Sonam Chhoki – Bhutan
Footsteps in the Fog
There’s an old monastery in
Darjeeling, where my father spent some
years as a young monk. On the tenth
anniversary of his death I make a
pilgrimage.
The taxi, an elongated version of a Willys
Jeep, speeds across the Brahmaputra Plains
on the Indo-Bhutan border but struggles up
the incline of the Himalayan road built by
the British in 1840. Called the Tenzin
Norgay Highway it snakes like an unending
cobra, whose hood is hidden in the
low-lying clouds clinging to the terraced
tea gardens and the meandering tracks of
the Toy Train*. All along this 80
kilometres highway wooden houses with
corrugated roofs sit cheek by jowl with
tin shacks of teashops, food and vegetable
stalls. Every now and then, cell phone
masts rise out of the wooded hills like
phantom towers.
road side billboard –
a bottle of Jameson dwarfs
Kang-chen-jun-ga**
Two students on holiday, fleeing the heat
of the plains, flirt with the driver with
boisterous rendering of the latest
Bollywood numbers. The taxi groans along
the zigzag of the highway. Soon the girls
huddle together and doze. There are four
other passengers including myself. We
murmur about a viewpoint stop. The driver
remonstrates he has another trip after
ours. He negotiates each hairpin bend with
an enthusiastic blaring of horn. Our
protests peter out in silence.
as if releasing
its secret, the mountain breeze
wafts pine resin
I look out the taxi window. My sisters and
I went to school in Darjeeling. I can
almost see father driving us home or
bringing us back after a vacation. The
municipality garden carved into the
verdant hill comes into view. Here,
amongst the rhododendrons and magnolias
father invariably stopped for a picnic of
cheese dumplings with coriander sauce and
the tea still hot in a tall thermos flask.
Mother insisted we wash our hands with
water from a plastic jerry can carried in
the booth of the car; father tried to
capture our ecstatic or homesick faces
with his Canon SLR.
spreading mist
like innumerable fingers
poke memories
I take incense, fruits and milk to the
monastery on the hilltop. The old
caretaker monk asks kindly what kind of
offering do I want to make. I tell him
it’s father’s death anniversary. In the
cavernous temple hall, where, each dawn my
father must have sat on the rug-covered
flagstone floor or perhaps dozed between
learning the scriptures by rote, I light
butter lamps – 108 each for mother and
father. Prostrating before Chenrezig, the
Buddha of Compassion, *** I pray they have
crossed the bardo to higher consciousness.
breaking through leaf litter
white primula pendants
light the old footpath
Notes:
*Toy Train: Also known as the Darjeeling
Himalayan Railway is a 2 feet (610 mm)
narrow gauge railway built by the British
between 1879 and 1881. It runs along the
80 kilometers route between Darjeeling
(2,200 meters) and New Jalpaiguri (100
meters).
**Kang-chen-junga (‘Great Mother
Glacier’): Dominant mountain range in
Darjeeling.
***Chenrezig (Pron. Chen-Ray-Zee,
Sanskrit. Avalokiteśvara) took a vow to
postpone his own Buddhahood to help all
sentient beings attain enlightenment.
Fool Moon
Now, our young cobra has not
read Whitman's Leaves of Grass or visited
the Savannah, the cradle of civilization.
He is five summers old with a gleaming
un-blemished hood, king of the grassland
which he surveys in the monsoon sun.
His father, Old Hood is unkempt of crown
and peeling scales. He mutters, ‘those
monsters that rumble beyond the long grass
are our nemesis.’
‘Pah’, scoffs our young king, 'with our
venom we hold sway. Who will dare face our
glorious heads or provoke our blistering
spit?'
Old Hood crouches in the warm split-lip of
a rock. He turns his face away at every
sound of wheels, buries his fangs and
waits in dread.
One full moon night the young king filled
with pheromone for a queen and a
determination to exorcise Old Hood's
fears, ripples down the highway.
His hood glints briefly in the headlights
of a truck.
village pond
guava blossoms drift
as foam
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