Deaths in Darjeeling

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The sun rose golden through the misty backwater villages and I was instantly transported to a steam train of fifteen years ago, chugging through a timeless landscape. I was still as eager to drink in all the sights as we wended our way through West Bengal up to Siliguri. Though the Indian age of steam locomotion finally seemed to have passed little else had changed.

I was on my way to Darjeeling to meet friends, some of whom I had known since that first visit in the winter of ’85/’86. One friend who I would not be meeting was old Mr P. T. Lama. I had first met him through a chance meeting with his granddaughter, the ebullient nun, Ani Sonam Chodron. When she had informed her grandfather that she had just met a disciple of the English monk, Sangharakshita, he told her that he knew that monk very well and that he had visited their house many times back in the ’50’s and ’60’s. He told that though the English monk’s had resided in Kalimpong he, himself, had been his main translator and organiser in the Darjeeling area. P.T Lama was a slight old gentleman, dapper and well-spoken when I had met him and though he was old, he was very fit and daily used to walk the few miles up from Westpoint to the Mahabodhi Vihara by the toy-train station. A few years ago, after he was into his 90’s he had been knocked down on his daily pilgrimage and broken a hip. Even so, he was eventually a familiar figure again on the busy road, but hobbling slowly. Last night, Mrs K.B. gently told me that he had passed away since my last visit. And what about his wife? Ah, she too had passed away, only a bare few months after. Sad, I reflected, gazing out through early morning mists, never to meet again.

In Darjeeling one of the first things I did was to travel out to Jore Bungalow - about 6kms back up the hill from Darjeeling. Usually, on the way, I would stop at West Point and drop in on P.T.Lama and his wife but as the jeep wound its way up the hill past Westpoint again I felt a sad that I would never see this little, upright, Buddhist gentleman of the hills again, nor his Hindu wife. However, soon the remaining sights of the short journey demanded my attention: past Dale Gompa where the head of the Drugpa Kagyu has his base; up to Samten Choling, Tomo Geshe’s newer Gompa, a place where many Tibetans didn’t want to be seen going to due to the Rimpoche’s devotion to the banned deity Dorje Shugden; past the lane that goes to Dhardo Rimpoche’s Gompa, Yi Ga Choling; through Ghoom station where the tiny steam trains and rattling carriages have a rest after their journey up from the plains; then, finally, along the ridge to Jore Bungalow junction where one road branches off down to Teesta Bridge and another short road branches off and climbs up to one of Chatral Rimpoche’s Gompas. Of all the Gompas this is my favourite.

I wanted to visit a woman hermit called Ani Rindzin. On my first trip to Darjeeling in 1985-6, again, this was when I had first met P.T.Lama’s granddaughter, Ani Sonam Chodron. She had said, I just must meet her friend, Ani Rindzin, who was the wife of some Rimpoche or other, and who mostly stayed in her tiny hut doing her sadhana. She took me to see her and I was indeed impressed by the middle-aged woman who just stayed in her hut doing her pujas and sadhanas. There was something indefinable and beautiful about this quiet woman wrapped in her brown chubba with the beads of her mala slipping through her fingers. I briefly met her husband, and there too is another short story, but for another occasion. Her husband had died before my second visit but the aging woman just continued in her hut absorbed, exuding beauty and with the beads slipping through her fingers. Each time I had gone to Darjeeling I went out to Jore Bungalow to meet her. I always took her some presents. Noodles, butter, tea and so on. And she was always very friendly and delighted to see me. I also took others to visit her – Mokshapriya, Mokshananda, Amarajyoti and Padmakara. They were all very much impressed meeting her. On my last visit to the Gompa I was disappointed to learn she had left for Nepal, where I think on of her sons stayed and where her master, Chatral Rinpoche stayed. Again, in Nepal, she had continued her reclusive life. On this visit I thought I had heard that she was back at the Gompa again and so I went with some gifts and a scarf for her, and some photographs of our activities, which she always enjoyed seeing. It was therefore a great shock to learn from one of the monks that she had died two years previously. Apparently she had tripped while circumambulating a gompa, had broken her leg and had later died. However, I heard another story from one of her friends that she had in fact recovered from that broken leg and that it was some stomach trouble she had died from. It was hard to find out what actually happened. Whatever had happened I was very much saddened. After meditating for a while I left to make my oft repeated pilgrimage to Old Ghoom Monastery, Dhardo Rimpoche’s Gompa.

There were few monks around and it all seemed a bit quite, even deserted. However a stout monk let me into the shrine hall to make my devotions but he seemed so put out that I was taking my time that I left quicker than usual. He locked up after me and disappeared. I found a plank of wood doubling up as a bench and sat down in the courtyard. It now was nearly ten years since Dhardo Rimpoche had passed away and, though I had not known it till today, nearly two years since Ani Rindzin had died. And since my last visit P.T.Lama and his wife had both died. My mind turned to thoughts of sickness, old age and death. I was forty-seven, the age my mother had her first cancer and about the same age as my father when he had had two heart attacks in quick succession. Two years ago I had been treated for skin cancer, had a very serious accident that smashed my right shoulder and had two further operations on it, not all together successful. I’d had an abscess on my left knee that flared up so quickly that it necessitated an emergency operation the same day I had visited my local doctor. This type of operation required the wound to be left open to heal in its own time – seven weeks in all, laid up on a bed! Sitting in this deserted courtyard of Dhardo Rinpoche’s Gompa I felt the uncertainty and frailty of human life.

More intense than these deliberations on impermanence, sickness and the inevitability of death were reflections on the increasing frustration I’d felt over the last two years. I had been in the UK for two years, unable to return to resume my work with our Order and movement in India. I’d found myself based first in Birmingham and afterwards Cambridge doing what I could while I waited for health and the right circumstances to coincide so that I could return to that work. The work in Cambridge and Birmingham was, no doubt, valuable in itself but I knew that I was not working at anything like the level I should be. It felt as if I was ‘filling in’, or ‘marking time’, not able to fully take up any big project. This four-week break in the Himalayas, in a time of reasonably good health, was a period in which to rethink my future. I didn’t really have to rethink it, though. Intuitively I knew that I couldn’t continue the way I had over the last two years. I felt I would soon either have to return fully to work for our Movement in India or put my full energies into some other project within the Movement. If I didn’t do so the consequence would be that I would just fritter away my energies here and there and that I would, by the end of my life, deeply regret that I had not made as much of my life as I should have, or could have. It was the engagement of my energies in one big project that had brought out the best in me and demanded transcendence of my limitations. I really had grown since my involvement with the Ordination Process in our Movement in India and it was the sudden diversion of my energies for two years that had given rise to such frustration. I decided I would have re-engage with that work very soon, within a very few months, or I would have to take a new direction within our Movement. This decision was quite firm in my mind and my pensive mood lifted even though I was still saddened by the deaths of P.T. Lama and his wife and of Ani Rindzin.

While I had been reflecting one or two monks passed back and forth through the Gompa compound on errands. One of them eventually sauntered up to me and asked me where I came from and what my name was, who was my Lama and so on. He was a short in height, in his early twenties and not particularly Tibetan looking, I thought. His eyes, for one, were not Tibetan. They were light brown not dark black. He sported a red fleece sweater and a blue and purple woollen hat, with ‘BULLS’ written on it. He introduced himself as Tenzin Gelek. Realizing I had some connection with the both the late Dhardo Rimpoche and the present Dhardo Tulku he introduced me to three other young monks who lived in a room off the courtyard. They honoured me with tea and biscuits. They had virtually no English, nor Hindi, each having come from Tibet within the last few years. They had all studied at Drepung in Karnataka for a few years but had been brought here by an old Drepung Geshe who was now also staying in the Gompa. Tenzin translated for us and we five got on very well. As I walked away from Yi-Gha-Choling, through the I carried with me a new and deeper conviction: I should take every opportunity to practice the Dharma and not to let chances slip through my fingers through carelessness or laziness.

Back in Darjeeling town, then, I thought to visit another old friend. On my second visit to Darjeeling in 1987 I had put up in a hotel and had stayed in one of the cheap basement rooms. I had been looked after by the three mischievous hotel boys: Laxman - a Hindu; a Nepali who was Buddhist-Hindu, whose name I’ve forgotten; and Dorje a thin Tibetan boy who, at nineteen, was the oldest of the three. They had all been so good-natured and had helped me so much that I gave each of them a good tip before I left. Dorje being quite overwhelmed by the tip, which actually wasn’t that big, presented me with his black long-johns – he knew I had been finding it bitterly cold in Darjeeling. On subsequent visits I had always gone to see him (the others had since moved on) and, after his marriage a few years ago, I used to take him or send him a little money now and then for his baby. He always used to send me a card at Xmas and thank me for my friendship and wish that I would come and visit him again soon. Over the years we must have met seven or eight times. I had passed the Sunflower Hotel the previous day, my first full day of the visit, and thought to leave off visiting him till a little later. This afternoon I thought not to leave it any longer. I asked at the desk for Dorje, the Tibetan worker. “You mean the Tibetan lad, the servant?” “Yes.” The two men at the desk looked at each other and said something in Nepali. I explained he had worked here for a number of years and that on my last visit here, a couple of years back, he had still been working here. “Yes, yes,” one of the men said, “but he died a two months ago.” Seeing the shock on my face the man just said, “TB!” I asked if they knew where his wife and child were living but, Dorje being only a servant and a Tibetan one at that, they had never known where he stayed. I meditated long that night.

January 2000