by Jaimal Yogis
The house was about the size of your average lawn mower shed in the American suburbs. There was no toilet. The only means of bathing looked to be freezing well water and a coffee can. But the shanty overlooked a sloping meadow that was starting to bloom with purple and white flowers. Waking up to this wouldn’t be bad. But when I ducked through the small front door, I didn’t see where I could stay. Radhika, her rickshaw-driving husband, and the twins all slept on the floor in the single room that had a fire pit in the center for cooking.
“Thank you,” I said. “But your family needs the space. I—”
Radhika shook her head and pulled back a curtain that ran along the wall, revealing a kitchen that wasn’t tall enough to stand in and barely long enough to lie down in.
“You, here,” Radhika said, and before I could refuse, she, Bipham, and Mehta began moving the kitchen cabinets into the main living space. They replaced all the kitchen cupboards with a single bed, made out of wood, that was about coffin-size.
OK, I thought, I’ll likely wake to some catch: “Now you take Bipham study America.” But since the front wall of the kitchen was lined with windows that overlooked the flowering meadow, sleeping here for one night seemed worth the risk.
I slept surprisingly well at Radhika’s after hauling my pack from the motel. And in the morning, Bipham and Mehta woke me before sunrise with chai. After breakfast, Radhika showed me how to heat the well water with fire. The process only made a bucketful of scalding hot water, but standing in thirty-five degree air, shivering and dumping small canfuls of steaming water on each goose-bumped limb, then quickly soaping up and rinsing while singing, “fuck, fuck fuck it’s fucking cold,” turned out to be just the thing for feeling that I was in authentic India. Two nights turned into three, three into a week. A catch never came.
Guilty, I insisted I pay at least double what the motel charged—meaning two dollars—but Radhika said she couldn’t accept more than one dollar per night.
“You very young,” she said. “Must save money for wife.”
Housing, check.
Next I had to figure out what I was doing up here. Besides finishing my undergraduate thesis, my whole excuse for being in India—so it wouldn’t feel exclusively like chasing Sati—was to get credentials to get into Columbia Journalism School, which seemed, at the time, an official pass to adulthood and a writing career. At the start of this trip, I’d been reporting in politically hot areas so I could submit stories to American papers, but my only published article thus far was an op-ed in an Indian paper apologizing for George W. Bush.
The international irrelevance of McLeod was a strike against staying. But a few days after meeting Radhika, I was working at an expat café and overheard a middle-aged British woman saying, “Lobsong, you’re confusing the lede.” My ears perked up. That was journalism-speak! I eavesdropped through the conversation and interrupted at the first chance to see what they were up to.
“We’re trying to keep this English-language magazine on the area afloat, but quite honestly, it’s going to die if we don’t find another English-speaking editor.”
“I’m an English-speaking editor,” I said, hoping she wouldn’t ask about past experience.
“Well,” the woman said, “when can you start?”
Job, check.
But it wasn’t until I met Sonam that things really began to click.
Shortly after taking the volunteer editing job, I was strolling along Temple Road, looking up at prayer flags dangling from a veranda, when Sonam reached out his hand.
“Hello!” he said. “Welcome my home.”
The voice startled me, and I nearly leapt into a sputtering rickshaw.
“Jesus!” I said, then looked up to see a young Tibetan monk laughing.
I dusted myself off, a little wary. Radhika had made me slightly more trusting of random friendliness, but before her offer, I’d been scammed at least a dozen times in this country. One time I’d entertained an overly friendly invitation to lunch and ended up at an awkward meal with a Nepali father asking me to marry one of his five daughters.
But Sonam had a trustworthy face: simultaneously round and defined, high cheekbones perking up shiny black eyes. I liked him straightaway. We went through the usual foreigner discussion.
“Where from?”
“California.”
“Ahhhh, nice!”
I figured it couldn’t hurt to accept his invitation to tour the monastery and have dinner.
The monastery was just a few cement rooms for eating, meditating, and studying. But it was adorned with silk mandala paintings and intricate statues formed from brightly dyed yak butter. Tibetan and Sanskrit texts with weathered spines covered some of the walls.
We ate mung beans and rice with the other monks in silence. Then, after dinner, Sonam brought me to the flat cement roof—rusted rebar still popping out from the cinder blocks. Here, he made his pitch.
Sonam was searching for a tutor to help with conversational English. He hoped to teach other monks and was wondering if I could chat with him on occasion. In exchange, he’d teach me Tibetan or, if I wanted, how to make yak-butter statues.
I didn’t see yak-butter sculpting in my future. But my thesis compared Buddhist and Hindu sects and was in need of some interviews. If Sonam would be my interviewee, I said, I’d meet with him for an hour per day of English.
“Wah!” Sonam said. “Soooo happy!”
I was still a wreck. I often woke up wanting to beat my head against the granite. I still hoped every moment that Sati would email and tell me she’d seen the light and wanted to run away to Tahiti together. But I considered myself on an upswing from breakup hell. I also had a sense of purpose: two jobs—albeit unpaid. And I wanted to keep them.
So, at our first tutoring session the next day, I met Sonam on the monastery roof, bringing a few English grammar books I’d picked up at a used bookstore. I was feeling proud of myself for being organized. But not long after beginning a conversational lesson, Sonam looked a bit bored. He told me what he loved most was singing.
“Chanting?” I asked.
“Ya, ya, chant good,” Sonam said, “but Bollywood good too. If no monk, I tink maybe, how you say, star singing?”
“A rock star?”
“No, no. Not rock. Star, you know star?”
I was about to explain what rock star meant. But Sonam was already breaking into a Hindi dance routine from the Bollywood epic Devdas. He put his hand to his heart as he sung and pointed at the heavens.
Sonam’s voice wasn’t great. And monkhood hadn’t exactly given him solid dance moves. But after he finished his jig, I told Sonam I played a little guitar. His eyes sparked.
“I come back, I come back!” he said.
A few minutes later, Sonam returned carrying an acoustic guitar. Canadian tourists had recently stayed at the monastery, he said, and hadn’t been able to pay their room fees. Feeling bad, they’d offered the monks the guitar.
Judging from its looks, the Canadians had gotten off easy. Even tuned up, the guitar sounded like a wet barrel with strings. But a beat-up guitar was slightly better than no guitar. And English tutoring became a jam.
I tried to explain the meaning behind Dylan, the Beatles, and Petty, which I generally did poorly because I often had no clue of the meanings myself. That said, “Let It Be” became a quick favorite when I explained it in terms of nonattachment. Nothing could compare to Sonam’s exuberance, though, when we got to John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”
“Wah! Wah! Dis beautiful song!” Sonam beamed. “Dis what feel every day! Dis Tibet many many missing. Every day sing my homeland far away!”
I got a lump in my throat. You couldn’t walk down the street in McLeod without reading some human rights pamphlet about Buddhist monks and nuns being tortured, kidnapped, or killed by Chinese security. Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, the young boy who had been chosen as the reincarnation of the Panchen Lama—the most holy Tibetan figure after the Dalai Lama—ha
d been kidnapped and activists were constantly parading the boy’s adorable face around town. I’d chatted with other monks and nuns since arriving, and their easygoing manner made you forget they’d lost anything at all. But Sonam’s connection with “Country Roads” made me remember that even the monastics—despite their daily equanimity training—were in constant mourning and trauma recovery.
From then on, Sonam and I sang “Country Roads” every class, usually a minimum of four times. Only instead of “almost heaven, West Virginia,” we sang “almost heaven, West Tibet.” Every single time, Sonam got misty-eyed midchorus. Once he cried.
He didn’t seem to want to talk about the tears though. Didn’t seem to want to burden me. But after four or five weeks of tutoring, Sonam and I began hanging out beyond English class. We’d cook dinner together or go walking in the hills. The details gradually became clear.
When Sonam was eleven, a Nepali man had come through his tiny village in Tibet. The man wanted to see if anyone in Sonam’s family would go with him on a trek to India to see the Dalai Lama. Sonam’s whole family declined—except Sonam. He knew even then that he wanted to be a monk. And he was so insistent, his family agreed to let him go, asking only that Sonam return to see them as soon as he could.
With no compass or map, Sonam and the Nepali man took such an arduous route they had to eat grass to stay alive. Sonam needed a year of medical care in Nepal to nurse him back from malnutrition. But he finally made it to India where he did ordain under the Dalai Lama—a moment that he described as “best day my life!”
Fifteen years later, when I met Sonam, he still loved being a monk. But he loved his family too. Chinese security had increased since he’d left Tibet. With no mail or telephone service to his village, he hadn’t even been able to write, much less visit. He didn’t know if they were alive and presumably they didn’t know the same about him. Often he dreamt about them, worrying they’d been imprisoned or worse.
Once I knew Sonam’s full story, I told him bits about my own life, including the Sati tragedy, and we became close.
“You best friend, Ja-ma,” Sonam started saying. “I tink one day, you me Tibet going. See family. You bring wife, baby.”
“Sonam,” I said, “I don’t even have a girlfriend anymore.”
“Soon, soon,” Sonam laughed.
I loved the idea of going to Tibet with Sonam and couldn’t help imagining Sati as the wife Sonam was prophesying about. But the fantasy seemed far-fetched.
“You never know,” I usually shrugged, not wanting to let either of us get carried away. But as if we already had tickets, Sonam would often launch into the details he hoped to show me: how his house sat alone on a remote hillside, nothing else for miles and miles around (“dis big big sky—you sing, ‘waaaaaah!’ nobody hear”), how he and his older brother would play pranks on each other (“dis Tibet game, tricky tricky”), about his mother’s homemade cheese and his father’s folk religion (“dis mountain-people religion, good religion, Buddhism same same”).
Sonam’s eyes often moistened when talking about his family. But after just a few weeks of knowing him, I remember thinking Sonam was, without question, the happiest person I’d ever met.
“Dis morning, I bery happy,” he would say while he made us thick Tibetan chai with milk.
“Dis night, I bery happy,” he would say in the evening as we cooked dinner.
“Dis puja make me bery bery happy,” he’d say when we did Tibetan chanting.
Quite literally, Sonam said he was “bery bery happy” at least twenty times a day.
At first I wondered if it was all an act. Sonam may not have seen Seven Years in Tibet, but he’d seen enough stressed-out tourists to know how the roles broke down. He was the happy monk and had to woo me, the miserable Westerner burdened by my lust for wealth, into simplicity and grace. But after weeks and then months of “so happy this, so happy that,” I realized it wasn’t what Sonam was saying that made him convincing. It was that I felt happier and lighter whenever I was around him. And since I was still tortured fairly regularly by dreams of Sati’s parents inviting Jyanth for afternoon tea, this was an improvement.
But I often wondered how Sonam maintained his contentment while also clearly grieving. I felt that I had two settings: upbeat and joyful—usually due to the future feeling bright—or guilt and despair—because the future seemed difficult. These settings were more like rivals, dark and light, than parts of myself that could live in harmony.
I’ll never know the exact functioning of Sonam’s psychology, only what I perceived through my own projections and needs. But one spring morning, I thought I got a clear glimpse.
Sonam had invited me with him to make offerings to Tibetan hermits who live high above McLeod deepening their meditation and preparing for death. We’d brought gallons of milk, some vegetables, prayer flags, and dried herbs to burn as an offering to the Buddhas and bodhisattvas. Sonam was ecstatic as we hiked.
“Today, I bery bery happy. Dis going big mountain. Dis big lama see. Dis lama many many meditation.”
Walking up the narrow path, we sang our usual “Country Roads” along with some Tibetan folk songs. We laughed as I botched the Tibetan lyrics and he botched the English ones. But when we passed the snow line, Sonam knelt down and scooped snow in his palms, rubbing it between his fingers, watching it melt.
“Dis snow many many sad,” he said. “Tibet snow bery same same. Dis longtime no see.”
Sonam stared at the snow for a while in silence. And since I’d earned this new best-friend slot, I put my hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry you can’t go home, Sonam.”
I expected Sonam to take the opportunity to talk more about Tibet. He seemed to be getting more used to this Western approach I’d introduced him to—constant emotional venting. But instead, he looked at my concerned expression, smiled wide, and said something I will never forget:
“Ja-ma, you funny. Dis bery sad no problem.”
4
without a hat
a winter rain falls on me
so what
—Matsuo Basho
I came to depend on Sonam’s jovial moods more than I knew. So when he had to go to South India for a couple of weeks to help a sick teacher, I found myself hiking the trail toward the hermits almost every day, humming our usual tunes.
One morning, early enough that there were still frozen puddles thawing on the trail, I stopped at a boulder that had been split in two by a pine root. The massive stone sat alone in the path, and it struck me because I didn’t want it whole.
The stone was just cracked. And in its cracked state, it was as beautiful as any rock—even more so. And maybe this was what the sages were getting at. Cracked, shiny, or beaten to dust, we just are, and when all the mental gymnastics are removed, that’s enough.
The more I hiked the trail alone, the more I sensed that. Up here, there wasn’t as much need for any special concentration techniques or yogas. The mind just settled into the blue pines, spruce, and fir stands. As it did, the memory patterns of Sati and me—the ones I’d convinced myself were proof of our soul mate status—became more porous.
But a day does not consist of pacing a trail. In town, my mind would quickly shift back to striving mode. I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to be productive in writing. Often I’d work late into the night, lose too much sleep, and find myself in a twisted state of anxiety. I worried I’d never amount to anything, that I’d screwed up my life by leaving Sati the first time, that I’d screw up again and again forever.
Some part of me knew this was in my head. But this knowledge made me even more frustrated because I should, I thought, know better. Why couldn’t I accept my cracked self like the cracked stone?
The Dalai Lama had begun his two-week teaching at his monastery on Temple Road. In all Buddhist schools, it’s said there are eighty-four thousand dharma doors, which is basically another way of saying there are infinite paths to enlightenment. But Tibet
an Buddhist schools seem to emphasize the variety more than other sects. Tibetans often note that a true master, a true bodhisattva, is a compassionate doctor. Enlightenment is the simplest thing imaginable, goes the saying, but our mental diseases are complex. A good teacher is there to deliver custom meds.
The Dalai Lama comes from the epitome of the scholarly door. It’s a variation of Vajrayana—a blending of strands of tantric yoga and Mahayana Buddhism—called Gelugpa in which monks get the equivalent of multiple PhDs in philosophy. In Gelugpa, quite the opposite of Zen at least in preliminary practice, it’s only when this philosophical foundation has been laid, and lengthy ritualistic purifications completed, that true meditation begins. And during the Dalai Lama’s two-week talks, he speaks for eight hours straight every day (no teleprompter, no notes).
I had great respect for Gelugpa, which Sonam was a part of. But I overthought things to begin with. One hundred and twelve hours straight of Tibetan metaphysics, I had a hunch, was not my dharma door.
That said, I loved to go to the teachings in the mornings to take in the scene: Nepali and Tibetan pilgrims—some of whom had hiked hundreds of miles making full-body prostrations to the Buddhas with each step—kneeling alongside Western psychologists, Australian surfers with neck tattoos, ascetic yogis in white dhotis, and thousands of maroon-robed monks and nuns all sipping their salty butter tea.
One afternoon when Sonam was still away, I was sitting on the outskirts of this assembly when Vella sidled up beside me.
“Howdy, stranger,” she said.
The voice startled me, and I jumped, disturbing some nearby meditators.
“Sorry,” I whispered. But then I turned and saw her.
“Vella!” I said, whispering a shout. “What! What are you doing here? I didn’t know you were in India!”