Blue Sky Kingdom

by Bruce Kirkby

  The truck spluttered to life, then set off at a frantic pace downhill. A loose tire careened around the box and the farmer and I struggled to avoid it, crouched low, knees pounding up and down like shock absorbers. In the village, school children swarmed the truck, all seeking a ride to Padum. Our driver shook his head, and instead, two nuns hiked up their robes and crawled over the tailgate.

  “Mortub, Mortub!” they beamed in recognition. “Where Norbu? Where Tashi?”

  Before I could answer, the engine roared again and we raced off across the plains. Dawn was spilling over the eastern peaks, and with wind caressing my hair, for a fleeting moment, a sense of teenage immortality returned.

  The truck bounced to a stop on a lonely section of road, and the nuns leapt out, carrying on by foot. We veered off the main road, jolting across boulder-strewn plains and splashing through shallow streams, eventually arriving at a constellation of six whitewashed homesteads tucked behind a thicket of poplars, on the banks of the Stod. This was Lama Wangyal’s home, Neyrok.

  In the largest homestead, a Zanskari woman was preparing butter tea using a wooden churn, known as a gurgur. A chunky turquoise necklace bounced as she worked, and her dark hair was tightly pleated. Probably no older than forty, she possessed a face creased from sun and wind, and eyes the color of the summer sky. For a fleeting moment, I thought of Christine—still suffering at the monastery.

  “My sister’s baby,” Lama Wangyal introduced us. “Padma.”

  Sitting on the floor, Lama Wangyal began mixing milk, water and barley flour in a copper bowl, creating an immense ball of tsampa. After adding yogurt, sugar, cinnamon and yak butter, he rolled the mixture into a long snake while Baby Yoda sliced off pieces, molding them into chorten-shaped statues, with flared bases and pointy tops. Yoda stretched out beside the pair and fell asleep.

  A nearby wall displayed the family’s cookware: shelves lined with brand-new copper pots, kettles, pressure cookers, ceramic cups, saucers and plates—so many I couldn’t imagine even a busy restaurant would need them all. Taped to another wall was a poster of Albert Einstein. Beiside it, a framed photograph showed a group of Zanskari businessmen in the middle of a muddy field, with khata scarves draped around their necks, huddled around the Dalai Lama. The pickup driver—Padma’s husband, Tashi—stood amongst them.

  A daddy-long-legs crawled into the tsampa bowl, and Lama Wangyal returned it to the floor gently, as if he were handling a kitten. Padma appeared with a Thermos of tea, head bowed low. She soon returned with bowls of zorro, a delicious porridge of whole-grain barley, flavored with butter, salt and sugar.

  With fingers submerged in a basin of cold water, Lama Wangyal and Baby Yoda molded decorative flowers from yak butter, using them to adorn the statues.

  After an hour, Baby Yoda nudged Yoda awake. Lama Wangyal handed me a tray of jarden and I followed the men up one ladder, then another, to the family’s puja room on the top floor.

  Lama Wangyal settled on a cushioned dais. Despite being the youngest of the three monks, he was also the most senior. Yoda and Baby Yoda flanked him on the floor. I sat against the opposite wall.

  There was no definitive start to the ceremony. Rather, it spluttered to life, like an old diesel engine. Lama Wangyal fiddled with a peacock feather in the spout of an ornate brass kettle, sitting on the altar before him. He began to chant. He stopped. Then he started again, and the other two joined in. Then they all stopped and began looking around frantically, as if searching for something. What on earth did they want?

  Pillows! I finally understood they wanted pillows, to support their backs.

  Leaping up, I retrieved several from a distant corner. Next Yoda wanted a blanket, grunting in thanks when I handed him one, pulling the wool high across his shoulders until only his bald head and large ears emerged. Comfortable at last, the men leaned back and began chanting in earnest.

  Lama Wangyal poured a slick of oil onto a silver plate, tracing complex patterns with his finger. He sent a spray across the carpet, smeared his cheeks, patted oil atop his skull, and finally, took a sip. Then the plate was passed to Yoda and Baby Yoda, who both performed the same ritual. Finally the oily plate came to me, and Lama Wangyal waved impatiently. Get on with it!

  Reluctantly, I dabbed a bit of oil across my cheeks, spread some in my hair, and then raised the plate to my mouth, only to discover (with considerable relief) it was not oil after all, but rather saffron-infused water.

  Chanting continued. One hour passed. Then two.

  Occasionally Yoda grunted—a signal he wanted his butter tea refilled—and I leapt up to retrieve a Thermos. Padma appeared regularly, bringing fried chapattis, curried vegetable greens, tsampa and a clear broth containing chunks of yak and doughy dumplings.

  Eventually Tashi strode into the room, wearing a blue suit and tie. He was departing for Padum, he told me, where he worked as a government clerk. It was time to go. Before slipping from the room I turned and bowed to the lamas, but not a single one looked up.

  The three men wouldn’t move for hours, chanting late into the night.

  * * *

  Padum’s medical dispensary lay on the outskirts of town, tucked amid a row of cinder-block shops selling fabric. The pharmacist, a reed-thin man hailing from the Indian foothills, retrieved three different types of antibiotic eye drops from a closet. I tried to decipher the ingredients, but they were listed in miniscule text that was impossible to read, so I bought all three. Total damage: seventy-eight rupees, or about a dollar and thirty cents.

  Next I dropped by the Mont Blanc Cyber Cafe, hoping to complete Lama Wangyal’s visa application. But Lichten, the owner, had not yet downloaded the required software.

  “Connection very slow,” he shook his head. “Maybe tonight possible?”

  At a roadside tea stall, I drained several cups of sweet, milky chai while trying to hitch a ride. But cars were infrequent. I was striding home across the plains when a pickup lurched to a stop beside me, Hindi pop music blaring from inside the cab.

  “Get in,” shouted the teenaged driver, wearing a Yankees ball cap sideways.

  He pulled his seat forward, and I squeezed onto the rear bench. A crumpled man wearing aviator glasses and a leather jacket sat in the passenger seat. I guessed he was the teenager’s father. The pair were headed to Pishu, a village beyond Karsha.

  The truck raced on at a breakneck pace. Dust devils danced across the plains. The cab smelled of liquor, and the passenger sipped from a bottle concealed inside a red plastic bag. Eventually he turned and asked my name.

  “Mortub,” I told him, and he scoffed.

  “Calling you Mortub in Canada?”

  The man appeared incensed and hammered me with questions. What did I know about Buddhism? Why did I pretend I was a Buddhist? Where did the name Mortub come from?

  “Lama Wangyal,” I admitted flatly.

  “Oh,” the father nodded, taking his sunglasses off and turning the music down. “Very good lama man. Sorry.”

  He didn’t need to apologize. I imagined it must be hard for locals not to feel resentment toward foreigners like me, all apparently wealthy beyond imagination, crowding into puja halls, wearing beaded bracelets and T-shirts emblazoned with Om mani padme hum, buying trinkets and taking pictures and then disappearing—every one of them carrying home some romanticized vision of the valley, the Shangri-La they wanted to believe in.

  On we sped, across the barren plains. Groups of uniformed school children were walking toward distant homes, hand in hand, and the pickup always slowed, allowing youngsters to toss backpacks over the tailgate and then wriggle aboard themselves. Soon more than twenty stood crammed in the back. I glanced at them through the rear window, and they waved in unison. Not one was older than ten years of age.

  As the truck swerved and bounced on toward Karsha, the children swayed like a grove of poplars in the wind.

  * * *

  Christine was waiting for me, and tried all three medications the moment I returned.
One stung her eyes like hell and she tossed it aside. The other two didn’t hurt, but didn’t appear to help either, for the next morning her eyes were just as red and clogged with pus.

  We were discussing what to do in the early hours, when Lama Wangyal bellowed from upstairs. “Angmo! Oh, Angmo!”

  Christine’s face went pale. “Oh my god. I think he might have found one of my tampons on the trail.”

  “What?” I asked incredulously.

  Yesterday, she told me, she had stumbled upon a used tampon while walking the monastery trails. How appalling, she thought. What type of tourist would toss such a thing aside?

  Then it dawned on her that it was the same type she had brought from home. Next came the horrific realization that the tampon was hers. Winds must have stolen it from Lama Wangyal’s open-sided outhouse and carried it out onto the slopes. Mortified, she had scooped it up and dashed off.

  “Oh, Angmo!” Lama Wangyal called again, more insistently.

  “Wish me luck,” she said, shuffling from the room and climbing the ladder toward his room.

  Five minutes later, she was back, grinning.

  Lama Wangyal had not discovered any incriminating evidence. Instead he wanted to pray for her eyes.

  “He blew and blew and blew on them,” she told me between giggles. “Spit went everywhere. Then he rubbed his mala beads back and forth across my face like he was scrubbing a pot. The crazy thing is they’ll probably get better now. And we’ll never know if it was the medicine or the spit that did it.”

  Minutes later Lama Wangyal’s footsteps thundered down the hallway. Leaping up, Christine raced after the lanky man. It was her turn to accompany him for a home puja.

  When she returned that evening, her eyes were clear.

  I. Ngari Rinpoche, the Dalai Lama’s younger brother, is often referred to by his secular name, Tenzin Choegyal. Like his famous sibling, he was discovered to be an incarnate as an infant, and spent his youth in the Potala Palace. Fleeing Tibet with his family at thirteen, he continued his Buddhist training in Dharamsala, but eventually grew disillusioned and traded in his monk’s robes for paratrooper fatigues in the Indian Army, taking up smoking and dismissing Westerners who flocked to Tibetan Buddhism as fawning groupies. He returned to Dharamsala later in life to work for the Tibetan people as a reformer, and now lives in a small apartment beside the Dalai Lama, acting as his translator and private secretary.

  II. Following the death of the Panchen Lama in 1995—whose spiritual authority is second only to the Dalai Lama—Tibetan lamas identified six-year-old Gedhun Nyima as the reincarnation. Chinese authorities swiftly took the boy into custody, along with his family, and they have never been seen again. When Beijing identified another tulku, it left the ancient lineage in disarray and under threat of collapse.

  12 THEY WERE THE LUCKY ONES

  “Bruce!” Christine’s shout sent a chill through me as I explored a catacomb of ancient dormitories, collapsing structures clinging to steep cliffs below the assembly hall.

  I eventually spotted her on the abandoned rooftop, waving frantically, and my first thoughts went to the boys. Neither was with her. What had happened? Sprinting toward her as fast as I could, my lungs heaved and my legs felt heavy in the thin air.

  “Is everything OK?” I gasped when within earshot.

  “No. I mean, yes, everyone is OK. But Sonam Dawa is here. He’s been waiting to see you for over an hour.”

  Our former guide sat on a pallet in our room. He leapt up and extended a hand as I rushed in, but I pulled him into an embrace, for we hadn’t seen each other since arriving at Karsha Gompa ten weeks earlier. The quiet man, wearing a blue track suit and bearing the same sad eyes, had spent the summer constructing a guest house on the outskirts of Leh. He was visiting Zanskar for a few days to harvest potatoes on his family farm.

  I’d forgotten how fluent Sonam was in English and peppered him with questions about life at the monastery, local traditions and Zanskar’s history. Lama Wangyal joined us, bringing a plate of yak jerky and fried bread. The two men knew each other, and chatted as Christine and I prepared our boys for bed.

  Eventually Sonam stood, brushing his hands. “OK, we go now.”

  It was a statement, not a question.

  Apparently, Sonam had asked Lama Wangyal if he could take our family to his farm, an hour’s drive away. The timing couldn’t have been worse. Our boys were hungry, it was almost their bedtime and even the slightest change in routine could cause Bodi to break down, so I suggested we visit Sonam another time.

  But Bodi interrupted. “What are we waiting for? Let’s go.”

  Sonam clapped him on the back, and before Bodi’s unexpectedly laissez-faire attitude could ebb, Christine and I quickly stuffed sleeping bags into a duffel.

  As Sonam’s white pickup bounced away from the monastery, Bodi and Taj sat with arms around each other in the back seat, giddily making funny sounds. Shortly after, both were asleep, mouths ajar.

  An hour later, we crossed the Stod on a bridge of steel girders. Ahead, tucked in the shadow of menacing peaks, lay the tiny village of Shegar.

  * * *

  Almost thirty years before our visit, during the winter of 1988, a severe storm dropped more than a meter of snow on Rimalik Range. As strong winds loaded the slopes further, the snowpack became dangerously unstable.

  Shortly after midnight on March 8, what sounded like a gunshot rang through the barren mountains. As the fracture propagated, thousands of tons of snow were released, accelerating down a narrow gulley, gaining speed and momentum. Far below, directly in the avalanche’s path, sat the tiny village of Shegar.

  The snow brought complete destruction. Every homestead was buried. Forty villagers perished in their sleep, and all livestock was lost.

  But miraculously, three villagers survived.

  A husband and wife—lying together in bed and buried beneath four meters of snow—endured for three days, eating fermented grains of barley (the residue in the bottom of a cup of local beer) while a shattered chimney delivered whispers of air. A neighboring nun survived under similar circumstances. Rescuers wept when they discovered the survivors, for they believed they had been digging for bodies.I

  Spring revealed the extent of the devastation. Every house, stable, field, stone wall and irrigation canal was gone. The precious topsoil, cultivated over generations, was lost too, buried beneath tons of rocky debris.

  Only a handful of Shegar residents were absent from the village that fateful night—including Sonam.

  “I was very young then,” Sonam explained as we drove on in darkness. “Just seventeen.”

  After finishing his third year of high school in Delhi, he had ridden trains and buses northward, racing over the Shingo La with school chums. Not until reaching the village of Kargiak did he sense something was amiss.

  “Everyone looking funny. But no one saying nothing.”

  Finally, an elder took Sonam aside and tearfully explained his village was gone. Destroyed by avalanche. Among the dead: both his parents, four grandparents, seven brothers and sisters, two uncles and three aunts. All gone.

  One uncle survived. The army colonel, who paid Sonam’s school tuition, was stationed on the Pakistan front at the time. He had sent Sonam a letter bearing the tragic news—but the headmaster inexplicably never delivered it.

  So when young Sonam arrived in Kargiak, he suddenly found himself alone in the world, without parents, home, possessions or money.

  And he did the only thing he could: he kept on walking, toward the rubble.

  * * *

  We arrived at dusk, bouncing down a valley stained with sadness, toward four homesteads tucked in a protected grove of willows.

  Headlights revealed Sonam’s wife, Tolma, on a stool outside their whitewashed homestead, milking a cow—a striking woman with high cheekbones, dark eyes and a wide mouth. Sonam explained their marriage had been arranged by his uncle, who, in the years following the avalanche, had assumed the role
of Sonam’s father. The couple’s youngest daughter, three-year-old Norzing, clung to Tolma’s knees.

  Inside, we sat cross-legged on the kitchen floor while Tolma brewed tea. Bodi drew in his journal while Taj played hide-and-seek with Norzing—despite sharing no language. Sonam delivered Christine and me each a glass of Amrut whisky.

  “Made in India,” he said proudly. “Much better than China.”

  The amber liquid burned my throat, and I felt myself melting into the carpet. Time seeped by. More Amrut arrived. I was aware of Taj and Norzing chasing a spider. Bodi was talking intently with Tolma, but I couldn’t catch the words. I glanced at my watch. It was 9:30 and dinner was nowhere in sight.

  Such a moment may sound simple—chatting with friends, dinner slightly delayed, kids playing happily on the periphery—but in seven years of parenting a child on the spectrum, I could not recall anything vaguely similar.

  “Is this really our family?” Christine whispered, leaning into me. “It can’t last. We are going to pay for this.”

  Eventually Sonam tramped out to the garden with a flashlight gripped between his teeth. I joined him, gathering potatoes, onions, radishes and cardamom for dinner. He showed me a sun-bleached yak skull, perched atop a stone wall nearby. It had been killed the previous October by a shen, or snow leopard, among the world’s most endangered, and elusive, cats.

  “Many shen coming, every fall time,” Sonam told me, a reminder of just how wild Zanskar remained.