The Second Rule of Ten: A Tenzing Norbu Mystery (Dharma Detective: Tenzing Norbu Mystery) (31 page)

A young monk walked inside, bowed, and delivered a tea tray.
Same chipped tea pot.
A lump of yak butter and a salt shaker flanked two cups.
Same cups.

“Tibetan or English?” my father asked, his eyes boring into mine. It felt like a test.

“I’ll have what you’re having,” I said. He filled the cups with tea, and stirred a spoonful of yak butter and a pinch of salt in each. He pushed one cup in my direction. Picked his up, and slurped noisily, following up with a drawn-out “Ahhh” of satisfaction. I sipped and was happy not to gag.

My father’s voice was amused. “You’ve lost your taste for the old ways.”

“Maybe I never had one to begin with.”

My father set down his cup. “Why did you come back?”

“You mean why, when you put so much effort into throwing me out?”

His voice was mild. “The front door is never locked. You walked out of it voluntarily thirteen years ago. Nobody forced you to leave, and as far as I know, nobody forced you to return.”

I was suddenly overtaken by an urgent need to lie down and sleep. I was so tired of fighting. My father’s stubbornness was monumental, my resistance exhausting.

Breathe, Ten. Breathe.

I inhaled deeply and exhaled fully. My father observed me, his face impassive. I tried to release my own stubbornness with the long exhale. I had wasted so much time waiting for my father to change. I would try not to waste a moment more.

“I didn’t come here because of you,” I said. “I came here because of Yeshe and Lobsang. I still link up with them, or at least I did until a couple days ago. When I reached out to them during meditation I found the connection broken. An image of you stood in its place.”

A slight smile played at the corners of my father’s mouth. To my mind, it was condescending. “So, still meditating?” he asked. “Still playing at sgom rgyab?”

How dare he? What gives him the right?
I wasn’t here to discuss my meditation practice. As far as I was concerned, he had lost the right to know. “I’d like to see my friends. Now, please,” I managed to say.

My father turned to look out the window. “They’re gone,” he said, fixing his eyes on the snow-capped crags. “Sent away. I’m sorry.”

“Why?”

“Ah. Why. That is an interesting question,” he said.

“What have you done with them?” I spat out the words.

He shifted his gaze back to me. “As the years passed, with no word from you, not one, I finally accepted you had left all of us absolutely. Then I discovered you hadn’t, not really. I found them, you see; all those letters you’d sent to Yeshe and Lobsang over time. Pages and pages filled with descriptions of your new life. So I sent your friends to a simpler place, where they would not be distracted. I told myself it was better.”

“Where?”

“Over the border,” he said. “The old country.”

“
Tibet?
”

“Yes, to Dip-Dorje. It’s still home to twenty of our monks. Twenty-two, now.”

Dip-Dorje. Our original monastery. When we were kids, Yeshe loved to locate it on the old map of Tibet hanging in one of our classrooms. He would find Lhasa, place his finger on Potala Palace and move it up a few inches to the hilly region that lay north. The map showed where our centuries-old monastery lay, but not what happened to it in 1959, when all of Tibet was “liberated” by the Chinese Red Army. Along with thousands of others, our temple was ravaged, and any surviving monks joined the massive spiritual exodus to India. Dip-Dorje lay in ruins until right around the time I’d left for America, when word trickled in that local volunteers had begun reconstruction. My father and the other abbots had dispatched a few brave lamas to reopen the monastery as best they could, given the watchful eyes of the local government. But that was a decade ago, before the recent crackdown.

“The Chinese allow such things?” I said. “Monks can go back and forth? It is safe?”

“No,” he said. “Not back and forth. Not safe. Our relations with the Chinese are no better. Now that His Holiness has half retired, perhaps worse.”

I stared at this shrunken version of my father. Smaller, but no less vindictive. “And still you sent Yeshe and Lobsang? How could you do this to them? I always knew you to be a cold man, Father. Cold and angry. But never unfair.”

“Unfair?” He shook his head. “Such a Western concept. The spiritual life, like any life, is neither fair, nor unfair. Life just is. And our feelings about its fairness are completely irrelevant.”

I wanted to throttle him. Then, like a pendulum, a deep ebb tide of fatigue again replaced the flow of anger. My father, too, seemed to slump under the wear of this ridiculous dance between us. He leaned back and closed his eyes. I blinked. His skin was giving off a faint pulse of grayish-green energy, like a discharge of poison.

He isn’t well.

“Father . . . “ I started, just as he opened his eyes, and said “I’m dying, Tenzing.”

My body was kneeling next to his before my mind had fully registered the words. He took off his glasses, exposing brackish eyes.

“But . . . “ My own stung. “You can’t . . . “

He put his glasses on again. “I’ve got a cancer, deep inside. I cannot fight it—it’s stronger than I am.”

“Where?”

“I think they call it ‘prostate’ in the West.”

“But that’s good, then. There are treatments.”

His smile was weary. “There’s no treatment for karma,” he said. “No pill, although I’m sure your drug companies would disagree.”

Now they were “my” drug companies
. I am his metaphor for all things Western and therefore wrong.
I pulled back from heading down that sour alleyway. Not now.

Next came panic, irony fast on its heels: No one prided himself more than me when it came to the subject of death—accepting it, allowing it, helping others to deal with it. But this?
Not my father.
“I don’t know what to do.” I said. My voice broke.

My father touched the back of my hand. I almost flinched, though whether from fear or disgust, I couldn’t say.

“Tenzing, do you remember what I told you when you left?”

“Every word. You said I had shown once again that my commitment to the Dharma was insufficient.”

“That’s right, son.” He sighed. “I’m sure I meant it at the time.”

Son.

A tiny heart-space opened, and a droplet of hope formed inside. I hardened around it.

“You meant it,” I said. “I’m sure you still do.”

“Tenzing, please. Look at me. Not who you think I still am. Me.”

I forced myself to look. And saw a fearsome monster that would live forever, claws eternally dug into my heart.

“Let it go,” he said.

And saw a frail man, old before his time, with little of it left.

I had fought against this person for my whole life. He had a permanent outpost inside me.
Because he is your father.
To eliminate him completely was to kill myself.
Because you are his son.
My body was the living host of his presence, and there was no way to root it out without jeopardizing the rest of me.
Because we live in each other.

“Tenzing, I’m trying to see things differently now,” my father said. “Can you allow that to be true?”

He was asking me to reexamine a core fact of my existence—that my father’s rejection was the source of all my problems. The challenge was terrifying. As I took a deep breath, my vow, the one I had outlined to Yeshe and Lobsang in that fateful returned letter, plucked at my heart. If ever there was a time to let go of an outmoded, limited model of thinking, it was now.

“I’m listening,” I said.

“Thank you, Tenzing.” My father’s voice was heavy. “I think . . . I think our struggles have their roots in resentment.”

“Whose resentment?” I said, and braced myself.

He touched his chest. “Mine.” His face twisted. A tear formed. Rolled down his cheek. More tears followed
. Impossible. My father does not cry.
But there they were—and something loosened inside.

I opened my mouth to speak.

“Please. There’s more,” he said. “Rather than addressing this resentment, I told myself I did you a favor. That I gave you something to rebel against, something that might propel you into a new life and make you strong enough to succeed.” His smile was wan. “Is there any truth to that? Or am I simply a failed father trying to make himself feel better?”

“Yes,” I said. “And yes.”

He nodded. “I understand. Just as I now understand why I sent Yeshe and Lobsang away. How much easier, to condemn intimacy and trust among others, rather than acknowledge one’s own utter lack of either.”

We remained silent for a few long moments.

“I am haunted by the thought that my life is almost over, and I failed in everything I did,” my father said.

“That sounds like the cancer talking,” I said.
Welcome to the human race,
I thought.

“Maybe. But there’s truth in the cancer nonetheless,” he said. “And the pain is teaching me things I couldn’t learn any other way.”

Fear put a choke hold around my throat. “Father, are you sure there’s nothing . . . ?”

He stopped my words with a raised palm. “I missed my chance, Tenzing. Now all I can do is regard the process of dying with equanimity. Try to stay open to learning from it.”

“Long may you learn, then,” I said.

“No,” he said. “Short may I learn.”

Our eyes met straight on. His crinkled in what looked like genuine good humor.

“I never gave you my blessing, did I?” he said. He opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out a soft, silken object, a white
kata
. “His Holiness gave me this when I was installed as head abbot. He will be pleased to hear that I have passed it on to you.” He draped it around my neck.

A seed of feeling blossomed in my chest area, a sense of warm expansion I had never associated with my father. Was it love?

He pushed upright and took hold of his cane.

“There is a Sikh in the village,” he said. “A merchant. Mr. Mohan. He will help you. Now go. I’m very tired.”

“Father . . . “

“Go.”

I went. On my way out, I glanced into the courtyard, now filled with young monks, heading for their afternoon assembly. I thought I might recognize some of them, but I didn’t.

There are fixers everywhere. Inside India, most of the really good ones are Sikhs. Their network is nationwide, they won’t cheat you, and if things get dicey, their ceremonial daggers are known to have sharpened edges.

I soon tracked down the white-turbaned Mr. Mohan in his rug shop. He was wide across the shoulders and a long, full beard, held neatly in place with a hair net, rested on his well-fed belly, a sign of distinction among the merchant classes in India. I explained who I was.

“Your father’s a great man,” he said. “How wonderful you come from America to visit him.”

I just smiled.

“What you need?”

I told him I needed to somehow get to Yeshe and Lobsang’s monastery. As I said the words, a feeling close to panic swelled in my lungs, making it harder to breathe.

Tenzing. Brother. Where are you?

Yeshe and Lobsang. Something was wrong
.

“As quickly as possible,” I said.

Mr. Mohan nodded. “I arrange passage for them,” he said. “But no ‘quick as possible.’ One full day by truck, followed by ten-mile hike where truck cannot go.”

“No!”

He raised his eyebrows.

“I’m sorry, but no. I don’t have a day,” I said. “Please. It’s urgent.”

He eyed me, and somehow deduced I had enough money to grease the right palms.

“Good. You fly Lhasa, then drive 3-wheel ATV to Dip-Dorje Yidam. I arrange both. Maybe you get there today, things go your way.”

“Is that the fastest way?”

He chuckled. “No. Fastest way helicopter. Fastest way get there. Fastest way die. Chinese don’t shoot you out of sky, they burn down monastery.” He waved me off. “Come back in one half hour.”

I was starving. I crossed the street and purchased three
momos,
plucked from the heated metal vat of a colorful street vendor. She beamed at me as I devoured hot dumplings of shredded cabbage, carrots and potatoes, savoring the sharp bite of ginger.

I hurried back to find the amazing Mr. Mohan had fixed all my problems. Within the hour I was back at the Dharamshala airport, catching a ten-seater to Lhasa. This plane, too, bucked and lurched until I wondered if I would outlive the journey. I distracted myself from worrying about my safety, and that of my friends, by mentally rearranging fragments of insight from the time with my father. Maybe I could piece them into a new quilt of understanding.

Half the cells in my body come from my father.

There is no escaping him. He lives in me.

I give him power every time I argue with him in my mind.

I give him power every time I spot some thought of his in my mind and curse him for putting it there.

He will trouble me as long as I continue to give him permission to do so.

Accept. Allow. All will be well.
My father’s voice, the newer, kinder version, seemed to float to me from somewhere outside.
No, not from outside. Inside. Inside me.
I had to smile. One part of my mind busily clung to regrets and resentments and heartaches from years ago. Meanwhile, another part piped up, trying to shift the direction, a wise voice like that of a good parent. Marvelous instrument, this brain, even if often an instrument of torture.

The “good father” voice spoke up again, encouraged by my brief willingness to listen.
Accept him as he is, and maybe he’ll quit bothering you. While you’re at it, accept the parts of you that are just like him, and maybe you’ll quit bothering yourself.

As I wrapped this new understanding around my shoulders, trying it on for size, the aerial bumps stopped bothering me, too.

A dour Chinese official at the Lhasa airport took in my dark eyes and high cheekbones with suspicion. I met his gaze steadily, though my heart was pounding.

“Reason for your visit?”

“Tourist,” I said.

He grunted and returned to my passport. But no matter how long he studied it, it still said “American.”