Blue Sky Kingdom

by Bruce Kirkby

  When we reached a dirt track leading toward the Stod River, the pair said farewell. They invited me to bring Christine and our boys to their homes in Upti. They would kill a sheep, they promised. On impulse, I took off two of my necklaces and held them toward the women. They refused of course, but I insisted, and eventually they accepted. Then the pair set off at a skip down a narrow lane, laughing and holding hands.

  I continued along the strip of tarmac, warmed by the fleeting encounter.

  As the road slowly passed underfoot, I found myself questioning a prima facie assumption I’d accepted since childhood: the conceited construct that somehow Western nations hold a monopoly over progress.

  Since my first journey abroad (Pakistan in 1991) I have harbored a deep regard for all foreign lands and cultures. And over the years, I have experienced a visceral sense of loss while watching my own monolithic Western civilization spill steadily outward, shrinking differences, creating an increasingly homogenous planet—aware of my own role in this trend as a traveller. Still, I assuaged my horror at this ongoing loss of diversity with the insipid belief that somehow it was necessary; it was progress. It was the only way.

  Perhaps this idea was kindled by the nomenclature of my youth: First World versus Third World; developed versus developing. Or by some unwitting combination of British colonialism and American exceptionalism. Whatever the case, the idea that progress flowed in one direction had long gone unquestioned in my mind.

  But recently, despite the wealth of Canadian society, I had begun to wonder if we were not simultaneously growing poorer, in ways that bank accounts and standard-of-living indexes couldn’t measure—time, connection and community.

  Ironically, it was Canadian cab drivers who brought my attention to such growing impoverishments. Typically men—often Ethiopians, Punjabis, Somalis or Pakistanis—the majority of these immigrants, I think it is fair to say, came to Canada in search of a better life for their families, seeking education, health care, peace and security. And while they found, and appreciated, such benefits, I sensed such progress had also exacted unanticipated losses.

  Frequently, if we were caught in traffic, and talked long and freely enough, our conversations would invariably arrive at reminiscences of their former homes, about warm evenings and streets crowded with familiar friends, about sharing food with neighbors and wedding feasts attended by thousands, about impromptu daily gatherings where news and gossip were shared over tea. And it all sounded so wonderful and natural—and foreign.

  What human riches are we sacrificing in our endless rush toward progress? What can we still learn from the unseen, unheard cultures who today are clinging to existence, before their ancient ways are paved over? And why does “progress” only ever seem to travel in one direction? Why don’t we, as Canadians, also learn and enrich our society from the ways of, say, Borneo’s Penan, Arabia’s Bedouin or the Zanskaris?

  I was mulling such bleak thoughts as I climbed the monastery’s pathways and spotted Bodi far above, silhouetted atop the abandoned roof. He was spinning, carefree. I called out, and he came running with open arms.

  As we neared, he raised his head to kiss me, but then at the last moment turned away, as if unsure what to do, and awkwardly planted his lips on my shirt instead. Then he asked if I’d bought any Center Fruit gum.

  “Who is the best dad in the world?” I asked, holding out the bag.

  “Oh, Dad! You know that’s impossible to know,” he retorted with annoyance. “I haven’t met every dad in the world.”

  * * *

  In Lama Wangyal’s kitchen, Christine ladled curry from the pressure cooker into bowls. I could tell with a glance that she was beside herself.

  “I burned the first goddamned pot,” she fumed. “And now this batch is underdone. It’s inedible. I’m gonna throw it out.”

  I stopped her just in time, and after tasting the curry, assured her it was perfectly palatable. Then I carried brimming bowls to our room, before she could intervene. Lama Wangyal was nowhere to be found—he must have chosen to eat supper with the other monks in the courtyard—so the four of us ate in silence.

  Later, as Christine and I scrubbed dishes together on the path outside the hobbit door, I realized she was crying. Gently, I put my hand on her shoulder.

  “I’m sorry,” she said eventually, rubbing her eyes. “I just miss some basic comfort. Like a shower. A proper toilet. Coffee.”

  Another silence, then she added, “You try having your period over a stinky hole in the floor.” We leaned against each other in darkness, bent over the pewter basin. “Don’t worry. This doesn’t mean I want to leave,” she said. “It’ll pass. I just needed to get it out.”

  When our knees gave out, we sat together on the rocky path. Then she asked, “Have you noticed I’m the only woman here?”

  Embarrassingly, I’d never considered the situation.

  “It doesn’t bug me,” Christine said. “I’ve never felt out of place. Or unwelcome. But it just dawned on me that for an entire month, I haven’t talked to anyone but men. I’ve prayed with men. I’ve eaten with men. I think I’m ready for a change.”

  To remedy the situation, we decided to visit a small nunnery, Karsha Chuchikjall Kachod Gyrubling, which neighbored the monastery. Sharing the same cliffs—but separated from Karsha Gompa by the deep gorge of the village stream—it was the largest of ten nunneries in Zanskar, founded in 1986 and home to twelve nuns.

  * * *

  The next morning, as dawn broke over the high peaks, I tossed Taj on my shoulders and chased Christine and Bodi down the winter trail, into the cool gorge.

  We followed a concrete pathway up the far side, swept as clean as a suburban sidewalk. A small chorten marked the nunnery entrance, and beyond lay a cluster of tidy homes. Gardens bloomed with marigold and aster. Picket fences glistened with fresh paint. The orderly atmosphere was in contrast to the monastery, where garbage littered the trails and it was not uncommon to stumble upon human feces.

  “This place is a lot newer made,” Bodi whispered.

  “Jullay, Tashi! Jullay, Norbu!”

  A beaming woman with a shorn head waved from an upper-floor window of a small house. Moments later she burst from the front door and introduced herself as Ani Garkyid.II Her brother was a lama at Karsha Gompa—we later surmised it was Dorjey Tundup, a jolly lama we’d nicknamed the Manchurian—and he’d told her of our family.

  Taking the boys by their hands, she dragged us past the temple—now crammed with scaffolding and paint tins and undergoing restoration—to an adjoining storage room, where the sound of song drifted from an open door. Inside, seven women were seated on the floor. All wore maroon robes and the orange hats of Zanskar. Two elders, with blankets pulled across their laps, were entirely toothless. The chant master bore a remarkable resemblance to the Irish songstress Enya.

  The singing never stopped, but the nuns welcomed us with a round of applause and gestured for us to sit among them. A short, stout woman shuffled out and soon returned with an urn of milky tea and chapattis. Taj ripped two small holes in his flatbread and held it up as a mask. The elders laughed so hard it left them breathless.

  When the singing ended, the nuns broke into excited chatter. Ani Garkyid translated their questions. Where were we living? How long would we stay? Did we go to puja every day? Had we been learning about Buddha? Were the boys healthy? Happy? How was school?

  A pot of vegetable broth arrived, along with fried bread. Singing resumed. Then came butter tea, tsampa and dried yogurt curd.

  When puja ended, the nuns toured us around their grounds, showing century-old frescoes, a small schoolhouse, a communal greenhouse and an innovative dormitory, heated with passive solar. The women gathered at the gates to see us off. Stroking our boys’ cheeks, they implored us to return again soon, and their singsong voices followed us down the mountain.

  “Bye-bye, Norbu. Bye-bye, Tashi.”

  “I know it’s pointless to say, but I kinda wish we’d stayed at
the nunnery,” Christine remarked, as soon as we were out of earshot. “There was something so pure about those women. Did you notice that instead of hiring Nepalis, they were doing all the hard work themselves? I think they could have taught us far more about Buddhism.”

  * * *

  On Sunday, with no class to teach, I set off toward the guest house alongside Lama Wangyal, a tin of paint swinging in hand. We found paintbrushes in a closet full of cobwebs, but they were as stiff as nails. Lama Wangyal marched to an adjoining homestead, banged on the door, and returned with a mug of kerosene. After much bending and twisting, we resurrected a pair.

  Then, side by side under a scorching sun, we began repainting the guest house trim. It was challenging work, for our paint was mahogany, the walls bone white and our brushes abysmal. So it came as a great relief when, after twenty minutes, Lama Wangyal inspected my progress and happily proclaimed, “Mortub good painting man.”

  When I glanced at Lama Wangyal’s window, I was shocked to see paint splattered all over the place, and I began to worry less about the perfection of my efforts.

  Working beside Lama Wangyal reminded me of working beside my father, who died twenty years earlier in an Ontario farming accident. Like my father, Lama Wangyal could be brusque and demanding, without ever meaning ill. And as with my father, I sought his approval.

  Bodi soon appeared, racing across the yard to see what we were doing.

  “Can I paint too?” he asked excitedly.

  “No,” Lama Wangyal barked, waving him off.

  Bodi ignored him. “Dad, please?”

  “No!” Lama Wangyal repeated emphatically. “Too dirty.” He pointed at Bodi’s bright blue polypropylene shirt.

  Bodi burst into tears. “Why, Dad? Why can’t I paint?”

  I knew Lama Wangyal viewed the issue pragmatically. Bodi would slow us down, and the elderly man wanted the job done quickly. Compounding his frustration was Bodi’s insubordination, as orders were always followed obediently in the monastic world.

  I understood his point of view, but at the same time, as a parent, I saw the teaching opportunity—a chance to expose Bodi to the practical skill of painting, while involving him in something beyond play.

  “Please,” cried Bodi.

  “NO!” declared Lama Wangyal.

  I distracted Bodi with a Thermos of milky tea and biscuits, feeling mildly guilty I was choosing ease over my son’s best interests.

  Eventually Lama Wangyal headed toward the village in search of rags, and I handed Bodi a paintbrush. As I watched him dab paint on the window trim—far more carefully and methodically than either Lama Wangyal or me—I saw a flash of my father in him. It was not the first time.

  In the years following Bodi’s diagnosis, I had come to a deeper understanding of my father than I’d had while he was alive. While it is impossible to diagnose a person retroactively, I am confident in saying my dad—a nonconforming, socially awkward, and occasionally prickly scientist—exhibited classic spectrum-like behavior, and likely could have fallen within the clinical bounds of ASD. Many of my father’s eccentricities make sense in retrospect: his aversion to hugging, his obsessive insistence on fairness, his lack of interest in trends and fashions or anything “cool,” his nitpicky arguments with friends and strangers alike.

  While I loved my father unconditionally, I certainly wondered at times why he insisted on making life so difficult. But in hindsight, as the father of my own child on the spectrum, instead of feeling frustrated by his idiosyncrocies, I am staggered by what he managed to achieve—getting married, staying married, raising three kids, having a successful career—as a somewhat geeky and nonconforming child who emerged from a British grammar school system determined to bend him to its mold, then immigrated as a teenager to the equally unsympathetic Canadian society of the ’60s and ’70s.

  I feel grateful for the extraordinary posthumous understanding Bodi has granted me, though it seems tragic my own father never gained these insights. Unfortuntately, Asperger’s research remained buried during his lifetime, only emerging into broader awareness later. While my father lived an engaged and vibrant life, I suspect he never had the opportunity to understand himself entirely—something Christine and I were determined to afford Bodi.

  More than once I joked with Christine that Bodi could be a reincarnation of my father, sharing his dedication to fairness and truth, a complete lack of concern for others’ judgment, and even a keen interest in the physical sciences.

  Now, as Bodi reached to paint the top of the window frame, he cried out in pain.

  “I can’t do it,” he declared and put the brush down.

  “What do you mean, you can’t do it?”

  “I can’t,” he repeated. “It’s my shoulder. It’s frozen inside.”

  Then he skipped off to drink another cup of tea while I remained behind in silence, looking out over the vast valley, asking myself once again what was real and what was imagination. For an entire year before his untimely death, my father had struggled to raise his right arm overhead, plagued by a condition that physiotherapists describe as “frozen shoulder.”III

  I. On his journey, Peissel was approached by “an old man with a pointed scraggy beard and weather-beaten face” seeking tea packets, who he later discovered was Gyalpo, King of Zanskar.

  II. Ani is a Tibetan prefix added to the name of a nun, akin to the Catholic Sister.

  III. Frozen shoulder, or adhesive capsulitis, is a condition characterized by stiffness, pain and loss of range of motion in the shoulder joint.

  11 THE ECONOMY OF MERIT

  From our perch in the monastery, I watched as patches of brown spread across the green and yellow quilt of Karsha’s fields. Harvest was underway, and after puja our family ambled down to explore.

  It was a glorious autumn day, and villagers dotted the fields. Some were stooped, pulling barley by hand. Others cut alfalfa with scythes. A few carried towering loads back toward the village, where alfalfa was piled on flat rooftops to be used as winter fodder, and barley was heaped in haystacks so high they required a ladder to ascend, awaiting threshing. Husks and chaff drifted across footpaths, and our boys delighted in chasing the flocks of sparrows that gorged on this bounty.

  In a quiet field, a family was stacking sheaves of barley—a grandmother, two daughters and six grandchildren all close in age to Bodi and Taj—and we joined them for a time, though I suspected we were more hindrance than help. The midday sun was scorching, and soon, both our boys were red-faced.

  We were returning to the monastery when we passed an elderly woman on the trail. Wearing yak-hair boots and an indigo robe, she was bent in half at the waist and shuffled beneath a towering load of alfalfa. At a tumbledown homestead, she climbed a rickety ladder to the roof, balanced precariously the entire way.

  I felt an overwhelming compulsion to help the elder, and Christine—whose homesickness had dissipated as quickly as it descended—encouraged me to stay.

  “You should lend her a hand. Take your time,” she yelled back. “Seriously, no rush. I’ll get some lunch ready.”

  So I waited, and eventually the ladder started to shake. The ancient reappeared, a chunky necklace swinging atop her robe, each turquoise stone the size and color of a robin’s egg. She stared at me, expressionless. I pointed to the ropes on her shoulders, and then myself. She broke into laughter and handed them to me.

  “Mortub,” I said, patting my chest, but she shook her head, which I took to mean she spoke no English. Then, taking my hand in hers—one finger bore a silver ring so tight I doubted it would ever come off—she led me into the fields.

  It took ten minutes to reach her family’s land. After laying the ropes parallel on the ground, she began stacking alfalfa on top. I joined, and after we’d created a waist-high pile, the woman cinched it tight. Taking a blue shawl from her hair, she spread it across my shoulders to prevent scratching. Then she pushed me backward until I lay across the pile, and indicated I should slip my arms thro
ugh the two ropes, wearing the bundle like a backpack. With great effort, I struggled to my feet. The load must have weighed thirty kilograms, and by the time I dropped it on her roof, my legs ached.

  The elder spread the fragrant fodder with a wooden rake, and a hoopoe swooped in, a distinctive old-world bird with a striped crown. Probing for insects, it soon caught a spider the size of a tarantula, and throwing its head back, swallowed it in a single gulp.

  We headed to the fields again, and this time villagers hooted at our passing. The elder waved but said nothing. What on earth were they yelling? Who is your new husband? It’s a shame he is so ugly. Can I borrow him when you are done?

  Yaks were now returning from the doksa (summer grazing lands), and we passed one surly beast tethered to a post by a wooden nose ring. A flap of hide had been torn from his rump, perhaps in a mating battle, and the festering wound reminded me of Tibetan lore, where in times of hardship, nomads were rumoured to peel a flap of skin from a living yak, hack off a smidgen of meat, then press the skin back in place and carry on.

  Soon I was again staggering toward the elder’s homestead beneath another heavy load. As I walked, I mulled the difference between “working” and “working out.” Living in a modernized society, where most physical labor has been stripped from my life, I often resort to lifting pieces of metal in air-conditioned gymnasiums, or spend hours pedalling bikes that go nowhere. I remembered the confusion on a Sherpa’s face when I’d explained such training. All that effort, he seemed to be thinking, and nothing accomplished?

  By the third load, I was dizzy.

  By the sixth, my calf was twitching like a sewing machine. The elder offered me a bowl of sweet black tea, and I doubted I had ever tasted anything so delicious.