The Avatari (29 page)

‘And we’re looking for that?’

‘It’s the same symbol which I had copied from the Bible, just next to the reference to the dogs and Mar Yul.’

She flipped a page, showing the symbols she had noted down to Ashton who had joined them.

When Susan had finished, she waved them back into the car and directed Dinesh to stop by a place which served tea. They drove along the river for a while before Dinesh pulled over in front of a café, where they turned out to be the only customers. A colourfully dressed Ladakhi woman served them tea in a traditional brass teapot. Susan spread her books and her notebook on the table and began jotting down notes on a sheet of paper. The others waited patiently for her to finish.

‘Well, here goes,’ she said, sounding nervous. ‘I might be wrong, but this is what it could be.’

‘That’s all right,’ Henry Ashton said quietly, the others nodding in agreement.

‘This is the prayer I copied from the
mani
stone,’ she said and began to read aloud from her notes. ‘First, the seeker must know himself. From here, he will experience the goal of the physical plane. This will lead him to what he must divine. This is the key.’

‘The key lies at the seat of the rebel kingdom,’ Henry Ashton said slowly, quoting from memory.

‘That’s great,’ Peter interrupted, ‘but does that help with the symbols you copied?’

‘I think so,’ Susan replied. ‘When I first deciphered the words in each group, they made no sense to me, but now they do. Look at these,’ she said, showing them the symbols she had copied in the notebook. ‘These symbols, in groups of six, are arranged in geometric order: with two rows of three symbols each, followed by a space. Then comes another group of six symbols. As I had surmised, this
is
a map, with the first row in each group representing the place you can see from where you are and the second row in the group symbolizing the place where you have to go.’

‘I haven’t got it,’ Peter said, puzzled.

The others too shook their heads in bewilderment.

‘It’s simple, really,’ Susan went on, then flushed as she looked up at them. ‘Sorry, that was rather fatuous.’ She flashed a smile, but returned quickly to her notebook, turning it in their direction so that they could see what she had scribbled on the page and tapping her pen against it for emphasis. ‘Let’s replace the symbols with letters for simplicity’s sake.’

The others leaned over for a look.

‘And the last symbol is Antahkarna or the “rainbow bridge” which represents Shambhala:

‘Each symbol represents a place; that’s why if you club them together in a group, they make no sense. But let’s take each symbol of the first group individually. The first row has three symbols: the sea – “B”, a forest – “C” – and a river – “D”. Evidently, the first two will never be found here. On the other hand, the Indus would always be here – this represents “what you can see”. Below the river is the symbol we need to go to. So if we move to the symbol below “the river” that, according to the key, is “the one which we must divine”, we come to “G”.’ Susan placed her pen on the symbol.

‘And what’s “G”?’ Peter asked.

‘Haven’t worked that out yet, I’m afraid. It’s a Buddhist kingdom, I think. But do give me some time and I’ll try and give you an answer. Anyway, we first need to get to that place. From there, we must find out which one we can
experience
physically
– “H”, “I” or “J”; the symbol below that, which could be “K”, “L” or “M”, is the one we have to go to, “divined” from our “physical experience”.’

‘So if we go by this “map”,’ Duggy observed, leaning over Susan’s notebook, ‘we have two sets of these puzzles to crack.’ He looked up at Susan. ‘What is this place before Shambhala?’ he asked, putting a finger against the second-last set of symbols on the page.

‘I should have told you,’ Susan said ruefully, ‘but thought I would do so only after I had identified it completely.’ She stared at the page. ‘One of the symbols is that of a “gate” or “gates”. I’m still trying to understand the other ones, but I would imagine they describe the “gates” or the way that leads to them.’

‘So we have to get through the “gates” to enter the kingdom of Shambhala,’ Duggy concluded, catching on.

‘That’s fantastic!’ Peter said enthusiastically. ‘That’s really something! In other words, we’re back in business.’

They were all smiling now, everyone, but Ashton. His mind was in a whirl. He remembered the snarling lions from his meditation session with Susan and his breath quickened. A sense of foreboding seemed to descend on him
. This isn’t part of Susan’s insight
, he thought, perplexed and upset,
it’s mine! What’s going on?

‘Why the subterfuge, the code and all?’ he now asked, trying desperately to sound normal.

‘Two things: first, if you don’t have the key, you can’t get there. It’s like a number lock. There are too many combinations. One wrong turn and you could get hopelessly lost. And second, you have to proceed step by step; you can’t jump one. At least you couldn’t in those days when most places were either unknown or knowledge of them was limited. Now we know that there are no forests or oceans anywhere around Leh. So theoretically, we could have got to Point Two without coming here – if we had the key, that is. But still, I wouldn’t recommend it.’

‘And this person, whoever inscribed this on the
paiza
, worked this out?’ Duggy asked. ‘I mean, he certainly went to a lot of trouble engraving it all on that rock!’

‘My guess is that this Sutra on the
mani
stone was already there; he simply improvised, using the existing message.’

Duggy and Peter were now smiling, their relief obvious.

‘If Henry hadn’t made me meditate, I could never have come this far,’ Susan acknowledged, looking at them.

None of the men failed to note that while speaking to them, she had removed the ring from her finger and dropped it into her purse.

Duggy reached across the table and held Ashton’s hand, his eyes expressing gratitude. Ashton nodded back without speaking. He felt better now, calmer. The panic attack had passed.

Susan was looking at the diary. ‘It’s not just a “Buddhist kingdom” we have to go to!’ she suddenly exclaimed. ‘It’s the Buddhist kingdom where the remains of the Buddha are to be found!’

Ashton and Peter exchanged glances.

‘And would you happen to know where that would be?’ Ashton asked quietly.

‘Of course,’ she replied. ‘It’s in Pakistan.’

‘Wow!’ said Peter. ‘So are we hoping to find the bad guys there? I wonder who
they
are?’

He wasn’t expecting answers. He knew none of them had any to offer.

CHAPTER 16

Texas

1956–1985

As far back as he could remember, Josh Wando had always wished he had been born as someone else –
anyone
else. When he was in sixth grade, his parents sent him off to join his older brother, Jason, at the Texas Military Academy in San Antonio, an Episcopal private school from which both his father and his grandfather had graduated. Small, asthmatic and unathletic, Josh was the antithesis of his brother, the classic all-American boy who juggled his roles as school football captain and class president with consummate ease. Jason was bright and popular; the only friends his younger brother could call his own were imaginary ones. To escape being bullied in the playground and taunted in class where his peers called him queer, Josh sought refuge in the library. He loved reading stories involving fantasy and read all volumes of Tolkien’s Ring trilogy, in which his favourite characters were the ‘shape-shifters’, men who could change their form into animals at will. As he grew into puberty, he realized, while on his knees in the gym toilet, that his classmates were actually right. The only person who had cared about him was his mother and when she died, he knew he had no one left in the world to call his own. His father didn’t seem to be aware of his existence and his older brother was clearly ashamed of him.

When Jason went off to fight the war in Vietnam, never to return, it dawned on his younger brother that he might one day become heir to a business empire that would open those very doors which had been closed to him so far. He just needed to bide his time. Josh imagined himself to be a jaguar, a predator that would go hungry rather than make its move until it was sure of its prey.

But that wasn’t to be. He was still a sophomore in college when his father, who now had a son by the cocktail waitress he had married, disowned him. Cut off from his legacy, Josh was now expected to live off a modest trust fund. When he confronted his father about it in the latter’s office, he was unceremoniously thrown out. His father justified his decision by declaring that Josh wasn’t a Wando at all, an opinion which was widely accepted – even though Wando Senior was a philanderer and a drunk. Josh thought his father had been blatantly unfair, but could find no one to take his side; in Texas of the 1960s, a ‘homo’ had even less standing than niggers and wetbacks. Josh threatened to take his father to court. It was at this point that the family lawyer took the young man aside and gently informed him that the Texas Sodomy Law was still very much in effect. It wasn’t an empty threat; Josh knew just how much his father despised him. If he were challenged, the man would have no compunctions at all about slapping charges on his son and sending him to jail for anywhere between five and fifteen years.

Once again, Josh decided to bide his time; he could do little else. Out of college now, he went on to live at the Old House, his only companion – apart from the young men he picked up outside bars on Friday night – being Aaron. The old man would talk endlessly about Grandad; it was obvious that he hero-worshipped the man. Aaron had shown him some diaries, carefully preserved in an old suitcase containing some of Grandad’s things which no one else knew of or cared about – the diaries written during his last expedition. Josh had gone through some of them and what he read beggared belief. But old Aaron had been there and his accounts tallied with what Grandad had written in his diaries. Gradually, Josh began to realize that his grandfather had not been the crank some people made him out to be; he was on to something, something really big. And he seemed to have finally found it on his last expedition. Josh began following the trail that had appeared to open up the first time that summer evening, long ago, when his older brother was leaving for Vietnam. He learnt that the metal piece Aaron had given Jason, when he visited him at the Old House to say goodbye, was a
paiza
with markings that were apparently directions to the kingdom of Shambhala.

Josh realized that this discovery had given him a sense of purpose. Suddenly, after years of aimlessness marked by a complete absence of self-worth, his life had found a direction and he knew where his destiny lay. His mission possessed him as nothing ever had. He joined Buddhist groups and study circles to be initiated into the Bardo Thodol. He followed up on Jason’s military tour of duty in Indo-China. Informing those around him – not that anyone was bothered – that he wished to pay homage to his dead brother, he made a trip to the Far East and located the monastery in Laos that Jason had visited. Josh befriended an inmate and, through discreet enquiries, confirmed that his sibling had, indeed, handed the
paiza
over to the monastery. It was also in Laos that he got both his forearms tattooed. One now bore the image of a jaguar; a rising phoenix adorned the other.

Then Josh’s father died. His stepmother Jessica changed the terms of the trusteeship, thereby giving Josh and his stepbrother equal rights on the Wando Foundation board. Josh moved into the Wando building. The very people who had once sneered at him were now obsequious and deferential. He was aware that they continued to say the same mean and hateful things about him – behind his back. For Josh, that didn’t matter; he didn’t need their approval or acceptance anymore. The modified terms of the trusteeship hadn’t made him a millionaire, but he finally had enough money to pursue his dream, which he did, sparing no expense. He got the foundation’s board of directors to set up the lab facilities he would need; he was determined to be reborn into the life he had been denied. The board didn’t bother too much about the running of the hospital; they were happy to leave it to him. It was oil that mattered to them. Over the years, Josh would make many more trips to Louangphrabang, winning the confidence of his contact in the monastery and persuading him finally to join him in his quest.