The New Baby

This is an original story, written for this site. It is fiction, not a teaching or a traditional account. Kinley, his family and their homes are invented. Perth’s Bhutanese community, newborn colic and the Seven-Line Prayer are real, and what is said about them comes from the sources listed below. Nothing here is medical advice: if a baby’s crying worries you, please ask a nurse or doctor.

Three in the morning

Glendalough is a small suburb of Perth, Western Australia, beside Herdsman Lake, where nearly one person in five gives their ancestry as Bhutanese.

At three in the morning, in a brick block of flats by the lake, one window was lit. Behind it Kinley was walking the floor with his daughter on his shoulder.

Kinley was thirty-one. Like most Bhutanese he had no family name, and had written his home district in the surname box on every Australian form. His daughter, Pema, was five weeks old, and she was screaming.

In the next room his wife, Deki, was asleep. She had fed Pema at two. They had a deal: Deki fed, Kinley walked. He had agreed to it in daylight.

Colic

The nurse at the child health clinic had a word for it: colic. A healthy baby who cries for hours at a stretch, often in the evening, for no reason anyone can find. Somewhere between one baby in ten and four in ten, depending on whose figures you use.

It usually begins in the first weeks, is worst at around six weeks and fades by three or four months, though some sources allow up to six.

She had given them a list. If Pema had a fever, stopped feeding, went floppy or pale, or her cry changed to one they didn’t know, they were to get help straight away. Otherwise: hold her, rock her, try gentle noise. And if they ever felt they couldn’t take any more, they were to lay her on her back in her cot, close the door and take ten minutes. “And never shake a baby,” she said. She said that part twice.

Tonight Pema had been fed, winded, changed and checked. She was not hot. She drew her knees up, clenched her fists, went red in the face and roared at the ceiling.

She spat out the dummy with contempt. The only thing she had ever liked was the extractor fan over the stove, so for half an hour he had stood in the dark kitchen under its hum, swaying, like a man waiting for a bus that was never coming.

She went quiet under the fan, until the possum that lived in the roof landed on the tiles with a thump.

What came back

Kinley was not, he would tell you, a religious man. He had grown up in a village in Mongar, in eastern Bhutan, where prayers were part of the furniture, and had let most of them go somewhere between his last exam and his first Perth winter.

But at a quarter past three, something came up out of him the way a song you didn’t know you knew comes up. He was murmuring before he noticed. It was the Seven-Line Prayer.

It was his grandmother’s. When he was small, Kezang had carried him on her back in a long cloth tied over her kira, the wrapped dress of Bhutanese women, down to the fields and back, saying it under her breath the whole way. He remembered woodsmoke in her jacket, and the prayer going up and down with her steps.

The prayer is addressed to Guru Rinpoche, the teacher from India whom the traditional accounts remember bringing the Buddha’s teachings to Tibet and the Himalaya. Its seven lines name his homeland, Oddiyana, and tell of his birth in a lotus. They speak of his great attainment and give his name, Padmasambhava, the Lotus-Born. They picture him surrounded by dakinis, the “sky-goers”, then promise to follow him and ask him to come and bless. It first came to light in the thirteenth century, and Lotsawa House calls it the most widely chanted of all prayers to him.

The lotus line

In Tibetan, each of the seven lines has seven syllables. Kinley found that if he took one slow step on each syllable and turned at the end of the line, he crossed the living room, from the bookshelf to the balcony door, in exactly one line. The whole prayer was seven lengths of the carpet.

He kept losing his place, and each time he landed on the second line, the one about the lotus. It begins with the word pema, which means lotus. It was also his daughter’s name.

In Bhutan babies are often named by a lama in their first weeks. Kezang had asked at the village temple, and the name had come back over the phone: Pema. Lotus.

So he said the lotus line to Pema. Step, step, turn. She screamed through the first two rounds. In the third she hiccupped, stopped, glared at his collar as if it had insulted her, and went quiet.

He did not dare stop walking. Four minutes later the possum landed on the roof again, and so did she. Kinley looked up and said, quite politely, a word his grandmother would not have liked.

The line for babies

In the evenings Kezang sat by her clay hearth with whichever grandchild was crying and rocked from side to side, saying the prayer. She had a theory, which no lama had ever taught her, that the lotus line was the line for babies.

“Because he was born too,” she said. “Out of a flower, in a lake.”

Kinley, who was four and practical, asked whether Guru Rinpoche had cried. The old stories, she told him, say he appeared in the heart of the lotus as a boy of eight, calm and perfect. “So, no,” she said. “Lucky lotus. No nappies.”

Kinley thought it the funniest thing he had ever heard. Twenty-seven years later, at three in the morning, it still made him laugh.

Twenty to four

Pema did not settle again for a long time. He tried the fan, the lotus line, the whole prayer and the short mantra that follows it, which Kezang always ran on at the end like the last carriage of a train. Some rounds she quietened for a minute. Some rounds she didn’t. He could not have said why, and after a while he stopped trying to.

Rigpa Wiki records a saying attributed to Guru Rinpoche: that when someone calls on him with longing, through this prayer, he will come, “like a mother who cannot resist the call of her child.” Kinley did not know it. At this hour he might have said that he was the one who couldn’t resist the call.

At twenty to four he noticed that his whole body had clenched, like hers. He wanted, very badly, for her to stop, and he knew that this was the moment the nurse had meant.

So he did what the list said. He laid Pema on her back in the travel cot in the corner, on its flat, firm mattress, with nothing else in it, and checked she was safe. Then he slid the balcony door shut and stood outside in the cool spring air for ten minutes, holding the rail, breathing.

Through the glass he could see the small furious shape of her. He said the prayer once out there, for himself, for the first time in years. Then he went back in.

Not a miracle

Nothing had changed. She was still crying. He picked her up and began again: step, step, turn.

What had changed, a little, was him. The prayer was no longer one more trick, like the dummy or the fan, to make her stop. It was just what his feet were doing. Kezang had never said it to make him stop crying either, he thought now. She had said it because she was carrying him.

At about half past four Pema fell asleep on his shoulder, mid-cry, the way a light goes off.

He longed to sink into the armchair with her, and didn’t: safe-sleep advice warns firmly against falling asleep with a baby on a sofa or armchair. He laid her on her back in the bassinet beside their bed, her feet near its foot, nothing in it but her.

Deki stirred. “Did she go? What did you do?”

“My grandmother’s prayer,” said Kinley. “And the fan.” Deki was asleep again before he had finished.

Morning

He woke at six to magpies carolling on the power line and the sky over Herdsman Lake the colour of the inside of a peach.

Pema was awake and making small, offended noises, not crying. Deki had her in the kitchen, upright on her shoulder, and was humming something that was definitely not the Seven-Line Prayer.

That night the crying came back, and the next, and the next. The prayer did not cure Pema’s colic. Nothing did. As the nurse had said it probably would, it faded by itself, and by three months the evenings were almost quiet. Kinley never knew whether the prayer had anything to do with it.

But he kept saying it, mostly at night, mostly the lotus line. When he told Kezang over the phone, she laughed until she had to put it down. “So it came back,” she said. “It’s the one for babies.”