Nine Rows of Twelve

This is an original story, written for this site. It is fiction, not a teaching or a traditional account.

In July the rain came to Bylakuppe every afternoon at about three, so hard that the coconut palms bent under it and the paths of red earth ran like streams. By five it had stopped. By six the air was hot again, and smelled of wet leaves and woodsmoke.

Tenzin was twelve. He had been a novice monk for five months, since a cousin of his father's brought him south on three trains and a bus from a village in the hills of Solu, in eastern Nepal. At home he was Pasang. Here he had a new name, a maroon robe that was still too long, and a bed in a room with seven other boys.

Bylakuppe, in Karnataka in south India, is one of the oldest Tibetan settlements in exile, founded for refugees in the early 1960s. Its monasteries now take boys from all over the Himalaya. In February Tenzin had only known that it was far.

Too hot

Nobody had told him about the heat. In Solu in July the mist sat in the pine trees and his mother kept the fire going all day. Here he sweated through his shawl at morning prayers and lay awake under the ceiling fan, listening to the frogs.

In the afternoons, after the rain, the older monks debated in the courtyard. One stood and threw a question, then swung his arm down and clapped, loud as a branch cracking. The one sitting on the ground had to answer. Tenzin watched from the steps, understood about one word in ten, and thought about home.

The lamp house

The tenth day of the Tibetan month was coming: Guru Rinpoche's day. Guru Rinpoche, the "Precious Teacher", is the eighth-century master remembered for helping Buddhism take root in Tibet, and on the tenth day monasteries gather in his honour. Here, that meant 108 butter lamps on the shrine.

The lamps belonged to the shrine keeper, the chöpön, an old monk called Gen Thubten. Gen means something like "elder", and the boys used it for anyone with grey stubble. Two days before the tenth, he found Tenzin on the steps and held up a key.

"I need hands," he said. "Small ones are best. They fit inside the cups."

The lamp house was a low room behind the temple with a stone floor and a tin roof, kept apart in case of fire. It smelled of old ghee and smoke. On the shelves stood last month's lamps: wide brass cups on slender stems, black inside, each with a burnt stub of wick stuck in the bottom.

Brass and tamarind

They carried the cups out to the verandah in baskets. Gen Thubten scraped out the old ghee with a spoon, then rubbed the brass with tamarind pulp from a jar. "A lady in the camp showed me this, thirty years ago," he said. "Better than anything from the shop."

The tamarind was sour and brown and got under Tenzin's nails. He rubbed and rinsed and rubbed. Slowly the black came away, and the brass underneath shone like a new coin.

At home his mother cleaned the one lamp on the family shrine every morning, with a rag and ash from the stove. He had watched her do it all his life and never once offered to help. He thought about that, and scrubbed harder.

Wicks

The next day the rain was so loud on the tin roof that they could hardly hear each other. They sat on a mat on the verandah with a bag of cotton wool between them and made wicks.

Gen Thubten pulled off a tuft and rolled it between his palms into a firm white stick as long as a finger. He did it without looking. Tenzin's came out lumpy and fat at one end. Gen Thubten unrolled one, smoothed it, and handed it back. "Tighter in the middle," he said. "Otherwise it drinks too fast and smokes."

By the time the rain stopped they had a hundred and eight, and a few spare. "For the ones that fall in," Gen Thubten said.

Sunday

On Sunday evenings the boys could phone home on their house teacher's mobile, five minutes each, waiting in a line on the dormitory steps. When Tenzin's turn came, the signal in Solu was poor, as it always was in the rains, and his mother's voice came and went.

Was he eating? Was he too hot? Behind her he could hear the pressure cooker hissing and his little sister Dawa shouting about a goat. He wanted to tell her about the lamps and the tamarind. Instead he said yes, and no, and fine, because if he said any more his voice would go.

Then the line dropped. He sat with the phone on his knee until the boy behind him coughed, and passed it on.

The tenth day

On the morning of the tenth, Gen Thubten woke him before the bell. In the lamp house a big pot of vegetable ghee from the market in town was melting on a gas ring. Yak butter, he said, was a long way from here.

The smell rose thick and warm and golden, and for a moment Tenzin was at home in the dark before school, his mother warming butter in a spoon over the fire for the shrine lamp. He stood very still until it passed.

They set the clean cups on the long shelf in nine rows of twelve and stood a wick upright in each. Gen Thubten gave him a small steel jug and showed him how to pour: slowly, close to the rim, so the ghee ran down around the wick without splashing.

"And while you pour," he said, "say the Seven-Line Prayer. You know it?"

Tenzin nodded. Everyone at home knew it. It was the first prayer he had learned: a short prayer that calls on Guru Rinpoche by remembering where he came from and how he was born, and asks him to come. Tenzin had said it a thousand times without listening to himself once.

"One for each lamp," said Gen Thubten. "It's about as long as the pouring. You won't rush, and you'll have company." He filled the first cup himself, lips moving. Then, not looking up: "I came here from Ladakh when I was ten. Old Gen Kunga gave me this job. I think he'd heard me crying at night."

Nine rows

So Tenzin poured, and said the prayer, and moved to the next cup. The ghee rose gold around each wick. His mind kept wandering off to Solu, to the mist and Dawa and the goat, and each time it came back it found the same things waiting: the next brass cup, the beginning of the prayer again, and the jug a little lighter in his hand.

Somewhere in the fourth row he noticed that his hands had stopped shaking. By the ninth his arm ached, and Gen Thubten had gone quietly off to do something else.

That evening the whole monastery gathered in the hall. Monks sat cross-legged in long rows, the youngest at the back, and the chanting went on until the windows went dark. From near the door Tenzin could see little except the lamps: 108 small flames standing in their rows before the shrine. He knew every cup. He knew which one had a dent in its foot, and which wick he had rolled twice.

When the Seven-Line Prayer came round in the chanting, hundreds of voices said it together. Tenzin said it with them. It sounded, for the first time since February, less like something from far away and more like something from here.

The same day

The next Sunday the signal was better, and his mother sounded as close as the next room.

"We lit the lamp on the tenth," she said. "Dawa did it. She wanted to, because you're not here." Of course: in Solu the tenth day was the tenth day too. While he had been pouring ghee in the heat, they had been lighting one small lamp in the rain, on the shelf above the stove.

This time he told her everything. The 108 lamps, the tamarind, the wicks that drink too fast. He talked until the boy behind him coughed. He cried a little at the end, and found that it was all right.

Next month

Two days before the next tenth day, Tenzin was already sitting on the lamp-house steps when Gen Thubten came round the corner with the key.

He still thinks about home most days. But he knows now what to do with his hands when he misses them: brass and tamarind, a wick rolled tight in the middle, and the seven lines, one for each lamp.