I Am a Fish in Yamdrok Yumtso

Lhashamgyal

(Translated from the Tibetan by Lucia Galli)

 

1.

I arrived in Beijing three years ago.

When I first got here, I wondered if there was a film covering my eyes. Nothing was clear: everything in sight – the atmosphere and the horizon – was cloaked in fog. It was like a mirror clouded by someone’s breath, or the reflection of the overcast sky in the mirrorlike surface of Yamdrok Yumtso. If only I could wipe it off with a towel! I thought at the time. I kept feeling the irresistible urge to breathe on the air in front of me, and to make my sight clear again by wiping off any blurriness in my eyes with a towel. Alas, the sky of Beijing was not a mirror nor was it dust on its surface that blocked my vision, so I had no way of clearing it out. And anyway, neither the sky overhead nor the gaps between the multi-storied buildings of Beijing were lenses, like the pair in the black-framed glasses perched on Namdröl’s nose – I couldn’t blow on them and wipe them clean with the hem of my dress.

I told Namdröl about my visual sensation. He said he had had a similar experience, and that he still had the feeling that everything in front of his eyes was opaque. I did not agree with what he said though. I rather thought that the blurriness he experienced was caused by the dirt on his glasses, but I didn’t say that to him.

According to Sumpa, it was Namdröl who was opaque. At first, I thought that Sumpa too had noticed the dirt on Namdröl’s lenses, and I assumed that what he meant was that Namdröl’s vision was hazy, just like mine. It was only later that I understood that it wasn’t like that. “You don’t understand what kind of person Namdröl is,” Sumpa told me. “You have no idea of who he is.” I wasn’t overly familiar with Namdröl initially. I came to know him during my three years in Beijing.

“He is a great scholar of our Tibet.” It was with these words that Sumpa had introduced Namdröl to me one night at The Lhasa Sunlight, a Tibetan club in Beijing. The two of them had been clinking their glasses and drinking them bottoms up, emptying the many bottles of beer they had with them. They had been talking pleasantly and deeply, and from the outside, they seemed to being close friends. It was when Namdröl had left and Sumpa was playing his fingertips across the strings of a dragon-headed lute, tightening and loosening them, that he said, “You’d better not give him your phone number. You have no knowledge of him.” He looked utterly indifferent when he said that – his mind was focused on the task of regulating the strings of his lute and he gave the impression of having said those words casually, almost as an aside. Sumpa was always like that. His outer manners and appearance showed disinterest, and those who didn’t know him said he was arrogant.

My name is Pelha.

That this Pelha girl had a crush on that young man called Sumpa was something everyone around me knew. My few coworkers, girls with whom I shared my dormitory, should have kept it secret like a bank card, but rather than doing that, they kept shouting it out as loud as they could to everyone. Yet, even if stolen by a thief, a bank card is still locked by a code. I would have thus laughed at their behaviour, hadn’t it been for the fact that the thief of my heart was Sumpa. And given that I had no way of protecting my heart from being stolen by him, locking it with a combination like one would do with a bank card, was any of this still a secret? I wondered. Because everyone knew I had fallen in love with Sumpa, but it seemed that he was the only one among many not to be aware of that. When other people had at times teased him by saying “Pelha is in love with you!” I had heard him reply carelessly, “That’s impossible.”

Sumpa was always like that. He gave the impression that he cared for nothing, but I knew that to be only for show. In this world, outer and inner appearances are not the same. Take for instance Yamdrok Yumtso in my home region. Gathered in that lake is water clear like crystal, but the eddies and swirls of that turquoise lake are never transparent when observed from the outside. There are times when it randomly shows different colors, and I have come to realize that those are not the natural glow of the lake, but an optical illusion given by the merging of earth and clouded sky, as the lake reflects the color of the weather like a mirrored image. I thought it possible that the inner patterns of Sumpa’s mind, like those of nature, were not the ones he showed outwardly, and I was confident that he was not indifferent to me. I have come to that realization over the course of two years, when I have been occasionally testing him.

“You’d better not give him your phone number,” Sumpa told me indifferently that night, when Namdröl had left.

“If Namdröl asks me, it’d be rude not to,” I answered him, adding, “didn’t you say he is a famous scholar of our Tibet? I like experts.” It was when I intentionally provoked him like that that Sumpa said, “Namdröl is opaque.”

I hadn’t been acquainted with Namdröl long enough to know whether he was indeed an opaque man. Those shortsighted lenses in those black frames perched on his nose gave him an effortless scholarly impression, but his character wasn’t at all the quiet one of an intellectual. On the contrary, he seemed to like jokes and was good at telling hilarious stories, his laughter an unrestricted cacophony of “ha, ha” and “ho, ho.”

Judging from his outward actions, he reminded me of one of those flags that waved in the wind at the saddle of Gampala Pass, his moments of calmness just as rare. Because of that, when Sumpa had said that Namdröl was opaque, I had assumed that he was referring to the lenses of his glasses.

They were caked with dirt. It was impossible that no one else had noticed how filthy the surface of those thick, shortsighted lenses was. Since I was a child, I liked to look at glassy things, especially the transparent sky. After all, I grew up on the shores of the mirrorlike Yamdrok Yumtso and since childhood the things that appeared in front of my eyes were those reflected on the surface of that lake, which was as clear in the inside as it was on the outside. Because of that, whenever I looked at the shortsighted lenses of those eyeglasses perched on Namdröl’s nose, I involuntary saw too much on them. It was while unintentionally observing his lenses that I noticed how, after laughing loosely at a joke told to those around him, Namdröl would at times pause his rolling back and forth and suddenly quieten, as though lost in deep thought. His abrupt calmness was like that of the prayer-flags at a sudden lull in the wind at the saddle of Gampala Pass, and I thought that with his acting – half-fluttering and half-listing – he was indeed a peculiar man. After placing his elbows on the small table, Namdröl would then push his glasses up his nose with his index finger and stand as if stunned, his cheeks propped up by his hands.

“Pelha, is that a nine-eyed dzi stone at your neck?” Namdröl asked that night, staring fixedly at my throat as though he was thinking of something, his cheeks propped up in his palms as was his habit. I noticed him looking at my chest, his pupils immobile beyond his thick, dirty lenses.

Later, Namdröl seemed drunk. He acted as though he was telling funny jokes, but I didn’t laugh at most of them, and the only loud cries of “ha, ha, ha” and “ho, ho, ho” were his. His glasses slipped down his nose from time to time, and he wiped off tears from his eyes with the back of his hand. He occasionally talked and cried at the same time, and I couldn’t decide whether those in his eyes were tears of joy or sorrow. Who’s to say what’s in the mind of a drunk man? Sumpa didn’t acted as if he was inebriated though. He was always like that. No matter how much alcohol he downed, he never got tipsy. If only Sumpa too got as pie-eyed as Namdröl when drinking! People speak honestly when drunk, and it would be wonderful if Sumpa too, once soaked, were to let go of his indifferent attitude and show me his love. But it seemed that no amount of booze could make him drunk. When he escorted Namdröl out, supporting him, his pace was the stable gait of someone who had not tasted even a sip. Back in a moment, he then spoke to me heedlessly, his attention focused on tightening and loosening the strings of his dragon-headed lute. How much love in those deliberate moves! I couldn’t recall where I had heard it, but I was reminded of the saying, “In this world the most handsome men are those who concentrate single-mindedly on something.”

Most of the patrons who had enjoyed the club’s entertainments had left by then; it was late in the night. If only all that alcohol swirling in Sumpa’s stomach were to ferment like my mother’s homemade chang, making him suddenly drunk! I thought. If only Sumpa or Namdröl became as talkative as the village drunkard Sötsé when pie-eyed! Were those “if onlys” – those wishes of mine – to become reality, I could have propped up a boozed-up Sumpa and taken him back to his rented apartment!

“Be careful! That scholar will steal the nine-eyed dzi stone you wear at your neck.” Contrary to my desire, that night Sumpa steadily got up and, carrying his lute on his shoulder, waved at me, leaving without looking back. It had been with a heavy feeling that I remained seated next to Yudrön.

2.

In my mind, the reason for calling that large Tibetan-style cabaret club The Lhasa Sunlight held no connection whatsoever with either Lhasa or the sunlight. Many youngsters hailing from Amdo, Ü, and Kham, like Sumpa, myself, or Yudrön, came to that club to work as staff. Yudrön was the one who had brought me there. Now we worked shoulder to shoulder as stage dancers at night-time and slept most of the day in our bedroom, getting out of our apartment only when the darkness of the night had sneaked in, and we had to go to The Lhasa Sunlight.

I had the feeling that in Beijing the darkness that gathered in the night never moved far away during the day, but rather it simply crept somewhere nearby to rest. The nature of that dark mass was not a patient one. The afternoon hours pushed it on the side for a while, but unable to tolerate it, that black obscurity immediately came back, sneakily squeezing in. In the place where I grew up, on the shores of Yamdrok Yumtso, day and night had not the same length. More than that, the setting sun was like a longtime friend, casting its flickering golden glances backwards as if it couldn’t make up his mind. The mountain tops of the upper village would gradually hide the golden twinkling of the western sunrays and the swirling on the surface of the lake would look like the melted butter my mother poured in the offering bowl. Those stages had a patient nature; in Beijing night fell in the blink of an eye.

I had told Yudrön my visual sensations, but she disagreed. “We sleep too long in the day and go to bed too late at night,” she said. “When one sleeps too much during the day, the day becomes short, and the night arrives quickly. It’s just that.” In any case, that Tibetan club – The Lhasa Sunlight – was a place where crowds of patrons gathered at night, and it had nothing to do with “daylight.”

Not long after Sumpa left, I received an SMS on my cell phone. It was from Namdröl. Since I could not read Chinese well, I looked at Yudrön, who translated. “Namdröl is asking you to please give him your WeChat ID.” That man was drunk, yet he did not forget – weird!

“Achak, should I give it or not?” I asked Yudrön. She was a year older than me, and since she was the one who had brought me to Beijing, I asked her advice on any minor issue.

“You should be the one to decide.” Yudrön’s answers were never an answer.

“If I give it to him, surely Sumpa will get mad, won’t he?” I asked again.

“Pelha, I have advised you many times. Give up on Sumpa. That man is not like you imagine. That is a flower of your heart,” Yudrön told me, without giving a direct answer. I understood that Yudrön’s advice was out of love. She was a friend of mine, but I had no way to stop loving Sumpa.

Before coming to Beijing, I had been selling prayer-flags to those travelling to the saddle of Gampala Pass. There was nothing to block the wind rising from the other end of the wide grassland of Yamdrok, and the wind made the prayer-flags flutter, giving them no chance to rest. The silk tongues hanging down made constant sounds, and amidst the flapping of the surrounding lungtas, Tibetans offered their invocations – “ki ki, so so” – to everything there was. They bought from us the white, yellow, red, and green prayer-flags that pulled at the banner rope, and simply tied them. Sometimes we acted as proxy for the buyers, and we helped them fasten the prayer-flags they had bought to the rope.

The day I’d first met Yudrön, I was wearing some Chinese clothes that came from the interior as a donation to the rural villages. I had combed my hair in a braid, with white, yellow, red, and green threads woven in the middle of it and left to dangle on my back like a fringe. For a few years, that had been a popular fashion style in Tibet. We liked leather boots with a flat sole and long shafts – I wasn’t personally fond of high-heeled boots. As a woman, given my height, men were sure to be shorter than me if I wore high heels. There had been times when my mother would say, looking at my receding back, “Now, if only I could stop my Pehla’s growing by hitting her on the head! It’s difficult for a woman to find a husband if she’s taller than him.” According to her, I got my height from my dad. Anyway, I liked to wear boots with long shafts and a flat sole. Yudrön was working as the tour guide to a group of travelers from the interior and that day they had come to the saddle of Gampala Pass. I was wearing a pair of boots with long shafts and a flat sole.

At first, I’d believed Yudrön to be Chinese. Her fashionable new clothes, her braid of dyed-blonde hair, and her white, soft face had looked to me like those of the Chinese girls coming to tour the country. Yet, Yudrön’s face was not as pretty as mine, as was later proven by the fact that when we danced together on the stage, patrons threw me a lot of kataks while Yudrön got only a few.

“Girl, how much for those prayer-flags?” When Yudrön asked me that in Tibetan, I realised that she was actually Tibetan.

“Atsi, achak, you’re Tibetan,” I blurted. I wanted to stick out my tongue, but a black face mask covered my mouth, preventing me from doing so. Then Yudrön bought the longest of my darcoks.

“This year the lungta is not galloping well.[1] Better that I hang a darcok, right?” she asked with a smile.

“That’s correct, achak. Like they say, ‘One should plant a wind-generating darcok when it’s time to raise the lungta.’ If you hang a darcok, the lungta will certainly go high,” I said in agreement. When selling prayer-flags, we tended to agree with the buyers.

“If you helped me and tied it, would it still work?” she asked me. “In our valley, it is not customary for women to hang darcoks. Also, to be honest, it won’t be easy for me to get on top,” she said. I looked at her red, high-heeled boots.

“No problem.” I almost laughed thinking that Yudrön didn’t seem to care that I too was a woman, and I immediately made to go on top to tie the darcok.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “You can tie it once we are gone.”

“It’s OK, I’ll do it now.” At that, Yudrön stared at me wide-eyed.

The weather had been fine that day. Aside from bothering people, the strong wind that had suddenly risen all around us had turned everything under the golden, flickering sunrays clear and free from dust. At the foot of the mountains, Yamdrok Yumtso swirled a shimmering azure – had the summer heat utterly melted the pale sky over our heads, filling the swirling water on the ground with it? Whatever the case, the eddying dark blue lake looked like a mirror. The travelers crossing the banks of the Yarlung Tsangpo into the Chushu Valley had stepped onto the treacherous path that was on their right side and were heading towards the Gampala Pass. When they reached the peak on their way up, their eyes fell from that high point directly on Yamdrok Yumtso on the other side of the pass. They stood stunned for a moment and then shouted in spontaneous amazement, taking pictures – “click, click.” What did those people see in the mirrorlike surface of Yamdrok Yumtso? Did they see their real faces? Even Yudrön had spent some time in silence that day, looking towards Yamdrok Yumtso from high above. What had she seen in that glassy, crystal-clear blue?

In the past, when working as a shepherdess on the lake shore or selling prayer-flags on the pass, the only thing I had seen reflected in the mirrorlike swirling of the lake had been myself. There is a village on the northern side of the lake. On the roofs of its houses, the national flag with its five stars and the darcoks consecrated with the drawings of garudas, dragons, tigers, and lions flutter together in the wind. The name of that village is Shelkar, and I grew up there. My mother told me about a rock cavern on the lake shores, but I have never seen it since it has been covered by the rising waters. In the past, my mother told me that she had given birth to me in that cavern. She said that one night, when she was in the early stages of her pregnancy, she dreamed that a being in the form of a fish had come to our house and told her that it was a lu from the lake. “Pardon me. Could you please lend me a body where I can place my consciousness?” it had said, and after turning into a sphere of light, it had dissolved into her navel. After telling me that, my mother said seriously, “Pelha, your consciousness is that of a fish from Yamdrok Yumtso!”

I was not sure if it was because of what she had told me, but starting from when I was five or six years old, I had been dreaming of becoming a fish in Yamdrok Yumtso.

In the daytime, I had continuous hallucinations and saw that fish that was myself in the mirrorlike lake. It was a goldfish, and I saw it all the time. However, that day atop the Gampala Pass, when I looked in the distance at the turquoise-colored lake at the foot of the mountains with Yudrön, I didn’t tell her what I saw. If I had, she would never have believed it true. And so, that day, while Yudrön stood for a long time looking stunned at the lake, I sat playing a song from my cell phone. I used to listen to it every day.

“The crystal-clear Yamdrok Yumtso

Childhood sweetheart of the lake’s shores

Childhood sweetheart, our love was like the ocean.

It was something deeper than the lake.

It was something clearer than the lake.”

When that song started playing from my cell phone, I had the spontaneous desire to sing along as was my habit, but I was wearing a face covering and, with no way of opening my mouth, I sat there playing the tune in my mind. I loved listening to that song and had been dreaming of the young man who sung it many times.

“This is one of Sumpa’s songs,” Yudrön said, taking her eyes away from the lake.

“Do you know him?” I asked her.

“Sumpa and I are friends.”

“Where is he?” I impulsively asked, removing my mask.

“He’s in Beijing.”

“Really? He is the darling of my heart!” I joked, laughing.

“Atsi! You have such a pretty face!” Yudrön exclaimed at seeing my face freed from the face cover, and a Chinese man nearby immediately turned his camera from Yamdrok Yumtso and aimed it at me, taking a few clicks. I didn’t like it one bit. When selling prayer-flags, we met many who behaved like that, and for that reason I had come to wear a tight mask and never show my face to them. However, after hearing the news about that singer – Sumpa! – I didn’t waste any time giving him a nasty look. I had seen a DVD of his song in the village in the past, and I had been completely taken by the appearance and voice of that young man on the screen.

Sometimes I even dreamed that he was my boyfriend. I didn’t said that to Yudrön that day though. I just joked, “He is the darling of my heart!”

“Would you like to come to Beijing?” Yudrön asked me.

“What will I do there?”

“You can dance. You’ll surely get a high wage,” Yudrön said.

“Can I see Sumpa?” I asked, smiling.

“There are times when we perform with Sumpa,” Yudrön replied, laughing. I had watched the stone hanging at her earlobes glittering under the sun.

And so it was that Yudrön had brought me to Beijing three years ago. She was one year older than me and I asked her opinion on any minor thing. That night, after I had hesitated on whether to give Namdröl my WeChat ID, we lingered on for a while. The Beijing night grew very late – it must have been past 2 a.m. The waiters had swept inside the club and were now cleaning. Taskless and relaxed, Yudrön and I sat at the end of a small table, laughing at our cell phones. Usually at this hour, the lights of The Lhasa Sunlight were turned down, and under that dim light I could see Yudrön’s face being illuminated by the bright glow coming from her cell phone, her long eyelashes flickering under the black mascara coating. Her cell phone was an Apple iPhone 5.

Having in-built Tibetan characters, it was very user friendly, but Apple phones had become extremely expensive in the past years. They were considered the trülkus of cell phones – just as trülkus were the best men among us Tibetans, so Apple phones were the best devices around. We always joked, “Even if you buy a whole apple and give it a bite, it still won’t call!” and “Pray to Apple Rinpoche!” Everyone wanted to get a phone branded with the bitten apple, but at the time I wasn’t rich enough to afford one. I was sending my monthly salary back home and I was saving up for the tuition fee of my younger brother Pelnam.

After some time, I got another SMS from Namdröl. I looked at Yudrön who smiled and said, “That man seems to like you! ‘Pelha, I am aware that you don’t read Chinese well,’” she translated. “‘You can use your voice and say what you want to say in a WeChat message. Think about it, please, please, pleeeease!’” She teased me, extending the last word – pleeeease. 

Sumpa will surely get mad if I give him my WeChat ID, won’t he? The question popped again in my mind, but this time I didn’t say it out aloud. When I first arrived in Beijing, Yudrön and Sumpa were not talking to one another. I hadn’t known then why their relationship was like that – it was from our coworkers’ words that I eventually came to understand the reason for it. Anyway, it had nothing to do with me.

3.

I had seen a few people wearing masks in the crowds. A few wore face covers shaped like an animal’s beak, small cells perforating the surface around the nostrils. The early summer heat made breathing difficult, yet those people walked around with their mouths tightly covered by thick masks. In the past, when I was selling prayer-flags, I too wore a face cover: it blocked the heat and the burning sunlight in the summer and the bitter cold and freezing wind in the winter as well as keeping away those camera lenses shamelessly pointed at my face. As for the citizens of Beijing, they used theirs to hold off the pollutants concentrated in the air.

“They call them ‘PM 2.5’,” Namdröl told me, taking off the shortsighted lenses sliding down his nose and wiping them with the end of his shirt sleeve. The sun was invisible in the noon sky of Beijing, filled as it was with smog. It looked as though the sun had been smashed into millions of pieces then scattered in the air, or maybe that it too had covered its round face with a mask. The dim light barely illuminated the day of Beijing and I saw many people around me coughing and spitting.

“This air is so foul and polluted that it’s difficult to breathe. How I miss the blue sky and white clouds of my homeland!” Namdröl said, and blinking, he placed the lenses of his glasses over his mouth, breathed on them once, and after wiping them with his shirt, he set them again on his nose. “Let’s go,” he told me, and we resumed walking. I felt like a servant of his. When I looked at the way he walked, swaying here and there, I was reminded of the cattle back home, their bellies filled with forage. They had the same waving pace. Yudrön called that haughty attitude “the Tibetan gait.” “Our men walk as proudly as yaks,” she said.

“Where are we going?” I asked in the direction of his back. I had just got up from bed.

“Your coworkers can see us from here, let’s move a bit farther,” Namdröl answered, turning backwards, and then, facing forward again, kept walking on. The sound of blowing horns from the cars speeding on the road was ear-splitting.

At his words, I involuntarily looked around. We were in front of the entrance to The Lhasa Sunlight. I wasn’t sure my coworkers could see us: I could only spot a few unfamiliar, blurry forms in the dim light around us, and none appeared to be one of them. I guessed that at noon most were still sleeping under the whirling of an electric fan, behind thick window curtains. It wouldn’t be a huge problem if they saw me going out with Namdröl, but the moment their gossip reached Sumpa’s ears, I was sure it would turn into a big deal. I did not wish to act against Sumpa’s mindset. The night I was first introduced to Namdröl, Sumpa had worn a disapproving look. “You’d better not give him your phone number,” he had warned me, and because of that, I had done as he wanted me to and hadn’t given Namdröl my WeChat ID for a long time.

I walked on, falling into step behind Namdröl. Although not wide, the alley in which the entrance of The Lhasa Sunlight opened was very trafficked. Cars moved on fiercely, blowing their horns, as though they were locked into a competition. It seemed that the fact of being unable to push quickly ahead filled them with the anxiety of being left behind. On either side of the road grew straight lines of trees. Under the noon heat, the leaves of the largest ones had dropped downwards, immobile and listless like elephant’s ears. The layer of dust that had formed on those green leaves made it clear that the maiden of the cool, clearing wind[2] had not come to the city in the noon hours to blow away the pollutants and cast them out of the way with her graceful movements.

Namdröl led me to a teahouse.

“Which tea will you have? Chenzik Chakdrupma or Dunglo Yukhyilma?” he asked me when we got in.

“It doesn’t matter,” I answered.

“Ü-Tsang girl, saying ‘It doesn’t matter’ won’t do. You must choose one,” Namdröl said, jokingly. “Sumpa is the Chenzik Chakdrupma tea, I am the Dunglo Yukhyilma. Which one will you have?” he asked, letting go a laugh – “ha, ha.” Immediately regretting the extravagant loudness of it, he placed a hand on his mouth to cut it off, looking left and right. There weren’t many people in the teahouse, and I laughed at Namdröl’s joke. Beads of sweat had pasted his white shirt to his chest, revealing the protruding shape of his pectoral muscles.

I had not planned to give Namdröl my WeChat ID. It had been three years since I arrived in Beijing, and although there had been many who asked me my phone number and WeChat ID, I had never given in to their requests. Sumpa had voiced no acknowledgment, careless to the fact that I was in love with him, but since I had wanted in my heart to be his girlfriend, I didn’t want to displease him.

Regardless of what I wished though, Sumpa had no intention of having me as his girlfriend.

It was starting from that time that I began noticing a woman coming frequently to The Lhasa Sunlight. Sumpa called her “achak Bai-la.” That woman overate and overdrank, while smoking thin cigarettes one after the other. Sometimes Sumpa would spark a lighter and place the flame at the end of the cigarette that Bai-la held at her lips, squeezing it between index and middle fingers. That woman would grace Sumpa with a pleasant smile and blow out a billowing blue smoke, sometimes puffing it straight into his face. In front of that “achak,” even Sumpa’s indifferent manner had become respectful, and now humbled, the young man of my dreams had turned in a tamed creature.

On those occasions Yudrön would softly whisper in my ears, “That Sumpa is like a dog,” but to me those words only proved that she still harbored anger towards Sumpa and that there was truth in what people said. The rumor went that in the years before I came to Beijing, Yudrön and Sumpa had secretly been lovers and that she had even tried to kill herself for him, although Sumpa had never made her any promise. The staff of The Lhasa Sunlight was made up of temporary workers – most came here to make some money, and after a year or two they went back to the highlands of Amdo and Ü, and other teenagers arrived to replace them. These later newcomers didn’t seem to clearly understand the situation. In any case, Yudrön and Sumpa were amongst the oldest workers of The Lhasa Sunlight, and none, apart those few who belonged to the old guard like them, knew about their secret. Still, those people kept silent and did not talk about it. According to what Yudrön said, she did not hold Sumpa in any regard and he was invisible to her as though he had been made of air, but she did not manage to walk the talk, and when achak Bai-la came in, she would sometimes whisper in my ears, “He is like a dog.” Because of that, I thought that Sumpa was not at all invisible to Yudrön’s eyes, rather he was fixed there in the shape of a dog.

If others ever heard Yudrön refer to Sumpa as a dog, I was sure they would be startled. In the mind of those who love listening to Tibetan songs, he was a god, and the special edition of the DVD of his songs was greatly cherished by all Tibetans. His songs were very popular, and one could hear them played in every street of Tibet. It was for that reason that Sumpa earned the highest monthly salary in The Lhasa Sunlight, and most of those who came to the club did so looking for the tastiest Tibetan dishes and Sumpa’s songs.

Honestly, every time that woman who Sumpa called “Bai-la” came to The Lhasa Sunlight, it was as though a shadow had been cast over the light of the day, and I felt no joy whatsoever. Yet it was impossible for me to cuss at him, saying “He’s a dog!” like Yudrön did. I noticed how he affected agreement with that woman, but I could never call him a dog. I was still in love with him. However, seeing Sumpa turning bashful like a boy in front of that Bai-la woman pained me. Yudrön said that she considered Sumpa as invisible as air, but really it seemed that it was Sumpa who deemed me invisible. As Yudrön and I had sat at the end of a small table, he had treated that Bai-la woman with love and respect, without taking any notice of me.

Later, Namdröl sent me several SMS, begging me for my WeChat ID. Normally I wouldn’t have wished to go against Sumpa, but since he had ignored me as though I was made of air, I sent Namdröl my WeChat ID and accepted his friend request. Still, I felt heartbroken.

“So, I’ll have a Chenzik Chakdrupma,” I replied to Namdröl’s joke in the teahouse.

“Pelha, Chenzik Chakdrupma is what we offer to the goddess and gods in the sky, like Chenrezik. It is not something we ordinary people drink!” Lazily placing his elbows on the table and pushing his glasses up his nose, Namdröl smiled, and looking directly at me through the thick lenses of his glasses, said, “Whereas, just like Dunglo Yukhyilma, I’m good to be had.”

“You said in your WeChat note you had something very important that had to be discussed in person,” I said, changing the subject.

“It is something I said before,” Namdröl said, looking at me seriously.

“I don’t understand your meaning,” I replied, and out of habit I started stroking the dzi stone hanging at my neck, looking outside. I felt uncomfortable looking directly at Namdröl’s keen eyes.

“If I must spell it out…Pelha, I cannot stop myself, I fell for you. Will you be my girlfriend?” Namdröl said and, stretching out his hand, he made to take hold of mine, but I immediately withdrew it.

“How can you be certain after one meeting?”

“Falling in love with someone has nothing to do with how many times you meet them. Some fall in love with a person they’ve never seen, don’t they?” Namdröl shot back.   

“Please, don’t speak like that. I don’t know what to say,” I replied. I opened the WeChat in my cell phone and looked at my friends’ Moments. I saw that one of those showed a few photos of my younger brother Pelnam. In those pictures, he was with a small girl with a black mole on her upper lip. They were posed in a kiss, pouting, their hands lifted over their heads to form the shape of a heart. Those photos depressed me.

Immediately after taking the entry exam at Beijing University that year, my younger brother had moved to the city, and I was now paying his tuition fees – 8,000 renminbi – from the monthly salary I earned dancing at The Lhasa Sunlight. Pelnam and I did not have the same father. His was said to be a certain Sötsé, one of the village’s drunkards. I heard it said by the villagers but never directly from my mother. Some time ago, when we were celebrating my younger brother’s entry test at a middle school in the interior, Pelnam had some of the barley chang brewed by our mother and got drunk. It was then that I overheard a few of the villagers who had come to celebrate whisper, “He takes after Sötsé.” Be as it may, we never made Pelnam feel our unhappiness. When he was a child, he used to play many tricks; one time, he went to swim in the lake and would have drowned had it not being for a passerby saving him. A great distance came between us when he left to attend middle school in the interior, but I did not care however much he had grown, whatever money I saved by selling prayer-flags at the top of Gampala Pass in those years, I would send to him. My brother would always be a small child to me. However, I had trusted that he would become more considerate once he turned into a man. Yet even now that he was going to university, he still found it hard to think about the welfare of both me and my mother.

My younger brother Pelnam went on and on saying, “Achak, I’m broke!” The girl in the photo must have been his girlfriend. How could it be OK for him to have a girlfriend when he was already failing at school? I was still looking at WeChat when Pelnam sent me a voice note.

“Achak, achak, I’m broke. Broke!” I lowered the volume of the speaker and brought it up to my ear to listen to it. I didn’t want Namdröl to hear Pelnam’s words.

“Achak, achak, if you don’t have money, sell the nine-eyed dzi. They say you’ll get a high price for it, you will!” A moment later Pelnam repeated the same words he had said to me before. It seemed that since he started university, what he had learned the most was the value of the nine-eyed dzi stone at my neck. He didn’t use to speak like that in the past, but since coming to Beijing, he did say these things from time to time.

A cold wind was blowing outside the teahouse, and it had become cold. Seated opposite me, Namdröl asked, “Is it a WeChat text from Sumpa?”

“No,” I replied, locking my phone.

“Waiter,” Namdröl called out loudly, waving towards the other side of the room. “Two cups of Dunglo Yukhyilma.” Facing me, he said, “Please, have a taste of Dunglo Yukhyilma today.” His eyes sparkled with the kind of light I had seen many times in other men’s. Yudrön called it “the lustful look.”

Smog was still obscuring the other side of the window, blurring it. I spontaneously stretched out my hand to wipe the surface of the pane glass off, but it stayed the same. It was the first time I drank tea in the company of a man. To use Yudrön’s words, this was a “date.”

“Why did you do that?” Namdröl asked after seeing me wiping the glass pane off.

It was then that I told him that since arriving in Beijing, everything I saw felt somewhat hazy, and he immediately said that it had been the same for him. “I keep having the impression that there’s something foggy in front of my eyes,” he complained. I did not agree with him though. I rather thought that the dimness in front of his eyes was due to the dirt on his glasses, but I didn’t tell him that.

Read Next (Part II)

Notes

[1] Not carried by the wind, the lungta hangs listless rather than soaring in the sky. The lungta is a symbol of good fortune: the rise of the wind-horse is therefore considered an auspicious event.

[2] Reference to the Dhondrup Gyal’s prose poem “Girl of the Wind” (dri bzhon bu mo). Protagonist of the essay is Nature, who the author’s imagining depicts as a “girl of the wind,” whose moods bring forth the changes of the season.

Lhashamgyal (Lha byams rgyal) is a Tibetan author and scholar living in Beijing. Mostly known for his short stories, he is also a novelist, a translator, and a prolific essayist, with dozens of articles to his credit in both Tibetan and Chinese. Winner of several literary prizes, his works have been translated into French, English, and Japanese. President of the Tibetan Youth Society of the China Tibetology Research Center and editor of the journal Nationality Literature (Mi rigs kyi ’tshom rigs), he currently works as a researcher in the Religion Research Institute of the China Tibetology Research Center (Beijing), of which he is also Deputy Director.

Lucia Galli holds a DPhil in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford. Previously a research fellow at the Centre de recherche sur les civilisations de l’Asie orientale (CRCAO, Paris) and a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), she is currently an independent scholar. Her most recent publications include peer-reviewed articles in Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, Life Writing, Revue d’etudes tibétaines, and Études mongoles et sibériennes, centrasiatiques et tibétaines.