Second Suns

by David Oliver Relin

  The old woman placed her hand tenderly along her niece’s cheekbone. “Your face looks fine, but what have you done to your hair?” she said, scowling. “I don’t like it. It looks like you’ve got fronds growing out of your head.”

  I left Bhutan reluctantly—partly because I’d had a glimpse into a rarefied mountain kingdom, a place that was unspoiled, unlike many of its neighbors, a country where an enlightened monarch’s policies made his people’s “gross national happiness” paramount, but also because I knew we were climbing back into the White Elephant for another twelve hours.

  Near the end of our long trip, as we were driven up the winding road to Kalimpong that the Third Jamgon Kongtrul had traveled down his final day, Ruit seemed strangely unconcerned by the blind turns and sheer drop-offs. “Are you really as calm as you look?” I asked. “Isn’t this the sort of place you’d usually get out and walk for a while?”

  “It’s true. I’m not as frightened as I once was. And I’ll show you why,” he said, drawing his left hand out of his pocket and holding it out for me to study. I expected to see an amulet, a precious stone, or some sort of lucky charm, but all he displayed was his open palm. “On my last trip to Thailand, when I was leading an outreach with local doctors we’d trained up, they introduced me to a palmist. Look at my hand.”

  I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary, other than the fact that it still struck me as too large and powerful for the delicate surgeries I’d seen it perform.

  “No, look at this line,” he said, tracing a deep fold that ran perfectly straight across the width of his palm. “The palmist said that in all his years, he’d never seen such a thing. And it makes sense, because really, I’m the luckiest person alive. I had very serious trauma on both arms as a boy, but that didn’t prevent me from becoming a surgeon. When my right arm was in a bamboo splint, I become a lefty. I’m ambidextrous, actually. And that’s been very helpful during surgery. My work is too good to do for money, yet I get paid. With all the trips my staffs have taken on roads like this, no one has ever been seriously injured. Myself, I should have died a dozen times on the road or in the bush, but here I am. And no matter the gradient, if I stay on the straight path, I always get to the top of the mountain.”

  We reached the four-thousand-foot-high hill station of Kalimpong safely, and as the reddened tip of Kangchenjunga broke free from a bank of dark storm clouds, Ruit sighed at the sight of his home mountain. “One day, I’d like to make it all the way back,” he said, “instead of circling and circling my homeland. But I know too well how far it is, and there’s never enough time.”

  We turned off a bumpy dirt road into the smoothly paved parking lot of the Jamgon Kongtrul the Third Memorial Home, and a man with a shock of gray hair and a shaggy goatee ran down a flight of stairs. Thinlay Ngodup placed katas around our necks and welcomed us to the experiment in social planning he oversaw. Children spilled down the stairs to greet us, and Ruit ruffled the hair of ones he recognized from previous trips. “How many at the moment, Thinlay?” Ruit asked.

  “Thirty-nine children. And we had round about forty old folks until we lost two last week,” he said. The children led us to rooms they’d vacated for our stay and helped unload luggage and medical gear from our three vehicles. Even though we were in India, most of the children were Nepalese—survivors of the civil war who’d lost their parents in the fighting or refugees from the war zone whose parents had sent them somewhere they’d have a chance, a place they could get both an education and three meals a day.

  The children seemed delighted to temporarily share quarters with the home’s elderly residents, treating our arrival like an excuse for an extended sleepover party. As we were shown to our rooms, we passed open doorways and I saw several girls sitting in the laps of elderly women in Tibetan-style garb, who were brushing their hair or helping them with homework.

  At the base of the hill, below the residential compound, the Jamgon Kongtrul’s trust had constructed a smaller version of the original Tilganga and had hired a young surgeon in residence to run its operating theater. Sona Yonjo lived in an apartment with a panoramic view of Kalimpong’s sloping hills with her husband, Saumya Sanyal, an ophthalmologist who worked out of a private clinic in Siliguri, on the Indian plain. Business was booming at the Jamgon Kongtrul Eye Centre. They’d recently installed a laser surgery suite, and Thinlay was trying to convince Sanyal to stop commuting and work with his wife as a full-time employee.

  We joined Thinlay’s staff under a striped plastic tarp that had been erected to serve as our mess tent during the four days we’d be at the center for surgery. Patients were already sitting on benches in the courtyard, though work wasn’t scheduled to begin until the following morning. “The patients look as elderly as your residents,” Ruit noted happily.

  “Proof of our success,” Thinlay said, filling our cups with hot, milky tea, which we sipped gratefully as the sun sank into a fog bank and the temperature plummeted. “We opened the eye hospital in 2005. We broke even in 2007. The last two years we’ve made a small profit. People here used to call cataracts ‘pearl tikkas’ and believed they were an honorable mark of aging. But we’ve changed their minds about that. Now we’ve cleared out many of the most serious cases in the region and we’re catching up the young ones before they go blind.”

  I asked Dr. Yonjo why she was working at the eye center.

  “Dr. Ruit’s been coming for many years,” she said. “At first he used to do six or seven hundred patients at a single camp. But the Indian government banned surgery outside hospitals, so the Jamgon Kongtrul’s trust built this place, so they could carry on, according to the law. I was born in Kalimpong, but I trained downside and began working as a nurse. Dr. Ruit had a strong effect on me. He looks like one of my own uncles.” Her face, with its Mongolian features, broke into a broad smile. “He speaks Nepali with an accent like we do. Mountain people face a lot of discrimination in India. The minority groups of this area are very proud of him, because he demonstrated we can rise as high as we want. So, after meeting him, I applied to medical school, and here I am,” she said as if she could scarcely believe her good fortune, “resident ophthalmic surgeon in my hometown. People can’t believe they can get this level of care in this terrain. I couldn’t be happier. And it’s all due to Dr. Ruit.”

  The next morning, the older students began their hour-long walk to the school the center ran off-site, while twenty-two of the younger ones climbed into the battered gray Indian jeep that would drive them there. It coughed and sputtered before its engine eventually caught. “That’s our school bus and our hearse,” Thinlay said. “Don’t worry. We scrub it clean after the cremations. The children don’t find it disturbing. We’re an old-age home, after all. We have lots of funerals here, and they become very familiar with the cycle of life. I think it makes them better students. It gives them perspective.”

  The morning after a long day and evening of surgery, one of the home’s brightest young residents knocked on my door at 6:00 A.M. I opened it, blinking in the bright sunshine, and saw a poised eleven-year-old girl wearing a red-and-white-striped turtleneck, her long, dark hair pulled back into a neat ponytail. I took a cup of milk tea from the tray Tsering Dolpo held shyly before her. And as I sipped the tea, I asked Tsering about herself. Her last name told me where she came from, as well as the violence she’d likely seen and survived during the People’s War. She avoided all mention of the past but spoke effusively about her plans for the future. “Nowadays I’m the top student in the eighth class,” she said. “I’m going to be a surgeon, like Dr. Yonjo.”

  Talking to Tsering, I understood clearly that Ruit’s campaign was not simply about helping Himalayan people see better but allowing them to envision brighter futures in a region that often presented only the bleakest of prospects. Ruit had set in motion a formidable domino effect, his achievement inspiring not only the Jamgon Kongtrul Eye Centre’s surgeon but the young people who saw her as proof that they, too, could rise as hig
h as their ambition would carry them.

  Tsering led me to the room she shared with six other girls and proudly showed off her personal space, the top bunk of a bed against the far wall of the room. There were two posters taped to the wall over her heavy pink comforter. One displayed an illustrated English alphabet, with an apple, a bee, and a cat standing beside brightly colored letters. The other showed a series of cartoons, titled “The Importance of Courtesy”; one panel contained a smiling child, who looked not unlike Tsering, holding a door open for an elderly woman.

  As we were walking back toward my room on the terrace, through the compound’s gardens, where pumpkins grew on vines that climbed onto bungalow roofs and ripe star fruit hung from trees, Tsering shouted, “Look!” I followed her finger toward a line of freshly washed green surgical drapes clipped to a rope, drying in the sun, then above and beyond them, where the broad summit ridges of Kangchenjunga hung from a perfectly clear sky, like a line of snow-white sheets.

  After breakfast, I traveled an hour up to Lava, where the young Jamgon Kongtrul lived in a monastery abutting the town. I’d seen enough surgery by then to fill several books, and I wanted, instead, to seek out one of the sources of Ruit’s inspiration.

  Since the day I’d met him, Ruit had been telling me stories about the foresight of the Third Jamgon Kongtrul, the handsome young monk who’d secretly taken the ambitious surgeon’s measure in Kathmandu before his followers donated the money to build Tilganga’s first surgical center. Ruit spoke of his departed friend often, in the hushed tones he reserved for those he most admired. He talked about the Jamgon Kongtrul’s wisdom, his refusal to stand on ceremony or pursue a cloistered meditative life, rather than working to relieve the poverty that surrounded him.

  Ruit had been fortunate that, after the Jamgon Kongtrul’s death, powerful allies like the Fred Hollows Foundation and the HCP had stepped forward to provide funding when he needed it most. But I sensed that, at his core, Ruit worried that all Westerners would one day fail him. If his scientist’s mind didn’t allow him to believe, unquestioningly, in reincarnation, his Walung heart hoped that the Fourth Jamgon Kongtrul, now fourteen, really was his dependable old friend returned to a new vessel, a well-funded force for good he could rely on for the rest of his career.

  “I’m not really what you would call a true believer,” Ruit had confided to me during our long drive to Kalimpong in the White Elephant. “Over the years, my religion has become eye care more than Buddhism. But I’m not prepared to rule out the possibility that my dear Rinpoche has returned. For such a young boy, he certainly seems to have remarkable bearing, you see?”

  The Kagyu Thekchen Ling Monastery straddles a hilltop at seven thousand feet, just above the village of Lava. Like Pullahari, the monastery had been built in a landscape of sublime mountain scenery. But unlike the Jamgon Kongtrul’s other residence, which seemed to float above the coarse realities of earthly life in the Kathmandu Valley, this one stood hard against the grit of the adjoining settlement. Only an iron gate separated the monastery’s lush gardens and glittering buildings, freshly painted plum, cinnamon, and gold, from the sagging tin-roofed shophouses and cinder-block residences topped with TV aerials that constituted the town of Lava.

  A sign near the entrance reminded guests that they were treading on sacred ground and should behave accordingly. VISITORS ARE KINDLY REQUESTED TO REFRAIN FROM ALL ANTI-SOCIAL BEHAVIOUR, it read. PLEASE DO NOT SMOKE, SPIT, SHOUT OR PLAY MUSIC WHILE VISITING THE MONASTERY. I wondered what sort of diversions there would be in this place for a fourteen-year-old boy, no matter how spiritually advanced he was reputed to be.

  An aged monk gave me a tour of a prayer hall, where, behind the altar, hundreds of gilded Buddha statues sat in small compartments behind glass. Then I was shown to a reception room in the Rinpoche’s living quarters and directed to sit on a Tibetan carpet a few feet from the Fourth Jamgon Kongtrul. He sat calmly before me in the lotus position, on a cushioned platform a few feet above my head. “He’s grown so tall and his feet are already size nine or ten!” Ruit had told me proudly that morning, charting his Rinpoche’s journey toward manhood.

  His feet were indeed large, but the most prominent aspect of his appearance was his ears. They were enormous, and brought to mind classical depictions of the Buddha. I shuffled forward on my knees to receive a blessing, and the Jamgon Kongtrul held a golden statue of the Buddha to my head before sprinkling blessed water onto my hair from a horsehair brush. As the droplets ran down my scalp, I felt torn, as I imagine Ruit did, by the twinned perspectives from which I regarded him: as a skeptical journalist and as a human hoping for a glimpse of deeper meaning, something beneath the uninspiring surface of daily life.

  After I scooted back to a seated position a yard or so from the Rinpoche’s feet, I took out my notebook. I directed the first question to the fourteen-year-old boy, rather than the reincarnation of a living god. I’d heard he was a devotee of video games, so I said, “You can’t study all the time, Your Eminence. What do you do for fun?”

  “Well, I was previously very fond of PlayStation,” he said in flawless English. “But I’m putting childish things aside now and assuming my responsibilities.”

  I wondered how he dealt with the hopes thousands had invested in him, and I asked him to describe a typical day. “I wake up at four-thirty,” he said, “to begin my prostrations.” Then he accounted for his entire schedule, in half-hour increments: He described his courses in Buddhist philosophy and scripture, the time set aside each morning for meditation, the hour each day he studied ancient Tibetan grammar, and the time reserved for meeting with advisers about humanitarian projects like a medical clinic in Lava and the Kalimpong eye hospital his charitable trust funded, all before his nonnegotiable bedtime of 9:00 P.M.

  I asked him which of his duties he enjoyed most, and he answered without hesitation.

  “Debate,” he said. “Three times a day I’m obliged to argue the fine points of Buddhist philosophy with my senior lamas. One of us stands and questions the other, who remains seated, according to tradition. Then we reverse roles. I relish those opportunities, and if I may be immodest, I can say that I’m not bad at debate. I’m practicing for a competition that will soon be held at Bodh Gaya, the site of the Buddha’s awakening.”

  I thanked the Rinpoche for his time and wished him luck at the debate, though I doubted he’d need it. Ruit, I felt, had been right to put his faith in this boy, who was, at the very least, wise beyond his years and, at most, something much harder to describe with the black-and-white language of logic. Escorted down a series of steep staircases by two of the 110 monks in flowing red robes who called the monastery home, toward the harsh reality of life on the other side of the iron gate, I looked back up, past gardens of carefully tended flowers, toward the Jamgon Kongtrul’s residence.

  I saw him standing, framed by a gilded window on the topmost floor, studying me as I left. Even at that distance, I could make out the surprising scale of his ears. I thought about all the Buddhas behind glass in the prayer hall beneath him and considered whether he ever felt as isolated and compartmentalized. I tried to imagine what it would be like to be plucked from your family’s home in a country across the mountains and planted, however comfortably, in this well-appointed hothouse of Buddhist faith. How lonely would the rest of his journey be, I wondered, as he traveled the road from fourteen to full adulthood?

  Visiting with postsurgical patients before we left Kalimpong, I noticed the shrunken noses and gnarled fingers of many of the elderly, indicating that leprosy had still not been eradicated from the surrounding forests. Suru Mundu, who lived in the woods between Kalimpong and Sikkim, had been particularly ravaged by the disease. At seventy-two, his sun-blackened face seemed to fold in on itself, and his fingers were so warped that I imagined what agony his work must have been, before he went blind. “I worked at the river, when the tide was low, carrying big rocks up to the bank and breaking them into chips for roadwork,” Mundu said. “A ye
ar and a half ago, my eyes shut all of a sudden. I didn’t know I could have them cured here for free, or I would have come sooner. The last year has been very hard.”

  Mundu sat beside his wife. Both were so thin they appeared skeletal. Mundu hardly seemed affected by the fact that his cataracts had been removed and his vision returned. But when Thinlay told him that he and his wife were welcome to stay at the hospital for a few days and eat as much as they liked, his face split into a grin that displayed his remaining teeth, and the Mundus hugged each other in relief. “After a few days, when their bellies are full and they’ve had time to think,” Thinlay said, “I’m going to ask if they’d like to come live here. As you know, we have a few new vacancies.”

  The final night of our long road trip together, after Ruit and Yonjo had done 134 surgeries in Kalimpong, and after three more days we’d spent across a river valley in the neighboring Indian state of Sikkim, during which Ruit and Dr. B. P. Dhakal had performed another 150, we gathered for dinner at the colonial-era bungalow where Ruit was staying, along with a group of his Chinese Australian donors.

  While we ate, with Ruit prodding and teasing them to answer, Gilbert Leung, who’d been shooting video the entire trip for a presentation he was preparing for a fund-raiser in Hong Kong, and Rosana Pittiyapongpat, a Thai surgeon who’d been training in Ruit’s technique at each of the places we’d stopped, admitted that they had agreed to marry. Ruit promised to organize a traditional Nepalese wedding for them when the medical caravan passed through Hetauda—they had first met at the hospital there—on the drive back to Kathmandu. They accepted his offer with obvious delight. Their engagement was further evidence of what I was coming to see as the most impressive aspect of Ruit’s career: He’d not only pioneered and refined a surgical technique but had woven a strand of personal relationships, spanning the Himalaya and beyond, bringing people together in a shared quest to improve others’ lives.