The River Crossing

This is an original story, written for this site. It is fiction, not a teaching or a traditional account. Kelsang, Kunchok and their family are invented, and so is their journey, though it follows the shape of many real ones. The departures from Tibet in 1959, the crossing of the Himalaya and the Tibetan community of Dharamsala are real, and what is said about them and about the prayer comes from the sources listed below.

The rain

In Dharamsala the monsoon does not so much fall as move in. It comes up the Kangra Valley in grey walls, swallows the whole Dhauladhar range, and stays from June until the middle of September. Some years it brings close to three metres of rain.

On the Saturday of this story it had rained since breakfast. At two o'clock the power went off, and the wifi went with it.

Kunchok was eleven, and he took it personally. He lay across his grandmother's bed with his dead phone on his chest and announced, every few minutes, that there was nothing to do.

His grandmother, Kelsang, was seventy-four. He called her Mola, grandmother; the -la on the end is the small Tibetan word that makes a name respectful and fond at once. She lived in two rooms on the steep hillside below McLeod Ganj, the upper part of Dharamsala, which people call Little Lhasa because so many Tibetans live there. Popo-la, his grandfather, had gone down to the clinic about his knee and would be stuck there until the rain eased.

Mola made tea on the gas ring and watched him kick the wall, gently, with one heel. Then she said, “When I was seven, I walked to India.”

Kunchok said he knew. Everybody's grandmother had walked to India.

“Then you know the story,” said Mola. She blew on her tea, and waited.

He held out for nearly a minute. “Fine,” he said. “How far?”

Leaving

She did not remember all of it, she said. Some of it was her mother's telling, repeated so often over the years that it had become her own. That is how old memories work, and she wanted him to know it.

Their village was in Lhoka, south of Lhasa: flat-roofed houses of stone and earth, barley fields, a stream with a willow over it. In March 1959 there was an uprising in Lhasa. Over that year and the next, some eighty thousand Tibetans left their country and crossed the Himalaya into India. Her family was among them.

“I didn't understand any of it,” said Mola. “I understood that my father was packing at night, and that we were not to say goodbye to anyone.”

They left before dawn: her father leading the yak, her mother with baby Pemba tied on her back, and Kelsang holding the end of her mother's sash. She looked back once at the house. She has not seen it since.

The pass

For days they walked south, and up. Other families joined them on the trail; some went other ways. What Mola remembered most was the cold: a dry cold that came through her boots and through her chuba, the long wrapped Tibetan robe, and a wind that never stopped.

Then came the pass. She was too small to know its name, only that it went up and up into the white, and that the top kept not arriving. Halfway up, her legs stopped. She sat down on a stone and said she was not going any further.

Her mother did not argue. She crouched beside her in the wind and said, “Don't look at the top. Look at your foot. Put one line in each step.”

Then she began the Seven-Line Prayer to Guru Rinpoche, the eighth-century teacher also called Padmasambhava, the Lotus-Born, whom Tibetans remember for helping the Buddha's teaching take root in their land. Kelsang had heard it every morning of her life without really listening. Now she said it with her feet.

One step for where he came from, a far country called Oddiyana. One step for his birth in the heart of a lotus. One step for the wonderful things he attained, one for his name, one for the great company of dakinis, female figures of wisdom, gathered round him. One step for the wish to follow him, and one to ask him to come. Then back to the beginning.

“Seven steps,” said Mola. “Then seven more. You can't think about a whole mountain. You can think about one line.”

Her mother told her one more thing on that pass, between breaths. The prayer begins with where Guru Rinpoche came from, she said, because he came from far away too, and crossed great mountains to reach Tibet. “Now we are crossing them the other way.” Kelsang thought about that for a long time, one step at a time.

The room

Kunchok had stopped kicking the wall. At some point he had sat up, then pulled his knees in, and now his chin was resting on them. The phone had slid off the bed, and he had not picked it up.

“Did it work?” he said.

Mola thought about it properly. “My legs worked. My father carried me some of the way. The prayer didn't carry anybody.” She drank her tea. “It gave me something to hold that wasn't the cold.”

The river

On the far side of the pass, she said, there was a river that came straight off the ice. It was wide, the colour of milky tea, and it roared.

There was no bridge. The men said it must be crossed at first light, when the water is lowest, because the sun melts the ice all day and by afternoon the river rises. So they slept beside it, and listened to it all night.

At dawn everyone took hands in a long line, the strongest at each end. Her father had Pemba on his back now and the yak's rope in his other hand. Her mother held Kelsang. The water was so cold it did not feel like water; it felt like being bitten. It came up to her waist and pulled sideways.

“Say it,” said her mother, and they said it together, one line for each step on the stones under the water, which they could not see. In the middle, Kelsang lost her place and went back to the first line, and her mother went back with her, without a word.

On the far bank everyone sat in a row and shook, and someone coaxed a fire out of the dried dung they had carried. Nobody had been taken by the river. Mola said it plainly, the way you say a thing you have been grateful for every day for sixty-seven years.

Down

After that the path went down and down, and then there were trees: a few twisted junipers first, then real forest, dripping and green and loud with birds, and air so thick she could taste it. Somewhere in that forest they came into India, though nothing marked it.

The rest she told quickly, because it was another story: the hot lowland camps, where she had never imagined such heat; years of moving from place to place; hard work. Since 1960 Dharamsala has been home to the Tibetan government-in-exile, and in time her family came up here, to these wet green slopes under the mountains, and stayed.

The steps

By five the rain had thinned to a fine grey drizzle. Mola looked out of the window and said the shop at the top of the steps would close soon, and there was no milk.

Kunchok groaned, on principle. Then he got up. The house stood near the bottom of a long concrete stair that climbs the hill between the houses. He had never counted the steps; they were just there.

Halfway up, his legs began to complain, the way they always did. He did not look at the top. He looked at his foot, and put the first line in it, and then the second. He lost his place at the dakinis, and went back to the beginning, the way you are allowed to.

At the top, the cloud had pulled back for a moment, and there was the Dhauladhar, dark rock streaked with white, the mountain that had been behind the rain all day. He looked at it for a while. Then he bought the milk.

When he came back down, he did not tell Mola what he had been doing on the stairs. But he put the milk on the table and said, “Seven steps. Then seven more.” She laughed, and put the tea on again.