Yeshe

ISSN 2768-4261 (Online)

A Journal of Tibetan Literature, Arts and Humanities

I Am a Fish in Yamdrok Yumtso

Lhashamgyal

(Translation from the Tibetan by Lucia Galli)

My mother never clearly explained the circumstances surrounding my father.

“Who’s my daddy?” I asked her again and again when I was little, but she never gave me a straight answer. “Is he a fish from Yamdrok Yumtso too?” I had queried with the naivety of a child. “Pelha, your father left you this as a gift,” she said sometime later, tying the nine-agate dzi at my neck and looking into the distance towards the nearby lake. “He is a great tradesman.”

When I was a kid, I had hoped that my father, who had been away for business for so long, would one day come back. Gradually though, as my body grew taller and taller, the hope that I had had in my childhood fell more and more distant. Every time she took a break from her brewing work, my mother would look at my receding back and say, “You’ve got your height from your father.” There had been a time when I had doubted her words. “This dzi is really your father’s. I’m not lying,” she told me. I was fifteen. My mother and I had already exchanged a few words on the matter by then, but that time we went beyond the topics discussed between mother and child. Ours was a conversation between women.

“Mom, who is really my father?” I asked her that year.

“Pelha, the cave where you were born is now under water.” My mother avoided my question by giving me a different answer.

“Is my father Pelnam’s dad? Is he Sötsé?” I provoked her.

“Hold your tongue!” My mother’s eyes travelled to our yard where my fun-loving brother was noisily shouting with other children. She stood looking for a long time.

“You must not tell Pelnam where he comes from,” she said. “I’ll go check that those jugs of barley chang are fermenting well,” and with that she left in the direction of the brewing room, without paying any attention to me. My mother’s worn-out apron was tossed by the wind rising from the surface of the lake. Watching her receding back I then thought that she was getting old. Be it the burden of years or the path of life, it seemed that the weight my mother had been carrying along the road was getting heavier, and the appearance of her back, when she moved away, was that of old age.

“Mom, did you brew that chang for Sötsé?” I asked her teasingly, looking at her back.

“Now that the girl Pelha is a grown-up, she knows how to badger her mother,” she said, facing me.

“Mom, if you like Sötsé, invite him to join our family. It’s not like my father will ever come back.” I had spoken in earnest, and my mother drew a long breath and patted her hands on her apron, stirring up some dust. “You’re still a child and don’t understand. You will when you have a man,” she said and entered the brewing room.

Regardless of my mother’s words, I was no longer considering myself a child by then. I’m fifteen, I’m an adult now! I thought. I had left the school at Nakartsé to help my mother and look after my younger brother Pelnam. In those years my mother had started suffering from rheumatism; her joints would swell, and she couldn’t do many chores. She always said that her illness was an affliction caused by the lu, and that it had been one of those living in Yamdrok Yumtso.

“When I gave birth to you in one of those caves near the shore, some of the blood from the womb tainted the lake. That’s what has got me this illness,” my mother said once.

“Why was I born on the lake shore and not inside the house?” I asked her.

“That day was the fourth of the sixth month,” she answered. “Your father said he would be back that day, and since the meeting point was at that cave, I went out to wait for him. But I suddenly started to feel a pain in the belly, it was you…” she said.

After my mother had tied the nine-eyed dzi at my neck, I spent most of that year at the edge of the cliff on the lakeside road, waiting for my father to cross Gampala Pass and come back. He never did. My mother had been keeping her hopes up for many years by then, and I did the same later on, but up to now, that man has yet to return.

We eventually left The Lhasa Sunlight that night, and while I was on my way back to the dormitory – alone, friendless, and lonely – I kept touching the nine-eyed dzi at my neck. Under the dim streetlights, I could only vaguely see its eyes.

I wasn’t happy in the least that night.

It had not been long since Sumpa had stopped a taxi and, propping up Bai-la, faded with her into the darkness of the night. “Pelha, has Yudrön already left?” he asked me when we exited The Lhasa Sunlight. “You are not afraid of going home by yourself, are you?”

“A bit. Can you walk me to the door of the dormitory?” I replied.

“You have no need to be scared. There are streetlights,” Sumpa said. “Bai-la is drunk, I must see to her.” Clinging to Sumpa’s shoulder, Bai-la staggered. “Makye Ama’s face appears in my mind,” she muttered, and then “Sumpa, you promised to sing to your achak tonight, didn’t you? Let’s go back now!”

“What if I walk you home, little sister?” Mr. Wang said, but Sumpa interjected. “You’d better not go with this kind of man,” he said to me in Tibetan. “Now, go home,” he urged, with a light shove on my back.

I had meant to come up with a retort, but the taxi arrived just then; supporting Bai-la, Sumpa entered, and the car moved forward with a slam of the door.

I followed the back of the taxi with my eyes, the shimmer of its red taillights gradually disappearing at the crossroad. Mr. Wang bent over and threw up near one of the trees flanking the road, the sour stench of vomit mixed with alcohol immediately rising in the night wind.

I was now moving towards the dormitory, crossing the pedestrian path under the dim lights. A film of tears was filling my eyes. I bit down on my lip to keep the tears in, but a scattering of them still fell on my cheeks like beads of a broken necklace.

From time to time, a few cars whooshed ahead in the road and the wind, rising unpredictably, would loosely pick up an empty plastic bag that was on the street, pushing it forward. Everything was moving ahead, and I felt as though I was the only one left behind. The night of Beijing was the dark background of a stage, and it seemed that the mundane performances that took place on it were now over. Even the streetlights shone faintly; the performers had retired in the dormitories, and I too was returning to mine alone.

Who would have thought a few years ago (even before that, actually) that I’d be returning home in the middle of the night, in a city like this? Not me. I was a girl from the shores of Yamdrok Yumtso, a girl who dreamed of turning into a fish in the lake.

While I was walking, my cell phone rang.

Thinking that it had to be Sumpa, I answered, without even glancing at the number.

“You aren’t asleep, are you?” the speaker asked. It was Namdröl.

“You’re not sleeping either, are you?” I shot back.

“Pelha, I have been robbed,” Namdröl said.

“What have they stolen?” I asked, worried.

“My heart. You’re the thief.” I heard Namdröl laughing through the phone.

“Namdröl, please. Don’t talk to me like that, I’m fuzzy-headed and don’t want to think about any of that.”

“One gets confused when waking up before falling asleep. Sleep tight,” Namdröl said, hanging up.

Yudrön wasn’t asleep.

She was lying prone on the top bunk bed, watching a South Korean TV series on her iPhone. In the four-bedroom apartment, an electric fan gave off a cool breeze, and like a head of a sunflower, it turned its neck towards the girls wrapped in the thin bedsheets, every now and then billowing the black locks dangling on Yudrön’s shoulder blades.

“You create a problem for yourself when I tell you to leave and you don’t,” she whispered softly, taking out her earbuds. “I’ve just watched the thirty-first episode.” In those days, Yudrön and I had been taken by a Korean TV series called “I Like You,” and every night we slouched on her bed to watch it together.

Without answering her, I headed to the bathroom to wash my face and rinse my hands. We had to smear some sticky fluid on our faces for the performance. It was a foundation for a flour-like white powder that would make our cheeks take on the red hue of the lights. We then applied a red lipstick and a coat of black mascara and drew our eyebrows. On my way back, the tears had melted the mascara on my eyelashes, leaving a smudge pattern behind. My real face gradually emerged from the mirror in front of me as I removed the make-up layer by layer.

I had just laid supine over my bed, a heavy feeling washing over me, when Yudrön’s head hung down from the top bunk. “Come up, we’ll watch it together,” she said.

“I’m not in the mood,” I answered.

“Are you still mad at Sumpa?” Yudrön asked in a low voice. “I’m sure Bai-la has taken him away,” she said. Yudrön did not say that it had been him who had taken her home, but rather that it had been her to lead him away, her words a hidden reminder of her likening Sumpa to a dog.

“Each time the master comes, he is taken away like the dog he is,” Yudrön went on, spelling it out.

“Can we just have a chat, without watching the TV series?” I asked softly. Raising her index finger up, Yudrön placed it on her mouth, giving me a meaningful look – “don’t speak.” Then she moved her finger in a beckoning gesture – “come up.” Our coworkers were sleeping, and she worried we would wake them.

I got up and climbed the small ladder to lie next to Yudrön.

Snuggling up in her bed, I whispered in her ear, “Sumpa and Bai-la are just like brother and sister, aren’t they?”

“To say that they are like brother and sister would be like saying that ours is a ‘la-la’ relationship,” laughing, she made to rub my nipple with her hand. “La-la” was a term used to refer to same sex relationships. Before arriving in Beijing, I had no idea that something like that existed, nor that there was a word for it. In any case, seeing us lying on her bed, watching TV series on her phone, our roommates sometimes had asked us whether Yudrön and I were “la-la.”

“Bai-la paid all the expenses for the special edition of Sumpa’s DVD,” Yudrön said. “Truth be told, they are ‘good friends.’”

I did not know what a “good friend” was. Was it a lover? But if that was the case, was it appropriate, I wondered, given the large age gap between Sumpa and Bai-la?

“A ‘good friend’ is not a boyfriend or a girlfriend, they are just friends you bed.” Yudrön explained, sensing my confusion. “Sumpa prefers to be a ‘good friend’ rather than a boyfriend,” she added.

“Doesn’t Bai-la have a man though?”

“I don’t know. Pelha, a ‘good friend’ is a friend you have sex with, it has nothing to do with having a man.”

“Oh.” I mumbled in understanding. “I wouldn’t mind having Sumpa as my ‘good friend,’” I added.

“If you want to make a ‘good friend’ of Sumpa, you’ll have to get rich,” Yudrön replied. “If you sell your dzi, you can make him a ‘good friend’ of yours,” she laughed jokingly, touching the agate at my neck. “Now, let’s not talk about Sumpa, Sumpa…OK?” she said.

“But you did have him as a ‘good friend,’ didn’t you?” I asked bluntly.

“Sumpa…I don’t want to talk about him.” Yudrön lay face down and made to pull the window curtains open. “The city nightscape is so beautiful,” she said. It seemed that our eyes could grasp the whole of the Beijing nightscape from the window of that room on the twenty-fourth floor. Although it was late, under our eyes Beijing lay adorned by lights. A dim glow shone at the windows of near and far skyscrapers of different heights, each of them surely home to a family. In there, people were certainly writing their own version of that story we called “life” and performing that show we called “living.” And then there were those, like Yudrön and I, who were adrift and without a family in that big city. Our life was the show of a vagabond, and I was a dancer in it.

“If only my family was in one of those apartments,” Yudrön said, looking outside.

“How long has it been since you left your place?” I asked.

“Seven years. I run away when I was eighteen.”

“Do you have any plans to return in the future?”

“What is there for me to do? How would I support myself if I went back?”

“Don’t you miss home though?”

“Sure I do. I miss it all the time, but truth be told, when I think about going back, I have no desire to return,” Yudrön said. “I’m now familiar with everything in this city. I’d miss the chaos of it if I lived peacefully in my hometown.”

“Oh,” I mumbled, not knowing what else to say.

“Now I will do my best to save some money and try to buy a house,” she said. “The best would be if I could buy an apartment in Lhasa, the Sunlight City. I’d be so happy!” she said, propping up her cheeks with her hands. “But since I’m broke…phweeee!” she whistled.

“I’ll go back home when my younger brother leaves university,” I said.

“Pelha, you would have no money problems if you sold that dzi. Why are you still working in the service industry?” Yudrön asked. By then, I was falling asleep.

I’d gone through so much stuff that day and I was tired. The nightscape had gradually become fuzzy in my eyes.

“Will I have that dream?” I mumbled, drowsily.

“What dream?” I vaguely heard Yudrön asking.

“The dream of becoming a fish…” I heard myself answering.

10.

I never saw the sun rising in the east or setting in the west while in Beijing. I couldn’t even tell where east and west were – I was a girl who had indeed lost her bearings in the city. When I was a child, one of the teachers at the school in Nakartsé taught us to recognise the four directions in this way:

“Face the morning sun.

The east is in front, the west at the back,

The south is on the right, the north is on the left.

East, south, west, north – the directions are clear.”

The sky in Beijing was always covered by pollution though, and it was impossible to see the golden face of the sun, and without looking at it, I had no way to recognize any of the cardinal directions. The winter of my first year in Beijing, I had seen a long, thick chimney rising in the sky, discharging a dark grey vapor in the gaps between the skyscrapers. Given how that smoke billowed out incessantly, I had wondered whether the blurriness in the Beijing sky did not hail from that broad chimney. I have been eking out my livelihood from this hazy environment for the past three years now. Whenever I called my mother to ask her about her rheumatism, she said that the drug she had been given was very effective in relieving her pain, but it was so strong that each time she took it she felt nauseous. “Pelha,” she said over the phone. “Please take good care of your brother in Beijing. Don’t worry about me.” “I miss you, Mom,” I answered.

It has been three years since I last met her. I missed her so much, I really did, but when night fell, I had to go to The Lhasa Sunlight to perform. Always, all year round.

Beijing, 7 p.m. It was at that hour, while everyone was watching the national news broadcast on TV by the central government, that I made my way towards the club with Yudrön and a few of our coworkers. It had been a week ago that I walked back home from there, alone in the middle of the night, tears rolling down my cheeks. That fool Sumpa had been snatched by Bai-la that time, and they had faded away into the belly of the city. The woman had not come back to The Lhasa Sunlight since then. That night I had felt a pain inside, as though Sumpa had scratched my heart.

As usual, many people had gathered in the club. Even Namdröl had come over, bringing three blond Westerners with him, saying that they were friends of his. He waved in my direction when he saw me coming in. I waved back and immediately entered the small side room near the stage. I got ready for the performance, applying some purple eyeshadow to make myself prettier. Then I danced, flexing my waist like a fish, swaying my hands like banners, making the anklets at my feet ring and the bracelets at my wrists peal, the white rosary of my teeth flashing in a smile.

That night Namdröl said again that I had stolen from him.

I had seated myself next to him at the end of the performance, and he was now telling jokes. Two of the three Westerners spoke Tibetan well, especially an achak called Elise. I was amazed by how pure her Lhasa dialect was. It was even clearer than Namdröl’s Lhasan inflection. I could understand Namdröl when he spoke in Central Tibetan, although I thought that they used the Amdo dialect in his hometown. Later, when I told him, “I can understand you when you speak Tibetan,” he replied, “I spoke to you in the Lhasa dialect. Of course you understood me.” Sumpa came from Kham but since he didn’t know other Tibetan dialects, we usually spoke only in Chinese. That night though we had no option but to speak in Tibetan, since Namdröl’s foreign friends knew no Chinese. Even Yudrön mostly spoke to me in Chinese; sometimes, when she ran into a paucity of Chinese vocabulary, she would use her own dialect. Just like a moment ago, when at the end of the performance I had asked her, “Namdröl waved at me, should I go over?” and she had told me, “Go if you want to go. Don’t make a fuss.”

Actually, I wasn’t making a fuss. For the longest time now Namdröl had been telling me that he liked me, via WeChat texts and phone calls. Not being able to judge what lay at the bottom of these words, I couldn’t tell if they were true or false. I had the feeling that many of the conversations held in this city said one thing but meant another, and that was why, at the end of every sentence, urban dwellers liked to clarify in a very serious tone, “What I said is true.” That gave me the impression that all the other things they said were somewhat false. Namdröl too told me that he spoke the truth, but there was now a wild and unbridled stallion in my mind, one over which I had no control and that was running towards that grassland that was Sumpa. It was there, I thought, where the horse of my love galloped. For this reason, I hadn’t known what to answer Namdröl, and when that night he had made that beckoning gesture – “come here” – I hadn’t known whether to go or not. While I was wriggling within the snare of my doubts, Sumpa reached Namdröl. He too waved at me, so I headed towards them.

“That Tibetan song was very pleasant,” Elise said.

“The pleasantness mostly depends on the purity of the mind,” Sumpa replied, conversationally. “If the minds of both singer and listener are pure, the song will be downright pleasant to the ear.” Sumpa seemed worried that one of the terms he had used – “downright” – could not be understood by those who were not familiar with his Khampa idiom, but when I heard him speaking like that, I felt a softness inside.

“That’s it,” Elise said with a flap of her shoulders. “Your song proves the purity of mind of Tibetans,” she added with conviction. Those words seemed to please Sumpa. Raising his beer, he made to touch Elise’s cup of chang and then frowned. “You understand what ‘art’ is,” he said, very seriously.

At that, Namdröl said, “Let’s not have such serious talks, Sumpa. Let’s tell a few jokes to lighten the mood, yes?” He added some barley chang in the cups and said, “So, let me tell you a silly story that relates to whether or not the mind is pure.”

The anecdote that Namdröl told that night went like this. A Tibetan, a Chinese, and a Westerner betted on who among them would last the longest in a pigsty. The first to get in was the Chinese, but it wasn’t long before he came out, pinching his nose. “The stench is unbearable,” he said. The Westerner was next, but he too didn’t take long to come out. Last was our Tibetan who entered with “I’ll go and win.” A long time had gone by and still he didn’t come out. As the Chinese and the Westerner were remarking on the Tibetan’s endurance, the pig came out of the pigsty. “I couldn’t stand the greasy stench of that Tibetan!” he grunted and left.

“Ha, ha, ha!” Namdröl guffawed. “Even the pig could not bear it!” he said. The three foreigners laughed at that, and I did too – I had no way to hide my teeth, and the rosary of them was out.

Sumpa didn’t laugh though, and his smile was thin. He swirled the beer in his cup and combing his long locks backwards, he said to Namdröl, “It’s not right to throw one’s own flaws out like that.”

“Sumpa, you’re wrong. We Tibetans always say that our essence is the purest, the most brilliant and honourable, but it’s hard to say whether this is true or not. It is especially difficult to understand it when we meet face to face in today’s society,” Namdröl said.

“You’re the scholar,” Sumpa retorted, “but I don’t agree with you.”

“There’s a subtler meaning in your discussion,” Elise said, smiling and turning her head to look at them.

For the most part, I didn’t get what that inner meaning in their discussion might have been; the two of them spoke to each other in Tibetan, and, at one point, they even argued in Chinese, their voices getting louder.

At that moment, Elise said, “I’m sorry, it’s time we three head back,” and waving goodbye they left The Lhasa Sunlight. Sumpa and Namdröl had remained behind and sat drinking beer. They touched each other’s cups and kept pouring chang, saying things like “Let’s not argue,” and “Let chang settle the matter.” After having emptied many bottles, they began praising each other back and forth. When the conversation lulled, I made a beckoning gesture towards Yudrön, who was playing with her phone at the end of a table at the other side of the room, but waving her hand she said, “Let’s go back to the dormitory.” I ignored her.

That night, seated as I was next to Sumpa and Namdröl – the man I loved and the one who loved me – I had no desire to leave. Yudrön sent me a WeChat note.

“Pelha, you are a pro. You’ve squeezed yourself between two men… squeezed in very deep,” she said. “I’ll continue watching ‘I Like You’ when I’m back. Bye bye.”

As I sat next to Sumpa and Namdröl, it got late. Not many patrons remained in The Lhasa Sunlight.

Under the dim lights, Sumpa asked Namdröl, “Is it true that you said to Pelha that someone stole something from you? What was that?”

“I’ve been robbed of my most precious possession. Let’s not talk about it now.”

“You don’t own anything like Pelha’s nine-eyed agate, so what was so precious?”

“That may be, but it was still very precious.” Namdröl made to push his glasses up his nose and looked at me smiling. “Pelha, what about having something to drink tonight?” he asked me.

“She won’t touch any alcohol. It’s impossible,” Sumpa said, but this time I saw his dismissive attitude for what it was – just a façade. Yet, I’d been waiting three years for him to manifest the love I expected rather than keeping up that kind of posture, and that was not at all enough for me. I wanted him to outwardly express the interest and affection he felt for me inside. And so I said, “Tonight, Pelha too wants to have a drink.”

11.

Actually, I used to drink those intoxicating beverages that people call “alcohol.” When I was younger, when my mother lay the day-old chang to ferment, I drank it as if it was sour water. She brewed barley chang. After the autumn harvest, she would pour the old, dried grains into a pot, and placing it over a stove, roast its contents. The blue flames inside the stove would spread upward, flickering red, and curve around the bottom of the pot. In a moment a grey steam would billow out of the container and the barley grains would turn round and puffy, as though joy had grown inside their bellies. She would drain the water from the pot after it had seeped through, getting out the juice, and then lay it to rest, like one would do with a child. The chang would ferment for two or three days. A sweet aroma of alcohol came from the refuse grains, and everyone, inside and outside the yard of our house, knew that apple-like fragrance.

The day-old chang would be laid to rest for a day, the month-old chang for a month, and the year-old chang for a year. In those years, I had been seeing the village drunkard Sötsé coming to our house and insatiably drinking chang.

Sometimes he would get drunk and stay overnight at our place. It was during one of those nights that, stretching out a hand towards my mother like I used to do when scared by the dream of turning into a fish, I didn’t find her resting next to me. I was still caught between sleep and wakefulness when I noticed my mother and the drunkard Sötsé lying together on the opposite divan. I slowly peeled away the beddings covering them in the summer night and clearly saw, emerging underneath, their naked bodies. My breath was rising and falling, but I couldn’t wake up from my dream. A snore escaped Sötsé’s lips then, pressing itself into my ears, but it turned into the sound of the waves brought forth by the tide of Yamdrok Yumtso. The wavering of that clear whiteness in my vision gradually blurred, and the flickering light in my dream turned into a fish that moved lithe and quick. I didn’t wake from my dream of becoming a fish in Yamdrok Yumtso.

When the following morning I described my night dream to my mother, she said, “Pelha, what you saw was a dream.” She then held me tightly on her lap and pointed to the empty bed, “Look, where’s Sötsé?” I could smell the reek of chang on her breath and, pinching my nose, I asked her, “Mommy, did you drink chang too?”

“Pelha, never in the future should you get drunk drinking chang. Women only bring suffering upon themselves if they do,” my mother said, without answering my question.

Later, when I turned fifteen, I thought that the swelling of my breast was a sign of my growing up and I told my mother, “If you like Sötsé, invite him to join our family. It’s not like my father will ever come back.” She took a long breath and patted down her apron, stirring up the dust. “You’re still a child and don’t understand. You will when you have a man,” she said.

In those years, my mother never spoke clearly to me about my dad, but from the handful of words she said later, I became familiar with what happened on the shores of Yamdrok Yumtso – it was a story that had never occurred before on the white banks of our world. It was a story that went beyond that of wanderers and roadside flowers. My mother had met a traveler – my father – while she had been eking out her living as a shepherdess on the lake shores. Seduced by that young man, she had laid with him in one of the caves along the shore. Before setting off, he had given her a nine-eyed dzi as a gift. They had separated with the promise of meeting again on the fourth day of the sixth month of the following year on the cliff over the lake.

“Don’t you know where he came from?” I asked.

“I saw him crossing over to the other side of Gampala Pass.” That day, my mother’s eyes must have followed the receding back of that man for a long time.

Anyway, on the fourth day of the sixth month of the following year, my mother had waited the whole day on the cliff over the lake, but he had not come back. On the contrary, an overwhelming pain had seized the lower part of her womb, and she had given birth to me in one of the caves.

“Mom, how could you have slept with a man you didn’t even know?” At being criticized by me after so many years, my mother reacted angrily. “He was a striking young man, and he also had a nice voice – I regret nothing! Anyway, you’d better not learn from your mother. Don’t trust boys who are good looking and know how to pull off a song.”

At times I felt that our whole life was some sort of show, created by someone to make fun of us. Its characters would bring on stage the different events of life, but when all was said and done, everything would inevitably end in laughter or tears, as though it was nothing more than a joke. At the end of the day, wasn’t my own coming to this world also the result of a trick? It was with those thoughts in mind that I drank the beer that Namdöl had shakingly poured into my glass.

Just a few years later and the advice my mother had given me – “keep away from chang, handsome men, and singers” – passed like wind behind my ears. Here I was, seated between Sumpa and Namdröl drinking beer.

“Sumpa,” I said, touching his cup with mine, “tonight you must listen to me and fulfil all of my requests.”

“Why should I? I’m not your servant,” he replied.

“Are you Bai-la’s servant then?” I retorted drunkenly.

“Pelha, you’re smashed. Drink less,” Sumpa said indifferently.

“I’m not! You must sing me a song. It was thinking of you that I came to this human realm from a very distant place, so you must sing me a song,” I said.

“I see, that’s it,” Sumpa said. “I will sing you a song titled ‘The Fourth Day of the Sixth Month,’ since that happens to be the date today.” He placed the cup of chang on the ground, took up the guitar at his side and sang:

“On the fourth day of the sixth month,

I went to make a smoke-offering.

Amidst the darkness in the central temple,

I met my beloved dharma friend.”

When I heard the words of that song resonating in the middle of the night, I couldn’t stop my tears. The fourth day of the sixth month was my birthday. I had come to this human realm on this very day twenty odds years ago. Will I too, like the man in the song, meet with my father, someone I have never known, one day? I wondered, rubbing the dzi at my neck. I said nothing of what was in my mind to the two men seated next to me though.

Namdröl passed me a handkerchief. “Why are you crying, Pelha?”

“Pelha, you’re drunk. Don’t drink any more chang,” Sumpa said, placing his guitar on a side table.

I may have seemed drunk that night, but everything was clear in my mind. It was just like the dream I used to dream in the past – I could clearly see in my mind the movement of my drunken body. It was as though there were two sides of me, and one saw the other being intoxicated.

When we exited The Lhasa Sunlight, Namdröl and Sumpa walked at my side, one on my left, the other on my right. A cool breeze blew in the midnight hours of the city, hitting my hair and face. “Let’s go to your place, Sumpa,” I said brazenly.

“You’re drunk, Pelha,” he replied. I wasn’t happy with his answer. All night he had said to me “You’re drunk, you’re drunk,” as if he alone was clear-headed and sober. I was constantly downcast in the face of his self-conceit and holier-than-thou attitude.

“Sumpa…” I meant to tell him something when his phone rang, and he brought it to his ear with a hand. “I’m coming,” he said in Chinese, “I’ll be back right now.” He closed the call. Although drunk, the other side of me clearly understood that the caller was Bai-la.

“Namdröl, Sumpa is very busy. Let’s go to your place,” I said deliberately.

“I have some tsampa and butter in my fridge,” Namdröl laughed, and pulling my shoulder said, “Let’s go.” I gave the impression of being a servant of his.

“Namdröl, don’t get yourself in trouble. Take Pelha home, please.” When I heard Sumpa’s words, the pain in my heart increased. It rose from the bottom of my heart and grew worse and worse.

“I won’t go back to my place, Namdröl. I’ll come and eat your tsampa and butter.” Saying that, I took hold of Namdröl’s shoulder and walked on. Like before, the river of cars on the road, that river of white and red lights, had no end. From the side of the road, Namdröl and I entered a taxi that immediately merged into that river, moving ahead. When I threw a glance from the rear window of the taxi, Sumpa was standing where we had left him, a dark, motionless figure. Man of my heart, why didn’t you do anything to stop me? I was just testing you, I thought. That time there were two sides of me. My body, propped up against Namdröl within the taxi, was moving ahead, while my heart soared towards Sumpa who had been left behind.

12.

When I came to, I was lying on a bed.

It bounced like a heaving sailboat, and I felt as though I was soaring on top of great waves that ebbed and flowed. I was aware though that it was a bed I was lying on and not a floating boat – that was clear to me.

I was completely drunk.

Or at least, my body was, but my mind could see everything. Be that as it may, my mind had no control over my body. I meant to get up but feeling that I would fall off that bed that moved like a boat, I stood still, grasping the bedsheets.

As I was lying like that, Namdröl sat himself at the edge of the bed and bent down to look at my face. I saw the lenses of his glasses, caked with filth, and behind those, his unblinking eyes, staring wide-open. Seeing the blurred surface of his lenses, I had the unstoppable desire to stretch up my hand and wipe them clean, but it was just a thought, and my hand stayed where it was, holding the bedsheets. I hadn’t moved.

“Namdröl, where are we?” I asked.

“You were drunk and couldn’t walk, so we came to a hotel.”

“I said that I would come to yours to eat tsampa and butter, didn’t I?”

“Pelha, we can go there later,” Namdröl said and then bent down with the intention of placing a kiss on my lips.

“Namdröl, aren’t you a scholar? A scholar shouldn’t be such a womanizer,” I said, turning my head away.

“This is something you’ve heard, isn’t it?” Namdröl smiled, straightening. “A womanizer is not among the things to fear these days. You’ve listened to those who say that you should be very afraid of a scholar who likes women, haven’t you?” Again he bent down to kiss me.

“Namdröl, please. We don’t love each other…” I pleaded.

“Pelha, you look straight into my eyes every time we meet, and it has been so since the first time we were introduced to one another. My eyes, out of everybody else’s. Why is that if you don’t like me? As they say, ‘For every eye that looks over, there’s one that looks back.’ You shouldn’t look at me in that way if you don’t like me, it’s not fair.”

Unable to recall those instances and think about them while Namdröl talked, I couldn’t avoid his move when he made to kiss me again.

“Please, it was just because of your lenses…” I tried to say, but his kiss was ardent, and I found it hard to breathe.

“I didn’t stare at you because I’m in love with you,” I wanted to say. “What caught my attention was the grubby state of your glasses!” But I had no control over my mouth.

Sumpa had said that Namdröl was an opaque man, and I thought at first that what he meant was that his sight was not clear, due to the dirt caking the surfaces of his lenses.

I had connected many times with Namdröl over WeChat, but I couldn’t decide if his words were nothing more than an attempt to seduce me. I didn’t even know where in Beijing he worked. Sumpa had said that he was a great scholar, but I had no knowledge of that.

In short, Namdröl was not someone I found transparent.

He was one of the Tibetan patrons who came to The Lhasa Sunlight. Like them, he was drawn there, coming from an undefined corner of this big city, to fade back once again into the belly of Beijing, not to be seen for a long time. Or maybe he had become someone who was not visible. He was that kind of man.

That night, Namdröl pressed me under his body.

“Pelha, never in the future should you get drunk drinking chang. Women only bring suffering upon themselves if they do so.”

I recalled the advice my mother had given me several years ago. I was deeply regretting not having listened to her words, but it seemed too late now. Under the influence of alcohol, my body and my mind had split, and however much resistance my mind had, my body was drowsy and tired, and had no strength. I saw Namdröl removing my clothes one by one. My consciousness had detached itself from the body and it was as though I was standing aside, looking at the events unfolding inside the room.

Beneath the lights, I saw my body move under the sheets of the bed – it was like the flopping of a fish that had tumbled on dry land. My movements were bashful. I had never showed myself naked to a man before now. Under the influence of alcohol, it was as though the blood flowing in my veins was boiling, and I felt myself getting warmer. The light fell over my red face, the swelling of my breasts, and the hollow of my navel, the round fleshiness of my tapering thighs, the fine dips of my buttocks, and my hips spreading my pelvis – I saw the cross patterns of every elevation and depression, and the impressions of each of my forms, thin and thick, as I rose and fell.

As for what was now unclothed, was that really the body of a full-grown woman?

Like a fish tumbled onto dry land, my body had freed itself of any shame in front of Namdröl’s eyes. I saw him removing his glasses and placing them on the side table. “Pelha, Pelha,” I heard him calling, unable to control himself.

“I can’t untie it,” Namdröl said. He had removed everything from my body and was now holding the nine-eyed dzi at my neck in his hand.

If only what happened last night had been just as unreal as the dream I used to have, I thought when I woke up the next morning, but the “if onlys” are rarely fulfilled in this world. Namdröl lying naked next to me was the proof that last night had not been a dream.

I picked up his glasses from the side table, and after breathing over them, I went to clean them with a towel. Without his glasses, Namdröl’s eyes bulged out slightly, probably a consequence of his wearing them for a long time. I was still inspecting his sleeping face when his eyes cracked open, and a grin tugged at the corners of his mouth. Holding me by the elbows, he planted a kiss on my head. In that bed, a man I barely knew made me feel something warm and soft, something that tickled my heart. I can try to love someone else than Sumpa in this world, after all, I thought.

“Namdröl, am I your girlfriend now?” I asked him from within the covers.

“He, he,” he laughed, stroking my hair. “You’re my ‘good friend,’” he said.

“When you say a ‘good friend,’ you mean the same thing as Yudrön?” I had just recalled her words.

“What did she say?”

“She said that a ‘good friend’ is just a friend you bed. Is that so?”

“Pelha, I’m really sorry. I want us to be a couple, but I…” Namdröl did not answer my question directly.

When I heard him speaking like that, it was as though ice had melted in my eyes, uncontrollably filling them with tears.

“That time in the teahouse, you said you wanted me to become your girlfriend, didn’t you?

“…” Namdröl dropped his glasses on his nose and didn’t speak, sitting calmly as though lost in thought.

It was something he had done in the past too. He would fall into deep thought all of a sudden, regardless of whether he was among other people.

“Namdröl, your words were just lies, weren’t they?” I said, shaking his elbows. I felt powerless and weak, and a nauseous sensation rose from my heart. Did a woman lose any shred of reputation by baring her body to a man? Was it really so? The tears that had been pooling in my eyes spilled out, like a river breaking a dam.

“I’m sorry, Pelha. All I said was true, but I have a wife and a child…”

At Namdröl’s words, I tightened my grip on his elbows; his words completely broke the hold I had on my tears, and they rolled over my cheeks and fell, as I was left with no sense of self-respect. Namdröl’s hands came out, exposing the nine-eyed dzi stone at my neck.

“Pelha, I’m sorry. Don’t cry.” Namdröl was quietly wiping away my tears with his hands. “There’s no love between me and my wife,” he said.

13.

When that morning Namdröl told me the story of his life as though it was one of his jokes, my impression of him as an opaque man gradually cleared.

He too had grown up in a village in the mountains, but, unlike me, he hadn’t stopped attending school, and had gone through primary and secondary levels, up to the highest degree, eventually getting a job at the Tibetology Research Center of Beijing. He had six siblings, five brothers and a sister. When he was in the third year of middle school, his aging father had given him away as a magpa to one of the village families, and he had lived according to the customs of the world since a very young age.

“It was as though someone was telling me a joke,” Namdröl said to me.

When he had got home after school that day, he had found that many villagers had gathered at his house. They were celebrating and the courtyard was filled with the tasty aroma of alcohol. Namdröl dropped his schoolbag, thinking that one of his brothers must have taken a wife. When he entered the kitchen, he heard his sister saying, “Namdröl, Father has given you away as a magpa.”

“For a moment I didn’t trust my ears that day. My father had always been fierce and harsh with his words, but I thought it impossible that he would ever give me away as a magpa. Yet, it was really like that. I was fifteen when I became the husband of Yutso Drölma, the only daughter of Tupten and his wife, a couple of villagers. I gave it no thought at the time. I didn’t know clearly what love was and so I voiced no opinion on becoming a magpa. At the end though, being an adoptive son-in-law caused me a great anxiety, and even now I cannot describe how I felt about it.”

Later, Namdröl had asked only one thing of his father. “That I should be allowed to attend school,” he said.

“In my day, a boy had only three choices: become a monk, a teacher, or a magpa. He, he,” Namdröl laughed. “They said to me, ‘Be a magpa and stop going to school.’ Or ‘If you want to be a scholar, enrol in a monastery and become a monk. It’s not proper otherwise. Our family won’t cover the expenses of sending you to school. If you join akhu Tupten’s family, it won’t be hard for you to pay the tuition fees.’ And so, I became their adoptive son-in-law.”

At first, Namdröl’s father and Tupten and his wife had let him attend school for a while, probably thinking that he would end up returning home like most of the other students at that time, unable to pass the final exams and be admitted to university. Yet, he had gone beyond all adults’ expectations. Namdröl had become fearless, like a vulture spreading its wings on the edge of a rock.

“When I was in my second year of high school, Yutso Drölma gave birth to a son. We called him Künga. His birth brought joy to both our families and turned me into a father. When I think about it now, I was just a child fathering another child. It seemed that fate had played a trick on me, but life was a joke I held in no regard. I kept going to school and I spent more time there than at home. As for Yutso Drölma, she had looked after her parents, taking care of them, since she was a child and never attended school. As the saying goes, ‘A walking stick to go up the pass, a helper to go to the next life.’ I was aware that those years of minding both her aging parents and our son were hard for her, but I didn’t love her. At that time, I was still trying my hardest to feel some love.”

Later, Namdröl had sat the entrance exams for Beijing University. There was no higher accomplishment than that. It was said that among those who had passed their final school exams in their district or valley, let alone their village, no one had ever gone to Beijing University.

“Had I sat the entrance exams for an average university, they wouldn’t have let me go, but since I sat those for Beijing University, I became like the proverbial man who not even the sky could stop. At nineteen I moved to Beijing, and many years have passed since. To be honest, I could have gone back to work in my hometown after graduation, but I went on and sat the admission test for grad school, and after that I looked for jobs in Beijing, without returning to my native place. I did it because I had no desire to go back and spend my life with a woman I did not love. As a matter of fact, I’m a runaway. You know what a runaway is, right? The only decent thing for me to do now is to ask Yutso Drölma for forgiveness. During the main phase of the marriage, I did all I could to fall in love with her. One time, I went back during the summer break. I had bought clothes for both her and the kid in Beijing, storing them in my backpack. I was coming up from the lower side of the village when I met her. She was headed home from the fields, carrying a flat bamboo basket. I cannot explain what I felt when I saw her. It was a sort of bitterness. She was a short distance away and saw me coming up the road from the foot of the village, but, casting her eyes down, she kept carrying her basket towards home. She did not wait for me. While I was walking in her steps, that feeling blew away any love from my heart, like a wind clearing out a cumulus cloud. I no longer held any fondness for her. When I was in Beijing, I repeatedly fantasized about Yutso Drölma crying longingly, waiting at the foot of the village for my return home, but that was just a fantasy and not reality. Yutso Drölma may have not behaved in the way I had fantasized, but how I had wished she would have waited for me. How I had wished she would have waited for me out of love!”

That year, when Namdröl returned to his village during the summer break, he heard many rumors about Yutso Drölma and a young man of the village, a certain Sanggyé. Starting from then, Namdröl began to go back home less and less frequently.

“Now everyone in my village says that I’m a shameless man, Pelha. I don’t wish to ponder on whether I’m a wicked person or not. It makes no sense for Yutso Drölma and I to criticize one another, I think. Fate has played a trick on us. I still send home half of my salary each month, and that seems to be the only thing I can do for them. I must now dissipate the karmic impressions and dispositions of the life I had in that remote valley, but I have no desire to go back.” Namdröl uttered those words from within the bedsheets, after I had grabbed his elbows that morning. Then he said, “Pelha, I did not deceive you. What I said is true.”

“However earnestly you claim your sincerity, I’m the one who must trust that what you say is true,” I said. “Why didn’t the two of you divorce?” I asked.

“Yutso Drölma won’t agree to a divorce. I don’t know why,” he replied, sighing deeply.

“From the way I see it, your life is a happy one. Your wife is at home, taking care of the child, while you’re out, looking for ‘good friends.’ How delightful!” I said bitingly, getting up and putting my clothes on.

“Pelha, please don’t be sarcastic. What sort of happiness is mine, huh? I don’t even own a room in this forsaken place. I’m almost in my thirties, and I can’t even buy a house to call my own.”

“So, where do you live now?”

“I stay in a rented place with one of my off-site coworkers,” Namdröl said.

“Wouldn’t you be happier if you returned home rather than living like this?”

“I won’t ever go back. I don’t want to spend my life with a woman from a rural village.”

“Namdröl, I’m a girl from a rural village too,” I reminded him, moving to a window at the other side of the hotel room and pulling the curtain aside. The Beijing sky had not changed, the smog dulling the air and completely obscuring long-distance vision. On the road opposite the hotel, the mass of cars, jammed together, moved slowly, a blowing of horns reaching the ears from time to time. I stood at the other side of the window, showing my back to Namdröl, thinking that he was a complicated man. Or at least his situation was, and I felt the desire to keep myself away from that mess.

“Namdröl,” I said. “I don’t want to be your girlfriend.”

“Pelha, please, what I want is for us to be ‘good friends,’” Namdröl replied, from where he lay on the bed behind me.

“…” I didn’t answer. When I first came to Beijing, I wondered if a film was clouding my eyes. Like today, there was no clear horizon, my vision of the sky and the surrounding space covered by smog. It was like the surface of a mirror clouded by breath. Throughout my stay in Beijing, my mind too had been as foggy as that mirror. I couldn’t clearly see the faces of people around me and the way they lived, and I kept calling back to memory the clearness of Yamdrok Yumtso and the life in the village at its shores. In my mind I was certain that I would return to my native land one day.

“Pelha, don’t get your hopes up with Sumpa. He has many ‘good friends,’” Namdröl said. I heard the stiff sounds of his clothes as he dressed himself.

“Have you ever loved someone from the bottom of your heart, Namdröl?” I asked him, turning around.

“My love was carried away by the wind a long time ago.” Behind his glasses, Namdröl’s eyes shone with a light of disenchantment.

“If you have never experienced such a feeling, you can’t understand the love that ties me to Sumpa,” I said, heading towards the door.

“You are really an experienced girl, Pelha,” As Namdröl shot those words at my back, I opened the door, and walking out, I slammed it behind me.