The Fifth Man

Tenzin Dorjee

It was October, the best month for camping in Dharamsala. The rainy season was over, although the tail end of monsoon season dragged right through October, flooding our tents on more than one occasion. There were about fifty of us, Tibetans, Indians, Canadians, and Americans, gathered on the Thakur family estate in lower Dharamsala, brought together as members of the same community of political activism. The Thakurs were an Indian family of uncertain aristocratic ancestry with connections to Tibet dating back to the 1960s when Tibetan refugees first arrived on the scene. Their estate was a sprawling farm of acres of greenery and great versatility. The nearest neighbors were fifteen minutes away.

You could walk from mango trees at one end of the farm to a plum garden and pepper plants at the other end, while encountering sleeping cows and fighting hens and barking dogs all in the same compound. During the day, we took our Patagonia ropes to the Deodars and trained at climbing, a skill we would deploy to scale towers and hang banners to promote the respective causes we worked for. We sat in endless workshops discussing the differences between tactics and strategies, between protest and civil disobedience, between conversion and coercion. In the evenings, we sat around a campfire with a couple of guitars and sang everything from classic rock songs of the sixties to Hindi oldies of the seventies to Tibetan pop songs of the nineties.

Throughout this weeklong camp, I found myself drawn to one particular tree. We called it the magic tree. It was a small tree, a very small tree, no taller than a tall man and barely worth being called a tree. It was actually more of a shrub, a yellowish pigmy all but forgotten amid the giant and proud Deodars that populate the hillsides of Dharamsala.

The tree, or rather the plant, bore these small green pearl-like things that tasted like grass but smelled like marijuana. My friend Kodo Sawaki, an American whose Zen Buddhist master renamed him after the legendary Japanese monk and whose real name was Chuck MacAdams, was with me. We both lived in New York and the two of us used to smoke up in my apartment in Flatbush. We were curious about the green pearls. We placed a small dose of the pearls in a pipe and smoked it. The pearls burned just like tobacco but smelled much better. We were thrilled. The green pearls gave you a good high.

And then it started. I began to see things. On the second evening of the camp, the classical singer Chusang Kyipa performed for us at the campfire. She had the most exquisite voice this side of the Himalayas, and her melodies ebbed and flowed like waves in the sea, evoking memories of our land on the other side of the mountains. As the darkness of the evening thickened into the blackness of the night, she concluded her singing and we all thanked her and said goodbye. A few of us including my friend Kodo Sawaki went to escort her to her taxi, which was waiting in the parking lot of the neighboring nunnery. 

We walked in single file through the narrow path in the bush. I was second from the last. I had a flashlight with me, one that I had expressly bought from Marshalls just before I left New York, but the guy walking behind me did not. I kept pointing the flashlight forward and backward so that we both could see in the dark. Once we got to the taxi stand, there was more light coming from the nunnery compound. I turned around but the person walking behind me wasn’t there any more. 

“That’s weird,” I said to the others. “There was one more guy behind me but it seems he just gave up and went back to the campfire.”

“No, Palden la,” said Bablu, the charming son of the Thakur family, who disappeared in the daytime but reappeared without fail at the campfire sing-alongs. “There was no one behind you, it was just the four of us to begin with.”

At first I thought Bablu must be mistaken. But he insisted that it was just the four of us all along—himself, Kodo, Chusang Kyipa, and me. I could see from my friends’ faces that they all felt a little bit uncomfortable, but we didn’t talk about this incident any more. We were all quiet on the way back to the campfire. I don’t remember who walked at the end of the line this time, but it definitely wasn’t me. We stayed close together, bumping frequently into each other. The walk back seemed to take much longer.

I

The next day, in the very late afternoon—actually it was more like early evening—I walked by where the Thakur family kept their cows. I was trying to be alone for a moment to clear my head between trainings and workshops. I saw one of my colleagues, Tsomo, by herself under the plum trees, holding her face in her hands. I couldn’t see her face clearly, but her shoulders rose and fell as if she was sobbing. Yes, she was crying, there was no question. 

I walked toward her. I wanted to ask her what was the matter. If I couldn’t help, I could at least comfort her. But as soon as I started walking, I stopped. Maybe she wouldn’t want the intrusion. Maybe she just wanted to be left alone for now. Yes, of course, give her some space, I told myself and walked away. 

The following day, Tsomo seemed completely fine. So I was right, all she needed was some space and privacy to find her footing. Whatever the cause for her tears, she was now back to her normal happy self. 

“So, Tsomo, what happened? Why were you crying yesterday?” I asked. Since I had already given her some privacy the day before, I couldn’t resist being a little nosy now. 

“What?” She had a genuinely confused look on her face. 

“It’s ok, I won’t tell anyone,” I said. “I saw you there under the plum trees yesterday evening.”

“What!” Her confusion turned to astonishment. “It must have been somebody else.”

“No, I was there. I saw you, and you were crying quite seriously. I came over to talk to you but then I didn’t want to disturb you, so I left.”

“OK, guess what, Palden,” she said, shaking her head. “Either I’m losing my memory, or you saw someone who was not me.”

I felt a sudden chill. Or you saw someone who was not me. 

I hadn’t seen her face but the crying girl had looked exactly like Tsomo. If it really wasn’t Tsomo, then who was it? 

I

I never found out who it was. Neither the man walking behind me when we were escorting Chusang Kyipa to her taxi, nor the crying girl who looked like Tsomo but wasn’t her.

But it wasn’t over yet. On the last night of camping, I stayed at the campfire well past midnight. I was one of the last people to leave the campfire every night. When everyone had gone to bed, I poured a bucket of water on the fire, buried the embers, and separated the half-burned pieces of wood from each other.

I had pitched my tent close to a thicket of bamboo trees. I unzipped my tent and crawled inside. I had been drinking beer. Unlike most Tibetans, I had a pretty high tolerance for alcohol so I was clear-headed but I felt good and I fell asleep immediately. It was a dreamless sleep, which I liked much better than a sleep full of dreams, because dreaming took up so much energy. I preferred to be awake when I dreamed.

That night, I was awakened from my sleep by the sound of light snoring. In the faint gray skylight that penetrated the thin skin of my tent, I saw a man sleeping next to me. I was in my usual sleeping-Buddha position, with my head placed on my right hand. As a schoolboy at Upper TCV, I had consciously slept that way, in the position the Buddha had chosen for his long, unending sleep. I was no longer a believer in the conventional sense, but it had become a habit for me to sleep like that. I blinked. The man was lying right in front of me. I could clearly see his left profile. It was the face of a middle-aged Indian man, thin and dark, with a white-and-gray stubble that looked like he hadn’t shaved in a few days.

But what the hell was he doing in my tent? Was he a drunkard who had lost his way and stumbled into my tent? There were a few Indian villagers in the neighborhood, I was aware, some of whom must surely have drinking problems and smart wives who refused to open the door if their husbands returned home too drunk too late.

Or maybe I was hallucinating. I had smoked a small portion of the green pearls from the magic tree that day. That must be it. That had to be it. I was certain. In which case, the man was not really there, he was just a projection of my own mind. So I closed my eyes for a long moment. The prayers that I used to say in school came back to me and I repeated the mantras silently, knowing that the hallucination would be gone by the time I reopened them.

After what felt like a lifetime, I opened my eyes. The man was still there. He was sleeping in the same position, with his face turned upward to the sky, as peaceful as a baby, snoring so softly that he should not have woken me at all.

Well, there was only one way to prove that I was hallucinating. I would have to touch him with my hand. Let me prove it, I told myself. I was intrigued by the possibility of catching my own hallucination red-handed, my own sense of touch proving its superiority over my sense of sight. The command traveled from my brain through my nerves to my muscles for my hand to obey.

But before I could move my hand an inch, something stopped me cold. “What if?” It was the small voice of reason, or unreason, in a remote corner of my mind. What if the sleeping man was neither an illusion nor a real person? What then? My caution wrestled with my curiosity, and I lay there, silent and unmoving, except now my heart was suddenly beating loudly and wildly in my chest.

At that moment, I noticed something odd about the man’s face. He seemed to have no nose. Indeed, there was a dent where his nose should have been. But his noseless face was still the most peaceful face I had ever seen. My own peace had been shattered, however, and I would have given anything at that moment to force myself into the oblivion of sleep. In spite of my heart racing like death and beating like a drum, I miraculously managed to fall asleep by sheer will power and concentration.

It was morning and blindingly bright when I woke up. I was alone in my tent. To my right was my black suitcase, extra-large and taking up too much room in the tent. There was no space even for a cat to lie down, much less for a man to sleep. So I had been hallucinating after all. It was clear. All that sweat and fright for nothing, I thought.

Later that day, while saying goodbye to the Thakur family, I shared a cup of tea with Bablu. I jokingly told him that I saw a ghost in my tent last night. He laughed cheerfully—he seemed incapable of doing anything cheerlessly—and said, “Where did you pitch your tent by the way?”

“Just below those bamboo trees, not far from the camp fire.”

“Well, now that you’re leaving, it’s Okay to tell you,” he said. “Someone died in the bamboo trees a while ago. We didn’t know him. I think he was a local nobody from a nearby village.”

“How did he die?” I asked, blowing lightly on my tea to cool it down.

“They say he got in a fight and the other guy smashed his nose in with a cricket bat. He died on the spot.”

A lump grew in my throat. I put the cup down. I could hardly breathe for a moment.

“Is something wrong? Now you look like a ghost!” laughed Bablu.

He clearly did not believe in ghosts. Of course, neither did I.

I I I