The Forbidden Temple (12 page)

IT IS SAID
that a giant ogress lies under the land of Tibet, held hostage by some rather clever urban planning. Like Gulliver and his Lilliputian captors, temples were constructed over the giant’s limbs, pinning her to the earth and preventing her from wreaking devastation throughout the holy land.

Over the heart of the beast was built the Jokhang – greatest of all the Buddhist temples.

Having ditched their bags at a hostel and taken showers, Luca and Bill now stood looking through a crack in the Jokhang’s huge, gilded doors. In the chalky evening light, the gentle sound of chanting rolled around the temple.

Both men watched mesmerised as men, women and children brought their hands together above their heads and, with eyes screwed tight shut and hands clasped together, lay flat on the ground, extending their arms towards the Buddha within. Without order or symmetry they stood up and repeated the process, again and again, for hours at a time. To prevent them from wearing down the skin on their hands, small bits of cardboard were tied around their palms. Like a million crickets rubbing their back legs together, a rasping noise bounced and echoed off the stone walls.

‘Amazing,’ murmured Bill. ‘To have such belief.’

‘Isn’t it?’ agreed Luca, his eyes following the constant flow of movement.

He looked up to where thousands of lines of criss-crossing prayer flags fluttered in the breeze high above them. They were tied from building to building, across lamp-posts and guttering, any place where they might catch the wind. Each patch of coloured cloth was emblazoned with Buddhist
sutras
and pictures of wind horses. As the fabric flapped in the breeze, the horses were said to be carrying the prayers up into the heavens.

Luca counted five colours to the flags, and checked again. He knew of the four sects of Tibetan Buddhism, each one with their own distinct colour, but had never heard of blue representing one of the orders. Perhaps it was another sect that had previously existed and had now fallen by the wayside. Or maybe there was a whole other strand of Buddhism out there he had simply never heard of. He shook his head. He had always found the enormous scope of Tibetan religion bewildering.

Walking away from the great doors of the temple, the men passed round its back, following hundreds of others along the well-trodden pilgrimage trail of the Barkor. The buildings to either side were high, hemming in the narrow streets with walls made from thick blocks of ancient stone, whitewashed in the traditional Tibetan style. Market stalls lined every inch of the streets, cluttered to overflowing. Everything was for sale, from army surplus military jackets to yak-bone prayer wheels, old Tibetan scrolls to plastic cutlery sets.

The vendors stood behind their tiny stalls, sipping yak-butter tea and occasionally heckling one of the passing devotees. There were hundreds of pilgrims, moving in a steady flow around the temple. Each held a prayer wheel of varying size. The top half of the wheel was attached to weighted beads that were spun round in a constant cycle to release a series of holy words written within. Some hung nearly a metre long, requiring a support hanging from the owner’s belt and great circular arm movements to get the momentum going.

Bill and Luca were passing the first of the market stalls when three small children, dirty and with cardboard still strapped to their hands, approached. Giggling and talking rapidly amongst themselves, one of them walked up to Luca and pulled on his arm. He crouched down, smiling.

‘Hello, guys.’

One whispered something to the next who hesitated for a second before leaning forward and gently pulling the blond hair on Luca’s forearm. He looked amazed to discover it was actually attached.

‘Of course . . . Tibetans don’t have any body hair,’ Luca said, glancing up at Bill, before turning back to face the children. ‘If you think that’s bad, kids, look at this.’ And, leaning forward, he pulled down the top of his T-shirt to reveal a patch of hair at the centre of his chest. The children squealed in delighted horror and retreated backwards, hugging each other. The same boy who had made the original discovery stepped forward again and pointed at Luca.

‘
Po
,’ he said simply, then ran off to the temple doors closely followed by his friends, all shrieking with laughter. Bill and Luca looked at each other blankly.

‘Any guesses?’

‘Not a clue,’ said Bill, before they moved off again, strolling past the remaining market stalls. From behind each came shouts of ‘Cheapie! Cheapie!’ as yak-bone dominoes, jade necklaces and ceremonial knives were thrust in front of them with encouraging grins.

‘So what are we going to do about our visas?’ Bill asked, as they gravitated towards one of the stalls at random. ‘I thought you said you had it covered?’

‘I had the
border
covered,’ Luca corrected, ‘but we’re just going to have to figure something out for heading further east.’

‘You know what they’re like, Luca. Once an area goes on the restricted list, there’s no way in hell they’ll change our permits. And if we do try and leave, they’ll definitely assign us one of those idiot interpreters who’ll do nothing more than spy on us the whole time.’

‘We’ll find a way,’ Luca said absent-mindedly, shaking his head as a vendor pressed on him what looked to be a human skull emblazoned with a silver swastika. He turned the skull over in his hands slowly, running a finger over the tiny indentations where the brain had been.

‘Listen, Luca, I’m serious,’ Bill said, taking him by the wrist. ‘I’m not about to waste three weeks kicking my heels in Lhasa, waiting for a bit of paper. I don’t have time for this.’

‘Neither do I, but I’ve already arranged . . .’

As he tried to speak, the vendor had moved round to the front of the stall, beaming a well-practised smile. She started listing prices enthusiastically, using her right hand to count the numbers off, bartering herself down from an outrageous starting point without Bill or Luca having said a word. Eventually, Luca spoke a few words of his limited Tibetan to her and she slowly retreated behind the stall, her expression instantly darkening.

They moved off again, back into the flow of human traffic.

‘What I was trying to say is that I’ve already arranged a meeting with René,’ Luca explained. ‘He’ll be able to think of something. He always does.’

Bill stopped in his tracks. ‘René? You’re serious?’

‘Why not?’

‘Because he is a disaster waiting to happen and I don’t think we should have anything to do with the man! How the hell he hasn’t been kicked out of Lhasa yet, God only knows.’

‘Yeah, but if there’s one person who knows how to get visas and deal with the bastard Chinese roadblocks, it’s him.’

Turning down one of the side streets, Luca headed in the opposite direction from the main temple and away from the Tibetan quarter.

‘Come on,’ he said, quickening his pace. ‘Or we won’t get a table.’

A few hundred yards later they found themselves on Lhasa’s main high street. The wide strip was flanked with modern shops,
the fluorescent signs and electric lighting clearly marking the transition from the Tibetan quarter into the rest of the city run by the Chinese.

Dusty cranes towered over half-finished buildings in every direction, and at the end of the high street they could see the golden roof of the Dalai Lama’s former residence, the Potala.

Up on its hill and carved into the living rock, the palace of a thousand rooms remained aloof from the urban development below, its vertiginous walls shielding it from the hasty expansion all around. But what was clear to see was that, the ‘peaceful liberation’ by the Chinese had not just been an external assault on the city of Lhasa and its temples. Inside, the pulse of the Dalai Lama’s former residence was slowly fading.

The Chinese had forbidden monks from worshipping in the temple. Its hollow rooms and deserted corridors were now bereft of their presence. Stone steps, worn in the middle from centuries of footsteps, were now barely used. The deserted shell of the building conveyed little of the teeming life that had once made its chambers, murals and thousands of figures of the Buddha seem to actually breathe. Now, the Potala stood silently at the end of the high street and was little more than an empty shell – a tourist attraction for anyone but Tibetans.

At the end of the street, Bill and Luca passed rows of shop windows with new posters glued on top, showing a picture of a pale Chinese man, about twenty years old and with a shaven head. He stared out impassively, his expression neither welcoming nor hostile. Thick bold characters were printed below. By the sheer number of posters visible, it was obviously important news.

Luca bent forward, peering at the newly pasted posters. At the bottom of every one was a single sentence printed in English:
His Holiness the eleventh Panchen Lama’s inauguration, 1 June 2005
.

‘Looks like we’re going to miss the big event,’ Luca said, pointing to the date.

‘He doesn’t look very Tibetan to me,’ Bill said, frowning slightly.

‘Well, whoever he is, with the Dalai Lama gone, he’s going to be the man in charge.’ Luca glanced up from the poster. Twenty yards along he spotted the turning he’d been looking for.

‘Hey, that’s the one,’ he said, slapping Bill’s shoulder.

Leaving the poster, they cut down the street and within a few paces the shining stores and paved roads gave way to mud tracks and ramshackle houses. Following the trail a bit farther, they threaded through a maze of twisting back streets and, after a few dead ends, came across the familiar open porch of a wood-built restaurant. Bill looked at Luca, anxiety creeping back into his face.

‘Let’s just get in and out as fast as we can.’

Luca turned to reassure him before going through the doorway.

‘Relax, Bill. It’s just René. Trust me on this.’

Bill grimaced, shaking his head as he followed his friend inside into the din of the restaurant. Trusting Luca was exactly what his wife had warned him not to do.

THE RESTAURANT WAS
brightly lit and packed with tourists. Waiters in traditional Tibetan dress wound their way around tables serving momos and yak burgers. Misplaced as it was down a dusty side street in Lhasa, it also felt surreally suspended between cultures.

As soon as Luca and Bill stepped into the room, they could hear René. He had a deep, booming voice that was usually accompanied, as it was now, by a string of expletives. A tour operator who had been working in Lhasa for nearly eight years, René, with his stubbled, red face, swollen midriff and crumpled clothes, made it clear how oblivious – or blind – he was to the subtleties of Eastern culture.

Right now he appeared to be delivering a monologue to a meek-looking tourist sitting at one of the tables on the far side of the room. As René’s vast belly quivered only inches away from the man’s face, it looked extremely likely he was regretting having asked a question in the first place. Fragments of the restaurant owner’s impassioned diatribe floated across the room, culminating in René pointing a thick digit directly at the man’s nose and bemoaning ‘every one of the dull-witted layabouts who passes through Lhasa these days’.

Luca started to laugh. Catching sight of him across the room, René
did a double-take and then bellowed across the rows of tables: ‘What do you think you’re laughing at, you skinny Englishman?’

The patrons curled their toes and sank lower in their seats, anticipating yet another outburst.

‘At you, you old bastard!’ Luca shouted back as René began to scythe his way through the seated diners, jolting some into their plates and scaring others into hurriedly scraping forward their chairs.

Beaming at them with bloodshot eyes, René pulled them both into a bearlike hug before slapping them on the back several times and herding them over to a table near the rear of the restaurant. Once they were settled with a shot of cheap brandy in front of them, Luca spoke.

‘So how are things going, René? Still battling bureaucracy?’

René rolled his eyes and slugged back the contents of the shot glass.

‘Nothing changes. Nothing ever fucking changes,’ he replied gruffly. ‘The Chinese build and build, but it’s still the same old shit. The agencies refuse to talk to one another, and God forbid they should actually make a decision. If they pass the buck, they take no responsibility. So they always pass the buck.’

He refilled his own small glass, adding a little more to Bill’s and Luca’s, despite the fact that they hadn’t touched their drinks yet.

‘It’s all about keeping you off balance,’ René continued, obviously warming to one of his favourite subjects. ‘They keep you bouncing between agencies, make sure you’re disorientated all the time, so you don’t even know who to ask any more. That’s how they like it.’

‘How do you cope with doing business like that?’ asked Bill.

‘Hah! Business . . . I don’t know – I really don’t. Sometimes I wish we would all just get kicked out of the country so we could create another Tibet somewhere else.’

Distracted by something, René fell silent for a moment and Luca followed his gaze towards a table in the far corner of the restaurant,
raised on a small platform by the window. Two soldiers were seated there in silence, waiting for their food. One of them was strikingly large for a Chinese, his black shirt stretched across a powerful chest; the other was slim-built and almost effeminate, with pale, fine features and oiled black hair. Even across the smoky restaurant, they could see that the smaller of the two men seemed to be eyeing the crowds of people around him disdainfully.

René reached out, catching the arm of one of the waiters scurrying from table to table.

‘Make those two by the window wait for their food, and see to it that they get the wrong order,’ he said.

The waiter blinked in confusion but, knowing enough not to argue with his employer, promptly retreated to the kitchens to relay the order.

Luca shook his head slowly in a mixture of disbelief and admiration. Few people would deliberately tangle with Chinese officers. He put his hand on René’s wrist, speaking quietly.