‘But . . .’
‘I think we’ll drop the subject. No? Well, I suppose I’ll have to show you I mean it. I hadn’t meant to tell you this, but I see I must. Now listen. Even if the Lama Amchi himself were to come and beg me to do what you want, I’d turn him down. He might threaten to throw me out of Dong Pe, but I’d still turn him down.’
‘But why . . .’
‘That woman . . . I’ve been fretting about this, because I didn’t care to tell you, but as a matter of fact I’ll be glad to get it off my chest. Lama Amchi asked me to go along yesterday morning – never set foot in his house before – sit behind a screen, listen to what you and Mrs Jones were saying. I’ve told him I won’t do it again. Remarkable character, Mrs Jones, don’t you consider? Here I am, past seventy and good as blind, and yet . . . I’ve known quite a few women in my day – nothing like an Indian Army station for hot little intrigues – and yet there was I, tucked in behind that screen, listening to that voice, and she brought it all back – the glances across the dinner table, the squeeze of a foot as you helped some other fellow’s wife into the saddle, dusk beneath the deodars . . . Can’t have that, you know, just when I’m starting to free meself from the wheel, all those memories coming whistling me back, hey? Not much help to you, me boy. I’m telling you partly to get it off me chest, and partly to show you that there’s no question at all I’m going to do what you ask. I’m sorry, but there it is.’
‘I see,’ said Theodore dully. ‘Shall we go and clean the temple?’
‘Been round already. All done. Can’t have the Guide doing that sort of work, you know. What would the other monks think of me?’
‘I like cleaning the temple. It’s something to do.’
‘My dear boy . . .’
‘I’m going to start over where I left off, and nobody’s going to stop me.’
The Major’s protests were short and feeble. He liked company while he was doing his chores and was glad to be overruled. Encouraged by this success Theodore determined to refuse to be present at Mrs Jones’s ceremony of initiation as the Lama Amchi’s chela, whatever anyone said or threatened.
He was brushing out the intricate crown of a female god called Tara when the big doors opened and the oracle-priest came in to perform his morning rituals. His face had a huge bruise all down one side, and he limped along, supported on one side by a young monk and on the other by a crutch.
‘How do you feel?’ asked Theodore, in answer to his croaked greeting.
‘Like a thrashed yak,’ said the oracle-priest, with a rueful peasant grin.
14
THE TUSSLE OVER the initiation ceremony was nothing like as fierce as Theodore had expected. He told Mrs Jones beforehand, and she pleaded with him with surprising earnestness, then suddenly shrugged and said, ‘Ah, well. You’ll just have to tell old Amchi it’s against your religious principles. I’ll back you up, if you really feel that way.’
The Lama Amchi on the other hand accepted Theodore’s decision almost as though he had been aware of it already.
‘It is not necessary that the Mother of the Tulku understands the ritual,’ he said. ‘It is only necessary that she has faith in it. But tomorrow, when her instruction begins, it will be necessary for you to be present.’
‘All right,’ said Theodore reluctantly.
The Lama Amchi was a teacher very like Father in some ways, patient, systematic, stone-certain of his divine right to teach. At the school in the Settlement Theodore had been neither the best pupil nor the worst. At Dong Pe there was only one pupil, Mrs Jones. Theodore was a piece of classroom equipment – a blackboard, so to speak, on which the Lama Amchi wrote for Mrs Jones to read. Theodore deliberately chose this role, rather than become a second pupil in the class. He tried to learn nothing, to let only the surface of his mind become engaged and then to wipe it clean as soon as Mrs Jones had understood what was written there. The job was both tiring and tedious, and though Theodore was perfectly at home in both languages, after about half an hour his mind would go numb, so that he was unable to find the right words for even the simplest phrase. The Lama seemed able to guess when these moments were coming, and would often tell him to rest just as he felt the blankness coming on him. Then Theodore would rise and bow and go to one of the windows, prop his Bible on the sill and read for a while with his fingers stuffed in his ears to shut out the sound of Mrs Jones practising the throbbing and humming mantras which the Lama was teaching her. Or else he would take a pencil and a sheet of the fibrous Tibetan paper and make one more effort to sketch the majestic bulk of the mountain called the Dome of Purest Light, which composed all the far horizon of the valley. After a while, as if at an unperceived signal, he would fold his paper away or put his Bible into his pocket, turn, bow to the Lama, and become a blackboard again.
But even as a blackboard he learnt something. Certain marks, so to speak, could never be quite rubbed out. For instance, he was startled out of indifference by discovering that the Lama didn’t believe in God. Gods, yes, but all bound like men to the world of illusion, beyond which lay something which wasn’t God, but was what the Lama called enlightenment, the only not-illusion. All life yearned towards that state. Souls were like fish struggling towards their spawning-ground against the rush of a great river; they were born again in many forms on that almost endless journey, until they reached their goal. But some, reaching it, turned back to help the others. The Buddha himself was not God, or even a god, but a soul who had chosen to be re-born into the world of illusion when it could have escaped, in order to show others the way. The Siddha Asara was another such teacher.
Theodore paid attention to what the Lama said about the Siddha Asara, because he thought it might affect their escape, but he could make no sense of it. The child in Mrs Jones’s womb both was and was not the Siddha Asara, just as in his previous life he had been Tojing Rimpoche, who was himself and not the Siddha, and yet he was the Siddha . . . Theodore gave up, but the mark was there on the blackboard.
At other times a mark would come and remain indelible in spite of him. The Lama, explaining what he meant by saying that Mrs Jones had not needed to understand her initiation ceremony, but only to have faith in it, had told the following story: some three hundred years before, the fifth Dalai Lama had noticed the goddess Tara walking every day along the pilgrims’ path round his palace. He made enquiries and found that one old man among the pilgrims made that journey every day, repeating the mantra of the goddess as he went. Only the old man got the mantra wrong each time, so the Dalai had him taught the correct words. Immediately the goddess ceased to walk the pilgrims’ way, and did not re-appear until the old man was allowed to say her mantra in his old, meaningless way. Theodore hated this story but couldn’t forget it. It embodied so much he disliked and distrusted about the Lama’s religion – the empty repetition of syllables, like the automatic rotation of prayer-wheels, as if nonsense was more holy, more worthwhile, than honest, wholesome intelligence striving for the meanings of things . . . and yet at the same time Theodore himself acknowledged a presence that listened morning and evening to his attempts to pray but gave no other sign. Were his prayers, like the old man’s mantra, nonsense too?
What did Mrs Jones make of all this? Theodore never asked – as soon as he was out of the Lama Amchi’s room he tried to forget everything to do with it, and Mrs Jones, quick as usual to perceive his needs, normally spoke about other things. But occasionally she would forget, and almost as if talking to herself, would make some comment. One day, for instance, as they were walking – or rather processing, for she was never allowed to move anywhere within the monastery without her own ritual escort – across the main courtyard she said, ‘Funny, that, about my spinal column.’