Second Suns

by David Oliver Relin

  Each morning, after warming their fingers around scalding mugs of tea, the doctors examined the previous day’s patients before scrubbing in. Tabin had been alarmed, at first, when one of these patients had been placed on his operating table. She was covered with so many cuts and bruises that Tabin worried she was the victim of domestic violence. When he asked about her injuries through an interpreter, sixty-three-year-old Sonam Detchen told him she was a widow. Without living sons, she explained, she had no one to help her, so she often bumped into farming implements, cut herself while trying to cook, or fell into ditches.

  The morning after Tabin repaired her eyes, seconds after he removed her white gauze patches, Detchen burst into tears of relief that streamed past the bruises on her broad, sunburned face. “You don’t get many moments in your life when you’re absolutely positive you’re doing exactly what you were put on earth to do,” Tabin says. “That was one of them.”

  Tabin watched Detchen squint, then stare at the serrated tips of the eastern ridgeline that cut into the pure blue sky with the precision of a freshly sharpened saw blade. “There is a new sky for my eye! I’m free from the hell of darkness!” she shouted, hauling herself to her feet. The day before, Detchen hadn’t been able to see the shadow of a hand waving an inch in front of her face. “Now,” she told Tabin proudly, “I can see well enough to take care of myself.”

  Their last night in Medrokongga, after nearly two hundred patients had received the same gift as Detchen, the village elders and the medical team gathered inside the community center, a big structure built in a disheartening style, with walls of unpainted concrete blocks. But the large single room at the interior of the building was purely Tibetan. Around a metal firebox that warmed the air a few degrees, low benches were arranged against the wall, and covered with handwoven rugs.

  After dinner, their hosts lunged around the room, topping up their cups every time they took a few sips with more sweet Chinese liquor. While Tabin tried to calculate how much he’d drunk, a musical competition broke out. It started innocently enough, with the Nepalese, led by Sonam, singing their traditional songs. Both groups danced to the rhythm Nabin banged on his bench in accompaniment, since he had no madal at hand. The Tibetans responded with selections from their own classical operas, which unfolded leisurely enough for Tabin and Ruit to remain upright, swaying on their feet, despite the alcohol and the altitude.

  A local boy of no more than nineteen upped the ante when he unveiled a boom box, slid in a cassette he’d produced from the pocket of his torn dress shirt, and pushed Play. Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” thumped out of the overstressed speakers. This whip-thin boy, with bowl-cut hair, brick-red cheeks, and castaway clothing, transformed himself into a credible King of Pop. Mirroring moves he’d perfected studying Jackson’s video of “Billie Jean,” he spun in place, spread his legs, and flipped up the collar of his shirt. The elders took their seats and the Tilganga team tried to keep pace, but dancing so fast in air so thin sent them panting toward their benches.

  “Nabin,” Ruit said, “don’t give in so easily.”

  Gamely, Nabin stood back up, kept pace with the boy for a few more steps, and was even feeling cocky enough to attempt a spin before the altitude asserted itself. He gasped for air and collapsed back into his seat.

  “Sonam!” Ruit ordered, playing his ace. “Get out there and kick his ass!”

  Sonam, slim and fit, always at the head of every trek up the steepest trails in Nepal’s mid-hills, fared no better above thirteen thousand feet. He faced off against the boy, and their two pairs of thin legs flailed together in time, at first, but the Tibetan danced faster and faster, swinging his arms wide and raising himself to balance on his toes, posing to hold his arm above his head, brandishing Jackson’s imaginary fedora. After two minutes, Sonam’s chest heaved and he slunk back to his seat, defeated.

  “Bugger this,” Ruit said. “I’ll beat him myself!”

  “You should know that Ruit never dances,” Tabin says, laughing at the memory. “And he wasn’t exactly light on his feet. By then he already had a potbelly beginning to poke over the edge of his belt. But Sanduk stood up and tried to match the boy step for step, grimacing with the effort of upholding Nepal’s honor.” Ruit lasted longer than anyone else, perhaps three minutes, until the song ended. But when the next song began, the boy went for broke. He started moonwalking, gliding backward and turning, gliding backward and turning, describing a square around Ruit, who staggered in place like a gut-shot bear. Then the boy took pity on the Nepalese doctor. He grasped Ruit in his arms and spun him gently around the room until the song ended, and Ruit hugged him with relief. The audience broke into wild, alcohol-fueled applause.

  Much later, when the others had tottered off toward their beds, Ruit and Tabin sat together, near the smoldering coals. “You know, Geoff,” Ruit said, “these really are the most deserving people in the world, don’t you think?”

  “I do,” Tabin said. “Not only the people here, but everywhere in the Himalaya.”

  “So let’s do something about it, everywhere in the Himalaya,” Ruit said.

  And by the barely warm stove, under blankets that smelled of yak dung and hay, they shook hands and made a vow. They would work together to wipe out all preventable blindness in the Himalaya. They would train and equip doctors not only in Nepal and Tibet, and they wouldn’t rest until every surgeon across the entire range was trained to implant artificial lenses under a microscope. Tabin looked down at his hand, crushed once again by Ruit’s startlingly strong grip. This time, they were not up in the air but on absolutely solid ground, and he didn’t mind the pain at all.

  Rock Meets Bone

  It is the spotless precious clear crystal.

  It is the glow of the lamp of self-luminous mind.

  When you intensify devotion in your heart,

  Rock meets bone in insight.

  —His Eminence the Third Jamgon Kongtrul, Cloudless Sky

  The brand-new BMW hugged the curves so well on the seven-thousand-foot descent from the monastery above the Indian town of Lava toward the airport at Siliguri that its driver gained more confidence with every mile. The sporty sedan the Jamgon Kongtrul’s brother bought for him promised to make the frequent travel that was required of the Rinpoche, to oversee his charitable projects, faster and far more comfortable.

  The Rinpoche rode up front, admiring flashes of cloudless sky through gaps in the leaf-dark forest canopy. The driver pushed the powerful sedan hard, after they’d finished the hazardous descent, and the flat road stretched temptingly straight.

  Tenzeng Dorjee, one of the Third Jamgon Kongtrul’s closest disciples, remembers the events of that day well. He can’t say the precise speed they were traveling, because he was sitting in the backseat with another monk, but he knows they were moving fast. Suddenly, he saw several pigeons dart in front of the car. “As you know,” Dorjee says, “in our tradition, every life is significant.” The driver did his best, swerving to avoid the birds, but he lost control and they pitched toward the forest and slammed into the rock-hard trunk of a large tree. “The Rinpoche’s earthly mind was dissolved into parinirvana. My companions also were killed. I alone lived,” Dorjee says, “and was left to consider why such a sadly tragic thing had taken place.”

  The Jamgon Kongtrul and the Karmapa are leaders of the Kagyu, one of the four major sects of Tibetan Buddhism. The Kagyu is also known to some as “the Whispering School,” since it places great stock in the oral transmission of Buddhist wisdom from scholarly leaders to their disciples. Replacing a leader as charismatic as the Third Jamgon Kongtrul was no simple matter. His absence left a Rinpoche-shaped hole in the hearts of those who had come to respect him, like Sanduk Ruit. “Too many of our monks are content to sit in comfortable monasteries, meditating,” Ruit says. “The Third Jamgon Kongtrul traveled throughout Asia, and even to Europe and America, telling people it wasn’t enough just to chant Om mani padme om. He taught that true compassion means rolling up
your sleeves and making people’s lives better.”

  Though he was only thirty-nine at the time of the crash in April 1992, the Rinpoche left a lifetime’s worth of inspiration for his disciples. He built a medical clinic at the gate of his monastery in Lava, where local people could come for free treatment. He bought land and set aside funds to build Pullahari, a retreat center for both Asian and Western scholars in the hills outside Kathmandu. He founded a combination orphanage and old-age home on a shared site in the former British hill station of Kalimpong, in northeast India. And, though his Rinpoche didn’t live to see Ruit conduct surgery near his monastery in northern India, Dorjee sold the wrecked BMW and used the proceeds to fund Ruit’s first camp in the region, where the doctor and two local trainees operated on more than seven hundred patients over the course of ten days.

  The search for the Fourth Jamgon Kongtrul lasted more than three years. Even as a boy, the Seventeenth Karmapa, the head of the oldest lineage in Tibetan Buddhism, was noted by his disciples for his uncanny ability to predict reincarnations of Rinpoches like the Jamgon Kongtrul. When he was twelve, the Karmapa summoned Tenzeng Dorjee and told him he’d been having visions indicating the spot where the Fourth Jamgon Kongtrul could be found. He wrote a prediction letter, detailing images that had come to him in dreams: He had seen a great black mountain near the Tsurphu Monastery in southern Tibet; he’d seen the smiling face of the Third Jamgon Kongtrul materialize within a rainbow just south of the monastery, by a turbulent river, and at that exact spot, he’d watched the Rinpoche’s face dissolve into spectral colors; and he had been granted a glimpse of a two-story home, populated by eight people, with the door facing east, where the young boy could be found. “Be attentive to these signs,” the Karmapa wrote, “and to the presence of rainbows, and you’ll find the Rinpoche.”

  Tenzeng Dorjee led a search party to Tibet. They combed the villages south of the Tsurphu Monastery, looking for a house matching the Karmapa’s description. They found it in the village of Sehmed Shang, with a door facing east toward rapids that surged over boulders in the Tsangpo River. The boy, eight months old at the time, was the youngest of a family of eight. He was plump, with outsized ears. “When I entered the home,” Dorjee says, “the boy, who was bound to his mother’s back, smiled at me like a long-lost friend, like the Third Jamgon Kongtrul.”

  Dorjee returned to the Karmapa and informed him of his discovery. The Karmapa rummaged in a wooden trunk until he found what he wanted. According to Dorjee, the Karmapa placed a replica of the home he had just visited in Sehmed Shang on the carpet before him, which the Karmapa had crafted from his vision out of a children’s set of Lego building blocks. “Is this the residence of the Fourth Jamgon Kongtrul?” he asked.

  “It is, Rinpoche!” Dorjee replied, his eyes flooding with tears.

  They whisked the boy out of Tibet and into India. At the seat of the Tibetan government in exile, in McLeod Ganj, India, the Dalai Lama wrote a formal letter of recognition, hung a scarlet cord around the boy’s neck, and performed the traditional hair-cutting ceremony to welcome the reincarnation of the Rinpoche, whom he named Tenzin Osel Choying Gyatso. The Dalai Lama agreed to supervise the Fourth Jamgon Kongtrul’s Buddhist education, and sent tutors with the Jamgon Kongtrul’s entourage when they departed to take up permanent residence at Lava.

  Stopping at the partially built Pullahari, on his way through Nepal back to the home of his previous earthly incarnation, the Fourth Jamgon Kongtrul was greeted by a crowd of thousands of monks, lamas, and devotees of the Kagyu faith who had come from around the world, straining for a glimpse of the spiritual leader they believed had been returned to them.

  Ruit and Tabin rode in Hilda, driving up the same road the Third Jamgon Kongtrul had descended on the last day of his life. They crossed the British-built Coronation Bridge over the slow-moving Teesta River, where, even at this early hour, gangs of thin, sun-darkened workers heaved large rocks from the shallows to shore, for others to break into manageable bits with sledgehammers. The air became noticeably cooler as they climbed, and Hilda’s engine roared, hauling them up the steep grade, tilting around tight curves cut from dense vegetation, as vines slapped at the windshield and monkeys, sitting inert in the middle of the road, stood and ambled insouciantly into the foliage at the last possible second.

  Since Ruit and Tabin had made their pact in Medrokongga, more than a year ago, Tabin had taken up residence at a lower altitude, in New England. When he’d returned to America, only one academic position in ophthalmology with the specialization in corneal surgery he sought had been posted. The process had been extremely competitive, but Tabin had prevailed—in part because of the experience he’d gained working alongside Ruit. After the University of Vermont offered him the job, Tabin negotiated unconventional terms of employment. He says he turned down $150,000 and five weeks of vacation to press for less money and more time away, agreeing instead on a salary of $105,000 and three months a year in which he would be free to work overseas. If he didn’t have at least three months a year to devote to international work, Tabin felt, he wouldn’t be able to dedicate himself to his partnership with Ruit.

  They settled on the name Ruit had suggested for their charity, the Himalayan Cataract Project, though Tabin’s ambition was to equip both Tilganga and their new organization with specialists trained to treat every type of preventable blindness. Tabin would eventually file paperwork making the HCP a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, capable of accepting tax-deductible donations, but for the time being, they were an NGO in name only; the few donations Tabin had been able to collect were small contributions from friends and relatives.

  After this trip, he told Ruit, he’d devote himself more vigorously to the process of charming cash out of colleagues and acquaintances. “One positive thing about my checkered academic history,” Tabin says, “is that I knew high-earning graduates from every institute of higher education I’d bounced between. And I planned to target them all.”

  As Hilda crested the ravine, the landscape softened and spread its wings, soaring past the sculpted hillocks of tea plantations, toward the wide, ice-encrusted summit to the west that moved both the mountaineer in Tabin and the Walung in Ruit. Kangchenjunga billowed like a sail set to capture the breath of the rising sun. They had been discussing the number of surgeries they could expect to perform when they reached Kalimpong, and the challenge of training the local doctors, but the sight of Ruit’s mountain silenced them both.

  Tabin sensed that this wasn’t simply a trip they were taking together to cure another group of blind patients. They could drive in almost any direction from Kathmandu and the level of need would be nearly the same. When Ruit had suggested that they work so close to the region where he’d been raised, a door had slid open slightly. Tabin felt he was being invited to peer through the crack, to look a bit more deeply at the forces that had made his partner a person he was still only starting to understand.

  This view of Kangchenjunga was nearly the same Ruit had seen as a schoolboy in Darjeeling. Kalimpong, another former British hill station gone gracefully to seed, was separated by only a few miles of tea plantations—folded back on themselves like bolts of green velvet—from the site where his formal education had begun. Ruit hadn’t been back to Olangchungola since his trip as a young doctor, accompanying the border survey team, and he wondered if circumstances would ever permit him to return. But being able to work so close to Kangchenjunga was nevertheless a kind of homecoming.

  The Jamgon Kongtrul the Third Memorial Home sprawled across a hilltop at the edge of town. The low, latticed Victorian bungalows of the original compound had been connected by garden walkways and trellises of tropical plants to concrete dormitories for the orphans and elderly, who regarded the residence not as a dead Rinpoche’s experiment in social engineering so much as simply home. Thirty-odd children gathered on the stairs leading from the drive to the upper compound, shyly cocking their heads and scrutinizing Tabin as he leapt out of the vehicle in
running shoes, trekking pants, and an unzipped orange fleece jacket that exposed his bare chest. Tenzeng Dorjee bowed and placed a white silk kata around Ruit’s neck as he climbed out of the Land Cruiser. Tabin, too, lowered his head to receive the lama’s blessing.

  Ruit raised his eyes and saw how healthy and well cared for the children looked. They had come from villages like his own—last places—where everything, especially opportunity, was scarce. He saw his younger self in them, recalled the boy who had been frightened, at first, by the store-bought clothes and sophistication of students raised in towns and cities. These children, too, would have suffered in their journeys down from the moon. He stared at them and felt so much tenderness he could hardly speak.

  Tabin was also touched by the children. He performed nightly magic shows for them. And when he made his set of sponge balls appear and vanish at will, or seemed to swallow a lit cigarette without suffering any apparent injury, he was greeted with gales of laughter and wild applause, until he slipped in the set of plastic vampire teeth he’d hidden in his pocket, growled, and the laughter turned to delighted screams.

  Ruit was pleased to see how comfortable Tabin was with the children. “When I saw Geoff entertaining them with magic and scaring them with a set of artificial dentures,” Ruit says, “I wondered why he didn’t have any children of his own. He was nearly forty years old at the time, so I advised him to think about starting a family before it was too late.” Ruit wasn’t the only one. Tabin’s mother had gradually resigned herself to the dangers he faced as a climber—he’d cheerfully ignored her protests for decades—but she’d never stopped hoping he’d settle down or hinting how much she longed for him to have children. For his thirty-fifth birthday, Johanna Tabin had gone so far as to send her son a package containing two sets of baby clothing, one pink, one blue, and a note that read, “Just in case.”