The Ninth Buddha by Daniel Easterman Read Free Book Online Page B

Christopher mispronounced the name deliberately.
    “Very good, Laten.   I’ll call you if I need you.”
    “Thank you, sahib.”
    Lhaten glanced curiously at Christopher once more, then left.
    Christopher sipped his tea.   It tasted vile.   He put the cup down and quaffed the cholapeg in a single swallow.   It wasn’t much better.
    Outside, the girl had stopped singing.   The sound of men and animals from the bazaar had grown duller.   An afternoon silence had fallen over Kalimpong.   Christopher sighed as he put down the chipped whiskey glass.   He was back.
    Mishig, the Mongol trade agent who had sent the messages to Calcutta, had disappeared.   According to George Frazer, the British Agent, he had returned to Kalimpong briefly, then left without warning about ten days earlier.   Frazer told Christopher what he could about the monk who had brought the original message out of Tibet.
    He was called Tsewong.   It seemed that he had battled his way over the Nathu-la pass, down through Sikkim, and almost to the outskirts of Kalimpong before collapsing from exhaustion.   According to the report received by Frazer, he was found on the roadside by a passing farmer on the fourteenth of December feverish, delirious, and near to death.
    The farmer had brought him on his cart to the orphanage, where the Reverend John Carpenter and his wife had cared for him until the Mission doctor returned from a visit to a nearby village.   The doctor had advised against Tsewong’s removal to the Presbyterian Hospital and had remained at the orphanage all that night.   The monk had died the next morning, apparently without saying anything intelligible.
    Before handing the body over to the Tibetan agent, who was to arrange for his cremation, the doctor had searched the man’s pockets or, to be precise, the pouch formed by the fold of his robes, in which Tibetan men carry their personal possessions.
    In the pouch, apart from the normal accompaniments of a lama - a wooden teacup (also used as a bowl from which to eat tsampa), the traditional metal water-bottle, normally hung from the sash, a yellow wooden rosary of one hundred and eight beads, a small gau or talisman-box and some medicinal herbs the doctor found a letter written in excellent and idiomatic English, asking ‘whomsoever it may concern’ to provide the bearer, Tsewong Gyaltsen, with every facility, since he travelled as the personal emissary of a Tibetan religious dignitary identified only as the “Dorje Lama’.
    A second paper had been folded into the same packet as the letter: it contained only five lines of writing, but was in Tibetan and could not be deciphered by the doctor.   He had thought it best not to give either the letter or the paper to the Tibetan Agent along with the monk’s other possessions.   Instead, he showed them to Frazer, who had the paper translated by his munshi.   It turned out to be very simple: instructions on how to find the Mongol Trade Agent Mishig.
    One thing nagged at Christopher’s thoughts while he made his way to the
    orphanage in accordance with Lhaten’s directions: if the monk Tsewong
    had been dying when he got to Kalimpong, and if he had in fact died the
    morning after his arrival at the Knox
    Homes, how on earth had he managed to convey Zamyatin’s message to Mishig?   Had someone else taken the message on his behalf?   If so, who?
    The orphanage, like the church beside which it was built, looked as if it had been transported bodily, like the palace in “Aladdin’, from the Scottish lowlands to the place where it now stood.   Here in Kalimpong, not only did the Christian god reveal himself in open defiance of the myriad tutelary deities dwelling in the mountains above, but Scottish Presbyterianism ranged itself against the questionable mores of the unredeemed masses of India below.
    Although the rest of Kalimpong luxuriated in a cold winter sunlight that seemed to have been bounced off the gleaming white slopes to