him a two-page resume of d’Ampères life and confessed I was searching for a sutra, half of which he had translated. He couldn’t remember being aware of this sutra and spent sleepless nights pacing up and down his studio, gazing out of the window for hours, trying to prise from his memory—which was a living library—any recollection of a similar parable in an Indian sutra or an analogous allegory that Buddha might have used in his frequent teachings, but in vain. He promised he would ask other Tibetan scholars, exiled—as he was—in various corners of the world, and specialists he knew in Cambridge, Oxford, Heidelberg, Harvard, Stanford, etc.
This investigation went on for almost all of my second year of Tibetan study. It was led, with great generosity, by Mr. Tarakesa, and from time to time it opened up leads which at first seemed interesting, but which proved on closer inspection to be false. None of his colleagues’ suggestions escaped the law by which each new possibility eradicates its predecessor, and none of them unearthed anything definitive about the sutra itself. The documents coming in from the four corners of the world, each more valuable than the last, were mostly about the Tumchooq kingdom, where recent archaeological finds had revealed its origins, its silk production and its totem-pole-based religion prior to its conversion to Buddhism.
To mark my gratitude I offered to go to Mr. Tarakesa’s house once a week and read to him, either in Tibetan or French. He accepted, to my considerable surprise.
“I would like to hear,” he said, “the language which Paul d’Ampère was first to decipher and of which I don’t understand a blessed word.”
I couldn’t refuse him this pleasure even though I was aware that my knowledge of Tumchooq, in which I had been initiated by a greengrocer, would not match his expectations. And so our weekly trips to the kingdom of Tumchooq began. On Saturday mornings I would go to his studio in the Rue du Cherche-Midi, a place which in many ways was like a hermitage, perched on the seventh floor (the red stair carpet stopped at the sixth), a former maid’s room under the eaves, transformed into a sort of sanctuary, with the tray and plastic curtain for an electric shower plonked crookedly across one corner. There was hardly any furniture, but a statue of Buddha had pride of place on a purely decorative mantelpiece and above it hung a large mirror in which, on each of my visits, I watched my reflection prostrate itself before the golden statue, while my prayers were accompanied by a rhythm beaten out on a ritual wooden instrument by Mr. Tarakesa, in ceremonial dress beside me. Then he took off his robes and, in his shirt sleeves, lit the gas stove to make Tibetan tea; the nozzles made a soft whistling sound, the bluish flames flickered over the Buddha’s face … and I started reading extracts of Tumchooq texts, most of them published in historical and archaeological reviews and orientalists’ monographs, which I had read and reread over the course of the week, until I achieved a degree of fluency.
I still don’t know what frame of mind he was in as he listened to me reading. Did he let those unfamiliar words carry him away on a sort of cloud, taking him on a journey back through time until he heard the voice of a loved one in that foreign language? Did he see it as a kind of meditation echoing a higher state, which allowed him to pray and bless all humanity, if not actually to save it, a meditation undermined by my poor pronunciation and strong French accent? I kept wanting to ask him whether the world was as empty, as pointless and as incomprehensible as the words I spoke. I sometimes even suspected he was simply reliving Paul d’Ampère’s life, one episode at a time; the oval of his cheek would stretch obliquely, filling out with the intensity of his emotions as he let slip a barely perceptible, knowing smile. Occasionally, without any apparent connection to what I was reading, his face would tense, his features harden, screwing themselves up and then relaxing again, and no alteration to the rhythm or resonance of my voice could do anything to change what he was feeling. Who was inspiring these feelings in him? The French orientalist? It was as if he had known him, as if they had been the greatest friends in the world. Quite often,