I Am a Fish in Yamdrok Yumtso

Lhashamgyal

(Translation from Tibetan by Lucia Galli)

 

Read Previous (Part III)

14.

I too felt that I was gradually becoming experienced. I wasn’t at all like that when I first arrived in Beijing.

When I barged out of the hotel door, the cars in the road were still dashing forth angrily, fearful of being somewhat left behind, while the citizens of Beijing quickly raised and dropped their feet, trotting ahead in a frenzied state. It was, in short, an impatient world. When I first got to Beijing, I was not accustomed to such a hectic environment. When I lived in my native place on the shores of Yamdrok Yumtso, the locals were relaxed and wherever they went, they did so in a leisurely way.

My impression of what we call “time” was something formless back then, akin to a patient traveler. From the shores of the ceaselessly moving Yamdrok Yumtso, we could see the black spot of someone coming along in the distance, and for us, “time” was the sight of someone coming from afar and the patient waiting for the shadowy form of that black spot to gradually come closer. When I was a child, as soon as those dark shapes came nearer, I would ask, “Are you my daddy?” The approaching of those men was like the approaching of time. My sense of “time” was as slow as that. And the same was true for the passing of time. “I’m not your father, girl,” those men would say, leaving me behind to head towards the far-off crossing of the Gampala Pass. The passing of time was as slow as the gait of those men walking away. The formless time manifested itself in the light that shone golden over the mountain peaks rising in the direction of the distant sunset, its shadow a corporeal thing that fell over those wayfarers’ bodies. The pace of the passing time was just as slow as that back then.

In Beijing though, there was a frenzy in that formless thing we call “time.” Three years had gone by in the blink of an eye since my arrival in this city. Did I actually become inured to those ways of life I was so ignorant of? “Pelha, you’re becoming experienced,” Yudrön had been telling me from time to time, and just now Namdröl had said to my back, “You are really an experienced girl, Pelha.” When I’d first heard Yudrön use the term “experienced,” I’d thought it to be one of her dialect words, and I hadn’t understood its meaning then. Later I came to know that it was used to indicate people who had a great knowledge in certain matters, and I realized that, by calling me “experienced,” they meant that I was a person who had a great understanding of how chaotic life could be, both here and in the city. Did I really become experienced over those three years? I kept asking myself that question that morning, after leaving Namdröl in the hotel and heading back home. When I’d first arrived in The Lhasa Sunlight, I had thought that everyone there was experienced but me. The way those people acted gave me the impression that they got along fine, but there seemed to be an almost invisible line in that harmony. Everyone kept the others at a certain distance, and when I first got there, I found it difficult to get used to everyone’s different characters. Where I grew up, we did not keep people at a distance, and that was not behavior I was familiar with. In my first days at the club, I had been going around telling everyone that I had fallen in love with Sumpa, and that I couldn’t stop loving him. “Don’t be so casual in telling things like that to whoever is around,” Yudrön had advised me then. “You have no life experience yet.” She was my friend. In those years, I had asked her opinion whenever I encountered a problem, such as keeping my distance in daily life. From my point of view, she was more experienced than me.

I understood what Namdröl had meant when he had called me an “experienced girl.” He thought of me as easy, a girl he would have no trouble bedding. When I danced on the stage of The Lhasa Sunlight, brazenly showing off my naked body, many spectators were certain that the girl on stage must be an easy one. They tried again and again to seduce me with their flattering declarations, as cloying as honey. Since I was, like Yudrön had said, “experienced,” I saw, laid bare, the lustful aim hidden behind their seductive words. Yet, last night I had trusted what Namdröl had told me and believed I had really stolen his heart. It may have been so, but on my way home that morning I laughed at myself for having thought that. Sumpa had warned me that Namdröl was an opaque man. It seemed I too had lost my bearings amidst his ambiguity. There was no one to blame. When my mind turned to Sumpa, I felt the guilt of having acted against my master last night. I hadn’t done that intentionally – I had been drunk. Thinking about it, Sumpa too was responsible. The way he had run at Bai-la’s bidding after handing me over to Namdröl was beyond any limit…

I moved along the road, analyzing the situation within myself. People were such a joke! If they acted in a certain way, they did so to create the pretext for what they had in mind. I had done the same that morning: acting out of spite against Sumpa last night, I had created the conditions that led me to sleep with Namdröl. Upon consideration, I wasn’t sure that was a sign of me being experienced.

The cars on the road hooted loudly, and a screeching sound of pressed brakes and rolling wheels woke me from my reveries. Taken by my thoughts, I hadn’t noticed that the red light had gone off at the crossroad, and I had been almost run over when crossing the main road.

“Are you ******* blind?!” A driver shouted at me, rolling down the window and pointing his finger at me.

Yet I still felt as though I was gradually getting more experienced. A few nights later, Mr. Wang, the man I had met when hanging out with Bai-la, came to The Lhasa Sunlight with a couple of friends to taste some Tibetan food, and on that occasion, he insisted on giving me a new iPhone 5. “Is it right of me to accept when a man gifts me something like this without a reason?” I asked Yudrön when he had left.

“It’d be a waste not to take the riches of men like him!” Yudrön answered in her Amdo dialect.

“It makes me uncomfortable when I’m given things for no reason.”

“Pelha, you could show your gratitude with the most precious thing you have, just like that old man wants,” Yudrön said, smiling. Actually, I had had no intention of accepting a new phone: it had been Yudrön who had stretched across the round table to grab the iPhone 5 (what we called “Apple 5”) that Mr. Wang had in his hand, giving it to me while handing him back my old phone. Since Sumpa hadn’t come that night, I had called Yudrön over after the performance, as they wanted us to sit with them for a while.

“I’m gonna tell you all a joke, Mr. Wang -la,” Yudrön said, picking up the new phone.

After arriving in Beijing, I had the impression that people loved to tell “jokes,” especially at gatherings, while they enjoyed food and drinks. They especially appreciated jokes that had a sexual innuendo. Many could tell funny stories about themselves, and Namdröl was very good at those. New colors were added to the night when people laughed loudly, their “ha, ha” and “ho, ho” sounding amidst the jests.

Yudrön’s joke had gone like this. Once upon a time, an old man wanted to have fun with a young girl. He tempted her again and again, until the girl eventually said, “Buy me a new iPhone 5, and I will repay you with the most precious thing I have.” The old man thought that meant that his appetite would be satisfied, and immediately bought an iPhone 5 and gave it to the girl. Thanking him with a surprised expression, she took an iPhone 4 from her purse and handed it to him. “I’m sorry, this is the most precious thing I have on me. Please, don’t be offended!” At that, the old man had nothing to say, unsure whether to laugh or cry.

“I’m sorry, our Pelha too has nothing on her but this old phone. Please, don’t be offended!” Saying this, she passed my old phone over to Mr. Wang, and those around the table let out a great laugh.

“Girl, you are a really a clever and experienced one!” A bashful smile grew across Mr. Wang’s face. “Pelha, be at ease. It’s just a token of my appreciation. I had nothing else in mind,” he said, turning towards me.

When they were gone, Yudrön and I took out the iPhone 5 from its box and sat, touching it. “What if Mr. Wang had really told me that I should pay him back later with the most precious thing I have? What would I have done then?” I asked her.

“Pelha, don’t make a fuss,” Yudrön replied. “Rather than sleeping with poor Tibetan boys like Sumpa or Namdröl, wouldn’t it be better to become the ‘good friend’ of someone as rich as Mr. Wang?” Then, touching the phone, she added, “This is an iPhone 5S. It’s the model above mine.”

“I’m not being fussy, Yudrön,” I said. “It’s that I’m not used to this kind of thing.”

“Well, if that’s the case, please, give the phone back to Mr. Wang.” Yudrön’s long eyelashes flickered under the dim lights. “We have no hope to buy a phone like this with our monthly salary,” she said.

“Who bought you a phone, then?” I asked, laughing.

“It’s a secret,” Yudrön answered, placing a finger on her lips.

“So you never told Sumpa about it, did you? Well, this too is a secret,” I told Yudrön.

“I plan to never speak to Sumpa again in my whole life,” she said, then shaking her head and smiling pleasantly, she looked at me. “Pelha, you’re becoming an expert.”

15.

Yudrön and I had just finished our performance when I received a phone call from my mother. The ringing sound of an incoming call came from the small room at the right side of the stage, and the Tibetan letters appearing on the screen of the iPhone 5 spelled “Sötsé and Mom.” I hadn’t been able to buy a phone for my mother yet.

Most of what I saved from my income at The Lhasa Sunlight covered my brother’s living expenses and tuition fees, as well as the cost of my mother’s medicine, and not much was left to spare. When she wished to call me, my mother had to borrow Sötsé’s phone, and from time to time I too had called him to connect with her. For this reason, when I had saved Sötsé’s phone number in my iPhone 5, I had used the Tibetan alphabet and added my mother’s name too. I must send my old phone over to her, if anyone ever heads back home, I thought.

When I got the call, the voice that came out of the speaker was not my mother’s. It was Sötsé’s. “Is this Pelha?” he said.

“Yes, this is her,” I answered, not knowing how to address the man on the other side of the line. For years, Sötsé had lived in a state of constant drunkenness, downing the barley chang my mother brewed. He had spent his life in an alcoholic stupor rather than getting some meaningful job. The people at the village said that he was Pelnam’s father, but my mother had yet to confirm it. I had told her every now and then, “If you like that drunkard Sötsé, please take him in as a magpa,” but she hadn’t done it, saying that I would understand once I grew up and had a man. “I don’t think about these things now that I’m old,” she had said when we had spoken over the phone recently. At the beginning, I hadn’t liked Sötsé’s character at all. He was lazy and lived a jobless, easy life, but when my brother Pelnam went to school in the interior and I left to work in the service industry in Beijing, I thought it a good thing that there was a man like him living in with my mother.

“Pelha, your mother’s rheumatism has worsened. When they visited her at the Nakartsé hospital, the doctor said that the best thing for her was to get immediately admitted and have some surgery. Your mother didn’t agree. She said that her illness can be kept under control with drugs,” Sötsé’s voice sounded frantic and anxious, and mostly sober. “You mother said I should not tell you this. I’m making this call without her knowledge. How can this be good?”

My mother had been suffering from rheumatism for many years. From time to time, I bought medicines in Beijing that improved her condition; I sent them to her, but they couldn’t eradicate the sickness, just alleviate the occasional pains. From the way she told it, when she gave birth to me, some blood from the womb had tainted Yamdrok Yumtso, and a lu had cursed her. It had been common in the past to perform healing ceremonies, with monks and tantric practitioners being invited to the house to perform counteracting exorcisms, but there was no one who could do it now. A doctor from Beijing once came to The Lhasa Sunlight to enjoy some Tibetan food; he had been explaining to me the causes of rheumatism when he realized that my homeplace was on the shores of Yamdrok Yumtso. At that point he asked me, “Did the illness arise after you ate fish meat?” I told him that we had never eaten fish from the lake.

“Then it must be connected to the fact that the temperatures in your area of Tibet are stable all year round and you never sweat,” the doctor said. Whatever the case, my mother’s sickness had yet to be completely cured. Her illness was a source of worry while I lived in Beijing.

“Did they say she will be fully healed if she undergoes surgery? I’ll find the money,” I said to Sötsé.

“We’ll probably need around 2,000 renminbi.” Sötsé coughed saying that. “Pelha, Pelnam says that the dzi you have hanging at your neck would fetch a very high price. It’d be best if you sell it – this doesn’t need to be difficult for anyone.”

“I’ll find a way with Mom’s medical expenses,” I said over the phone to that drunkard Sötsé. “I’ll call again tomorrow,” I said, ending the call. Had Sötsé and Pelnam been establishing a father-and-son relationship? I wondered.

That night in that room at the side of the stage, I was left with nothing else to do but rub the dzi stone at my neck.

“Atsi, Pelha! When did you buy such a pricey phone?”

As I was sitting dumbly, Sumpa entered the side room, loosening the guitar at his shoulder, and picked up the Apple-branded phone from my hands.

“Yesterday.”

“Did you sell your dzi?” Sumpa’s eyes wandered to my neck. “Your precious stone is still where it was,” he said. Although he spoke to me in that indifferent way of his, I understood the gist of it. Sumpa was always like that. He never said it as it was.

“Shall we have a drink tonight, Sumpa?” I said, changing the conversation. I wished for Sumpa to never know the origin of my phone.

“When did you become such a lover of chang, Pelha?” Sumpa smiled.

“It’s impossible that you’ll care even if I turn from a human into a demon,” I said displeased.

“Well then, let’s do it. I’ll give Namdröl a call. It’s been a while since I last saw that opaque man,” Sumpa said, calling Namdröl.

I too had not seen Namdröl for a long time, since I had left him that day, slamming the hotel door. He had sent me voice messages though, from time to time – “Pelha, my good friend, what if we stay together tonight?”  He no longer said, “You stole my heart, Pelha.” Now he straight up invited me to sleep with him, to which I answered, “Namdröl, wipe your glasses clean, and everything will certainly get clearer.”

Namdröl didn’t pick up the call. Sumpa shook his head, “These Tibetans in Beijing are really bizarre. As soon as they walk out of The Lhasa Sunlight, they are never to be seen again. It’s like they have been absorbed by the darkness,” he said. “I wanted to drink some chang tonight, but it looks like I don’t have even a chang friend.” He seemed to have forgotten that I was near at hand. Even if he hadn’t forgotten though, I wasn’t likely to be considered as one of the “chang friends” he talked about.

“Sumpa, I’ll be your chang friend tonight. You don’t need anyone else.” I voiced my heart’s hope, without any pride or self-respect.

16.

That night, after three years, I got the opportunity to accompany the famous Tibetan singer Sumpa back to his mysterious den. That had been the dream of my youth. When I lived on the shores of Yamdrok Yumtso, I had been fantasizing about walking hand in hand under the moon with Sumpa, the glorious young man who sang the beautiful songs on that DVD. Since arriving in Beijing, I wished that Sumpa would take me to his place in the darkness of a night like that, but as the hours flapped their wings, months and years flew ever more distant. Everyone had been telling me, “Pelha, you’re becoming experienced,” and now, I, an experienced woman, was crossing the night roads with Sumpa, heading to his place. Yet, that was just the outcome of my pleading with him, without any pride or self-respect.

Sumpa’s place was a two-room apartment. It consisted of one bedroom and one living room, to which a bathroom and a kitchen had been added along the corner walls. On the walls of his apartment there were many posters advertising the DVDs of his songs, and on the one opposite the bed, where the TV was, I saw the woven thangka of a goddess holding a lute.

“That’s Lhamo Yangchenma,” Sumpa said, coming near me as I was staring at the thangka. He then opened the fridge that was in a corner of the living room and took out a few bottles of beer – clink, clink. “Pelha, what are you having? Gold or white?” he asked me.

“If you drink gold beer in the summer heat, you’ll quench your thirst,” I intoned from where I sat on the couch and I raised the two glasses set on the low table in front of me. The interior of Sumpa’s apartment mirrored its owner, decorated as it was with an arrangement of artsy objects in neat rows. I saw that he liked to keep beautiful trinkets, like a girl. In his house there were those useless things one found sold in markets all over Tibet, but they had been displayed in a tasteful way. Still, there were strings of them here, there, and everywhere.

“I too had a mind to drink beer. Let’s do that.” Sumpa grabbed two bottles and sat on a chair opposite me. Then he placed the lip of one under the lid of the other, opening it with a popping sound.

I immediately smelled the aroma of beer. Bubbles rose softly in the golden liquid swirling in the glass, amber hued under the lights. I hadn’t drunk any beer for three years. At the time of leaving home, my mother had told me, “Pelha, take good care of yourself in that distant place. Don’t drink chang!” For three years, many people in The Lhasa Sunlight kept pressing me into drinking, but I had kept my mother’s advice in mind and relinquished beer for a long time. It was while in the company of Sumpa and Namdröl that summer three years later, that I tasted again that golden liquid and got drunk. Namdröl had taken me to a hotel, and I had offered myself, naked, tumbling like a fish onto dry land. Had I to get drunk on chang tonight, I would again experience a loss of my own making, yet I let it go and drank with Sumpa.

“Bottoms up, Sumpa!” I said, raising my glass and pouring the cold, soft drink into my mouth.

“Pelha, since when do you drink alcohol? I didn’t notice,” Sumpa said. He had drained the beer in his glass and frowned and was now refilling his empty glass. His expression was sour, and he wasn’t looking at me.

“You don’t have eyes for me, so how could you know when I started drinking beer?”

“I don’t want to have this conversation tonight, Pelha. Let’s just be merry and drink our fill of chang.” Sumpa refilled his glass.

The night was a dark, bottomless hole, and Sumpa and I were falling deeper and deeper into it. Will dawn ever rise from the depth of this darkness? I wondered. In front of Sumpa, I had become a fish swimming happily in the sea. I had the desire to stretch my hands and touch his face, but I lacked the courage to do so.

This man in front of my eyes – the man of my youth’s dreams, the man towards whom my heart ran like an unbridled stallion – if only now that this man sat opposite me drinking beer the wheels of time could stop revolving! If the world must end, it should do so tonight!

That feeling was as strong as the tide, but I calmly sat in front of Sumpa as still and unrippled as the surface of a lake. After my three-year long observations, I came to the conclusion that, despite his outward indifference towards me, Sumpa had in truth liked me all along. And so, humoring him, I stretched out the hours, drinking and chatting of inconsequential things.

Despite his drinking though, Sumpa did not open his heart to me. It seemed that no amount of alcohol could get him drunk. On the contrary, it was me who was gradually showing signs of inebriation.

“Do you know, Sumpa?” I asked with tears rolling down my face, while lifting my glass filled with beer.

“What?” Sumpa made to touch his glass with mine.

“That time, when I was selling prayer-flags on the peak of Gampala, Yudrön told me you were in Beijing. She said that if I moved here, I could be one of your backup dancers,” I said, swallowing a mouthful of beer. “Did you know that it was for this reason that I came to Beijing?” I asked.

“I heard the two of you speak of this. I also know that you have loved me unwaveringly for three years,” he told me, placing his glass on the table.

“If you knew that, why didn’t you acknowledge it?” The dam that was holding back my tears broke once more, and some dropped into my glass.

“Pelha, you are a decent girl. I do not wish to ruin you.”

“But you can bear to have others ruin me, eh?”

“Pelha, you are not equipped to live in the city. It’d be better if you went back home,” he said, giving me an answer that was not an answer.

“Would you come back with me?”

“I can’t go back to that life,” he said.

“Why?”

“Have you ever seen a ship, Pelha?” he asked, then without waiting for my reply, said, “the ship is very safe when anchored at the dock, but it’s not for that purpose that it was built. Likewise, I’d be the happiest were I to stay in our homeland, but that would not be the reason I came to this world.”

“Sumpa, these concepts are too deep for me to understand, but I don’t want to act as either a ship or a person who will never go back in her life. I do have a rope tying me, and that’s my mother at home,” I said.

“You still don’t get it, do you? There’s no way for us to be together. Had you been a wanderer like Yudrön, we could have casually dated, but you’re not one to sleep around. I’ve seen some kind of purity in your body, Pelha,” Sumpa said, downing his beer.

“How could I actually be as pure as you say, Sumpa, eh?” I exclaimed.

He received a phone call from Bai-la at that moment. Why isn’t that woman asleep at such a late hour? I asked myself.

“It’s late. Isn’t it weird that she is not asleep?” The thought escaped my lips.

“There are many in the city who don’t sleep at night,” Sumpa said, accepting the call. He said something to the person on the other side of the line and hung up. “I’m so fed up,” he said to me.

“It seems that Bai-la is the rope anchoring your little boat,” I remarked sarcastically.

“She bought a new pair of high-heeled boots, and she told me to come over and see if they look good. It is boring, actually,” Sumpa abruptly switched off his phone, saying nothing more.

“I don’t like high-heeled boots,” I said, for no reason.

“You’d look pretty in high heels, Pelha. I mean it,” Sumpa said, seriously.

Later, I got drunk and dreamed that dream I hadn’t had since arriving in Beijing. I once more dreamed of having become a fish in Yamdrok Yumtso. In it, the lake had swelled and was getting bigger and bigger. It was like an overly inflated blue balloon. The crests of the crystal waves rose ever higher, destroying the road that looked like a desiccated water viper, while the village of Shelkar – the pens and farms on the mountain and the locals and their cattle in the valley – were drawn into the lake, engulfed within the great flow. In the dream, I could hear the pulsating splashing of the flood and the feeling of my body being hit and touched by the water – moist, damp, heavy, smooth. I was enveloped by waves, sometimes rising upwards, sometimes pulling downwards. At first, I felt an indescribable fear and I even cried out in my dream. Moving my hands, I reached out within my bed to Sumpa, who was sleeping nearby, managing to take hold of one of his shoulders. At the edge of wakefulness, I heard him calling my name – “Pelha, Pelha!” I did not wake up though and kept dreaming of having turned into a fish…

17.

I had bought myself a pair of red boots with high heels. At noon, I put them on and walked down the road with a clip-clapping sound. My brother Pelnam had called me, saying that he would come at The Lhasa Sunlight that night. “Let’s meet up in the afternoon, not tonight,” I told him. I didn’t plan to let him see me performing with those costumes on, so I had set the meeting time to the afternoon in the teahouse where Namdröl and I had had our first date. My brother told me over the phone that he would go back home during the summer break, and I thought it a good thing. I should give him those few boxes of painkillers I bought for Mom, as well as my old phone, I thought. It had been a few months since I’d last seen Pelnam, and I was very much looking forward to meeting him. He always sent me WeChat messages, saying things like “Achak, I’m broke!” or even “Achak, achak, if you don’t have the money, sell your nine-eyed dzi! They say it’ll fetch a good price!” It had really been a long time since I’d seen him. Although we lived in the same city, I had had very few occasions to see my brother. To me Beijing felt like an endless desert, and people were as many as the grains of sand. Even the time moved like the wind in the desert, running ahead without encountering any tangible obstacle. I often felt that my brother and I risked being cast adrift in the vastness and multitude of such a fast-paced city, never to find each other again.

While crossing the road in front The Lhasa Sunlight, I heard the clip-clapping sound of my boot heels hitting the cement. I had never worn this kind of high-heeled boots, and I felt a strong sense of awkwardness while I walked the streets. I had to be careful, lest I tripped and fell on the ground. “Pelha, you don’t like wearing high heels, do you?” Yudrön had asked me when I left the dormitory. Without giving her a direct answer, I asked back, “How do I look? Are they nice?” Yudrön smiled at that. “Don’t stand still at the corner of the road with those boots on, or people will take you for a hoochie!” she joked. “All men in the world may find these boots unattractive, but as long as they look good to one man, they’re fine,” I said, slamming the door on my way out. The Beijing sky was still covered by smog and had not cleared at all. It was like a steamed mirror. The faces of the people I met on the road held no expression, and everyone moved tiredly and lethargically in that hazy environment. Amidst the polluted air, the mid-summer heat felt like a firestorm, or murky water brought to a boil. I felt like a fish that had been dropped into hot mud. I thought to open my mouth and take a breath, but I had to restrain myself, lest the pollutants that filled the air – the “PM 2.5,” as they called them – got stuck in my throat. Beijing, Beijing…it’s unbearable to live here.

The air conditioning was on in the teahouse, and it was cool inside. I waited for some time that afternoon, and the hours of that bright day seemed to be running in the four directions as the colors of the sky gradually darkened. When my brother arrived in the teahouse, I saw two people following him in. One was the girl with the mole on her face who I had seen in my brother’s WeChat Moments. The other was a grown man holding a fan in his hand; he had a pair of gold and black eyeglasses with round lenses perched atop his nose. I examined my brother, since I hadn’t seen him for a few months. He looked to have put some weight on. The shape of his face spontaneously reminded me of Sötsé’s, that village drunkard. Once seated, my brother indicated the girl with the mole on her face. “Achak, this is my classmate Li Jia,” he said.

“You’re beautiful, achak!” The girl exclaimed in Chinese, looking at me with a smile. Then, turning to Pelnam, “It seems that your parents gave the nectar of beauty only to your sister!” she said.

“This is my sister Pelha.” Without answering her teasing comment, my brother went on to introduce me to the man next to him. “The one at her neck is the nine-eyed dzi I have been telling you about,” he said, pointing at the stone at my throat.

“I’ll have a look at it. If you could untie it, please,” the man said loudly, looking at my neck with his eyes hidden behind the round lenses. I felt an uncomfortable apprehension at that man’s shameless staring at my chest, and I involuntarily covered my dzi with a hand. Annoyed, I asked my brother in Tibetan, “Pelnam, who is this man?”

“Achak, this is Mr. Zhang. He’s an expert in the analysis of dzi stones.”

“Why did you bring him here?”

“Achak, we need money for everything, from Mom’s cure to my tuition fees. That dzi will fetch a good price. Why not sell it?” my brother said. “It makes us no profit, sitting there at your neck,” he added.

At Pelnam’s words, my mind clouded. Since arriving in Beijing, with the blurriness of sight came a sensation of mental unclearness, like now. Amidst that fog, even my brother, who was sitting in front of me, had lost his clarity and was hard to see. Why was that? Everyone around me kept saying that the nine-eyed dzi tied at my neck would fetch a high price, that it was rare, that I should be careful. But to me it was like the sweat on my flesh and skin, and it had been hanging at my throat since I was a child. I had never given any thought to its value up to that moment – it was part of my own body. Even more, it was the only thing that my estranged father had given me, and by keeping it at my neck, it felt as if he was close to me and had never left. It was a feeling that went beyond words, thoughts, or expressions. A feeling I didn’t know how to convey to others, and even had I know how to express it, it would have been impossible for them to understand. In any case, I had never before considered how much money I could get from the dzi.

“If you go back home, will you take this medicine to Mom?” I did not wish to keep talking about the nine-eyed agate with Pelnam, and so I handed him the knapsack with the things for our mother. “There’s also my old phone inside. Please, give it to Mom. You don’t need to worry. I’ll be working hard, and I’ll make sure to have enough money to see you through school,” I said.

“I’m going to your hometown too, achak. I’ve heard that there is a lake called Yamdrok Yumtso. I’m going with Pelnam to see it,” the girl who my brother had introduced as Li Jia cut in, interrupting the conversation between my brother and me. She seemed to have understood not a word of what we said in Tibetan.

“That lake is really beautiful,” I said to her.

“It is just as clear as a mirror! I saw it on Pelnam’s phone,” Li Jia said, then turning to my brother, she pressed, “give me your phone.”

I saw Pelnam taking out from his pocket an iPhone 5 – that phone everyone, everywhere, wished for – and handing it to Li Jia. “This is the photo. Look, achak! It is as beautiful as that!” Li Jia showed me a photo of Yamdrok Yumtso on my brother’s phone. “How clear photos are on the iPhone 5, huh? Pelnam bought an iPhone 5 for himself and gave me an iPhone 4 as a birthday gift. Achak? Speak up!” That girl called Li Jia said, the black mole on her fleshy lip quivering. From the way she spoke, with no pause between words, she seemed to be a girl whose mouth ran faster than her brain. I saw my brother, seated opposite me, scratching his head uncomfortably.

Until now he had been sending me WeChat texts – “Achak, I’m broke, broke!” That’s how he ran out of money!

Before I could chastise my brother, Mr. Zhang, who was in front of me, shouted, “It’s fake! It’s fake!” and for a while all of us sat there, stunned. That man, who Pelnam had labelled “an expert in the analysis of dzi stones,” had probably been observing and studying the agate at my neck. Ramming his glasses up his nose and straightening his body upwards, away from the table, he leaned against the backrest of the sofa, sitting with a disappointed look on his face while flapping his fan.

“What’s fake?” my brother asked.

“The dzi at your sister’s neck, that’s what.”

“How do you know it’s fake if you haven’t even touched it?”

“You told me that the agate at her neck is a nine-eyed one, didn’t you? I counted carefully, but I could see only six. At least, I’m certain that it is not a nine-eyed one,” the man said.

“It’s impossible!” Pelnam was probably more anxious than me. “Achak, take it off and look at it thoroughly,” he said.

“Don’t you think this man is deceiving you?” I asked in disbelief.

“Achak,” Li Jia said. “I know how to count the eyes of a dzi. Don’t get upset, I will count them carefully,” and getting up, she came closer. She touched the agate at my neck with her hand, without taking it off. “One eye, two eyes, three eyes, four eyes, five eyes, six eyes,” she counted. Then, “There really are no more than six!” she exclaimed.

“I had no reason to lie,” Mr. Zhang said.

“Achak, Mom said that it was a nine-eyed dzi, didn’t she?” my brother asked.

The words of those people standing opposite me became tangled up in my head.

It was as though I had been wrapped up by the dusky shadows outside the window, that gathering of darkness that was never far away and that seemed to sneak in in no time from the four corners of the city.

“I’ve been counting them since I was a child. The dzi at my neck has nine eyes,” I said with conviction.

“Girl, if you don’t believe me, take it off and count them yourself,” Mr. Zhang said, still leaning against the backrest, unmoving. “If my assessment is not wrong, it’s one of those fake dzi that have been seen on sale lately. Most of them are made in Taiwan,” he said.

I weakly untied the dzi from my neck. Since my childhood, I have been told by my mother that the agate hanging at my throat was just like the one that my estranged father wore at his neck. “It’s a nine-eyed one, the rarest,” she said. She taught me how to count the eyes. The dark center within the pale flesh resembles the contrasting pupils of a person’s eyes, and it was by counting the pupil-like eyes of the dzi I had learned numbers. There were nine eyes on the dzi hanging at my neck, it was impossible I had ever mistaken the number. Yet, when I lifted the dzi onto my palm and looked at it carefully, there were no more than six eyes. How could that be?

“Girl, according to Pelnam, this agate was a gift from your father. At that time there weren’t fake dzi on sale. I’ll give you my word, that dzi is a counterfeit. It’s not an authentic agate, but an imitation made of rock crystal,” Mr. Zhang said, bending over and touching the dzi on the palm of my hand with a finger.

“It’s impossible,” I heard myself saying.

“Achak, no one has swapped the genuine dzi you had at your neck, right?” I heard Pelnam asking me.

“It’s almost dusk. It’s time for me to go to work.” Clasping the dzi in the palm of my hand, I got up and exited the teahouse without bidding the others goodbye.

18.

I arrived in Beijing three years ago.

Now, three years later, I was going through the city alleys like a corpse deprived of consciousness. The gathering darkness of Beijing probably stood lingering, never distant even during the day. It wasn’t patient, and as soon as it became unable to tolerate the afternoon hours stretching any longer, that black shadow came over sneakily, squeezing and pressing itself in. I moved ahead and it was as though I was moving further into a dark night. The road in front of me was made gradually clearer by lights alongside it, but my vision was blurry. Clouding my sight was not the ever-present smog, but tears that had flooded my pupils and now bubbled at the corners of my eyes.

Who had swapped the dzi at my neck?

I recalled Yudrön, the friend who had taken me to Beijing. Namdröl, who always had a layer of dirt caking the surface of his lenses. Sumpa, the man of my heart, who had stood close and called me – “Pelha, Pelha” – when I stretched my hand from the space of my dream. And even as I thought of them, it was not their smiles or their words of affection that came to my mind, but the memories of Yamdrok Yumtso. The only thing I always had in mind was the mirrorlike clearness of the lake.

Anyway, who had swapped the dzi at my neck?

I moved along the road like that, losing my footing a few times in those high-heeled boots and almost falling on the ground. The masses of cars on the streets went on flowing like a river of light. The tears at the corners of my eyes were running down my cheeks, and I felt them dropping. A wail escaped my mouth.

“WHO STOLE MY NINE-EYED DZI?” I shouted in the night air of Beijing. The cry had yet to fade when something on the side of the pavement hit my foot and the heel broke off my boot sole. In an instant, I fell into the road.

I heard an ear-splitting sound as the car braked, then I saw my own body flying in the air, dropping heavily on the ground a moment later. That was really bizarre. It was as though there were two sides of me: one side stood watching while the other was caught up in the incident. I saw that red blood flowing freely from every part of my body and swirling on the concrete surface. My vision was both clear and clouded. Amidst the blurriness, I saw the dzi held in the palm of my hand dropping my side. I saw my hand stretching towards it – how defenseless and alone that stretched hand was! I saw my body, made of flesh and blood, gradually turning into a lifeless corpse.

The masses of cars on the roads of Beijing flowed like a river of light. I saw my consciousness turning into a fish and quickly flickering into the main stream of that river of light. Then I saw the mirrorlike Yamdrok Yumtso ahead…

Beijing, March 2, 2015

 

For the original Tibetan language version of this novella, see Lha byams rgyal. 2016. “Nga ni yar ’brog g.yu mtsho’i nang gi nya zhig yin” in Lha byams rgyal gi sgrung ’bring phyogs bsgrigs (Collection of Lha byams rgyal’s Novellas). Zi ling (Xining): Mtsho snon mi rigs dpe krun khang (Qinghai Nationality Press), 1-126.

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.