Second Suns

by David Oliver Relin

  I scanned the crowd waiting in the courtyard of the Pakhribas school, most people sitting on the piles of bricks the school had purchased for future expansion. All but four seemed to have enough visual acuity to walk without aid: a teenage boy who sat, slumped, by himself; two older women who’d come from distant villages and were leaning helplessly against their relatives; and a middle-aged man in a clean gray V-neck sweater who was led into surgery, flailing for balance, by local teenage volunteers. The volunteers wore yellow ribbons, like those presented to champion equestrians. And their expressions of pride demonstrated that they enjoyed the duties they’d been entrusted with: feeding the patients and escorting them to surgery.

  When I returned to the operating room, Ruit still wasn’t talking to me, except when I asked him a direct question. He was speaking loudly and with some heat to Rahan Man Tamang, the patient in the gray V-neck sweater, who’d been placed on his table. I asked him what he was saying. “This gentleman is an alcoholic,” Ruit explained. “That’s very common among the blind in remote areas who want to escape the drudgery of their lives. But this fellow lives in a prosperous town. He has a trade as a skilled mason and no excuse for not having surgery already, so I’m asking him why it took him so long to come to us for help.”

  Ruit repeated the question, and Tamang mumbled something in response. Ruit began speaking forcefully, in a tone I recognized from the previous night, and his words clearly found their mark. The man twisted on Ruit’s table as if he was already in pain, though the operation had yet to begin. Then he nodded in agreement. I asked Ruit what he said.

  “I told this fellow, ‘I propose a bargain for you. I’ll give you back your eyes. You have to take back your life. You’ve made a mess of it so far, but I’m going to give you a second chance. When you can see again, do you promise to stop drinking?’ ”

  While Tabin whipped through his unchallenging cases, I walked out, pulled off my mask, and roamed the schoolyard. The teenage boy was still hunched over, with his head between his knees. He wore a dress shirt so faded the original color was hard to discern. With Satenla translating, I learned that he was sixteen and his name was Bhupin. I asked how much he could see.

  “If it’s bright out, I can see some shadows,” he said. “Otherwise, it’s always dark.”

  “Do you go to school?” I asked.

  “My parents make me,” he said. “But I don’t see the point.”

  Two teenage volunteers tapped Bhupin on the shoulder and led him in to surgery.

  Our last morning in Pakhribas, the patients sat quietly on the benches lining the school’s courtyard and their families squatted on top of the piles of bricks, waiting for the show to begin. While the nurses laid out their boxes of eyedrops for the patients to take home and prepared for the doctors to begin their examinations, Rahan Man Tamang fell to the ground and began twitching. His wife helped prop him back up and began massaging his legs, trying to ease the tremors from his alcohol withdrawal. Satenla and I spoke to his wife, and she explained that her husband had kept his promise, at least for a day, and had drunk nothing since his surgery.

  Bhupin was one of the first patients Ruit unbandaged. Like so many Ruit had operated on, he began to unfold like a plant exposed to the sun as soon as he was able to see. But Bhupin’s transformation was the fastest I’d ever witnessed. While Ruit moved on, working his way down the line of patients, Bhupin stood and began walking gingerly, with his arms held before him for balance. Then, as if a switch had been thrown, he let his arms drop to his sides, realizing that he no longer needed to move like someone with an infirmity, and began walking briskly, then sped up still further, skipping back and forth across the courtyard, laughing aloud. His mood affected the other patients, and they laughed along and applauded his every move.

  Ruit knelt to unveil Rahan Man Tamang’s eyes, and as he looked at Ruit, then let his gaze rest on his wife, who was still rubbing his twitching legs and had wrapped a thick wool scarf around his shivering neck, I noticed for the first time that he was a handsome man. Ruit had prepared another lecture, but he didn’t need it. “I promise,” Tamang said, first to Ruit, then, lingeringly, to his wife. “I’m so sorry,” he told her.

  Ruit unwound the gauze from the eyes of his last two patients. Seventy-year-old Devi Maya Khadka was a wisp of a woman who wore her hair pulled back in a pink kerchief; she smiled ecstatically with her remaining teeth when she met Ruit’s eyes.

  Sixty-six-year-old Devi Rai wore a white cardigan and a finely wrought, flowered gold nose stud that seemed especially fragile on her broad, willful face. “My sister-in-law says she’s growing impatient,” Rai said after Ruit unwrapped her bandages. “She had to walk me here from my village, and she doesn’t want to wait any longer for me to receive my medication and instructions.” Rai stood up and stared at her sister-in-law. “Well, get going! I don’t need your help anymore. I’ll do everything for myself. I’ll walk back myself. I’ll dance all the way home. Look!” And then she stood up, raised her arms over her head, and began to dance. “I may have the physique of an old lady,” she said. “But I’ve got the heart of a sixteen-year-old now. Come on!” she urged the other Devi. “Our lives aren’t over yet. Dance with me!”

  She pulled her partner to her feet and began to sing. The two women twirled and spun as the crowd clapped along to Devi Rai’s song. “I can’t go beyond the river,” she sang in a voice far more delicate than her weathered appearance. “I can’t cross the water to win your love. My heart will break right here. Sitting alone at home.” The two Devis spun to a stop, hugging each other, gasping for breath, as the crowd cheered. Thanks to Ruit, neither one would have to sit helplessly at home any longer. As helplessly as Yang La had withered behind the counter at Sonam’s shop down the road, struggling to breathe, waiting for the end prescribed by her banishment from modern medicine.

  I looked at Ruit and saw something hard he’d carried since we’d arrived soften and sink without a trace.

  We packed up and climbed onto the blue Tilganga bus that would carry us to our trailhead. The people of Pakhribas bowed and handed us bouquets of flowers as we boarded. They decorated the bus with strings of marigolds and tied yellow silk katas to its mirrors, knotting them around its grille and lacing them through the windows.

  We waved good-bye with our flower-filled hands, and the bus rumbled up the road, deeper into the mountains, deeper into Ruit’s past, leaving behind terraced hillsides and cultivated plots, passing patients walking toward distant homes, rolling finally through a wild and empty landscape of clumping bamboo that threw shoots high into the air, shoots that bent and curved in every direction of the compass before exploding into blossoms at their tips, like an enduring display of fireworks.

  The Winter Trail

  I am of the nature to grow old.

  There is no way to escape growing old.

  I am of the nature to have ill health.

  There is no way to escape ill health.

  I am of the nature to die.

  There is no way to escape death.

  All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change.

  There is no way to escape being separated from them.

  My actions are my only true belongings.

  I cannot escape the consequences of my actions.

  My actions are the ground upon which I stand.

  —The Five Remembrances, the essence of the Buddha’s teachings, as translated by Thich Nhat Hanh

  Khem woke me and Tabin well before dawn, easing into our cramped and filthy room in the Yak guesthouse with cups of milky tea. Tabin had thrown his pack onto the more comfortable of the two beds the evening before, and I’d tossed most of the night on a tilting slab covered with a straw mat that threatened to spill me and my slick nylon sleeping bag onto the floor.

  Too few minutes later, we stood shivering on Basantapur’s main commercial street at first light. A cold mist blew past shuttered shophouses, and our porters repacked and adjusted the w
oven baskets they’d brought to carry our loads. Then Ruit marched to the head of the line, holding his walking stick like a band conductor’s baton, and waved it, urging us on.

  The trail began where the road ended, and climbed gently at first. Tabin had taped my ankle, so I felt reasonably confident as we climbed up a ridge, but the route grew progressively steeper, and we scrambled over slide paths. One section of loose rock was so tricky to cross that I climbed up to a boulder where someone had hammered in an iron cable and, hanging from it, pulled myself across, arm over arm.

  Tabin simply jumped down into the gap where the trail had been, bracing himself, in his borrowed shoes, on either side of a sheer drop. Reaching up, he supported Satenla, and then her father, as they tiptoed across a ledge. Tabin’s instinctive move was proof of how useful he must have been to Ruit when they were first blazing their path together into the high places of the Himalaya.

  After four hours of steady climbing, we reached the crest of a ridge covered in rhododendrons. Pink, red, and the rare giant white rhododendron trees that Ruit remembered from his long walks with his father were in full bloom, and we traveled through tunnels of them for hours, the flowery light filtering through their blossoms, their fallen petals softening the path.

  Satenla, her hair pulled back into a ponytail for the trek, was moving more slowly than the rest of us, and her father stayed with her, while the mountain people among Ruit’s team took turns helping her over rock slides and boulders that blocked the trail and carrying her light pack. She was winded when she arrived on top of the next ridge, and she sat down heavily, gulping from her nearly empty aluminum water bottle decorated with a Barbie motif. I couldn’t imagine her crossing increasingly rough terrain over the next few weeks, but I knew I shouldn’t underestimate a Ruit, even one raised in relative comfort.

  Past the rhododendrons, the sharp summit ridges of Kangchenjunga carved their way out of a cloud bank, looking more rugged from the west than they had from Kalimpong or Sikkim. “Do you see it, Sat?” Ruit asked. “Do you see our mountain?”

  “Yes, Daddy,” she said, dutifully aiming her camera.

  I kept pace with Tabin and he talked the entire way, telling meandering jokes that lasted as long as the ridges we climbed, and discussing Ghana, Ethiopia, and Rwanda and his plans to expand his efforts across Africa, and muttering aloud, as if he were walking alone, about the negative effect his extended absences were having on his family.

  Twelve hours after we’d set out from Basantapur, it began to rain—gently at first, then whipping up into an onslaught that we leaned against as we climbed. We were still climbing after dark, trying to keep our headlamps focused on the main channel of a rocky path cut through thorny alpine scrub that forked away into side trails and dead ends every few yards. “Do you think we should stop and make sure Sanduk and Satenla aren’t lost?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t worry about them,” Tabin said. “They have half of the Sherpas on Tilganga’s staff looking out for them. I’m more concerned about where we are.”

  I checked my altimeter. We had just climbed above ten thousand feet, and the precipitation, as if it responded to round numbers, changed to hail. It pounded on our hoods in marble-sized pellets, drowning out our attempts at conversation. I thought of a phrase from Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard, which he’d written while following another driven madman, the wildlife biologist George Schaller, into this range a few hundred miles to our west. “In the calamitous weather,” Matthiessen wrote, “the journey was losing all reality.”

  We were looking for a town called Gupha, where we planned to spend the night, but my altimeter said we were too high. We’d expected to reach it an hour earlier, and there was no flicker of artificial light or sign of human habitation anywhere we could see, along the entire length of the sharp ledge extending for miles to our north. Then thunder cracked so close overhead that we both ducked, and a bolt of lightning forked toward us with a tearing sound and hit a rocky outcrop a hundred yards ahead of us, precisely where our trail was headed.

  “Well, look at the bright side!” Tabin shouted over the storm. “We may be hiking on a slippery trail in the dark, with no sign of shelter in sight, but at least there’s an excellent chance we’ll both be killed by lightning!”

  Just then we rounded a corner and reached a cleft in the ridge where we could see, half a mile ahead and below us, propane lamps the residents of Gupha had hung, flaring like runway lights, guiding us to a landing strip in the storm.

  We ducked and walked through a low door into Gupha’s teahouse. Ruit, Satenla, and the rest of the team were resting on cushioned benches surrounding a smoking fire box and sipping milky tea. Tabin and I must have climbed above the main trail on a detour that lengthened our trek. The home belonged to a Walung family of Ruit’s acquaintance. The matron, a ruddy-faced woman in a striped pangi, shoved steaming mugs of milk tea into our hands and stoked the fire. Tabin slid into the last empty seat and I stood against the wall, next to a framed photo of the Dalai Lama. Soon the room was so thick with smoke that I couldn’t stop coughing or keep my eyes open, and I slipped out the back door for some fresh air.

  The hail had stopped, but the gusts were blowing even harder. We were on a ridge at 9,600 feet, fully exposed to the bitter wind whipping east from the high peaks of the Khumbu. Having left my headlamp inside, I stumbled around in the muddy yard among unfamiliar rounded shapes that looked like crude stupas. They towered over me, two or three times my height, and it was only when I slid on a wet stone and steadied myself against one that I saw they were stacks of firewood. Without them, human life in this place would hardly be possible.

  The tin door, banging against its frame, announced my return. Shivering, I picked up my tea and tried to drink without burning my tongue. “David?” Ruit asked from his comfortable seat next to his daughter. “Where’s that handsome orange coat of yours?”

  I sagged now that he’d said it out loud. “I forgot to pack it,” I admitted. My one warm piece of clothing, an insulated belay jacket I’d brought for moments like this, hadn’t made the trip to the mountains. I could see the peg where I’d left it hanging in a spare classroom at the Pakhribas school. I’d been chastising myself about losing it all day.

  “Are you sure?” Ruit said, his eyes twinkling with amusement as he pulled it out of his pack and tossed it to me. Everyone in the room shared a belly laugh at my expense. I took off my thin wet shell and gratefully zipped the hood of the warm coat over my head. “We couldn’t let you freeze to death,” Ruit said. “Who would tell our story?”

  The next morning, we left again at first light. Scoured all night by rain and hail, the morning sky was washed clean. We hiked up a ridge out of Gupha, and once we’d left the narrow lane between the smoke-blackened homes, Makalu and Lhotse—two of the world’s five tallest mountains—jutted into view, directly to our west. They resembled crumbling palaces of vanished Himalayan kingdoms, but they’d been shaped by a hand surer than any human architect and were built to last. Seeing their summits lit by the rising sun made every step we’d taken the day before worthwhile.

  Our train of nurses, technicians, surgeons, and porters stretched for nearly a mile, all of them walking at their own pace. Pemba Sherpa, one of Tilganga’s most fit orderlies, carried the heaviest load, a metal locker containing one of the operating microscopes as well as two cartons of bottled intravenous fluids. The porters hauled piles of gear that made the light packs Tabin, Ruit, and I wore look weightless. The large woven baskets they carried by plastic straps that creased their foreheads were packed full of crates marked TILGANGA INSTITUTE. Metal surgical stools were lashed to the tops of their unwieldy loads. They sped beyond me as we walked under strands of torn prayer flags at the top of a ten-thousand-foot pass, breathing easily, chattering to keep one another company.

  I clambered down slippery rocks on the other side, watching more than forty people descend a saddled ridge while Pemba and the others at the leading edge of the party began
hauling their overloaded baskets toward an even higher pass. The immensity of our undertaking struck me. In an age when most doctors are unwilling to even make house calls, the team Ruit had assembled was carrying the contents of an entire hospital over a mountain range to reach his patients.

  I was walking with Satenla and her father, telling them how extraordinary the spectacle seemed to me, when Ruit grabbed each of us by the arm, pulled us a few feet above the path, and pressed us hard against a boulder. Around a bend in the trail I heard a faint chiming. “Yak!” warned Ruit, who’d heard them sooner. “You need to give them a wide berth,” he said as the animals passed below us, straining at their leads. “They might look like gentle, furry creatures, Sat, but those big kitty cats have sharp horns, isn’t it?”

  When the yak caravan had passed and we approached our high point for the day, the eleven-thousand-foot Deurali Pass, Ruit stopped short of the summit and rooted around in the thorny undergrowth for a rock with dimensions that pleased him. At the top of the pass he heaved it skillfully straight-armed, like a cricket bowler, and it landed on the very top of a nearby pile of stones stacked into a chorten. “Let the mountain rise higher!” he proclaimed, as his father had said to him once, on another long walk many decades earlier. He handed another stone to Satenla so she could cement the tradition.

  We walked along a ridge for another hour, then sat on a sunny ledge while Nima Sherpa, a young orderly whom Ruit had asked to pay special attention to Satenla on difficult stretches of terrain, poured us milk tea from a pink thermos decorated with frisky cats pawing at balls of yarn. Satenla was writing rapidly in her diary. Tabin had spotted a cellphone tower on a distant peak and had scrambled up a rocky promontory like a mountain goat, trying to find a signal so he could call his wife. I sniffed my forearm. It smelled like smoked meat after one night in a Walung home, and I understood why respiratory infections were so common in the mountains of Nepal.