Peter Dickinson - Tulku

Theodore paid attention to what the Lama said about the Siddha Asara, because he thought it might affect their escape, but he could make no sense of it. The child in Mrs Jones’s womb both was and was not the Siddha Asara, just as in his previous life he had been Tojing Rimpoche, who was himself and not the Siddha, and yet he was the Siddha . . . Theodore gave up, but the mark was there on the blackboard.

At other times a mark would come and remain indelible in spite of him. The Lama, explaining what he meant by saying that Mrs Jones had not needed to understand her initiation ceremony, but only to have faith in it, had told the following story: some three hundred years before, the fifth Dalai Lama had noticed the goddess Tara walking every day along the pilgrims’ path round his palace. He made enquiries and found that one old man among the pilgrims made that journey every day, repeating the mantra of the goddess as he went. Only the old man got the mantra wrong each time, so the Dalai had him taught the correct words. Immediately the goddess ceased to walk the pilgrims’ way, and did not re-appear until the old man was allowed to say her mantra in his old, meaningless way. Theodore hated this story but couldn’t forget it. It embodied so much he disliked and distrusted about the Lama’s religion – the empty repetition of syllables, like the automatic rotation of prayer-wheels, as if nonsense was more holy, more worthwhile, than honest, wholesome intelligence striving for the meanings of things . . . and yet at the same time Theodore himself acknowledged a presence that listened morning and evening to his attempts to pray but gave no other sign. Were his prayers, like the old man’s mantra, nonsense too?

What did Mrs Jones make of all this? Theodore never asked – as soon as he was out of the Lama Amchi’s room he tried to forget everything to do with it, and Mrs Jones, quick as usual to perceive his needs, normally spoke about other things. But occasionally she would forget, and almost as if talking to herself, would make some comment. One day, for instance, as they were walking – or rather processing, for she was never allowed to move anywhere within the monastery without her own ritual escort – across the main courtyard she said, ‘Funny, that, about my spinal column.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Just it comes in a lot. Don’t you remember, him telling me to form the shape of it in my mind, and then dream up a lotus growing out of the top of my skull? That’s not the botanical flower what you and I know, Nymphaea lotus , what I always have a bit of trouble getting out of my mind – it’s his holy lotus, of course. You remember that?’

‘No.’

‘Oh, I won’t bother you with it . . . only I keep thinking, some of what he tells me, I ought to of worked out for myself long ago. Spines, for instance – I’ve always had a fancy for backbones.’

She gave a silent chuckle, reached out and ran her hand from the small of Theodore’s back up to his collar; it was the sort of half-thinking caress one might give to a dog that settles alongside one’s chair, but it made him shiver as though energies were flowing from her finger-tips into his marrow. They walked on, four monks before and two behind, but he had to restrain himself from shaking himself as a dog does after such a touch.

That must have happened quite early in the course of her teaching, because she was still wearing her hat and veil, and all her make-up, and was carrying a frilly parasol over her shoulder. But as week added itself to week and then month to month, she changed. There was no particular day on which she discarded her hat – instead she spent a couple of evenings remodeling one, twisting and steaming and punching and stitching the tolerant felt until, though it was the same hat in all essentials, it now had a curious upward-pointing peak vaguely like the caps worn by Tibetan nuns when they came from the nunnery, two miles along the mountain, to attend one of the ceremonies.

A few days later the veil vanished. Mrs Jones also took to wearing her dark russet riding-cloak, experimenting with its clasp, taking up its hem, devising a loose belt, until she had a garment that fell in much the same folds as a monk’s robe. She gave the parasol to a peasant woman who admired it. And by unnoticed stages she abandoned her make-up. This change was so slow that there was no certain morning on which Theodore realized that her skin was rather coarse – not pocked, but large-pored – with a delta of wrinkles at the corner of each eye, and that a line of dark down ran along her upper lip. The blue-black shadows faded from round her eyes, making them seem less enormous, but they were still the same eyes, large, sparkling with life and full of secrets. She might spend half an evening in her screened nook in the guest-house, quietly humming her mantras or sitting in total silence, cross-legged on her cot, staring at one of the patterns of Tibetan letters which she had hung there; but then she would emerge and begin to tease Lung and Theodore, or touch up her plant-drawings or look at Theodore’s latest work and show him how the emphasis of a line or the deepening of a shadow might give a picture body. They would eat supper, and then she would sit beside Lung on his cot with her head on his shoulder and his hand clasped in her lap and sing his favourite song . . .

The boy I love sits up in the gallery,

The boy I love is looking down at me . . .

and Lung would smile and fondle a tress of hair with his free hand and pretend to be happy, but often the tears would stream down his cheeks as she sang. Theodore was neither shocked nor embarrassed by these scenes. It was like watching an old couple, grandparents of many children, sitting by the hearth and remembering their courting days.

Lung, of course, noticed and resented each alteration in Mrs Jones. Sometimes he argued, but more often he would try and do things to draw her attention back to earlier days: fuss over her plant collection, or try to get her to organize her sketches; strip down her rifle and clean it; unpack and repack the baggage, on the pretext that everything had to be ready for the escape; and so on. One morning Theodore and Mrs Jones returned from the Lama’s house to find that Lung had hammered nails into the wall and hung there, like a military trophy, the sword he had taken from the dead bandit. The rifle was slung across it.

‘That looks real handsome,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘Mind you, you’ll have to keep cleaning it, or it’ll get the rust. It’d be better off in its case, honest.’

‘Will not be there long time,’ said Lung.

‘Oho! What’s up, then? You on to something?’

‘I find friend who help us escape.’

‘Have you now? Sure? Who is he?’

‘You see him long time back, drink tea with me. Lama Sumpa his name.’

‘Ah, that fellow! What’s in it for him?’

‘Not say, but perhaps he think if help Chinese, then Chinese make Sumpa Abbot of Dong Pe.’

‘Now you be careful, my love. He’d help the Chinese just as much by pushing me into the first ravine we come to.’

‘No, no,’ said Lung, smiling confidently. ‘Sumpa say perhaps Lama Amchi find wrong Tulku, but Sumpa not sure. If this maybe true Tulku, Sumpa afraid to kill Missy, see. But take Missy far from Dong Pe, then baby is born. If he is true Tulku, Sumpa says, he find way back to Dong Pe.’

‘Now, that’s amazing!’ said Mrs Jones. ‘Just what I been thinking myself. I’ll know, won’t I? He’ll tell me, somehow, if he’s . . . what the oracle said he is, and then I can bring him back.’

‘So you are coming,’ whispered Theodore.

‘What do you mean, ducky?’

‘I’ve been scared to ask, and so’s Lung, I guess. You’ve been taking Buddhism so seriously. I mean, your clothes, even.’