INDIA

The trip by cab from the airport to Mumbai takes more than an hour and is stunning. India dances around us, right up to the taxi cab window, in various mutilated forms: half a man on a skateboard, his hands reaching up to the window; a man with no arms (I shrink back: how am I to give him the money?); a little girl who flirts with us, running her small hand seductively along the window glass and twisting away with the sweet, faraway look of someone who has lost her mind. A rain of images: bicycles spinning along avenues lined with washed out palm trees; a house strung with laundry in orange and red; a goat on a tether leaning on its knees in a doorway; signs that advertise the national lottery, the game of karma.

Our taxi driver honks constantly, as do all the other taxi drivers around us, but we do not move. And here is what I say to myself about India: that we are in the middle of a permanent catastrophe; that this place is so alive, it does not seem to be real at all, but a film, a documentary about itself.

Delhi, April 30

In Delhi, Bram and I have been staying at a guest house that consists of corrugated tin bungalows on the roof of an apartment building. The bungalows have no windows; only cots and tiny revolving fans with long cobwebs hanging from each, which oscillate back and forth with the movement of the fan. Breakfast is “en plein air” —eggs served with squares of toast that have the crusts cut off, and milk tea.

We sit with the other Westerners, ask each other the same three questions over and over again: where are you from? Where have you been? Where are you going? This is the time to share war stories, to laugh about our adventures—the bus that stops for a couple of hours in the middle of the journey so that everyone on board can listen to a cricket match; the incredible difficulties involved in buying train tickets.

My boyfriend, Bram, excels at these impromptu get- togethers—he’s a native New Yorker, naturally talkative. In particular, he likes to impress others by recounting our adventures in Africa, where fewer of the other backpackers have been. The time we were marched off a bus in Zambia at machine gun point; the time he almost fell into Victoria Falls.

I am the shy one.

His idea to take this trip. Bram, the scrawny New York Jew with Crohn’s Disease and the big attitude. Me, the Emily Dickinson wannabe; who does not fit in this world. He’s the one who knows how to live, but after eight months of traveling, a surprise: Bram is the competent one, making travel arrangements and friends, but I am the one who truly takes to it. Bram finds Indians to be obnoxious busybodies. “Always in your face,” he grouses. But I love all I see; the dobi wallahs who bring tins of hot food prepared at home by housewives to the office workers in the City; the bicycle vendors who attach poles to their vehicles and hang stores’ worth of goods there: inflatable toys, kitchen utensils; the ear-cleaning man in Connaught Circle. There is joy, somehow, in this scramble to survive.

The truth is, I was predisposed to love it here. In the 1970s, the religions and philosophies of the East entered American consciousness, and when I was twelve or so, my father gave me a book called Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization by Heinrich Zimmer. Zimmer illuminates the way the Hindu concept of time—that time occurs in endless cycles—differs from the Western concept of linear time. In Hindu thought, time is conceived of as

cosmic cycles—eons following each other in the endlessness of time, eons contemporaneous with the infinitudes of space…In “timeless” India these extensive diastoles give the life-rhythm of all thought. The wheel of birth and death, the round of emanation, fruition, dissolution, and re-emanation, is a commonplace of popular speech as well as a fundamental theme of philosophy, myth and symbol, religion, politics, and art.

Delhi, April 31

At 4, after reading all day to escape the heat, I go out.

India begins as soon as I step from the doorway of my hotel: the choked, multi-colored parade of people on the sidewalks, the man who asks me: change money? Kashmir, Madam…Nepal, Kathmandu? Another who proffers his wall-scape map of India for sale.

In the streets, vehicles are locked in a futile struggle for leverage. A bus is pulled up next to a bicycle that has a tower of birdcages stacked on its back, a cacophony of chirping. In the street, a standoff between the cars of two middle class families, neither of which will move. In the middle of the traffic, a man with a wooden leg dances a can-can in order to attract a bus.

Varanasi–Date

Varanasi, the holy city. We take a dawn rickshaw ride in order to be at the ghats at sunrise. The route to the city is not yet choked with traffic, and we ride along silently. We pass a stall where dogs are being slaughtered. Their muffled cries resound in the half-light, and we see their wet, skinned bodies hanging in a row. The gutter, that margin of the city that everything falls into, is not yet dotted with children squatting over their morning ablutions.

I can’t help but think of Zimmer ‘s endless cycles of time in a city so old. Everything here is ancient, crumbling, eternal.

            In the afternoon we revisit the ghats with Pam, a bony red-haired New Yorker whom we have discovered over lunch. Passing through the cracks between buildings we round a corner and come upon a dying puppy, curled around a can of spice. We walk along a step at the top of the ghats single file, and end up at a cremation, where fires send up waves of heat into the already stifling air. Pam tells us that the bones that are not completely burned are thrown to the dogs and the images of this morning, dogs waiting for the slaughter, comes back to me.

            We walk back again towards the main ghat, passing a group of monkeys who are running along a gutter, taunting a dog that is barking at them from below. Ahead of us, under an umbrella, a man is telling fortunes with some cards. Two white-haired, orange-clad sadhus sit talking.

We pause and Pam leans athletically over a railing, telling us about a guru she saw here, whose hundreds of followers camped on the other side of the Ganges. That night, they all lined up with fistfuls of rupees in their hands, and the guru went along the line, grabbing the money from their hands and blessing them in the same motion. While she talks, I watch a water buffalo struggle with its tether. It bends its forelegs, trying to twist its head out of the rope, which is so short it cannot lie down. More and more desperate, it pulls again and again at the rope, its mouth foaming with thirst.

We stay until sundown, then remount the steps back to the city where the evening is already in full swing. The liquid blue of the sky deepens and expands everywhere, giving to the commotion around us the desperation of the fading light. Behind a temple, two faucets gush water into buckets that are eternally overflowing.

On the trip back, the road is blocked by traffic: cars, motorcycles, rickshaws, people, and cows, that refuse to be hurried. The bicycle rickshaw drivers are locked knee to knee, and all of us tourists find ourselves on the same level, looking out from our chariots that manage to be both grandiose, with tassels and brightly colored canopies, and shabby. Up ahead, weaving through the traffic, we see a boring Canadian couple we’ve been avoiding since Mumbai. On some of the bicycle rickshaws, whole families sit: fat, Indian ladies surrounded by their long-haired daughters, all leaning on the calves of a single driver.

            Against the blue, scenes succeed each other and fall away: a saried woman swinging a baby to her hip, three boys crossing the street with their arms around each other. Between two buildings, the shadow of a dog trots trustingly by. We pass a family operating a tiny fruit market on a blanket spread on the ground. All work together, cutting, weighting, and arranging fruit. On the edge of the blanket a young girl sits with a melon in her lap, staring off into space.

            I think of a passage from Zimmer. He writes about the mandala of Shri yantra, a Hindu symbol which is a series of interlocking triangles with no center.  

The Absolute itself, the Really Real, is not represented. It cannot be represented because it is beyond form and space.   The Absolute is to be visualized by the concentrating devotee as a vanishing point or dot, “the drop,” (bindu), amidst the interplay of the triangles. This Bindu is the power-point, the invisible elusive center from which the rest of the diagram expands.

Bindu: also the name for the tiny red dot that every Hindu woman marks in the center of her forehead.

I look at the young girl with the melon who is staring off into space. The clamor and intense activity that surrounds her has become a faded out buzz around the tunnel of concentrated calm where her gaze is caught. For a moment, she is the city’s center: the single, self-absorbed point of the absolute that abides in the midst of its roar. Bindu, the vanishing point.

Nepal: Date

It is a shock to be here, alone. A week ago, Bram left me. The plan had been for us to go from India to Nepal and then Tibet, but Bram told me he was going to Thailand instead. His body couldn’t take Nepal, he said—he’d already had dysentery twice. He needed some “R&R,”—that was the way he put it.

            We fought about it. You promised; we made a deal, I said, but he was adamant. This has always been the fire between us: he is a leaver. I hate to be left. I spent a few days stalking around Delhi in a rage. The truth is, Bram has been the one taking care of things—buying tickets, planning, striking up conversations with other travelers. I am afraid—very afraid—to be on my own. But I’ve been waiting to get to Nepal and Tibet since I started this trip. I’m not giving up now.          

            Thankfully, Nepal is easier than India was. The Thamel section of Kathmandu is a Westerner’s paradise—rock music plays in the streets, and menus offer food that Westerners long for after their weeks on the road–banana pancakes, raclette, spaghetti. Sitting alone in a restaurant called the Yeti Momo, I listen to a foursome of Aussies with bottles of Singha. The women have blond hair and pinched faces and the men are in safari shorts and teva sandals, their legs covered with curlicues of black hair. They are telling stories about rickshaw drivers—“Bloody lets me off at the edge of town! With each story, their laughter rises in unison.

There are sensible Brits giving the details of their treks, buxom German hippy-girls in yoga pants, groups of curly-haired Israelis. Yesterday I eavesdropped while a petite, earnest French girl told a red-faced Swede the sorry tale of her “deesentery.” Farther off, a serious looking Brit is questioning a smiling guy in harem pants about the Thai Island he just returned from.  Names of the places people have been rise all around me: Bali, Bangkok, Goa, Chiang Mai, Mandalay.

            But I don’t make friends. Instead, I take long, solitary walks. I walk through Thamel, the street signs all jumbled together on Nagpat Marg: Oriental Cargo Service; Trekking Center; Thangka House; Laundry, 50 rupees, Shree Lal Pure Veg Restaurant.  The store windows are filled with colorful dhaka-weave clothing to sell to tourists and aluminum goods from China.

Another day, I take the trunk road where the dust rises in sheets, and people wear face-masks or cover their mouths when they walk.  I trail away from it and pass a courtyard, where bicycle rickshaw drivers sleep in their vehicles, covered by small plaid blankets. An emaciated yellow dog crouches under the shade of a street shrine; a few toddlers with holes in their pants instead of diapers play in the street. On the threshold of a doorway: the entire head of a buffalo, blood running from its severed neck.

            I was eleven when my parents took me to see the film Walkabout. A white Australian father takes his two children, still in school uniforms, to the desert and shoots at them, then kills himself. They escape, but are stranded in the desert. For days, they walk through a beautiful but unforgiving landscape under a hot sun, becoming increasingly thirstier and closer to death. Eventually they meet up with an Aborigine boy, who shows them where to find water, saving their lives. The Aborigine boy is on his walkabout—a yearlong coming of age ritual in which he must learn to find his own way in the desert.

I suppose, in my mind, I am on walkabout too. There is the vague idea that by going into what is unknown, what is not-me, I will come to know myself. I suppose that is what I am doing alone in Kathmandu: my walkabout.

I spend whole days at the Hindu temples in Durbar Square, exulting in the wildness of the wood carvings; sensuous-hipped women ; dancing bodhisattvas; many-armed deities; a raucous multiplicity of forms. When I see a sign advertising a meditation course at a local Buddhist teaching center, I sign up at once. It’s taught by a stick-thin Swiss monk named who laughs convulsively at almost everything, but mostly himself. He teaches us various methods for calming our minds: counting our breaths; imagining ourselves in deep space, our bodies vanished away. Each day, I exchange a few words with a friendly, short-haired Englishwoman named Miranda as we gingerly pet a hairless puppy who has wandered into the compound. But my hope that she will become a traveling companion fades when the course ends. I’ve been in Kathmandu two weeks. The vague promise of finding myself isn’t becoming reality. Paging through the guidebook, I come upon photos of Pokhara with its huge lake surrounded by mountains. I decide to leave town.

Pokhara–date

Pokhara is ridiculously beautiful. Lake Phewa is framed by a semi-circle of blue, snow-capped mountains, Annapurna II among them. Everything revolves around the giant blue lake with its mountainous backdrop

It’s also unrelentingly hot. Wherever you go, the light glints painfully from surfaces. There are lots of happy tourists here, including a group of partying Australians, but I can’t seem to bring myself to speak to anyone.

I am sick in Pokhara for two weeks. There is an abscess in my thigh which must be treated with antibiotics and hot compresses, embarrassing the Nepali doctor I see. I’m not trying to hide my loneliness from myself anymore. Most days I stay in my hotel room writing long letters to everyone I know back home.

It rains a lot. Every day I go out for a walk; get a little farther on the path to the lake, but have to come back because of the rain. The farthest I can get one day is to a hill that looks down on a green, marshy expanse of fields that are separated by shallow grass walls. I look around and see a procession of black umbrellas coming, tromping along in a snaky line. It’s a wedding procession I met up with earlier. They look ridiculously out of place. In a few moments they all take different paths and then the effect is even more comical. From far off, with their umbrellas, they look like persons displaced from an impressionist painting, trying frantically to scatter off a background where they do not belong.         

After the second week, lonelier than ever and with no direction, I return to Kathmandu, my mind made up. It hasn’t been easy without Bram, and I’m torn about spending more time on my own. But I’ve wanted to get to Tibet for too long now. I stand on a line outside the Chinese embassy with the other backpackers to apply for a visa, then I’m on my way.

Tibet—

Zhangmu and Sakya–DATE

Another book my father gave me when I was young: The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe. The story of the Merry Pranksters going cross-country in a spray-painted schoolbus named Further was a phenomenon of the 1960s that filled me with longing. What an adventure to have missed!

And it is exactly what Tibet feels like in the beginning. There is a steady procession of backpackers climbing the mountainside that leads to the Friendship Bridge, the border between China and Nepal each morning. We cross, are given a cursory search by a group of bored Chinese soldiers in olive green uniforms and strangely delicate white shoes, and then we are in Tibet.

Zhangmu, the border town on the Chinese side, is no more than a truck stop. We gather at the only “restaurant,” a wooden shack where instant ramen noodles are served by an energetic Chinese lady in a floppy hat. To sleep, we trudge up the hill to the Tibetan guesthouse, one big room full of twenty cots or so, a latrine out the back.

We all have the same problem: there’s no public transportation. If we want to go further into Tibet, we’ll have to trek or beg a ride, either from a truck or a bus. There are about fifteen of us Westerners there. It’s every man for himself, and some people mysteriously find truck rides up the road. But the rest of us are still stranded, worrying about how we will get to Lhasa. When we wake up one morning and discover an empty Hino bus at the bottom of the hill, the bargaining begins.

We are a strange group: a French couple; a solo Australian in halter top and hemp sandals traveling with her four year old; an excitable Swede; a few Canadians.

And Oud.

Oud—face like Milton Berle, tiny gray ponytail, paisley elephant pants that swing back and forth wildly as he strides back and forth between the amused Tibetan bus driver in his newsboy cap and the ten of us, negotiating; cementing the deal.   I recognize him at once as a fellow New Yorker. He was an advertising executive who “dropped out” in the 60s, gave himself a new name, and has been living in Goa, in India, ever since. I relish his out-of-bounds weirdness, another anomaly of the road. And he’s safe—no sexual vibes at all–so at last I have something of a traveling companion.

The road to Lhasa goes straight up. At first it’s jungle on either side of us; an impenetrable network of vines, but after a couple of hours the road levels out and we are in a different landscape entirely. It’s desert here: hills of crumbling sand salt in all directions. We’ve arrived on the moon.

By offering more payment, we’ve cajoled the driver to take us to Sakya monastery, described in the guidebook as having “magnificent art,” and containing a conch shell given to the monastery’s founder by Kublai Khan. We’re very pleased about this.

For most of the trip our driver has played a wailing, high-pitched Chinese popular music that none of us like.   Oud goads me to offer him a trade—how about the Talking Heads? He agrees, and that is how we make our triumphal entry to Sakya monastery, dust flying away from the tires, David Byrne crooning We’re on the roooaaadd to nowhere. The Merry Pranksters had a slogan: you’re either on the bus or off the bus. We are definitely on the bus.

Shigatse–date

I’ve always been good at school. In college, before I met Bram, I was a recluse, hiding in the back of the library, poring over some work of classic literature, trying to come up with a brilliant concept for a paper. Bram used to tease me: Sylvia Plath girl. That’s one of the fears I carry with me–I’m better at school than real life.

Maybe it was my love of school that led me, post-graduation, to enroll in a class on Tibetan culture and art. Now that I’m finally here, there’s immense satisfaction in going into monasteries and knowing what I’m looking at.

That’s what I do in Shigatse, at the great monastery of Tashilunpo. I run my eyes lovingly over the green-maned snow lions at the gate (I’ve seen them before in a slide show); pass by the wall of small, identical painted buddhas all in a row. The teacher of the class I took in New York showed this very wall in a slide. He told us that we should forget the concept of “The Buddha.” The Buddhist belief (in Tibet at least) is that we are all going to be Buddhas some day. Here was an image of all of us as buddhas—all very similar but each still unique.

I walk through Tashilhunpo dreamily, relishing my satisfaction at being here, recognizing things: the flickering yak butter lamps, the frescoes of various deities on the walls—Tara, the mother goddess; Yamantaka, the god of the dead—Tsongkhapa, the yellow-hatted founder of the Gelugpa sect, the main sect in Tibet. This is where I’ve been headed all this time: the goal of my pilgrimage.

And this, also, is where my luck changes. Leaving Tashilhunpo, I see a familiar face–the Englishwoman from the meditation class I took in Kathmandu.

Miranda.

“You!” we exclaim at the same time.

She hugs me, invites me to dinner with her traveling companions, two Dutchmen. Later that evening, she invites me to travel with them to Gyantse.

That night, in the Tibetan guesthouse in Shigatse, I have a decision to make. My instinct tells me to stay on the bus—it’s a sure thing, and I can hang out with Oud. I’m still planning on it that morning; after breakfast, I stand with the others, ready to board the bus. But then, across the dusty road, I see Miranda and the two Dutch men talking with a truck driver. One of them throws his pack onto the back and jumps in, then another. At the last minute, I run across the road and join them.

GYANTSE—DATE

The Tibet class I took in New York wasn’t just art history. The teacher, John, had studied Buddhism with a Tibetan teacher and was passionate about Tibet. He called his class, proudly, a religion class. But there were politics, too—if we were going to study Tibet, he said, we had to understand what had happened here since the Chinese invasion. He recommended a book to us: In Exile from the Land of Snows by Richard Avedon. That was how I learned what Tibetans had been through since 1959: the Chinese invasion; the Cultural Revolution; the destruction of Tibetan culture.

Now that I am here, I’m puzzled. I have in my mind the accounts of the thousands of Tibetans who were killed, imprisoned or tortured under Chinese rule; the famines caused by government mis-management; the looting and razing of monasteries and continued oppression of all things religious. But most of the Tibetans we meet seem so happy.

Gyantse is the first place I’ve been with a heavy Chinese presence. There is no Tibetan guesthouse here, just the industrial Chinese hotel with its hostile staff, hard cots, and dry, concrete fountain in the shape of a giant daisy. Each morning at six we are roused from sleep by martial music and exhortations in Chinese blaring from speakers in the streets. We see crews of Tibetans riding in the backs of carts attached to tractors, taken out early in the morning to work in the road gangs. They come back in the afternoons, covered with dust, still smiling.

The town itself looks like my imagination of the American west in the frontier days. There is one dirt road running through it; crooked wood buildings on either side. On a bare hill above town is an abandoned dzong, or fort. The town’s only “restaurant” is a tiny, blackened shack where Miranda and I and the two Dutch boys get stir fry.

We are here for the kumbum. It is at the opposite end of town from the hotel, and looks like a giant, many-sided layer cake, built in tiers that are stacked on top of each other, each layer narrower than the one below. On top, a brass steeple. Next to it, a small monastery with a roof that tips upward at each corner in a slight arabesque. In Tibet the roofs of religious buildings are gold colored. Pointed poles like upside down pitchforks point up into the sky, ready to impale any demons who might want to attack.

According to the guidebook, Gyantse’s is the oldest kumbum in Western Tibet. It is an art historian’s goldmine, with intact paintings that date back to the 1400s, and which blend Newari and Chinese painting styles.

What’s most intriguing to me is what it is: a 3-D mandala. Mandalas are everywhere in Tibetan art. Buddhism was brought to Tibet from India in the 8^th century at a time when Indian religion was heavily influenced by tantric practices—mandalas, mantras and yantras. Mandalas, squares within circles, may represent the mind of the Buddha, or provide maps for the spiritual journey. There are many varieties: the wheel of life mandala in front of every temple door shows the different types of beings in the universe: gods, human, animals, hungry ghosts. What’s different about the Gyantse “mandala” is that you can go inside and walk around in it, like entering a giant mind.

Although the building is not a circle, it is traveled in one.

I step through the entrance: it looks like a gingerbread house. The smell of dust and mildew is almost overwhelming. Already the temperature has dropped ten degrees and I feel the chilly, stagnant air on my bare arms and ankles. A thread of light comes in from somewhere. Ahead of me on the walls are frescoes of buddhas suspended in space. I turn a corner and am immersed in darkness. Eyes adjusted, I see that I am in a hallway not much wider than a meter.

I turn left and find myself in a room the size of a walk-in refrigerator. It is almost filled with a lacquer, larger-than-life statue, set against one wall. The statue is hideous: Black skinned, fat, with white eyeballs big as gold balls, that protrude as white globes, thick red lips twisted in a snarl, a flayed tiger skin around his waist, holding a bowl of human brains, wearing a necklace of decapitated heads.

Standing in front of it, I remember the lecture about Mahakala that I heard back in New York.

My teacher back in New York told us that the first Westerners to go to Tibet were taken back by images of the wrathful deities—they looked like monsters. But the wrathful deities are actually protectors of the purity of the dharma. Often they appear on the outer rings of mandalas, guarding the inner sanctum. The wrathful deities embody what Buddhists call the “afflictive emotions.”

“Everyone wants to be a sweet, serene buddha,” said the teacher. “Well you’re going to have to get past this guy first

Standing in front of the Mahakala head, I am back on walkabout, my pilgrimage. I think about my rage at Bram for leaving me on my own—the way the anger is an endless dance in my head.

Transcend: that was the word that pulled me to that class on Tibet in the first place. I did not want to be what I was—Bram’s depressed girlfriend. I wanted to be happy, to Rise Above, and it seemed to me that maybe Buddhism would get me there.

I stand for many minutes, contemplating. Then Miranda comes up behind me, makes a comment about how dusty it is, and the moment flees. We go up to the top and look out at the valley spread all around us.

LHASA.

No matter how we get here, all backpackers eventually end up in Lhasa. This summer, Lhasa is teeming. There are groups of us Western backpackers; Tibetans; and Chinese settlers dressed in Mao suits who flit by on their bicycles, and stare at us. The Tibetan guest house is busy: There are rows of bicycles to rent, notes left on the bulletin board.  

There is a lot to see here: the Potala Palace, the Jokhang Temple with its wide circumambulation route walked by tourists and Tibetans, urns of burning juniper branches planted at regular intervals. Tagged Tibetan women and men with knee guards do full-length prostrations in front of the temple’s front door. Inside there are lines of flickering butter lamps, huge papier mache faces of various Tibetan deities draped with white cotton katas (scarves that are offerings), a huge golden Buddha towering over all of us in the semi-darkness.

One day we go to Drepung monastery, once one of the biggest in Tibet. We walk through the darkened temple where boy monks sit rocking back and forth as they recite scripture from rectangular texts, looking up at us with eyes that are obviously longing to be free from their catechisms as we sally through. We climb the stairs to a roof and look down into a courtyard where teenaged monks in their cranberry-colored robes debate with each other, clapping their hands loudly in front of their opponents when they feel they’ve made a good point. Later, one of the boy monks appears on the roof. A mischievous look in his eye, he flaps his arms at us, encouraging us to fly. When we shake our heads, smiling, he throws his head back and laughs at his own naughtiness.

Another day it rains, and we are confined to our stone room on the ground floor. We watch the rain out of our open doorway. Large, iridescent drops ricochet off the ground with a “pock” sound, and instantaneous puddles form, then let loose into curving, dividing streams. Already the ground disappears in a layer of brown foam.

Miranda takes this as an excuse to stay in and we hurry into our rooms and get into our sleeping bags, laughing against the cold. We’ve been together ten days now. There have been long bus rides in which to get to know each other. Miranda has a lot of travel stories. She stayed for a month on a remote Indonesian island where all there was to eat was fish and rice. She traveled with an Italian boyfriend who was constantly pained by her clothing choices (black and navy blue together? Miranda, please.)

Today, we compare. We start with English vs. American school systems (in England, undergraduate is free, acceptance determined by a test; in the US college is extremely expensive.). Then we move on to job markets, Then social classes. Miranda tells me about the English class system, denoted by accents, and repeats a phrase to me: Whenever an Englishman opens his mouth, another Englishman despises him… When we get bored with this, we get up and go through our packs, showing each other what we brought in the way of medical kits. I have Diamox for altitude sickness, which Miranda is impressed with.  

“Ah, but guess what I’ve got,” says Miranda, holding it up. “Antibiotic powder. It goes on dry.” It isn’t immediately clear to me why this is such a great thing, but I act impressed. I am envious of her. It seems to me that traveling is effortless for her. She isn’t just surviving, like I am—she’s actually enjoying herself.

Like Bram, Miranda is good at meeting people. One day she shows up with soft-voiced Kathy: blonde, blue eyed, able to speak multiple languages. Her father was a Swiss diplomat, and Kathy has been everywhere.

Kathy has found out that there will be a religious festival in a town called Samye; Miranda thinks we should all go. We look it up in the guidebook. We see pictures of how we would cross the Yarlung Tsangpo river if we went: in circular boats called coracles. That clinches it.

Samye–Date

Early the next day, we march to the bus station with our giant backpacks on. The bus lets us off at the banks of the river—there is already a crowd of Tibetans, further evidence of the festival. While we wait for the boats, we carefully ration out the Chinese army biscuits we have. 151s, they are called. They are a kind of shortbread, very good for keeping you going when you are on the road.

The long wood boats glide to us at the widest point of the river, each with a man in gray Mao jacket, who stands wresting with long wooden oar. The boats aren’t round, but the effect, in the morning light, is still spectacular. The Tibetans around us, their possessions in bundles, stand and wait to board. It is cold, cloudy. When the boats set out, they glide across the water in giant zigzags.

On the opposite shore is another landscape entirely: giant sand dunes line the side of the road. Two flatbed trucks are waiting; everyone is in a rush and jumps in, tossing bundles to each other. We three women do the same, helped onto the back by two young Tibetan men who push our butts, then laugh good-naturedly. On the back, the Tibetans motion to us to tie kerchiefs over our faces for the dust. Then we are off, wind racing past our cheeks. When we stop, it is outside a walled town with large trees, an oasis growing miraculously in the sandy soil.

According to legend, Padmasambhava, the mystic who brought Buddhism to Tibet, arrived on a flying tiger. Samye is the monastery he founded, the oldest in Tibet. The monastery complex takes up one third of the town, a giant L-shape. There is a 2^nd story balcony, where the monks sleep. The destruction of the Cultural Revolution is still evident: there are giant metal pieces of buddha head strewn along the edge of the balcony. The town itself is made up of modest Tibetan houses with white walls and flat brown roofs. Just outside the walls, irrigation canals flow through rows of crops.

For an hour or so, the three of us walk through town, trying to find a guesthouse. There is none, but when we amble back towards the monastery, the monks show us a building in the back where we can sleep—a cross between a barn and a balcony. That is how we end up staying for almost a week in what was once a holy place. There are partially erased frescoes on the walls that show blue waves with small figures of men in different colored robes stretching out their hands in the water, a turtle on one side. The windows do not have glass in them. I stand at one, looking out at the grassy courtyard below where the monks practice the dances they will perform at the festival.

The monks here seem quite spunky. When we visit the monastery, I am wearing a shirt I bought in New York that is printed with mantras in Sanskrit. One monk in his early 20s finds this delightful, turns me around a few times, then uses the shirt as a kind of blackboard to give me lessons, pointing to the letters, saying the mantras for me to repeat.

Samye is different from Gyantse: we don’t sense a lot of Chinese presence. It feels, instead, like a sleepy Tibetan village. When we find out that the festival will not take place for several days, we settle down to wait.

One day Miranda and I amble out to the irrigation fields. Some Tibetan villagers, women, are curious about us and come out to meet us. Conversation has to take place with sign language, but there is still an interchange, as they closely examine our things—the goretex that makes up our backpacks, our thick-soled Western sneakers (Most Tibetans wear a cheap Chinese version of Keds). Miranda is always prepared for these situations. She takes out pictures of her family and shows them while the Tibetan women look on. We can hear them inhaling in their absorption.

When we return to the village, we find that Kathy has spent her day rounding up the children in the village and teaching them French nursery songs. She gathers the children in a semi-circle, dirty-faced, clump-haired, and dazed, as she leads them in “Frere Jacques,” and then “Mon Ami Pierrot.”

Each night, we amble out to the one place in town that serves food; a kind of hovel where a Chinese couple makes stir fry. Miranda has figured out how to cross the language barrier. She walks into the kitchen and points to what she wants.

Kathy has had diarrhea for the last three months. When antibiotics didn’t work, she tried Tibetan medicine. The pills are as big as cocoa puffs, and taste awful, she tells us.

Once we’ve pointed at the vegetables we want, we sit down at the one table to wait. There is no glass in the windows; fly strips covered with the bodies of dead flies hang from the ceiling and there is a bowl of dead flies on the table as a centerpiece. Kathy must take her pills before she eats. She lines them up on the surface of the table and looks at them, her face a mix of fear and sadness.

The stir fry isn’t bad.  

The Boy Rinpoche

Three days after we arrive, Miranda suggests that we “give each other some space.” Stung, I agree, and that morning after a 151 army biscuit, I take off on a path out of town. I meet a German couple who tell me about a “new Rinpoche.”

“He lives in a chapel on top of the mountain,” they say. “You can visit.” They describe the path. Still angry and upset, I decide to find it.

Rinpoche—precious one in Tibetan. This is a lama who has been recognized as an incarnation of a former great teacher. The teacher of the class I took on Buddhism back in New York said that no one could become enlightened without the help of a guru.

The directions take me through the barley fields in back of the town; after less than an hour, I am walking through sand, sun beating down on me. Then the path leads me up. At various intervals, I turn and wonder if I should go back or not. Still upset, wanting to go away and never come back, I am also afraid of getting lost. As I get higher there is a better view of Samye, a collections of roofs laid out tidily below me; the gray river snaking towards the horizon. At my left, the green, broad-backed sides other mountains look like flying buttresses, some green, some brown.

I imagine the Rinpoche: what will he be like? The guru teaches each student differently, depending on his or her nature,” the teacher of my Buddhism class told us. And then, mysteriously, the guru is a mirror. I wonder if he will be a wise old man; I wonder if he will see through me to my essence.

The path gets fainter, and I wonder again if I shouldn’t turn back, but just then, a party of Tibetans turns up: a man and woman with a donkey. The woman has long black hair fastened down her back like a rope; the man wears a black wool chuba and traditional Tibetan boots made of colorful felt with upturned toes. They breathe hard as they climb, swinging prayer wheels that veer dangerously to the right as they rotate. I walk behind them, listening to their steps crunching against the pebbly path; the drone of the mantra they are repeating: aum mani pemme hung.

As I climb, there are more trees. At one point two trees lean toward each other, forming a gateway across the path. A fat monk leans against a rock, panting, and smiles apologetically as I pass. A sign: we are all on pilgrimage, here.

The chapel isn’t much more than a stone hut, bare and bereft of furniture, Three people sit, receiving visitors. There is an older monk in cranberry-colored robes and a mustard-colored hat. I can only see the Rinpoche in profile, sitting on a ledge. Two visitors sit at his feet, looking up–they are the man and woman with the donkey who were ahead of me on the path. As they talk, they rock back and forth and I realize that there is still some part of their bodies that continues to pray.

They have brought gifts—pills. I can see them from where I stand at a distance. I think of what I’ve read—in old Tibet, people would bring supplies up the hill as a gift to the lama. The pills look like they might be antibiotics. They offer them to the Rinpoche, and as I watch, all lift up and solemnly pop a pill.

Then it is my turn to be received.

When the Rinpoche turns his head and looks at me, I am surprised. He is young, in his 20s, and I know him already. He is the same cheeky young monk who came barreling out of the back door of the gompa down at Samye the other evening, catching sight of my tee shirt, turning me around a couple of times to have a good look. Now in his Rinpoche hat, he looks more dignified, but only for a moment. When he sees me, he recognizes me, and his face transforms, aware of the comedy of the moment. He grabs me by the forearm and plops me down on the stone floor by his side.

The summer in Tibet seems to be a kind of Rinpoche renaissance. Maybe it’s the loosening of some of the Chinese government’s restrictions, but rinpoches seem to be popping up everywhere. Some monasteries are being rebuilt, and perhaps the “resident” rinpoches are coming back as well.

Here is where Tibet is a puzzle again. Because of the language barrier, I can’t quite put together what’s going on here. This is the way it’s been all through Tibet—are things really better, or are we just foolish tourists who only see the surface?

In any case, this rinpoche is having fun. Sitting cross-legged across from me, his monk robe drawn over his lap, he contemplates me for a minute. I’m someone to play with. He’s not sure how to start the game.

“Dalai Lama,” he says experimentally. The first thing most Tibetans ask when they see a foreigner—give me a Dalai Lama photo. I reach into my pack where I have a stack of them, and give him one.

He takes it, touches his forehead with it with reverence, secretes it within his robe.

“Dalai lama,” he says again. I give him another.

“Dalai lama, Dalai lama,” he pretends to steal my daypack.

Our conversation has to be in sign language, but he is adept at it. He folds his hand, lays his head on them to mime sleeping, then points to the ground to ask whether I am sleeping here. I shake my head. “Samye,” I say, pointing down the hill towards town. He repeats the same motions, his eyes following me lazily. I realize I have misunderstood: he is inviting me.

A ripple of shock—he is inviting me to be his acolyte. Just like that.

I don’t know whether to be happy or not, so I launch into practicalities.

“Nothing to eat,” I mime, pointing to my mouth. He smiles, pulls out a plastic bag filled with a grayish powder.

“Tsampa!” he says triumphantly.

I pause. This is what I’ve wanted all of these months: to meet a Teacher. To have a Mystical Experience. But I have my doubts about how wise he is; whether this is the “real thing.”

I smile, shake my head again, smiling.

“Samye,” I point down the hill again.

The puzzle of Tibet—it’s hard to know what’s real. I look around the tiny hut and notice that the Rinpoche has a little entourage: along with the older monk, there’s a young Tibetan boy and a Western boy who doesn’t look more than fifteen.

The young Rinpoche and I get tired of staring at each other, and there are others waiting for his blessing, so I rise.

About to leave, I walk around the little chapel one last time. When I get to the right wall, I hear something falling into the bushes. Looking up to the roof, I see the Westerner and the Rinpoche peering over its edge.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“He threw his hat away,” says the boy in an Australian accent.

“He threw his hat away,” I say.

“He got a new hat, so he threw the old one away.”

I pause again: should I stay? This place seems a little enchanted.

But the desire for Chinese stir fry calls me. I’ve been away from town all day, and my stomach is talking. I descend the mountain, still wondering. If this Rinpoche isn’t the real thing, why is the mountain dotted with half ruined stone huts where nuns are living? I return by a different path and my last sight is a ruined hut with a tree growing in the front yard. It is the only tree on the mountain, and two young nuns are standing under it, speckled by the shade, looking out at a view that unrolls all the way down to the river and the mountains beyond.

When I arrive in town, I’ve been gone for twelve hours and, gratifyingly, Miranda is worried about me. Even more gratifying, she is envious when she hears about my “find.” The stir fry hut is closed but they’ve saved some food for me.

At the festival two days later, the puzzle of Tibet is somewhat solved. Huge crowds have arrived for it; mostly Tibetans, but some tourists too. We throng the courtyard where the dances are to be performed. The optics are spectacular: there is music, the sonorous drone of the long horns the monks blow, and all kinds of giant, brightly-colored, papier mache masks that fit over the monk’s heads as they dance. Probably most enjoyed by the crowd are the clownish figures that make up a kind of intermission between each dance.

But it’s clear this doesn’t really mean religious freedom for Tibetans. They enjoy the festival, but there are Chinese police everywhere, and a red-faced Chinese man in a green army uniform yells at cowed Tibetans throughout the day.

Nam-Tso

ADD NAM-TSO HERE, edited. Different tone, shortened version. Maybe: things unseen: we did not see the monks chased out….

Monsoon

At the end of July, our visas are about to expire. We charter a bus with other tourists. Amazingly, we end up with the same driver I met in Zhangmu—the Tibetan who dresses in bell bottoms, a blue Mao jacket and a derby, two pink spots on his cheeks, and seems to find just about everything funny.

Then we take the Zhangmu-Lhasa trip in reverse. We barrel past long stretches of steppe, the countryside unpeeling, pulling away from us: long stretches of grassy land with round canvas nomad’s tents, moving dots of yak at the edge of distance.

The road is muddier. Every few hours we have to stop when the bus gets stuck in the road. We spill out to survey the damage and prowl around while the driver, who greets everything with an absent-minded smile, decides what to do.

Past Shigatse, our bus stops close to a village where the adults are in the fields harvesting barley. A group of children comes to stare placidly at us. They wear black wool chubas and laceless hi tops, their faces smeared with dirt, their unwashed hair in mad scientist hairdos. They are eating fresh pea pods. With the easy generosity of children, they pull the greens out of their chubas and offer us some. We try them; they’re sweet and crunchy. The youngest, a girl who can’t be more than four, has a long line of snot hanging from her nose like bungy cord; it contracts and cascades down again with each breath. The children peer curiously through the open door. The village is a painting I would like to stay in.

The landscape changes abruptly 25 kilometers from the border. We head down at a steep angle and enter a landscape of water. The driver slows the bus to a crawl, hoping for traction. Mountains stretch around us, waterfalls hissing and spinning, steep sheer walls dropping past the little thread of road. Ravines on either side of us, and the roar of rushing water below. Water is everywhere: white rivulets pulse down crevices in the rock, spray picturesquely like a lady’s veil. Rain drums on the roof of bus. We can see the river below us, a furious white, with droplets of foam kicked up into the air as the water throws itself at rocks.

The monsoon has begun. In Zhangmu, we are arrivals from another planet, a dry place. It’s been raining here for a month, pounding steadily on the galvanized tin roof of the noodle lady’s shack, turning the road outside into a river of slush where the Chinese soldiers struggle comically; getting sucked in, aiming for dry spots, mis-stepping in their delicate white shoes.

In Zhangmu, we expect to find hordes of other backpackers on their way to Lhasa but there aren’t many. This is because of the state of the roads in Nepal. From Zhangmu, it’s only possible to get to Nepal by foot.

We start out down the path from the Friendship Bridge in the rain. When we get to Barabise, we inquire about a bus to Kathmandu and receive the astonishing news that there is no road. This doesn’t have full impact until we see it: the road is simply not there.

This year the road finally gave way under the rains. Whole sections of it have fallen into the river. On the Nepalese side, we find everyone on the road, walking to Kathmandu or coming back again.

The demise of the road, although a legitimate disaster, has also opened up a whole new source of revenue—transporting goods and tourists from Kathmandu to the border and back again. There is now a road economy has already been established and is thriving amidst the impermanence, with prices set for a porter to Kathmandu, or the taxi between two landslides.

Miranda, Kathy and I are only too glad to hire porters, who not only carry our packs, but also guide us through the many parts of the journey. There are parts to be walked; other sections where one can get a ride on a section of intact road.

The next-to-last stage of the journey is a ride in a truck that has been stranded in a section of road between two landslides. Nearly an hour passes before we are ready to embark. Because of some unwritten Nepali law, we three white women are given seats in the cab. In front of us is a Nepali farmhouse, surrounded by cornfields that glisten in the wet. Off to the right, a boy runs beside a hoop, guiding it with his stick along a shallow wall. Three women trudge by, covered with blue plastic.

When the truck finally starts up I realize it’s going to be a terrifying ride. High up, and exposed to the view by the large window, we bounce along a road whose edge is crumbling into the sheer drop beside us. Behind us in the back of the truck are a crowd of souls who don’t even see the death that sways across the window with every turn we take.

We are back in Hindu territory and I think again about bindu, the vanishing point. All of these lives depend on one man who sits in the driver’s seat, and not even that, but on the single point of his concentration on the road.

We pause to pick up more riders next to a food stall, where a beautiful Nepali girl sits eating potatoes. I take in her surroundings: the rain, the radio wailing, the profiles of two men who are talking to her. Life in the rain: this little world, created in a moment, will just as quickly be overturned again.

Our porters have assured us emphatically that the last portion of walking is only two kilometers, but when we get to the landslide that has to be crossed, it turns out to be moving. People are standing to the side of it, gesturing heatedly in Nepali. We extract from our porters the information that there is an alternate route: one can climb the mountain. That is what we do.

It is raining heavily now. I am exhausted, and trudge up the path looking down at the ground, the landscape swinging in meaningless snatches of water and rock and mud past my eyes. We pass some porters draped in blue plastic and a farmer who stands halfway up the slope under an umbrella, staring out at his fields, wrapped in a melancholy silence. At the crest, a sight breaks across our eyes: rice terraces. Delicately, in stages, they ripple down the mountain, like a thousand bright green steps. I pick my way through mud trenches that are steep, slippery, treacherous, all my weight leaning on two fingers placed between two points in the barbed wire.

In the heaviest part of the downpour, we pass two little girls who are perched under an umbrella at the corner of a rice terrace. They are an image of life in the monsoon, at once precarious and contemplative. It is the season of suspension: the indrawn breath that waits politely for the rain to end.

Epilogue

I call home in Kathmandu, and learn that Bram is back in New York. In Thailand, he contracted dengue fever, and had to cut his trip short, flying to a hospital in Switzerland, then home. Now he wants me back. There is some quiet satisfaction in this for me.   I agree to meet him in Bangkok.

Bangkok is frenetic, but much more modern than India. The two of us take a bus and a boat to an island called Koh Phan Gan.

It’s a Westerner’s paradise: white sand beaches with turquoise ocean; breakfasts of papaya at the pavilion on the beach; wood bungalows with hammocks for rent for $1 a night. We stay for two weeks. I go swimming and snorkeling every day.

At night, after dinner, we backpackers hang out at the pavilion down by the water. The sky is black, exploding with stars. I take a walk on the rocks down near the sea, look up, and a boundary of my heart breaks loose. I suddenly realize how free I am. It overwhelms me, almost: how I have transcended distance, how I have transcended time.

I came to find something, to be changed.

I am still me, but now I know things.

I know there is a world. I know that time is an illusion. Just watch a Nepali girl in the rain eating potatoes.   The radio wails, men talk around her, but she has escaped this world.

I have learned this.

I have seen things.

Time to go back home.