master cannot refuse. I made another wai. “I am asking for the third time.”
He blew out his cheeks, shook his head, but said, “Okay, get up. You win. But I need a drink first.” He limped to the door and yelled something in Tibetan. We waited in silence until the woman who ran the tea shop appeared, wearing a long donkey-brown dress with striped apron, her hair in thick braids; she brought chang, a barley-based alcohol.
We drank in silence for a long while. The chang didn’t seem very strong and had a sweet and sour taste with some fizz, as if it were still in the fermenting stage. When Tietsin finally started talking it was in the voice of a very ordinary, humble man.
“They tortured me for seven days. I was fifteen years and ten months old. My comrades in arms were tortured to death before my eyes, and I didn’t know why I was surviving. Nor did my Chinese tormentors. They couldn’t believe it. Neither could I. We had all fantasized about it, of course: how we would react under torture. My comrades had ordered me, Don’t hold out, you’re still a kid, no one expects you to resist. You don’t know anything important about the resistance, you can’t compromise any of our operations, just tell them everything you know. Promise? A couple of beats passed. “So I did promise, eagerly. I didn’t think I’d last an hour under that kind of agony. Then, when they caught us and took us back to Chamdo at gunpoint, I felt such fear in the back of that van I couldn’t move. I was frozen. My comrades had to carry me to the prison, I was so out of control, pissing and shitting in my pants, vomiting. But the next day, when the torture started in earnest, something happened. It’s as much a mystery to me as it was to the Chinese and everyone else. The pain they inflicted seemed to be happening to another body. I hung above it all, watching myself twitch when they touched me with their cattle prods. I literally put all my consciousness in a sixty-watt lightbulb, if you can believe that. I can’t. But it’s what happened. When we got to day seven and I still wasn’t dead, I finally understood why my master had given me such a powerful initiation. He had seen that I was going to need it.” Another pause. “And that, my friend, is the only permissible reason for passing it on. I’m not sharing it with you because you followed some arcane formula by asking three times. I’m passing it on because in asking three times you’ve told me that you are going to need it as much as I did. And may all the Buddhas have compassion on you.”
He turned his eyes away from me, as if he could not stand to look at my future suffering. Of course, that is an observation of hindsight; in the heat of the moment I felt only excitement.
“Go back to your guesthouse. Tomorrow morning someone will come to start the preparation. It takes seven days—you know how weird the gods are about the number seven. I don’t know if it’s really necessary, but we may as well follow the system while we can.”
From the cab on the way back to the guesthouse, I called Vikorn to say I was sick with giardia and wouldn’t be back until after the weekend.
I can’t tell you about the initiation, farang, it’s against the rules and they made me swear not to. I can give you something of the preparation, though. The nun who came to my suite at the Kathmandu Guest House, thereby shocking the whole establishment, was the same woman who had begged from me at the stupa on the first day. She looked just as decrepit as she had at the stupa; her face was terribly lined and shaggy and a number of teeth were missing from her mouth, but her mind was as sharp as a razor and she spoke perfect English, with a UN accent. The conversation went like this:
Nun: Do you ever wake up scared in the early hours of the morning?
Me: Almost every night.
Nun: And does this fear seem to originate somewhere in the area of the navel?
Me: Above the navel, somewhere between the navel and the solar plexus.
Nun: And what do you do about it?
Me: My mind finds specific things to worry about, and the fear gets absorbed.
Nun: These