The First Snow

This is an original story, written for this site. It is fiction, not a teaching or a traditional account. Diego, his family and their house are invented. Phoenix, Dharamsala, the Beeline Highway and the rare snows outside Phoenix are real, and what is said about them and about the prayer comes from the sources listed below.

Never

Diego Tsering Wangdu was eleven and had never seen snow.

This was embarrassing, because he was half Tibetan, and Tibetans call their country Khawachen, the Land of Snows. Being half Mexican did not help: his mother's family came from Sonora, which is mostly desert too.

He lived with his dad in Phoenix, Arizona, in a small stucco house with a gravel yard and a lemon tree. Phoenix sits in the Sonoran Desert, and snow there is rare: the heaviest fall since records began in 1898 was a few inches in 1937.

His dad, Karma, fixed air conditioners. In Phoenix, Dad said, an air-conditioning man is like a doctor: people cry when they see you. Dad had grown up in Dharamsala, in the Himalayan foothills of north India, and had seen plenty of snow.

His mother lived two hours south in Tucson with his abuela, his stepdad and a baby sister who mostly shouted. His parents had split up when he was five, and got on better now than before.

Sundays

Diego's grandfather lived in McLeod Ganj, the upper part of Dharamsala, home since 1960 to the Tibetan government-in-exile, so full of Tibetans that people call it Little Lhasa. Diego called him Pola, Tibetan for grandfather. They had met in person once, when Diego was two, which Diego said didn't count.

Mostly they met on Sundays, on the tablet propped against the cereal box. Phoenix and Dharamsala are twelve and a half hours apart. Neither Arizona nor India changes its clocks in summer, so the gap never moves, and the half hour delighted Diego. “Pola lives in the future,” he said. “But only by a bit.”

Sunday breakfast in Phoenix was Sunday dinner in McLeod Ganj, which Pola found hilarious.

That December, Pola said it was time Diego learned the Seven-Line Prayer: the prayer to Guru Rinpoche, the eighth-century teacher also called Padmasambhava, the Lotus-Born, whom Tibetans remember for helping Buddhism take root in their mountains. Dad had known it as a boy and admitted, from the stove, that it had gone rusty.

“One line every Sunday,” said Pola. “Seven Sundays. Then you have it.”

Diego wrote each line down as it sounded, in the only notebook on the table: his Spanish one.

Spanish

This was a mistake. Spanish and Tibetan got into the same notebook and caused trouble.

In the first line, which names where Guru Rinpoche came from, is the word nub, west. Diego heard nube, Spanish for cloud, and for a week believed Guru Rinpoche came from a cloud. “For Guru Rinpoche,” said Pola, “it is not the worst guess.” But it was west: the north-west of a land called Oddiyana.

The second line ends with a little word, la. In Spanish, la makes a word a girl. Here, Pola said, it means in: in the heart of the lotus. “And when we put la after a name, it makes it polite. Pola-la.” “Diego-la,” said Diego. “Too polite,” said Pola. “You are eleven.”

The fifth line has mangpo in it, which means many: the many dakinis, female embodiments of enlightened energy, gathered round Guru Rinpoche. Diego heard mango. In Diego's head, Guru Rinpoche sat surrounded by fruit.

Seguir

In the third week of January, the Spanish homework was the verb seguir, to follow. Yo sigo, tú sigues, él sigue. That same Sunday, Pola reached the sixth line.

The sixth line is the wish to follow in Guru Rinpoche's footsteps. In it, Pola said, is a short word, jé: a trace, a track, the mark a foot leaves behind. Jé su means going after, in the tracks.

“Like seguir,” said Diego. “Exactly like seguir,” said Pola, who had never heard of seguir.

Diego wrote the sixth line under yo sigo. His Spanish teacher put a small, polite question mark beside it.

That weekend in Tucson, his abuela heard him practising jé su under his breath and asked, with some hope, whether he was learning about Jesús. No, said Diego, it means following. “Well,” said Abuela Licha, “that's good too.”

“But footprints in what?” Diego asked. In Phoenix the wind took everything.

“In snow,” said Pola, “you can see where everybody went.” Behind him, through his window, the snowy Dhauladhar mountains stood over McLeod Ganj. On the screen they were only a bright blur. It was the nearest Diego had ever been to snow.

So Diego practised snow. He stood in front of the open freezer with his eyes shut until Dad told him he was air-conditioning the whole of Maricopa County.

The seventh line, which asks Guru Rinpoche to come, ends with sol. Sol is Spanish for sun. A prayer ending with the sun seemed exactly right for Phoenix. Pola laughed until he coughed. In Tibetan, he said, sol is the respectful word for asking; it is even in the prayer's own name.

“So you end by asking,” said Diego. “Every time,” said Pola.

By the last Sunday in January, Diego could say all seven lines without the notebook, fast and a bit wrong in the middle, the way you say your own phone number.

The forecast

In February a cold storm rolled in. It rained all Thursday. On the news a weatherman said the snow level could come down to three thousand feet. Dad looked up from the sink and said nothing, which was suspicious.

At half past four on Friday morning he switched on Diego's light. “Shoes,” he said. “Real shoes. Two pairs of socks.”

They drove north-east on the Beeline Highway, past Fountain Hills, towards the Mazatzal Mountains. In Phoenix, Dad said, snow does not wait for you. By lunchtime it would be gone.

Then the sky went grey, then pink, and the hills had changed colour. Above them all stood Four Peaks, the mountain that Phoenix sees on its eastern skyline, white from top to bottom. Lower down the snow lay on the boulders, the shrubs and the saguaros, the tall cactuses with upturned arms. Each one wore a white cap, like someone who had stepped outside without thinking and been caught.

Dad pulled into a wide gravel turnout. Half of Phoenix had had the same idea: children in shorts shrieking, and a man building a small snowman on the hood of his car to drive it home.

Snow

Diego got out. The cold went straight up his nose. He knelt and put both bare hands flat in the snow, and said nothing for so long that Dad got worried.

“It's wet,” Diego said at last. “Nobody told me it was wet.” “It's frozen water,” said Dad. “Yes, but nobody told me.”

It squeaked. It hurt his fingers in a good way and then in a bad way. He threw a snowball at Dad and missed, then hit. Dad threw one back, got him in the ear, said he was sorry and was not.

Footprints

Above the turnout the snow lay smooth and untouched. Diego walked up it slowly. Behind him he was leaving something he had never left in his life: footprints that stayed.

He looked back. Dad was coming up after him, setting his big work boots carefully into Diego's small prints, one by one. “It's easier,” said Dad. “Somebody already did the work.”

Jé, thought Diego. Jé su. Going after, in the tracks. Yo sigo, tú sigues.

At the top of the rise he took out Dad's phone to call Pola. In McLeod Ganj it would be half past seven in the evening. There was one bar, then none.

Seven lines

So Diego said it for him anyway. He faced the white hills, with the sun just coming over Four Peaks, and said the Seven-Line Prayer, all of it, out loud: where Guru Rinpoche came from, the lotus, the wonderful accomplishment, the name, the many gathered round him, the wish to follow in his tracks, and at the end, the asking. He got the middle a bit wrong. He got the sol right.

Partway through he noticed a second voice, lower, a little behind his and a little rusty. Dad was saying it too. He had not said it aloud since he was a boy. He had followed Diego in.

Nothing happened, the way nothing happens when the sun comes up. A saguaro dropped its white cap with a soft thump. Down by the cars a child shrieked with joy. That was all, and it was plenty.

Sol

Before they left, Diego packed snow into the lid of Dad's steel thermos to show Pola. The signal came back near Fountain Hills, and Pola's voice came warm and close from twelve and a half hours in the future. Diego held up the lid. It was full of water.

Pola looked at it for a long time. “Very good snow,” he said gravely. Then Diego said the prayer again, with Pola this time, and Dad joining in from the driver's seat: three voices and a lot of road noise, right to the end, to sol.

By noon the snow was gone from the low hills. The prayer ended with asking. The sun was just a bonus.