Young Monk Becoming
Mingma Sherpa, age 8, waits in the courtyard of Thupten Choling monastery wearing Chinese made jeans and a Chicago Bulls t-shirt. Tears as wet as any child’s river a face turned to watch his dad disappear along the broken trail terracing the hillside to the villages below.
His name will be gone before his tears dry.
200 Nepali rupees hide fisted in his right hand. His left is lost in the palm of the monk who has come to meet him. Beside his feet, a crumbled plastic grocery bag holds everything he owns.
“Breathe slowly,” the monk says, “like me.”
The courtyard is busy, busier than home. Mingma looks for familiar faces. He sees none.
Brooms slap flags draped under open windows. Purple potatoes peel and fall. Bok Choy wilts in filling baskets. Carrots pop from the ground and pile. Rice finds its way through wicker strains, ratta — tat — tatting the tin bottom of a pot bigger than any he has ever seen.
“You must be hungry.”
Mingma tries to imagine a kitchen big enough for that pot.
Grandma Ama cooks for three now in pots as small as Mingma feels. His sister Dolma fits in the biggest one. Warmed by water heated for her bath, she’ll smash bubbles and splash, smile and laugh, and search the room, the shelved pickles, the piled logs, the empty chair, for a brother who is not there. Tonight their dinner will be Dhal Bhat served in the kitchen next to the fire where they’ll sit. Milk for Dolma. Butter tea for Ama. Rice beer for dad.
This morning Ama made Tibetan bread for breakfast, mixing wheat flour and water and salt right on the table, breaking and rolling little dough balls that she flattened round under the heal of her hand.
Four slits cut in each, they slide into boiling oil, one at a time, and when Ama spoons them out they look like big buttons, hot and greasy, and waiting for honey.
“The ones for me have five holes,” Mingma whispers. “Ama cuts an extra in the middle just for me.”
He and his dad had three each before leaving home, more than he’s ever eaten at a single time, and he ate another, one grandmother hid in his pocket, on the hike up to the monastery.
His clothes are traded for saffron and crimson sheets. They wrap his waist, and knot on the side. It takes five tries to make the knot hold. Four times the sheets fall. Four times he stands naked.
One day he may be monk.
Today he is boy.
Since he believed, as he had been taught, in the deep compassion that could mend broken families and soften hard lives, with all the disappointment, the pain of his mother’s passing and the fear he felt the morning they carried her to the pyre, realizing at that moment what others already knew but had not yet talked about, that his dad would have to leave, returning to work on the porter path carrying loads for tourists and that Grandma Ama was too old to care for him and and his sister both, Mingma Sherpa, within moments of being without name and ready to give up even more, on his way to becoming Mingma Lama, stood up and looked around, the busy work continuing, but suddenly seeing so many others like him. Their faces promised hope.
(Note: Not a great pic, not even a good pic, the above picture is the story’s inspiration. Caught without my camera, I borrowed a mates knockoff cellphone — a MBK Bangkok want-to-be iPhone — and captured this image. Flash fiction followed from fact while sipping butter tea on a deck overlooking the monastery’s courtyard. Such is life. This bit of flash fictionalized non-fiction was posted in Twitter (@deservedrugburn) — as it was written — in 13 §’s.
More from me at www.deservedrugburn.com.)