Exiles (10 page)

“He ignore, always,” said Lobsang. “To get him to see doctor, we must beat him with stick.” He playfully mimed whacking the lama, and they both chuckled.

Peter watched their interactions, their easy fondness with each other, and felt himself begin to relax. The smell of the incense, the soft light coming through the windows, and the cool, fresh air all seemed to permeate his body and settle him down in some palpable way.

“Does he feel weak?” he asked.

Devi spoke to the lama, who replied softly. “Yes,” she said.

“Any swelling in his feet or ankles?”

“Sometimes.”

“How does he spend his days?”

When he heard the question, Lama Padma smiled.

“Sitting,” Devi said. “He says meditating is his job, that is why they pay him the big bucks.”

Mina laughed. Peter glanced at her; she too seemed more at ease. The stern glare had left her eyes, which looked softer and somehow larger.

“How many hours a day does he meditate?” Peter asked.

“He says eighteen or nineteen.”

Peter looked at Mina in disbelief. She just nodded.

“So if you add eating and sleeping and walking in the evening, he gets how much sleep a night?”

“About three hours,” Devi said. “Sometimes two.”

Peter tried to understand how this could be possible. The only patients he’d ever had who slept so little were clinically depressed, which was obviously not the case here.

He turned to Mina and spoke quietly. “Angina, don’t you think?” She nodded again. “Has Franz ever done any bloodwork?”

“Last year he took a sample, but the vacutainer broke on the way down the mountain and we were in a hailstorm, so we had to let it go.”

“Is it all right if I examine him?” Peter asked.

Devi asked and the lama nodded, his eyes bright. Peter put on his stethoscope and checked Lama Padma’s carotid arteries, then listened to his heart and lungs. He thought he heard a murmur, maybe a little click or mitral valve noise. Usually this was nothing; sometimes it was worth paying attention to.

“Did he ever have rheumatic fever as a kid?”

Devi spoke to him. The lama replied, seeming somber now. “He says he doesn’t know,” Devi said. “When he was growing up, most children had fevers, and many died. He lost a brother and a sister to measles, but the other diseases were not called by any names that he remembers.”

Peter noticed that the lama’s nails and lips had a bluish tint. “What does he eat?” he asked.

“Mainly
tsampa
, roasted barley flour mixed with hot water and butter. Some tea. Rice, sometimes, also with butter. Lamb, when it’s available.”

“He likes butter, I take it.”

Devi didn’t bother to translate. “All Tibetans like butter,” she said.

“Is it all right if we do some tests?” Peter asked.

The lama nodded. Mina drew blood, and Peter hooked up the portable EKG they’d brought, which confirmed his impressions. He told the lama he probably had atherosclerosis and heart disease, and that he’d most likely had rheumatic fever as a child, which had damaged his mitral valve.

“If you come down to the valley we can arrange an echocardiogram,” Peter said. “We may want to put stents in your arteries and repair the valve. Is that something you’d consider?”

When the lama heard the translation of this, he smiled.

“He says he very much wants to help you do your best, that he can see this is important to you and he appreciates it,” Devi said. “But his commitment is to stay here and practice.”

Mina seemed unsurprised, but Peter felt frustrated. Why had he come all this way if no one was going to take his advice?

“Unless he’s willing to exercise more, he may progress to heart failure within a couple of years,” Peter said. “And he should probably cut down on the butter.”

Devi spoke with the lama, and he looked thoughtful for a few moments before replying.

“Lama Padma says please do not be upset,” Devi said. “He says he will try to walk more.”

Peter was used to patients disregarding his recommendations out of fear or carelessness, but this was new terrain. He didn’t completely understand, but he couldn’t deny the lama’s presence and evident kindness. He felt chagrined at his frustration.

“Tell him I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I just want to get him well.”

Devi spoke to the lama, and he answered. “He appreciates this,” she replied. “He says he will even try to cut back on his butter, but that the whole monastery will have to pray if he is going to accomplish such a great challenge.”

With that, Lama Padma and Lobsang began to laugh again.
Peter looked at Mina; she shrugged, and her expression said,
Ke garne?

Lama Padma spoke to Devi, then. She turned to Peter again. “He wonders if you know anything about Western science.”

He was surprised by the question. “Biology, mainly,” he said. “That was my undergrad degree, and I try to keep up. Why?”

“He’d like it if you would think about corresponding with him,” she said. “He enjoys what he’s learned of this, and he’d consider it a favor.”

“I’m really an amateur,” Peter said. “But sure, of course.”

Devi spoke to Lama Padma and smiled at his response. “He says he is an amateur at meditation too,” she said. “That’s why he has to practice so much.”

Lama Padma and Lobsang laughed again, and once more Peter felt the calm of the place settle into him. An uncanny radiance suffused the room, as if even the light held secrets. Peter’s eyes went to the window, to the sky outside, and in that moment he felt that he had been lifted right through the glass and into the open air. It was a dizzying and exhilarating sensation, as if the boundaries of his mind had expanded to encompass part of the sky. When he looked back at Lama Padma, the lama was watching him intently, a coy smile on his lips, his eyes dancing with delight.

Lama Padma spoke gently to Devi, who blanched a little and glanced at Alex.

“What is it?” Alex asked.

“He wants all of us to have his blessing before we leave,” Devi said. “He thinks that soon some karma purification is coming for everyone in the room.”

“Oh, no,” muttered Mina.

Peter looked at her. He had come back through the window, back into himself, but he still felt a little giddy, as if nothing could really be unpleasant. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Isn’t that a good thing?”

She looked at him, frank dread in her eyes. “Long-term, yes,” she said. “Short-term, get ready for things to hit the fan.”

Two days later Peter awakened at 2:00
A.M.
, curled into a fetal position with excruciating abdominal cramps. His gut made noises that sounded like a trapped badger going bonkers in a trash can—something he had actually heard once, as a kid at summer camp, and had forgotten about until now. He sprinted down the hall to the bathroom and burst in on Alex, who was crouched miserably on the toilet in her nightshirt. He backed out, and they spent the night taking turns.

They barely made it to the clinic the next morning, where Mina herded them into a room, looked them over, and said, “Tch.” Peter didn’t like putting himself at her mercy, but he didn’t know what else to do. Alex lay down on the exam table, and Peter slumped in the chair. “Any suggestions?” he asked weakly.

Mina smiled, just slightly. “You could take advantage of this wonderful opportunity to develop compassion for the plight of your patients,” she said.

Alex and Peter looked at each other and had a brief moment of telepathy, in which they both understood that they were too debilitated to kill her.

“Or we could go over to the hospital and leave samples for the lab,” he said.

“The treatment is going to be the same regardless of what you’ve got,” said Mina.

“Flagyl, I suppose.”

“What is it?” asked Alex.

“A miraculous medicine that will make you feel much better,” said Mina.

“By killing every living thing between your mouth and your butt, including a bunch of stuff that’s good for you,” Peter added. “You’ll feel like you have the worst flu in history, but you’ll feel better than you do right now.”

“We’ll get you some yogurt to take with it, and you’ll be fine,” Mina said. “Now, if you can get up, we have patients who are, believe it or not, sicker than you are.”

|   |   |

That evening Sangita and Devi came over to tend to them. Devi went upstairs to be with Alex while Peter sat up on the couch.

“All foreigners, this happen.” Sangita clucked sympathetically, handing him a cup of mint tea.

Peter sipped gratefully. He’d already had the first dose of Flagyl and was too nauseated to eat. Sangita sat in one of the chairs and blew on her own tea to cool it. She sipped it, set it aside, and took out her knitting. He’d never seen her knit before—possibly because she never sat still long enough.

He’d been wanting to ask about her son, but it always seemed too awkward. It bothered him that he was so little acquainted with the details of her life, partly because she knew much more about him and Alex, and the imbalance of this emphasized her status as a servant and irked him. He liked to believe that such things could be more or less egalitarian—you’re working for me today, maybe I’ll work for you tomorrow—but he knew this was a bullshit rationalization to assuage his conscience, because in fact he would never find himself working for her. All of which
was, of course, further complicated by the relationship between their daughters.

What struck him, though, was that Sangita accepted the situation as she accepted everything, with a shrug and a
“ke garne?”
and a rueful laugh at the great jokes the universe played on people. For her part, Alex viewed Sangita as a motherly figure who happened to take a little money for her mothering, and who was in any case the mother of her lover. Devi was harder to read; Peter sensed fire in her, a temper and a keen sense of justice. As a result, he felt more comfortable with her, since they were basically two sides of the same coin. Sangita, Peter thought, would scoff at such high-minded concerns. They didn’t make her life any easier, and anything that failed in that regard was by her definition a waste of time. Peter thought he understood why they all functioned so well as a kind of wacked clan.

Not that this delivered him from the anxiety the master feels in the presence of the servant he senses is his superior. Knowledge, the great leveler, offered one way out of this angst.

“Franz told me you were Tibetan,” he said, looking for a casual way into the questions he wanted to ask. “How did you end up here?”

She waved her hand. “Story very boring.”

He doubted it. Her general amiability to the contrary, underneath she was one of the most private people he had ever met, and he briefly recalled Franz’s dismissal of his questions, saying that Sangita would tell him about herself if she chose. Peter didn’t want to press her, but her reticence just provoked his curiosity further.

“I’ve got nothing better to do,” he said. “I’m just sitting here, trying to get my gut working again.”

She leveled a keen, evaluative gaze at him, then glanced upstairs, as if to be careful she wasn’t overheard. “This many years ago, when Devi very young,” she said quietly.

“You came over the mountains?” Peter asked. She nodded but seemed hesitant to continue. “It was bad in Tibet, under the Chinese?”

She looked at him as if he’d just asked whether the sky was blue. “My parents, killed,” she said. “Older brother, a monk, they put in prison. My sister, they take her to police station and rape her, many times.”

“Jesus.” Suddenly Peter felt idiotic for opening this can of worms, but now it was open and there was no way to seal it up again. If he felt embarrassed or enraged or sickened, her frankness said, he’d asked for it.

“When my younger brother go for her, he get angry and shout at them. They take him behind that place and shoot him. The monasteries, they tear them all down, everything burn.” Her face was flushed. She set her knitting in her lap and picked up her teacup. It shook a little in her hand.

Peter felt ashamed at his own ignorance. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” he said.