End of the Road Read online

  “I suppose, if you care for that sort of thing. The poem is called the Mahabharata.” Emily finally seemed satisfied. “Let’s go home, child. We have work to do.”

  4: Meditating with the Monks

  Norbu and Pasang were resistant to the idea. Rinpoche insisted on including her in a special meeting… as if she were actually one of the monks, and he expected the senior monks to meditate with her! What could he hope to accomplish?

  Late that afternoon, Norbu met her at the gate to the outer courtyard. She arrived dressed like a Newari market woman, in tunic, pants and shawl. At least that was better than the running suit or blue jeans she usually wore. He showed her into the central hall, where Rinpoche and several monks were waiting.

  Rinpoche’s instructions to the monks: be open to suggestion. To the girl, he said: “Slow your breathing.” And then they sat, quietly, eyes closed or unfocused, breathing, all around the room. She sat in one corner, as far away from the rest of them as she could get. Perhaps she sensed their disapproval.

  The experience turned out to be quite peculiar, and utterly new. For Norbu, the goal in meditation had always been to leave himself behind, not to carry corporeal images with him, to transcend the usual shapes of sensory experience. But now he noticed the tug of a very particular sensation. Could this be what Rinpoche had in mind?

  He felt the sun on his cheek, and then the shade. The clarity of the sensations was startling. Cool, crisp dirt and fallen leaves crinkled under his feet. Water sounded in the distance—a river, or a waterfall?—he followed the path toward a light up ahead. Tall trees arched overhead, forming a canopy at least thirty feet up. Smaller trees, tropical and lush, palm fronds and oversized ferns reached out to him through the leopard shade. The forest thinned out ahead and he saw the gleam of a clearing through the last few branches. Tall grass, with butterflies and other flying things dancing in the sunlight, the invitation was irresistible. He pushed his way out of the shade.

  He wasn’t alone. He couldn’t see the others, but he heard voices murmuring, lots of voices. And then he saw her. She was so bright he didn’t exactly know how he recognized her. Looking at her was like looking at the sun, searing and yet somehow not painful. Two dark spots in the center of the fire beckoned to him. Eyes? They glanced to the side. He followed where she led, to a stream along which a footpath meandered back across the meadow to the waterfall that was its source.

  He couldn’t see the top through the mist that formed naturally around so much falling water. It might as well have been as high as the sky. The vertical river crashed down with a roar. When she stepped behind the curtain of water on one side onto a rocky ledge, he followed. The air behind the falls was cool, humid, dark. He saw her up ahead, glancing back at him meaningfully, before she disappeared into what looked like a hole in the cliff face.

  Bright as she was, when he got to the mouth of the cave, no light could be seen. A blast of hot air pushed him back as he tried to enter, but he pressed on through. Perhaps this is what Rinpoche meant. Is he here, too? The floor fell away beneath him with each step, and he began to move faster and faster, until he was running out of control. Soon he was in free fall, hurtling toward what seemed like the bottom of the world.

  Dark as coal at first, he noticed a tiny patch of faint lights in the distance. He seemed to be accelerating toward them at great speed. As the cave narrowed, the pressure grew enormously, threatening to crush him. Breathing would require an enormous effort. Better not to breathe at all.

  Just as the weight pressing on him threatened to become unbearable, he felt himself propelled out the other end, as if he’d been spit out of the world like a watermelon seed. Hurtling now through endless space, surrounded by a billion lights, as many as the stars in the sky, he no longer felt himself anywhere. The cosmos spread out in all directions and he’d been dissolved into it, along with all the other voices he heard in the meadow. But for the fact that he was now everywhere at once, he’d have felt adrift in the enormity of infinite space.

  Eventually, he found that he could see the whole from a single point of view, a cloud among the stars, perhaps a nebula like the one in the belt of Orion. He saw a vast wheel of light, composed of so many smaller lights, turning slowly on its axis. And further in the distance, more wheels turning each in their own time, perhaps as many wheels as there were stars.

  The cloud from which he looked out on the cosmos grew brighter and hotter, until it seemed to be gathering itself for some new thing. The brightness all but coalesced into a single point, and then burst from the cloud, moving at tremendous speed in a vast, gradual arc, all the while turning on its own axis. Was that her? Or was it a completely new birth? He watched as she found a place among all the other wheels of light.

  Norbu felt the breath move into his lungs, filling him up, expanding his chest, pressing against the edges of the world. As the breath left him, the cloud seemed to dissipate and all the lights rushed away into an even greater distance. Soon it was pitch black, no light at all. The air was cool and quiet. He felt the stone tile of the floor, and heard the breathing of the other monks. When he glanced around the room, he saw the look of astonishment on the faces of the other monks that he assumed must also be scorched into his.

  How strange her meditations must be. No transcendence. She doesn’t leave the material world behind, but somehow manages to leave herself behind to become one with the whole. Is this what it means to be a deva? The power he felt inside her, if that’s really where he had been, it was immense, as big as the world itself.

  The girl was nowhere to be seen. And Rinpoche was gone, too. He scrambled to his feet.

  “Pasang, where are they? Where’s Rinpoche?”

  The other monks looked around the room nervously. Where had they gone?

  ~~~~~~~

  “Please, stay here, Rinpoche,” Emily said. “Let me go by myself.”

  “No, Michi-chhori. I will come with you.”

  “We must hurry, please, Rinpoche-la,” Nawang said, with his hands pressed together in front of his face and his voice trembling. “They’re gangsters. They might hurt Sonam.”

  “We shall hire a taxi,” Rinpoche said.

  “But you don’t carry money, Rinpoche,” said Nawang. “And I have none.”

  “I have money,” Emily said, now resigned to bringing the Tulku to a meeting whose unknown dangers she would prefer to face by herself. “Let’s go.”

  Taxis were scarce in the early evening in Swayambhu, but Nawang spotted a tiny green Maruti a block away. By the time Rinpoche and Emily caught up, she could see it was too small for all three of them, especially if they meant to bring Sonam back in the same car.

  The sight of an ancient monk approaching his taxi made the driver shudder. He jumped out, pressed his hands together and bowed to Rinpoche, the whole time apparently trying to tell him not to get in. The old man waved him off and squeezed himself into the back, while Nawang gave him a destination. Emily understood nothing of what was said, except “eight hundred rupees.”

  “Who are we going to see, Nawang?” she asked.

  “The Manange. They’re the one’s who took Sonam away. Dangerous people, Michi-didi. I should come to make sure nothing happens to Rinpoche-la.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll see to that. Is it far?”

  “Twenty minutes,” the driver interjected.

  Emily smiled at that estimate. She learned on her first day in Kathmandu that everything was always twenty minutes away. She turned to the driver.

  “Eight hundred rupees. But you wait there. Another thousand rupees to bring us back.”

  He grinned and nodded as she climbed into the back seat with Rinpoche. The vinyl upholstery was shredded and repaired here and there with what looked like denim iron-on patches. As if to balance out the aesthetics of the interior, the side and rear windows were festooned with lace and images of the Buddha.

  “Who are the Manange?” she asked, as they pulled away from the curb.

  “T
ibetans,” the driver called out from the front.

  “They are Tamang or Gurung people,” Rinpoche corrected him for her benefit. “They came to Lhasa from Burma several generations ago. When the Chinese came, they moved south. Manange is their language. There are very few of them left.”

  Emily could see by the fading light of the evening that they were entering a scrubbier, less developed part of the Kathmandu valley. Gone were the elegant temples with their high-flying stupas. No more of the colorful, almost whimsical ornamentation on the side of every building. The shacks and shanties she saw passing by offered nothing to celebrate in the lives of the people who lived there.

  “The Tibetan gangs are all working for the Chinese,” the driver barked over his shoulder as if he were a welcome part of their conversation. “Before the end of the monarchy, the Maoists recruited young men from those gangs. Now all the political parties pay them to cause trouble.”

  “Ignore him,” Rinpoche said. “He doesn’t know what he’s saying.”

  “What makes you say that?” Emily asked.

  “The Manange aren’t Tibetan, and they hate the Chinese.”

  The car bucketed in and out of potholes, swerved around the largest ones, stopped occasionally for livestock wandering in the street, until some forty or so minutes later, the driver pulled to a stop and announced their arrival. It took a moment for Rinpoche to extricate himself from the back seat. Emily handed the driver three hundred rupees.

  “Wait here,” she said.

  The driver looked at the bills in his hand and leaned his head out the window to protest. Emily froze him with a stern look and he sat back with a scowl. It wasn’t hard to see the reason for his irritation. Even in the semi-darkness, the neighborhood appeared less than welcoming. Bored young men huddled in a doorway on one side of the street where several buildings leaned against each other for support. Resentful women peered out of doorways and windows. A sturdy, squat cinder block building on the corner seemed to offer the adjacent rickety architecture an anchor to the sidewalk. A sign on the front gave the impression it might be a shop, though Emily could read none of the characters. Limited experience suggested that whatever there was these people needed to get through the day was likely to be found in there.

  Crude wooden fencing on the other side of the street hinted at an empty lot, or perhaps some low buildings too decrepit to provide steady shelter.

  “They must be in there,” Rinpoche said, pointing to the fence.

  Emily was unconvinced, though she had no better idea of where to begin looking for the boy. On the off chance he might hear, she called his name over the fence. The air hung still and silent. She called again, louder. Still no response.

  “Sonam,” she cried out once more.

  Muffled noises and the sound of running feet echoed from behind the fence. A door slammed.

  “Wait here by the car, Rinpoche,” she said.

  No gate or entrance, not even a missing plank, was visible in the fence. Between a couple of boards a few feet away, a slight gap and a few protruding nails caught her eye. A ragged edge skinned her knuckle as she tore one of the boards away. Two more came away more easily now that the gap was wide. She stepped through. Several small buildings lay scattered around the yard, as well as a couple of small trucks. In the dim light, she could make out a few figures in the distance, standing in front of the largest of the buildings, a low lying brick and wood structure with no windows on the side facing her. Light escaped through a few cracks in the siding on one edge.

  As she walked toward the men, she heard footsteps behind her. When she turned, Rinpoche looked up at her and said, “We will go together, Michi-chhori.” She reached back to help him over some debris in the yard.

  “What a pair we make,” she thought. “A wizened old man and a foreign girl who doesn’t even speak the language. I’m sure they’ll be impressed.”

  At first, the men at the door to the shack looked like they wanted to shoo them away. But a closer look at the old man seemed to bring a change of heart. They bowed, hands pressed together, and said something to him that she didn’t understand. The only word she caught in his reply was “Sonam.” They grunted and ushered Rinpoche in through a rough-hewn wooden door. When she moved to follow, the men stepped across to block her, but the expression in her eyes startled them, and they let her push through to the door.

  A dozen or so faces looked up at her from around the sparsely furnished room. A bare bulb hanging from the ceiling provided the only light. They were mainly young men, sallow skin still smooth, probably teenagers like her. She detected no authority in their eyes, nothing to indicate aggression either, just the usual adolescent mixture of fear and confidence—and no sign of Sonam anywhere.

  Sitting around a makeshift table off to one side, three older men, possibly in their thirties, paid her no mind. Rinpoche spoke a few words to them, but they dismissed him with a wave. Emily cleared her throat to get their attention. In their eyes she saw what she was looking for, the disdain that usually accompanies leadership in a criminal gang.

  “I’m here for Sonam,” she said. “Where is he?”

  “He is not your concern,” one of them finally snarled in heavily accented English, after an uncomfortable silence.

  “Sonam is coming with me.”

  Something in her voice, her firmness perhaps, or the intensity of her passion, seemed to catch their attention. The one whose demeanor most commanded deference from the rest stood to face her.

  “What is the boy to you?” he asked.

  “You should ask him that.”

  “I am Deepak. What is your name?”

  “Tenno Michiko,” Emily replied.

  “Just because you are Mongol does not make you Manange. Sonam is one of us. His father was my friend. His son belongs to us.”

  A door across the room opened and a young woman entered holding a groggy Sonam by the hand. He must have been napping. In a single glance, Emily took in the resemblance, the same sallow, oval face and curly black hair, the same brown almond eyes. Sonam was unmistakably one of them. No wonder they want him. The thought flashed across her mind that he might really be better off with his own people.

  With a glance at Rinpoche, Emily wondered what she could say that would move them. The old man nodded to her meaningfully.

  “His mother left him with Rinpoche,” she said. “She wanted a different life for her son.”

  “What a Sherpa girl might have wanted means nothing to us. The boy is Manange. He will stay with us.”

  Sonam shook off the last shreds of sleep and recognized her.

  “Michi-didi,” he cried out, and ran to her.

  Emily bent down and scooped the boy up in her arms. He rubbed his cheek against hers.

  “I’m here for you, Sonam,” she whispered.

  “Are we going home now?”

  “If that’s what you want,” Emily replied, staring intently at Deepak. “I will honor his mother’s wishes,” she said.

  “Are you going to protect him?” Deepak asked. “Do you even know who the boys who bully him at school are?”

  She shook her head.

  “They are the little brothers of the gangsters who killed his father, Tibetans and Sherpas. The monks didn’t tell you that, did they?”

  Emily turned a searching glance on Rinpoche.

  “It makes no difference, Michi-chhori,” he said. “His mother brought him to us.”

  “They will never leave him alone,” Deepak said. “And when he’s old enough, they’ll kill him. He is safe with us.”

  Sonam’s little arms clung tightly around her neck. She felt his chest heave with a sob. Somehow she had become the arbiter of his fate, and the puzzle of what to do with him was fast becoming insoluble. Only one place offered her any promise of clarity.

  Emily closed her eyes and listened to the air enter her chest and then slowly leak out. In and out, slowly at first, and then even slower, her breath pressed outward against the walls of the r
oom, and then came seeping back to her. She heard the breathing of the others, all of them, some frantic, anxious, worried, one resolute: Deepak. Rinpoche’s chest hardly moved at all, as if he were barely even there. Only one chest really mattered, the one pressed against hers.

  Sonam’s breath was hectic at first, then gradually calmer until he found the rhythm of her breathing. She could feel his heart beating against hers, almost hear the blood sloshing in his veins. The warmth of an innocent heart flooded her body. In that moment, she saw what she must do.

  “I am here for Sonam. We will honor his mother’s wishes.”

  “And if the Sherpas take him?”

  “Then I will get him back.”

  “And after you leave, what then?”

  “After I go, that duty falls to you, I suppose. But the boy will stay at the monastery.”

  Deepak stepped forward and stared into Emily’s black eyes, thinking perhaps to test the extent of her resolve. What would he find there? Perhaps the same darkness everyone before him had seen, almost palpable, so placid, so clear, and yet at the very bottom so turbulent, a storm of sublime immensity. He stepped back, blinked once or twice, and nodded his acquiescence.

  “As you wish, Tenno Michiko. But we will be watching.”

  Emily turned toward the door and led her little party back out to the taxi on the other side of the fence.

  5: Yesh and the Mongol Girl

  “Have you come to a decision, chhori?” Mrs. Kansakar inquired innocently over breakfast.

  Steam from a large pot on the stove filled the kitchen with the smell of curry. Emily had made breakfast all week, but this morning, at least, she saw no raised eyebrow. She’d also heard of no further incidents at Sonam’s school. The bullies seemed to have lost interest in him, and perhaps the Sherpa gang had, too. Other than Mrs. Ranjeet trying to fix her up with a grandson named Yesh Malla, no other dangers appeared on the horizon.

  “I’m supposed to report in Annapolis at the end of next week,” Emily replied.

  “Is that what you want?”

  “I think it may be for the best.”