The Godfather of Kathmandu (6 page)

He stopped in mid-flight with his stump still raised and stared at us one by one for a full minute.

“It was touch and go,” he continued, still apparently talking about Younghusband. “You’ve no idea what a chore it is to develop a fetal psyche to the point where it can leave the womb of its culture of origin and begin to adapt to reality in one lifetime. Normally, with someone of that profile, you’d want a couple hundred years to be on the safe side—suicide is always the great risk. We did it, though. The good captain became an embarrassingly ardent convert to our spiritual path, without understanding very much about it, unfortunately, or necessarily realizing it was Buddhism that was rebuilding his character from the inside out.” He shrugged. “Still, I guess as a way of introducing ourselves to the West you could say our strategy worked. It was Younghusband, really, who inspired the irrational distortion of our religion by people like the neurotic Madame Blavatsky, and the curious case of Dr. Rudolf Steiner, who somehow grafted gnostic Christianity onto it and called it Spiritual Science, for Buddha’s sake.”

I would grow used to his tendency to talk about events of more than a hundred years ago as if they happened yesterday. And they say we Thais have no sense of time. But I wasn’t prepared for his erudition. I had vaguely come across Madam Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner while surfing the Net: two early Western prophets of Oriental wisdom whose work was largely lost in that cosmic catastrophe called the Twentieth Century. I was out of my depth and knew it. I found myself wondering how
my
fetal psyche was going to adapt to this new reality.

Now Tietsin turned away from the window again and suddenly stared at me with the full force of his developed mind. “Then in ’59, after the Chinese invasion, His Holiness went into exile and brought
our
spiritual science, if you want to call it that, to a world which had been at least partially prepared.”

He paused again and frowned. “We’ve invaded the world. But we’ve lost Tibet.”

There could be no doubt that this last phrase was meant for me. Suddenly it seemed everyone was following his eyes and staring at me. I nodded in full agreement with whatever the underlying meaning might have been, at the same time wondering what it all had to do with the price of smack. But you couldn’t help but be riveted by the man himself. I was assuming he’d crossed the fifteen-thousand-foot pass on foot from Tibet to Dharamsala at some stage in his life. With the courage of a giant he managed to use his disabilities to project a spirit freer than an Olympic gymnast’s. But it was his eyes: the speed of their movement together with the sharpness of focus indicated decades of meditation which cannot be faked.

There was nothing to do but listen while he expounded on the Chinese invasion: its barbaric cruelty, Tibetans reduced to slavery, forced to participate in the rape and pillage of their country, all in the name of glorious Socialism; young women forced into prostitution in Lhasa for the entertainment of Chinese soldiers—rough and brutalized peasant lads for the most part, children and grandchildren of Mao Tse-tung’s holocaust, called the Cultural Revolution.

It was pretty somber stuff and not the sort of thing your average Western backpacker comes to the Himalayas to hear about. But they seemed to be all attention, gripped by this maimed hero. For my part I think I would have been fascinated if he’d been giving a lecture on reinforced concrete; it was all about the man, and the man knew it.

Exactly as I was thinking this thought, Tietsin focused on me with such intensity I experienced it as a passing headache. I looked up in astonishment at that rugged face, which betrayed no loving-kindness. Indeed, for that moment it did not seem human at all; perhaps it wasn’t. Then he looked away again.

After his unusual account of Tibetan history, Tietsin’s summary of the principles of Buddhism was surprisingly standard. He took us through
explications of the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha in the usual order, simplifying for the
farang
audience. When he’d finished, everyone clapped politely and started to leave. I watched them, five white women and three white men, all of them under thirty. I could not tell if they were European, American, or Australian; they all looked innocent enough: travelers without commitment. Maybe Tietsin was aiming his discourse at the people they would be a couple of lifetimes hence. None of them looked like they were going to rush to ordain as monks and nuns. All of a sudden I was alone with the Doctor himself, who was staring out the window at the two great eyes on the stupa and ignoring me. I coughed.

He turned with a grin, came over, and twisted a chair around so he could sit and stare into my eyes. Finally he held out his right hand, the one with the missing fingers, and clasped my own between the two remaining digits. He held on until I had to tug to get my hand back. Those remaining fingers were extra strong. Now he jerked a chin at me, daring me to speak.

“Did you lose your fingers when you crossed the mountains to Dharmasala?”

“No. I lost them in Chamdo.”

“I have no idea where that is.”

“Extreme east of Tibet. Where the Chinese started the invasion.”

I found myself nodding slowly while information I had absorbed in a vague way years ago began to filter through the memory cells. Somewhere the biocomputer was going through its elaborate calculations, which ended with a brief flash of inspiration on my part. “You were in the resistance?”

He inhaled deeply, then exhaled. “Thousands of us voluntarily disrobed so we could fight for our country. It didn’t seem such a stupid thing to do; after all, we had America on our side, in the form of the CIA.”

“Yes,” I said. “I read about it somewhere. You were betrayed.”

He shrugged. “You could put it like that. Or you could simply call it a flaw in democracy. America voted for Nixon.”

I remembered now. The president with the meatloaf mind saw China as a useful counterbalance to the Soviet Union—and to hell with human rights, which, as a part-time burglar himself, he’d never had any time for anyway. As soon as he got into power he ordered the CIA to hold back on support for the Tibetan resistance.

“But you must have been very young,” I said.

“Fifteen. I’d already been in the robes for seven years. When I heard that my father and all the men in my home village had gone to fight, I joined the other monks who disrobed at that time. Of course, the Chinese slaughtered us. But that wasn’t the point. Was it?” He stopped, waited for my question.

“You escaped to Dharamsala?”

He puckered his lips. “Maybe it’s better you don’t know what I did next.” Another pause. “Sure, in the end I got to Dharamsala, paid my respects to His Holiness, accepted his gracious offer to find me a place in a monastery there so I could continue my religious studies.”

Again a pause, as if he were calculating exactly how much information to let out. “But when the time came to take my vows again, I couldn’t do it. In my soul the Chinese had replaced the Buddha with hatred. Things that happen when you’re still young are hard to overcome.” He sighed. “So I found a girl.” He smiled. “Or, I should say, a girl found me. A Westerner, of course. A natural born do-gooder, which is the same as saying someone blind to their own badness. It was her notion that love and marriage would heal me. I believed her. I was so new to the West, so disillusioned with everything else, I assumed she had the right answer. That’s how naïve I was.”

He looked at me with a comic expression. “I had a well-trained mind from my monastic studies, so I went through the usual third-world thing of collecting qualifications. I ended up with a doctorate in Tibetan history—really useful for joining corporate America, right? Naturally, love and marriage failed in the end, as they always must. The wife who would have died for me on day one was starting to think about having me bumped off by day one thousand. I had been brought up to take vows seriously, so there was no way I was ever going to leave her.” Here he let a few beats pass while he contemplated me. “But when the self-righteous, hypochondriacal, self-pitying, life-fearing, man-resenting, competitive, criminal-minded, infantile bitch dumped me I wept with relief. Thank Buddha there were no children.” He held up both hands, one deformed, the other whole.
“Me voilà.”
He cocked an eyebrow.

“You are a misogynist?”

“Nope. It can happen to anyone. Let’s say the aspect she offered of her multifaceted humanity was pretty unvarying toward the end.”

I stopped short. “The whole of humanity is that bad?”

“Actually, I was going easy on her. And the rest of us. I left out ‘homicidal.’”

It would be a characteristic of his conversation that I seemed frequently to find myself at the receiving end of some kind of spiritual revelation when I thought we were having a normal chat. He leaned closer to me to whisper, “Do you really think that in the future it will be nations alone fighting for scarce resources? Don’t be so naïve, we’ll be fighting each other, all against all, down to the last square inch of commercially viable dust. Actually, that is what we’re doing already. Without spiritual aspiration we revert, do you see? Not merely to the monkey state, that wouldn’t be so bad. No, all the way back down the evolutionary spiral. Those are the stakes. How would you like to be worker number ten million and twelve in a termite nest?”

Something about Tietsin made you feel he wasn’t just shooting his mouth off; it was as if he were reading from a text in the sky. I badly wanted to change the subject.

“You speak French?”

“French, English, Tibetan, Hindi, some Thai.” He paused. “And Chinese. When your karma is that of the Homeless One, you’d better learn to be a linguist.”

I remembered that “Homeless One” was a technical expression for a Buddhist monk.

It was at that moment I experienced for the first time a sensation which was to repeat itself a number of times in my association with him. It was a curious feeling that I was about to faint, then just at the moment of loss of consciousness a wave of energy flooded my mind and I recovered in what can only be described as a higher form of consciousness. I knew two things: that this was something Tietsin was doing to me deliberately, and that the exercise of such powers was strictly forbidden to genuine Buddhists.

All this time he had been watching me curiously, while the assemblage point of my mind hovered somewhere above the top of my head and sensory import became pleasantly blurred, as if the five senses didn’t matter anymore.

Now he stood up and gave a great big benevolent smile which effortlessly wiped away the heaviness of the previous moment. “Let’s get out of
here,” he said, and, limping, led the way down the stairs. I had to follow slowly, so as not to lose my balance, but the sensation was at all times seductively pleasant.

“We watched you yesterday, when you came with that Hindu with the rag around his head. We were very impressed. Without seeming to think about it, you started at the most easterly point of the stupa, walked around it exactly three and a half times, carefully turning every prayer wheel, which brought you up at exactly opposite the point where you started: west. When that old lady approached you for money, you didn’t stick to the letter of the law but showed compassion over and above strict dharma and gave her rather a lot of dough. You are a terrible romantic, therefore: you broke the law for love. That makes you a high security risk on the one hand—and a dreadful sucker—but a sympathetic fellow traveler on the other. Let’s say you already passed our interview yesterday, there’s nothing more about you we need to know. So this day is your opportunity to interview me. Fire away.”

I tried to say,
Interview you?
, but the words would not come out. We had reached the bottom of the stairs and turned right toward the great stupa, but all the people were gone. I gasped.

There is nothing magical about telepathy; it is merely one of those faculties our ancestors developed to a certain point before discarding it in favor of something more reliable, like answering machines. I had never experienced it in anything but the most atrophied form—Chanya and I were occasionally telepathic, usually reading each other’s minds with regard to things that didn’t matter much; I had never seen anything like this.

For a start the stupa had changed color. It was black. The eyes were an intense, angry red; a great, exaggerated burst of enraged lightning was emerging from the steeple; it was night; a bloated full moon hung in the eastern sky; and, weirdest of all: nothing was happening. I mean, there was no movement. I was looking at a mental painting, an internal snapshot which Tietsin had transferred to me. Later, once the initial amazement had subsided, I would penetrate to a deeper and still more disturbing meaning: this was how Tietsin saw Buddhism, the world, life. Or, you could say this was a picture of his soul he was showing me.

The moment evaporated, the sun came back out, the stupa was a brilliant white again and surrounded by pilgrims in burgundy robes and tourists in shorts and sandals and jolly souvenir shops, and Tietsin was staring at me with that curious look on his face. “Interview over?” he asked with exaggerated courtesy. “Let’s take a stroll. We’ll be like spies in those Cold War movies who have to conduct their negotiations in open places where there are no microphones and anyone following us would be conspicuous.”

I spared him a wild-eyed glance as I followed. “Would you mind telling me how you did that? I mean, excuse me, but for a moment just then you took over my whole mind.”

He shrugged. “Blame my meditation master. I was a star student before I disrobed. There was stuff he showed me that shouldn’t really be shared with a teenager. To this day I don’t know if he passed on those advanced initiations because he thought I would be a lama, or because he knew the Chinese were coming and there was no time left for niceties, or because he was the kind of master who didn’t give a shit, which is supposed to be the best kind. Obviously, for whatever reason he felt he had no choice but to risk my sanity.” He gave me a quick glance. “Nothing is ever as simple as it seems. Come, let us make merit.”