The Dalai Lama's Cat and the Power of Meow

by David Michie

  Tragedy struck eight years after they were married. Shanti, driving along a treacherous pass in the mountains, lost control of her car and drove off a cliff. She died instantly, leaving Sid with their five-year-old daughter, Zahra—and no end of self-blame that, if he had been with her on the journey, perhaps things may have turned out differently.

  Sid was a loving father, but he felt he could never begin to compensate for the loss of his little girl’s mother. Over the years he had been careful about introducing his daughter to other women. It had been a sign of immense trust when he brought Serena into their lives.

  Serena and the now-fourteen-year-old Zahra had got along well from the start. Serena took her out shopping for clothes, showed her shortcuts in math, and introduced her to a whole new world of gourmet cuisine. Their relationship had quickly become warm and special.

  All had seemed well until Serena detected that, despite outward appearances, it wasn’t just the three of them in this relationship. Sid had planned a first, glorious vacation for the three of them to Europe, during which they were to visit London, Venice, and the South of France. But a week before they were due to leave, they were told that the health of Mr. Wazir had taken a dramatic turn for the worse. The holiday had been canceled. Sid hurried Zahra up to see her grandfather who, it turned out, wasn’t nearly as ill as they had been led to believe.

  More recently, the house Sid had bought for them as a new family home had become a source of stress. Not wanting Serena to move into the building from which he ran his businesses, Sid had purchased a spacious bungalow for the three of them. Although well located, the house apparently needed a makeover. Instead of taking only a few months to complete, the planned renovations had become bogged down with inexplicable building delays.

  As the yoga class ended and students began making their way onto the balcony outside, Sid and Serena sat up on their mats. Reaching over, Sid took her hand in his.

  “So . . . ,” he said with a playfulness in his expression, but a genuine concern, too. “You think I am trapped in ways of thinking that no longer serve me well?”

  Serena drew his hand closer, folding it between hers. “You are the kindest of men, Sid.” She glanced down. “Sometimes I just think you are maybe too trusting.”

  There was a pause before he nodded. “This is about the Wazirs.”

  “Sid—”

  “They’re still her grandparents, whatever else happened between them and me.”

  “I know that. You’ve been very honorable.”

  “It’s not about honor. It’s about Zahra having a normal relationship with her grandparents and a link to her mother.”

  “Which I would never want to interfere with.” Serena looked back at him. I could see the anguish in her eyes.

  “Well, then . . .” Sid shrugged. Withdrawing his hand from hers, he rose to his feet, turned around, and began to roll up his yoga mat.

  “I know you worry about me being taken advantage of, and I am touched that you do.” He reached out and traced her cheek with his forefinger. “But you have no need to be concerned, my darling. It’s right that Zahra should stay in touch with the Wazirs, but they have nothing to do with you and me and our life together. They live in a different world.”

  Padding along the upstairs corridor that evening, after my return from the yoga studio, I paused outside the executive assistants’ office. Tenzin was behind his desk and on the phone—he would sometimes stay late to make international calls. Whatever he was talking about seemed to engage him. There was a sparkle in his eyes. Wobbling into the office, I hopped onto the empty desk on the other side of the room. Until the year before, this desk had belonged to Chogyal, His Holiness’s adviser on monastic matters. But Chogyal’s untimely death had left a vacancy that, despite many interviews, had so far been impossible to fill.

  “Well, HHC!” Tenzin beamed as he put down the phone. “You’re becoming quite the celebrity!”

  At that very moment, the Dalai Lama stepped into the room.

  “That was the producer of this afternoon’s interview, Your Holiness,” Tenzin said as he gestured toward his phone. “With a request.”

  His Holiness raised his eyebrows in surprise and came over to where I was sitting on Chogyal’s desk. I flopped over to my side, stretching my paws out in front and behind me as far as they would go, offering the full curve of my fluffy white tummy for him to stroke.

  “They were planning to cut HHC out of the interview and record a different ending,” Tenzin continued. “But when everyone in the editing suite saw her, they loved the segment and are insisting she be kept in. They are requesting your permission to show the whole thing, unedited.”

  The Dalai Lama shrugged, unconcerned, as he leaned over to stroke my luxuriant tummy. “You see, all sentient beings can create happiness. Look at this little one. She will help more people to learn about loving-kindness than most beings on Earth. She will also make many people laugh.”

  “Her methods are certainly . . . unorthodox,” observed Tenzin.

  “Spontaneous. Delightful.” His Holiness chuckled. “Soon, I think, this cat will be more famous than the lama.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Are you regularly mean to someone? Do you belittle a particular person quite frequently? This may seem a strange question. Readers of a more sensitive nature may be offended that I am even asking.

  But I have encountered many souls who are nevertheless possessed of a curiously compulsive cruelty—in every case directed at just one individual. Such people will manage the casual selfishness of strangers with equanimity. They will overlook the disappointing behavior of their friends with gentle forbearance. But let one particular individual show the slightest deviation from perfection by sending an e-mail in error, for example, or eating a delectable slice of Black Forest gâteau while on a diet, or failing to successfully install new software even though he or she never professed to know the first thing about computers, and all notion of fairness is abandoned. The person is admonished for being a complete idiot, a glutton, a ham-fisted incompetent. Foul language may be used. A stream of harsh invective may be directed at the hapless individual with utter disregard for the person’s mental well-being.

  What is the reason for this horrific double standard? you may reasonably ask. How can someone who is so understanding toward everyone else be so pitilessly judgmental about the behavior of this one individual alone?

  And in case there is any doubt who I’m talking about, move from where you are currently sitting to the nearest mirror and look into it. There you may, dear reader, find yourself staring into the eyes of your most jaundiced and unyielding critic.

  I can’t deny that I’m guilty of exactly this behavior. If I inadvertently collapse while scampering along the runner, I will pick myself up and press my ears firmly back with displeasure. If I open my mouth to meow and instead produce only a high-pitched squeak, I berate my own foolishness—what sort of a sound is that, pray tell, for a cat of my breeding?

  As for meditation, despite the inspiring teaching of His Holiness, I became acutely aware of what fertile ground it can be for self-reproach. Even though the Dalai Lama said that mental agitation is normal, I found it hard to avoid criticizing myself for my own pitiful inability to concentrate on one single thing for even twenty seconds. As soon as I tried, my mind would again be scrambling with fleas.

  I persisted, every day. When His Holiness got up to meditate at three in the morning, I did so, too, sitting with my paws tucked beneath me, trying to focus on my breath. But it wasn’t easy. It would have been so much easier to give up trying than to descend down that spiral, drawing in every other negative thought I had about myself.

  Exactly how we deal with such challenges is a subject each of us has to deal with on an ongoing basis. In most cases, there is little outward sign of our inward battle. In others, by contrast, long-latent pressures may break to the surface in the most unexpected ways.

  The Himalaya Book Café, a short wobble
down the road from Namgyal, is a favorite tourist destination, an oasis of civility away from the chaos and crowds of downtown Dharamsala. Inside the doors, to the right of an ornate reception counter, the café is all white tablecloths, cane chairs, and a large, brass espresso machine. Elaborately embroidered Tibetan wall hangings, or thangkas, bedeck the walls. To the left-hand side of the counter and up a few steps is the bookstore section. Its well-stocked shelves are interspersed with a cornucopia of cards, gifts, and Asian trinkets. To one side are polished teak shelves stacked with daily newspapers and glossy magazines from around the world. Over the years the top shelf, between the covers of Vogue and Vanity Fair, has become my preferred vantage point. It is a place from which—like His Holiness’s windowsill—I can maintain maximum surveillance with minimum effort.

  One afternoon my top-shelf siesta was disturbed by a large furniture delivery van parked directly outside the front doors of the café. Its engine proceeded to idle noisily, all the while belching a stream of dark fumes. The café’s omniscient head waiter, Kusali, the Jeeves of Dharamsala, headed over to close the doors. A uniformed driver emerged from the cab just then, delivery book in hand, and demanded a signature. In the meantime, two huge men began lowering a large object from the open rear doors of the van. It was clad in blankets and ropes, and what it was I couldn’t begin to imagine.

  By now Serena had taken charge, providing a signature and directing the movers toward a bare space of wall on the far side of the café. Whatever the blanket-swathed object, it was being treated with the utmost regard by the two men. They glided it reverentially across the polished parquet flooring before beginning to undo the belts and buckles holding the padding in place.

  This was more than I could resist. Hopping down from the top shelf, I made my somewhat lurching way over and arrived to inspect the foreign object just as the movers stripped the last piece of shrouding from its highly polished rosewood exterior. Serena and Kusali had been joined by Sam, the manager of the bookstore, as well as a couple of curious waiters.

  “Franc’s piano,” announced Serena as I stepped forward to sniff the pungent, full-bodied fragrance of furniture polish. I tried to make sense of the object’s strange shape and the polished-brass pedals protruding from the bottom.

  Producing a cell phone from her pocket, Serena scrolled down for Franc’s number. “He’ll be thrilled.”

  The owner of the Himalaya Book Café, Franc, had arrived from San Francisco in a cloud of Kouros cologne and with his French bulldog, Marcel, as his constant companion more than ten years ago. No one had ever quite worked out what brought him here. Perhaps it was simply that Dharamsala was like a magnet for eccentrics—and there was nothing commonplace about Franc. He created a café that would have been more at home in one of the cobbled alleys of Montmartre or Monterosso than off the cracked asphalt of McLeod Ganj.

  Franc started out as a “designer Buddhist,” captivated by the outward trappings of the religion. But, after being taken on as a student by the uncompromising Geshe Wangpo at Namgyal Monastery, Franc soon dropped his golden om earring and allowed his shaven hair to grow again. He began focusing on inner transformation. On Geshe Wangpo’s advice, he even went home to make peace with his dying father, during which time Serena acted as caretaker-manager of the café. When he returned, the two of them came to a job-share arrangement that was mutually satisfying: Serena would be able to achieve the work-life balance that had eluded her in Europe, and Franc would be able to have the freedom to read and meditate under the watchful gaze not only of Marcel but also of Kyi Kyi, a Lhasa apso he’d rescued after hearing from the Dalai Lama’s office that it needed a home.

  Franc had always been intensely private. Very little was known about his life before he opened the café. When he returned from San Francisco, though, things were different. He had always been a curious mix—charming to his customers but imperious to his staff. Lately, his mood swings seemed even more intense. There were times when he blossomed with good feeling, barely able to contain the pleasure he took in the company of everyone around him. At those moments it seemed the whole world had been created especially for his delight. But on other days, for no apparent reason at all, his whole world shifted on its axis and he would become suddenly withdrawn. His face would appear drained of all expression. While going through the motions of being maître d’, he would communicate in bare monosyllables. In these moments he seemed hardly able to contain his self-loathing and despair.

  In the midst of one of his “up” periods, he had made the unexpected announcement that playing the piano had been his passion when growing up, that he planned to buy a piano for the café, and that he’d like to hold a soiree when it arrived. We all noticed that, since getting back from San Francisco, he had been much more actively involved in the selection of background music played in the café. He would arrive with downloads of classical music, and he was especially drawn to vocal tracks. He knew better than to overwhelm the clientele with anything too intrusive, but on one occasion, when the café was closing, he had loudly proclaimed the “Queen of the Night” aria from Mozart’s Magic Flute to be the finest ever composed for a soprano and had ramped up the decibels to an unbearable volume. I fled from the scene as fast as my fluffy gray boots would take me!

  The afternoon of the piano delivery, we didn’t have to wait long before Franc pulled up outside in his ever-shiny Fiat Punto, Marcel and Kyi Kyi at his feet. He swept into the café and headed toward the piano, happiness lighting up his face. But he also showed some uncertainty in his movements as he looked over the piano, pulling out the stool and lifting the lid to reveal a gleaming keyboard.

  Serena, Sam, and a small group of the wait-staff stood in silence a short distance away studying Franc, who was in turn studying the piano: the way he leaned down to inspect the glistening white and black keys and ran a fingertip lightly along their surfaces; how he lowered and raised and lowered the piano rack, as though recollecting times in the past when he had placed sheet music in front of him; how he leaned back, looking down at his feet as he depressed first one of the brass pedals, then the next, getting a feel for them. There was a strong and growing sense of expectation.

  Even though this was the first piano I had ever seen, I was very familiar with piano music. In times gone by I had spent many lunch hours with Tenzin in the first-aid room, a quiet place where he could shut the door for a while and enjoy a meal while listening to concerts broadcast from Bush House in London. These moments had been my cultural education. Knowing something about the amazing versatility of the piano made me all the more eager to hear one in real life. Just like Serena, Sam, and the waiters, I watched as Franc adjusted the height of the piano stool by twisting knobs on either side of it. How he sat upright, head moving fractionally from side to side as though trying to remember.

  Just play something!

  Turning to look over his shoulder, Franc noted that the only patrons were at the far side of the café by the open doors. Turning back, his posture straightened. He extended his arms to the upper end of the keyboard. There was a moment while all of us watched, transfixed. Time seemed concentrated by our all-absorbing anticipation. Then, suddenly, his hands were moving, crashing down on the keys to create the dramatic opening chords of Grieg’s Piano Concerto. Just like the mountainous landscape they described, the chords descended in spectacular style from the upper register to the lower, where they rumbled thunderously.

  It was a flawless opening. Bedazzling. We watched, entranced, as Franc continued playing. Who would have guessed Franc was such a great pianist? Or that he could still remember and play so well after years away? What a performer!

  After a short while, however, Franc’s playing faltered. He played a few ugly, block chords that Edvard Grieg had most certainly not included in his composition. He stopped and flicked his hands despairingly to each side.

  “Franc! That was wonderful!” Serena was the first to congratulate him.

  “Truly amazing! Terrific!” ch
imed Kusali and Sam.

  Franc shook his head, ignoring their warm approval completely. “Hopeless memory . . . ,” he said, sounding bereft.

  Soon he tried something very different—a few gentle, rippling bars of “Für Elise.” This time he was able to continue for much longer before fumbling over a note. Although it went undetected by anyone else, he abruptly stopped and vented with a few dark chords.

  “Must have played that piece a thousand times—ten thousand times—since I was a boy. Used to be able to play it in my sleep. Now look!”

  “But you haven’t played for years, Franc,” Serena tried to reason. “With the sheet music—”

  “That’s just it! I shouldn’t need the sheet music! I should have it down pat. I used to!”

  “Bit of a refresher—” Sam began saying, but Franc had already started another piece.

  It wasn’t one I recognized, though the lavish, brooding cadences suggested something romantically Russian. He didn’t get very far into it before he once again castigated himself for his “appalling” memory. His audience murmured consolingly. He ignored them.

  “What about playing something you don’t need music for?” suggested Sam.

  However well-intentioned the advice, it provoked a strongly negative reaction.

  Franc pushed his stool back. “That’s just it! I can’t improvise!” he berated himself. “I’m a hopeless musician!”

  “Franc—”

  “Come on—”

  “But, sir—” tried Kusali.

  With calm deliberation, Franc lowered the piano lid and rose to his feet. Head bent and eyes lowered, he made his way out of the café. On his way past the counter, the two dogs leaped from their basket and glanced curiously toward the group standing by the piano, as if seeking to confirm that Franc’s short visit really had come to an end. They trotted faithfully after him.