Shari

AT THE TIME, the chieftain’s wife was looking everywhere for me.

If he’d been home, Father wouldn’t have stopped me from playing this sort of game. But Mother had been in charge of the household for the past few days, and things were different. In the end, the servants found me in the orchard. The sun was high overhead, and the snow was blindingly white. My hands were covered in blood as I gnawed on the birds tiny bones. Together with the slaves children, whose faces and hands were likewise blood-spattered, I returned to the estate house. The smell of fresh blood threw the watchdogs into a frenzy. At the gateway I looked up to see my mother standing at the top of the stairs, staring down sternly. The little slaves wilted under that gaze.

I was sent directly to the upstairs fireplace to dry my clothes.

Soon after, the cracks of a leather whip reverberated in the courtyard, like the sound of a hawk racing across the sky. At that moment, I think, I must have hated my mother, hated the wife of Chieftain Maichi. Resting her cheek on her hand, as if she had a toothache, she said, “Those aren’t low-class bones in your body.”

Bone, a very important word here, as is another, root, which means about the same thing.

But the word root in Tibetan is short and abrupt: nyi. Bone, on the other hand, has a proud sound: shari. The natural world is made up of water, fire, wind, and air, while the human world is made up of bones, or roots. As I listened to Mother and soaked up the warmth of dry clothes, I started to ponder the issue of bone but got nowhere. Instead, I heard the thrushes trying to spread their wings in my stomach and the whips lashing my future livestock; tears began to flow from my young eyes. The chieftain’s wife took that as a sign of self-reproach, so she rubbed my head, and said, “Son, you must remember that you can ride them like horses or beat them like dogs, but you must never treat them like humans.” She thought she was pretty smart, but I think even smart people can be stupid sometimes. I may be an idiot, but I’m better at some things than other people. As I mulled this idea over, I started to laugh even though my face was still damp with tears. I heard the steward, my wet nurse, and the maidservants asking what was wrong with the young master, but I didn’t see them. I thought I’d closed my eyes, but in fact they were wide open. So I cried out, “My eyes are gone!”

By which I meant I couldn’t see anything.

The eyes of the chieftain’s son were all red and puffy, and even the tiniest light stung like needles.

Monpa Lama, a specialist in healing arts, said it was snow blindness. Kindling a spruce branch and some herbs, he smothered my eyes with pungent smoke, as if avenging the thrushes. Then the lama respectfully hung a portrait of Bhaisajya-raja, bodhisattva of healing, in front of my bed. I soon stopped screaming, quieted down, and fell asleep.

When I woke up, Monpa Lama brought me a bowl of clean water and, after closing the windows, told me to open my eyes and describe what was inside the bowl. I saw flickers of light, like stars in the sky, emerge from bubbles on the surface. Then I saw plump kernels of barley at the bottom of the bowl releasing the glittering bubbles. Before long, my eyes felt much cooler.

Monpa Lama kowtowed to the bodhisattva of healing to express his gratitude before gathering his things and returning to the sutra hall to pray for me.

I slept for a while but was awakened by the thuds of someone kowtowing outside. It turned out to be Sonam Tserang’s mother, who was kneeling before the mistress to beg forgiveness for her wretched son.

“Can you see now?” Mother asked me.

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

With this affirmation, the chieftain’s wife said, “Take the little bastard down and give him twenty lashes.”

One mother thanked another, then went downstairs. Her sobs reminded me of bees buzzing among flowers, and made me wonder if summer was here.

Oh, well, let me continue with my thoughts on bone, since I’m stuck here for a while.

In the place where our religion came from, bone was called “caste.” Sakyamuni, the Buddha, came from a high noble caste in India. On the other hand, in the place where our power came from—China—bone was considered to be something related to thresholds, a difficult word to translate accurately, but which probably refers to the height of one’s door. If that’s the case, the door of the chieftain’s family should have been very high. My mother came from a lower-class family, but cared a lot about such things after entering the Maichi household. She was always trying to cram them into her idiot son’s head.

I asked her once, “If our threshold is so high, does that mean we can go in and out of the clouds?”

She gave me a wry smile.

“Then we’d be fairies and gods, not chieftains.”

With a comment like that from her idiot son, she smiled even more wryly, obviously disappointed. The look on her face was meant to make me feel guilty over my failure to amount to anything.

Actually, Chieftain Maichi’s estate house was nearly a hundred feet high, with seven stories, a roof, plus a basement dungeon. The many rooms and doors were connected by a series of staircases and hallways, as intricate as the affairs of the world and as complex as the human heart. Built atop a winding mountain range where two streams converged, the house occupied a commanding position overlooking dozens of stone fortresses on the riverbank below; the feng shui was perfect.

 

The families living in those stone fortresses were called Kabas, and all belonged to the same bone, or shari. In addition to tilling the land, they answered to the chieftain whenever they were needed for work around the estate. The Kabas were also messengers for the Maichi chieftain’s territory, some 360 li from east to west and 410 li from north to south, with more than two thousand families residing in three hundred fortresses. The Kabas have a saying: “The feather on a letter from the chieftain will set your buttocks on fire.” When the gong sounded at the estate, summoning someone to deliver a message, a Kaba was required to get on the road immediately, even if his mother were on her deathbed.

Looking far off down the river valley, you could see fortresses nestled in the valley and on the mountains. The people there farmed the land and tended their herds. Every fortress had its own headman, with varying ranks. These fortresses were controlled by the headmen, who were in turn governed by my family. The people controlled by the headmen were serfs, a class with many people who shared the same bone. They could move up and increase the weight of their bones with aristocratic blood, but mostly they went down. And once that happened, it was hard to turn things around, for the chieftain liked as many serfs to become bonded servants as possible. The family slaves were livestock, which could be bought and sold or put to use at will. It’s not difficult to turn free people into slaves; setting up a rule targeting the most common human frailties will do. It’s more foolproof than a seasoned hunter springing a trap.

That’s exactly what had happened to Sonam Tserang’s mother.

She was the daughter of serfs, which meant that she was a serf as well, and the chieftain could extract tribute and labor from her only through a headman. But she became pregnant out of wedlock, thus violating the law against illegitimate children, and turned her son and herself into bonded slaves.

Someone once wrote in a book somewhere that the chieftains had no laws. True, we didn’t put everything down on paper, but a rule was a rule, and it was fixed in the people’s minds. It was more effective than a lot of things that are written down. I ask, “Isn’t that so?” And a booming voice comes to me from a distant place, deep in time: “Yes, it is so.”

In any case, the rules in those days were set up to move people down, from freemen to slaves, not the other way around. The nobility, with their heavy bones, were the artists who created these standards.

The bone separates people into high and low.

Chieftain.

Beneath the chieftain are the headmen.

The headmen control the serfs.

Then come the Kabas (messengers, not couriers). At the bottom are the family slaves. In addition, there’s a class of people who can change their status any time they want. They are the monks, the artisans, the shamans, and the performers. The chieftain is more lenient with them than with the others; all they need to avoid is making the chieftain feel that he doesn’t know what to do with them.

A lama once said to me, “When facing evil, the Tibetans who live in the Land of the Snows cannot tell good from bad, like the quiet Han Chinese. When there is nothing to be happy about, the Tibetans revel in joy, like the Indians.”

China is called Gyanak in our language, meaning “Land of Black Robes.”

India is called Gyaghar, Land of White Robes.

That lama was later punished by Chieftain Maichi because he was always pondering questions that no one wanted to think about. He died after his tongue was cut out and he suffered the anguish of being unable to speak. As far as I’m concerned, the time before Sakyamuni was an age of prophets; after him, we no longer needed our brains to think. If you believe you’re someone special, but weren’t born an aristocrat, then you need to become a lama and paint pictures of the future for people. But you must hurry if you have something you feel you must say about the present, or about the future, because you won’t be able to say it after you lose your tongue.

Can’t you see all those rotting tongues that once wanted to say something?

Sometimes the serfs have something to say, but they hold back until they’re about to die. Here are some good deathbed expressions:

“Give me a drink of mead.”

“Please place a small piece of jade in my mouth.”

“The day is breaking.”

“Ah-ma, they’re here.”

“I can’t find my feet.”

“Heaven, ah, heaven.”

“Spirits, oh, spirits!”

And so on.