Sometimes we write things only we really like, stories which don't speak much to others. This is one such. It is in Shared Sacred Landscapes, available for download here: https://lib.icimod.org/records/67y76-5jc26
ICIMOD has been restructuring its online library, so the download count seen here isn't accurate :)
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We
do not know how long ago the events described here occurred ― or where in the
weft of events past or yet to come these people lived and died ― but, in the
village of Yari, deep in the shadows of the Himalayas, in a valley of plenty
and gurgling with the restive Karnali, lived a merchant with an insatiable
desire. It wasn’t merely greed or ambition, for he was a learned man, a man of
the world who believed in hard work and who had met and studied a thousand
other men just like him. His desire was built on caution and thoughtfulness: as
a child he had seen deprivation, and as a merchant he had profited from the
hardships and the excesses of others. But, as much as he knew how to gain and
gather wealth, the miracle through which it could be retained for all ages to
come had eluded him.
Every
morning, well before his sons or their wives awoke, the merchant chased away
sleep and wiped clean his mind muddled with dreams. He cleaned the shrine for
the ancestors kept in a corner of the wide, flat roof of his splendid house. He
offered water and incense to the aged brass statue of the Buddha in the shrine,
and remembered the gods of his home, of the village and the valley, and then
remembered all the shrines, peaks and passes, rivers and lakes, meadows and
forests where he had prayed for safe passage. In the few moments of rest before
the day awoke like a beast in a hurry, he allowed the mind’s eye to wander, and
allowed himself the proud but quiet joy of watching himself on his roof, in the
home he had built to tower above all the houses in the village, a house that
was slightly bigger than the village monastery. There were forty rooms under
his roof, each built during the spring thaw of the forty years since he had
started his life as a trader.
The
merchant hadn’t started rich; he had grown up in a two-room hut, fatherless, in
the bosom of a mother who shied from accepting charity and chose instead to
labor for each rope of garment and each morsel of food. When his brother, older
by two years and a lifetime of hardship already, had failed to return after a
summer of herding cattle in the high pastures, he told his mother that he
wanted to become a trader instead of working his kinsmen’s fields in exchange for
just enough grains to see them through the long winter.
His
mother had taken his face in her hands, gazed into his eyes, and quietly walked
out of the house. She returned in the evening with a bundle of lamb’s wool. “Urgyen,
you’ll repay them, each of them, before you gather your own wealth,” she said
and recited to him a list of names and measures: women in the village who had
put them in debt by sparing a handful of wool each. Even now, in his ripe old age,
standing on the roof of the house where he had gathered more wealth than all
the wealth of the richest men in every village within three days in every
direction, he could recite the list of names, recall the face of every aunt or
elder who had gently pushed him towards his fate.
Through
that first winter, when the snow lay thick over the valley, the young merchant
spun and wove and carded and felted the wool. His mother sat by the fire and
prayed. When the thaw came and the first of the green shoots of wheat peeked
out from the wet and dark soil, when traders who had wintered in the southern
plains returned with bales of printed cloth and sacks of grain, pots of oil and
boxes of ivory and coral, and news of beasts made of iron and smoke, the young
merchant was ready with two blankets of coarse black wool to trade and a felted
shawl under which to pass the nights.
His
kinsmen who had crossed the high passes into the blue skies of Tibet and the
frothy rivers to the dark jungles of India, who spoke sometimes among
themselves in tongues he knew to be foreign smiled at him with compassion and
took care never to speak to him harshly, even when they scolded or pelted their
own sons with the dry droppings of goats and yaks for laughing too much or
letting a goat wander off the trail. And the young trader repaid them with his
only possessions: service, loyalty, obedience and deference. He took special
care to know which cattle belonged to which merchant, and, without
eavesdropping or being intrusive, he made it a point to remember the
particulars of each kinsman’s transactions with traders along the long route
over and around the mountains. He learned to look at the facts of trade like a
handful of grains to be sifted, the chaff to be separated from what could
become seeds to be sown in the coming year.
After
the spring spent trading in the endless grasslands and salt-swamps of Tibet,
the pair of blankets became twenty sacks of salt. He accompanied his kinsmen
back to Yari for a spurt of hurried farm-work before continuing south, through
the gorges cut by the Karnali and past villages of Khas people, who saw his age
and assumed innocence and tried to seduce him into parting with his sacks of
salt for cheap. But he persisted; he watched how friendships were made, how
belligerently or politely bargains were struck, how quickly some kinsmen
converted profit into goods or how they sewed coins into the linings of their
coats. He didn’t sell his salt, but he readily opened a sack to hand out a
large fistful to poor women with sons of his own age. He smiled politely and
pretended not to understand the gestures made by Khas men with thick arms and
soft bellies, but he spent the evenings sharing his tsampa with, and
accepting salted gruel from, boys who wore hunger around their eyes and soil
under their nails.
“Sell
your salt,” kinsmen only a few years his elder would tell him. “Sell it, buy
the grains you need and return to your mother. She must be worried sick.”
But
he persisted, without seeming stubborn, without causing offence to those who
were clearly more fortunate, and therefore may have taken offence at his
ambition. He didn’t offer excuses, and he didn’t let it appear that he sought
greater profit.
He
had seen how a day’s walk northwards into the windswept plains of Tibet or
southwards into the humid stench of the hot valleys of Salyan increased the
value of his goods. In Yari, a measure of salt could be bartered for three
measures of grain brought by Khas traders from Jumla. But a measure of grain
would become three measures of salt when transported to the salt swamps of
Tibet, where all day long the women and children carried buckets of brine to
their raised terraces where the sun separated the salt from the water. The
trader’s life was full of hardship between the two ends of such journeys, but
the reward was of the ever-increasing sort. Even as a young boy, the merchant
could count in his mind the vast possibilities of wealth that he could command.
Accordingly, he acted with caution, holding back his merchandise until the very
moment when the potential for gain was the greatest.
Gradually,
his kinsmen retraced their steps homewards, loaded with dried apricots and
obdurate highland wheat and mustard oil. But the merchant was determined to see
the end of the road, to encounter the iron beasts that carried more goods in a
day than all the yak caravans of the world combined, to befriend the dark men
of the forested plains, for there the greed for gold and musk, the perfume of
mountain hashish and sap of pine the was greatest: there lay the wealth he
needed for his mother.
Coral,
mirrors and glass beads, statues and amulets with the image of the Buddha ― if
a trader went deep into the malarial south, these were the goods he brought
home. But when the young merchant returned, just before harvest, he had
acquired two new pack mules, and each was laden not with the trinkets or
trifles expected of a novice, but only with grains. He showed his face to his
mother. She touched foreheads with him, muttered a prayer of thanks and peered
deeply at his face, then set about boiling water and preparing him a meager but
warm meal. The young merchant immediately went around the village to the door
of each woman who had given him a measure of wool.
“You
are too generous, Urgyen,” each woman said when she saw the measure of grain
set before her as repayment. He didn’t look up as he added more grain to the
already generous portions, and, in response, the women climbed the ladders to
their stores and each brought back an armful of fine wool. “Son,” each of the
women said, “don’t embarrass us by repaying this gift. Your father was like a
brother to me, and this I give because I have the right to love you like you
are my own son.”
And
that was a very long time ago ― forty-one winters had passed since. His mother
had died, leaving him truly orphaned, but the merchant had built a wide world
for himself. He had built his house one spacious room at a time, climbing up
the terraced mountain. He had been still young and virile by the time he had
gathered wealth enough to last his lifetime. Kinsmen who had once taught him to
distinguish between coarse and fine merchandise brought to him their young sons
to learn the trade. Richer men offered him their daughters in marriage, but he
chose for his bride a poor orphan who knew little of luxury but enough of
hardship and economy. Sons were born, and they, too, learned to trade, married
pretty brides and filled the house with their laughter.
Now,
when he took account of the wealth he had laid away ― the gold and silver, the
musk and yak tails so sought after in the plains of India, the bales of fine
silk in teakwood chests and heads of cattle strewn across seven meadows and a
week’s walk, blocks of sandalwood and utensils of brass ― he accurately counted
that his sons and their sons, and their sons and grandsons after them, could
live for seven generations to come without ever having to card wool or carry
salt, without ever having to leave the village of their birth. The merchant let
out a sigh as he opened his eyes to face the gods on the altar of his house ―
this wouldn’t suffice, this horde that would last a measly seven generations
after his death. What of the sons and daughters to come after? He needed to
work harder if he was to earn enough to last another seven generations beyond
the seven he had secured against the tomblike cold of the winters and the sharp
hunger that infected those months of inactivity.
But
lately, as the end of his days approached, his mind had lost the surefootedness
of his youthful years when every calculation fell snugly into place, like the
hooves of the bellwether yak that plods through blinding blizzards on the high passes
across the Himalayas. The beads on the abacus that in years past had flitted about
like the shuttlecock on a loom now moved clumsily, as if tired after a life of
counting and recounting, and the thread of his thoughts often frayed abruptly.
It was in one such moment that he finally recognized the melody that he had
often heard through his days filled with industry, when he heard for the first
time the words in the songs that he had mistaken for a voice inside his own
mind. The merchant was amazed that his daily routine had all along been
accompanied by songs so full of reward; the calm and patience he had
experienced for so many years was owed to the voice of another, to songs that
echoed through the village and found him as he worked. When he understood this,
he felt the shores of his patience and calm crumble away, for they had never
been his possession, but simply gifts borrowed until this moment of rupture.
Didn’t
the merchant once have a friend who died of malaria, nearly twenty years ago?
Did the man not leave behind a child? No fate worse than to die shivering of
sweat and fever in the winter, with the paths to shrines and sacred groves of
ancestor gods buried under snow, weighed down by the helplessness of knowing
that the disease had smuggled itself here from a faraway land, so that no local
spirit or god could answer the appeals, for the gods, too, admitted to their
inadequacy at such times, and the dhamis halfheartedly muttered their
incantations, the smoke of the incense only stung the eyes and didn’t fill the
flesh with the hope of healing. Malaria should kill men in the damp swamps of
the Terai, not in the crisp air and crystal light of the mountains. And, so,
after prolonged suffering, the man had died, leaving behind a seven-year-old
girl, who, straightaway, knowing fully the hardship that awaited her, pursed
her lips in quiet determination and set about being the orphan who doggedly
pursues survival.
The
merchant now remembered, not without revulsion, the cold and rational manner in
which he had asked his eldest son to carry a sack of rice and a blanket to the
orphan, and never since given any thought to his dead friend or his daughter.
She was the singer: this he now learned. And he also learned that he no longer
remembered her name.
The
merchant came to the edge of his roof and watched the young woman ― what was
her name? Sonam? Tseten? ― as she walked past his house. She glanced up and saw
him. He froze in guilt; she smiled and scratched her head, walked around the
corner of the house and began humming her tune again. The merchant walked to
the room where he worked ― a brazier in a corner, a tiger-skin rug before a low
table, an abacus, a bowl and a flask of water, ink, discreet heaps of scrolls.
He scratched his head tilted to a side to follow the orphan miller’s song.
Every
day, the orphan miller walked to the top of the village, to the mill on the
stream that rushed through, and waited for villagers to bring her grains to be
milled. Her share was a measure of the flour she delivered to their homes in
the evening. Every year, each family also spared her their old clothes and
blankets. There was no trade to be had through the winter when the stream froze
over ― she had to set aside a portion of her wages each day, a fistful of the
flour or tsampa, a store against the lean months. She lived downstream
of the village, in a hut on the way out of the valley. The merchant rode his
horse past the hut four times every year, and when he put his mind to work
recollecting what he had heard and seen of the hut each time, he realized that
he had seen nothing and heard nothing: through the always open door, past the
threadbare blanket draped halfway across the threshold, he had seen nothing but
the dim shape of a pellet on the damp floor and two pots stacked by a corner
bearded in soot. He had heard nothing, but the miller’s song had always chased
him to the gorge leading out of the valley, or welcomed him home after his
lengthy travels.
Grief
had left no score on the orphan: within weeks of her father’s death, Thendup,
the old miller, had invited the geshe from the monastery and asked
elders from each household to drink tea at his house. “I have milled your
grains, brothers, but now I am tired. Geshe has given me mantras to chant, and
a hut behind the monastery where I can rest my old bones, and I hope you will
come when he calls you to bury my body. But, my brothers and nephews, know that
you will not see me again in this village.”
The
men had nodded their heads solemnly, scratching their bare heads, waiting for
someone to ask the necessary question: “But, who will take your place,
Thendup?”
Before
anybody did ask the question, Thendup spoke in a soft voice, asking the men to
lean in and listen. “I have learned something that none of you have – milling
is not a job for someone without gratitude. Yes, the stream turns the water-wheel
and the millstones grind the grains, but the miller makes the flour.” Everybody
understood Thendup: without the care and compassion of the miller, each batch
of flour wouldn’t match its purpose.
“We
have among us an unfortunate child. Geshe knows better if she suffers now
because of her father’s karma, or if this suffering is due to the karma of her
own soul.” It was understood then that the child would become the village
miller. For months to come, the women of the village would have to show the
child how to mill the flour for noodles and how to grind roasted grains for tsampa,
how to break grains for cattle-feed and how to store the chaff of wheat. But
the orphan learned, and became the miller.
And,
as her work became her life, when her daily routine required no effort, the
orphan started singing. From dawn to dusk, with each breath, she sang – of gods
and love, of faraway lands she had heard of only in songs, of the mother whose
love she had never known, of the wind that brought snow and rain, and of the
sun that brought the thaw. She remembered a song after hearing it once, and she
could recite the songs of harvest and rain, songs of pilgrimages to Kailash in
Ngari and to Swyambhu in Nepal. Her songs became the yarn that stitched
together the village: they awoke to a song and were lulled to sleep by another;
in the winter the songs touched the ache in the bones, sometimes taking away
the pain, and sometimes sweetening it into a longing for the first runs of
snowmelt in April. In the short spring the song was the smell of new grass and
the flitting of butterflies among short-lived flowers. In abrupt moments when a
man caught himself mid-thought, the miller’s songs were his thoughts, fading
away in smoky curlicues. The wails of births and deaths in the village were
twined with the miller’s songs.
The
merchant spent the day poring over accounts, distracted, worrying the cubes of chhurpi
mixed into the dry tsampa in a pocket of his chuba; he had always
disdained the interruptions that came from his body: the need to feed, the need
to chew his food, the cramps and aches in his limbs and joints, the need to empty
his bowels even as he was in the middle of planning the next caravan to Purang
in the north or Achham in the south. It felt profane, this insistent
repatriation back to carnality. His daughters-in-law knew this, and all day
long they quietly circled him, placing before him warm, salty tea or porridge
flecked with dried yak meat, adding wood to the brazier or cracking open the
window to let out the smoke. When his moon-faced second daughter-in-law climbed
up the ladder with a bowl of rice and meat, he asked her to wait. He scratched
under his hat, thinking, but she waited patiently.
“Dawa,”
he said, “when did you go to the mill last?”
“I
am going tomorrow, father,” she said.
“Go
today,” the merchant said. “Go today.”
In
the evening, the merchant heard the miller approach his door and call Dawa.
“I
am coming,” Dawa said as she hurried down a ladder. The merchant called her in
a louder-than-usual voice. “Dawa! Come up for a moment.”
Dawa
stood on the ladder and peeked into the room, just her head and shoulders
appearing through the passage on the floor.
“Give
her more than her usual share, will you? Give her two times what you would
give.”
Dawa
nodded and smiled. As she climbed down, the merchant muttered, half a command
to Dawa and half a reminder to himself, “We have enough to spare, don’t we?”
“Tseten,”
he heard Dawa call. “You
will need a bigger sack today!”
Over
the next week, the merchant sent Dawa to the mill twice, and heard a lift in
the miller’s songs. He instructed his daughters-in-law to bring to him their
tattered old dresses, and although they protested that they didn’t have any
tattered old dresses, that they had been well provided for, he nevertheless cut
a comical figure, the patriarch rifling through the clothes of the women of the
household and picking chuba robes and a thick outer bakkhus.
“Send
these to the girl, Dawa,” he said.
When
he noticed that the miller walked barefoot, the merchant sent her his dead
wife’s shoes. And he wondered if he had done enough, if it was quite enough.
Throughout the week he listened to the miller’s song, now with a certain amount
of proprietorship. He even tried humming along to one of her songs, but was too
embarrassed to listen to himself. However, with each day, through his mind's
eye, he saw how little work he was getting done: he watched himself go about
the day clumsily, mislaying scrolls, forgetting trading camps along a route,
losing confidence that he had successfully imagined what people in a particular
village would want beyond just the bare necessities of salt, grain and yarn. He
had lived for so long now with the singular purpose of increasing wealth,
without pause or rest. But he was restless now; he knew he was still poor,
because the merchant inside him could feel the raw absence of what would bring
fulfillment.
On
a quiet evening, after watching from his roof as women gathered grains and
greens drying in the sun, or gathered the children playing in the alleys, and
as men ducked indoors to close the purse of the short autumn day, after
listening to the miller walk past his house with her upbeat songs, the merchant
put on a hat trimmed with fur and stepped out. “Urgyen la,” a cousin called
from his house, “Where are you going?” But the merchant didn’t stop for longer
than it took to wave at the cousin to signal that he was on urgent business.
With each turn in the alleyways that took him farther from his house and closer
to the mill he felt more like a thief. The cold lump of a silver ingot in his
pocket felt heavy. He was grateful when the jumble of houses ended abruptly and
the path to the mill opened up before him, hugging close to the clear, cold
stream.
The
millstone, resting still for the night, was as broad as the merchant was tall,
and the mill was swept clean, with not a stray grain or sprinkle of flour
anywhere. Water rushing under the mill chilled the air but the smell of crushed
grain brought warmth to the merchant’s mind. Surely, nobody ever came here in
the dark ― to the young and innocent the stream was the abode of a water-demon;
and the mill was the domain of the miller, where only her labor was of a thing
of value, for the rest were stone and wood and nothing more. The merchant took
out the silver, embossed with an imperial seal ― shaped like the head of a
horse, with eyes cut into deep grooves ― and carefully placed it by the
millstone. Will she recognize it for what it is, he wondered. Only a man as
widely traveled as he was, and only a man as wealthy, could tell the rare piece
of silver from a misshapen lump of tin. It was the emperor’s own coin, worth a
cartload of sandalwood, a hundred cartloads of salt. This was his gift for the
poor miller: he wanted her to share in his wealth just as he had shared in her
wealth of songs. A lifetime’s worth of wealth for a poor miller. But she will
recognize it, the merchant told himself. When she arrives in the morning, even
in the dim light of dawn, the silver will gleam and catch her eye, he thought.
Dawn
broke the next day, as it did every day in the village of Yari, in the plentiful
valley under the Himalayas. First stirred the fog from the river, rising to
hide the stars already retreating from the morning’s brilliance, then stirred
the birds in the pine and juniper, then came the calls of deer farther out in
the forest and the lowing of cattle in their enclosures. A murmur filled the
valley as men awoke to pray and women to prepare for the day. Incense rising
from the sweet resin of juniper boughs chased after the thinning fog, meeting
it midway between earth and sky, and dissolving before they could together
smother out the sun. The miller’s song approached the merchant’s house and
passed without hurry. The merchant smiled at the altar to his ancestors and
touched the statue of the Buddha, calling forth a witness. He settled at his
low table; the abacus and the scrolls rolled towards him. A shaft of sun
illuminated the heavenward path for his prayers and offerings.
An
abrupt silence snaked through the village and entered the merchant’s room: of
course there were a thousand other noises that made up the voice of routines
roped together like the crackle of fire and the gurgle of boiling gruel, but
there was also the dread absence of a particular note: the miller’s song had
gone quiet.
Drugged
as they were by the omniscience of the miller’s songs, the villagers failed to
hear the silence, but the merchant’s ears rang with the coarseness of an
uninvited silence, and he saw the song withdraw and fade from the overlay of
the village: now, the alleyways would seem dimmer, the cattle restless, the
light in the ears of wheat dull. As the echoes of the miller’s songs faded
away, the suffusion of warmth that had covered the village also ebbed and
dissipated. The silence was a shadow, as if the gods had turned their backs
upon the people of the valley.
Throughout
the day, the merchant got up abruptly to stand at the edge of his roof, high
above the rest of the village, to lean in the direction of the mill, as if
through this supplication he could call forth the lost songs. He saw women carry
sacks of grains to the mill, and, surely, he heard the millstones grind. But
the miller didn’t sing. The merchant watched the miller hurry past his home in
the evening, huddled under a bakhhu he had given her. In the morning,
the merchant searched for the wisp of smoke that should have come from the
miller’s hut, but saw nothing. When she hurried past his house, without looking
up or making smalltalk with Dawa, it was already midmorning, and she had an
unpleasant look pasted to her face, as if the villagers calling her to the mill
had stolen the morning from her.
“Dawa!”
the merchant called his daughter-in-law when he heard the millstones grind to a
halt sometime in the mid-afternoon. “Go to the mill, Dawa. Take two baskets of
wheat.”
“Father,”
Dawa said. “We have more flour than we need for the entire winter.”
The
extra flour, the clothes and blankets and shoes ― the merchant turned red with
embarrassment. What explanation did he have to give? What must they think, his
sons and daughters-in-law? But he didn’t have the patience to explain anything
just then.
“Daughter,
just go, will you? Half a basket of wheat, if you think we already have too
much, but go.”
When
Dawa returned, the merchant tried to think of a way in which he could ask her
about the miller, if she seemed sour or if she had laughed freely, but without
letting his impatience and dejection become apparent. Just then, he heard Dawa
talk to her sister-in-law.
‘Something
has taken over Tseten. She is pale, she is shivering, as if she hasn’t slept
for a week. She didn’t even hear me call her name, and when she saw me, she
jumped up, scared, and ran to a corner. She wouldn’t come to the door, she
wouldn’t move her feet. She must have been hiding something. She stood like
this, on her bakkhu, like she was killing a frog under her foot. She
scared me.’
The
merchant had to sit, because now he understood why the miller had stopped
singing: the silver he had offered her had become her demonic master; greed had
bred fear, and suspicion in her heart now poisoned every comfort. He looked at
the wealth around him: the silk khata around the Buddha, which he knew
was cut from the same cloth that a Lhasa merchant had offered to the Potala to
be sewn into the robe that His Holiness the Dalai Lama wore for his ascension
to the holy seat; the tiger pelt on which he sat daily; the ivory of his pen
and the sandalwood of his table. The many rooms in his house where nobody slept
or sat around a fire, but which were all full to the rafters. Debts outstanding
that he hoped to collect from Limi, from Purang and Dunai, from Achham and Ladakh.
The chest of turquoise that bore his seal and sat idle in a Muslim merchant’s
home in Srinagar. Far to the east, in the valley of Nepal, in a Shakya
artisan’s home in Patan, his name being carved into the base of a bejeweled
statue of the Guru Rimpoche, with rubies and lapis lazuli on the sage’s crown.
The silver was a paltry nothing compared to the wealth the merchant surrounded
himself with every day, but it had been enough poison to seed suspicion and
greed in the miller’s mind. Urgyen had taken away the song from her.
That
night, after washing his bowl with hot water and drinking down the swill, the
merchant asked his sons to sit with him. He passed around the scrolls and asked
them to recite the contents to each other, then quizzed them hard. Dawa came
into the room twice to replenish the oil in the lamps before the merchant was
satisfied that his sons knew every detail he wanted them to remember.
“Go
to your beds now,” he told his sons. “Remember ― this,” he swept an arm around,
a finger pointing to the skies to encircleg everything he owned in the world. “All
of this is yours, for you to keep and enjoy until the end of your days.” His
sons looked at him with worry, but they were obedient, and so they went quietly
to their wives. Perhaps he had given them too much to remember all at once.
The
merchant didn’t bother with the gods on his roof when morning broke the next
day. Before his daughters-in-law could rouse their tired husbands, the merchant
had put on his fur hat and left the house. He was astonished to find the miller
in the mill, sitting still in a corner as if somebody had forgotten her there a
thousand years ago. When he stirred in the doorway, she looked up, recognized
him, and scurried back with a tiny yelp of protest. Her knuckles went white
from gripping the silver ingot in her hand. The merchant could make out the
shape of the piece of silver under her bony palm. What names old Thendup would
call me now if he could see what I have done! My sin is the greatest, he
thought, for I have done worse than harbor greed: I have tainted an innocent
mind with greed and avarice.
The
merchant kneeled by the door, keeping out of the morning light. “Why don’t you
sing anymore, Tseten?” The merchant was embarrassed by how simple and plaintive
he sounded. The miller didn’t answer. This woman ― this poor orphan, this
daughter of a dead friend ― how pitiable and ugly she had become over just a
few days!
“Tseten,”
he tried to approach her, but she retreated into the dark. “I haven’t come to
take back what I gave you. I have come to ask why you don’t sing anymore. Your
song was the joy of our village. It was my joy, too. But you have taken it away
from us.”
The
miller watched the merchant as if it was he who had lost his mind. She tried to
laugh, but only a repulsive twitch of the mouth filled her face. She buried the
silver piece deeper into the flesh of her chest.
“It
is only silver, Tseten! It isn’t the breath of life or the blessings of our
ancestors. It can buy silk and wine, but it cannot buy a moment’s peace in the
world.” Was the merchant telling this to the miller, was it Urgyen pleading to
Tseten? Like scales falling away from a serpent, or like the colors of a sand
mandala being swept away to reveal the plain ground underneath, desire fell
away from the merchant, even as he realized that more and more desires were
clinging to the miller every new moment.
After
a long and quiet moment, the merchant kneeled before the miller and spread a
scarf on the mill-floor. “Daughter,” he said, “Give me a fistful of flour.”
As
he walked away, lightened of a burden, weighed down by another, he heard her
call after him in a voice made ragged by a new fury ― “Doesn’t fill your belly,
a song doesn’t. Doesn’t keep you warm, doesn’t fatten you, doesn’t make you the
mistress of a big house like it makes your daughters-in-law, a song doesn’t.
What do you know of want and poverty? When have you known the cold embrace of
the floor and the shattering lightness of an empty belly?”
It
didn’t take the merchant as long as he had feared it would take to walk far
away enough that he wouldn’t see any of the mountains around his village: after
all, the trading route hewed close to the serpentine rush of the Karnali. A
sharp bend in the river, and everything else in Creation was hidden out of
sight, save the blue-tinted light of the space and whatever life found a hold
within. Knowing that he no longer saw his village or valley instantly put the
miller’s song out of the merchant’s mind. In a fold in his coat he carried a
small sack of tsampa, and in the lining were three gold coins. A party
of Khas shepherds recognized him and flocked to him, bringing him firewood and
water, showing him a flat recess in a fire-blackened cave where to sleep, never
daring to question why he was so far from home and so obviously without kinsmen
or merchandise, horse or mule. He tried to share his tsampa with them,
but they laughed and brought him misshapen copper bowls of hot food instead.
The
fire burned bright and hot for an hour, but soon no spark from the crackle
climbed with the smoke, and the ash on embers turned as grey as the moonlight
on it. When he saw that everybody around him was warm and asleep, the merchant
spread his bakkhu by the fire, covered himself with an old and worn felt
blanket, and waited for sleep to find him.
