@@CHAP@@ Prologue
IN 1992 I MOVED to a small Himalayan village called Mashobra. Later that year, I began to travel to the inner Himalayas, to the Buddhist-dominated regions of Kinnaur and Spiti. These places were very far from Mashobra, but travel to them was easy and cheap: rickety buses that originated in the nearby city of Simla went hundreds of miles, across high mountains and deep valleys, to a town near India’s border with Tibet. I often went on these long journeys attracted by nothing more than a vague promise of some great happiness awaiting me at the other end.
I remember my first trip. The monsoons had just ended, with several dull weeks of fog and rain abruptly cancelled out by a series of sharp clear days. On that chilly, bright morning, the bus was late and crammed with nervous Tibetan pilgrims, peasants and traders, its dusty and dented tin sides already streaked with vomit.
Luck, and some pushing and shoving, managed to get me a seat by the window; and then, after that bit of luxury, the crowd, the bad road and the dust seemed not to matter. Everything I saw – the sun leaping across and through dark pine forests, the orange corn cobs drying on slate roofs of houses lost in immense valleys and, once, a tiny sunlit backyard with a pile of peanut shells on the cowdung-paved ground – seemed to be leading to an exhilarating revelation.
The day flew quickly past my window. But evening came cautiously, and the bus lost some of its cranky energy as it struggled up a narrow twisting road into the Sangla valley. Pink-white clouds blurred the snow peaks of the surrounding tall mountains as the river in the ravine below roared. The valley broadened at last. The mountains became even taller and more self-possessed. Long shadows crept down their rocky slopes and then over the green rice fields beside the river. Lights shone uncertainly through the haze ahead. Then, a long curve in the road brought them closer and revealed them as lanterns hanging from the elaborately carved and fringed balconies of double-storeyed wooden houses.
The bus began to climb again; the houses and the riverside fields receded. Boulders now littered the low barren slopes of the mountains where occasionally a glacier had petered out into muddy trails. Finally, at the end of the flinty snow-eroded road, the air growing thinner and thinner and Tibet only a few desolate miles ahead, there was a shadowy cluster of houses on a hill.
I was panting as I walked up a narrow cobblestone ramp. The bluish air trembled with temple bells. But the sound came from some other temple, for at this temple – shyly nestled under a giant oak and festooned with rows of tiny white prayer flags – there was only an old man hunched over an illustrated manuscript, a Tibetan, probably, judging by his face and the script on his manuscript, whose margins shone a deep red in the weak light from the lantern next to him on the platform.
The temple, though small, had a towering pagoda-like roof; the gable beams ended in dragon heads with open mouths. The carved wooden door was ajar and I could see through to the dark sanctum where, serene behind a fog of sweet-smelling incense, was a gold-plated idol of the Buddha: a Buddha without the Greek or Caucasian visage I was familiar with, a Buddha with a somewhat fuller, Mongoloid face, but with the same high brow, the broad slit eyes, the unusually long and fleshy ears, and the sublime expression that lacks both gentleness and passion and speaks instead of a freedom from suffering, hard won and irrevocable.
I had been standing there for a while before the old monk raised his head. Neither curiosity nor surprise registered in the narrow eyes that his bushy white eyebrows almost obscured.