Lord Buddha, Grant Us Safe Passage

In the morning it seems like a dream, says Little Bat. As if the night before is an underwater world, a place where candles never waver and the moonlight hides you if you ask it to. Daylight I wake back in bed with my brothers. Our mother and sister already with the fire going, the three simple rooms we live in starting to warm. The only strange thing is that the bottoms of my feet are dirty, as if in the night I walk to the ends of the earth and back.

Over the next few days I hardly give that night any thought, though I know something is different. The warmth still echoing in my heart where the heat from the bowl of water touches it. I do all the things that are expected of me. I tease Pema, my baby sister, who is two years younger, chasing her around the yard as if I am a maddened yak. Only my mother notices a difference. She puts a hand on my forehead and asks if I feel all right. Yeah, I say. I walk outside and look up at the mountainside, scanning it for the faintest glow, but there is nothing. I know that if I walk to the cave that very instant it would be abandoned and empty as always. All the same I feel content. I touch my side where I am keeping the photo I find in the chest, tucked inside the waistband of my pants. It’s still there.

One day there is a knock on the door. When I come home with my brothers and our animals from the high pastures, our father is gone, our mother inconsolable. A group of soldiers comes and searches our house before marching our father away. I am seven. I both understand and I don’t understand. I know it is the Chinese. I know they hate us, are destroying us, that they disappear people, and now my father is gone.

Three days later he comes back. He looks the same on the surface, but there is something different underneath. That’s how it starts. They don’t tell us younger children anything so that we won’t accidently tell someone and ruin it. One night a few hours after we go to bed my mother rouses us from sleep. She tells us what to do. I put on every article of clothing I own. I help my little sister do the same. Pema is five years old. It’s hard to move. I feel hot and sweaty. Then a truck rolls up out front with its lights off. We take nothing with us. Absolutely nothing.

The truck drives us the many hours to Lhasa. We are my parents and my three older brothers and my little sister and me. We huddle among a herd of goats. After driving through the night we wake up in the city. There are so many buildings in one place! We walk down an alley and into the back of a restaurant. There is a man wearing a bandana so that we cannot see his face. He looks at my little sister and shakes his head. Lord Buddha, he says. Grant us safe passage. We stay in that restaurant all day, never venturing outside. I never see the Potala, the thousand-room palace of the Dalai Lama built on the side of Red Mountain.

The next day we take another truck up into the hills outside Lhasa. We walk for eleven days. Three days before we get to the pass, the landscape changes. We are at five thousand meters. The snow is up to my neck many times over. My sister and I are light. We can walk on top of it. My father and oldest brother and the guide kept falling in up to their waists. Then they have to struggle to get back out. The guide knows where we can stop to find food. There is food hidden along the way for travelers like us. We melt the snow for water. We also bring some tsampa with us, but it doesn’t last. Most days we walk twelve, thirteen hours.

At first we walk only at night to avoid the Chinese patrols. Then we are high enough that there are no patrols. The pass we are headed to is located at sixty-seven hundred meters. Everest is eighty-eight hundred meters. My sister is carried by the guide. My father often carries me.

Somehow Little Bat’s voice grows more scoured yet flat. It is like he is talking about something he hears, not something he lives through. Our party hits a crevasse, he says. All my brothers fall in it. The guide shines the light down into the endless hole. There is no sound. One minute they are there. The next they are gone. My mother sits down. She refuses to leave. I can hear her praying to the Green Tara, beseeching the Bodhisattva to intervene and keep us safe. The snow is rampaging around us. We have to press on, says the guide. The snow is coming down sideways. My mother won’t get up. The air is thin. Taking a single step is like walking forever. My mother never stands back up. We keep going without her.

Little Bat stops talking. It is the most I ever hear him speak, his voice as if scorched. In the firelight it looks as if there is blood on his teeth. Uncle tells us the rest of the story, how Little Bat’s father dies, then the guide, and then when there is no one left to carry them, how Little Bat tries to lead his sister down out of the mountains. Her hands big as apples, her fingers blackened and swollen until the skin splits. She never cries. She is beyond crying.

When Pema stops moving, Little Bat sits down in the snow and the darkness and digs out the photo tucked in his waistband, the one he finds on the mountainside in the secret drawer. He knows it is the reason the police come to his house and interrogate his father. He holds the image in his hands all through the night, and somehow he stays just warm enough. A Sherpa finds him in the morning, clutching a photo of the Dalai Lama. One month later when he reaches the Tibetan Children’s Village in Dharamshala, India, he receives the medical care he requires. All his toes are amputated. His voice permanently altered, his vocal cords frost-bitten. He is the only survivor of his family.

I feel a wave of anger crest in my brother, the fires of anger and its corollary, helplessness. In Tibet, it is illegal to possess images of the Dalai Lama, says Uncle. One can be jailed for invoking His name.

I try to imagine living under such conditions, but I cannot. This is the reason why too many of the faithful arrive at a place where they lose hope. Who can be expected to live in a world without the freedom to believe in that which sustains you? There are one hundred fifty-seven self-immolations by Tibetans since 1998, says Uncle. Does the world know this? Twenty-six of those who set themselves on fire are under the age of eighteen.