Blue Sky Kingdom

by Bruce Kirkby

  I often found myself pondering the seismic changes Lama Ishay had witnessed in his lifetime.

  He was born in 1932, before currency, electricity or vehicles entered Zanskar. As a child, he had been visiting the distant city of Leh—a foot journey of some two hundred kilometers—when a Douglas Dakota C-47 landed on the nearby flood plains of the Indus River, the first aircraft to ever arrive in Ladakh. As news of this peculiar god spread, women began arriving with loads of hay on bent backs, offering it as food.

  In the ensuing years, he had witnessed the horrors of Partition, endured the appearance of noisy trucks, transistor radios and mobile phones, and now likely sensed the looming collapse of Buddhism’s role within Zanskari society. Little wonder the senior lazur had chosen to pass his days in silence.

  Beyond the central aisle, row after row of lamas fanned out toward the edges of the assembly hall. Some were permanent backbenchers, fated by either politics or aptitude never to scale Karsha’s hierarchy. Others were young and only beginning their ascendance.

  Stenzin Jamyoung, known to us as the Young Scholar, was one such up-and- comer: a fresh-faced young monk always carrying an armful of books. Lobsang Strab was another, a homesick teacher dispatched from Leh to teach meditative techniques to the novices.

  Sitting alone at the back of the assembly hall was Lama Jimba Sonam, an intimidating bull of a man with domed skull, broad shoulders and a scattering of crooked teeth, who we called the Hockey Player. As the ghe-gheu, or monastery disciplinarian, he stalked the aisles during puja, huffing like a bull and occasionally cuffing noisy novices upside the head.

  Rarely spotted were the Lost Boys. This elusive group of teenagers had graduated from the monastery school, but were not yet fully ordained monks. As part of their apprenticeship, they were assigned a slew of menial tasks: sweeping floors, filling water bowls, whitewashing chortens, producing offertory tsampa statues. Slouchy young men, they often loitered outside the monastery kitchen, like teenagers in a mall. I always said “Jullay!” as I passed, but they rarely looked up.

  Their leader, Stanzin Ta’han, was a striking young man with chiselled cheekbones, dark eyes and a stone pendant necklace. A brown fleece beneath his robes—a Chinese counterfeit of the famous North Face brand—bore a misspelled logo that inspired his nickname: the Noble Face.

  * * *

  At noon, our family always climbed with bowls and spoons in hand to the upper courtyard, where we sat amongst the lamas, quietly waiting in rows for communal lunch.I

  The monastery kitchen was tucked in a shady corner of the courtyard. Built from stone and timber, the windowless room was reminiscent of a stable, its floor strewn with barley. Cleavers and copper kettles were scattered across wooden benches, and all manner of pots hung from the walls—one remarkable vessel apparently large enough to boil a pony. From sunrise to sunset, cauldrons simmered over clay hearths, and smoke billowed from the door.

  The cooks were both surly men who hailed from the village below, their skin and clothes darkened from decades of soot. Bowlegged Tashi Tsering wore a beanie and wool sweater, even on the hottest days, and spoke only in grunts. His assistant, Chagar, was a thin-faced man with a wispy beard. Neither stood taller than my shoulder.

  A hush fell over the courtyard the moment Tashi emerged from the kitchen with a wash basin of rice balanced against one hip. Chagar followed, swinging a bucket bearing some sloppy combination of boiled beans, onions and lentils. The lamas were served in order of seniority. Then the Lost Boys. And finally the novices, with whom we sat.

  As the cooks neared, I followed the example of boys around me, casting eyes downward and holding my bowl out. Tashi served the rice generously: two immense spoonfuls, sometimes three. But the stew was proffered more sparingly. Chagar appeared to eye each recipient, then fill his ladle according to some indecipherable system of merit. The schoolboys generally received a quarter cup or less. Being an outsider, I was offered a tad more, but always tried to refuse because I didn’t want preferential treatment. On the rare days the gruel held meat, I noticed that grim-faced Chagar ensured all the boys—Bodi and Taj included—received a precious morsel.

  The novices wolfed down their lunch at a frantic rate, using fingers or chopsticks of carved willow twigs. Christine and I ate with our fingers as well, and how delightful it was to actually feel the food, a sensual pleasure mostly lost in the West. Our boys preferred metal spoons.

  The novices finished their food in minutes. Leaping up, they ran to rinse their bowls in a water barrel and then dispersed. Our boys, on the other hand, were painfully sluggish eaters, and we often found ourselves sitting in the empty courtyard long after the others had departed, melting under a relentless sun, waiting for them to finish. Passing lamas would look at the four of us in confusion. What is taking so long?

  Even more disturbing to the aging men was the fact that Bodi ate with his left hand. Ambidextrous since birth, he wrote with his right hand but ate with his left. For the lamas, who never missed anything, this was appalling. Across many African and Asian countries, the left hand is regarded as the “dirty hand,” used to clean backsides in the absence of toilet paper. Touching food with the left hand is unthinkable, and almost every day, one lama or another would approach Bodi as he ate, firmly explaining that he must eat with his right hand.

  “Tell them to stop,” he would scream, looking at us and not the startled men.

  “Shhhh!” Christine and I both hissed.

  “I wipe my bum with my right hand,” Bodi would bellow. “Which means I can eat with my left.”

  He had a point, but it held no currency in Zanskar.

  Lama Wangyal reprimanded him continually at home. “Oh, Norbu! Right hand good. All lama eating with right hand.” Lama Wangyal then explained that just one lama ate with his left hand, and he was “very stupid.”

  “Who?” Christine and I asked in unison.

  Jimba Sonam! Lama Wangyal shook his head with disgust, as if eating with his left hand had subordinated the gompa disciplinarian to the realm of village idiot.

  This ongoing left-handed versus right-handed debate presented a parental challenge. Should Christine and I respect local customs and force Bodi to eat with his right hand? He certainly was capable of doing so, and his refusal was born at least in part of stubbornness. Or should we turn a blind eye?

  We worried about screwing up Bodi’s natural dexterity by imposing such restrictions. Stories of left-handed students being forced to write with their right hand are common. Christine suffered that fate, and still wonders what her handwriting and art might have looked like had her natural inclinations been allowed.

  What was best for Bodi?

  Ultimately, like so many things in life—particularly when raising a child on the spectrum—we chose the path of least resistance. And Bodi, with his iron will, easily prevailed over the obdurate monastery.

  * * *

  Before departing on our trek into Zanskar, we explained to our boys there would be no way to recharge their new iPad at the monastery. It may have been a little white lie, but Christine and I would be cutting ourselves off from such distractions and believed the boys would benefit from similar sequestration.

  So we charged the tablet for a final time in Manali, and for the first three days of the trek, the boys eagerly played their allotted half-hour at bedtime. Then the screen went black. Amazingly, the pair hardly fussed, and soon it seemed they’d forgotten the device entirely. As quickly as their addiction came, it eased. At the monastery, in place of the tablet, they filled their days with simpler things: sticks, rubber bands, discarded water bottles and dried leaves.

  I noticed similar changes in myself.

  Within days of leaving my phone behind in Kimberley, I’d stopped reaching for my pockets to check if it was there. The phantom buzzes of imagined calls faded. As did the desire to fill every lull in action by mindlessly browsing the web. The demands of email and texting, which comprised an embarrassingly large portion of my days at h
ome, dropped entirely from my awareness, and for the first time in memory, my mind began to feel relaxed.

  * * *

  The novice monks attended monastery school six days a week: Monday to Saturday.

  Their mornings were crammed with memorization of scripture, meditation, Tibetan language and Buddhist debate—a strikingly physical exploration of philosophical teachings, punctuated by flamboyant gesticulations, loud claps and, occasionally, by both contestants leaping into the air toward each other.

  Our afternoon classes in English and mathematics appeared to be an afterthought. There was no curriculum, and when pressed, Wang Chuk suggested we assign exercises from the textbooks the boys carried in their satchels. Decades old and published by the Indian government in Delhi, these tattered books had answers scribbled beside every question.

  When I asked Norphal where the answers had come from, he told me, “Last teacher writing them.”

  The situation was heartbreaking.

  For a thousand years, Karsha Gompa had stood as the most prestigious learning institution in Zanskar, grooming students for post-secondary studies in Tibet’s great monasteries. But now, as Buddhism’s central role in this remote valley began to crack, it appeared the senior lamas had given up. Or didn’t care. The result: the young monk boys, once destined for academic greatness, were reduced to copying answers from outdated exercise books.

  The novices’ plight was even more deplorable when viewed in the context of India’s current obsession with education, an environment where standardized testing plays an enormous role in determining a student’s future. Across the southern Indian states, photographs of top students grace newspapers, and billboards advertise “all-star” high school teachers in the same way a North American sports team might promote its franchise player.

  What hope did these young novices have in the modern world that was about to engulf them?

  Knowing our time at the monastery was limited, Christine and I felt the most valuable skill we could pass on to the boys was conversational English. So we cast the exercise books aside and began talking with the novices, not just in class, but on pathways, in the puja hall, at lunch.

  “Hello!” we would call out whenever we spotted the boys. “How are you?”

  Gradually, they learned to respond.

  “Hello, Angmo. Hello, Mr. Bruce. I am fine. See you tomorrow.”

  Within our classroom, a routine began to emerge, and like all youngsters, the novices gelled around such certainty.

  First, we sang. And how the boys loved to sing! Inveterate chanters, they bellowed the words in unison. We began with a simple alphabet song, adding a new letter every day.

  A says ahhh. A says ahhh.

  Alligator, Alligator. Ahhh! Ahhh! Ahhh!

  (Performed with arms chomping wildly, like an alligator’s mouth.)

  B says buh. B says buh.

  Bouncy ball, bouncy ball. Buh! Buh! Buh!

  (Performed with the motion of dribbling a basketball.)

  Then we settled into English, Christine gathering the senior students in a circle and practicing conversations, while I introduced the youngsters to basic vocabulary.

  After an hour we took a “body break,” spreading out across the classroom and completing twenty push-ups, twenty sit-ups and ten burpees to release pent-up energy. The monk boys, unfamiliar with such exercises, grew giddy with excitement. Everyone counted loudly in unison. The older boys raced each other to finish first, while the younger ones, yearning for physical contact, crawled all over Christine and me as if we were a jungle gym.

  Then it was on to mathematics. Again we split the class in half, but this time I took the senior boys, who were practicing increasingly complex multiplication and division, while Christine worked with the youngest boys on addition and subtraction.

  By four o’clock, when Wang Chuk arrived to brew a vat of milky tea, it felt like we’d been teaching all day.

  * * *

  Despite ongoing efforts to meditate, it seemed like I was making no progress. I couldn’t concentrate on my breathing for more than a few seconds without my mind wandering.

  When I asked Lama Wangyal for tutelage, he brushed aside my request, as if it were a triviality. So I asked the smiley teacher, Lama Chosang, who suggested a trade: he would tutor me in meditation if I taught him English. I eagerly agreed, but the very next day, Lama Chosang received a letter from a friend at the Tashi Lhunpho monastery in southern India.

  “Him mother very sick,” Lama Chosang told me. “Friend wanting help. So I must go.”

  An hour later Lama Chosang left the monastery. An overnight bus would carry him to Jammu, and from there, it was a five-day train ride, wending southward. We never saw the jolly man again.

  Lama Strab, the homesick teacher, told me not to worry. It took a long time to establish true calmness of the mind, he explained. Most students required five years, or more, to grasp tong-ee, true emptiness.

  “If you mediate for five hours, but can only achieve a calm mind for one, this is natural.”

  I didn’t ask him if trying for an hour and achieving only seconds was natural too.

  A few days later, Strab appeared at the hobbit door holding a portable DVD player and a USB drive—it held a meditation instruction video he thought I might find of benefit. After our boys had drifted to sleep, Christine and I cuddled close and started the video with anticipation. To our disappointment, the lecture was in Tibetan, and at the abysmally slow rate we were learning the language, it remained cryptic.

  We were about to turn off the DVD player when Christine noticed pirated copies of Saving Private Ryan and Return to the Blue Lagoon on the USB drive. In darkness, we watched the former, and for a brief moment, I forgot entirely that I was in Zanskar.

  Unable to find meditative mentorship, I stumbled blindly along on my own, practicing every day in puja—not entirely sure what I was trying to achieve.

  No matter how hard I focused on my breath, my mind wandered, and within seconds of closing my eyes, I found myself writing sentences for a book, or riding my mountain bike through groves of autumn larch.

  Let the thoughts go, I told myself. Don’t judge your efforts. Be gentle. Return to the breath.

  Then I was gathering firewood. Getting a haircut. Skiing in powder. Eating nachos. Sleeping in. Cliff diving and feeling the sting of a bellyflop.

  It seemed bitterly ironic that before leaving home, I often caught myself daydreaming about living at the monastery. And now that I was here, I daydreamed about being home.

  Even the very effort to silence my thoughts created more thoughts. What would meditating feel like when I got it right? Free falling? Bliss? Silence?

  The continual background chatter was staggering. “Monkey mind,” Buddhists call this: thoughts leaping randomly from place to place. The goal of meditation is simply to tame the monkey and regain control of our thoughts.

  On the rare occasions that I started slipping toward stillness, I recognized the situation—Oh my god, holy shit, I’m almost there, it’s about to happen!—and then, of course, the entire house of cards collapsed.

  Try again.

  I concentrated only on the movement of air through my nostrils, visualizing white khata scarves billowing out and then back in. Wouldn’t they tickle? Or choke me?

  Try again.

  Changing strategies, I opened my eyes, determined to think only of the scene unfolding before me: the chanting and soft padding of feet. Novices swirling blackened teapots before pouring. The scent of juniper. Swords of sunlight dancing in blue smoke. I gazed at an ornate thanka, a colorful Buddhist painting fringed with silk, hanging from a nearby pillar. Soon I was wondering if I could buy one in Zanskar and take it home to hang in my office as a reminder of our time here.

  Try again.

  * * *

  Every morning started the same way.

  I rose as the light began seeping over glaciated peaks, stealing past the sleeping bodies of Christine, Bodi and Taj, tiptoeing
into the dark kitchen and instinctively casting about for a light switch—until I remembered, of course, there wasn’t one.

  As my eyes adjusted, I filled a saucepan with cold water from a brass urn, then carefully added a handful of tea leaves, a pinch of sugar and a shake of chai masala—a fragrant mixture of finely ground cardamom, cinnamon and cloves. With the flare of a match, the stove hummed to life, casting a pale-blue glow across the earthen room.

  As I waited for a boil, I listened to bats in the thatch overhead, clawing their way home. Outside, gusts battered the cliffs. And from the attic, muffled footsteps and an occasional giggle.

  Then Tashi Topden tumbled down the ladder. With a heavy clunk, the hobbit door flew open, and a blinding flash flooded the passageway. Paljor and Jigmet followed.

  When the tea was ready, I ladled it into a red vacuum Thermos. Remarkably efficient, such Thermoses are common across the Himalaya, and I’d used precisely the same model at Everest base camp twenty years earlier, where it kept water scalding all day long, even at minus twenty degrees Celsius. After leaving a steaming bowl of tea beside Christine’s sleeping form, I shuffled down the long earthen passageway, Thermos in hand, and emerged into the light.

  The valley remained in shadow, but already the sky overhead was a vast, unbroken blue. Crowded around the frost-rimmed barrel, the monk boys were scrubbing arms, chests and faces. I left the Thermos beside them and carried my own bowl of tea down the trail, toward a large boulder that offered a sweeping view of Zanskar’s central plains.

  Far off—on the opposite side of the valley, and a full day’s walk away—sat the ghost village of Kumik, its fields fallow and brown. Glacial meltwaters once nourished this community. But a decade ago, as the Zanskar climate began to change rapidly, the glaciers disappeared and the life-giving stream dried up, leaving the fifty-odd inhabitants no choice but to pack up and move. Instead of resettling beside another clear stream and growing barley, as had been the Zanskari tradition for millennia, the elders instead foresaw a future of selling meals to passing truckers. So they constructed homesteads alongside the dusty highway construction project. Ten years later, they were still waiting in vain for traffic to roll.