But after that he was friendlier to the monks, which was important, as they were everywhere in the valley. Climb up a slope for firewood and look back down on the browns and grays and the greens of the chingko barley terraces, and there would be these maroon dots jumping out all over the landscape. Monks.
They fit into the society in the same sort of way—you saw them everywhere, but couldn’t be sure what they were doing. Not exactly authority figures, nor the holier-than-thou types that our preachers tend to be, men who can strike dead any conversation on earth just by walking in on it unexpected—no, here the monks and the smaller group of nuns were woven into things, out in the fields hoeing, stacking yak dung after it had been laid out to dry in the sun, laughing at rude jokes. It was hard for George or any Westerner to understand, coming as we do from a place where religion is mostly ignored or used as a cover for theft. That’s why so many were so quick to believe the lies the Chinese spread about Tibet, that stuff about an evil priesthood taxing poor serfs into poverty—that’s how it would have been if the system were ours, in fact it is a pretty good description of TV evangelism now I come to think of it. And it was as convenient as hell for the Chinese, who with us looking the other way could not only torture murder enslave rape imprison and starve the Tibetans, but also tell everyone that of course they were only doing it for the Tibetans’ own good. Saving them from themselves.
And being more like the Chinese than the Tibetans, we went for it. After all we did the same to the religious elder culture on “our land” not all that long ago, so we want to believe the Chinese, or at least not think about it. George, traipsing all over the south slope of the Himalaya, digging the unbelievable mountains—of course he didn’t care to think about the genocide proceeding on the north slope. It would be like tooling around in the Bavarian Alps in the 1940s, and pausing to wonder about those plumes of smoke on the horizon.
So it took him a while to see it, you bet. A while planting potatoes and fixing terrace walls and hunting firewood, with a monk or a nun in the crowd humping a load or cracking jokes. A while of hearing the chants every day at dawn, or seeing a farmer meditating in his field, or women cutting mani stones, or the kids spinning the prayer wheels with loads of firewood tied to their backs. A while of watching the way everyone pitched in on the communal work without tallying who had done what. A while of figuring out relatives, and discovering every family had monks or nuns, that they were not hereditary but came right out of the farmers every generation, the monasteries hoping to get the best and brightest but also taking the feebs and the handicapped, and naturally getting the oddballs too, the religious space cadets. All those dots of maroon in the brown and green, adding the final touch of color to the scene—when George saw that and understood it, he saw everything new.
And so I said to Kunga Norbu, “Can’t you show him some little extra, some bit of Shambhala magic to give him that last shove?”
Kunga Norbu said “Freds, you’ve got it wrong as usual, we don’t do tantric exercises to impress people. But he is welcome to visit the Manjushri Rimpoche in his chambers. And next week the Dalai Lama’s youngest sister is making a visit here. He will witness that.”
“Right on,” says I.
* * *
The very next day, first thing in the morning, I took George to his audience with Sucandra, the Manjushri Rimpoche and the King of Shambhala—the equal, in Tibetan Buddhism, of the Dalai and Panchen Lamas.
We were led out of the yellow morning light through a grove of sandalwood trees and into the dark lower chambers of Kalapa monastery, in amongst thick wood beams black with centuries of stove smoke and butter lamps. Every beam on these floors was covered with festival masks, each a brilliantly colored pop-eyed toothy demon face, heavy on green and red and yellow, with splashes of blue and white and gold. Bönpa nightmares they were, the scariest faces you would ever want to run into. Seeing them it was no mystery to me why the Buddha had been so welcomed in Tibet.
Then it was up stairs for flight after flight, because Kalapa was a dzong, a fortress monastery built back in the days when they had to worry about invasion by Genghis Khan or Alexander the Great. So it was plugged into a steep rocky ridge of the valley wall, looking like a squared-off outcropping of the ridge itself. Each level was set back from the one below it, and as we climbed higher on steep well-worn stairs we passed through larger and larger rooms, each with more light pouring into it than the one below. We passed through the library, where thousands of volumes of the Kalacakra and the Tengyur were set against the wall—short wide thick loose-leaved black-bound volumes, and scrolls in boxes like player piano rolls. Then through a music room, where drums and cymbals and long horns were kept. Then up into the sunniest room yet, where the walls were painted white, and the smooth wood floor had a sand painting mandala at its center. “What’s this?” George asked, looking in as we passed by.
“That was Essa’s room,” I told him.
“Essa?”
“Jesus, you know.”
No reply from George.
Finally we were led into what appeared to be the highest room in Kalapa. Its walls were hung with carpets that showed the history of Tibetan Buddhism in bright mandala patterns. Other than that the room was empty. The south wall was made of big sliding panel shutters, and the monk who had led us up the stairs slid these back to let in cool crisp morning air, and the sound of chanting from some floor below.
The monk left, and after a bit another one entered. Then I saw the new monk’s face, and realized it was Sucandra, the Manjushri Rimpoche.
I had never seen him before, but I knew. I wish I could explain how. He was a reincarnate, a tulku like Kunga Norbu, only infinitely more powerful—he was the reincarnation of Padma Sambhava, the Indian yogi who brought Buddhism to Tibet in the eighth century, and he was also the Manjushri Bodhisattva, the bodhisattva of wisdom, meaning he had worked right to the edge of nirvana but had then chosen to return to subsequent incarnations in human form, just to help other people along the way.
This time around he looked much like any other monk. Old, head shaved, face wrinkled into that map of wrinkles that old Himalayan faces take on. But the look in his eye—that calm and friendly smile! Out of his presence it’s hard to put my finger on what it was, but with him in the room there was no doubt of it—a feeling flowed out of him into us, both sharp and soothing. Invigorating—as if the chill sunny morning air had been suddenly turned into a state of being.
He asked us to sit, in English that had a strong Brit accent. He sounded like our buddy Trevor’s grandpa. We sat and he brought over a tea tray, and poured us some hot tea, no yak butter in it.
We drank the tea and talked. He asked us about our lives in Nepal, and back in the States, and had us tell him the story of our climb with Kunga Norbu up Chomolungma, which gave him a lot of laughs. “The Diamond Path is hard,” he said. “Climbing the Mother Goddess! Still, it’s better than getting beat in the head with a shoe.” He laughed. “I would like to make that climb myself.”
I could see George was trying to decide whether to tell the Rimpoche that the Mother Goddess had actually been K2 all along—there was something in the Rimpoche’s face that made you immediately want to spill the beans, about anything at all. So I quick changed the subject. “George here is going to help us try to stop the construction of the road to Chhule,” I said.
The Rimpoche looked closely at George. The attention he brought to bear on you was intense, but so suffused with friendliness that you couldn’t help but be warmed by it. And his voice was so relaxed. “That would help us,” he said. “For a long time we lived at the end of the earth, but the world has grown until the danger of being discovered and overrun is very real.”
“In a way it’s already happened, hasn’t it?” George said. He gestured out the window, down at the village and its skirt of refugee tents.
The Rimpoche nodded. “In a way. But we couldn’t hide from our people when they were in need, in danger of their liv
es. And when the time comes they or their children or their children’s children will return to their real homes. But to be discovered by the world at large—to be connected by road to Kathmandu, and its airport.…” He cocked his head and looked at George. “Do you want to help us?”
“I’m not sure I can do anything.”
“This is not what I asked.”
“Well.…” George struggled, looked away. Finally he met the Rimpoche’s patient gaze. “Yes. I do.”
“Gotcha!” I exclaimed, and they both laughed at me.
After that they talked of other things. I went through the open wall onto a narrow balcony to look down at the village, smoking away in the morning sun. Inside George and the Rimpoche laughed at something George had said. “The Chinese are a test,” the Rimpoche exclaimed in response. “We have to love them too.”
“Freds says they’re going to be reincarnated as leeches,” George said.
And they laughed and talked some more. I went back inside and joined them. At one point the Rimpoche leaned over to refill our teacups, moving like a dancer miming the filling of teacups. They had been talking about the road again, and he murmured as if to himself. “The pure is powerless in the face of the impure. Only the sacred vanquishes it.”
Quiet minutes, sipping tea in the sunlight—that’s how you spend time with a bodhisattva, and while you’re doing it, you understand why.
Afterwards, on our way back down, George was silent. Once outside the monastery he said, “You know, I asked him how old he was.”
“You did?”
“Yeah, weren’t you curious? He’s a hundred and twenty, Freds. A hundred and twenty years old.”
“That’s pretty old.”
“He says he’s gonna die in three years. He says that if he’s reincarnated in Tibet as they usually are, the next incarnation is sure to be a strange one.”
“He should aim himself somewhere else.”
“I suggested the same thing myself, but he told me it’s not easy to do. The Bardo is a dark and dangerous place. He told me that once back in the forties, a lama tried to reincarnate himself as the King of England—”
“Prince Charles? So that’s the explanation.”
“No, no. He missed. Got lost. The Rimpoche thinks he may have been reborn as Colonel John. That’s why the colonel came to Tibet, and got so wrapped up in the resistance, and why he’s so confused now about his past.”
“That would explain it.”
“True. Although I still think it’s a case of learning a new language after damage to the speech center of the brain.”
“Did you tell the Rimpoche that?”
“No. But I wish I had.”
* * *
And then the next afternoon Colonel John appeared leading a string of ponies over the pass, the second pony carrying the youngest sister of the Dalai Lama. Suddenly everyone in the village was rushing out of homes and off the slopes, from upstream and down, all converging on the procession until there was a crush around the ponies and they couldn’t move, and everyone crying, the Dalai Lama’s sister and all her party crying, Colonel John crying, everyone there calling out her name and the tears running down their faces like monsoon flooding. George and I stood back from the crowd, feeling like we had accidentally stepped in on an intense family scene, a reunion that no one had ever really expected, but never stopped hoping for.
Later we were brought to meet the Dalai Lama’s sister, Pema Gyalpo. She spoke excellent English, and looked supremely happy to be there in the valley. She laughed and gave each of us the traditional white scarf of welcome, and a little picture of the Dalai Lama, and we had a big meal and all the locals dressed in their Sunday best and all their jewelry, spreading it out among refugee relatives so everyone had some, and we drank chang and sat around the stoves singing until late in the night. George and I didn’t know the songs so we drank chang and provided a bass auoum to every tune, singing until we were practically unconscious with it. George kept his portrait of the Dalai Lama in hand, and every once in a while he would look at it and say, “Now I see why the Chinese don’t allow tourists to wear Phil Silvers T-shirts in Tibet. Look at that!”
And the next morning we were sitting on the rocks that made a lookout point over the hot spring. Water clattered down the stone chute into the empty laundry pool, and steam rose from it and drifted onto all the ferns and mosses, giving them a coat of fine dew. Downvalley the village was just waking up, gray-brown smoke rising from the roofs out of the shadow of the mountain into the sun where it turned bright gold, and George turned to me and said, “Okay, okay, okay. Let’s go see what we can do about that road.”
* * *
So we returned to Kathmandu, hiking hard for days and then driven by Colonel John, who had a Land Rover stashed with a family in the village at the End of the Road. We dug it out from a tower of yak dung, and he drove us down the Swiss road faster than I would have liked, putting the Land Rover in four-wheel drifts at every hairpin and looking like he would have preferred to ignore the switchbacks entirely and take off straight down the mountainside, using the road as an occasional take-off or landing ramp. He had us down to the old dirt road inside an hour, and then he ignored ponds and mudslides and the sad roadside villages and drove like a suicide until we reached Kathmandu’s Ring Road, covering the distance that had taken our bus eighteen hours in just over four, but leaving us just as exhausted if not more.
After the weeks in Shambhala Kathmandu looked like Manhattan, only noisier and more crowded. The taxi horns and bike bells and the heat and rain and mud and all the cars and shops and faces drove us immediately to the Hotel Star, where we collapsed in our rooms, overwhelmed. Colonel John declared he was driving back to The End of the Road that very night and we couldn’t dissuade him. “I’ll be back soon,” he said as he disappeared down the stairs. “You’d better have results by then.”
So we were on our own, and after George sat under his dwarf shower and ran through two tanks of hot water and burned a couple bowls of hash he felt better about everything. “Let’s go to the Old Vienna and eat like pigs,” he suggested. “I’m so sick I don’t care anymore, water buff, milk, I’m having it all.” So we went to the Old Vienna Inn and had Hungarian goulash and wiener schnitzel and beer and apple strudel and it was so good we almost died, literally for George unfortunately as he spent most of that night on the toilet moaning.
So he started his dive into the public administration of Nepal feeling a little peaked, which couldn’t have helped. First day he spent talking to contacts, visiting the Oriental Carpet Shop, where the owner Yongten had gotten word through the Tibetan exile grapevine that we were to be given all aid. Then he found an American friend of ours named Steve, who worked for the Peace Corps. And finally he visited some buddies of his in Central Immigration, who had prospered heavily in the past from baksheesh provided by George’s employer. All of them told him about the same thing, which was “good luck.” Yongten suggested he start by going to the Department of Public Works and Transport in the public administration building over on Ram Shah Path. “Don’t be in hurry,” Yongten told him.
George said he wouldn’t be, that he had had a lot of experience in Central Immigration getting trek permits and the like.
“Immigration very quick,” Yongten told him. “Very efficient.”
This paled George a bit, but he was determined, and the next morning he hopped on his Hero Jet and took off into traffic ringing his bell enthusiastically.
He came back that night just before sunset, completely beat. “Starved,” he said. “Food.”
So we went to K.C.’s and I asked him how it had gone.
He shook his head. “I found the right department, I think. There’s a Department of Old Roads and a Department of New Roads, if you can believe that. They’re both in Singha Durbar, which is a big place.”
I nodded, having seen it before—it was a pile set back from Ram Shah Path by a park and a ceremonial circular driveway, and looke
d like the Lincoln Memorial with a Hindu temple roof.
“The whole civil administration is there. It took me a while to find the Department of New Roads. It was empty.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No. And then somebody walked by and when I told him what I wanted to find out, he told me that since this road was an extension of an old road it would be the Old Hill Roads office I wanted. ‘For new hill roads that are extensions of old hill roads you need Old Hill Roads department and not New Hill Roads department.’ So he sent me in that direction. Didn’t know where it was exactly. After a while I found it, but it was three by then and they had closed for the day. So I came home.”
“Hey,” says I, “good progress.”
No reply from George.
Next morning he was off first thing, and he got back even later. I asked him how it had gone, trailing him to Valentino’s for Chinese food.
He shook his head as he scarfed eggroll. “Old Hill Roads told me that since it’s a new road I obviously had to go to New Hill Roads. They acted like I was stupid. They said they only do maintenance and they don’t know a thing about extensions.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No. So I went back to New Roads and asked someone else, this time with baksheesh. He told me they don’t know anything about this road, that it is a very special road.”
“Say it again?”
“You heard me. ‘Oh, sir! We are knowing nothing about this road you speak of! It is a very special road!’ They recommended I go talk to the Department of Information in the Ministry of Communication.”
“Ah ha. Progress.”
That night he was in considerable distress again—all the exotic Kathmandu food was disagreeing with him. And the next day he found the inhabitants of the Department of Information knew nothing about our road, not even when primed with baksheesh. They recommended the Department of Roads. Or possibly the office of the National Planning Commission.
Next day the people in the planning commission sent him to the Ministry of the Panchayat, which had a Local Development Department. There he was directed to the Department of Roads.
Escape From Kathmandu Page 19