Fortunate One

JJI Cafe became our usual hangout. Each new day started with a JJI Special (eggs, Tibetan bread, stir-fried vegetables, and hot chai) and ended with a Tibetan thentuk or momo soup at the very same table, overlooking the valley. At night wed go downstairs to the owners apartment to watch a movie or have a jam session (everyone in Dharamsala seems to be a musician). One day some friends brought along a monk named Sonam, which means fortunate one in Tibetan. He wore a maroon fleece over his robes, with big floppy sandals, and a messenger bag filled with books. Sonam shook my hand silently, turning the corner of his mouth up into a smile. He was looking for a private English tutor. Teaching engagements in Dharamsala are fairly ad hoc, staffed by itinerant backpackers in their spare time. No time commitments, no curriculum, no obligations. Just sit with the monks and talk. I was tired of travel already. Not tired of Asia but of moving around so mucha day or two in each town, see the sights and get out. Travelling this way allowed me to cover a lot of ground and keep my days busy, but it had become a little tedious. I certainly was not so smitten with sightseeing that I could justify quitting my job and hopping on the first flight overseas for it. Any traveller will tell you that sightseeing is only the backdrop; the main course is everything else. I came to appreciate the cardinal rule of travel: dont overplan (that is, if you plan at all). Most fellow backpackers Id met in India had no idea what they were doing, no direction whatsoever, claiming to be in India just to exist for a while (you hear that phrase a lot). India is the perfect country for drifters; its cheap, slow, and endless. Plus they give you a six-month visa, renewable ad infinitum at the Indian embassy in nearby Kathmandu. So I said Yes to staying in Dharamsala and teaching Sonam for a while. Why not. We were to meet daily on the patio of Nicks Restaurant over a pot of ginger-lemon tea, and read from the books in his messenger bag: a childrens adaptation of Siddhartha, a grammar book, some pro-Tibet political pamphlets, and several notebooks filled with assorted English phrases, all given him by previous teachers. At our first meeting and I asked him some basic questions. He spoke enough English to make conversation. He was born in a small village in the east of Tibet and had come to India when he was eight years old via the familiar Himalayan hell-passage, suffering severe frostbite from which it took him months to recover. He spent the next seventeen years in a monastery in Karnataka state in south India, studying the Tibetan canon and meditating in the sweltering heat, rising at 4:30 AM each day for hours of tedious morning chanting, taking breakfast and lunch but no dinner. He had met the Dalai Lama eight times, and spoke of him like an old buddy. Sonam was twenty-eight years old; he and I were born only eight days apart. Aside from us both now being in McLeod Ganj at the same time, our lives had been different in every imaginable way. Sonam had a curious demeanour. While I was eager to accommodate him and make him feel comfortable, he watched me with some good-natured suspicion. Rapport was difficult; he smiled at everything. He understood my words, but not how I said things. Even the simplest Western conversations have complexities that never really occurred to me until I was presented with this blank slate. He picked up a spoon, slowly, carrying it without any wasted movement to the tea glass, stirring it three times, then pulling it out and laying it precisely on a napkin. All his movements were careful and deliberate. Grasping the rim of the glass with three fingers and raising it to his mouth, he sipped perfectly, and then set the glass down on the exact same spot, and turned the glass clockwise to face him. He turned each notebook page with similar care, easing each page gently over the metal binding, and wrote with the smoothest hand, even in English (Tibetan uses a different script, as does Hindi, both of which he spoke fluently). I offered him a bite of my brownie (Nicks Restaurant is famous for them), and he firmly shoved the plate away with a smile. Always with a smile. It would appear offering sweets to a monk is a faux-pas. I began to feel like my cordial affectations were indecipherable to him. Why would I give a brownie to a monk? I felt like a fool. When I asked him what his long-term plans were, he said, learn English. Nothing could happen until he learned English, and his plan was to spend all his time learning English. Thats all? Yes. He said this in a way that made me the silly one. A monk living in poverty could be perfectly happy with his life the way it is, he was telling me. The cultural gap between us yawned. The idea of having such genuine and bone-simple conceptions of ones future just sent my head spinning. My mind now erased of good conversation topics, we moved on to the reading. He preferred Siddhartha so he opened it to the appropriate page. An American lady gave him this book, he said. I saw her address in Georgia written in his notebook, under the words SONOM, YOU ROCK! [sic] She crazy girl, very loud he said, with a laugh. He wanted me to read each chapter first, out loud, and then he would follow, and hed ask about the words he didnt know and Id draw him a picture or explain it in simpler terms and hed spend the rest of the session blurting out these words at odd times, sometimes scribbling them on his hand, getting me to re-pronounce them, over and over. Sonam practiced English every night by himself, reading each page out loud ten times in a row. We read a chapter of Siddhartha per day. After two or three sessions I could see that he didnt understand a word of it. I figured every Buddhist monk knew the Siddhartha story but he wasnt following a thing, didnt know what a naga was or why the Prince fled his fathers palace. It didnt take us long to become friends. At the end of every session he always tried to pay for the tea without me noticing. It became a little contest between us (I knew that he had almost no money, so we didnt get carried away). He once asked me how much it was costing me to travel around the world. I told him the amount I had saved up, and he could not believe the number. Couldnt even understand the number; hed never heard of a person having a sum of money that large. What strange place did I come from? What was my life like back home? He wanted to know everything, but he hadnt the slightest interest in trading places with me. There was only one place in the world he wanted to be other than Dharamsala, he said, and that was Tibet. He drew me a little floor plan of the apartment he shares with three others: one small room, one hot plate, and enough floor space for all to sleep, but no bathroom. Instead, they walked to the other end of McLeod Ganj to use the public toilet (yes, Indian public toilets). His living expenses were about thirty dollars per month. He cooked all his own food, and showered once in a while at a friends place. And he was as happy as could be. I saw Sonam often around McLeod Ganj, and he walked along the road with me, ignoring the beggars as I did, asking me about my day and how long I was staying. He always wanted to know how long I was staying in Dharamsala. Sonam was always laughing, except when the topic was my departure, when he became very serious. In fact hed been asking me for weeks, always trying to figure out exactly how long we had left. The day before I left McLeod Ganj, Sonam stood up from the table and looked me in the eye. He produced a white scarf, and put it around my neck. He then knelt, put his head down reverently, and handed me a beaded bracelet, a mala used in Tibetan chanting. He said something in Tibetan, stood up, gave a prayer-bow, and thanked me for helping him with his English. Stunned, I could only slide the mala on my wrist with a smile and thank him quietly. He was clearly dismayed that I was leaving, and frankly, so was I. Perhaps my definitive memory of Sonam was when someone in our group got a laugh by teaching him a kind of gangsta hand gesture. You make a gun with your two fingers and thumb and flick your wrist while making the appropriate goofy facial expression and you say Yo! Sonam took this gesture very seriously. He asked us over and over to show him how to do it. And for the rest of the day, whenever I looked over at him, there he was, this maroon-clad, shaven-headed monk from east Tibet, studiously practicing the gangsta hand gesture to nobody, out loud, ten times in a row.