The Dalai Lama's Cat (7 page)

The chicken duly arrived and was every bit as delicious as it had smelled. Recharged and reassured of my newfound status, I climbed from the lowest shelf on the rack to the highest, finding a congenial niche between
Vanity Fair
and
Vogue
. It was a position more appropriate to the Snow Lion of Jokhang, not to mention one that afforded a much better view of the brasserie.

Café Franc was a truly Himalayan hybrid—

metropolitan chic meets Buddhist mystique. Along with the glossy magazine rack, espresso machine, and elegant table settings, it was decorated with Buddha statues,
thangkas
, and ritual objects, like the inside of a temple. One wall featured gilt-framed black-and-white photographs of Franc: Franc presenting a white scarf to the Dalai Lama; Franc being blessed by the Karmapa; Franc standing next to Richard Gere; Franc at the entrance to Tiger’s Nest Monastery in Bhutan. Patrons could gaze at these while a hypnotic musical arrangement of the Tibetan Buddhist chant “Om Mani Padme Hum” emerged from the speakers.

As I settled in my newfound aerie, I followed the comings and goings with keen interest. When I was noticed by a pair of American girls who began cooing and stroking me, Franc crossed over to them. “The Dalai Lama’s cat,” he murmured.

“Omigod!” they squealed.

He gave a world-weary shrug. “Comes in all the time.”

“Omigod!” they squealed again. “What’s her name?”

His expression went blank for a moment before he recovered. “Rinpoche,” he told them. “It means precious. A very special title usually only given to lamas.”

“Omigod! Can we, like, take a photograph with her?”

“No flash.” Franc was stern. “Rinpoche must not be disturbed.”

The pattern was repeated throughout the day. “Dalai Lama’s cat,” he would say, indicating my presence with a nod of the head as he handed customers their bills. “Adores our roast chicken.” To others, he would add, “We take care of her for His Holiness. Isn’t she divine?”

“Talk about karma,” he liked to point out. “Rinpoche. It means precious.”

At home, I was HHC, treated with much love by the Dalai Lama and great kindness by his staff, but I was a cat nonetheless. At Café Franc, however, I was a celebrity! At home, I was given cat biscuits at lunchtime, proclaimed by the manufacturers to provide growing kittens with fully balanced nutrition. At Café Franc, beef bourguignon, coq au vin, and lamb Provençal were the daily fare, offered up to where I sat on a lotus cushion Franc soon installed for my comfort. It wasn’t long before I forsook the biscuits at Jokhang in favor of regular visits to Café Franc unless the weather was inclement.

Quite apart from the food, Café Franc turned out to be the most wonderful entertainment venue. The aroma of roasted, organic coffee exerted a magnetic spell on Western visitors to McLeod Ganj of every age, temperament, and coloring imaginable, who arrived speaking a great variety of languages and wearing the most astonishing range of clothing. After spending all my short life surrounded by soft-spoken monks in saffron and red, visiting Café Franc was like visiting the zoo.

But it wasn’t long before I began to realize that beneath all the apparent differences, there were many more ways in which the tourists were quite similar. One way, in particular, I found intriguing.

On days when Mrs. Trinci wasn’t in the kitchen, food preparation up the hill was always uncomplicated. Most meals were rice- or noodle-based, garnished with vegetables, fish, or, less often, meat. This was the case in both the Dalai Lama’s household and the nearby monastery kitchens, where huge vats of rice or vegetable stew were stirred by novices wielding broom-length ladles. But although the ingredients were basic, meal times were occasions of great enjoyment and relish. The monks would eat slowly, in companionable silence, savoring every mouthful. There would be an occasional observation about the flavor of a spice or the texture of the rice. From the expressions on their faces, it was as though they were on a journey of discovery: what sensory pleasure awaited them today? What nuance would they find that was subtly different or gratifying?

A short wobble down the road at Café Franc it was a different universe. From my lookout on the top shelf of the magazine rack, I could see directly through the glass panel of the kitchen door. From well before dawn, two Nepalese brothers, Jigme and Ngawang Dragpa, were hard at work baking croissants,
pain au chocolat
, and all manner of pastries, as well as sourdough, French, Italian, and Turkish breads.

The moment the café doors opened at 7
A.M
., the Dragpa brothers launched into a breakfast service that included eggs—fried, poached, scrambled, boiled, Benedict, Florentine, or in omelets—as well as hash brown potatoes, bacon,
chipolatas
, mushrooms, tomatoes, and French toast, not to mention a buffet of muesli and cereals and fruit juices, accompanied by a full range of teas and barista-made coffees. At 11
A.M.
, breakfast would segue into lunch, which demanded an entirely new menu of even greater complexity, and that, in turn, was succeeded by an even more diverse range of dishes for dinner.

Never had I seen such variety of foods, prepared to such exacting standards, with ingredients from every continent. The handful of spice jars in the monastery kitchen seemed altogether inadequate when compared with the multiple racks of spices, sauces, condiments, and flavorings in the kitchen of Café Franc.

If the monks up the hill were able to find such pleasure in the most basic of foods, surely the delectable cuisine offered to patrons of Café Franc should be the cause of the most intensely spine-tingling, claw-curling, whisker-quivering ecstasy imaginable?

As it happened, no.

After the first few mouthfuls, most customers at Café Franc hardly noticed their food or coffee. Despite all the elaborate preparations, for which they paid a high price, they virtually ignored their food, too busily engaged in conversation, or texting friends and relatives, or reading one of the foreign newspapers Franc collected daily from the post office.

I found it bewildering. It was almost as if they didn’t know
how
to eat.

Many of these same tourists stayed in hotels that provided coffee- and tea-making equipment in their rooms. If they wanted to drink a cup of coffee without actually experiencing it, why didn’t they do it for free back at the hotel? Why pay $3 to
not
drink a cup of coffee at Café Franc?

It was His Holiness’s two executive assistants who helped me make sense of what was happening. Sitting in the room they shared the morning following my first visit to Café Franc, I looked up as Chogyal pushed back from his desk. “I like this definition of mindfulness,” he said to Tenzin, reading from one of the many manuscripts received each week from authors petitioning His Holiness to write a foreword. “‘Mindfulness means paying attention to the present moment deliberately and non-judgmentally.’ Nice and clear, isn’t it?”

Tenzin nodded.

“Not dwelling on thoughts of the past or the future, or some kind of fantasy,” elaborated Chogyal.

“I like an even simpler definition by Sogyal Rinpoche,” said Tenzin, sitting back in his chair. “Pure presence.”

“Hmm,” Chogyal mused. “No mental agitation or elaboration of any kind.”

“Exactly,” confirmed Tenzin. “The foundation of all contentment.”

On my next visit to Café Franc, having enjoyed a hearty helping of Scottish smoked salmon with a side of double-thick clotted cream—a meal I can assure you that I ate with the most intense, if somewhat noisy, mindfulness—I settled onto the lotus-pattern cushion between the latest issues of the fashion magazines and continued my observation of the clientele.

And the more I observed, the more obvious it became: what was missing was mindfulness. Even though they were sitting a few hundred yards from the Dalai Lama’s headquarters, in the Tibetan Buddhist theme park that was Café Franc, rather than experiencing this unique place and moment, most of the time they were mentally far, far away.

Moving between Jokhang and Café Franc more and more often, I began to see that up the hill, happiness was sought by cultivating inner qualities, beginning with mindfulness but also including such things as generosity, equanimity, and a good heart. Down the hill, happiness was sought from external things—restaurant food, stimulating holidays, and lightning-quick technology. There seemed to be no reason, however, that humans couldn’t have both: we cats knew that being mindful of delicious food was among the greatest happinesses imaginable!

One day an interesting couple appeared at Café Franc. At first glance, they were quite ordinary-looking, middle-aged Americans in jeans and sweatshirts. They arrived during a midmorning lull, and Franc sashayed over to their table in his new black Emporio Armani jeans.

“And how are we this morning?” he asked, in his standard opener.

As Franc took their coffee orders, the man asked about the colored strings around his wrist, and Franc began the recitation with which I was now familiar: “They’re blessing strings, and you get them from a lama when you take special initiations. The red one was from the Kalachakra initiations I took from the Dalai Lama in two thousand eight. The blue ones are from vajrayana initiations in Boulder, San Francisco, and New York, in two thousand six, two thousand eight, and two thousand ten. I got the yellow ones at empowerments in Melbourne, Scotland, and Goa.”

“Very interesting,” replied the man.

“Oh, the Dharma is my life,” Franc announced, placing a theatrical hand over his heart, then nodding his head in my direction. “Have you seen our little friend? The Dalai Lama’s cat. In here all the time. Close karmic connection to His Holiness.” Then, leaning closer, he confided, as he did at least a dozen times a day, “We’re at the heart of Tibetan Buddhism here. The absolute epicenter!”