The Forbidden Temple

by Patrick Woodhead

  ‘You’re sure about that?’ Bill’s forehead creased in concern. He’d been anxious since they left, and for good reason. Cathy had been absolutely furious when she had found out they were off again and had refused to speak to him for two whole days. It had only been the promise that this would be his last expedition that had finally made her relent. Despite everything she had said when they parted, Bill knew only too well what this was costing his marriage.

  ‘Really, it’s all sorted. Look, Bill, I know it was a hard decision, but this is going to be the best trip we’ve ever done. You made the right choice.’

  Bill was attempting to return his smile when the exhaust backfired suddenly and the taxi lurched to a halt outside the steps of the Chinese Embassy. Luca walked round the back of the car and came up to Bill’s open window.

  ‘You stay here and keep an eye on our bags.’

  ‘What am I, a sodding Labrador?’ he protested. ‘Why do I have to stay in the car?’

  Luca grinned. ‘Just give me your passport.’

  With an obvious show of reluctance, Bill dug into his rucksack and pulled out a cellophane bag with his passport inside. He handed it out through the car window.

  ‘Cheers,’ Luca said. ‘Now, try not to chew on the upholstery.’

  The chill of the air conditioning gave the interior of the embassy an instant sense of calm, like walking into a church. One of the swarming officials asked Luca to wait in a side room and he sat down, enjoying the respite from the heat outside. Folding one leg over the other he picked up one of the discarded newspapers and began leafing through it, looking at the pictures.

  Ten minutes later the door opened and a tall, smartly dressed Nepalese man approached, his shoes tapping against the polished floor. He had shiny black hair and large, lugubrious eyes set in a gentle face. Luca smiled as he recognised Sonam.

  ‘Namaste, my friend,’ Luca said warmly. ‘How are you, Sonam?’

  ‘Very good, Mr Matthews, it is good to have you back so soon.’

  ‘How did it go with the visas?’

  ‘I will show you.’ Sonam rummaged around in the small leather briefcase he was holding and produced two sheaves of paper. The Chinese governmental seal was stamped boldly at the head of each.

  ‘I have just finished getting you and your companion on a group visa for Tibet. I was unsure what occupation to fill in and so therefore have put “employee”.’ He gave Luca a sideways glance. ‘I hope this is satisfactory?’

  Luca grinned. ‘You’re a genius, Sonam. That’s brilliantly vague.’

  He nodded. ‘There is, however, a small problem. This permit is only valid in two weeks’ time. We have had many restrictions on numbers entering Tibet and, I am regretting to say, there are no sooner visas available.’

  Luca’s smile dimmed.

  ‘Two weeks? You’re kidding me?’

  Sonam shook his head gravely. ‘And the permits will only allow you on the standard route back to Nepal. Each night, you must be checking with the local police station, right up until the Friendship Bridge.’

  Luca stared at the sheaves of paper, his thoughts racing. The expedition was supposed to last four weeks in total. Even that was more than Bill could afford. If Luca told him they would have to kick their heels in Kathmandu for another fortnight, Bill would be on the first plane home.

  ‘We’ve got to get round this, Sonam. This is Kathmandu. Everything has its price.’

  ‘This is indeed Kathmandu, Mr Matthews,’ Sonam said, a note of anxiety in his voice, ‘but we are standing in the middle of the Chinese Embassy. They would take my licence if they thought I was trying to bribe . . .’

  ‘OK, let’s be calm about this,’ Luca interjected, leading him by the arm over to a corner of the waiting room. ‘Use one of the touts out in Thamel to get the permits for you. They’re all bloody crooks anyway.’

  ‘Mr Matthews,’ Sonam said, eyes widening and looking even more worried, ‘it is not that I don’t want to help. It is just . . .’

  Luca raised his hands, gesturing for Sonam to calm down again. One of the officials glanced over at them from behind the large marble desk at the back of the main room.

  ‘Look, Sonam,’ Luca said, lowering his voice further. ‘You know as well as I do that if I go and pay off one of the touts, they’ll fleece me for every damn dollar I have. I know what a big favour this is, but we just can’t wait two weeks.’

  Sonam’s eyes darted nervously to the security guard standing by the main entrance. His expression became grave, a deep vertical crease furrowing his forehead. He inhaled slowly before eventually nodding his head.

  ‘I will see what can be done,’ he said softly. ‘But it will be more expensive.’

  ‘Thank you, Sonam.’

  Luca reached into his trouser pocket, surreptitiously pulling out a tight wad of notes wrapped together with a twisted elastic band. The notes were torn and filthy, having passed through thousands of different hands on their journey through the markets. Taking Sonam’s arm, Luca gently placed the bundle in the palm of his hand.

  ‘There should be plenty there. Whatever you don’t use, you can keep.’

  Sonam’s cheeks instantly flushed bright red and he fumbled a few times before managing to hide the money in the side pocket of his suit jacket.

  ‘When I said I would help, I did not mean you should be handing me money in the middle of the Embassy!’ he hissed, shooting another worried glance at the security guard by the door. ‘Let us leave now and I will send news later.’

  Out on the steps of the building, Luca offered him his hand. ‘Don’t worry, Sonam, this will all work out fine.’

  Sonam slowly shook his head. ‘Mr Matthews, I just hope you are not getting yourself into trouble. The Chinese are not to be played with like this. The consequences can be most serious.’ Buttoning his jacket, he nodded curtly before walking down the steps and starting back in the direction of Thamel.

  Luca watched him dodge round a cow lying in the gutter and then turned his gaze back across the street. A gaggle of grubby children had collected around the taxi. Bill was leaning out of the window, in the middle of folding a piece of scrap paper into a leaping frog. Luca walked up to the car and lifted one of the children out of the way.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said to the child’s curious, upturned face. ‘Bill, we’re done. Let’s get out of here.’

  He signalled to the taxi driver and the car rattled into life. Bill quickly handed the half finished frog to one of the young girls then reached into his pocket to produce a bundle of filthy rupee notes. At the sight of the money, the children all started shouting. Thin brown arms shot through the window and he started cramming notes into each open hand. The children’s excited faces pressed against the glass of the driver’s door and only stopped pushing forward when Bill leaned back and turned out his pockets to show that they were empty.

  ‘No more, no more,’ he shouted, and put his hands together in the traditional Nepalese salute. ‘Namaste!’

  As the taxi pulled away to join the main flow of the traffic, the children all put their hands together, their echoing cries of ‘Namaste!’ soon drowned out by the noise of a car backfiring somewhere down the street.

  ‘Good way to start a riot,’ Luca said, looking over his shoulder at his friend.

  ‘I know, but the little buggers have to eat, don’t they?’

  There was silence as they both turned to stare out of their respective windows. As they passed under the mass of overhead banners and edged further into the narrow, crowded streets of Thamel, Luca thought back to Sonam again and wondered if he had done the right thing. If there were two things that kept the city of Kathmandu moving, they were bribery and gossip. The problem was that one tended to lead to the other.

  ‘Everything OK with the permits?’ Bill asked, leaning forward between the front seats.

  ‘No worries,’ Luca said, flashing him a reassuring smile. ‘Picking them up later at the hotel.’

  ‘Great. So no pr
oblems at all?’

  ‘Like I said, everything’s sorted.’

  Luca bent forward and rummaged in a small leather bag at his feet. He picked out a rolled up piece of photocopied paper, a little battered round the edges. Swivelling round, he handed it over to Bill so that it partly uncurled, showing the corner of a pyramid-shaped mountain, intricately illustrated.

  ‘Let’s go for a pint at Sam’s. There are a few other things you should know about this mountain.’

  Chapter 17

  IT IS SAID that a giant ogress lies under the land of Tibet, held hostage by some rather clever urban planning. Like Gulliver and his Lilliputian captors, temples were constructed over the giant’s limbs, pinning her to the earth and preventing her from wreaking devastation throughout the holy land.

  Over the heart of the beast was built the Jokhang – greatest of all the Buddhist temples.

  Having ditched their bags at a hostel and taken showers, Luca and Bill now stood looking through a crack in the Jokhang’s huge, gilded doors. In the chalky evening light, the gentle sound of chanting rolled around the temple.

  Both men watched mesmerised as men, women and children brought their hands together above their heads and, with eyes screwed tight shut and hands clasped together, lay flat on the ground, extending their arms towards the Buddha within. Without order or symmetry they stood up and repeated the process, again and again, for hours at a time. To prevent them from wearing down the skin on their hands, small bits of cardboard were tied around their palms. Like a million crickets rubbing their back legs together, a rasping noise bounced and echoed off the stone walls.

  ‘Amazing,’ murmured Bill. ‘To have such belief.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ agreed Luca, his eyes following the constant flow of movement.

  He looked up to where thousands of lines of criss-crossing prayer flags fluttered in the breeze high above them. They were tied from building to building, across lamp-posts and guttering, any place where they might catch the wind. Each patch of coloured cloth was emblazoned with Buddhist sutras and pictures of wind horses. As the fabric flapped in the breeze, the horses were said to be carrying the prayers up into the heavens.

  Luca counted five colours to the flags, and checked again. He knew of the four sects of Tibetan Buddhism, each one with their own distinct colour, but had never heard of blue representing one of the orders. Perhaps it was another sect that had previously existed and had now fallen by the wayside. Or maybe there was a whole other strand of Buddhism out there he had simply never heard of. He shook his head. He had always found the enormous scope of Tibetan religion bewildering.

  Walking away from the great doors of the temple, the men passed round its back, following hundreds of others along the well-trodden pilgrimage trail of the Barkor. The buildings to either side were high, hemming in the narrow streets with walls made from thick blocks of ancient stone, whitewashed in the traditional Tibetan style. Market stalls lined every inch of the streets, cluttered to overflowing. Everything was for sale, from army surplus military jackets to yak-bone prayer wheels, old Tibetan scrolls to plastic cutlery sets.

  The vendors stood behind their tiny stalls, sipping yak-butter tea and occasionally heckling one of the passing devotees. There were hundreds of pilgrims, moving in a steady flow around the temple. Each held a prayer wheel of varying size. The top half of the wheel was attached to weighted beads that were spun round in a constant cycle to release a series of holy words written within. Some hung nearly a metre long, requiring a support hanging from the owner’s belt and great circular arm movements to get the momentum going.

  Bill and Luca were passing the first of the market stalls when three small children, dirty and with cardboard still strapped to their hands, approached. Giggling and talking rapidly amongst themselves, one of them walked up to Luca and pulled on his arm. He crouched down, smiling.

  ‘Hello, guys.’

  One whispered something to the next who hesitated for a second before leaning forward and gently pulling the blond hair on Luca’s forearm. He looked amazed to discover it was actually attached.

  ‘Of course . . . Tibetans don’t have any body hair,’ Luca said, glancing up at Bill, before turning back to face the children. ‘If you think that’s bad, kids, look at this.’ And, leaning forward, he pulled down the top of his T-shirt to reveal a patch of hair at the centre of his chest. The children squealed in delighted horror and retreated backwards, hugging each other. The same boy who had made the original discovery stepped forward again and pointed at Luca.

  ‘Po,’ he said simply, then ran off to the temple doors closely followed by his friends, all shrieking with laughter. Bill and Luca looked at each other blankly.

  ‘Any guesses?’

  ‘Not a clue,’ said Bill, before they moved off again, strolling past the remaining market stalls. From behind each came shouts of ‘Cheapie! Cheapie!’ as yak-bone dominoes, jade necklaces and ceremonial knives were thrust in front of them with encouraging grins.

  ‘So what are we going to do about our visas?’ Bill asked, as they gravitated towards one of the stalls at random. ‘I thought you said you had it covered?’

  ‘I had the border covered,’ Luca corrected, ‘but we’re just going to have to figure something out for heading further east.’

  ‘You know what they’re like, Luca. Once an area goes on the restricted list, there’s no way in hell they’ll change our permits. And if we do try and leave, they’ll definitely assign us one of those idiot interpreters who’ll do nothing more than spy on us the whole time.’

  ‘We’ll find a way,’ Luca said absent-mindedly, shaking his head as a vendor pressed on him what looked to be a human skull emblazoned with a silver swastika. He turned the skull over in his hands slowly, running a finger over the tiny indentations where the brain had been.

  ‘Listen, Luca, I’m serious,’ Bill said, taking him by the wrist. ‘I’m not about to waste three weeks kicking my heels in Lhasa, waiting for a bit of paper. I don’t have time for this.’

  ‘Neither do I, but I’ve already arranged . . .’

  As he tried to speak, the vendor had moved round to the front of the stall, beaming a well-practised smile. She started listing prices enthusiastically, using her right hand to count the numbers off, bartering herself down from an outrageous starting point without Bill or Luca having said a word. Eventually, Luca spoke a few words of his limited Tibetan to her and she slowly retreated behind the stall, her expression instantly darkening.

  They moved off again, back into the flow of human traffic.

  ‘What I was trying to say is that I’ve already arranged a meeting with René,’ Luca explained. ‘He’ll be able to think of something. He always does.’

  Bill stopped in his tracks. ‘René? You’re serious?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because he is a disaster waiting to happen and I don’t think we should have anything to do with the man! How the hell he hasn’t been kicked out of Lhasa yet, God only knows.’

  ‘Yeah, but if there’s one person who knows how to get visas and deal with the bastard Chinese roadblocks, it’s him.’

  Turning down one of the side streets, Luca headed in the opposite direction from the main temple and away from the Tibetan quarter.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, quickening his pace. ‘Or we won’t get a table.’

  A few hundred yards later they found themselves on Lhasa’s main high street. The wide strip was flanked with modern shops, the fluorescent signs and electric lighting clearly marking the transition from the Tibetan quarter into the rest of the city run by the Chinese.

  Dusty cranes towered over half-finished buildings in every direction, and at the end of the high street they could see the golden roof of the Dalai Lama’s former residence, the Potala.

  Up on its hill and carved into the living rock, the palace of a thousand rooms remained aloof from the urban development below, its vertiginous walls shielding it from the hasty expansion all around. But what was
clear to see was that, the ‘peaceful liberation’ by the Chinese had not just been an external assault on the city of Lhasa and its temples. Inside, the pulse of the Dalai Lama’s former residence was slowly fading.

  The Chinese had forbidden monks from worshipping in the temple. Its hollow rooms and deserted corridors were now bereft of their presence. Stone steps, worn in the middle from centuries of footsteps, were now barely used. The deserted shell of the building conveyed little of the teeming life that had once made its chambers, murals and thousands of figures of the Buddha seem to actually breathe. Now, the Potala stood silently at the end of the high street and was little more than an empty shell – a tourist attraction for anyone but Tibetans.

  At the end of the street, Bill and Luca passed rows of shop windows with new posters glued on top, showing a picture of a pale Chinese man, about twenty years old and with a shaven head. He stared out impassively, his expression neither welcoming nor hostile. Thick bold characters were printed below. By the sheer number of posters visible, it was obviously important news.

  Luca bent forward, peering at the newly pasted posters. At the bottom of every one was a single sentence printed in English: His Holiness the eleventh Panchen Lama’s inauguration, 1 June 2005.

  ‘Looks like we’re going to miss the big event,’ Luca said, pointing to the date.

  ‘He doesn’t look very Tibetan to me,’ Bill said, frowning slightly.

  ‘Well, whoever he is, with the Dalai Lama gone, he’s going to be the man in charge.’ Luca glanced up from the poster. Twenty yards along he spotted the turning he’d been looking for.

  ‘Hey, that’s the one,’ he said, slapping Bill’s shoulder.

  Leaving the poster, they cut down the street and within a few paces the shining stores and paved roads gave way to mud tracks and ramshackle houses. Following the trail a bit farther, they threaded through a maze of twisting back streets and, after a few dead ends, came across the familiar open porch of a wood-built restaurant. Bill looked at Luca, anxiety creeping back into his face.

  ‘Let’s just get in and out as fast as we can.’