The Season of Retreats

Tsering Namgyal Khortsa

He had come to the Catskill Mountains to study at the feet of a Tibetan Lama and to finish what he had hoped would be the final draft of a novella about Tibetan Buddhist “crazy wisdom.” He had also been practicing meditation of late, especially in the mornings. And that particular morning, he had had a typically restless sitting session. His mind kept traveling to Iowa City, where he had spent two years in graduate school working on what became the first draft of the book while consuming what seemed, in retrospect, the entire local brewery. Disillusioned with campus life, he had written to the lama of
his intention for such a retreat—as far away as possible from the women, wine, and what he thought of as the rather pointless and loud music festivals of the Midwest. And the lama, an old family acquaintance, had invited him to stay there, at no cost whatsoever.

Following his morning ritual, he decided to go to the dining hall for breakfast. Normally, it was retirees who greeted him as they ate their meals. But today the scene was slightly different: he saw a beautiful young woman sitting at the table. She greeted him. She looked even more charming when she was talking, her unusually large dark eyes speaking more than her words. Wearing a long black dress, she had a loud and ready laugh. She was a medical student from a prestigious university in the nearby state of Connecticut. A beauty with brains, he thought. But at a Buddhist retreat?

“Here to volunteer for six weeks,” she said firmly and matter-of-factly while playing with her phone, “and learn more about Buddhism.”

For him, her response raised more questions than it answered. She had her own questions for him. As soon as she learned he was from the Tibetan community of India, she asked him, amongst other things, about the human rights situation in Tibet and the Chinese government’s latest policy on the reincarnation system. As if that was not enough, she wanted to know about democracy in the Himalayas. But he was in no mood for such discussion before breakfast, especially today.

“I thought we were at a retreat,” he told her, much to the shock of a bespectacled, greybeard sitting next to them. “Are we really allowed to use phones here?”

“I am not really using it to call people,” she responded.” I am just using it for my Facebook.”

He didn’t know what to say. She told him she would like to visit Dharamshala, and wanted to know what would be the best time to go.

He still wasn’t convinced that she was interested in studying Buddhism, definitely not in any serious way. And what would she do here among the monks and retirees? Listen to the teachings? Meditate? Write? In fact, yes. She told him that she, too, wanted to write poetry. She had also signed up to volunteer in the main shrine room during her six-week retreat. She said it with such conviction, as if all the Buddhist deities in the shrine room had somehow collectively hired her for the summer.

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He had come here three months ago specifically to get away from such distractions and focus on writing. He had been productive. The pine trees, the verdant valley, the big blue sky above reminded him of the Himalayas of his youth but the general laid-back atmosphere was not unlike graduate school. Yet, unlike in Iowa City, there were no bars—at least, not as far as he knew. For the past several years, he had spent far too much time traveling in Asia and in the universities of the West (including a stint at a British university). At the retreat he had so far stayed off social media, and had been able to concentrate on the final draft of the book. But now that she had appeared, his focus was no longer the same.

In the barren sexual landscape of the spiritual retreat, she looked like a veritable feast of flesh at a table of hungry ghosts. Her colorful appearance and the sheer economy of her clothing always caused much excitement among the crowd in the dining hall, making them forget, for a moment, that they had come here to get rid of desire and attachment, not increase it. All eyes collectively followed her movements. One aging artist and world-traveler announced: “She must have been a Goddess in her previous life.”

The woman was rarely out of his sight. She seemed to be everywhere. Meanwhile, the food was getting predictable, as if to remind him of the repetitiveness of meals in the Indian schools of his youth, which had served rice and dal seven days a week. This meant he went to the dining hall a lot less than before. In a few weeks, he lost at least four pounds.

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He soon went into hiding to focus on his book. He tried to keep to himself, spending most of his time writing in his room. Whenever he took a break, he usually hung out with a senior Bhutanese monk who also resided there. The monk, who had a passion for spicy cooking, also found the food in the mess rather bland. “Salads are for Westerners,” the monk told him once, “Himalayans eat differently.” The monk often invited him to dinner, which usually consisted of a particularly hot dish made of Sichuan pepper and dried beef, the last of which was imported all the way from Thimpu. They ate rice and beef and drank tea while sharing their views on politics and the royal family in Bhutan, and they often burped loudly together after the meal. After they finished their dinner, he would return to his room to write.

He also sat on his cushion and tried to practice meditation, which basically entailed following his thoughts to wherever they went and making attempts, usually unsuccessful, at bringing them back to his breath. He wasn’t really convinced that it helped calm him down. He was even conscious of the fact that this kind of practice was straight out of the generic beginner’s guide to meditation sold in college bookstores. His mind often behaved like a particularly hyper-energetic monkey: perpetually in motion, jumping from one place to another, completely undisciplined and random. Restless, his mind traveled places, often in quick succession—to the Himalayas, to his social media pages, to the plot and characters of his novel, and how he would—or should—end it. His mind drifted to his friends, to the jobs he had held over the years, and to the people he had met along the way, on three continents around the world. Now, his mind seemed to travel exclusively to the woman at the retreat. What was she doing now? Who was she talking to? She must be in the shrine room. He knew he was in trouble. What would happen to the book?

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He tried to avoid her, but the retreat center was a tiny community. It was like an extended family living in a small hostel
with an immaculately designed temple attached to it, above which resided the lama. One evening, he was eating with the Bhutanese monk, his mouth burning with spices, chatting about Bhutanese politics and electoral rights in the Himalayas when they heard a gentle knock on his door. She came in hurriedly. The monk had to look away, for her cleavage was clearly visible. She sat down near the monk.

She turned and asked him if he could help translate for her. She wanted to know if she should drop out of med school and go to India to study Tibetan medicine.

His jaw dropped. “Are you nuts?” he said. “That is not medicine—that’s traditional healing.”

“I like traditional healing,” she responded, without a hint of irony.

“So you’ll leave Yale—just like that?”

She wanted to help raise awareness about the human rights situation inside Tibet, to teach English to Indian kids, to take lessons in Tibetan cooking, to study Ayurveda and yoga, all the while studying ancient Tibetan healing. She had done all the research on the Internet.

He was left speechless. He just stared at her face. She was attractive in a movie star kind of way, a consequence of a mixed parentage and, she confessed, a lot of sports from a very early age. His skepticism did not diminish. Still, he reluctantly yielded to her request, after she held his hands and begged for his help.

The monk took a scripture bound in fine silk out of his cupboard. He threw dice, and looked up some lines in the scripture. The verdict of the divination was that medical school actually did not look very attractive in the long run.

He turned to her and said: “The monk says: Drop Out!”

She immediately jumped on her feet and high-fived him.

“You see, my intuition was right. You’ve got to listen to your heart.”

She was following her heart by swapping a highly selective and prestigious medical school for a course on Tibetan herbal treatment in the Indian Himalayas. He wondered if she was mentally sound. But then the monk told him that that it was quite hard to come across normal, functioning people in the decade that he had been in the West. “Relationships and mobile phones,” the monk said, “combine these two and they make people completely crazy.”

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Two days later, he received an email from Iris. In her first email since they had parted ways six months earlier, she asked him how he was progressing on the book. She had been hurt by his decision to leave behind the beer, music, and anti-depressants that were supposed to ease him through the travails of graduate school and go to the mountains. He wrote back that it looked like his path to creativity and simplicity was not without its challenges. Furthermore, he was sad to announce that there had so far been no signs of spiritual liberation for him, nor had he achieved much headway in his literary endeavor. He didn’t know if he would be able to finish the book. She wrote back that he should have gone for a doctorate degree, which might have helped him find a fellowship somewhere. “But now you sound like you are at the wrong summer camp!”

And in the meantime, the young woman had now become a book unto herself, a permanent fixture of his impermanent life. He saw her in the reading room and in the shrine room during his morning prostrations. She would be there offering butter lamps, dusting off the cushions, mopping the floor, or simply meditating in a corner, silently reciting mantras. He saw her, of course, during his visits to the dining hall. They often found themselves eating together. He would generally keep quiet, his mind obsessed with his book. But it was difficult.

More questions followed: Why do Tibetan statues depict deities embracing each other in such reckless abandon? Why does he think Tibetans are self-immolating with such frequency? Does he consider himself Tibetan, Indian, or Chinese? Her questions turned every meal into a press conference. She paid little heed to his statement that in fact he was not in a position to speak with any authority on these issues. He had spent most of his adult life working outside India, far away from the local politics, far away from the Tibetan community. If she had more questions about Tibet, he told her, they should best be directed to the lama and other relevant specialists. Her questions, however, persisted to the point that he once warned her that if she asked him one more question, he would burn himself right then and there! “Silence is golden,” he told her more than once. “Speech is bullshit.”

Time flew by. The summer gave way to autumn, and it was already quite chilly, even during the daytime. His meditation practice seemed to be helping him concentrate better. And he had made some progress in his writing. Now he pretty much knew the arc of the story. He wanted to finish the book at a sacred site in India, which would serve as the end point of his fictional pilgrimage.

One evening, he walked up to the building where the lama lived and gathered enough courage to tell him that he had changed his mind. He had done more meditation in the past three months than most people would do in their lifetime. And he did not think he should do the three-year retreat that he had originally planned. Since he already had doubts about the retreat, it was better not to begin it at all than to leave in mid-session, which would reflect very badly on his character, especially because so much preparation went into the program.

This must have come as good news for the lama who was skeptical of what he must have considered as a rash decision by a young man. The lama immediately agreed and gave him approval to leave the retreat. The lama even called in his assistant, a garrulous and cheerful lady, to help book his bus and airline tickets back to the city and onwards. He thanked the lama and offered him a scarf that the Bhutanese monk had given him.The lama advised him that since life was short and impermanent, he should devote himself to serving others, which was the secret to happiness. Nothing existed in and by itself, he was told. And then the lama gave him some real advice. Forget writing and get a wife, he said, adding that there were plenty of Tibetan girls in Dharamshala. One of the lama’s relatives, volunteering at Tibetan Youth Congress or Students for a Free Tibet, had even met a girl from his own Tibetan region there. He was quite impressed with the lama’s advice. He had never imagined that his teacher’s spiritual advice would include terminating his literary ambitions and joining a political movement to find a wife from the same Tibetan region. Anyway, he thanked him and left.

When he walked out of the building, he saw the woman sitting outside on the stairs, playing with her iPhone.

“I heard you’re calling it quits,” she told him.

The assistant had apparently already started spreading the news. He told her he was going back to New York City to work at an NGO. He didn’t tell her he was actually flying straight to India from New York.

She told him that her dad was quite unhappy about her decision, but his threats and warnings had done little to dent her enthusiasm for India. She said that one of the aging artists had already been tutoring her pro bono on every nook and corner of Hindustan. The seasoned traveler—who apparently had been kicked out of India several times for overstaying his visa—had even given her a thick, old copy of The Lonely Planet Guide to India. She was reading the section on Dharamshala and had already made furious notes in the margins. She had memorized the distance from Delhi to Dharamshala in kilometers.

She asked: “Do you think I should stay overnight in Pathankot when I travel to Dharamshala?”

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He spent the next week adding the final touches to his book. He wrote to his friends and family in India about his decision to return there. He updated his Facebook page to make an announcement: “Done with the Retreat. Off to India.” He immediately earned several likes and comments. Over a particularly spicy dinner, he told the Bhutanese monk that there was more to life than silent meditation in upstate New York. The monk pointed out that he had already spent three years writing the novel. That evening, he bid farewell to the monk: his one true friend at the retreat, a pillar of support, and a trusted partner in clandestine Bhutanese cooking, a completely unexpected high point of his American retreat.

The next morning, he quietly hired a taxi to the Greyhound station. He thought about the young woman. He felt strangely vulnerable after the retreat and he was already beginning to miss her presence. He was almost resigned to the fact that he would surely run into her somewhere in India and that she would become part of his circle, or his mandala, as Tibetans would call it. He was drawn to her and she, with her strong passions and flawless looks, was a formidably interesting character. Still, the novelist in him realized that she was far more interesting as a figment of his imagination, best envisioned from a distance, than as a real person crowding into his daily life.

The bus ride to New York City felt very quick. Navigating the maze of tunnels underneath Port Authority, he hopped onto the train to JFK. Before checking in at the airline, however, he thought he would eat something. He walked into a Korean restaurant. After three months of fiery Bhutanese food, the spice in the kimchi noodle failed to register on his tongue. But he did enjoy his first Heineken in three months, which actually made him feel quite meditative. On the plane, he tried to watch a Bollywood film but fell into a deep and peaceful sleep right after the first song. Soon enough, however, he had a nightmare which woke him up—he dreamed that he was frantically and repeatedly adding the woman as a friend on Facebook.

He drank some water and tried to clear his head. And if he did run into her in India, he decided, it would be no mere coincidence, but a sign that she was meant to be in his life—to be part of his story. Or, at least, his story about that season of retreats in the mountains of New York.

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