But the real madness had begun outside Gyantse. Tibetan troops carrying muzzle-loading guns and broadswords, and wearing charms to turn aside British bullets, had advanced against men armed with modern rifles and machine guns. Christopher would never forget the massacre that followed. In four minutes, seven hundred Tibetans lay dead on the battlefield, dozens more were screaming in pain. The expedition took Gyantse and moved on unopposed to Lhasa, where it arrived in August 1904. The Dalai Lama had fled in the meantime to Urga in Mongolia to take refuge with the Living Buddha there, and the Regent was forced in his absence to sign a peace treaty with Britain on very unfavorable terms.
“Don’t remember you,” Norbhu Dzasa said.
“I was much younger then,” answered Christopher, ‘and of no importance.
We would not have been introduced.”
Norbhu Dzasa sighed.
“Younger then, too,” he said. Their eyes met for a moment, but the tsong-chi gave nothing away. That, as he interpreted it, was his job: to give nothing away. He was very good at it.
Tea arrived quickly. It was served in ornamental cups of jade decorated with silver. Norbhu’s man had brewed it in the kitchen from semi-fermented tea bricks imported from Yunnan, mixing it in a wooden churn with boiling water, salt, wood-ash soda, and dri-butter. It was more a soup than tea, but Tibetans drank it in vast quantities forty Or fifty cups a day was not at all unusual.
Christopher could tell at once from the way he quaffed his first cupful that Norbhu Dzasa was a record-breaker even in Tibetan terms.
Norbhu had been tsong-chi at Kalimpong for seven years now and was doing very nicely out of it. He could afford to drink tea in urnfuls if he wanted to. His greatest fear was to be recalled to Lhasa prematurely, that is, before he had stashed away enough rupees to ensure a comfortable future for himself and, above all, his children. He was over sixty now, though he could not be sure exactly how old he was. His mother thought he had been born in the year of the Fire Serpent in the Fourteenth Cycle, which would have made him sixty-three. But his father had been equally sure he had been born in the Wood Hare year, which would make him all of sixty-five.
“What I do for you, Wylam-la?” asked the little tsong-chi as he poured himself a second cup of the thick, pinkish beverage.
Christopher hesitated. He felt he had got off to a bad start with Norbhu Dzasa by referring to the Younghusband expedition. In the end, the British had gained the respect of the Tibetans they had looted no temples, raped no women, and withdrawn their forces at the earliest possible opportunity but the memory of the more than seven hundred dead and the profound sense of vulnerability that the expedition had created in their minds lingered even now.
The problem about the present business was that Christopher could not mention the real reason for his visit. There was ample evidence that the Mongol Agent, Mishig, had been contacted by Tsewong. But it was always possible that the Tibetan tsong-chi might also be involved. For all they knew, he might have been the person responsible for transmitting Zamyatin’s message to the Mongol. The tsong-chi’s residence lay between the mountains and the spot where Tsewong was supposed to have been found. The monk could very easily have paid a visit to Norbhu Dzasa before continuing his ill-fated journey.
“It’s very little, really,” Christopher said.
“Perhaps you will find it sentimental of me. You’ll have seen from my letter that I am a businessman. I’m here in Kalimpong to do business with Mr.
Frazer. I knew him years ago, back in Patna. He knows about an incident that happened back then something that happened to my son, William. We were in Bodh Gaya, William and I, just passing through, on our way to Aurangabad. We lived in Patna then, when .. . my wife was still alive.” The combination of fact and fiction would, Christopher hoped, serve to convey a feeling of conviction to the tsong-chi.
“William fell ill,” he went on.
“There was no British doctor in
Bodh Gaya, none anywhere near. I was desperate. The child was very sick, I thought he would die. And then one of the pilgrims visiting the sacred tree ... It is a tree they have there, isn’t it, Mr.
Dzasa?”
Norbhu nodded. It was a tree; he had seen it. Lord Buddha had gained enlightenment while sitting under it.
“Right,” said Christopher, warming to his tale.
“Well, one of the pilgrims heard William was ill, you see. He came to visit us and told me there was a Tibetan monk who was a sort of doctor.
Anyway, I found this monk, and he came at once and looked at
William and said he could treat him. He went off- it was late at ‘ night by then. I can remember it, sitting in the dark with William in a terrible fever.”
There had been a fever once, and William had almost died but there had been no monk, no sacred tree, only an old doctor sent round by the DBI.
“I thought he would die, I really did, he was that bad. Anyway, he went off as I said the monk, I mean and then came back in about an hour with some herbs he’d got from God knows where.
He made them up into a drink for the boy and got it into him somehow or other. It saved his life. He came out of the fever that night and was on his feet again two days later. I tried to find the monk afterwards, to thank him, give him something. But he’d gone.”
“Frazer knew about it. When he came here, he asked questions, but he never heard of any monk. Until a couple of weeks ago.”
Norbhu Dzasa glanced up from his steaming cup. His little eyes glistened.
“He said a Tibetan monk died here. A man with the same name as my monk. About the same age. Frazer said he carried herbs. He thought I should know: he wrote to me about it. I was coming anyway, I have business here. So I thought I’d make some enquiries at the same time. About the monk.”
“Why? You could not meet. Not thank. He is dead.”
“Yes, but he might have a family, relatives. His parents, brothers, sisters. Perhaps they need help, now he is dead.”
“What his name, this medical monk?”
“Tsewong,” Christopher answered.
“Is that a common name?”
Norbhu shrugged.
“Not common. Not not common.”
“But it was the name of the man they found here? The man who died?”
The tsong-chi looked at Christopher.
“Yes,” he said.
“Same name. But perhaps not same man.”
“How was he dressed?” asked Christopher.
“Perhaps it would help to identify him.”
Norbhu Dzasa saw that Wylam wanted him to lead with information rather than confirm something he already knew. It reminded him of the theological debates he had seen the monks at Ganden engage in verbal fencing matches in which the slightest slip meant failure. What would failure mean in this case, he wondered.
“He wear dress of monk of Sak-ya-pa sect. Was monk you met Sak-ya-pa?”
“I don’t know,” said Christopher.
“What would one of them look like?” But in his own mind he had already begun the process of narrowing things down. The majority of Tibetan monks belonged to the politically dominant Ge-lug-pa sect. There were far fewer Sak-ya-pas and fewer Sak-ya-pa monasteries.
Norbhu Dzasa described for Christopher the dress of a Sak-yapa lama:
the low, conical hat with ear-flaps, the red robes, the broad-sleeved over-mantle for travelling, the distinctive girdle.