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3
To the Rinpoche
Helena and Hans left at four this morning for Srinagar. I woke at seven, felt lonely in Leh without them, and went to the bus-stand to take a bus back to Lamayuru.
A man and an old woman sat next to me on the bus. They were poor, and dirty. The man had a worn purple rag around his head, and his shoes were held together by string. At first, I did not notice that the old woman was ill. She leant against the man with her eyes closed, her right hand resting on his neck. Then she began to moan, softly at first, then more and more insistently. The man stroked her forehead sadly.
‘She is my mother,’ the man said to me. ‘We came to Leh yesterday to see the doctor. She was burnt the night before last.’ He rolled up her left sleeve and showed me the bandage the doctor had wound round her wrist and a part of the large festering burn above it. ‘The doctor said she would be better today.’
The bus started. The moans of the old woman got louder. Every time the bus jolted and shook her whole body trembled in pain. She started to cry. Her son held her closer and dabbed her eyes with his sleeve.
There was a French girl, a medical student from Paris, on the bus. We had met and talked in Leh. I called out to the conductor to stop the bus and walked up to where she was sitting.
‘Louise, we need your help. There is an old woman at the back of the bus who is very ill and in pain. Could you have her sit next to you and give her something?’
The man helped his mother up the bus. Louise put her arms around her and the woman lay against her. Louise found some tranquillisers in her bag and gave them to the woman. At first she would not take them, but Louise’s calm voice persuaded her and she slept a little. The son sat on his own staring out at the road. His mouth was moving in prayer. From time to time, Louise took out her scarf and wiped the woman’s forehead.
Just before Lamayuru, the bus stopped. The man and his mother got up. The mother tried to smile at us and raised one hand in a wave. Then she tottered slightly and her son caught her. The two of them stared up at us helplessly from the side of the road. She seemed to be shivering from cold, although it was the middle of the day. The son took a black shawl out of a bag and wrapped it around her shoulders.
When we got to Lamayuru I asked Louise, ‘Was she very ill?’
‘She was dying. She won’t live out tonight.’
‘Did she say anything to you?’
‘She said she knew she was dying and that she wanted to die in her own house.’
The monastery seemed heartless in its pomp and bustle. I tried to drink some cold cabbage soup in the kitchen but kept thinking of the old woman and couldn’t finish it. I tried to sleep in the afternoon, but I had only to close my eyes to see her eyes staring up at me from the side of the road. There was a fat German woman meditating on the bed next to mine. After she had finished, she began to play a long wooden flute and sing. I asked her as gently as I could to stop singing as I was trying to sleep. She looked furious and said, ‘Everyone is so tired around here! Where is all the good energy these days? When I first came to India there was so much good energy!’
I left my bed and walked into the afternoon. The sound of the woman’s idiotic flute followed me down the valley.
Looking back at the monastery, I found it hard not to hate it a little. I wanted the hills to be bare again. I wanted there to be nothing but rock and water and the mountains in the changing light. I wanted to see Lamayuru as Naropa, its founder, must have seen it, before it had a name, before it had walls and fields and prayer flags and Spanish men with ‘Viva Madrid’ sweaters taking flash photos of its frescoes.
And then I turned a corner into another valley. There was not a sign of human habitation in the valley—not even the crumbling remains of a chorten or a prayer flag.
My mind changed, emptied. I walked more and more slowly, more and more rhythmically. I felt my breathing grow even and my blood clear. I walked higher up the valley.
The rocks around me were the strangest I had seen in Ladakh. Vast fluted cathedrals of rock, cathedrals that might have been designed by Dali, loud with birds of all kinds. I saw an oriole high on one of the spires of gold rock, and all around me small gnarled rose-bushes, some with the last roses of summer still on them, shook in the breeze.
A stream glittered ahead. I walked faster, so that I would have time to bathe in it before I had to return. I took off all my clothes and lay in the freezing brilliant water, shouting at the cold. I turned on my side so that the water could run down my back and jabbed my elbow on a stone sticking out slightly from its bed of pebbles. It was the most delicate fossil I have ever seen—a primeval fern, each small filigree unfolding fixed and preserved for as long as the stone would last. I took it as an omen of hope.
That night in the monastery I dreamed I was in Benares. I arrived by an evening train. The station was deserted. None of the lights was on in the city and there was no one in the streets. A few ghostly, thin dogs wandered in the dirt. I walked slowly through the deserted city and at last came to a hotel. There was an old man asleep at the counter. I woke him and asked him if I could have a room. He looked at me tiredly, rubbing his eyes, and said, gesturing to an open door, ‘No one comes at this time of year but there is a bed in there.’
Then I found myself sitting on the ground near the river. I couldn’t see anything at first but I could smell the burning of the bodies. As I sat in the dark, I remembered my childhood home in Hyderabad that had been near a cemetery and the smell of burning that the wind sometimes carried into our garden, and I saw for a moment the large red and yellow flowers of the garden, lightly powdered with ash. My mother was sitting in a deck chair reading, in a white dress. I wanted to cry out, ‘Come in! Come in quickly!’ but she couldn’t hear me . . .
A man sat down next to me. He was younger than me, perhaps twenty-five. His hair was white, whether from a strange ageing process or ash, I couldn’t say. He had small, narrowed, yellowish eyes.
‘Why are you here?’ I asked him.
He said nothing.
I asked him again, ‘What is your name? Don’t you want to talk? What do you think of this place?’, my voice rising higher and higher.
He leant towards me and breathed over my face. ‘Why are you here? Why are you here?’ he repeated in my voice, vacantly. ‘Why are you here?’
The dream shifted: I was lying in my room in the hotel. From the street below I could hear sadhus singing—on and on, monotonously, in the chill moonlight. I looked up and saw on the ceiling a large square of darkness, a square of pulsing darkness, as if a pit of black snakes were writhing and tumbling over each other. I wanted to look away but could not. I went on staring at the square. It cleared, slowly. At its heart, a small, ragged patch of light appeared.
‘Have you met the Rinpoche?’
I said I hadn’t.
‘You haven’t met the Rinpoche? How long have you been here?’
I said I had been in Ladakh six weeks.
‘My god, what have you been doing? The Rinpoche is Ladakh.’
‘Which Rinpoche? There are several.’
‘Thuksey Rinpoche, of course. The Bakula is mostly a poli tician. The Rinpoche of Hemis is too young. I’ve never met the Rinpoche of Phyang but reports say he’s a bit of a playboy. Perhaps they are wrong. But Thuksey Rinpoche . . .’
Dilip Chatterji looked at me pityingly. Dilip’s bald brahmin head gleamed in the afternoon light in the Tibetan restaurant. His plump Sindi wife sat at his side chewing a piece of mutton.
‘Dilip—don’t be such a bully! Dilip is such a bully!’ She giggled and nudged closer to him. It was amusing to see this thin dignified sixty-year-old brahmin blush a little.
I had met Dilip only an hour before. We had been the only three people in the restaurant in the middle afternoon and I had sat down with them. Dilip, in his Gandhi clothes, had asked me, in a perfect English accent, ‘Where do you come from?’ I said I was an Englishman from Oxford.
Dilip nearly fainted with joy. ‘My god! How amazing! Sit down! Sit down immediately! I was at St Paul’s! Yes, and at London University! Engineering! Lived in Connaught Square! A rich aunt, you see . . . the Chatterjis wanted all their children given the British Treatment! Some hated it! I loved it! I was a very good cricketer. You know, only last month I won the Bombay Squash competition. But I mustn’t boast. Sit down immediately! I get so very bored in India. I am an industrialist, god only knows why. I’m going to retire soon. I’m developing a plan of solar heating. But anyway . . . no. I get so very very bored in India. No one to talk to . . .’
‘You have me to talk to,’ Moneesha giggled. ‘But I am so stupid, I know.’ She had finished chewing and sat back against the wall, content.
‘You know what I want to talk about?’ Dilip asked. ‘No? Can you guess? I want to talk about Indian philosophy. Are you interested?’
‘It is my deepest interest.’
Dilip looked at me. ‘Really? When I was at school in England everyone thought Indian philosophy complete rubbish. I remember one of my masters at St Paul’s saying, “Chatterji, I hope you are not going to grow up to contemplate your navel? That would be a sad, sad waste, Chatterji.” I can hear his voice now. Ask an Englishman then about Indian philosophy and he’d say, “It’s complete balls. A lot of fat-bellied men sitting in the dirt doing nothing.” I didn’t care at all then about Indian things. All I wanted to do was to play cricket. But cricket is a very philosophical game, isn’t it? So much patience . . .’
Moneesha yawned. ‘You say you need patience. What about me? I have to sit on the sidelines and watch. My god, Dilip, the boredom I have endured for your sake. The cricket matches, the squash matches. Thank goodness I’m so plump I can’t play any games.’ She yawned happily again.
Dilip ignored her. ‘No, when I came back to India at twenty-five I really knew very little about India. I felt lonely, strange, as foreign as an Englishman. I took up yoga, yes, but only to get fit for cricket. Imagine taking up yoga to get fit for cricket! And I was an engineer, you see. Still am. Built most of the dams in India. Most of the hydro-electric things too. Rather famous actually . . . Being an engineer I only read Engineering things. I was completely rationalistic. Moneesha says I am still a fiend of rationalism. But slowly I became aware of everything I had been ignoring about my own country. I saw that Western values, Western government, Western materialism, could not help India—India must find its own spirit, its own identity . . . and so I began to read. I read the Gita, I read the Upanishads, I began to read the Buddhist classics. I talked to sadhus, holy men of all kinds . . .’
‘Those bloody holy men,’ Moneesha said. ‘My god, Dilip, how many of them I had to feed. Remember the sadhu from Bangalore who stayed four months! You said he was very austere. But he ate more than my whole family put together. And he slept all afternoon. And your yoga teacher. You said he was very holy too. He was always trying to get the ayah into bed.’
Dilip looked at her with weary patience. ‘My wife is a cynic. All Sindis are cynics . . . they care only for money . . . Don’t get me wrong. I do not believe India will save the world or anything. I’m more disillusioned than you could imagine by India and the Indians. The Indian middle class . . . you cannot believe their greed and stupidity. Last week a business colleague in Bombay spent one hundred thousand rupees in covering a hotel roof with flowers for a reception for his daughter, and in an area of Bombay where millions are starving. I did not go. In all this chaos what else is there to do but turn one’s mind to God? And try and preserve something of one’s heritage?’
‘I wish I could turn my mind to God,’ Moneesha giggled. ‘I am very superficial. I like to eat and sleep and talk. Dilip says I’m hopeless. But he always gets me to read his books. And he takes my advice on all business matters. In fact I’m going to start a business and leave him to his yoga.’
Dilip looked up at the ceiling.
‘What have you been doing in Ladakh?’ I asked Dilip.
‘I have always been interested in Buddhism. I have travelled in Nepal. I lived in Sikkim for a while. You know, I once went to a ball in the Palace of Sikkim.’
‘Not that story again, Dilip, please.’
‘Anyway . . . This is the second visit to Ladakh. I came last year and I fell in love with the place. It is the strangest place in India. And I love to walk . . .’
‘What an understatement! Do you know, my husband has dragged me up most of those mountains? Why didn’t I marry a film star instead of a yogi?’
‘As I was saying, I love to walk. I love to be alone . . .’
‘He loves to have me carrying all the things behind him . . .’
‘I love to walk and be alone in the mountains. It clears my mind.’
‘It may clear his mind. It makes me sick. I have lost ten pounds already.’
Dilip looked at me, suddenly. ‘You say you are interested in religious things. I am sure you are. It is strange and wonderful how many foreigners are interested in Indian philosophy now. It is wonderful for us Indians because it shows us that we are not fools, that we have something to give to the world.’
‘Give to the world,’ Moneesha said. ‘My dear, these gurus make fortunes! Think of Sai Baba! Think of Rajneesh! Sometimes just to annoy Dilip I say that when I have become a multi-millionairess I will give it all up and become a Holy Mother and become even richer!’ Moneesha thought this very funny and went off into a peal of high-pitched giggles. ‘Imagine me a Holy Mother!’
‘You’d have to be a silent Holy Mother,’ Dilip said.
‘My husband is so cruel, don’t you think?’ She giggled, snuggling closer to him. He blushed happily again.
‘You must come with us tomorrow,’ Dilip said, ‘and meet Thuksey Rinpoche. I met him when I came last year. He is the Guardian of the Rinpoche of Hemis, Drukchen Rinpoche. He is an old man, an old Tibetan. He used to be head of several of the highest meditation abbeys in Tibet—of the Kargyupa sect, you know, the sect that Milarepa founded, I think . . . I saw him a few days ago. He said that I must go back and see him while he is at Shey. He’s taking the prayers there for a fortnight. We will go tomorrow night.’
‘Dilip is always going on about one holy man or another . . . but this man is something,’ Moneesha said. ‘He is a very beautiful old man. I like that. And he is kind. He does not look at me as if I were a leper or something. I think he rather likes me. He sees my soul. Dilip says I have no soul. But the Rinpoche sees my soul.’
‘For god’s sake, Moneesha . . . No, you must come with us tomorrow. I insist. Do you know what the Ladakhis call the Rinpoche? Thuksey Rinpoche. It means “The Rinpoche whose heart is a sun”.’
Dilip and I met later that evening. Moneesha stayed at home to eat sweets and wash her hair. ‘My wife’, Dilip said, ‘is a very remarkable but tiring woman.’
Dilip had changed into a long simple white dhoti and with his thin gold spectacles could have been a younger brother of Gandhi. He walked very briskly, very fast.
‘My god, Dilip, do you always walk as fast as this?’
‘Yes. I am frightened that if I slow down I will die.’
All afternoon I had been thinking about what Dilip had said about the Rinpoche. We were walking in the hills beyond Leh, by the row of small crumbling white stupas. An old man was sitting in the shade of one of them, spinning.
‘What is it about the Rinpoche that impresses you, Dilip?’
‘Contrary to what Moneesha told you, I am impressed by very few people. I have met everyone in India. All the politicians, all the leaders of industry. And most of them bore or disgust me. And I have met many so-called holy men who have not moved me at all. Either they have seemed venal or they have said idiotic things or they have been surrounded by adoring Westerners in a way that made me ashamed of them and suspicious. But the Rinpoche seems to me different. Perhaps I am fooling myself. Perhaps it is Ladakh, these mountains, this air, that makes me think so . . .
‘What is it in him that makes him seem different?’
‘He makes you feel immediately at home with him. He does not want anything from you. He is tender to all the people around him . . . You feel you have been seen by him. Oh god, why do you ask me to describe him? You have to meet him. I am no good with words anyway.’
We walked on.
‘Moneesha says I am a snob. That if I had met the Dalai Lama I would love him because he is a King and an Incarnation. That I like the Rinpoche so much because he is so grand, because he is old, because he is a Tibetan. Moneesha says all this is just spiritual snobbery.’
‘Is it?’
‘Who can be sure of anything?’
Dilip and I walked up to the top of the hill. The sun had set and the first stars were appearing over the mountains. Below us, the stupas seemed to shrink into themselves and into the dark shadows of the hillside.
At last, Dilip sat down.
‘I have wasted my life. I have built dams, run companies, made roads. I have done all that and sometimes I am quite proud of it, for a moment. But what is that really? Many men could have done that. I was lucky, I was privileged, I was ambitious, I had the righ...
