Authors: Eliot Pattison
Shan let his awareness drift and in his mind’s eye he was on Rapjung plain, nearly sixty years before, and a young Lokesh was with his old teacher Chigu and with Jokar, as a young healer monk then, perhaps still in training. Behind them in the distance the graceful buildings of Rapjung rose up the slope. Geese flew overhead, and Jokar was exclaiming over a rare herb he had found. A lark flew and landed close by, and it became a boot, and Shan saw four stubby fingers pushed in his face by a man in dark glasses. Realization swept over him like a wave of sickness, and he was suddenly back in the chamber, breathing hard and very cold. He rose unsteadily and stepped outside.
Moments later Nyma caught up with him as he sat with his back against the mountain wall, looking at the sky. “What is it? Are you ill?”
“Not sick,” he muttered.
She stared at him then took a hesitant step backwards as though she saw something that frightened her.
“You remember, Nyma, that morning at Norbu when we thought the knobs were going to take us?”
“I will never forget that terrible morning,” she answered, and sat beside him.
“The knob doctor was impatient, he was unhappy with Khodrak and the committee, as if they were wasting his time. He had come for a purpose, from far away, not from local Public Security.”
“A special squad of doctors,” Nyma said, “probably from Lhasa.”
“But not just arrived from Lhasa. Gyalo said they had been traveling hard, a long time, from the Indian border.” Shan sighed and gazed back at the stars. “The doctor looked at that officer and held up his fingers. Four fingers. I thought he was mocking Khodrak, saying that there were only four of us when there was supposed to be five.”
“But they wanted Tenzin.”
“Someone wanted Tenzin.” Shan nodded. “Khodrak I think, and Tuan. But that knob officer was there for something else. There was a reason that special medical team had been traveling with the knobs. For weeks, coming from near the Indian border. At Norbu Tuan said the doctors were there because of an agitator from India. I thought he meant the resistance, even the Tiger. But he meant Jokar.”
“I don’t understand.”
“His fingers. He pushed his little finger back and held up the other four. A strange way. Most would just push the thumb down and show four fingers. But he used his thumb and three fingers.”
“Like Jokar,” Nyma said in a slow whisper.
“Not like Jokar,” Shan said. “It
was
Jokar he was indicating. He was looking for the medicine healer with four fingers, tracking him with a team that could lure the sick from him with offers of Chinese clinics and hospitals, and find evidence through those who use traditional healers. The government thinks he has stirred up a path of reactionary practices all the way from India.”
“If that’s true,” a voice said out of the darkness, “it would explain why the medicine fields are being burned.” Winslow stepped beside them.
“But why?” Nyma protested. “The rumors, the reports. They make it sound like the government is seeking some terrible criminal. He is a healer. He is so important to Tibetans.” She looked at Shan and her eyes dropped to the ground. She had answered her own question.
Winslow dropped to a rock and they sat in silence. A new vision rose in Shan’s mind: Jokar in a lao gai camp, being flogged by guards as he tried to push a barrow of rocks up a hill.
“He only wanted to teach us again, to bring the healing home,” Nyma said finally, in a mournful whisper.
* * *
In the morning, Lin was sitting up, leaning against the wall. He seemed incapable of speech, or at least not inclined to speak, but his eyes restlessly watched the Tibetans and his good hand restlessly searched his pockets, making a small pile of their contents. Cigarettes, matches, a whistle, a small key for manacles, and a tiny pouch of ochre cloth tied with a thread. Whenever Tenzin appeared in the circle of light cast by the butter lamps, the colonel pointed at him, sometimes making small grabbing motions like an angry crab, sometimes rubbing his eyes as if to see Tenzin better. Anya still did not leave his side, and she held a bowl of tea from which he sometimes sipped, though he winced whenever he lifted his head to swallow.
Jokar was gone. No one had seen him leave. Lhandro’s mother said it was the way of such creatures, that they would just spirit away. Winslow thought he had seen someone walking on the western trail in the grey light of early dawn. Lokesh looked exhausted. He had stayed up nearly all night with Jokar, long after Shan himself had collapsed of fatigue onto a blanket. Shan watched as he tightened the strips of cloth binding Lin’s wrist, then, deeply focused, as if unaware of anyone else in the room, pulled a bowl of brilliant white salt from the shadows. Lokesh placed Lin’s hand, the hand with the broken wrist, over the bowl, and began rubbing the salt over the hand. It was Lamtso salt, the empowered salt of the sacred lake, and Lokesh was washing Lin’s hand in it.
Lin did not react, but simply watched with the same rapt attention as Lokesh while the old Tibetan applied the salt with a kneading motion, then gently wiped the skin clean with a scrap of cloth. When he was done he folded what looked like a prayer scarf around the wrist, tied the arm into a sling around Lin’s neck, pushed himself to his knees, and rose. Lin watched him expectantly, and raised his eyebrows, as if he were going to ask Lokesh to stay, but just watched uncertainly as he stepped away. Shan followed him outside to where Lhandro’s mother was churning butter tea. The two men took their bowls of tea and walked to the rim of the plateau. Neither seemed to know what to say about what had happened the night before.
“So many times we have climbed up mountains because you thought you saw a giant turtle or a deity with ten arms,” Shan finally observed. He had lost count of the number of times, in fact, but he never said no when his friend insisted they climb. “Last night, it was like the turtle was finally there.”
Lokesh offered his crooked grin to Shan and nodded. “Those are the words.”
“Is it true that you knew him? At Rapjung?”
“I was only a low initiate. But he remembers. We spoke for hours last night about Rapjung and Yapchi Valley, until Jokar wandered away and sat with Tenzin by that old tree. He remembers how I was always with Chigu Rinpoche, how Rinpoche had hoped I would stay to live at Rapjung for training.”
No one stayed at Rapjung to live, Shan thought bitterly. “But he escaped before the army came.”
“He had been called away by the Dalai Lama’s personal physician. In a secret message, when the Dalai Lama fled to India. Jokar was one of the youngest instructors and they wanted him to help establish a new Tibetan medical college in India. All these years that is where he had been, building for a new future in India.”
“It’s such a long way to come. Hundreds of miles. He appears to have no money.” Shan remembered the tattered robe and shoes. “Knobs have been chasing him.” But he knew that meant little to Jokar. Once he was on the course intended for him he would be as likely to change it because of knobs as Gendun, or Lokesh. The Beijing Shan would have laughed when told deities protected such men. But there were times it seemed the only explanation.
“He said it is a pilgrimage of sorts,” Lokesh continued. “He said if he had money he might be tempted to ride buses and go into towns. He has traveled on foot, always on foot, close to the earth. Eight months now, staying with rongpa here and there, sometimes traveling with dropka and their herds. Healing where he can. Uncovering old roots he said, as though the old ways were still in the land and in the heart of the people and simply had to be discovered again. He makes the old medicines when he can. Sometimes entire villages have sat with him through a night, to hear of the Dalai Lama and of the old days in Tibet and he reminds them of ways of healing they thought they had forgotten.”
“But why come here?”
“This is where he spent nearly fifty years of his life, at Rapjung. He was sent there as a young boy while the thirteenth Dalai Lama still lived. In India, he was senior lama of the new school for many years. It was time to finish there, he said. I think now he wants the old school to be born again.”
“Rapjung?”
Lokesh nodded. “He says he met other healers while walking from India, that they all know of Rapjung and many asked if medicine herbs still grow there. He said he saw the ruins, but he also saw new buildings.” They exchanged a meaningful glance. Jokar did not know about the fire. “He said Tibetans must learn how to stay the same by practicing change.” Lokesh paused and nodded again, slowly, as if contemplating the words. “The rumors must be true. Jokar must have come to take the seat of Siddhi, the defiant leader from the ancient tales.”
“The knobs have spies in India,” Shan said. “They would have learned about such a prominent lama embarking for Tibet to gather the people and restore an institution of the old order. They would consider it the gravest of sins against the government. It is so dangerous for him.”
Lokesh nodded. “Duties,” he said sadly. There was no need for more words. It had become their own shorthand. Shan had had the same conversation with Lokesh, and other Tibetans, often. Soldiers would do what they had to do, Lokesh meant, and the Tibetans would do what they had to do.
“He would have been safe staying here, for a few days.”
“Who could presume to tell him to change his plans? He is visiting all the old places. The herb meadows. The mixing places. While he does so he will look for medicine for the sick colonel.”
Shan considered Lokesh’s words. “What does he say of Lin?”
“The bone at the top of his head was cracked. But there was something else, worse, from before the rocks fell.”
“He was already ill?”
Lokesh nodded heavily. “Heart wind.” The tantric medical system Lokesh and Jokar practiced believed that the heart-center was the intersection between the physical and spiritual beings. Not the physical, beating heart as such, but the center of the awareness and life energy. Heart wind meant stress on the heart center brought on by intense anger, fear, or other mental imbalances. Jokar would not address one of Lin’s maladies without addressing them all. “There are medicines that could help perhaps, but in such cases all the imbalances are related,” Lokesh said.
“Jokar says that heart wind seems to be the most common ailment in Tibet today.” Lokesh’s gaze drifted toward the trails. He, too, seemed to be looking for Jokar. “He said something else. He said that bringing Lin from the rocks to here, that was part of the healing, too. For everyone.”
Shan weighed the words. Jokar meant that it wasn’t just Lin who suffered an imbalance, that perhaps they all shared an imbalance, and that for Tibetans to bring a hated colonel from what would have surely been his grave may have begun another healing as well.
“Jokar says there was a small grey plant with heart-shaped leaves that grew on the slopes near Yapchi that would be helpful. He asked me if I remembered the ways of harvesting and mixing.”
“I think you should find him, Lokesh,” Shan said after they watched a flight of birds leave the mountain, soaring toward the Plain of Flowers. “You should take him to hide, stop him from moving around so much while soldiers are in the mountains. Take him and hide him. For weeks. Speak with him of the old ways. Write them down. For months, if necessary. Until the soldiers leave Yapchi. The purbas would help you.”
His old friend seemed to consider the words a long time. “I would not know how to,” he said at last.
Shan stared at him. Lokesh not only meant he would not know how to find Jokar, but that he would not know how to ask such a holy man anything. Shan thought of the night before. No one had questioned the ancient lama, no one had asked where he had come from, or why he was there. Because, in the language of Shan’s teachers, his deity had become him. It was as if Jokar was indeed a spirit creature, a true Bodhisattva, a Buddha who remained on earth to help others find enlightenment.
“I have to go back to that valley,” Shan said. “I have to find the path of that eye if it is there. Because,” he said slowly, “I am bound.”
Lokesh fixed him with a searching stare. “Sometimes deities are created in the seeking. And the seeking itself may create the path.”
Shan returned Lokesh’s stare. “You make it sound like I just follow acts of compassion and they will eventually connect me to a deity.”
Lokesh answered with his crooked grin.
Shan sighed. “You will be safe staying on the mountain. Someone needs to help Tenzin,” he suggested. It would be a way of keeping Lokesh with Tenzin, who was perhaps his safest guardian if Shan could not be with the old man.
“You forget, Xiao Shan. I am bound also.” Lokesh looked over the plain. “You should know something else,” he said with a strange spark in his eye, excited yet solemn. “Tenzin was speaking. I saw Jokar touch him, and Tenzin’s tongue grew back. They spoke a long time at that tree, and when the moon was bright Jokar and Tenzin began working at something, like lamas mixing medicine in the moonlight. After a while I went to investigate. They had a sack of Lamtso salt, and Jokar had ripped off the bottom of his robe and made little squares of it. I helped them, creating little pouches from the squares, filling them with salt and tying them at the top. True earth, Jokar called the salt. Tenzin repeated the words, again and again, smiling like a young boy.”
Lokesh stared out at a high cloud. “Tenzin has a strong voice, a voice that would be good for temples. His new tongue knew prayers. Jokar told him of a teaching, from the first lama at Rapjung, the founder, the one called Siddhi. He said all healing was about the same thing, about connecting the earth to the earth inside us all. We took all the pouches to one of the meditation cells. While Lin was sleeping Jokar put one in his pocket. He said everyone in the mixing place should leave with one.” Lokesh reached into his shirt and produced one of the small bags for Shan.
“Lin was studying the room this morning,” Shan observed as he accepted the pouch. “As if planning something.”
“I don’t know the state of his awareness,” Lokesh said forlornly, as though finishing the thought for Shan. Lin was such a dangerous man. He could still inflict great harm on them all. “Those falling rocks may have done something to the soldier in him.” Lokesh was fond of telling Shan stories of cruel people who had experienced close calls with death only to become dramatically different, better people.