Chapter 6 Finding Gods

October 7

Late in the morning in Chatra Bharu, farther east up the Chandra River, I stopped for tea and chatted in Hindi with the Tibetan man who ran the chai shop on the side of a very dusty road. The hamlet is a single unoccupied government house and a tea stall, itself no more than a ragged army surplus tarp attached to the building’s mud-brick wall. Not much reason to linger. The man, maybe ten years older than I, was a scruffy fellow in dusty jeans and a loose, well-patched woolen shirt. He had just finished shaving but the job was erratic. He had only a broken shard of mirror to work with, and dark hair sprouted in knotted patches along his jaw. Across his cheeks he had applied a thick layer of glistening coconut oil. His face shone as if he’d just finished running a marathon.

We talked slowly in Hindi. His name was Pema, Tibetan for lotus, the flower that rises blooming out of the swamp’s decomposing muck. He told me he had lived in Dharamsala for almost ten years and had worked as a cook, even preparing food for the Dalai Lama. I asked what the great master enjoyed eating,

Lahaul AND Spiti, Himachal Pradesh, India

“Everything!” he said with a huge grin.

His Holiness has a healthy appetite but according to Pema he particularly enjoys momo, the half-moon shaped meat and vegetable stuffed dumplings that are relished throughout the Himalayas.

Maybe sensing my interest, Pema leaped from the bench where we were enjoying a cup of sweet chai and declared in English, “I make you Dalai Lama momo!”

I protested but he wouldn’t listen and strode off to his kitchen, a tiny building to one side of the tea stall that I had assumed was the outhouse. I followed him into the room’s kerosene reek and watched the man transform from a dishevelled chai-wallah to a self-assured cook. He beamed in the light of the one sooty window. Spices, vegetables, grains and oils were milled, mixed, sieved and pounded. He was so caught up in the cooking that he completely ignored me. I returned outside and lay in the shimmering heat of the noon sun until, an hour later, he emerged from the darkness bearing a platter of momo artwork.

He placed the tray delicately on an unsteady three-legged stool in front of me. The dozen, translucent dumplings gave off an aroma that would have made the most fulfilled salivate. Through their pale skin of flour and water I saw a matrix of green, gold, orange and red: chilies and coriander, tumeric and garlic, carrots and spinach. I could have wolfed them down, but they were arranged in such perfect symmetry, each momo a ray of steaming sun radiating from a mound of saffron carrot chutney.

I stared at them for half a minute. They were beautiful. Pema was silent, rubbing his hands against his greasy apron. I placed one in my mouth. I bit the juicy pocket and the contents melted on my tongue. I exhaled the vapour and smiled. My friend’s face lit up.

Pema had put his entire effort into producing food for someone he had only just met and would probably never see again. He presented his creation in the same spirit he had cooked for the man who embodied his beliefs. His momos were an offering not just to me but to the workings of dharma; they were a pure gift that would return to him in some future life. For twenty minutes in the dazzling midday sun I savoured his offering.

Near the bridge at Batal I happened upon two men laid out on top of a pile of fifty, overstuffed burlap sacks. It was twenty-five kilometres in either direction to the nearest house. I stopped, we shook hands, they offered me some of the flat tsampa bread they were eating and I asked them why, in the middle of nowhere, they had so many bags and what was inside. The younger of the two pulled himself up from his relaxed position, thrust his hand inside the nearest sack, pulled out a dozen dark brown pellets and exclaimed, “Sheet!”

I took the handful of hard balls, rolled them around in my hand and realized that the men were straddling fifty sacks of sheep shit. The dung would be transported by the next available open truck back to their village and there it would be sold as fertilizer and fuel. To me this collection was nothing short of a miracle. Ovine excrement varies in size from that of a pea to that of a marble; to load fifty large bags in an area where I could see neither sheep nor grass was something exceptional. I asked the older man how they’d done it. With a ratty fur cap of goat or maybe marmot hide perched on one side of his bald head, he said, “Chutsu mangpo,” a long time.

The tattered gravel road between Lahaul and Spiti links two of India’s most remote districts. The band of mountains along the Tibetan border is India’s least inhabited region. It was hard to believe I was in the world’s second most populous nation, a country that boasts over a billion people and two million kilometres of roads. There had been no traffic at all that day. But as I wound my way up the nineteen switchbacks that lead to the Kunzum-la, a metallic clatter and grind cut the silence. Around a bend towards me, inching cautiously along a path that barely accommodated their breadth, came four sturdy, snout-nosed trucks. They were the ubiquitous Tata 1210 lorries, a utilitarian, ’60s-design Mercedes successfully transplanted to the subcontinent. With over a million of these carriers on the road, the 1210 has replaced the buffalo and the horse as India’s primary goods hauler. Painted in saffron, green, blue, purple, pink and yellow, their air horns blaring, sparkling mylar film tassels fluttering from their mirrors, the chain of vehicles making their way down the sixth highest road pass in the world resembled more a carnival than a convoy.

In India truck bodies are delivered as bare-bones chassis: wheels, frame, engine, a roofless, seatless cab and a standard, bulbous, saffron orange hood. The buyer finishes the vehicle and, other than the standard colour of the hood – orange being the colour of Hindu India – every aspect of the truck is customized by the purchaser. What left the factory as stock issue becomes as individual as the owner. The box, fabricated undoubtedly by a local sheet metal workshop, will be painted with flowers and animals, pictures of beaches and harvest-rich fields, images to soothe the ride. Other drivers have race cars or jet fighters fashioned on their cabs; these are the top guns of the road, the trucks you want to steer clear of. The swing gate at the rear of the box will be lettered, in Hindi, Urdu and English, with admonishments for any vehicles following behind.

“Horn Please”

“Dip Lights”

“40 Km/H Max Speed”

“Ride With Shiva”

To enter the cab of a Tata truck is to enter the driver’s home. In the area between the front seat and the rear bulkhead lies a narrow, vinyl-covered bench. In this one-metre by two-metre space the driver and his assistant, usually a preadolescent boy from a poor family, will sleep, cook, eat, play cards and tell stories. The dark panelled rear wall is decorated with posters of favourite Bollywood stars. Each night, in whatever far-flung area of India the team finds itself, they drift off to sleep mutely serenaded by the well-endowed maidens of the Hindi silver screen. The dashboard, on the opposite side of the moving home, positioned above the instrument panel and overlooking the road ahead, is reserved for framed photos and glued-down statuettes of gods and gurus. Sometimes these icons, no more than the size of an outstretched hand, are complete dioramas: plastic, golden-coloured gods and goddesses in intricate bas-relief temples, circumscribed by angels and elephants and lit by haloes of blinking red LED lights. Nighttime is for dreaming. Daytime is steered by faith in the gods.

Through the dusty windshields I could see the drivers were as surprised to see me as I was them. The entire convoy came to a shuddering, air-brake hissing halt. Out jumped the drivers and their helpers, surrounding me in a cloud of diesel and bedi smoke. The men, surprisingly thin for truckers, smiled through three-day beards and bombarded me with questions.

“My God, brother, are you alone?”

“Are you O.K.?”

“You must be crazy.”

They wanted to make tea in celebration of our meeting. I thought that four trucks stopped in the middle of a one-lane road on a 4,550-metre pass was not such a good idea, but they insisted no more traffic was due that day. They were the experts and we all climbed into the cab of the lead driver’s truck.

Choti, the vehicle’s assistant, got the kerosene stove burning in a burst of gold and blue flame. He was a Lilliputian boy with a spine so bent he had to twist his head sideways to look up at me. On the burner he placed an aluminum pressure cooker. Dilip, another driver, pointed his exquisitely long fingers at the stove and explained that without a pressurized pot at that altitude the water would not boil hot enough to make a good cup of tea. Another assistant, a feral-looking boy called Devinder, offered a stainless steel plate with a broken assortment of coconut biscuits.

All of them, including the preadolescent assistants, smoked cheroots. The cab was hot and sweaty, smelled of wet tobacco, coriander, fennel seed, unwashed clothes and the background reek of diesel. The wind whistled through the poorly sealed edges around windows and doors. Everyone was talking at once. I had expected to be jovially interrogated by the truckers, but instead everyone was asking everyone else questions in Hindi about me. I was a living, breathing, tea-drinking museum piece.

Chai in an assortment of glasses, steel mugs and chipped tumblers was passed around. Being the guest I got a dramatically stirred extra spoonful of sugar. The brew was sweet enough for the spoon to stand up in. The tea went down fast. The rate of conversation increased with the downing of the drinks and when everyone was finished I saw Kumar swiping his finger around his glass to get the last taste of sugar and with that motion, the crew, in a display of wordless synchronicity, evacuated the cab. I followed.

Outside we all shook hands, pummelled each other on the backs and shouted our farewells. The truckers climbed into their juggernauts, fired up their altitude-choked diesel engines, revved clouds of jet-black exhaust and zig-zagged like a saffron snake down the mountainside. The noise and smell followed them, drifting farther and farther away until eventually diesel was replaced again by dust.

October 8

From a cold and windy camp on the Kunzum-la I turned north and followed a good trail towards Chandra-tal, the largest lake in Lahaul and Spiti district. In summer it is bordered by green meadows and is one of the Himalayan shepherds’ favourite pastures, but by October the flocks had dispersed and the hills were brown and stony. The odd thorny shrub stands out only for its offsetting verticality. Chandra-tal’s broad finger of water, a kilometre long and five hundred metres wide, is unexpected in such high arid country.

I pitched my tent in a brisk wind that continued through dinner and subsided only when the sun set. I rested outside, leaning against my pack and relishing the silence. In the darkness I was very much alone. The black-billed magpies that had stood inquisitively on the crest of my nylon house and observed me eating my rice and dal had left with the sun. Even the marmots ceased their whistling.

On the hills opposite my camp I saw the moon’s first sign, its chromium rim edging over the black line of the earth. The pale light illuminated the bony slopes behind me. Two slivers had been cut from the disk’s perfect symmetry. Light crept down the hillside and across the lake’s surface, as if incandescent lava was crossing the water. Gradually, the moon’s reflection floated to the lake’s centre and hung there, framed in black light. My breath was deep and even, my eyes unblinking. I was too drawn to the subtle movement to let go, and then from the south a gust rattled the fabric of my tent, brushed my cheek, rippled the surface and shattered the mirror. The moon was replaced with a thousand glinting lights.

The lake that haunts me is Elk Lake. Every time I drive by it I mutter mantras in remembrance of Gareth.

That night in January when I arrived home from Europe after crossing eight time zones and having been hit with the knee-buckling shock of Gareth being gone I couldn’t sleep. It was raining but I had to see the lake, so at two a.m. I pulled on my shoes, threw on a waterproof jacket and waded into the wet, black night. I can remember the smudgey glare of the streetlamps and the little splash each footfall made on the soaking pavement. It took half an hour to walk to the lake.

The place was deserted. The odd car whooshed by on the highway that borders its eastern edge, but other than that it was quiet. No wind. I walked out onto the dock of the national rowing centre at the lake’s southern end. The pontoons swayed back and forth with my movement and made sucking sounds as if they were trying to release themselves from the water. At the end of the dock I could barely make out the far shore. Black water, black land, black sky only differentiated by shades of their darkness. It was a lonely place. Out there in the blackness there was nothing to hang onto, nothing solid visually, physically, psychologically. Gareth was still there in that lake, alone. God, that was sad. The poor boy, so cold, so all alone. I repeated his name over and over, just letting it run from my lips, letting it disappear into the darkness, “Gareth, Gareth, Gareth.” What a beautiful name. I repeated it loudly and softly until the words mixed with tears and eventually the tears took over. I returned wet and cold to the house where everyone still slept.

October 9

From Chandra-tal it was back on the same trail to the Kunzum-la and then east downhill to the Spiti River. The valley is dry, drier even than Ladakh, and bordered north and south by the same sedimentary and metamorphic mountains. The Precambrian rock is stratified in a thousand shades of ochre and terra cotta, umber and sienna. Golden autumn willows illuminated the erosion-scarred draws. The only water is the glacial-fed river, flowing clear and fast, pure snowmelt.

The Spiti Valley is the eastern half of Himachal Pradesh’s Lahaul and Spiti district. Like Zanskar and Ladakh it is part of the Tibetan diaspora. Its residents follow the same forms of Tibetan Buddhism and their language is derived from pure Tibetan.

In the afternoon I dropped into an easy rhythm, stopping only to drink water or appreciate the odd skeletal, knee-high bush of caragana or lonicera, tough alpine survivors, long out of flower. At one point I heard the clack, clack of slipping rocks and looked up to see a pack of wolves two hundred metres above me. Two silver backs and a trio of golds scampered away, unhurried.

I spent the night at Gyumu-thang, a 200-metre by 400-metre plateau of undulating grass hills in the crook of a bend in the Spiti River. I camped near a huge fin of rock chiselled with carvings similar to the Buddhist petroglyphs I’d seen in Ladakh and Baltistan. The Gyumu-thang boulder’s design concentrated on stupas and monasteries. It was primitive work, rough and shallow, the artistry of dedicated amateurs. But in it was a spontaneity that implied deep conviction. The images held devotional power that more polished efforts could not express.

Alongside the ten-metre-high stone was a cliff twice its height. I pitched my tent at its base. Mice burrows and the last silver shocks of caper blossoms showed amongst the rocky debris. The cliff acted as an echo wall for every noise within a kilometre and as the afternoon light crept down its surface, I listened to myself talk and heard the chuffing repeat of my kerosene stove.

Darkness came and with it a wind that funnelled along the escarpment, ripping past my tent, sending the loose nylon into fits so loud it was hard to think. The pitch kept up for an hour until the pale glow of moonrise filtered past the rock and then it suddenly ceased. But the crescendo was replaced by subtle chinks and whirs, gentle banshee wails that made me strain to hear more. Sternly I told myself that the echo wall was playing tricks on me, amplifying the carousing of marmots and mice, but in reality I was scared. I was alone. There was no one for twenty kilometres and in my fear solace lay with the chiselled stone ten metres away.

I found myself dwelling on the carvings. Fear had brought me to connect with a boulder sculpted centuries ago by men in similar circumstances. Far from home while herding sheep or goats, unsure of the power of their surroundings, doubtful of their ability to alter the negative events that hover in the background of everyday life, they had linked themselves to the land by working trusted symbols into it: the stupa, the architectural representation of the Buddha, and the monastery, the repository of the tradition’s wisdom.

That night I joined the shepherds I’d seen for years prostrating and chanting mantras on the high passes. I understood now it was not superstition or high religion that compelled them to show that respect. It was the need to connect with the environment, because the land is the undercurrent of the dharma, the most obvious place where people connect with the Buddha. By repeating their religious practice until it was part of them and in the process understanding the land on a multitude of levels, they integrated themselves with it. The land became family and there was protection in its fold.

October 10

For a mountain river the Spiti is surprisingly wide. Here and there bony plateaus cut from the cliffs to the waterside. On those flats ragged sheep graze. There was no need for fencing as the flocks were hemmed in on all sides by precipices. From river to ridge it is a landscape of layers. Often the tablelands are riven by creeks, some flowing, many dry. Seasonal waters have carved deep fissures through the loose earth and along the miniature canyons wind and water have shaped files of pockmarked hoodoos, medieval-like steeples that look to be the refuge of gargoyles.

Not that I saw any of those mythical creatures, but the Spiti Valley is a land of mirages. In the morning the river’s long straight lines enabled me to see three or four villages ahead. From the village of Hal I could see the regional capital, Kaza, more than twenty kilometres downriver to the east, but in the rarefied high altitude air I swore it was a quarter of the distance. Strangely, those depth misperceptions invert themselves after midday, as the temperature increases and features ahead disappear in waves of heat or dust kicked up by late-afternoon squalls. Distance in that environment is nebulous. You can interpret space infinitely; your mind knows a kilometre is a thousand metres, but a tired body wants those metres to pass swiftly and an occupied mind lets space move through it like water over sand. In such a realm of mirages distance is best measured one step at a time.

Following the rough road down a hoodoo-sided draw late in the morning I saw, across the narrow stream, a trailer-size, boxy, yellow air compressor and around it a huddle of construction workers lightly waving their hands in conversation and smoking bedis. They were upgrading the road, making it passable for Tata trucks and creaking buses. They were five hundred metres away by the circuitous road but only one hundred metres directly across the creek. They seemed to be ignoring me, so I ignored them and enjoyed the sense of my footfalls on the stony trail, always uneven yet consistently solid, each step a drop and gathering of my self, a movement forward …

Then …

BOOM!

One hundred metres away the cliff exploded and jagged rock spewed in a 180-degree arc. I cringed, threw my hands over my head and dropped headfirst to the ground. My pack rode over my shoulders and drove my face into the gravel. My senses were wrenched. Flight or fight. The aftershock rolled up and down the canyon, beating against my chest. The ringing in my ears was deafening. For a second I was newborn, without knowledge of past or present. I hovered.

The shock waves receded and slowly I rose. I dropped my hands to my hips and felt my legs. Everything still there? The explosion had coated me in a skin of powdery dust. As I stood pebbles fell from the folds in my clothes. The closest major debris, a shattered orb of pink-flecked river stone twenty centimetres in diameter, lay mockingly two metres away. Fear turned to anger. I strode down the road towards the crew who were now wide-eyed and talking agitatedly amongst themselves. They were gathered close to the compressor, as though there was refuge in its modernity. The hot bite of rage was climbing from the base of my spine.

“Who’s in charge here?” I shouted in Hindi.

No one stepped forward. Their faces dropped to the ground, but one man guiltily caught my eye. I stepped up to him.

“Why were there no signs about the blasting? Why didn’t anyone shout a warning when you saw me over there?” I demanded, pointing to the other side of the gorge.

The foreman endured my attack, his canvas-shoed feet scuffing stones, hands deep in his pockets. When I ran out of steam he waited, one, two seconds – he had experience with apoplectic interrogators – then looked up. His face had three days’ growth and his eyes were criss-crossed with a matrix of blood-red vessels. There was alcohol on his breath.

“Most sorry, sir,” he said. “We were not seeing you. We were not expecting anyone from that direction. No one is ever coming from that direction.”

He offered a weak, yellow-toothed smile.

The crew was not local. They had the thin, dark faces of northwestern plains Indians: Punjabis, Uttar Pradeshis, Biharis. His assumption was based on a few days or a few weeks of observation. It was his release from almost killing me.

But what could I do? I raised my hands in surrender, let out an exasperated groan, and stomped off.

From years in India I knew I had no recourse. The bosses were far away in Shimla or Delhi and any complaint to the police would be shuffled, with effusive smiles and handshaking, under the table. Foreigners involve reams of paperwork. There was nothing to do but put distance between me and them. I strode off, trying to remember the feeling of my feet on the ground.

In retrospect the confrontation rather than the explosion or the sound that rang in my ears for hours afterwards was what disturbed me most. The anger, something I hadn’t experienced in months, wrenched me from my contemplation; it brought me back to the daily grind of accusations and the laying of blame. In the end I knew I was right to walk away, to let the incident drift and recover the composure I had found in those mountains. Focusing on my steps was the best way to reconnect with the reason why I was walking alone through the greatest mountains on earth.

October 11

Ten kilometres farther down the valley from my campsite was Spiti’s regional capital, Kaza. From the west the village looks to be an orderly set of prefabricated tin buildings, a collection of squared-off soup cans in silver, red, and green set amidst a stony valley. From a distance, in the sun, they shimmer as if they don’t exist in this reality. After the mud-brick mansions of the upper valley, with their familial air and warm dark interiors, these were blatant imports. Strange, in such a land of extreme weather, that the Indian government uses steep-roofed monsoon designs and paper-thin sheets of corrugated iron from Uttar Pradesh and Bengal rather than indigenous techniques and local craftsmen.

After securing a room in a sheet metal guest house I went for a stroll and was relieved to discover, close to the river and far below the road, an old section to the town. I followed a maze of alleys down to a small bazaar. I needed supplies and at the first shop the young owner, Lobsang Phuntsok, invited me in.

My seat was surrounded by tea chests full of lentils, rice and sugar; dented metal bins on sagging wooden shelves brimmed with nuts and dried fruit. We sat behind a line of poorly cast aluminum pots and pans hanging from the ceiling, and looked out through the open, wooden-shuttered front doors. The place was comfortable, dim and dusty. It had the archaic, cluttered smell of gathered dry goods. Bundles of polyester rope in yellow, blue, green and orange hung theatrically from the ceiling. Colour prints of Hindu gods and moisture-eaten calendar photos of Swiss mountains wilted on the walls.

Lobsang offered tea. We drank and chatted. We munched on the almond-like kernels of apricot pits and shared pieces of heavy soda bread made from barley.

Lobsang was dressed in jeans and a jean jacket. His black woolen watch cap was embroidered with a New York Yankees logo. He was curious about the outside world. Our chat steered from nuclear bombs on the subcontinent to sitcom television, Bollywood, Hollywood and the rise of Hindu and Muslim religious fanatics. But we were constantly interrupted by the most interesting aspect of Lobsang’s shop, his customers.

Gangs of women, young and old, trooped in and out of the store testing my friend’s shop-keeping skill. Mostly they came from out-lying communities ten to fifty kilometres away. Lobsang said they ventured into Kaza only once every month or two. For them the trip was a major shopping expedition. They came in clusters of five or six, their shopping lists in hand, and from their shoulders hung battered nylon bags emblazoned with the logos of distant airlines and Delhi department stores. The bargaining was never aggressive but the women were persistent, returning four or five times over an hour to drop the price, rupee by rupee, of a kettle or a sack of beans. The negotiating was as much to gain face as about saving money. The talented bargainers had a revered place in the campaign and were consulted in chattering huddles between exchanges.

After each purchase Lobsang gave me a sideways glance and told me how much he had made on the transaction: five rupees on a pot, three rupees on a few kilos of sugar, fifty paise on a half-dozen stainless steel spoons. The women always left smiling. Hands were shaken and greetings were exchanged on behalf of shared relatives in distant villages.

When one of the groups left Lobsang shook his head. “They all know my costs. It’s the bargaining they enjoy.”

I asked if he ever made any big profits. He laughed and nudged me in the ribs. “Only when tourists come shopping.”

October 12

From Kaza I walked back up the Spiti Valley to Kyi Gompa, the largest monastery in the area. I had passed it the day before but it was too late in the afternoon to visit. The monastery sits atop a hill on the north side of the valley. The buildings are a tighter, more compact version of Karsha. When I was there it was in the throes of construction activity. A bamboo exoskeleton wrapped the 500-year-old prayer room and the screech of compressed-air tools drowned out chanting monks.

A young lama was designated to show me around. I followed him through a series of musty meditation cells and unlit alcoves crammed with statues and scroll paintings of fierce-looking deities. The monk offered little commentary. He had been press-ganged into being my escort and his heart wasn’t in it.

But in one of the smaller prayer rooms I happened upon a sepia-toned, black and white photo of the Kyi Rinpoche, the head of the monastery. It must have been taken soon after his enthronement as the boy in the picture looks to be four or five years old. In it he is seated in a cross-legged lotus position on the roof of the gompa. He sits straight-backed on silk cushions. His little body is draped in elaborate brocade, dragons and stylized clouds are embroidered on the cloth around his shoulders, snow lions and eight-spoked wheels of dharma encircle his chest. He wears the high pointed hat of the Geluk-pa school. It is an accessory that transports him centuries back in time. His torso is framed by two-metre-high rooftop tantric tridents and in the background are the thinly snowed peaks of late spring.

It is a staged shot, expertly exposed, an image you would remember for anthropological rather than artistic merits. But I was absorbed by it. What held me was the boy’s face. He has the cherubic features of a child, yet his eyes and mouth are of another person. Pursed and serious, his lips are those of a scholar trapped in debate. His eyes have a gaze that transcends time; in them is the glare of prophets. They are eyes you feel will never blink. The intelligence and confidence of one who understands his calling dwells inside the tiny body.

I never met the rinpoche but the image is etched in my memory; it returns to me when I wrestle with the concept of reincarnation.

Reincarnation is a bedrock concept of Buddhism. For Buddhists, the inevitability of life after death eliminates the fear of an end to this life, and in the openness of that individuals are free to concentrate on living the best they can. It is the accumulation of good deeds based around wisdom and compassion that leads Buddhists higher and higher up the ladder of rebirth until eventually, after many lives of struggle, they are reborn in a state of higher consciousness: nirvana.

For me the photo of the rinpoche is an icon in the orthodox Christian sense, a two-dimensional image that carries with it the power to make you believe. There is a child, a tiny body only recently released from his mother’s bosom, his little mouth now ready with answers, his clear, unwrinkled eyes penetrating, hard as diamonds. They are features beyond time, almost as if an accumulation of lives had concentrated in that being.

Reincarnaton is one of the reasons I was attracted to Buddhism. In the years after Gareth’s death, it had been impossible for me to believe that all the great and powerful energy that had constituted my brother could just disappear. Poof! How could that be? How could the teenage vitality of someone so loved vanish?

A Christian interpretation of his death told me that he must have gone to heaven, up there with the good men and women of my life, my Nana and Papa, my Gran and Granpa. But that still didn’t explain how all his positivity could just evaporate into thin air. In the years after his death I read widely about religion and death, and reincarnation seemed to offer some explanation.

From my readings Buddhism postulated the most complete portrayal of reincarnation. The mind of a deceased individual does not transfer directly into that of a newborn. Instead, the five aggregates of a person (form, sensation, perception, mental formations and consciousness) break down at death and these components reform with the aggregates of other deceased individuals and create a new being. Gareth was not existing as Gareth in some tiny body, but his spirit, the components of his being, were continuing in another form. There was solace in this for me, in the thought that all his great smiling, humorous, hard-working inquisitiveness was out there blessing others.

I walked back to Kaza through sunset. As night fell the stars, one by one, pricked through the enveloping darkness until by 7:30 p.m. the sky resembled a phosphorescence-riddled sea. On the horizon silhouetted mountains transformed into black-light vacuums, so dark they drew weight from the moonless heavens. Through it all wound the Milky Way, a trail of crystal smoke rising and falling in an infinite arc.

October 13

I followed the Spiti River twenty kilometres west and then cut north on the smaller Lingti River towards the village of Lhalung. The valley was desolate. Rain there is a rare occurrence and yet the river flowed thick and fast, nurtured by the glaciers hanging from the snow peaks on the border with Tibet. The village sits five hundred metres above the river, and its fields descend step by step to the water. The few people I saw in the paddies and around their houses gave me that shy smile Tibetans reserve for the unexpected. I asked an old lady for directions to the gompa and she pointed to the only dense patch of trees on the hillside.

In the midst of the copse was a pair of two-storied, flat-roofed buildings, whitewashed with red accents around the doors and up against the roofline. The compound was small, twenty metres by twenty metres, more of a lha-kang, or temple, than a monastery. Spreading over them was an ancient willow, its branches stroking and connecting the roofs of the two shrines. The tree was moving from blazing colour to hibernation and my footsteps kicked up clouds of golden leaves.

Tenzin, the twenty-something monk who had appeared within minutes of my arrival, unlocked the weathered main door, its jambs shone black from centuries of touch from sweaty hands. The lha-kang, he explained in halting Hindi, was more than seven hundred years old. I was taken aback. There are only a handful of Buddhist temples in India that old and I had never heard of this one.

From the midday light we entered the dusk of the sanctum. The central temple is a low, rounded structure completely surrounded by a narrow, enclosed passageway that devotees use to circle the inner shrine. In the walkway shards of frescoes peeked out from behind layers of adobe. It appeared that the hall had once been entirely decorated. Seven hundred years of history had been plastered over with mud.

We circled the shrine room using the outer hallway and returning to the front door entered the inner sanctum. In the half-light I saw life-size, three-dimensional statues pushing out from the walls. The central altar was dominated by weathered statues of the Nyingma triumvirate: Padmasambhava, the tantric missionary who founded the school and brought Buddhism to Tibet; Chenrezig, known in Sanskrit as Avalokiteshvara, the thousand-armed embodiment of compassion; and Lon Chenpo, the fourteenth-century philosopher monk who codified much of the Nyingma liturgy.

Tenzin sat on a cushion to one side of the statues and began a ceremony, or puja, reciting prayers and accompanying them with a hand drum and cymbals. I had not expected this. Outside he had materialized beside me still eating his lunch, but now I saw the bits of rice that had been stuck to his hands were washed away.

I sat cross-legged beside him. The only light was the refracted sun flushed through the open door. In the shadows I could just make out the monk’s face, and the statues were blurry phantoms. The space rippled with the thunk and ding of Tenzin’s music and the bass tone of his chanting. The vibrations shivered in the air around us. Tenzin continued and syllable by syllable, minute by minute I forgot my own hunger. I lost track. Time moved on until all of a sudden the music stopped. Tenzin cleared his throat, tucked his drum and cymbals into silk coverings and slipped them under the low table in front of his seat. He stood and left without a word or a wave goodbye.

I moved my hands from my lap, my fingers tingling. Slowly I twitched my toes, shook my feet, my legs and then my arms. I rose and made my way outside. Tenzin had gone back to his cell. From the doorway of his hut he waved and smiled, but turned and went inside before I got there. I walked on by. He wanted to be alone. So did I.

As I retraced my steps back down to the Spiti River I kept coming back to Lhalung, back to the feeling in my bones that that building was more than bricks and mortar. That night, camped on the banks of the Spiti’s southerly tributary, the Pin River, I began to make sense of it. I was able to step back and in my mind’s eye view it from far above. With that perspective I was able to imagine it for what it could be: an architectural mandala.

In Tibetan Buddhism practitioners use the mandala, generally a series of circular images, to visualize in meditation the steps along the path to higher consciousness. The best known images of Tibetan mandalas are drawn by monks on flat surfaces using coloured sand. These two-dimensional mandalas are layered in decreasing sized circles from their outside to the centre. In the Kalachakra mandala, for example, 722 deities, or manifestations of Kalachakra, are portrayed within a twelve-layered circle about two metres in diametre. But the mandala is more a psychological construct than a physical one, and could just as easily be a piece of landscape or architecture viewed with the correct mindset. At their core mandalas are universal maps, cryptographs that outline a way of understanding the universe and the individual’s place in it.

That evening, lying in my green-roofed tent, I visualized Lhalung as such a map. The exterior of the compound with its mellow light and gold-leafed fringe was everyday life, the place you need to move beyond to begin the process of understanding. The enclosed passageway, with its ancient wall paintings surrounding the inner shrine room, was where the search begins with those initial glimpses and realizations of powers greater than the self. The tiny pilgrimage that devotees make through the tunnel is a process of coming to terms with the power that the central deities represent. The inner sanctum, the area you move to after the journey around the passageway, is the home of gurus and gods. It represents the place all Buddhists want to reach. Being there, in a psychological sense, implies a realization of what the deities represent and how they relate to higher consciousness.

I lay in my tent for hours piecing this together, until finally sleep surprised me and my overactive imagination surrendered to my bone-tired body.

I woke in the middle of the night to the whisper of snowfall. It is the gentlest sound imaginable – the footsteps of a sleepy mouse or the exhalation of forgotten breath. I opened the tent flap to see the Pin River framed in lunar white; the snow-covered boulders on its shores looked to be downy spheres bracketing the river’s quick blackness.

October 14

Morning came with the sound of birds – “dzchit … dzcheet.” It was a pair of brown dippers close by my tent. I unzipped the door and saw them hopping on riverside rocks, their tiny talons wrapped in snow. The world outside was white, the perspective flattened by the dull light. I sat in my vestibule and made coffee and tsampa porridge as the river, black against the snowy borders, rushed by. I packed my tent in a hurry and trudged into swirling clouds of spindrift snow.

Five kilometres up the valley I reached Gulling village. I was drained from walking through calf-deep snow on the unplowed road. I arrived at the same time as the local bus from Kaza; the passengers stepped down unsteady and pale-faced. The ride up from the Spiti River through deepening snow must have been harrowing. But three men got out in a state of glee. Dark-skinned and mustachioed, wearing balaclavas, multiple scarves and heavy tweed jackets, they were a breed apart from the woolen-robe-wearing locals.

Once off the bus the three leaped up and down, clapped their hands, slapped each other on the back and threw snowballs in the air. It was grand to see such staidly dressed grown men acting like excited children. Following the calisthenics they came breathlessly into the dhaba where I had gone in search of chai. They ordered tea and in the tiny space sat down beside me on a bench by the window. The man to my left smiled, showing a line of huge, sparkling white teeth, and inquired in English what I was doing there. I told them about the walk and they nodded their heads gravely, muttering, “My God” under their breaths.

I asked them what they were doing in Gulling, and they said they were government servants auditing the accounts of the village council. All three – Sunny, Hari and Mukesh – were originally from Kolkata but for many years had been working for the central government in Delhi. I had to ask what they had been so excited about when they had gotten off the bus. Mukesh pointed outside, his face breaking again into a huge smile. “The snow, my friend, the snow.” None of the three had ever seen snow before.

It was another ten kilometres up the valley before I came to Kungri Gompa in late afternoon. The clouds that had brought the snow still hung close to the earth and the three large mudbrick buildings that make up the monastery seemed to float towards me out of the mist. Kungri was built in 1331 and is the only monastery in the Spiti Valley associated with the Nyingma Buddhist school.

As with Kyi Gompa new construction was underway; bags of cement, wooden concrete forms, stacks of iron rebar and piles of gravel, sand and dirt all lay as if abandoned around the buildings. The gompa was a mess. I was disappointed; it was not my image of a Buddhist monastery. The Karshas and Lamayurus were my archetypes – monolithic, unchanging architectural relics. I wanted the monasteries to be as timeless as the teachings. But it was selfish grumbling.

Buddhism teaches that all constructs, human or otherwise, are impermanent. For me to think that a building could be as eternal as the dharma was naïve. Everything changes, even the appearance of a religion. Concrete gompas, fibreglass sculptures of the Buddha, gaudy mass-produced posters, plastic gods glued to plastic dashboards – these are not what is important. At the heart of any religion is what the icons represent and to perceive that you must strip back personal ideas and encounter the imagery in the pure state out of which it was created. Mukesh, Hari and Sunny seeing snow for the first time – that was the state in which to view religious iconography.

Past the rubble I reached the main dukhang. I wanted to find someone to ask about a room in which to stay, and it was only when I was outside the main door that I heard the sound of a single standing drum beating away. I removed my shoes, unslung my pack and stepped from damp flagstones into a twilight-dark, gymnasium-sized hall. At the opposite end of the room, his back to me, facing a triumvirate of statues, was a single lama performing a prayer ceremony. He was draped in a thick burgundy cape of homespun wool, fuzzy with age. Butter lamps sputtered on the altar, illuminating his silhouette and lighting a golden aura around him.

I moved off to one side and sat on a woolen rug close to the back corner of the room. I felt voyeuristic but said nothing and let myself be taken by the drum and prayers. The old man’s instrument quivered with each strike of the bentwood stick. The sound hung in the chilly air. We were together for at least half an hour before the lama stopped his chanting.

He wiped his face with his hands, placed a burgundy and gold silk cover on his loose-leaf prayer book and inserted the drumstick into the instrument’s frame. He rose unsteadily, wavered in the vertical and shuffled his feet into a pair of thick, worsted wool slippers. He put his hands together in prayer and lifted his head to the statue of Guru Rinpoche on the altar. Then, finishing his prayer, he lowered his head, turned and pushed off across the polished timber floor. His woolen slippers glided easily on the floorboards. With a few pumps of his legs he skated past me, silent, like a ghost. His momentum stopped as he hit the doorsill and he converted his momentum into a couple of quick steps. With that he was gone.

I stood, a little dazed from the thirty minutes of silent sitting and from what I had just seen. Slowly I stood and went outside. It was pitch black. I still didn’t have a room and it was too late to set up my tent. I made for the first light I could see and was led to the monastery’s kitchen.

Tenzin, the man inside, was the lone caretaker of the monastery; his wife and son stayed at the family home in Kaza where he returned a few days a week. In Hindi he told me there were only a handful of lamas at the gompa and no official rooms for rent, but he offered to let me bed down in the storeroom behind the kitchen. He then generously offered me some of his rice and dal. We ate in silence and soon after I slipped into my sleeping bag on the flagstone floor of the storeroom. My stomach was full, my sleeping bag was laid in the corner of a warm room, I had seen things I would remember forever. I was blessed that night.

October 15

At sunrise I returned down the Pin River and followed the Spiti River east. My goal that day was thirty kilometres away, the monastery of Tabo. I was walking on a paved road with almost no traffic so I moved quickly, happy in the consistency of my steps. At one point in the morning I watched a golden eagle turning and turning above and wondered why it would choose this valley, a place of such meagre fertility. Why not fly south across the mountains to the harvest-thick paddies of Punjab or Uttar Pradesh? I looked around; stony ridges cut sharp lines on the horizon. The sky was a cloudless aquamarine. The river was unceasing, the colour of precious stone. The air was crisp, even in the piercing sunlight. There was openness and simplicity in that landscape.

It was almost dark when I arrived in the village by the monastery. I quickly found a room at the monastery hostel and shared a meal of rice, dal and fresh chilies in the smoky kitchen with the family managing the rooms. I was the only guest.

Tabo was established in 996 by Lotsawa Rinchen Zangpo, the same great translator who founded Lingshed Gompa and 108 other monasteries and temples in the western Himalayas. Tabo is particularly important for Tibetan Buddhists because the complex’s nine temples and the artwork inside them have been built, renovated and reworked again and again over the past 1,100 years. The result is that the Tabo temples are the most complete chronology of the development of Himalayan Buddhist art in the world.

It is a small miracle that Tabo survives. All but a half dozen of the 108 temples and monasteries that Rinchen Zangpo founded have been destroyed, but Tabo is untouched. This is surprising because Spiti, which had traditionally been ruled by Tibet and then Ladakh, from the late seventeenth century onwards suffered a series of invasions from warring Hindu states south of the Himalayas, first from the Kulu Valley and then from the Dogra people of Punjab state. Even in the past fifty years, only the quirk of an arbitrary political boundary that makes Spiti part of India rather than Tibet has spared it the destruction of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Tabo Gompa now stands dignified but alone.

I had heard much about the artwork at Tabo, but detailed descriptions can lead to great expectations and I wanted to see the gompa with the eyes of a child. My first glimpse late that afternoon assisted in the process because from the main road, the original temples are a set of nine low, unornamented earthen mounds – primitive sandcastles – not what one would expect of one of the world’s great treasure houses of religious art.

That night after dinner I listened with the family in their kitchen to crackling news reports from the BBC World Service on the radio. It was the first time in weeks I had heard an extended conversation in English. I found I was having difficulty keeping pace with the words of the announcers. My mind was slowing down, something I was not unhappy about.

October 16

Early the next morning I walked to the compound. Tabo is known as the Ajanta of the Himalayas, in reference to the great Buddhist cave temples in Maharastra state near Mumbai. When arriving at Ajanta, in the tradition of Indian salesmanship, you are inundated with amateur guides harassing you to hire them for exorbitant rates. At Tabo I had expected some kind of official entranceway with written instructions and guides waiting by the gate. There was nothing of the sort. I wandered unobstructed into the temple area. There was no one there, but that also meant there would be no keys to enter the locked temples. I decided to circumambulate the complex, hoping someone would notice and take pity on me.

The buildings were smooth tan squares with curved edges and walls that tapered gently inwards as they climbed – so different to the jagged verticality of the surrounding mountains. Most were two-storey, mud-brick constructions freshly replastered with fine-grained golden adobe. In places the façade had contracted and cracked; spider-webbed lines flowed across the surfaces, translating unseen patterns from the submerged millennium-old superstructures. The entire compound was floored with the same unblemished mud. No trees or plants grew there. No garbage or leaves bucked in the breeze.

I continued circling the buildings in a clockwise direction. Tibetans call this a kora. The circumambulation of any shrine is considered auspicious. To round a religious object, and the sacred entity could as easily be a mountain or lake as a statue or temple, to view it from every angle and sense your relationship to it, and ultimately to absorb some of the power the object possesses, this is the essence of these pilgrimages in miniature.

Eventually a monk, only a boy, maybe sixteen or seventeen years old, approached me. He asked in broken English if I wanted to visit the main shrine room. I nodded and in response he jangled the keys hidden beneath his burgundy robes. The boy spoke only when spoken to. He had a recently shaved head and the razor had left small puckered nicks criss-crossing his scalp.

He unlocked the door to the largest hall, the Sug Lhakang, the Temple of the Enlightened Gods. I untied the laces on my boots and left them on the porch. He kicked off a pair of blue and white rubber thongs. We entered a dim alcove, then a passageway flanked by a pair of life-sized, sword-wielding terra cotta guardians. At their feet, before the closed double doors of the assembly hall, I shut my eyes. I was excited; I had read so much about this place and now I was here. I could smell the dust reeling in the ancient air and the cheap rose-water soap on the monk’s skin.

Deliberately I opened my eyes as the boy pushed through the inner door. Before me was a large cave-like room, cool and very, very dry. A shaft of light beat down from the single slit in the roof and, with the breeze from the open door, sun-shot dust motes flickered in the beam. I stepped in.

At the rear of the room was an altar, a metre high and covered in white and gold silk. This is where the Dalai Lama performs prayer ceremonies when he is at the gompa. On the altar was a framed photo of His Holiness. To either side of the dais were vertical, pigeon hole-like cases holding loose-leaf books wrapped in saffron brocade. This was the Tabo library: 40,000 handwritten, rice paper pages that reputedly predate the temple itself.

On the far side of the altar sat a four-bodied statue in silver and gold, each figure looking off in one of the four cardinal directions. It was a human-sized representation of Vairocana, the embodiment of the continuum of reality. He is the primordial Buddha, the Buddha that is with us life after life after life.

In horizontal file, partway up the four walls, shadowy three-dimensional images emerged from the darkness; statues of deities and bodhisattvas floated against a painted background. Above and below them the walls were covered with frescoes depiciting Buddhas, saints, teachers, monks, nuns, angels, kings, queens, mythical beasts, palaces, stupas, gompas, merchants and everyday people, men, women, children. The place quivered with stories but in the cold and silent half-light I couldn’t make the connection I wanted to. To compensate I moved closer to the wall. The images were smooth but not glossy, painted with ancient stone-ground colours, still grainy and colour-charged a millennium after their application.

I put my face breathing distance from the Buddhas and bodhisattvas and smelled the earth of a thousand years before: bricks and mud, pure water, bright air, a landscape full of gods.

I tried to listen. I put my ear close to the surface. I heard my own breath, felt my own heart thumping steady against mud bricks.

The space was neither alive nor dead but it throbbed with energy. With strange bodies evolving out of nothingness, fear would have been the simplest emotion but the thin air was weighted with something else, something I couldn’t quite identify – maybe it was compassion. I looked to the teenage monk. The beads on his roasary clicked as they slipped through his fingers.

I rounded the temple, circling the central shrine, enjoying the soft tread of my sock feet on the mud floor, a surface worn smooth by the passing of devoted millions. I felt the gentle bounce of my body adjusting foot to foot. A small dance caught me each time my heel rolled up and onto my toes. Blood flowing, temples pulsing, cool air leeching under my collar. I circled and circled the room. The statues tracked me. My thoughts slowed, my mind cleared. Experience was being let go of, and the faith of a millennium was rolling over me.

As I left the temple I offered my hand to the young monk; Namgyal was his name. We shook and it was a strange gesture, insignificant in relation to the gravity of where we had just been, but I needed something physical, something tactile to offset what I had felt inside the room. Namgyal’s fingers were talcum-powder soft.

In the hostel after lunch I debated if I should return to the temple. Would going back destroy what I’d experienced there? Maybe it was greed, but I went.

The temple, in the five hours since morning, had transformed. The sun was high and what had previously been a twilight grotto was now fully lit. In the light of day the statues on the walls had taken on personalities. The early morning light had created a uniform feeling in the temple but now the statues on the wall, the frescoes behind them and the figures on the altar were all emanations of the energy I had had so much difficulty identifying earlier on.

With the benefit of sunlight I studied the paintings behind the statuary. The murals were so detailed it took minutes to appreciate parts of single figures. From an artistic sense the walls were cluttered. Images were piled upon images and yet each piece was somehow balanced and connected: there was a harmony in the imagery, a pattern to the chaos. They made me want to learn more, want to understand what had motivated hundreds of artists to create that place. I thought of Lhalung, of how my neophyte mind had been moved and of how, for the initiated, Tabo, its larger, more intricate cousin, must hold exponential power.

That night I lay in my guest house bed staring at the concrete ceiling and thinking. Throughout my journey I had felt a spirit, a compassion in the landscape, and now I was experiencing that energy in human constructions. Lhalung and Tabo were not architecture holding religion; they were architecture being religion. It was all a very long step from my Presbyterian childhood.

Every Sunday morning we attended church in Belfast. Mass was a dour affair, everyone sitting ramrod straight on oak benches, women in hats, men in dark suits, the smell of old cigarettes, wet wool and the sour aftersmell of grandparents. I couldn’t stop fidgeting. I remember trying to sit on my devilish hands while my older brother poked me for a reaction. All around us were grey stone walls and the stern imagery of Scottish Protestantism – Victorian-era oil paintings of Jesus and his disciples and sober stained-glass windows backlit by a hazy sun. It was minimalist decoration constantly overshadowed by the wrath of God.

The priest on his altar was the room’s focus. I remember his tight collar, wet lips and aggressive body language. The atmosphere expanded and contracted with his breath. I feared him. He expounded from an impossibly thick Bible and pointed his finger at the Beyond. He was God’s representative. God in that church was a frightening old man.

But I knew another God. Every night, kneeling by my bedside, eyes clenched shut, hands clasped in prayer, I asked God to help in solving Ulster’s Troubles and I asked him to keep my family safe. God and I talked. It didn’t resolve the conflict – the killings went on – but we conversed. I enjoyed those nightly discourses. There was intimacy, a relationship beyond language, something that infused me with confidence.

That God receded from my consciousness when I gave up my nightly prayer. By the age of nine I had become too indoctrinated in the rational to believe in the efficacy of conversation with a nebulous old man in flowing robes. My fear of God, which in a subtle way heightened my attraction, disappeared when my family moved to Canada. Our churchgoing ceased. Without intimacy or fear there was no reason for me to follow that God. But a childhood in such a place leaves a mark. After Gareth died I went in search of what I had had before, the innocent discussions with the God in my bedroom. Maybe in Tabo, in the half-light of morning, with sixty-six terra cotta deities’ eyes upon me and a contented feeling that I couldn’t fully describe, maybe then I finally found that God again.