End of the Road (31 page)

He wasn’t alone. He couldn’t see the others,
but he heard voices murmuring, lots of voices. And then he saw her.
She was so bright he didn’t exactly know how he recognized her.
Looking at her was like looking at the sun, searing and yet somehow
not painful. Two dark spots in the center of the fire beckoned to
him. Eyes? They glanced to the side. He followed where she led, to
a stream along which a footpath meandered back across the meadow to
the waterfall that was its source.

He couldn’t see the top through the mist
that formed naturally around so much falling water. It might as
well have been as high as the sky. The vertical river crashed down
with a roar. When she stepped behind the curtain of water on one
side onto a rocky ledge, he followed. The air behind the falls was
cool, humid, dark. He saw her up ahead, glancing back at him
meaningfully, before she disappeared into what looked like a hole
in the cliff face.

Bright as she was, when he got to the mouth
of the cave, no light could be seen. A blast of hot air pushed him
back as he tried to enter, but he pressed on through. Perhaps this
is what Rinpoche meant. Is he here, too? The floor fell away
beneath him with each step, and he began to move faster and faster,
until he was running out of control. Soon he was in free fall,
hurtling toward what seemed like the bottom of the world.

Dark as coal at first, he noticed a tiny
patch of faint lights in the distance. He seemed to be accelerating
toward them at great speed. As the cave narrowed, the pressure grew
enormously, threatening to crush him. Breathing would require an
enormous effort. Better not to breathe at all.

Just as the weight pressing on him
threatened to become unbearable, he felt himself propelled out the
other end, as if he’d been spit out of the world like a watermelon
seed. Hurtling now through endless space, surrounded by a billion
lights, as many as the stars in the sky, he no longer felt himself
anywhere. The cosmos spread out in all directions and he’d been
dissolved into it, along with all the other voices he heard in the
meadow. But for the fact that he was now everywhere at once, he’d
have felt adrift in the enormity of infinite space.

Eventually, he found that he could see the
whole from a single point of view, a cloud among the stars, perhaps
a nebula like the one in the belt of Orion. He saw a vast wheel of
light, composed of so many smaller lights, turning slowly on its
axis. And further in the distance, more wheels turning each in
their own time, perhaps as many wheels as there were stars.

The cloud from which he looked out on the
cosmos grew brighter and hotter, until it seemed to be gathering
itself for some new thing. The brightness all but coalesced into a
single point, and then burst from the cloud, moving at tremendous
speed in a vast, gradual arc, all the while turning on its own
axis. Was that her? Or was it a completely new birth? He watched as
she found a place among all the other wheels of light.

Norbu felt the breath move into his lungs,
filling him up, expanding his chest, pressing against the edges of
the world. As the breath left him, the cloud seemed to dissipate
and all the lights rushed away into an even greater distance. Soon
it was pitch black, no light at all. The air was cool and quiet. He
felt the stone tile of the floor, and heard the breathing of the
other monks. When he glanced around the room, he saw the look of
astonishment on the faces of the other monks that he assumed must
also be scorched into his.

How strange her meditations
must be. No transcendence. She doesn’t leave the material world
behind, but somehow manages to leave herself behind to become one
with the whole. Is this what it means to be a
deva
? The power he felt inside her, if
that’s really where he had been, it was immense, as big as the
world itself.

The girl was nowhere to be seen. And
Rinpoche was gone, too. He scrambled to his feet.

“
Pasang, where are they?
Where’s Rinpoche?”

The other monks looked around the room
nervously. Where had they gone?

~~~~~~~

“
Please, stay here,
Rinpoche,” Emily said. “Let me go by myself.”

“
No,
Michi-
chhori
. I
will come with you.”

“
We must hurry, please,
Rinpoche-
la
,”
Nawang said, with his hands pressed together in front of his face
and his voice trembling. “They’re gangsters. They might hurt
Sonam.”

“
We shall hire a taxi,”
Rinpoche said.

“
But you don’t carry money,
Rinpoche,” said Nawang. “And I have none.”

“
I have money,” Emily said,
now resigned to bringing the Tulku to a meeting whose unknown
dangers she would prefer to face by herself. “Let’s go.”

Taxis were scarce in the early evening in
Swayambhu, but Nawang spotted a tiny green Maruti a block away. By
the time Rinpoche and Emily caught up, she could see it was too
small for all three of them, especially if they meant to bring
Sonam back in the same car.

The sight of an ancient monk approaching his
taxi made the driver shudder. He jumped out, pressed his hands
together and bowed to Rinpoche, the whole time apparently trying to
tell him not to get in. The old man waved him off and squeezed
himself into the back, while Nawang gave him a destination. Emily
understood nothing of what was said, except “eight hundred
rupees.”

“
Who are we going to see,
Nawang?” she asked.

“
The Manange. They’re the
one’s who took Sonam away. Dangerous people,
Michi-
didi
. I
should come to make sure nothing happens to
Rinpoche-
la
.”

“
Don’t worry. I’ll see to
that. Is it far?”

“
Twenty minutes,” the
driver interjected.

Emily smiled at that estimate. She learned
on her first day in Kathmandu that everything was always twenty
minutes away. She turned to the driver.

“
Eight hundred rupees. But
you wait there. Another thousand rupees to bring us
back.”

He grinned and nodded as she climbed into
the back seat with Rinpoche. The vinyl upholstery was shredded and
repaired here and there with what looked like denim iron-on
patches. As if to balance out the aesthetics of the interior, the
side and rear windows were festooned with lace and images of the
Buddha.

“
Who are the Manange?” she
asked, as they pulled away from the curb.

“
Tibetans,” the driver
called out from the front.

“
They are Tamang or Gurung
people,” Rinpoche corrected him for her benefit. “They came to
Lhasa from Burma several generations ago. When the Chinese came,
they moved south. Manange is their language. There are very few of
them left.”

Emily could see by the
fading light of the evening that they were entering a scrubbier,
less developed part of the Kathmandu valley. Gone were the elegant
temples with their high-flying
stupas
. No more of the colorful,
almost whimsical ornamentation on the side of every building. The
shacks and shanties she saw passing by offered nothing to celebrate
in the lives of the people who lived there.

“
The Tibetan gangs are all
working for the Chinese,” the driver barked over his shoulder as if
he were a welcome part of their conversation. “Before the end of
the monarchy, the Maoists recruited young men from those gangs. Now
all the political parties pay them to cause trouble.”

“
Ignore him,” Rinpoche
said. “He doesn’t know what he’s saying.”

“
What makes you say that?”
Emily asked.

“
The Manange aren’t
Tibetan, and they hate the Chinese.”

The car bucketed in and out of potholes,
swerved around the largest ones, stopped occasionally for livestock
wandering in the street, until some forty or so minutes later, the
driver pulled to a stop and announced their arrival. It took a
moment for Rinpoche to extricate himself from the back seat. Emily
handed the driver three hundred rupees.

“
Wait here,” she
said.

The driver looked at the bills in his hand
and leaned his head out the window to protest. Emily froze him with
a stern look and he sat back with a scowl. It wasn’t hard to see
the reason for his irritation. Even in the semi-darkness, the
neighborhood appeared less than welcoming. Bored young men huddled
in a doorway on one side of the street where several buildings
leaned against each other for support. Resentful women peered out
of doorways and windows. A sturdy, squat cinder block building on
the corner seemed to offer the adjacent rickety architecture an
anchor to the sidewalk. A sign on the front gave the impression it
might be a shop, though Emily could read none of the characters.
Limited experience suggested that whatever there was these people
needed to get through the day was likely to be found in there.

Crude wooden fencing on the other side of
the street hinted at an empty lot, or perhaps some low buildings
too decrepit to provide steady shelter.

“
They must be in there,”
Rinpoche said, pointing to the fence.

Emily was unconvinced, though she had no
better idea of where to begin looking for the boy. On the off
chance he might hear, she called his name over the fence. The air
hung still and silent. She called again, louder. Still no
response.

“
Sonam,” she cried out once
more.

Muffled noises and the sound of running feet
echoed from behind the fence. A door slammed.

“
Wait here by the car,
Rinpoche,” she said.

No gate or entrance, not even a missing
plank, was visible in the fence. Between a couple of boards a few
feet away, a slight gap and a few protruding nails caught her eye.
A ragged edge skinned her knuckle as she tore one of the boards
away. Two more came away more easily now that the gap was wide. She
stepped through. Several small buildings lay scattered around the
yard, as well as a couple of small trucks. In the dim light, she
could make out a few figures in the distance, standing in front of
the largest of the buildings, a low lying brick and wood structure
with no windows on the side facing her. Light escaped through a few
cracks in the siding on one edge.

As she walked toward the
men, she heard footsteps behind her. When she turned, Rinpoche
looked up at her and said, “We will go together,
Michi-
chhori
.” She
reached back to help him over some debris in the yard.

“
What a pair we make,” she
thought. “A wizened old man and a foreign girl who doesn’t even
speak the language. I’m sure they’ll be impressed.”

At first, the men at the door to the shack
looked like they wanted to shoo them away. But a closer look at the
old man seemed to bring a change of heart. They bowed, hands
pressed together, and said something to him that she didn’t
understand. The only word she caught in his reply was “Sonam.” They
grunted and ushered Rinpoche in through a rough-hewn wooden door.
When she moved to follow, the men stepped across to block her, but
the expression in her eyes startled them, and they let her push
through to the door.

A dozen or so faces looked up at her from
around the sparsely furnished room. A bare bulb hanging from the
ceiling provided the only light. They were mainly young men, sallow
skin still smooth, probably teenagers like her. She detected no
authority in their eyes, nothing to indicate aggression either,
just the usual adolescent mixture of fear and confidence—and no
sign of Sonam anywhere.

Sitting around a makeshift table off to one
side, three older men, possibly in their thirties, paid her no
mind. Rinpoche spoke a few words to them, but they dismissed him
with a wave. Emily cleared her throat to get their attention. In
their eyes she saw what she was looking for, the disdain that
usually accompanies leadership in a criminal gang.

“
I’m here for Sonam,” she
said. “Where is he?”

“
He is not your concern,”
one of them finally snarled in heavily accented English, after an
uncomfortable silence.

“
Sonam is coming with
me.”

Something in her voice, her firmness
perhaps, or the intensity of her passion, seemed to catch their
attention. The one whose demeanor most commanded deference from the
rest stood to face her.

“
What is the boy to you?”
he asked.

“
You should ask him
that.”

“
I am Deepak. What is your
name?”

“
Tenno Michiko,” Emily
replied.

“
Just because you are
Mongol does not make you Manange. Sonam is one of us. His father
was my friend. His son belongs to us.”

A door across the room opened and a young
woman entered holding a groggy Sonam by the hand. He must have been
napping. In a single glance, Emily took in the resemblance, the
same sallow, oval face and curly black hair, the same brown almond
eyes. Sonam was unmistakably one of them. No wonder they want him.
The thought flashed across her mind that he might really be better
off with his own people.

With a glance at Rinpoche, Emily wondered
what she could say that would move them. The old man nodded to her
meaningfully.

“
His mother left him with
Rinpoche,” she said. “She wanted a different life for her
son.”

“
What a Sherpa girl might
have wanted means nothing to us. The boy is Manange. He will stay
with us.”