Nine Lives (32 page)
‘We weren’t happy doing this fighting, but what could we do? It is almost impossible to leave the army once you are signed up. I used to feel I would not get a good rebirth, as I wasn’t doing any good with my life – just learning to kill, and then putting those skills to use, actually killing people. And I felt sorry, because the war didn’t seem to be about right and wrong, and it certainly wasn’t about the dharma. It was because of some high politicians in Delhi and Islamabad that people had to suffer and to kill.’
I asked if he felt he had been misled by the Indians into joining the army.
‘For refugees like us who had no rights, the Indian army was a life commitment, though of course we didn’t really realise that when we first joined up. My conscience was very troubled by what I had seen, and by what I had done in Bangladesh. On my annual leave, in expiation, I had begun touring the Buddhist pilgrimage sites of India and Nepal, searching for peace of mind. I went to Bodhgaya, Varanasi, Sarnath and Lumbini. There I spent my time praying and meditating, performing prostrations in an attempt to gain back some of the merit I had lost. I went to the place where the Lord Buddha lived, to where he was born, to where he attained Enlightenment, and where he preached his first sermon. And I swore that the very day that I was able to leave the army I would try to make up for what I had done as a soldier.
‘It was not until 1986 that my papers came. I retired and caught a bus the same day to Dharamsala. As chance would have it, I arrived in the middle of the Monlam ceremony, when the Dalai Lama gives his public teachings – the same ceremony I had seen in Lhasa in 1959, nearly thirty years earlier. As I listened to the sermons, I wondered what I could do to make up for all I had done. Then I saw some prayer flags attached to the temple, and thought, this is something I can do: I can make prayer flags.
‘Compared to Tibet, there are relatively few prayer flags in India, even in Dharamsala, and many are very badly printed: you can’t read the mantras, and often they are not correctly written. I knew all the mantras from my training as a monk and I decided I would try to make well-printed prayer flags. I decided I would really take trouble over them so that they earned good rather than bad merit. In this way I could help the Lord’s dharma and do service to the community. I thought I could live a calm and peaceful life, and also make a little money to supplement my army pension.
‘I found a small wooden hut in which to live. It had a tin roof and was mounted on four small wooden chocks. I also found an old lama who taught me the techniques of printing. As part of my penance and reparation for what I have done, I have made it a point that every single flag should be perfect, that every word should be correct and legible. When someone buys my flags they are putting their faith in them, and I don’t want to cheat them. It is like when we used to draw
thangka
paintings when I was a boy in the monastery in Dakpa. If you miss something, or have the wrong number of fingers, or give the wrong Bodhisattva the wrong
mudra
, we were told that that would be a great sin. So when I make the flags, I try to think of the person who will buy them, and of the merit they will earn by flying them, and I always pray that they may find the right path and not make the same errors as me.
‘Finally, in 1995, I decided to become a monk again. It wasn’t a difficult decision. I only gave back my vows so that if the need came I would be able to kill to protect the dharma.
But in my heart I never really gave up my vows. I was always a monk in my heart – it was just that sometimes my duty led elsewhere. I talked about it with several of my old army colleagues, including two who had been monks with me in Dakpa, and we decided to take our habits again together. His Holiness gave us our vows, and gave us new names to signal the new beginning we were making, even though it was so late in our lives.
‘The period since I rejoined the religious life has been the happiest time – at least the happiest since my days as a nomad in the mountains, or when I went to the cave in Dakpa to live as a hermit. It may seem odd: many people think that old age is an affliction. But from youth I have always accepted that I had to grow old – it comes to everyone. I now have the time to read all the scriptures, which I could never do in the army. What is done is done, and I can’t undo my actions in Bangladesh. But I feel very fortunate that I had this second chance. Now at least I can die as a monk. It may be more difficult to memorise and learn by heart the scriptures than when I was young; but there are many less distractions in old age, and concentrating becomes easier. It is tough getting all the readings for the day done at my age – I have to start at 3 a.m. or I don’t finish, but at least my mind no longer goes off like a yak that has escaped its herder.
‘The veterans’ home is a good place, and almost like a monastery. Certainly there is some loss of freedom, but I know that if I get sick now I will be looked after. Everything is taken care of, and you can concentrate on your prayers. Like in the old days, I get up at 3 and pray and meditate until 6.30. At 8.30 I go to the temple here. Then we have tea, and after that I do the first circumambulation of the Dalai Lama’s residence. Two others follow in the afternoon and evening.
‘For the first time in thirty years I feel that I spend my day practising the dharma again. I have no material goods, and no temptations. I think of the time I will die and how best to embrace this. I am here in Dharamsala, near His Holiness. Whenever the Dalai Lama preaches, I can attend, and listen to him, and learn from his wisdom.
‘And I am especially fortunate that of late I feel I have conquered the hate I used to feel for the Chinese. His Holiness is always preaching that it is not the Chinese, but hate itself that is our biggest enemy. Ever since the Chinese tortured my mother, I felt a deep hatred for them, and was always striving for violent retaliation. Whenever I saw a Chinese restaurant in India, I would want to throw stones at it. Even the colour red could make me boil with anger at what the Chinese have done. But after I heard His Holiness say we must defeat hatred, I determined that I would try to eat a Chinese meal in a Chinese restaurant to try to cure myself of this rage. I wanted to wash my anger clean, as His Holiness puts it, to wash clean the blood.
‘So one day when I was on pilgrimage in Bodhgaya, I saw a small Chinese restaurant by the roadside. It was run by two Chinese women – an old woman of seventy and her daughter who must have been around forty. I went in there one evening and ordered some noodles. I have to say that they were delicious. After I had eaten, I thanked the mother and asked her to sit down with me, so we could talk. I asked, “Where are you from?” and she replied, “Before the Communists, I was from China.” It turned out her father had been tortured and killed by Mao’s soldiers at the Cultural Revolution, and her relations had fled to Hong Kong and from there to Calcutta. By this stage, she was weeping: crying and crying as she told me what her family had suffered. I told her, “Before the Communists, I was from Tibet, and my mother was also tortured, and died from what Mao’s soldiers did to her.” After that, we both burst into tears and hugged each other. Since then I have been free from my hatred of all things and people Chinese.
‘There is another reason I feel very fortunate. Three years ago, I was doing the
parikrama
when I saw a man from my village. I hadn’t seen him for over fifty years but I recognised him immediately. He had only just come to India from Tibet, and he was able to bring me news of my family, and told me that one of my elder brothers was still alive. Even more than that, he knew his telephone number.
‘The next day I rang home. After thirty years I was able to talk to my brother, though I couldn’t understand very much, as he was crying so much. He told me all my other brothers had died, and it was just the two of us who were left. He said that the Chinese had taken the family house, and our land, and all the yak and
dri
, saying that we were landowners and so Class Enemies. They gave the yaks to a collective farm and made the family live in the yak shed. But that was all I could really hear. My brother kept sobbing and asking me to return. “Just come back, come back, and everything will be all right.” I wondered whether I should. But then I thought: what help could I be at my age? I will just be a burden.’
As we walked back to the veterans’ home in the evening light, with the sun setting behind the peaks, the crows were calling to roost, wheeling and croaking in the deodar slopes around us. Passang was silent, so I asked: ‘But wouldn’t you like to go back to Tibet, even just to see it one last time? Isn’t that where you should be ending your days?’
He didn’t answer immediately. ‘I always thought I would return to Tibet in this life,’ said Passang eventually, as we climbed down the path to the home for the last time. ‘That was why I joined the army, to fight for it. India is still a foreign land for me, even though I have been here forty years and the people have been very hospitable.’
I could see the prayer beads whirring in Passang’s hand – always the sign that he was thinking hard.
‘And of course,’ he continued, ‘I am sad that I have been separated from my country and my family, and that even now, in old age, I am not back home. I am sad that there has been so much violence
and suffering in my life. I am now seventy-four. I am still in exile, and Tibet is still not free.
‘I still hope that one day Tibet will be free, and who knows? Even the Chinese do not believe in communism any more, so maybe in time the dharma will spread from Tibet into China? Maybe before I am finished, I will get to go back home. That is my last wish, to go back to Tibet and die there.’
Passang looked down the wooded slopes to the Kangra Valley, far below the veterans’ home. ‘But you know . . . I have always felt that all of us fled together, and I should wait until a time came when we could all go back together.’
‘It wouldn’t be right to go back alone,’ he said. ‘After all this time, it just wouldn’t be right.’
‘The gods created man,’ said Srikanda Stpathy, ‘but here we are so blessed that we – simple men as we are – help to create the gods.’
Rain was coming down in sheets, and we were sitting looking out on to the downpour from the veranda of Mr Krishnamurthy’s house. Men in white lungis bicycled past, their right hand on the handlebars and their left holding up an umbrella. Rickshaws sluiced through the flooded streets, their wheels cutting wakes through the ankle-deep water, like motorboats on a canal.
Earlier, Mr Krishnamurthy had seen me caught in the downpour and had beckoned me over. While we waited for the rain to end, and the annual procession of the village gods to begin, he had introduced me to his friend. Srikanda, explained Mr Krishnamurthy, was a Brahmin and an idol maker or Stpathy: the twenty-third in a long hereditary line stretching back to the great bronze casters of the Chola empire, which had ruled most of southern India until the end of the thirteenth century. His workshop was a short distance away in the great temple town of Swamimalai. There he and his two elder brothers plied their trade, making gods and goddesses in exactly the manner of their ancestors.
Srikanda was a plump, middle-aged man with a side parting and a slightly slow left eye. He wore a freshly laundered white lungi and a long baggy white shirt which nearly, but not quite, hid the swelling bulge of his rice stomach. On his left breast he wore a small enamelled star which, he explained proudly, was his badge of office as president of the Swamimalai Lions’ Club; our host, Mr Krishnamurthy, who was the proprietor of the Sri Murugan Hotel, and also headed the local temple committee, was his vice president. It was Mr Krishnamurthy who had commissioned Srikanda to cast the new pair of idols that were about to be processed around the village for the first time, before being taken off to visit the great Murugan temple in Swamimalai.
I had arrived in Tamil Nadu only a couple of days before. It was the week of Tamil New Year, and I had come to see one of the many temple chariot processions which each year mark the occasion. The monsoon had not yet broken, yet already the humidity was high, and the rains which fell late each afternoon were heavy and insistent. Sheet lightning quaked sourceless beyond the distant thunderheads. For an hour each day, the dark archipelagos of cloud bank massing over the Kaveri Delta let loose a great white waterfall that flooded the rice fields and washed clean the dusty fronds of the palm trees, ran down the tumbling eves of the temple
gopuras
and soaked the palm thatch of the village huts.
