“There is another reason I feel very fortunate. Three years ago, I was doing the parikrama when I saw a man from my village. I hadn’t seen him for over fifty years but I recognised him immediately. He had only just come to India from Tibet, and he was able to bring me news of my family, and told me that one of my elder brothers was still alive. Even more than that, he knew his telephone number.
“The next day I rang home. After thirty years I was able to talk to my brother, though I couldn’t understand very much, as he was crying so much. He told me all my other brothers had died, and it was just the two of us who were left. He said that the Chinese had taken the family house, and our land, and all the yak and dri, saying that we were landowners and so Class Enemies. They gave the yaks to a collective farm and made the family live in the yak shed. But that was all I could really hear. My brother kept sobbing and asking me to return. ‘Just come back, come back, and everything will be all right.’ I wondered whether I should. But then I thought: what help could I be at my age? I will just be a burden.”
As we walked back to the veterans’ home in the evening light, with the sun setting behind the peaks, the crows were calling to roost, wheeling and croaking in the deodar slopes around us. Passang was silent, so I asked: “But wouldn’t you like to go back to Tibet, even just to see it one last time? Isn’t that where you should be ending your days?”
He didn’t answer immediately. “I always thought I would return to Tibet in this life,” said Passang eventually, as we climbed down the path to the home for the last time. “That was why I joined the army, to fight for it. India is still a foreign land for me, even though I have been here forty years and the people have been very hospitable.”
I could see the prayer beads whirring in Passang’s hand—always the sign that he was thinking hard.
“And of course,” he continued, “I am sad that I have been separated from my country and my family, and that even now, in old age, I am not back home. I am sad that there has been so much violence and suffering in my life. I am now seventy-four. I am still in exile, and Tibet is still not free.
“I still hope that one day Tibet will be free, and who knows? Even the Chinese do not believe in communism any more, so maybe in time the dharma will spread from Tibet into China? Maybe before I am finished, I will get to go back home. That is my last wish, to go back to Tibet and die there.”
Passang looked down the wooded slopes to the Kangra Valley, far below the veterans’ home. “But you know … I have always felt that all of us fled together, and I should wait until a time came when we could all go back together.
“It wouldn’t be right to go back alone,” he said. “After all this time, it just wouldn’t be right.”
The Maker of Idols
The gods created man,” said Srikanda Stpathy, “but here we are so blessed that we—simple men as we are—help to create the gods.”
Rain was coming down in sheets, and we were sitting looking out onto the downpour from the veranda of Mr. Krishnamurthy’s house. Men in white lungis bicycled past, their right hand on the handlebars and their left holding up an umbrella. Rickshaws sluiced through the flooded streets, their wheels cutting wakes through the ankle-deep water, like motorboats on a canal.
Earlier, Mr. Krishnamurthy had seen me caught in the downpour and had beckoned me over. While we waited for the rain to end, and the annual procession of the village gods to begin, he had introduced me to his friend. Srikanda, explained Mr. Krishnamurthy, was a Brahmin and an idol maker, or Stpathy: the twenty-third in a long hereditary line stretching back to the great bronze casters of the Chola empire, which had ruled most of southern India until the end of the thirteenth century. His workshop was a short distance away in the great temple town of Swamimalai. There he and his two elder brothers plied their trade, making gods and goddesses in exactly the manner of their ancestors.
Srikanda was a plump, middle-aged man with a side parting and a slightly slow left eye. He wore a freshly laundered white lungi and a long baggy white shirt which nearly, but not quite, hid the swelling bulge of his rice stomach. On his left breast he wore a small enamelled star which, he explained proudly, was his badge of office as president of the Swamimalai Lions’ Club; our host, Mr. Krishnamurthy, who was the proprietor of the Sri Murugan Hotel, and also headed the local temple committee, was his vice president. It was Mr. Krishnamurthy who had commissioned Srikanda to cast the new pair of idols that were about to be processed around the village for the first time, before being taken off to visit the great Murugan temple in Swamimalai.