Coco may be the buddha

I have been thinking a lot about what is going on in Tibet. Not with any intelligent understanding of it, just a vague, khaki-colored kind of thought that troubles you without the anger that comes with tangible knowledge. Something like that.

Anyway, when I think of TIbet I think of a place known as "little Tibet" in Northern India, a place my Matt and I went to in 2000. Little Tibet is in and around the city of Leh in the area of Ladakh, smack in the middle of the Himalayas and just south and east of Tibet proper. It's called Little Tibet because the area is populated mostly with refugees from Tibet.


I was very naive about India when we went. I imagined women staining my hands with henna and I imagined small huts and elephants and temples that felt amazingly holy. The truth of India was crowded, polluted streets, busy markets, a smell that was sickly sweet everywhere you went -- a mix of sweat and curry -- cows in the middle of the street, auto-rickshaw drivers that took you to a shop where you were pressured to buy things, people following you for many many blocks trying to sell you a wooden flute or a box of colored powders or cigarettes, and quick, ridiculous down pours every afternoon.


But Little Tibet is very different. It is quiet, with very thin air that makes you hallucinate just enough, and makes climbing stairs incredibly difficult for the first few days. And the sky is a blue that you don't see here. A different, deeper, darker blue.



In the breeze you hear bells ringing from the prayers at the little temples everywhere. You get fresh mint tea every morning, like really fresh, just picked out of the freaking garden outside your all-three-walls-floor-to-ceiling window where you can see the Himalayas rise against the sky and, on your tiptoes, the women doing laundry on the rocks in a stream.



And there are these markets. Tibetan refugee markets. These are so different from the markets in Delhi or Agra or Varanassi. There is no pressure sell, and everything is labeled a fixed price. We were offered yak butter tea, which was unfortunately horrific, but we were (I hope) adequately humbled and appreciative. We were quite taken with some prayer beads, and had a delightful conversation about how they are used, blessed, and the politics of selling them to tourists. We also talked about the refugee status of the seller, and how he was there to avoid the political situation in Tibet, which we were painfully ignorant about. But the prayer beads we were considering were made of yak bone and were about 1500 rupees. We were deciding whether we could afford them when the seller who had been so hospitable told us that there were some at another booth for only 500 rupees.

"Oh, you have another booth?" "No, not my booth. Another booth." What? Someone else's booth? And we had more yak butter tea there.

Later, we were walking the long road to our hostel and a man walked by with a big, beautiful cow. It was just starting to get dark outside, and the cow was just breath-taking. I mean, big, dark eyes, with giant, thick lashes. A beautiful bell around her neck rang lazily. The driver of this cow saw me look, and stopped to gesture that I could pet her. We did. Then he offered us his cigarette and we stood, three of us, watching the sky grow darker, smoking a cigarette between us, nodding heads and smiling at each other.

We learned of a monastery not far away, but tucked into the mountains, where the monks kept dogs that they believed had reincarnated souls. (My mom's pup, Coco, is very likely one of these wayward monks, contemplating life and death, and laughing at it all.)


So when I hear of Tibet, I have little idea what is going on, but I think of a few Tibetans who would greet us with both hands clasped on top of ours with a sincere "Joolay!" I think of a stream where I washed clothes and mint tea and prayer flags and prayer wheels ringing throughout the day. I think of a market where booth owners offered more than we could pay for. And I feel that vague sense of having turned the wrong way and not knowing where to go. That the road we're all on is the wrong one, and there is a big sign, in offensive red, "WRONG WAY."