by Pico Iyer
We’d followed the decorated roundabouts into the very center of town—“Global Solutions” on one window, BMW show-rooms and chic cafés—and arrived at what I’d taken to be the present tense. All around, though, I saw now (and I’d begun to intuit then), was a past so untamed and remote that just to walk around it for a few moments, ten minutes from downtown, was to feel that everything around me—the hotel, the lights I saw out of my window, the conclusions I was beginning to come to— was as fragile as the light, just turning now, beside the sunlit valley, to dark above the mountains.
2002
IN THE DARK
It was dark when I set foot on the island, and it felt as if the darkness was chattering. I could see oil lamps flickering at the edges of the forest. I could hear the gamelan coming from somewhere inside the trees, clangorous, jangled, and hypnotic. I could see people by the side of the road as I drove in from the airport, but I couldn’t tell how many there were, or what they were doing in the dark. When I woke up, jet-lagged, in the dead of night, and walked down to the beach, figures came out of the shadows to offer me “jig-jig” or some other amenity of Paradise. There was a holy cave on the island, I had read, inhabited only by bats; there was a temple in the sea guarded by a snake.
The bush is burning only for those who are completely foreign to it, I had often thought; in the works of V. S. Naipaul, say, the jungle is seldom a force of magic, and if it is, it speaks for a magic that is only pushing back and down the clear daylight world of reason. Those born to nature seldom have to go back to it. Yet in Bali all these ideas are upended. Bali is a magical world for those who can see its invisible forces and read all the unseen currents in the air (that woman is a leyak witch, and that shade of green portends death). Yet for everyone else, it is simple enchantment. We stand at the gates of Eden, looking in, and choose to forget that one central inhabitant of the Garden is a snake.
I walked through the unfallen light my first day in Bali, to the beach, to watch, as foreigners do, the sun sink into the sea. Snake-armed masseuses were putting their things away for the day and boys were kicking a soccer ball into the coloring waves. As the outlines of the place began to fade, and the dark to take over, a woman came up to me and asked if I’d like to take a walk with her.
I couldn’t really see her in the dark, and the name she gave me—Wayan—is the same name given to the oldest son or daughter of every family on the island. It was pitch-black as we walked along the sand, and pitch-black when we turned into what I thought was the little lane that led back to my guest house. At night in Bali, the dogs come out, and they are nothing like the serene creatures who sit outside the temples of Tibet, seeming to guard the monks. The dogs in Bali howl and curse and bite. As we walked through the forest on the path back to where I slept, I could feel the dogs very close to us, and everywhere.
We know Bali, those of us who read about it, as a magic island where there are thirty thousand temples in a space not much bigger than a major city; we have heard that it is a forest of the kind you see in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where people fall in love with the first Other that they meet. A childhood friend of mine had had her first experience of real transport with a stranger in a thatched hut on Kuta Beach; all around, you can see what look like asses—or rude mechanicals—waiting to be picked up by Titania.
But the stranger by my side did not seem interested only in romance as she led me up into the heart of her island’s cosmology of light and dark. We walked along the buzzing lanes of Kuta after dark, dogs growling on every side. We walked along a beach on the other side of the island, where couples are supposed to walk on full-moon nights. We took a ride up into the interior, where whole villages are given over to ritual dance: small girls were fluttering their bare arms in the temple courtyards, and boys were chattering in a trance. Foreigners often awaken in the night in Bali to see ghosts standing by their beds; when a brother needs to communicate with a brother, a Balinese dancer once told me, with no drama in his voice, he finds telepathy easier than the telephone.
I walked through all these spaces with the girl from the beach, and through the skepticism I brought to them, and felt at times we were walking through parallel worlds: she could read everything around us, and I could read nothing. This was the way people were buried on the island, she said; this was why black magicians lived in that forest of monkeys. Part of the excitement of being a foreigner in a place like Bali is that you can’t reduce the signs around you to an everyday language.
That is also what is unsettling about being a foreigner in a place like Bali, and after some days I slipped away from the girl, and went to the airport, to fly away. When I got there, she was standing at the gate, come, she said, to say goodbye. We would not meet again, she went on, because she had dreamed the previous night that she would put on a white dress and go across what is the Balinese equivalent of the Styx.
This is the kind of mystery that makes an almost ideal souvenir: something strange and a little spooky that you can take back to your regular life in (as it was for me then) Rockefeller Center. When I chanced to return to Bali, eighteen months later, I took pains not to tell Wayan I was coming, and to make my way discreetly back to the little lane where I’d stayed before. But when I came out of my guest house the first night back, at dusk, there she was, waiting, at the threshold, as if we had made a prior arrangement.
We went out again into the dark, the unlit fields behind the night market, the lanes that seemed, after dark, to be inhabited only by dogs. It was better to meet in broad daylight, I told her, and made a date to get together on the public beach at noon. She was wearing a sky-blue dress when I met her there, not scarlet as before, and her manner was withdrawn. I wasn’t here for very long, I said, I didn’t know where we were going: all the visitor’s easy evasions. She looked at me, and then it was goodbye.
When I went back to my little room, I was unable to move. For days on end, I couldn’t stir. I wasn’t feverish, and yet something in me was waterlogged, leaden. I couldn’t step out of my hut to eat or drink or take a walk; I couldn’t sleep. For three days I lay in my bed and listened to the dogs amidst the trees, the gamelan. An Australian was pressing his claim on a local girl in the next room and she, laughing, was dancing away. I saw lizards on the walls of my room, and I awoke one morning to find that the lizard was nothing but a light switch. I went up into the hills, summoning all my strength for the one-hour trip, but something in me was evacuated: a guardian spirit vanished in the night.
It was time to leave the enchanted island, I decided. But before I did, I wanted something to remind me that I had been here, and that all of this had really happened: proof, of a kind. The streets of Bali teem with masks, which hang from the fronts of stores, staring-eyed, with tongues protruding, as talismans of the island’s nighttime ceremonies. Knowing that they were too potent to take back home, I looked for something more innocuous, and found an owl.
I took the owl back with me to my small studio apartment in Manhattan and put it up on my wall. Almost instantly the New York night was so full of chatterings and hauntings that I had to get up and rip the thing down, and put it away in a closet where I’d never have to lay eyes on it again. You go into the dark to get away from what you know, and if you go far enough, you realize, suddenly, that you’ll never really make it back into the light.
2002
ON THE ROPEBRIDGE
If you turn off the main road that leads from Gyantse to Shigatse, in the central Tibetan province of Tsang, you come, very soon, to a dirt road that bumps through fields of barley, and over a couple of small streams, to a small, green-roofed monastery tucked against the mountains, out of the sight of passing traffic. A few children are playing in the muddy streets, and their voices come up to greet you in the quiet morning. A yak (or maybe it’s a dzo, a cross between a yak and a cow) is standing stationary under the high blue sky. The thin air gives the whole plateau a sense of unnatural illumination, so you feel, as you pass through late-summer field
s of wild mustard, as if you are not yourself, light-headed, prone to dreams.
The monastery is seldom visited these days; it belongs to a small esoteric order that is not part of any of the four major schools of Tibetan Buddhism. It was never as much a target of Mao’s Revolution, therefore, as are the more famous temples around Lhasa, and though it has seen its share of damage, it remains inhabited by the past in a way that few of the more familiar temples do. Almost the only adherents of its doctrine are the people who live nearby, their square houses sitting near the main road, as in a pueblo, earth-colored, with blue-and-white awnings fringing their windows, and decorated curtains. Women in long turquoise braids labor up the steep, thin ladders that connect one floor to the other, and up above, as everywhere in Tibet, prayer-flags flutter in the wind, carrying their messages up and up.
As I jangled along this road, one day in the rainy season of 2002, I ended up at a small entranceway with only two dusty cars and a bus outside it. Inside, through a low gate, was a central courtyard where two young monks, in red, were seated at a folding table, as if selling tickets to a high-school prom. I handed over some banknotes—quite a few—and one of the boys got up, pulling his robes about his shoulders, and motioned for me to follow him through a low opening into the next courtyard, and a prayer hall. Inside, like all the chapels of Tibet, it was dark. Candles flickered in the little rooms that led off from the main chamber, and the air was thick and dark with the smell of melted butter, the dust, the incense of centuries. Through the gloom I could see a few faded murals, and as I wandered among the chanting figures I slipped, more than once, on ground made uncertain by years of melted yak butter.
This day, as it happened, the handful of monks who belonged to this order had arrived from every corner of Tibet (hence the bus) to partake of a special ceremony. They sat now in long rows, on cushions on the floor, the light flooding in from the small high windows in shafts, and muttered low, sleepy chants in the dark room. At one end of a row, on a slightly raised chair, sat the young head of the monastery. Around him, tired, dusty, shaking monks, not reading their sutras from books, as is usual in Tibetan monasteries, but reciting them by heart. Eyes closed, bodies rocking back and forth on their cushions, the whole room seeming to shake and tremble with its collective, ragged chant.
I knew, from two previous trips to Tibet, that there was nothing very otherworldly in this gritty, embattled place. People lived here as they had always lived, as if to vindicate Camus’s assertion, based on his native Algeria (“There is a solitude in poverty, but a solitude that gives everything back its value”). In the old days of Tibet, so easily romanticized, when a quarter of the population was said to be attached to monasteries, this meant that the great temples were great political forces in their own right, with armies and strategists and enormous monk policemen. Now that the temples served different purposes, as Potemkin tools of the government in Beijing, many of the monks who remained were said to be informers or spies, luring foreigners to say a little too much about their feelings for the Dalai Lama, or listening for real monks who cursed the Chinese presence.
As I stood in the uncertain light, a young monk hurried up and down the lines, pouring tea into rows of little cups from a heavy silver kettle; another was wandering around with a sleek new digital camera from Japan, turning the long rows of red-robed figures into smaller, tidier rows on his compact screen. Around us, amidst the protective deities and icons, were pictures of the Tenth Panchen Lama in various lives; the most prominent pictures featured him sitting with a motley dog in his lap.
Tibet is not an easy place to live, and as I listened to the low grumbles, wishing for long life and peace for all sentient beings, I noticed that many of the monks had lesions on their feet, or even deformities. Some were inordinately fat, some so thin it seemed they would evaporate altogether. They were a very ordinary group of people, living in conditions of great poverty, and trying to find some hidden compensation in their ancient, changeless chant.
As I looked up and down their lines, however, my eye stumbled on a single tall figure seated in the back row. He sat perfectly erect, hands cradled in his lap, head straight, though his eyes were closed, and it seemed as if he were sculpted out of light. His posture was impeccable; he sat, among his fellows, somehow apart, in his own realm, entirely transported. He never moved as he murmured his chants, and it was hard not to think of a statue of the Buddha, lit up somehow by a candle inside.
My guide gestured for me to come out into the sun with him, and we drifted away. I looked back at the gathering as we left and saw this solitary figure, almost alone among the monks, seeming to sit in a corner of light, the hands in his lap cupping fire. Then we were out again in the high, strong sun, and climbing up a ladder into another courtyard of chapels, where my guide, drawing from a huge jangle of keys at his side, opened one door, and then another. On the walls of the old place were whole diagrams of the universe, the stench of years, or centuries, of smoke and melted butter. Gods of compassion and protection; pictures of staring-eyed lamas and the magician who gave us much of what we know as Tibetan Buddhism, Padmasambhava. Here and there—the monk pointed with his hand—the judge who consigns souls to the realm of light or to that of dark, a figure surrounded by skulls.
We stood in the dust and silence of several centuries and then went back out into the sun, and returned to the main prayer-hall just as the morning prayers were ending. The neat lines of monks had broken up into a cluster, and as the assembled gathered in a group to go to lunch, I went and stood as close as I could to the one I had picked out. He looked back at me and raised his palms together in greeting. His eyes were unnaturally bright, and his face was clear. Then, returning his attention to the other monks, he joined the great mass of them as they proceeded down the long hallway, chanting as they went, under murals that had been here for almost a thousand years.
We went out again into the sun. An old monk, helped along by two attendants, raised a cupped palm to me several times, in the traditional Tibetan gesture of welcome. Then I got into the car again, and bounced back towards the main road, and five minutes later we were driving towards Shigatse.
What exactly you believe, and how much, and why, is a question Tibet asks you more searchingly than any place I know. It’s part of what travel involves everywhere—the stepping out of the bounds of what you know, and into the realm of wishfulness and illusion and real marvel—but in Tibet it comes with centuries of legends, and a self-consciousness, on both sides, you don’t find in other cultures. We go to Tibet, often, to be transported, and so, inevitably, we are (as we might not be if we saw and heard the same things in Wisconsin); “Tibet” is the name we give to whatever we wish to believe, or can’t quite credit.
In the modern country, of course, this dovetails with the other central question of travel, which is how to put the terrible conditions you see around you together with the radiant sunlight (stronger, sharper, closer to the heavens in Tibet than in any lower place). The Chinese would say that the issues are related: Tibet is poor precisely because it devotes its time to gods and prayer and superstition. Many Tibetans might reply that karaoke parlors and industrial cranes look to them like what is truly barbaric. The traveler, anxious in most cases to see the particular beauty and dignity of an ancient culture preserved—yet in no position to suggest that its people live without the schools and hospitals he finds so essential himself—walks between the two sides as across one of the ropebridges that famously span the gorges of the Himalaya. Swaying one way, as the wind catches the bridge, swaying the other.
When I arrived in Tibet on this particular trip, one week before coming upon the hidden monastery, I experienced what might be called the reverse of déjà vu: I couldn’t believe I’d ever been here before. The streets, the shape, the very skyline of Lhasa were transformed beyond recognition; where once there was a scramble of old houses at the foot of the Potala Palace, now there was a theme park, with swan boats and an old airplane, where people coul
d dress up in Tibetan finery for the duration of a photo. China, as is well known, has brought Tibet into the age of enlightenment with broad streets and high-rise apartment blocks and department stores; the result is a city that looks like an Eastern Las Vegas, one unnaturally fat strip of huge discos and modern hotels set in the middle of what would otherwise be lunar emptiness. CHINA MOBILE banners flutter from the lamp-posts of the wide, spotless boulevards, and a billboard presents you with a picture of Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, and Mao Zedong, beaming beside the Potala (the same Potala that Mao, for one, showed every sign of wanting to destroy). It’s as if a glossy propaganda poster had been laid down on what was once a jumble of family snapshots.
When first I visited Tibet, in 1985, just after the country opened up to the world at large, I came upon a festival of hope and light: Tibetans delighted to see the foreigners who seemed to belong to a different universe from theirs (as of 1979, fewer than two thousand Westerners had been to Tibet in its entire history); travelers just as astonished to find themselves in a “Forbidden Kingdom” that had not even seen wheeled transport when we were young. Flower boxes shone in the blinding sun outside the whitewashed houses, shy monks came out from their prayer halls to toy with my camera, and at night the few of us who’d managed to steal into this secret enchantment went up onto the rooftop of our rickety guest house to watch the Potala under the full moon, its thousand windows alight.