Bird

by Sophie Cunningham

  Some of my students uncertain about my teaching. Some people leave. But I tell them that as a karmic result of killing, all these hell realm birds devour you for hundreds of thousands of years. Of course, these not human years; these hell realm years—much, much longer. Hell years are equal to millions, trillions, zillions of human years. Unbelievably long. All these birds eat you, then you die, and immediately reborn in the same realm and get eaten all over again.

  Later Anna tell me some trips being taken while I am teaching. Flower children. You know how they were. One young man very frightened by my stories of hell realms and run from the tent screaming. Another young man say to his friend, ‘What does he know?’ And I hear him even though he is at the back of the tent. I look at him and say, ‘I know because I have realised the teachings.’ He think I’m a magic lama after that. [claps] Oh yes.

  One day Lama Gyatsho speak to students also. Anna say later they like little birds with their mouths open waiting to be fed. ‘The problem,’ he tell them, ‘is your fickle minds. You can’t get no satisfaction! You are like lotuses that grow out of the mud. Lotus is Buddha nature, mud is samsara. You are all flowers. My flower children, huh!’ [laughs] Then he tell students he going to make pizza. Some students smiling, others looked confused. A young Australian boy puts up his hand.

  ‘Is this part of the teaching?’ he asked and Lama Gyatsho tell him, yes.

  ‘Exactly right. You have got it on the head. Can you imagine what I am teaching you?’

  ‘That food is an offering of love?’ a tall, Swiss girl say. Same girl, eagle steal her sunglasses—but that another story. She is important nun now, that girl. Still with us at monastery.

  ‘Almost,’ Lama Gyatsho tell her. ‘Like that. I am showing you this important thing, the thing to remember when you are all studying so hard. Very impressive. Enlightenment is not just pizza at the end. It is pizza, pizza, all the way! So this morning, you do some Karma Yoga or something like that. I am going to cook.’

  Anna help organise pizza day. Lama Gyatsho stand by table with special ingredients. Anna have cookbook that she borrow from Boris, who run the Yak and Yeti. First western man into Katmandu. Russian man. Russian like Anna. Anyway. [coughs] ‘We will need to multiply all ingredients by four,’ Anna say. ‘That one pound of flour, one ounce of baker’s yeast, water, salt, twenty tomatoes, oregano and cheese.’

  Lama Gyatsho say, ‘Okay. And the little fishes? Italians love their little fishes. Many sentient beings in one meal. Like caviar. Bad karma pizza.’ Then Lama Gyatsho sift the flour into a bowl, cover himself and Anna in white dust. They were like ghosts! Anna show him how to knead the dough. He put on the tomatoes that Anna chop for him, herbs, cheese, everything like that. When the pizzas being served up Lama Gyatsho nervous. ‘Good pizza?’ he ask everyone. ‘American tasting?’ [laughs] Everyone love Lama Gyatsho after Pizza Teaching.

  Soon it is time for Anna to go on long retreat. Three years. First she decide to go on long walk. For six months she want to walk. Like pilgrim nun. Before she go we give her special transmissions. Intellectual understanding not enough. With oral transmission one receives the continual blessings of the Buddha. Buddha gives a teaching in a field to five hundred swans and just from hearing the teaching they are born again next day as fully realised human begins. Her retreat was Yamantaka retreat. Father Tantra. Tantra shows you the powerful qualities that exist within. If ordinary people see a painting of Yamantaka wearing human bones, they will feel sick, they will think he kills human beings. Not like that. Symbol of supreme, highest realisations. Yamantaka start out as yogi, in cave. He sees a bull get beheaded and is very upset by the cruelty. He comes out of his cave and puts the bull’s head on. Becomes wrathful being. He is blue. Corpses of animals and humans under his feet. Have nine heads, thirty-two arms and sixteen legs. He helps overcome fear of death, remind us that death is an illusion. The elephant skin he wears on his back, that mean overcoming ignorance. His short mantra is Om Yamantaka Hung Phet. Anna must say that mantra, maybe a million times or so times. Anna not so sure about that. But we explained that his mantra has special powers. Sometimes it brings you telepathic visions of things on the other side of the planet. If you purify obstacles you will discover whole new world.

  There is also a prayer she must say:

  Due to the past, present, and future merits created by myself, Buddhas, bodhisattvas and sentient beings, who are like a dream or an illusion, may I, who is like a dream, attain Yamantaka’s enlightenment, which is like a dream, and lead all sentient beings, who are like a dream, to that enlightenment, which is like a dream, by myself alone, who is like a dream.

  Whatever one wants can be produced magically from nothingness in the moment of a single thought. Do you understand? Can change everything, whole life force continuum, in a single second. Maybe become enlightened. [sound of clicking fingers] Just like that.

  Az

  I had no name for India

  Soon after I arrived in Darjeeling I tried to seek out the villa where we had lived, forty years before. I remembered it as being on the road out of town but development had changed everything and the villa seemed much closer to the centre of things than I’d expected. When I got to what I thought was the right place, I found I was standing outside a youth hostel. Had I got my facts wrong? It was not that it didn’t seem familiar, it was that everywhere seemed familiar. My memory was a con artist, isolating me, luring me further and further away from where I needed to be. ‘Here,’ it said. ‘You lived here. No, actually, here, further along the road, down the mountain, away from the town. No, not that way. Follow me.’

  It was almost dark when I got to the place that my map told me must be right. I needed—what did I need? Certainty. Perhaps that. But the youth hostel showed no signs of having been a villa occupied by a hippy Russian singer in the 1960s. I wondered what such a place should look like: especially there in northern India where the monsoon caused buildings to be born, age, collapse and be rebuilt within a decade. I stood there until it was dark and the lamps in the houses on the hills around me began to light up. Soon dozens of bright smudges glowered through the mist. I willed the place to offer up its history. I sniffed the air like Minx would, for some kind of sign, but all I smelt was coal smoke.

  As I walked back through to my hotel the butcher shops were closing. Through the still-open wooden shutters I saw the dark-yellow light of the oil lamps, vivid flashes of red flesh as men lifted down animal carcasses for the night. It occurred to me that if my mother walked this path, at dusk, forty years ago, she would have seen exactly the same thing.

  I was staying at the Windamere which was the same hotel Ian, Anna and I stayed at when we arrived almost forty years ago. The cottages were still painted buttercup yellow and the paths were lined with flowers. I walked past the chair, out the front of reception where the hotel’s owner, Mrs Tenduf-La sat during the day, dressed in traditional Tibetan clothes, looking like a doll. It was she who had greeted my mother and me the first time we stayed. Now she was nearly a hundred and as deaf as a post. That morning I saw—and heard—her maid yelling straight into her ear; ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ and she stared blankly ahead. There was no asking her if she remembered my mother.

  I headed for the bar where Anna went each evening. It was the same bar where Charity met her Bhutanese prince. After my whisky I went into the living room where there was an open fire. I flicked through the photo albums that were piled up on the piano. There were decades of guests, frozen in time: a girl in a miniskirt surrounded by matrons; bearded Australians in fluffy alpaca jumpers; women sitting in a row against the wall in full taffeta skirts wearing silly party hats; Mrs Tenduf-La’s 95th birthday; and, startlingly, an elderly Peter Ustinov holding court. Charity was there, and so was her prince. There was a picture of Ian—my god he was a handsome young man—with his arm over the shoulders of a shy young waiter that I seem to remember was his boyfriend for a while. I found a photo of everyone who had stayed there in fifty ye
ars—or so I imagined—everyone, except Anna. I looked through the guest book (Just delightful for all five Hillarys. Thank you) but she wasn’t there either. She eluded me.

  I moved further north. I flew to Nepal then caught a taxi an hour or so out of Katmandu. I stood on the hill of the monastery my mother helped build and looked down across the valley to where wheat was splayed to dry in the sun, green turning to gold against the dark earth. Dogs barked incessantly. Roads spread out through what once was farm land; pollution hung heavy in the air. A group of monks walked past me, smiled and pressed their palms together in greeting. I felt a rush of affection; for them, and this place. When I turned back to the view it was as if the urban sprawl had shrunk, the green fields expanded and the smog lifted. I could see beyond the green mountains to the towering Himalayas, their razor sharp tips reflecting the sun. I heard the dogs still but not the buses, and I ignored the gusts of diesel smoke that blasted out as they wound up the muddy road. I remembered instead long-haired westerners trudging with their packs through paths in the fields. I heard them asking locals for directions, and saw the children trotting behind them, curious. Stories got hidden under layers of dirt, were built in by concrete and smothered by pollution. But my mother’s story was there still, if only I looked hard enough. If only I remembered where to look.

  When I got to the monastery Lama Dorje Rinpoche was busy giving teachings so I walked around the grounds. I didn’t recognise the place. It was nothing like the ramshackle buildings and tents Anna and I lived among years ago. The room I was eventually given to wait in was white and neat, with a real bed. The window looked across to the hill where a group of students stood, in neat lines, practising Tai Chi. They seemed a more focused bunch than the students who’d been hanging around when Anna lived there, though out of that chaos, of course, had grown great devotion. Darkness fell. I lay down. I listened to dogs fighting loudly, viciously. They are always worse when the moon is full. Lama Dorje once told me monastery dogs were the lost souls of wayward monks. After a couple of hours the barking calmed down but the sound of crickets became so insistent that I wondered, in my dozing, if I’d come to some place where everything—the mountains, the trees, the bed I slept in—was made of millions of hard and shiny insects, rubbing their hind legs together and clicking their wings, cracking their way out of chitin shells. The insect world roiled beneath me. It was three in the morning when Venerable Bruce (this really was his name; this place was full of Australians) finally came to my room and said that Lama Dorje Rinpoche was able to see me.

  ‘I will bring you some tea in the rooms,’ Venerable Bruce said, looking exhausted. Everyone who worked for Lama Dorje Rinpoche looked exhausted. It was as people said: he never slept.

  It was a few minutes’ walk from my guest room to the offices above the main gompa, freshly painted in red and green. The moon was so bright I didn’t need the torch Venerable Bruce offered me. When I reached Lama Dorje Rinpoche’s room I was struck, forcefully, by how he’d grown into himself. He had been such a slight, serious young man. Now he was the shape of his guru: round, with a broad smile. To look at him was to see a man who was extraordinary and then, if your gaze faltered, was ordinary; he transformed depending on your perspective, the context, the light. My mother told me Lama Gyatsho was like this also, shimmering between the real world and the world of clear light.

  ‘Ana-Sofia,’ he stepped towards me and took my hands in his. He bowed so that our foreheads touched and I fell—these days I am always falling—into memory.

  I was seven years old and Lama Dorje Rinpoche was greeting me at Katmandu airport. Airports were difficult for me. They had been since Anna had left me at the airport at Colombo years before, just like that, in front of everyone, and told me I was returning to America with Eleanor. Lama Dorje held his hands up as if in prayer when he saw me being led, through the entrance hall, by an air-hostess. When I got to him he reached down and took my hand.

  ‘Where is Mom?’ I was suddenly overwhelmed with anxiety. Perhaps she was dead? Perhaps no one had told me?

  ‘You will see her,’ his English was halting. ‘Soon.’

  ‘You know your mummy, dear,’ Lama Gyatsho said to me, when I arrived at the monastery. ‘She suffers and because of her suffering she goes away. Sometimes here. Sometimes there. Mind stream like movie film. In movies, light makes imprint on special chemicals and that makes the pictures on the screen. I think that is how it goes. Anyway, you know what I mean. So. Karma is like light. It makes imprint on the mind’s chemicals. In new life our reincarnation must be working with the film that is already made, already there from previous lifetime. We are stuck in our own movies. No escaping it. Like that. Your mother stuck, that’s why it’s good she’s here now. In Nepal. Away from Los Angeles.’

  I didn’t really understand what he was saying and thought I must have done something terribly, terribly wrong for my mother not to want live with me, to not even want to see me when I had flown all this way to be with her. That evening the lamas took me down to Bodanath. We walked down the hill and across the fields. By the time we got to the stupa it was close to five p.m. and the harsh sun of midday was spreading thinner, becoming softer. Tibetans were putting up crude trestles and covering them with butter lamps though it was too early to light their wicks. Beggars and monks were positioning themselves around the stupa and putting blankets out before them so the pilgrims, when they came, could throw them coins, or food. There were moneychangers too, squatting near the beggars, with piles of change to be exchanged for large notes. That way people would be able to give the beggars and monks a small coin. Others would give them some bread.

  First there were a few, then a dozen, beginning their clockwise circumambulation. We fell in with them. Lama Gyatsho and Lama Dorje Rinpoche had explained to me that one must always walk in this direction, as the planets circle the sun. Some pilgrims touched the hundreds of small copper prayer wheels that lined the low walls at the base of the dome, spinning prayers out into the air. Others had prayer wheels on a long stick that they spun round and round, like a top.

  Lama Gyatsho told me that the words on the wheel were Om Mani Padme Hum. That all the teachings of the Buddha are invoked in those few words. ‘Including the benevolent attention and blessings of Chenrezig, the embodiment of compassion,’ Lama Gyatsho said. ‘Om Mani Padme Hum also helps achieve perfection in the six practices from generosity to wisdom.’ I nodded as if I understood. Om Mani Padme Hum, I chanted under my breath. Lama Gyatsho continued my teaching. ‘It is the enlightened awareness through which one can end suffering. Om Mani Padme Hum. The union of sound and emptiness.’

  I stared at the locals in fascination. I was rude, I suppose, though no one seemed to mind. The women wore brightly striped aprons, chubas, black and white, brown and blue, yellow and pink. The men were all in hats. Some were neat little hats, like the hats American men wore to church. Others were broad-brimmed cowboy hats. The older pilgrims had deeply lined faces. They wore turquoise earrings, coral braided into hair and amber around necks. Dusk was falling and the stall owners began to light their lamps. As the sun faded, this deep dark golden flickering took over: thousands of old suns. The candles were moving. They were being carried to the shrine at the front of the stupa, placed around the walls, from the lowest tier to the two higher ones. The moon wasn’t out yet and above them the Milky Way was coming into focus, hanging so low it touched the tip of the stupa.

  Pilgrims fretted their malas, repeating their prayer over and over, with each wooden or bone bead that slipped through their fingertips. I slipped into the river of sound, for now hundreds were chanting, people swirling around the stupa like floodwater round a boulder. They surged into the night. Even the old people moved faster than I could. I trotted behind Lama Gyatsho and Lama Dorje, struggling to keep up. The only snags in the stream were the prostrators who took a few paces, dropped to their knees, pressed their palms together above their heads in an attitude of prayer, then dropped them to their throat,
to their heart, before stretching out their bodies and touching their forehead to the 177 ground. Finally, in a fluid movement, like a wave swelling, they lifted themselves up so they could begin again.

  After a couple of days, when it seemed that Anna might not be returning as she’d promised, the lamas and I got on the bus so they could deliver me to her. When we arrived at the Yak and Yeti no one was sure where she was. Lama Dorje asked a man watering plants where she might be and he suggested we try Boris’s room—Boris owned the hotel—so, with both of my small hands clutched in the lamas’, we went and knocked on the door. Boris, a dashing Russian with a flourishing handlebar moustache, answered it. He put his finger to his lips to shush us if we made a sound. His other hand he held to his heart, as if to compensate for any disrespect. There was a television in the room—most likely the only set in the entire country. My mother was there, and so were a dozen other people: tourists; Nepalese staff; and an elegant young man who, I was told later, was Prince Birenda. Everyone was staring at the television. My mother—robed and shaven, I’d never seen her like this, this was not a woman I knew, this was not my mother—glanced over her shoulder and flashed me a quick smile, before turning back to stare at the screen. The image was black and white and there was a loud crackle coming through the speakers as a blurry grey figure bounced down some steps. Snippets of sound floated towards us through the heavy static—it was as if the words literally had to fight their way from the moon, to us, this strange group of people in a heavily timbered room in a tiny kingdom in the Himalayas. I looked at the lamas—Lama Dorje to my left, Lama Gyatsho to my right—and they both gripped my hands harder than ever. Lama Gyatsho nodded, animatedly at the TV. Lama Dorje Rinpoche looked intent. Suddenly the whole room was in an uproar of cheers and applause and I—confused, finally close to my mother but not with her, not being held—burst into loud sobs. It was only then that Anna came through the chaos towards me, reached out and took me into her arms.