Teacher

Teacher is always saying marrying young helps; and when he says it he holds his five-year-old daughter like she was a piece of evidence.
Teacher, dear eyes, thinning, greying sixty-ish hair, then pats his girl on the bottom which signals she go out and play.

"Listen to experience speaking," he says, sitting cross-legged on a pile of rugs that serves as his bed. His voice is clear, his choice of words exact but without stiffness, never committing more than 60 years can back up.

"A man can´t build without a wife," Teacher says. He drinks, puts down his wooden tea-bowl, and pours a fresh addition from a thermos flask with storks painted on it.

"Or," he says. He looks me in the eye. "Or, join the monastery." He sounds as though he exhausted the first option.

Join the monastery, I think. What a bright idea! I walk back home from Teacher´s, promising fidelity to it. I read the Vinaya/ the twenty-five-hundred-year-old rules of the Buddhist campus. But a little later, with the three Tens on the subject -Rapten, Sapten and Thupten – a whole sky slips between Idea and Action, even though the action is monkhood.

That night after dinner I sit thinking things over while mother thumbs her prayer-beads and steals glances my way.
"Amala," I say. "Will I increase your merit if I join the brotherhood?"

"Stop playing the fool," she replies and returns to devotional bead- rurning.

I am still playing the fool as I get into bed. Before falling asleep, 1 try engineering my dreams to search for links between Idea and Action instead of screening action-packeds.

Returning to Teacher´s the next day, after lessons we sit side by side on his rug-bed, drinking endless refills of tea from the thermos with the storks on it.

Teacher´s room is the world´s best room. It has two beds (a lot of money in rugs),analtar, a Godrej safe, picture-framed deities, the Enlightened One during his emaciated days of leftist a scetism, a radio-cassette player covered with a magic-needle embroidery of his second wife´s young face.

There is a lunar calendar with full-moons red-inked,suitcases with clothes, a biscuit tin with Teacher´s ritual accessories, a biscuit tin with letters from his first wife´s children. There is also an extra thermos with red flowers on it, filled with fresh hot water, standing by in case the tea runs out.

When it is full, the room has Teacher, Teacher´s second wife, and their five-year-old who obeys cues to go out and play. Teacher´s noodle business and other needs are taken care of downstairs.

In the intimacy of this room, the world comes into focus. We talk about everything, helped on occasion by the radio, from the devaluation of the rupee and who got caught with gold at the airport, to the U.S.-Sovietization of the world.

In this room, we knife off the fat from the issues, place them on the low table on which the thermos with storks stands, beside our tea-bowls, and alongside Teacher´s:

"Listen to experience speaking."
One day I do and I ask: What is wrong with a 60-year-old, a Teacher to top it, with a young second wife and an obedient five* year-old?
Teacher´s only response is a quiet look of exasperation.

The next time I put this question, the second wife has slipped in to the room. The second wife stops what she is doing, wordlessly takes the girl´s hand, and they walk out together.
*  *  *
A year passes, then two. I observe that Teacher has stopped dyeing his thinning hair. He works less, sits more, and when he sits he prays. He is calmer, more detached.

Before, from my window, I would see him pass by, headed for everything visits with his buddies. He would poise his head up in a slight slant, and call out, and come up to chat if I was home, smoke a cigarette, then continue on his way. He doesn´t anymore.

His wife serves him well, it would be testified by all. But when they quarrel, she calls him "old man," and he suddenly grows quiet. Though he remains kindly to his daughter, who can now walk to school by herself, an invisible distance has grown between them.

1 "Can´t keep up with her," he says when she turns to her mother to find a better ear for her school goings-on. And he gives me that look again.

One day his wife comes by with noodles, wet, with the smell of fresh eggs in them. She says Teacher plans a month´s retreat.
I run into Teacher a few days later. Below a cream cotton hat lies a smile on a weary face etched with new lines.

"Oh, just around the comer," he says, refusing a ride on the backseat of my new motor-cycle. "I´ll be gone a month, no more," he whispers and, feebly, he shakes my hand.

He is to go on retreat the next day. In bed the following night, taking my last drags on a cigarette, envious thoughts come to me of my Teacher on retreat, up in the mountains, by a silent monsoon fog. As the last wisp of smoke tapers from the stub of my cigarette, my name is called, my heart jumps.

It´s Teacher, it´s Teacher, says an informing voice in the dark.
"Come, quick."

I dress silently, and rush to Teacher´s. 1 part the door curtains, and there´s Teacher -in striped pajama and a singlet – prostrate on a straw mat. Seeing his pallor, I think of that face two days ago and kick myself for not having seen it then.

I enter the room and the violent glare from its single bulb. Teacher´s wife sits curled, besides tearful neighbours; her shoulders heave and drop as she sobs: "There was no warning, there was no warning."

Anew sound emerges from behind the curtains. Teacher´s daughter appears, crying. She has just awoken somebody whispers.

People begin to come and go. There is whispered pre¬dawn planning and orchestration of duties for the cremation. Visits are made to the astrologer, the Lamas, the Sangha. Butter lamps are lit and offerings made to all the monasteries. Wood to burn a full day and kerosene are bought, the cremation ground prepared.

In the course of the day I learn that Teacher had postponed his retreat He had not been able to get out of bed that morning, his face bloodless; in his state, he wasn´t going anywhere.

What if he had died on retreat? The arrangements? – the question is posed repeatedly. Thank God, he didn´t! Thank God!
We sit in the room, having gone and returned, executing our assignments. It is a greatly changed room, without the warmth of a familiar order. Teacher´s wife has stopped sobbing, then she starts again.

In the comer sits Teacher´s daughter, playing. She´s over her fright, poor girl, a red-eyed somebody says softly. Suddenly, the girl gets up gripping a handful of sweets and walks toward her mother.
"Is it time to go to school? Is it?" she asks her weeping mother.

"Mother, I want to go to school! I want to go to school!" she is now shouting.Then as she slings her schoolbag over her shoulder and keeps shouting, I see, hauntingly, mother and daughter hand-in -hand walking out wordlessly, embraced in an understanding peculiar to only them; and an image flashes of Teacher, sitting cross-legged on his rugs, saying:
"Listen to experience speaking."

Tseten Is a writer and lives in Kathmandu.