Fifty Degrees Below (18 page)

Everyone receiving them bowed; they looked down upon the black hair and colorful headgear of several hundred people. Joe goggled to see it, mouth hanging open in a perfect O.

Descending into this throng they were surrounded by their hosts, including two women from the Khembalung Institute of Higher Learning, who introduced themselves to Anna; she had been corresponding with them by e-mail. They took the visitors in hand, leading them slowly through the crowd and introducing them to many of the people they passed.

Soon they were through the airport’s little building, and bundled into a van that drove them east on a broad, palm-lined boulevard of dusty white concrete. On each side extended flat fields, divided by rows of trees or shrubbery. Small building complexes stood under drooping palm trees. Many of the plants looked desiccated, even brown.

“There has been drought for two years,” one of their guides explained. “This is the third monsoon season without rain, but we have hopes it will come soon. All South Asia has been suffering from these two bad monsoons in a row. We need the rain.”

Anna had heard a lot about this from her contacts with ABC, the “Asian Brown Cloud” study, which was trying to determine if the long-term persistence of particulates in the air of south Asia—mysterious in their exact origins, although clearly linked to the industrialization and deforesting in the region—had any causal effect on the drought.

In any case it made for a rather drab and stunted landscape. No plants they saw were native to the island, they were told as they drove through the dust cloud of the bus before theirs. Everything was tended; even the ground itself had been imported, to raise the island a meter or two higher. Nick asked where the extra ground had come from, and they told him that a few surrounding islands had been dredged up and deposited here, also used to provide the raw material for the dike. It had all been done under the direction of Dutch engineers some fifty years before. Very little had been done since then, as far as Anna had been able to determine. The dike was in sight through the trees wherever they went, raising the horizon a bit, so that it felt a little like driving around in a very large roofless room, blasted with hazy harsh sunlight, the sky like a white ceiling. The inner wall of the dike had been planted with flowerbeds that when in bloom would show the usual colors of the Tibetan palette—maroon and saffron, brown and bronze and red, all gone or muted now but the blue and black patches, which were made of painted stones.

In a little town they got out of the van and crossed a broad pedestrian esplanade. The sea breeze poured over them in a hot wave, briny and seaweedy. The smell of the other Sundarbans, perhaps.

“Will we see more swimming tigers?” Nick inquired. He observed everything with great interest, looking cool in his sunglasses. Joe had refused to wear his. He was taking in the scene so avidly he was in danger of giving himself whiplash, trying to see everything at once. Anna was pleased to see this curiosity from the boys; clearly America had not yet jaded them to the beauty and sheer difference of the rest of the world.

Their guides took them in the biggest building, the Government House. It was darker inside, and with their sunglasses on, seemed at first black. By the time they had taken off sunglasses and adjusted to the relative gloom, they found Joe had run off ahead of them. The room displayed the post-and-beam construction characteristic of Himalayan buildings, and the rough-hewn posts in each corner were hung with demon masks.

They followed Joe over to one of these collections. Each mask grimaced rotundly, almost exploding with fury, pain, repugnance. Stacked vertically they looked like a totem pole from a tribe of utter maniacs. Joe was embracing the bottom of the pole.

“Oooh! Oooh! Big— big— big—”

Big what, he could not say. His mouth hung open, his eyes bugged out; they could have molded a new mask portraying astonishment directly from his face.

Frank laughed. “These are his kind of people.”

“He probably thinks it’s a stack of mirrors,” Charlie said.

“Quit it,” Anna said. “Don’t be mean.”

Charlie and Nick leaned their faces in to take photos of themselves on each side of Joe, eyes bugged, tongues thrust out and down. Hopefully they were not offending their hosts. But looking around Anna saw that the guides were smiling.

“They’re masks that hide your face but show your insides,” Charlie said. “This is what we’re all really like inside.”

“No,” Anna said.

“Oh come on. In your feelings? In your dreams?”

“I certainly hope not. Besides, where’s the good feelings?”

She had been thinking of perhaps the curiosity mask, or the striving-for-accuracy mask, but Charlie gave her a Groucho look and indicated with his eyebrows the paintings on the beams between wall and ceiling, which included any number of improbably entwined couples. Frank was frankly checking them out, nodding as if they confirmed some sociobiological insight only he could formulate, bonobo Buddhism or something like that. Anna snorted, pretty sure that the tantrically horny painters had to have been fantasizing elements of female flexibility, among other endowments. Maybe six arms made it easier to position oneself. Or perhaps there was no gravity in nirvana; which would also explain all the perfectly round tits. She wondered what Joe would make of those, being still a breast man of the first order. But for now he remained too fixated on the demon masks to notice them.

Then they were joined by more scientists from the Khembalung Institute for Higher Studies. There were introductions all around, and Anna shook hands, pleased to see all her correspondents at last, just as shockingly real and vivid as the demon masks. Frank joined them, and for a while they chatted about NSF and their various collaborations. Then Frank and Anna and Nick left Charlie and Joe in Government House, and followed their new hosts through rooms and across a courtyard to the Institute itself, where the new labs that NSF had helped to fund and build were still under construction. Outside one of the rooms was a statue of the Buddha, standing with one hand raised before him palm outward, in a gesture like a traffic cop saying
STOP
.

“I’ve never seen him look like that.”

“This is, what say, the Adamantine Buddha,” one of her pen pals said. “The Buddha is represented in a number of different ways. He is not always meditating or laughing. When there is bad going on, the Buddha is as obliged to stop it as anyone else who sees it. And, you know, since bad things happen fairly regularly, there has always been a figure to represent the Buddha’s response.”

Nick said, “He looks like a policeman.”

Their guide nodded. “Police Inspector Sakyamuni. Who insists that we all must resist the three poisons of the mind: fear, greed, and anger.”

“So true,” Anna said. Frank was nodding also, lost in his thoughts.

“This aspect of Buddha-nature is also the one represented in the statues on the dike, of course.”

“Can we go on it?” Frank and Nick asked together.

“Of course. We’re very near it here.”

They finished their tour and joined the rest of their group outside, on a lawn surrounded on three sides by buildings, on the fourth, to the east, by the inner wall of the dike. The wall was a tilted lawn in this area, bisected by a set of broad stone steps leading to its top. Frank and Anna and Nick followed some of their guides up these steps; Charlie and Joe appeared below, and Joe began to run around on the grass.

On top they emerged into a stiff onshore wind. Out to sea lay a white fleet of tall clouds. A big statue of the Adamantine Buddha faced seaward, hand outstretched. From beside him they had a good view of both sea and land, and Anna felt herself lurch a little. “Wow,” Nick said.

It was as it had appeared from the plane during their approach: the land inside the dike was slightly lower than the ocean surrounding it. It was no illusion; their eyesight and inner ear confirmed it.

“Holland is like this in some places,” Frank said to Anna as they followed Nick and the guides. “Have you ever seen the dikes?”

“No.”

“Some of the polders there are clearly lower than the North Sea. You can walk the dikes, and it’s the strangest sight.”

“So it’s true?” Anna asked, waving at Khembalung. “I mean—it looks like it must be.”

One of their guides turned and said, “Unfortunately it is true. When the land is drained, there is a resulting subsidence. Dry land is heavier, and sinks, and then the water wicks up into it. We have gone through cycle after cycle.”

Anna shivered despite the hot wind. She felt faintly queasy and off balance.

“Try looking only one way at a time.”

Anna tried, setting her back to the island. Under a pastel blue, clouds flew in from the southwest. The sea bounced to the blue horizon, waves with whitecaps rolling in. Such a big world. Their guides pointed at the clouds, exclaiming that they looked like the beginning of the monsoon; perhaps the drought would end at last!

They walked along the dike, which was clearly old. A heavy bar mesh at the waterline had rusted away, so that the boulders held in by the mesh were slumping, and in places had fallen. Their guides told them that dike maintenance was done with human labor and the little machinery they had, but that there were structural repairs needed that they could not afford, as they could see. Frank jumped onto the waist-high outer wall, setting a bad example for Nick, who immediately followed it.

Sucandra and Padma came up the broad stone staircase, and when they saw Frank and Nick on the retaining wall they called to them. “Hello! Look, the monsoon may be coming!”

They topped the wall and fell in with them. “We wanted to show you the mandala. Hello, Mingma, you have met our visitors, we see.”

Back down on the dusty grass Charlie and Joe had been joined by Rudra, Drepung, and a group of Khembali youth who were creating a mandala on a giant wooden disk that lay on the lawn. “Let’s go down and see,” Sucandra suggested, and they walked down the steps and out of the brunt of the wind. It certainly felt humid enough to rain.

The biggest sand mandalas took about a week to complete, Mingma told them. Long brass funnels were held by the artists just an inch or so over the pattern, and when the funnels were rubbed with sticks, thin lines of colored sand fell from them. The colorists worked on their knees, scarcely breathing, rubbing the funnels rhythmically, gently, their faces down near the ground to watch the emerging line of sand; then with a quick tilt of the funnels they would stop the flow and sit back and turn to the others, to crack a joke or laugh at someone else’s.

When the design was completely colored in, there would be a ceremony to celebrate the various meanings it held, and then it would be carried to the long shallow reflecting pool in front of Government House, and tipped into the water.

“A real launch party,” Charlie noted.

“It signifies the impermanence of all things.”

To Anna that seemed like a waste of the art. She did not like the impermanence of all things, and felt there was already enough in the world to remind her of it. She liked to think that human efforts were cumulative, that something in every effort was preserved and added to the whole. Perhaps in this case that would be the mandala’s pattern, which would remain in their minds. Or maybe this art was a performance rather than an object. Maybe. What she wanted out of art was something that lasted. If their art did not have that, it seemed like a waste of effort to her.

Over on the other side of the mandala, Joe and Rudra were standing before a group of monks, and Rudra was chanting intently in his deep gravelly voice, a happy gleam in his eye. Those around him repeated the last word of every sentence, in a kind of shout or singing. Joe stamped his foot in time, crying “No!” in unison with the rest of them. He hadn’t even noticed Anna was there.

Then suddenly he took off directly toward the sand mandala, fists clenched and swinging like a miniaturized John Wayne. Anna cried out “Joe!” but he did not hear her. The Khembalis actually made way for him, some of them with arms outstretched as if to create a better corridor. “Joe!” she cried again more sharply. “Joe! Stop!” He hesitated for a second, at the edge of the circle of brilliant color, then walked out onto it.

“JOE!”

No one moved. Joe stood peacefully at the center of the mandala, looking around.

Anna rushed down the steps to the edge of the circle. Joe’s footprints had blurred some lines, and grains of colored sand were now out of place, scattered brilliantly in the wrong fields. Joe was looking very pleased with himself, surveying the pattern under his feet, a pattern made of colors almost precisely the same as the colors of his building blocks at home, only more vibrant. He spotted Rudra, and thrust an arm out to wave at him. “Ba!” he declared.

“Baaaa,” Rudra replied, putting his hands together and bowing.

Joe held his pose, not unlike that of the Adamantine Buddhas, with a kind of Napoleonic grandeur. Charlie, standing now beside Anna, shook his head. “Ya big old hambone,” he muttered.

Joe dropped his arm, made a gesture at all the people watching him. A few drops of rain spattered down out of the low clouds bowling in from sea, and the Khembalis oohed and ahhed as they felt it and looked up.

Joe took off again, this time in the direction of the reflecting pool. Anna rushed around the circle of people to cut him off, but she was too late; he walked right into the shallows. “Joe!” she called out, to no effect. Joe turned and confronted the crowd that had followed him, standing knee-deep in the water. It was sprinkling lightly but steadily now, the rain warm on Anna’s face, and all the Khembalis were smiling. Enough colored sand had stuck to Joe’s feet that vermillion and yellow blooms spread in the water around him.

“Rgyal ba,”
Rudra declared, and the crowded repeated it. Then:
“Ce ba drin dran-pa!”

“What is he saying?” Anna asked Drepung, who now stood beside her, as if to support her if she fainted, or perhaps to stop her if she started in after Joe. Charlie stood on her other side.