by Bruce Kirkby
Tolma prepared lamb curry, and we devoured it by the bowlful, drizzled with tangy homemade yogurt.
“Do you know how yogurt is made, Mom?” Taj asked, and Christine shook her head. “Well, first the cow eats milk and fills its stomach. Then it goes poo. And that’s yogurt.” He was dead serious.
It was past midnight when Sonam fell asleep with Norzing in his arms, sprawled across the kitchen floor. Tolma shepherded our family to an adjoining bedroom. After hauling fuzzy pyjamas onto the pair, we read each a quick story. Then I searched for a light switch. But there wasn’t one. The bulb that burnt above our heads was wired directly to the main line, flickering on and off as service came and went. That wasn’t going to work for our boys, so I cautiously unscrewed the bulb, mindful of bare wires stapled to ceiling logs. The room plunged into darkness.
* * *
I awoke to the sound of a torrential downpour. Then the tang of bovine urine flooded the room, and I realized a yak was pissing outside an open window by my head. Tolma was already up milking cows under a slate sky. Two steel buckets of frothy milk were set on the fire to boil.
Later, Sonam and I led the cows to pasture, winding through a scrub forest—though we didn’t so much “lead” the cows as drag them by nose rings, which one would think must hurt like hell, but nonetheless, the cows resisted every step of the way. After tethering the animals to wooden stakes, we set off to gather alfalfa, for there was no sense in walking home unburdened. A few other villagers were already there, cutting fodder that sprouted amid the rubble of the abandoned village site. Sonam showed me exactly where his family’s fields once lay.
“Where was your home?” I asked.
Sonam pointed to a grassy rise nearby. Red and blue prayer flags fluttered from a solitary pole on its crest. A pond rimmed with brown reeds sat nearby, and a gull squawked noisily at our approach, but otherwise everything was still. Sonam explained that he and his siblings waded these waters as children.
“We always remember that day,” he eventually said. “Each year I bring lamas here to praying.”
I gazed up toward spectral peaks above, their summits obscured by cloud.
“The first avalanche came at noon,” Sonam said. “But it was small and didn’t reach the village. Because people had lived here for hundreds of years, they thought they were safe. So no one left. Then the big avalanche came at midnight.”
After a long silence, I asked, “Do you feel sad when you come here?”
“Not anymore. I used to feel very sad, for a very long time. But not now. It’s just my life.”
A chunk of mountainside as large as a suburban home had come to rest nearby, and tucked in its lee was a small stone shack. I wouldn’t have noticed it if Sonam hadn’t walked over and opened the door. Inside, an old man sat beside the embers of a dung fire, roasting a charred leg of lamb. Sonam said a few words. The man grunted. We stepped back out.
Not until we were hobbling homeward, beneath towering loads of alfalfa, did Sonam explain the wizened man was his uncle—the same uncle who had served in the army, had given Sonam money for schooling and had arranged his marriage.
“He likes the old ways,” Sonam said, as if to explain why he hadn’t introduced me. “These days he not so happy. Too much changing.”
I asked Sonam what he thought about the changes sweeping Zanskar, and he chose his words carefully.
“When I was young, people were very friendly. If they saw you in the fields, they would invite you for tea and insist you come, no matter what. If there was a wedding, they would physically force everyone in the village to attend. And make you stay late in the night.
“Today, no one invites friends for tea. And if they do, it’s not coming from the heart. It’s out of obligation. And they hope you’ll say no, because they are busy. Everyone is busy. I’m busy. Everyone wants to buy mobile phones and fancy clothes and televisions. They want to join the upper class.”
“Do you think people are happier now?”
Again, Sonam paused.
“Twenty-five years ago, people were very happy. They were fit. Both in body and mind. Zanskar was isolated in those days, so life was simple. Just learning about the Buddhism. And living in nature. Nothing else. People had lots of kids to help on the farms. Often there wasn’t enough to eat, so some boys had to go to monasteries. They were the lucky ones, getting good education and good power. But to your question, yes, I think all people were more happy then.
“I remember being a young boy, playing outside my home with other children. We would watch the old men and old women of the village, sitting by the irrigation canal. All day talking, spinning wool or carving mani stones. They were happy. Every piece of clothing was made by their own hand. They didn’t care about another world. Just Zanskar. They were at rest. Mind at rest. Body at rest. They were the lucky ones. Now people in Zanskar never at rest.”
It was hard to imagine those with materially so much less than we enjoy today being the lucky ones. But I understood what Sonam was saying, and again I found myself wondering why modern progress couldn’t seem to coexist with ancient peace. Why have we allowed so much of what brought us joy in generations past to seep from our lives? Collateral damage in the search for more? More of what? We walked in silence for a time.
“Today, families have less children. Two, maybe three. And parents have a different mind. If they have money, they send their kids to private schools outside Zanskar. Not to the monasteries. There is still a strong faith in the villages, but it’s weakening. Less boys are become monks.”
I asked Sonam if he thought Zanskar’s monasteries could survive.
“Today, there are two ways for a boy to become monk. The first way is rare. A boy completes his schooling and then decides on his own, say at age fifteen or sixteen, that the monastery is where he wants to spend his life. Studying Buddhism. This is a very good route.
“Second way is pressure. Monks visit families every year and demand a boy be given. If the parents say no, monks refuse to do home pujas and no longer bless the fields, which is very bad for that family. So family always gives a child. But these boys are young, seven years or less. And so they aren’t ready for such a big choice.”
I thought of the novices in our class.
“Because gompa schools no good anymore, these young boys fall behind. By the time they realize gompa life is not in their heart, it’s too late. The only thing they can do is become a taxi driver. Or a shopkeeper. The boys in the monastery today are the unlucky ones.”
As if to illustrate his point, we passed a young man wearing a red ILLINOIS BASKETBALL hoodie on the trail. It was Sonam’s nephew, Tenzin Choldin, who had been forced to join the Bardan monastery at age twelve. Three years later he ran away.
“Now what?” Sonam shook his head. “No schooling. No job. No future. Just passing his life. Very sad.”
“For the gompas in Zanskar to survive, they must once again become institutions of high learning. But I don’t think that will happen. Today, the lamas and monk boys, they are just drifting through life, doing nothing.”
* * *
Down a darkened hallway in Sonam’s house was a puja room. The simple wooden altar held shelves of scripture, a brass dorje and bell, and a small statue of Buddha.
“These were only things to survive the avalanche,” Sonam told us. “They were my father’s.”
In the spring, after the snows melted, the altar stood alone, untouched, amid a field of rubble. The books of scripture, Sonam explained, had come across the mountains from Bhutan, more than five hundred years ago, their hand-painted letters containing flakes of gold. He showed us a wooden printing block, used for making his family’s prayer flags.
“Fifty years ago, every household in Zanskar making their own prayer flags. Today, they come by truck, from factories in China.”
I turned the dark wood in my hands, the exquisite detail speaking of time and passion no longer common. Sonam told me it had been carved by his grandfather, who pe
rished in the avalanche, sleeping beneath this very altar.
* * *
Sonam was a busy man, with ambitious dreams.
The trekking company he’d started after college was celebrating its twentieth anniversary. He’d just finished building a guest house in Leh, and next summer, he planned to construct six tourist cottages on the banks of the Stod River. He was thinking of starting a rafting company. And he’d recently purchased three fallow fields from a neighbor, where he would plant potatoes come spring.
“The soil very good. Potatoes very easy to grow. Every day I see empty trucks leaving Zanskar. They should be carrying my potatoes, no? I will make too much easy money.”
Sonam’s iPhone was constantly buzzing. And little Norzing, who hadn’t seen her father for three months, constantly fought with it for his attention. But he often brushed her aside when she crawled onto his lap, scrolling through messages instead.
* * *
We were eating a breakfast of paratha—curried potatoes fried inside dough, served with a homemade salsa of tomatoes, onions and coriander—when three monks in robes appeared at the door. Sonam had sent the trio a text, inviting them to join us on a climb to the deserted Tselakche temple, on the cliffs behind his home.
The shortest of the men wore a down vest and red baseball cap, and said he came from Karsha Gompa, but I’d never seen him. He explained he lived in Padum during summers, where he managed the monastery’s hotel, and only returned to Karsha when the snows fell.
The second monk was a geshe at the renowned Tashi Lhunpho monastery in southern India. He was in Zanskar visiting his brother, the third monk. That man, with a craggy face and stern air, was a geshe also, at Stongde Monastery, situated across the valley from Karsha. He stooped to pull our boys into a tight embrace, and I could tell at a glance they trusted him.
Tolma immediately brewed tea for the three monks and began preparing a meal of rice and dal. Suspecting the boys would climb more slowly, our family set off while the men ate, suggesting we’d meet them along the way.
The small monastery was perched atop a high band of cliffs, and we wound our way toward it, following faint livestock paths over rocky slopes. After two breathless hours, we emerged beside a squat temple surrounded by crumbling chortens.
The brush at this elevation was already turning mustard and crimson with the frosts of autumn. Dappled pools of sunlight drifted lazily up the Stod River, and far below I could see three maroon dots moving quickly across the scree.
Bodi scrambled atop a boulder to wait, sitting in the lotus position with closed eyes. While many in today’s society seem to crave distraction—earbuds in gymnasiums or subways, phone calls while driving, scrolling through texts on the toilet, televisions in the background—our son instinctively abhorred it, and in this, he shared an uncanny parallel with the Buddhists.
“There is a lot going on in there,” Christine whispered. “Sometimes I’ll find him sitting quietly and ask him what he’s doing, and he says, ‘Oh, just praying.’ Earlier today he walked straight into Sonam’s living room and introduced himself to the monks without prompting. That’s new—and exciting.”
Sonam soon arrived with the monks. Unlocking the temple door with keys hung from his neck, he led us down musty hallways, past barren dormitories, to a small puja hall with an eight-hundred-year-old chorten rising in the center. Books of scripture still rested in cubbyholes, and the silk-covered altar was adorned with silver bowls and bronze statues. Finding a brass kettledrum tucked in a corner, the craggy-faced lama from Stongde hoisted Taj upon his lap, and the pair happily hammered out a chaotic rhythm.
Bodi spotted rupee bills tucked behind photographs of famous lamas, and asked if he could leave some of his money too.
“Of course,” Christine told him. “I’m so proud of your generosity.”
As youths, Sonam and his brothers stayed at the temple every summer along with other children from Shegar, learning to write and read in ancient Tibetan, the language of Buddhist scripture.
“Twenty-eight monks once lived here,” he told us. “And many, many goats. Maybe fifty, or more. The garden was so beautiful then. Growing so much vegetables and flowers. This place always had a special feeling. Very powerful lamas would visit, bringing beautiful thankas and statues from far off places. But these things are all gone now. It is bad luck that we have not preserved this history.”
Up a shaky set of stairs we found a balcony overlooking the valley. All three monks pulled smartphones from their robes and snapped selfies of themselves with our boys on their laps.
* * *
Sonam and I were leading his cows home when Hindi pop music broke the silence—a ring tone.
Sonam glanced at his phone but didn’t answer. “Lama Wangyal,” he muttered.
The phone rang again. Shaking his head, Sonam picked up.
I could hear Lama Wangyal barking in the background. Sonam yelled back into the device, as if the increased volume might help his words traverse the distance. After more shouting, Sonam hung up.
“What did he say?” I asked.
“He said bring family home now. But what is the rush?”
Sonam clearly wasn’t ready for us to leave and suggested we ignore the call. Instead we should eat dinner, and he’d drive us home to the monastery the next morning.
Christine agreed. It was late, and our boys were exhausted. Sonam tried to call Lama Wangyal, to advise him of our plans, but the cellular network was down. I felt like a naughty teenager, staying out past curfew.
Hours later, the red glow of tail lights appeared outside. Christine thought she saw a silhouette of a monk in the passenger seat, and guilt washed over me. Sonam hid the bottle of Amrut whisky under the table and ran outside.
But it wasn’t Lama Wangyal. Just a friend from Kargil, visiting his uncle. The whisky reappeared.
I. The trio never fully recovered, and the man wandered homelessly for years, viewed by many as a crazed yogi.
13 ALONE
Sonam dropped us at Karsha Gompa the next morning, and as we wearily dragged our duffel bags up the steep paths, I felt resentment building toward Lama Wangyal. Why had he called late at night and ordered us to return to the monastery? I suspected he would be annoyed by our disobedience, and momentarily wondered if he might have done something vindictive, like locking us out?
But the hobbit door swung open as we approached and Jigmet scrambled out, late for class. Breathlessly, he explained that Lama Wangyal had left the monastery at dawn. When I asked how long he would be gone, Jigmet sprinted off with a shrug and a wave.
Waiting on the carpet of our room was a bag of expensive treats: noodle soups, spicy Indian snacks and lollipops for the boys. I felt overcome with guilt. Lama Wangyal had only wanted to bid farewell to our family.
* * *
Lama Wangyal never allowed the novices to visit our room—that was a privilege reserved for him alone—but with the strict disciplinarian away, Tashi Topden, Paljor and Jigmet began appearing at our door routinely.
“I think they miss their dad,” Bodi commented, and I realized that until that moment, he had thought Lama Wangyal was the novices’ father.
We were pleased to have the monk boys’ company, but their presence in our room also proved stressful, for they were curious about everything and tried to disassemble whatever they laid their hands on: camera, headlamps, tripods, battery chargers. A Lego scene that had taken Bodi weeks to build was ripped apart in seconds.
Tashi Topden was particularly troubling. Ribbons of yellow snot dangled from his nostrils as he wandered our room in search of food. Everything went into his mouth: bubble gum, an entire bottle of chewable vitamin C, my pen, Lego mini-figures.
The novices seemed to live in a state of perpetual hunger, and with Lama Wangyal away, we heard them rustling about in the dark kitchen at night, nibbling on crusts of bread, gobbling leftover rice, pocketing apples.
One morning, Christine stumbled upon the trio in the hallway, a dusti
ng of white powder covering guilty faces. What on earth had they gotten into, she wondered?
Later that day, we discovered our entire bag of milk powder was gone, eaten spoonful by spoonful.
* * *
At communal lunch, Skarma sat alone, bent forward until his face rested on the concrete. Christine checked his forehead and found it aflame with fever.
She was leading Skarma toward the water barrel when he spewed lentils everywhere. The other novices swarmed, snickering and trying to push over their sick friend. Christine shooed them away angrily. Lama Norbu, the senior lopon, ordered Skarma to class. Instead, Christine snuck him home. Within minutes, the young boy was sleeping.
Tashi Topden soon appeared at our door, sent to investigate. Blocking the entrance, Christine shooed him away. Other novices arrived, racing into the room and shaking their sleeping friend, unleashing a flurry of questions. Eventually Christine locked the hobbit door. Skarma puked violently throughout the day and night, unable to hold down even a sip of water.
The next morning, Wang Chuk visited, probing the sleeping boy’s belly, then sniffing a pot of vomit beside the bed. He explained that a special puja would be held that day in the neighboring village of Yulong, and “Skarma must coming.”
I gently suggested Skarma should stay in bed and rest. A heated discussion erupted between Wang Chuk and Skarma, who was now awake. Eventually Wang Chuk stormed out.
By afternoon, color began returning to Skarma’s cheeks. He sat up and nibbled at a piece of bread. Soon he was nestled between Bodi and Taj, flipping through storybooks. When I popped a set of headphones over his shaven head, playing ambient music from Enigma, a look of profound joy—and trust—passed over his face. And in it, I glimpsed, for the first time, the betrayal that our departure would feel like to these boys.