The Dalai Lama's Cat and the Power of Meow (5 page)

As I sat, purring very gently on the visitor's lap, it seemed to me that His Holiness's room, filled with TV lights and crew members, was becoming rather stuffy. The heat was making me feel positively dry-mouthed. And, following my lunchtime meal, I could do with a little drink. A customary glass of water had been provided for His Holiness's visitor on a side table, only a few steps away.

Without further ado I got up and stretched my front paws in front of me briefly. I stepped off the visitor's lap, onto the arm of the sofa, and down onto the side table. There, I got down on my haunches and proceeded to lap the water with relish.

I'd been doing this for only a short time when I became aware of a snorting noise from behind the cameras. Within moments there came another, similar sound. I looked up briefly, unable to perceive anything but darkness behind the glare of the lights. Things went quiet for a while, but as soon as I resumed my drinking—I was thirstier than I realized—there came the sound of breathless laughter, followed by a peculiar wheezing.

Then came a full-blown attack of the giggles. One of the female members of the crew was unable to contain herself any longer. It was as though the importance of
not
laughing during a live, global meditation broadcast led by the Dalai Lama made it impossible to do anything but that. Once one person was giggling, it became like a contagion. It seemed soon everyone in the room was snuffling, choking, emitting all manner of noises.

His Holiness and his famous interviewer raised their heads at the exact same time. The two of them glanced toward me, brows furrowed, before dissolving into laughter. The laughter was so infectious the interviewer had tears running down her cheeks. The Dalai Lama was laughing with unfettered amusement, both hands on his tummy.

Having finished drinking, I made my way off the side table and back onto the arm of the sofa. Then I walked across the interviewer's lap to the other side of the sofa. This provoked another round of laughter. What was so hilarious?

His Holiness gestured to her glass. “Would you like to have a drink?” he offered, prompting yet more hilarity.

“I think it's clear to everyone,” the celebrity interviewer finally managed to say through her chuckles, “that the meditation session didn't go quite as planned.”

“But very good medicine.” His Holiness laughed.

I was conscious that the cameras, as well as many pairs of eyes, were trained on me at that particular moment. I looked up, an imperious expression in my sapphire-blue eyes.

What was the big deal? Hadn't anyone seen a cat drink water before?

Later that afternoon I decided to get away from Namgyal Monastery and the chaos of all the TV people with their lights and cameras and endless, snaking cables. Instead I took myself off to another one of my favorite places, first introduced to me by Serena. It had come to have a personal significance much deeper than I would ever have imagined: the Downward Dog School of Yoga.

Perched on a hillside a short distance away, the studio directly overlooked the Himalayas. It had become something of a ritual for me to take my place on a wooden stool at the back of the late-afternoon class and watch the students, silhouetted against that spectacular backdrop, as they progressed through their sequence of stretches. Afterward, feeling more settled, they would step out the sliding doors onto a broad and spacious balcony. They'd gather around their teacher, the tanned and timeless Ludo, whose silvering, close-cropped hair and faint German accent gave him the air of a guru.

In the falling twilight green tea and conversation would flow freely, and up above us the icy peaks of the Himalayas would change color from molten gold to burnished red to faint pink—the same color as the frosting of Mrs. Trinci's cupcakes. All this was exactly the kind of gentle ritual that appeals to us cats.

It was at the Downward Dog School of Yoga that I had first met Sid, the handsome and enigmatic Indian man who had won Serena's affections. It was here, too, that I had noticed a small, black-and-white photograph of a Lhasa apso hanging on the wall. I had guessed it was probably the particular dog after which the studio had been named. I never imagined that it had anything to do with me.

Some months ago, I had had the most vivid dream of my life. In my dream I watched a much younger version of the Dalai Lama enter his rooms at the Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet. There had been a sense of danger and haste. His Holiness came over to me and, picking me up, explained that he had to leave Tibet because the Red Army was bearing down on Lhasa. He would hand me over, for safekeeping, to Khandro-la, a Tibetan lady accompanying him who had a kind but fearless face. He promised to find me again—if not in that lifetime then definitely in a future one.

It had been a dream truly startling in its implications. The most shocking of which, dear reader, was that in it I was a dog.

Yes—really! A
Lhasa apso
, to be precise.

Because the quality of the dream was so abnormally clear and in it I had felt so normal, I never doubted the truth of it. Indeed, its veracity was soon confirmed by a subsequent event. When His Holiness was asked to officiate the reopening of the Downward Dog School of Yoga—it had been closed for repairs from a minor fire—he caught sight of me on my wooden stool at the back of the class. He glanced up at the faded photograph of the Lhasa apso.

Turning to yoga teacher Ludo, eyes twinkling, he said, “I'm so pleased she has found her way back to you.”

It seemed that I had made the journey from Tibet to India during my life as a dog, and that Ludo had played an important part in taking care of me. Why not the Dalai Lama? Where had he been when I reached Dharamsala? Had His Holiness fulfilled his promise in the way he found me again in this lifetime?

Questions, so many questions. But also a recognition that has stayed strongly with me ever since that revelation: Be careful not to heed even your most instinctive hatred of other kinds of beings, dear reader. You were almost certainly one of them in a previous lifetime.

This evening's class followed the reassuringly similar pattern of stretching and self-discovery as most previous evenings'. All the usual people were there, including my friends Serena and Sid, on their mats directly in front of me. Ludo talked through a sequence of poses as he moved around the class, adjusting the angle of a head here, a hip there. He helped each student find the optimal alignment for opening his or her body and mind.

Ludo's understanding of yoga had evolved over decades of practice and study. And as so often in the past, I was struck by the wisdom that he expressed in his yoga studio. It seemed so closely to parallel what I overheard on the sill of His Holiness's office.

“These sequences are familiar to all of you, now,” he said in a gentle voice as he led the class through their standing poses. “Try to dissolve the sensations of the body into pure feeling. Dissolve all movement of the mind into that same pure feeling. Let there be stillness.
Karuna
, in Sanskrit. What is
karuna
? Nothing other than awareness imbued with compassion. Open,” he intoned, moving along a row of students. “Receptive. Expansive. Abundant. Free from ill will. A sincerity of being.”

As they moved into the Natarajasana, the Lord of the Dance pose, balancing on just one leg, Ludo continued, “It is wonderful to be able to hold these poses. But great feats of physical flexibility have little meaning if there isn't a commensurate opening of the heart. How valid is a practice that frees our bodies from rigidity but does nothing for the mind?”

Later Ludo sat at the front to lead the class through their sitting poses. As always, the sequence of twists was accompanied by an audible crackle of joints across the room.

“How good is that!” exclaimed Ewing, an aging American man and longtime student, as his twist produced a particularly audible snap.

“What have you been up to, Ewing?” asked Merrilee in a suggestive tone as she sat next to him. She was also frequently his after-class conversational sparring partner on the balcony.

There were chuckles throughout the group.

“We get so engrained in physical patterns,” observed Ludo. “Habits we repeat beneath our awareness. We don't even realize them until we bring attention to our body. Then we can let go. It's the same for the mind. We get caught up in cycles of habit, ways of thinking that may have been useful in the past, but then we get locked into them. What was once the solution to a problem becomes a problem in itself. We need to break free.”

At this point, I noticed, Serena turned to face Sid.

“How do we do this?” continued Ludo. “Same as with the body. We bring attention to the mind. Simply by being present, here and now, we free ourselves of our conditioning
. Samsara
is going around and around in circles, the mind afflicted by karma and delusions.
Nirvana
is its oppose—letting go. Relaxing into our true state of being. Dissolving away any sense of separation between ourselves and all else.”

All the time Ludo had been speaking, Serena continued to hold Sid's gaze with a meaningful expression, as though Ludo's message had an especially personal significance.

I had followed the relationship between Serena and Sid since its earliest days. Among the many qualities of cats is our ability to tune in, to scrutinize, to play close attention to our human companions long after they have forgotten we are even in the room. This was how I knew that, in recent months, things between Serena and Sid hadn't been easy.

Some years Serena's senior, Sid had a past. Specifically, in his early twenties, he had been married to an Indian woman, Shanti, with whom he'd had a daughter, Zahra. Shanti had been an extraordinary woman: beautiful, unwaveringly loyal, vivacious, and kind. Sid had once confided that she had also possessed the same unusual clear blue eyes as me. But their marriage had been extremely difficult from the start. Shanti came from an immensely wealthy and prominent family, the Wazirs, who had arranged for her to be married to the son of an equally powerful family. It would have been a union of two of the grandest dynasties in India, and it would have preserved their status and power long into the future. Shanti rejected the arranged marriage in favor of Sid, the kind but poor maharajah of Himachal Pradesh, which was considered a shameful match by her parents—especially the socially ambitious Mrs. Wazir.

Tragedy struck eight years after they were married. Shanti, driving along a treacherous pass in the mountains, lost control of her car and drove off a cliff. She died instantly, leaving Sid with their five-year-old daughter, Zahra—and no end of self-blame that, if he had been with her on the journey, perhaps things may have turned out differently.

Sid was a loving father, but he felt he could never begin to compensate for the loss of his little girl's mother. Over the years he had been careful about introducing his daughter to other women. It had been a sign of immense trust when he brought Serena into their lives.

Serena and the now-fourteen-year-old Zahra had got along well from the start. Serena took her out shopping for clothes, showed her shortcuts in math, and introduced her to a whole new world of gourmet cuisine. Their relationship had quickly become warm and special.