Blue Sky Kingdom

by Bruce Kirkby

  It took nine loads to clear the field.

  As I prepared to leave, the elder took my hands and pressed them to her forehead. We’d worked side by side for three hours and never shared a word.

  * * *

  I was dozing in our sunlit room later that afternoon when I became aware of an odd sound—a soft thrumming that rose and fell in intensity.

  What could it be? A machine? Helicopter? Chanting?

  “Can you hear that?” I asked Christine, who sat across the small room, repairing underwear with a needle and thread. She nodded, and as we listened, the sound was abruptly silenced. Then something flickered above my head, and the sound started again.

  It was a fly, caught in a web!

  As the fly thrashed, struggling to escape, a dark spider materialized from the recesses of the curtain and began inching closer. With a leap, it began bouncing back and forth over the fly, as if on a trampoline, trying to land a sting.

  “Look! Look!” we both exclaimed, and the kids leapt up from their Lego.

  “Wow,” whispered Taj. “That’s so awesome.”

  “It’s trying to sting the fly,” Bodi whispered. “Oh no. I don’t want the fly to die. But I don’t want the spider to starve either.”

  Soon the spider scored a lethal hit. The fly twitched violently as life ebbed. Quickly entombing its prey in silk, the spider dragged the fuzzy coffin back toward its lair, hidden somewhere in the curtains.

  At home I would have swept away the cobweb without hesitation, but now I paused, for the spider seemed to be fulfilling an important function by keeping the fly population in check. Besides, I knew Bodi would have been apoplectic.

  So I left the arachnid in peace and dozed off, dimly aware that somewhere overhead, a plump spider was munching on a fly.

  * * *

  When the monk boys finished memorizing all twenty-six verses of “A says Ahhh,” we held an impromptu celebration. We called every boy to the blackboard in turn, where they led the class through the song, pointing to each letter as they went. Over and over and over, the class sang the same song. I worried it might become boring, but oh no, the boys loved every minute. Even the surly teenagers acted out the parts with gusto: arms chomping like an alligator’s mouth, legs kicking like a kangaroo. When Norgay’s turn came, I hoisted the tiny tulku aloft so he could reach the blackboard, and the class erupted into applause when he finished.

  In English, we began studying opposites (big versus small, high versus low) and played a lot of Simon Says, which was highly competitive and occasionally ended in scuffles.

  In math, the senior boys mastered three-digit multiplication and began long division. The junior boys were struggling with even simple addition, so Christine built a cardboard abacus for each, using mala beads and string. The youngsters loved these new tools and progress came quickly.

  We established two special days of the week; Friday Fun Day, when the boys all drew, and Saturday Story Day, when Christine and I read aloud to the class.

  Concerned that Wang Chuk might not approve of art lessons in his classroom—I suspected traditional subjects, such as mathematics and science, were held in higher regard by the monks—we tried to circumvent censure on the first Friday Fun Day by asking the boys to sketch a Buddhist symbol. We explained it could be anything they wanted: a mandala, a dorje, a thousand-armed Avalokiteshvara. After receiving construction paper and pencil crayons, the monk boys fidgeted uneasily and did nothing. Eventually Norphal explained they needed something to copy. It appeared these boys had never drawn from imagination before.

  So we sent them off to wander the monastery, scanning lintels and frescoes for inspiration. Over the coming hours, an astounding variety of drawings emerged. Some boys were gifted artists, while others produced barely recognizable stick figures.

  When four o’clock rolled around, we gathered in a circle and Christine held the drawings aloft, one by one. The class broke into an ovation for every picture, and I stuck a shiny silver star on each—which the boys adored—before taping the artwork to the mud walls. At last the barren chamber was beginning to look like a classroom. When Wang Chuk ducked in to brew tea, he pulled up short with a look of surprise, and I could have sworn a fleeting smile passed his face, but he said nothing.

  With each passing week, the novices produced more and more art. Color swept across the walls. Christine and I always brought objects for the class to sketch: a miniature prayer wheel (the type seen on Zanskari dashboards), a tea bowl, Lama Wangyal’s potted geranium.

  One Friday I pulled a Captain America action figure from my backpack and introduced the superhero as “Captain Canada.” The monk boys, knowing no difference, exploded with delight, but Bodi was appalled.

  “That’s not right, Dad!” he shouted. “It’s not Captain Canada. It is Captain AMERICA.”

  I tried to explain that our family came from Canada, so calling the figurine “Captain Canada” was meant to be fun, but Bodi was inconsolable.

  Meanwhile Wang Chuk began joking with Taj. “You Kapitan Karsha! You stay here. You no go home.”

  “No way, José!” Taj jeered. “I’m Captain Canada.”

  “Captain America,” Bodi screamed.

  “Kapitan Karsha!” Wang Chuk insisted.

  And so it went, as the monk boys feverishly drew.

  * * *

  Another fly was caught in the spider’s web. I lay on my back and watched as the spider emerged from hiding and inched closer. Then the fly broke free, and the spider retreated.

  Buzzing back and forth across the pane, the fly was soon ensnared again, and this time the spider approached more quickly. The fly went berserk as the final showdown commenced, and I found myself silently rooting for the spider. Soon it landed a fatal sting and was dragging its meal away, when Lama Wangyal strode into the room. Entranced, I pointed toward the unfolding drama.

  Without hesitation, the old monk began delicately pulling the web down, thread by thread, as if unpinning a curtain. The spider, its meal forgotten, zipped frantically this way and that, until Lama Wangyal gathered it in one hand, along with the web, and held the mess toward me.

  “No good, Mortub,” he said, shaking his head and pointing to the dead flies. “Too much.”

  I followed him down the earthen passageway and out the hobbit door, where he gently shook the spider into rose bushes. Then, still chanting, he brushed his hands and disappeared down the path.

  * * *

  A traveling pharmacist arrived the next morning. The bespectacled man wore a collared shirt and tie, and made annual visits to all Zanskari monasteries. I found him in the courtyard, surrounded by a group of senior lamas.

  Lama Norbu, the senior lopon and next in line to become Head Lama, shifted nervously as a blood pressure cuff was attached to his skeletal bicep. Upon receiving a thumbs-up, the seventy-seven-year-old beamed with relief. Nonetheless, he was handed a package of foil-wrapped pills, just like every other lama. When I asked the pharmacist what the pills were for, he replied, “Good health.”

  The majority of the monks certainly appeared to be in good health, remaining lean and strong into their advancing years, able to walk for hours on end, often at a blistering pace. The local villagers appeared equally healthy.

  For generations, communicable diseases had been what felled people in this remote valley: diarrhea, tuberculosis, cholera, parasites and infection. Thankfully, medicine capable of treating such maladies arrived in the mid ’70s, following the construction of the road.

  But other illnesses lurked in modernity’s wake.

  Within years of adopting a modern lifestyle, traditional societies unfailingly suffer an epidemic of previously unknown, non-communicable diseases—heart attack, stroke, diabetes and cancer—all caused by skyrocketing consumption of salt, sugar and fat.

  This was the fate that awaited our novices.

  But who was I to worry? The same fate awaited me. And my own boys, along with the majority of our family, friends, neighbors and co-w
orkers. And anyone else eating a Western diet. Although we rarely pause to consider it, we are all killing ourselves slowly with what we eat.

  Perhaps in Zanskar it just felt more poignant—for in the crossroads of our family’s visit, the villagers, monks and novices still grasped the last vestiges of a traditional diet, even as the seeds of disease were being sown around them.

  * * *

  The next morning, we found the lamas congregated in the courtyard again. Many sported freshly shaven skulls. As Bodi, Taj and I neared, we spotted Jimba Sonam, the monastery disciplinarian, running a blue disposable razor over Wang Chuk’s glistening noggin. Nearby, Stanzin Ta’han, the Noble Face, kneaded a basketball-sized lump of tsampa.

  When Bodi and Taj sprinted off in pursuit of a butterfly, he glanced up and murmured, “Your babies so cute.”

  The sharp-faced young man had never spoken to me before, or even nodded in recognition, and when I asked what he was doing, he gestured to a row of small tsampa chortens. “Daily days, my responsibility is making jarden.”

  Glancing around furtively, he held his thumb and forefinger close together and whispered, “I have only little power.”

  Every morning, he and his partner—a blushing teen with milky skin— fashioned four hundred tsampa balls for puja, all perfectly symmetrical. But today was different, Ta’han explained. They would make one thousand balls, to mark the annual celebration of Kalzang Tongchet, the puja of a thousand offerings. As we spoke, he explained, other members of the Lost Boys were lighting a thousand candles in the assembly hall.

  Ta’han was twenty-one years old. He’d arrived at Karsha Gompa at age seven and, after showing great scholastic promise, had been dispatched to Gyuto Monastery, in distant Dharamsala. But his studies had recently been cut short when his father fell ill.

  I asked if he would return to Gyuto when his father was better, to complete his geshe studies, but he glumly shook his head. “Not possible. No big money for me.”

  We sat in silence for a time, then he asked, “Good jobs in Canada possible?”

  I stammered, unsure how to respond.

  “If I visiting, job possible?” he clarified.

  “Maybe,” I stumbled.

  Ta’han asked for my journal and carefully entered details of his Facebook account. He hadn’t used it for three years, he told me, but suggested we could keep in touch that way. I said that would be lovely.

  Leaning close, he whispered, “Do you want to see Dode?”

  “Yes, of course!” I stammered. “Please.”

  Dode—pronounced do-dee—was the nickname of Dorje Rinchen, a fifteenth-century Buddhist reformer who spent his later life teaching at Karsha Gompa. Following the lama’s passing, his mummified remains had been sealed inside a silver-plated chorten in the assembly hall.

  During the tumultuous days of the Partition, when India and Pakistan were cleaved apart in 1947, a rogue brigade of Pakistani soldiers pillaged Zanskari monasteries, carrying away anything of value—including the jewel-encrusted silver sheets covering Dode’s chorten.

  But now an effort was underway to restore the funerary monument. The chorten’s four-hundred-year-old framework had been disassembled and the timbers refinished. Now the monastery was raising funds to purchase silver sheeting; a sign near the entrance to the assembly hall sought donations from tourists. In the meantime, Dode’s remains had been stashed somewhere at Karsha Gompa.

  After I rounded up my boys, Ta’han led us into the assembly hall, where the altar was already ablaze with a thousand yak-butter tea lights. In a darkened corner, beyond the scripture cubbyholes, was a box draped in silk, roughly the size of a washing machine. Ta’han pointed to a hand-written sheet of paper on the wall beside it, which read, NO SNAPS PLEASE. I nodded, and then with a flourish, he pulled the fabric aside.

  Inside was a clear Plexiglas box, holding what appeared to be a golden statue of a cross-legged man, arms folded, sapphire eyes staring toward infinity. It took me some time to comprehend we were actually looking at the mummified remains of Dode, for his face had been thickened with plaster and painted gold, making it appear like every other Buddhist statue across the Himalaya. But protruding from the disintegrating robes beneath were blackened arms and legs, thin bones supporting a gossamer of desiccated skin like ridgepoles in a tent.

  “Whoa,” Bodi burst out. “A gold-faced man. That is so cool.”

  “Is he real, Dada?” Taj whispered, and I nodded.

  The lama’s dark fingers gripped a wooden bowl, identical to the tea bowls used in puja today. “That Dode’s cup,” Ta’han explained. “Him using daily days.”

  We stared in silence, until Ta’han finally let the fabric drop back in place, and rushed back out to the courtyard to continue his chores, leaving us alone in the flickering light of the assembly hall.

  Curious, we explored the sea of candles on the altar, where offertory plates were buried beneath khata scarves, barley grain, kusha grass and soiled rupee bills. In a small adjoining chamber, we found life-sized statues of Buddha and his disciples, gold-plated and inlaid with gems. The 108 books of Kangyur occupied cubbyholes in the wall. And two yellow-cushioned daises, which I’d never noticed before, stood at the very front of the hall, higher even than the Head Lama’s seat.

  The lower dais of the two was reserved for the monastery’s abbot, Ngari Rinpoche,I who resided in Dharamsala. The other—closest to the altar, and highest of all—waited for the Dalai Lama. A similar seat awaits him in every Tibetan Buddhist temple, in every country around the world.

  A small black-and-white photograph balanced on the cushion showed the Dalai Lama as a young man. It was taken around the time Mao Zedong summoned the youthful leader to Beijing, famously sharing his assessment that religion was poison, while hinting at his future designs on the Tibetan Kingdom. The man in the photograph, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and looking like a university graduate, surely sensed the rising darkness that would engulf his country. Yet his peace appears unassailable.

  What an extraordinary leader the Dalai Lama has proven to be, I mulled, guiding his people through times turbulent beyond imagination. Even as he enters his eighth decade, the man remains indefatigable, insisting he is just a simple monk—despite navigating a relentless schedule of public appearances and meetings with world leaders. He still rises at 3:30 A.M. every day and meditates for four hours.

  Remembering my boys, I glanced about and found the pair peering into the cubbyholes holding ancient scripture.

  I gazed back upon the empty seat. It was hard not to wonder what fate would await Tibetan Buddhism upon the death of this great man. The Chinese government will unquestionably attempt to interfere with the identification of a reincarnation.II To protect against that possibility, the Dalai Lama has declared his successor will not be born in either Tibet or China. And recently he has begun floating an even more revolutionary idea: Perhaps the institution of the Dalai Lamas has outlived its usefulness?

  His Holiness has pledged to consult with Tibetan high lamas in the coming decade to evaluate what will be best for future Tibet, but the possibility exists that he will be the last in a line of tulkus stretching back to 1391, all believed to be incarnations of Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion.

  I was still gazing at the youthful man in the photograph when Tashi Tsering, the cook, appeared by my side, wearing a leather motorcycle jacket with silver zippers at the cuffs. His head was freshly shaved, and after rounding up Bodi and Taj—who had been ordering and stacking rupee bills on the altar—he placed an arm across their shoulders, then asked me to take a photograph. Afterward, he inscribed his address in my journal, and I promised to send him a copy.

  The distinctive ceremonial yellow hat of Tibetan Buddhism’s Gelugpa sect.

  Soon lamas wearing ceremonial yellow hats began streaming in. Christine appeared, back from a successful mission to buy eggs in the village. Unrolling a carpet, we sat together—Taj in Christine’s lap, Bodi in mine. Milky tea was served, and for
a sublime moment, I wanted for nothing.

  * * *

  Christine woke up the next morning with itchy eyes. By dinnertime, globs of mucus clung to her lashes. Her eyes were so red it appeared as if she’d smoked a bag of weed. There was no question: she had pink eye. But unfortunately, our well-stocked first aid kit held no antibiotic eye drops.

  Before leaving Canada, our family doctor had warned of a global eye drop shortage. Seriously? Such things happened? After canvassing pharmacies across the province, and finding none, we admitted defeat. And now we desperately needed some. It seemed improbable that Padum’s small dispensary might carry anything suitable, but I promised to go in search the next morning.

  But Lama Wangyal had other plans.

  A car would arrive before dawn, he explained, to carry us both to his home village of Neyrok, where he would perform a puja. I told him I desperately needed to go to Padum in search of medicine, but he waved off such concerns.

  “First puja. Then Padum.”

  I glanced at Christine, with her clogged eyes, and she shrugged.

  The next morning Lama Wangyal’s heavy footsteps woke me, banging down the ladder. “Oh, Mortub!” he cried. Moments later the hobbit door swung open. Leaping into clothes, I grabbed my backpack and raced after him. The old monk floated down the steep trails, and I struggled to keep pace.

  We joined a group of lamas milling by the monastery gates in first light, all bound for satellite villages to begin the season of home puja, a process whereby local households accrue merit by hosting—and paying dearly for—elaborate prayer ceremonies. A column of headlights appeared on the central plains, bouncing toward us, climbing the dusty switchbacks toward the monastery.

  Lama Wangyal ushered me toward a white pickup truck. Two monks hopped into the cab before us. Old Sonam Wangchuk, who was stout, large-eared and heavily wrinkled. And beside him, younger but larger-eared Thukstan Chosphel. (Privately I nicknamed the pair Yoda and Baby Yoda, long before Baby Yoda debuted in The Mandalorian.) Lama Wangyal crammed in beside the pair. With no space in the truck, I clambered over the tailgate, joining a wiry farmer in collared shirt, jeans and gumboots. We shook hands, but when I spoke, he waved me off.