he felt his scalp crawling with sweat, Sanduk discovered another new enemy: swarms of relentless mosquitoes. Struggling to keep his skin covered, he learned that Sonam had decided to move their family down five thousand feet to Dhankuta, a trading hub in the foothills, where they owned a small parcel of land in a Hindu community called Hile, on the town’s outskirts.

  In the same terse way in which he’d related Olangchungola’s troubles, Sonam declared that the caravan trade to Tibet was doomed and he planned to earn a living by letting customers come to him. Sanduk couldn’t picture his father, so masterful at crossing mountain passes with his yaks or hearty Tibetan horses, living the sedentary life of a shopkeeper. But he was relieved that his mother and sisters would be living far from an armed border where obliteration could plunge from the sky, or floods could sweep away entire families while they slept.

  Sanduk and his father arrived in Kathmandu on top of an overcrowded bus. He’d seen photographs of its gilded monuments and temples, and the intricate wood- and stone-carved façades of its Rana palaces in his schoolbooks. But when he climbed down from the bus on the eastern outskirts of the city, what he saw hardly resembled a royal capital.

  The first wave of Olangchungola’s refugees had arrived in the capital a few years earlier. Cousins of the Ruits’ had launched a small carpet-manufacturing business. They’d also bought a disused gas station on the city’s barren eastern fringe, with the aim of eventually returning it to service. Its pumps had been pried up and sold for scrap. Weeds and vines had burrowed through broken windows and choked the garages on the ground floor. But a small room on top of the station was snug enough for Sanduk and his father, after they swept it clean of rodent droppings, to install themselves while they searched for an acceptable boarding school.

  They settled on Siddhartha Vanasthali, a vast high school of middling reputation with a tuition Sonam found tolerable. He bought Sanduk a used bicycle, two pairs of pants, and a blue-and-white-striped, short-sleeved dress shirt from street vendors, bargaining fiercely, counting out each rupee with reluctance. “I could see from my dad’s face he was really not very happy at all about spending the money,” Ruit says. “But he was so glad I hadn’t missed any classes—I think that nearly made up for the expense of getting me sorted out.”

  Tenzing Ukyab, whose parents lent Sanduk the room, remembers his teenage cousin vividly from those days. “I’d see Sanduk bicycling to and fro, with heavy stacks of books,” he recalls. “When we’d visit him, he’d be bent over those books, doing his homework by the light of a small flickering candle. And always, he was wearing that same striped shirt. He washed it and washed it until the color faded and all you could make out were slightly darker bits where the stripes had been. He was really struggling.”

  In Dhankuta, where Sonam opened a small shop, earning a living proved more difficult than he’d expected. He sold cloth, small necessities, and medicinal herbs. But so did most of the other merchants in the village. Competition was fierce and profit margins painfully slim. On school vacations, Sanduk would take a bus that dropped him at a trailhead, where he slept on pallets in a warehouse owned by one of his father’s friends. If he left before sunrise, he could reach Dhankuta by dark, after a hard day of walking across two mountain passes and wading the shallows of the lower Tamor River.

  During one visit, Sanduk learned that his youngest sister, Chundak, whom he remembered as little more than a small, swaddled creature carried on his mother’s back, had developed a high fever and died, despite the efforts of the town’s traditional healer to treat her. The depth of his family’s grief was obvious to Sanduk, by the weight added to ordinary gestures, like the brooding way Sonam lit a butter lamp, or the trundling steps Kasang took toward him to refill his porcelain cup with tea. His parents told him about the loss of his youngest sister with the terse resignation that outsiders often misconstrue as callousness. He carried the weight of his family’s loss with him back to Kathmandu.

  Sanduk’s daily life brightened considerably when his father sent Yang La to live with him and enrolled her in a girls’ secondary school. “Yang La had become very pretty by then, and I always had to be on the lookout for rascals targeting her on the way home from school,” Ruit says. He remembers that she was a capable student. But even more so, he recalls how happily she embraced the pop culture of Kathmandu. “When I think of my sister, when I visit her in my memories, she’s always singing,” Ruit says. “Yang La had a very nice voice. Very soft and clear. And she’d always be singing this or that new popular song as we walked along.”

  When he had a few rupees, Ruit would treat his sister to a matinee at a cinema on New Road, watching lavish Bollywood spectaculars or the Nepalese musicals that emulated the Indian films’ intoxicating formula of romance, violence, class struggle, and choreography. Afterward, Yang La would reprise the love ballads and dance hits she’d heard as she swept the floor, washed clothes, or brewed tea to fortify her brother as he studied.

  During her second year at school, Yang La started losing weight and her appetite. Sanduk sent word to Dhankuta about Yang La’s declining health, and Sonam arrived to investigate. “My dad and I were really worried, and we walked all over Kathmandu trying to get doctors to see her. We were new in town, so it was difficult to get a reliable diagnosis,” Ruit says. Finally, a doctor delivered the devastating news: Yang La was suffering from tuberculosis.

  Sonam spent more than he could afford to send his daughter to a sanatorium in the hills, a day’s walk from Kathmandu. Doctors put her on a course of conventional TB medications, and Sanduk was relieved, when he visited her, to see that she’d regained some of her weight. “We all thought she was getting better, and Dad decided it would be more healthful for her to move back with them in Dhankuta,” Ruit says. “She worked in the shop, and for a year she seemed nearly fine. But then her condition dropped off a cliff.”

  Sonam rushed Yang La back to Kathmandu. “We ran from door to door, like refugees,” Ruit says, “trying to find a doctor who could cure her.” But the message they received at the crowded clinics they visited was crushingly, invariably the same: The drugs had stopped working. “They said we should take her home,” Ruit says, “and make preparations for her death.”

  Ruit’s voice, ordinarily so level when discussing even the most disheartening events, lowers to a melancholy croak when he talks about those days. “I remember feeling … incredible pressure. The whole time, as she got sicker, Yang La kept calling me ‘elder brother’ and begging me to find someone who could cure her. She looked up to me and believed I could help her. But I had no connections in Kathmandu and could do nothing. So we brought her back to Dhankuta to die.”

  The last time Sanduk visited Yang La at his parents’ shop, his sister was lying on a mat behind the counter, too weak to sit up for any length of time but trying to be helpful, dragging herself upright to sell a bolt of cloth or a handful of herbs to a
customer. “She had become nothing but bones, you know, but she was still beautiful,” Ruit says. “She was wearing clean kurta pajamas and her hair was nicely done. And her voice, when she wasn’t coughing, had become even more lovely. The last time I saw her, she held my hand and sang a famous Nepali song of romantic tragedy. ‘Slowly putting stones on your chest,’ ” Ruit sang softly, in a voice surprisingly tender for a man who could seem so gruff. “ ‘The stones are so heavy, but still you have to pretend to laugh. Your mind is very heavy, and yet you have to pretend to laugh.’ ”

  Sanduk was back in Kathmandu a week later, studying for his high school leaving exams, when he learned of Yang La’s death. He had tests to take that would determine his future academic options, and he didn’t travel to be with his family for the funeral. “She was cremated in a Buddhist ceremony in Hile, which was mostly a Hindu town, far from our real home,” Ruit says. “I know that made my father very unhappy. It was very hard for him not having the support of his village at a time like that.

  “I also struggled after her death,” Ruit says. “I kept hearing the last song she sang. And I can tell you I felt something like the weight of stone on my chest, too. My whole family respected me and had hopes for my future. But in reality I was just a powerless student. I tried to understand where I had failed. Why did this have to happen? Somebody so young. When you talk about TB, it’s not a very fatal disease. I know now that in richer countries, several effective new TB drugs had been widely available at that point, for seven or eight years.”