The Ninth Buddha (46 page)

I cannot criticize her.
 
If she has chosen you, then the Lady Tara has chosen you.”

Christopher began to wonder if he had any choice in this at all.

He had never felt more like a puppet.
 
And he knew exactly whose hands held the strings.

“Go back to her now,” said the abbot, ‘and tell her I wish to speak with her again.
 
Do not ask her to tell you what she and I talk about there are things it is better for you not to know.
 
But do not resent that.
 
You have an important task.
 
You have been chosen for it, see that you fulfill it.”

On their last night at Gharoling, she came to his room, wearing a Chinese gown of white silk and small stitched shoes of Indian brocade.
 
She brought tea and barley cakes and purple incense that smelled of honey and musk and wild roses.
 
As they sat and sipped from their tiny cups, coils of smoke wreathed their heads, filling their nostrils with a heavy, intoxicating fragrance.
 
The smell reminded him of his childhood: of church on high holy days, of spring evenings crammed with the sweet smell of holiness, of the white hands of the priest turning bread to flesh and wine to blood.

But there was no priest, no altar, no life-renouncing god to stand between him and his senses.
 
He feasted on her hair and eyes and lips, on the simple miracle that she was there.
 
He had grown to need her, and he wondered how he had lived before he knew her.

“Do men love women where you come from, Ka-ris?”
 
she asked.

He smiled.

“Of course.
 
And women love men.”

“And do they marry?”

“Yes.”

“The person they love?”

He shook his head.

“No, not always.
 
Perhaps very seldom.
 
They marry for money or land or to please their parents.”

“And may a woman have more than one husband?”

He laughed.

“No,” he said.

“One is enough.”

“In Tibet, a woman may marry several brothers at one time.

When the oldest brother is away, she has to sleep with the next.

She is never lonely.”

“What if she does not like her husbands?”

She shrugged.

“She may like one.
 
What if an English wife does not like her one husband?
 
Can she choose another?”

i “Sometimes.
 
If she is wealthy.”

I “And if she is poor?”

“Then she will have to stay with him.”

, “Even if he beats her?”

He nodded.

A “Even if he beats her.”

She paused.

“I think your people may be very unhappy,” she said.

“Yes,” he said.

“Sometimes I think they are.”

Chindamani sighed.

“I don’t understand why such a simple thing should cause such unhappiness.”
 
She paused.

“Do I make you happy?
 
Are you happy when you lie with me?”

He nodded.
 
She was beautiful.

“How could I not be happy?
 
I wish for nothing else.”

“But if I ceased to please you?”

“You will never cease to please me.”

“Never is very long.”

“Even so.”

She sat, watching him, lifting her lower lip with little white teeth, breathing the perfumed air.

“Does my body please you?”
 
she asked.

“I never slept with a man before you.
 
I find everything about you wonderful.
 
But you have known other women.
 
Does my body please you in bed?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Very much.”

She stood and unbuttoned the white gown and let it fall to her feet.
 
She was naked.
 
Only coils of incense smoke veiled her.
 
It was the first time he had seen her naked: each time they had made love ‘ on their journey, it had been in the darkness of their unlit tent.

“Does this please you?”
 
she asked.

“Yes,” he answered.

“Yes.”

Afterwards she seemed sad and a little withdrawn.
 
She had grown serious again, just as he had seen her before, after her talks with the abbot.

She stood and went to a door that led on to a small terrace.

Opening it, she stepped outside.
 
She wore her white gown: the night air was cold.
 
He joined her and took her hand.

She looked out at the darkness.
 
The stars seemed so far away, the darkness so near, so immediate.

“Don’t think I can be yours forever,” she said.

“You must not think that ‘ He said nothing.
 
Below them, he could see lights in the valley, little lights that twinkled as if the sky had fallen.

“What must I think, then?”
 
he finally asked.

She turned, and he saw tears in her eyes.

“That I am dying, that I am dead, that I have been reborn where nothing can ever come to me not you, not the Lady Tara, not even the darkness.”

“Please,” he said.

“Don’t speak to me in riddles.
 
You know I don’t understand.
 
When you speak like this, you frighten me.”
 
He paused and shivered.

“You say we’re all reborn.
 
Very well, if you’re planning on dying and coming back, why can’t I do the same?

What’s to stop me?”

Her cheeks flushed angrily.

“What do you know of it?”
 
she snapped.

“Do you think it’s easy?

In places like this, men spend their whole lives preparing for death.

They study it like a text that has to be memorized.
 
They know its face as if it were the face of a loved one; the sound of its voice, the feel of its breath, the touch of its fingers.
 
And still, at the very last moment, their thoughts are corrupted and they fail.
 
Do you think you can make death so easy?”

He took her face in his hands.
 
The tears on her cheeks were cold and frosted.

“Yes,” he said.

“I love you.
 
That’s enough.
 
Wherever you go, I’ll follow you.
 
I swear.”

She bowed her head and put her arms around his waist.
 
In the darkness outside, an owl swooped low across a frosted field in search of mice.

They set off the next day on ponies supplied by the abbot of Gharoling.
 
He had wanted to send a monk with them as guide, but Chindamani had vetoed his suggestion for reasons not altogether clear to Christopher.
 
He, for his part, was entirely happy to be alone with her.
 
Her downcast mood of the previous evening had passed, and she smiled at him often while they packed the ponies with the provisions they would need.

The abbot accompanied them to the gates of the monastery, Christopher sensed in his manner a calmness and a self-possession he had not encountered previously in a lama.
 
It was as if every gesture he made, every word he spoke was intended to convey the simplest of messages: that everything is transient, and even the greatest concerns will soon pass into insignificance.

“Travel in easy stages,” he advised them.

“Rest when you are tired.
 
Do not drive your animals hard.
 
Be easy with yourselves and the road will be easy with you.”

They thanked him and turned to leave.
 
As they passed through the gates and started down the hill, a small processions of monks wound its way past them, carrying what seemed to be a human figure wrapped in a white sheet.

“What’s happening?”
 
Christopher asked.

“Is it a burial?”

Chindamani nodded, sober again.

“It’s the hermit,” she said.

“They found him dead last night.
 
He had not taken the food they left him for six days.”
 
She paused.

“He died on the day after we arrived.”

The monks passed by reciting a slow dirge, heading towards a secluded area high on the hillside, where the gomchen’s emaciated remains would be cut into food for vultures.
 
A cloud passed over the sky and threw a shadow across the valley of Gharoling.

Tibet moved past beneath their feet, a carpet of grass and barren soil and rock that sometimes erupted in patterns of broken ice or bright mountain rivulets.
 
At times they rode, at others they walked, leading their ponies by their bridles.
 
They had named the animals Pip and Squeak, after the little dog and penguin whose adventures William followed every day in the Daily Mirror.
 
To Chindamani, who had never seen a cartoon or a newspaper, much less a penguin, the names were little more than pee-ling eccentricities.

The ponies were indifferent to names, English or Tibetan, and simply got on with the job of plodding along the road.
 
That was what life was about, after all: plodding and eating and sleeping.

It was not all that different for the two humans, except that they at least could choose when to move and when to halt, when to eat and when to sleep.
 
They avoided all major towns, preferring not to draw official attention to Christopher’s presence.
 
The abbot of Gharoling had given Chindamani a letter bearing his seal, and this they used from time to time to secure them lodging.
 
They stayed in tasam houses caravanserais where they could find fodder for their animals and shelter for themselves or in small monasteries where Chindamani’s letter secured them more than just a bed for the night.

Wherever she went, Chindamani was received with respect, even reverence.
 
Christopher was an appendage to her holiness as the incarnation of Tara and a lifetime’s inexperience of the world outside Dorje-la made it impossible for her to act as though she were an ordinary mortal.
 
With Christopher she could be herself or at least, that part of herself that she reserved from others but to everyone else she showed only her incarnation al face.

They travelled ever northwards and a little to the east, heading for the Great Wall and the border with Inner Mongolia.
 
They passed to the west of Shigatse, following the course of the Tsangpo.

On their right, at the foot of Mount Dromari lay the red walls and golden roofs of Tashilhunpo Monastery, the seat of the Panchen Lama. On Chindamani’s instructions, they hurried past, eager to leave Tashilhunpo behind.

Six days later, they passed through Yanbanchen, where a road struck east for Lhasa and Peak Potala.
 
Just outside the town, an official stopped them- and began to question Christopher.
 
But Chindamani interrupted him sharply.
 
The abbot’s letter was again produced and the official wilted visibly.
 
They did not stop again until Pip and Squeak were about to drop and Yanbanchen was far behind.

After Shigatse, the going was hard: steep ridges, dark ravines and furious mountain streams blocked their path again and again.

They found numerous villages and monasteries, but the mountains through which they rode were bare and forbidding, cleft by narrow gorges whose walls towered above them, blotting out the sunlight.

Each day the world was reborn for Chindamani.
 
The simplest things held her attention as though they were miracles.
 
And in their fashion they were, for her at least.
 
She had come from a world of un melting snow and ice into a land of changes, where sun and shadows played complicated games with grass and rocks and shimmering lakes, and where sudden openings in the hills revealed clear vistas stretching for mile after unexpected mile.
 
She had never seen so clearly or so far.

She saw men and women as though for the first time.
 
So many faces, so many styles of dress, so many occupations: she had never guessed that such variety existed.

“Is the whole world like this, Ka-ris?”
 
she asked.

He shook his head.

“Every part of it is different.
 
This is only a little part.”

Her eyes grew large.

“And where you came from ... is it not like this?”

He shook his head again.
 
How could he explain?
 
He thought of the London underground, of motor cars and trains and the tall chimneys of factories.
 
Of the multitudes on the streets and in the omnibuses, tumbling like bees in a hive after a thousand different honeys, each without taste or savour.
 
Of churches hung with military flags and cluttered with dead soldiers’ monuments.
 
Of polluted streams and scarred hillsides and black palls of smoke choking the sky.
 
She would consider all those a lurid kind of madness.
 
And yet beneath them there lay a deeper malaise that he thought she would be unable to understand.
 
But when he thought again, he suspected she would understand it only too well.

“There’s a place called Scotland,” he said.

“I went there once for a holiday with my aunt Tabitha.
 
To a place called the Kyle of Lochalsh.
 
This is very like it.”

She smiled.

“Perhaps we can go there together some day,” she said.

“Yes,” he replied.

“Perhaps.”

Several times a whole day would pass when they rode together in silence, neither speaking, each wrapped in thought.
 
Spring winds blew across empty plains almost without respite, forcing them to bend across the necks of the ponies, blinded and chilled to the bone.
 
They passed frozen lakes and rivers in which patches of ice still lay, thick and scarred by the winds.