How Lotus Girl Got Her Name

There was no point in complaining about the rats or the ubiquitous piles of shit, or the flies that blackened the meat stalls, or the loose feces splattered onto market vegetables by sacred cows. By American standards, the place was a cesspool, take it or leave it. I was happy to take it. Every moment in the presence of the mountains felt like a benediction. The peaks themselves could split the mind and shatter the chattering that went around and around—incessant, unbidden, unwelcome, inconsequential.

Their soaring, sentient magnificence bestowed an intoxicating, thrilling moment of newness that more than compensated for the filth below.

But I could not stay awake any more nights fending off rats with my inadequate artillery of books, shoes, pots, and cans. I pleaded with Mr. Ratna to move me to the top of the waiting list for the soon-to-be vacated room on the top floor, from which two windows looked west to the Bagmati River. The river supplied water for washing bodies, clothes, and kitchen utensils—all at the same time. Then more fields stretched out to the great Swayambhu temple complex with the spherical form of its central stupa just visible. Once installed on the top floor I discovered that rats climb walls. By then I had made the acquaintance of an official in the USAID office. With welcome American efficiency, he disembarked from his jeep one afternoon gallantly carrying sheets of screening, a ladder, nails, and a hammer, and set about securing the windows.

It took a few minutes to walk from Mr. Ratna’s house to the Tibetan Blue, a popular restaurant that specialized in thukpa, a thick-cut noodle soup with slivers of onions, green peppers, cabbage, cauliflower, and sometimes buffalo. The restaurant attracted the incipient tourist trade, creating more than usual foot traffic for a side street, and this made the corner a suitable spot for Tenzin, a Tibetan trader. He had a resigned smile, and the ends of his two long black braids were tied together at his back with red thread. In hot weather or cold, rainy or dry, he wore a ratty black woolen chuba—the traditional Tibetan outer garment—often with the top part off and the long floppy sleeves tied at the waist. Over many layers of shirts and sweaters a variety of neckwear covered his chest. The rosary-type beads called malas hung in separate strands of ivory, turquoise, bodhi seed, coral, and human bone—or so he explained in scarce English and extravagant gestures. He also wore around his neck, hanging from leather cords, several sizes of pendant-style engraved silver boxes. These portable shrines, called gau, held protective images and amulets. Tenzin’s seat was a wooden crate turned upside down. 

He sat with his knees toward his chin and watched over a cloth on the ground where more treasures were set out for sale, including conch shells, skull cups, butter lamps, wooden bowls, and thigh-bone trumpets. These ritual objects, used to transform worldly ways into a sacred outlook, were the warm remains of a culture newly slaughtered, still leaching the smells of incense and rancid butter. Now, pale foreigners in pressed khakis and hippies wearing Mexican huaraches—all at the fever pitch of tourist greed for native trinkets—jostled over Tenzin’s wares. They stuffed holy artifacts into their bags and backpacks, souvenirs from Shangri-La. At dusk, Tenzin returned to makeshift refugee tents at the edge of the city that were clogged with smoky fires and crying babies. He dispersed scant sums to those whose religious possessions he had sold, kept his cut, and went off to buy beer. I passed Tenzin several times a day, going to and from the Tibetan Blue.

The owner of the Tibetan Blue, Kelsang, offered to exchange meals for English lessons—fried eggs and toast in the morning, and thukpa for dinner.

This arrangement suited me fine. I liked hanging out with him and his helper, Pasang, toothpick-skinny and mournful, who cooked and served and begged me to take him to America. The dining area off the street had blue walls and half a dozen Formica tables. The lessons were held upstairs in a room that combined living quarters with storage. Amid sleeping rolls and boxes and under burlap bags of rice and flour hanging from the rafters, we sat on the floor, drank milk tea, and said words out loud in English. Whenever I became flustered by nearby rats, my earnest pupils laughed at me.

I did not linger at Tenzin’s, but I learned about him at the restaurant and about his escape from Chinese-occupied Tibet. It took him ten months to cross the Himalayas, moving only at night, sleeping in caves, at times gnawing on his leather belt to blunt his hunger. He had started off with a party of a dozen other men, but some were shot by Chinese soldiers, others died of starvation or illness, and less than half crossed into Nepal. He had made his way to Kathmandu to seek work and try to get his family out.

Then, with the first news of home, he learned that once his escape had been discovered by the Chinese, his wife, son, and baby had been shot in front of their house. After that Tenzin got drunk every night.

One morning I went out early, and Tenzin was just setting up. There were no shoppers yet, no static between us. He yelled out: 

Where from? America?
Yes, America.
America good?
Yeah . . . ​America’s good. Land of the free.
You like Buddha?
I like Buddha.
You husband?
No husband.
You marry me?
Ha, ha.

Time for breakfast. On leaving the Tibetan Blue, I passed a group of young Germans, disheveled and blond, moving away from Tenzin’s corner. Their boisterous manner felt out of step with the early hour of the day, and Tenzin’s gaze followed them with unfiltered bafflement. No judgment, no interpretation. Then he noticed me watching, and he saw that I found his bewilderment heartbreaking.

The next day I flew west to Pokhara, in the foothills of the Annapurna Mountain Range. A cow pasture doubled as a landing strip for the small planes that made up the fledgling fleet of the Royal Nepal Airlines. There wasn’t much of a town, but with the opening of the airfield less than ten years earlier, Pokhara was just evolving into a starting point for trekkers heading farther west. On returning to Kathmandu the following week, I immediately went to the Tibetan Blue. When Tenzin saw me, his face lit up. Lotus Girl! he cried out.

I laughed. Yeah, that’s me. Lotus Girl.

By then he knew from Pasang that I made regular trips to volunteer at a Swiss-run Tibetan refugee camp a day’s trek from the Pokhara airstrip. He beckoned me over. He seemed excited to see me. He was finishing up a transaction with an older European couple. Once they moved on, he knelt on the ground and fumbled around under the box that he had been sitting on. Standing up, he handed me an ivory mala that had a few beads of turquoise and coral. I shook my head no. He held the mala toward me:

No sell. No money.
I cannot accept this from you.
Lotus Girl, for you. You take Buddha beads to America.

He placed them over my head and waved me away. I brought my palms together and bowed in gratitude. When I emerged from the Tibetan Blue he was gone. I stayed in Kathmandu for another six months, but I never saw Tenzin again.

♦

From Lotus Girl: My Life at the Crossroads of Buddhism and America by Helen Tworkov © 2024. Reprinted with permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

Read an interview with Helen Tworkov here.