The celebrated sutra had taken us one half turn of the stupa. We had started in the west, I suppose because Tietsin wanted to finish in the east. He was silent for the whole of the second turn of the stupa, then he said, as he spun the wheels with particular vigor, “I guess we have a deal.”
“I guess. How much can you ship?”
“Our movement needs forty million dollars. Whatever will get us that sum, we’ll ship.”
“Your movement? Is it political?”
“Sure. We’re going to invade China.”
“What with?”
He stopped short, as if the question surprised him. “With the inexorable power of Tantra, of course.”
I assumed this was some kind of macabre Tibetan joke; we were talking, after all, about a Communist republic which suppressed religion wherever it could, so I focused on the practical issue. “How can you do what no one else can do and export so much at one time?”
“Contacts and know-how. The stuff is shipped raw from Afghanistan into Waziristan, that is to say tribal Pakistan, where it is processed. From there it is moved to Ladakh, which used to be known as Greater Tibet, all under our supervision. People forget, Buddhists were active in that part of the world for a thousand years before Mohammed. Our contacts predate Islam. From Ladakh we ship it directly into Chinese-occupied Tibet. That’s the key. Tibet is mostly pure emptiness, and anyway our people are the only ones who can tolerate the climate-the Chinese all get very frail at that altitude, especially when stationed outside of Lhasa, where there are no hospitals and no oxygen bottles. We have total free rein. No one can stop us.”
“Does the Dalai Lama know?”
Here Tietsin stopped. It was the first time he had frowned at me. “Of course not. His Holiness is the greatest living Tibetan. Actually, he is the greatest living human being, he is the incarnation of Avalokiteshvara, but his mission is not to save Tibet. He has invaded the world instead. Anyway, he has said he will not reincarnate, or if he does it will not be in Tibet. Do you understand what that means?”
“You and your movement are left to defend it on your own?”
“No, we’ve already lost it. I and my movement are going to take it back on our own. From under the noses of two billion Chinese.”
“How many lifetimes will it take?”
“That is the only unknown in the whole equation. It is also irrelevant.”
My next question, obviously, involved the sensitive issue of morality. However worthy the cause, Tietsin was involved in shipping poison in bulk. I didn’t need to ask it. He said, almost apologetically, “I follow my dharma. That’s all I can tell you. At the end of the day I am is an unfathomable mystery.”
We had come to a stop, our three and one half turns of the stupa were complete. We had landed in the east. As we shook hands and he gripped mine with those two fingers, Tietsin said, “We’ll ship it to any address in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, or Burma. We’ll talk about offshore bank accounts nearer the time. We prefer to use Lichtenstein.”
I was about to take my leave, but those two fingers of his were pressing into my palm, refusing to let go until I looked into his eyes. Naturally, he had one more spectacular little trick to play that day. I saw it again, in each of his eyes this time, in perfect miniature clarity: the black stupa, the lightning, the rage.
“Nice meeting you,” Tietsin said, and turned to make another tour, spinning the wheels as he went.
I should have let him go, but instead, in my ignorance, I stared after him, willing him to come back. So he did. Now he was standing in front of me again, rolling his eyes back, as if he hated having to preach but felt he had no choice. “There’s only one real instruction. Forget the Eightfold Path if it doesn’t apply to your situation. Be one of those who travel to the Far Shore. The Buddha doesn’t give a broken alms bowl how you get there, just do it before it’s too late. There isn’t a lot of time left. That’s all I can tell you.”
Then he was gone.
9
When the how-to publishers produce a handbook for aspiring consiglieres it will emphasize the wisdom of getting the hell out, once the main deal is done. Any good mafioso would have gotten on the next plane, right? Even a mediocre, 9-to-5 type of consigliere would have done so. Even a tenth-rate thug who operates on animal instinct would have known to go to the Thai Air offices on Durbar Marg and have them change the ticket so he could leave that same day and rush back to Colonel Vikorn with the wonderful news that we could expect to receive however many tons of poison for retail within the next month, probably enough to put our main rival General Zinna out of business-wouldn’t he? And did I?
Well, I rushed, but it wasn’t to the airport. It was to the Pilgrim’s Bookshop on Thamel. (You have to remember how I got into this: I was a monk manqué who found himself ensnared in a nefarious process for which he could only feel partially responsible; if that sounds like a cop-out to you, farang, try being an Asian head of family.)
Now, reader dear, would you permit a pause in the breathless narrative while I sing praises? Briefly, if it’s God you’re after, or some variation thereon, the Pilgrim’s Bookshop is the outfit for you. Maybe the Library of Congress is better for general inquiries, but if it’s the allegedly nonexistent that interests you-say, the lesser-known habits of Shiva, Vishnu, and Brahma, or which color Tara would be most suitable for the thanka in your living room, or which particular cave in the high Himalayas you should choose for your summer retreat, or how to be a sadhu without giving up your day job, or which plants, mushrooms, and toadstools in the Kathmandu Valley will really get you stoned (there’s a whole wall dedicated to them)-trust me, you need the P.B. (Yes, they do ship overseas, and they are on the Net, and no, I don’t have shares in the company.) In the end I bought eleven volumes of transcendental obscurity and five DVDs, only one of which turned out to be of direct relevance. Entitled The Shadow Circus, it went into detail about the CIA-sponsored rebellion after the Chinese invasion of Tibet. I got the management of the Kathmandu Guest House to lend me a DVD player and holed up for the day with my books and my disks. By afternoon I felt I knew a lot more about Tibetan Buddhism, aka Tantra, aka Vajrayana, aka Apocalyptic Buddhism. I guess I ended up with a more nuanced concept of the Far Shore, the biggest nuance being that it was not susceptible to concepts.
And still I didn’t go to the airline offices. Or call them. When my eyes grew tired and I couldn’t focus anymore, I decided to do some sightseeing. I took out a map of the city and after a lot of wrong turns wound up at a backstreet shrine near Asan Tole which is dedicated to Vaisya Dev, the god of toothache. There were half a dozen dentally challenged citizens wearing scarves around their jaws looking miserable; the trick is to nail a single rupee coin to the wooden shrine with an ancient hammer which is tied to the shrine with a string, mutter your favorite mantra-and Bob’s your uncle, no more pain. You almost wish you had a mild toothache yourself so you could check out the magic. Then I thought maybe old Vaisya was also good for preventive medicine, and fished out a rupee to nail up: Oh, Vaisya, let me never suffer toothache again. There is no denying superstition. It’s part of what’s out there, thathagata: like toothache.
After that I walked on Thamel, then down to the Vishnumati River, across the iron bridge next to the Hindu temple, then the long trek to the foot of the Monkey Temple. Even the stairs did not cool my fevered brain. At the top I impatiently paid my tourist rip-off fee and almost ran around the stupa spinning the wheels and then stared out over the valley thinking, nay, screaming silently to myself, The mountains, the mountains. Then: Tietsin, oh Tietsin, I want the Far Shore. That old Tibetan witch had pressed my big red emergency button. I was in a fever.