Puja at Nako

We found out the next morning that it was all about sending a man's spirit on its way.

But right now we don't know that. Right now my friend Joanne and I are on the almost tiptop of the world, perched on the ridge that separates India from Tibet. We are in the village of Nako. It's on the Indian side of the mountains, but it's not really India. It's Tibet: stone houses strung with prayer flags, ringed by rocky land, snow-capped peaks, painstakingly watered fields, green with peas and gold with barley.

In the evening, we go to the village temple. We hear the sound of chanting, we push open the red door, and the dwindling daylight filters in. Candles flicker in front of the altar and its Buddha; they cast shadows on the painted bodhisattvas on the walls. Two lines of old people sit on the ground, spinning prayer wheels.

Chanting, spinning, chanting, spinning. We join the old people, sink to the ground, into the movement and the sound.

In the half-light that fills the room, it seems like I've time-traveled. That was my best childhood dream: time travel. And now I've done it. We are in a village with no stores or restaurants or functioning telephone lines. The faces around me are ancient and weathered, golden in the glow, sooty in the shadows, wrinkles and creases blurred. As the room gets more and more dim with night, I travel further and further back.

*
And now, after India, here I am. Months of journey have gone by since Nako, and here I am, finally returned, back in my little apartment at 10th and South. I look around and sigh. I calculate my account: fifteen hundred photographs of Indian adventure. Seven hundred dollars of Indian credit card debt. Thirteen pounds lost due to Indian diet. One office job to be returned to. One unexplained stain on sofa left by Swedish subletter.

One Whole Foods Market across the street.

And so I go to Whole Foods. The glass doors glide open with a barely-heard whoosh. The bright light, the sparkle --- it is dazzling. I pause by the door, try to take it all in. How clean, how colorful, how well-stocked. How free of unusual or unpleasant smells. My kitchen cupboards are empty. I need ---

Tofu, burritos, imported cheese, domestic cheese, organic cheese, papaya juice, Taste of Thailand frozen pad thai, roasted red pepper pesto hummus, antipasti, basmati rice, baklava, garden burgers, soy dogs. Tempeh.

My basket is still empty. Well, I do need some herbal tea. I left for India in the summer and now it's winter. Should I get peppermint? Sleepytime? Yogi Kava Kava? Maybe green tea? It’s not quite herbal, but green tea is good for you --- we all know that. Antioxidants… or something…

I stand in the tea aisle. I look at the teas. I count the teas. There are thirty-two types of green tea. Thirty-two.

I leave the tea aisle. I abandon the bounty of tea. I circle the produce section but produce is too much work. I pick up a tray of sushi and pay in the express lane.

*

I turn away from the chanting and towards the door and see that women have begun to enter the temple. And they are carrying buckets.

Buckets filled with bread. Buckets overflowing with bread. More and more women come in, and bring with them more and more bread. They crouch on the floor beside us and begin to divide the bread into stacks of ten loaves, and stacks of five loaves. They boss each other above the sounds of the chants, telling one woman to get more bread, another to move the already made stacks out of the way.

Once a critical mass of bread has been achieved, they begin to distribute it --- first a stack of ten to each of the chanters, then stacks of five to everyone else. We get some as well and sit holding it in our hands.

It is heavy. Round thick flat loaves of brown barley bread, each the size of a salad plate, smudged with soot from the oven.

I feel odd, holding a stack of bread in my hands, not knowing why I am holding it, not knowing what I'm supposed to do with it. What is going to happen with the bread? Is it a post-prayer snack? Or is it part of the prayer? Are we going to have to eat it all? I picture a night of bread-eating ahead of us: bread-eating and chanting, bread-eating and chanting, bread-eating and chanting…

And I’m not even hungry. I’m already filled up with everything that’s around me.

But we wait. We sit there, holding the bread in our hands.

*

Sushi is a clean food made of dirty things: raw flesh, seaweed, rice. The dirty things are cleaned up, made beautiful, transformed into little jewels. I like the tekka maki the best. Tuna rolls, circular and tri-colored, neat and tidy and bite-sized, sitting alongside a dab of wasabi and a pile of pickled ginger. The wasabi and ginger are still harmonious, still in the color scheme of tekka maki: the brilliant green of the wasabi and the bright pink of the ginger mirrored in the dark green of the seaweed, the deep pink of the tuna.

What would the bread women think of my dinner? Had they ever eaten fish? Certainly not tuna, certainly nothing from the ocean --- the ocean is unfathomable in the Himalayas, even though once upon a time it had covered the mountains, and I read in my guidebook that you could find little sea fossils among the stones near Nako.

And what would the women think of Whole Foods? Nako had no commerce: no grocery store, no restaurant, nothing. There was just the little shop attached to the guesthouse, just a stall, really, but even that seemed to be there mostly for the benefit of passers-through, stocked with dusty candy bars and instant noodles and Coca-Cola and bars of soap. I never saw a villager there.

In Nako, in the temple, holding the bread in my hands, I had been poured full. Almost too full. Every inch of me had been filled up. So what would this place do to them? Whole Foods. 32 types of green tea. The sushi in its plastic container, with its packet of soy sauce and lemon slice and meaningless strip of green plastic grass.

Sitting on the sofa with the unexplained stain, I eat my sushi. I empty the soy sauce into a little dish, discard the lemon slice and the strip of green grass, break the chopsticks apart. I top each piece of tekka maki with lots of wasabi and lots of ginger. That might not be the proper Japanese way to eat it, but this sushi isn’t from Japan. It’s from the supermarket across the street from my apartment in Philadelphia, and so I can eat it any way I want.

And it tastes good. It feels good. Firm but still soft and moist. It feels clean, it feels fresh. It feels a world away from India, a world away from Nako.

It feels like Whole Foods feels.

With each bite, my world shrinks. It is both comforting and disconcerting. I wonder how it can be that I have gone so far, for so long, and have still come back to a certain sameness.

I like having sushi again, I know that. I like having Whole Foods across the street, I like my apartment, my VCR, and my laptop.

I don't like having to wonder if I am picking up exactly where I left off, or if I can carry a bit of New World back with me, here, to the Old. A little bit of Nako, still with me, still filling me up inside?

I eat the last of my sushi: one last little jewel, one last piece of tekka maki, one last slice of ginger, one last dab of wasabi. It hit the spot. I go to the kitchen and throw out the plastic tray, the chopsticks. My cupboards are still empty: no herbal tea, no tofu, no organic cheese. But it doesn't matter; Whole Foods is always just across the street. I don’t have far to go.

*

Eventually, we leave the temple. The old people are still chanting, still spinning. The bread is still uneaten. We take ours with us. We almost leave it behind, but the women stop us, seem to say, “For heaven’s sake! Don’t leave without your bread!”

I sleep well that night. I sleep heavily in the silence of Nako, a silence punctured only by the howling of dogs and the braying of donkeys. We get up before sunrise, pack our bags, and crowd onto the morning bus. We sit next to the village schoolteacher. He speaks English and so we tell him about our evening in the temple. Then he tells us what it was.

He says it was a puja, a prayer ceremony. A man in the village had died, and it was his funeral puja.

In Tibetan Buddhism, there are forty-nine days between lives --- forty-nine days to make the journey from this life to the next. During those days, pujas are held to help the soul along its way.

This puja was the last one; the forty-nine days were ending. The family of the man who had died bakes a whole lot of bread. In the temple, during the puja, the bread is distributed to the women of the village. The women take it home with them, and their families eat the bread. Their hunger is satisfied. They feel happy. And their happiness fills the dead man. He takes courage from their happiness, from their satisfaction, and he can finish the journey to his next life with an easy heart.

We haven't had breakfast, and in the bus we share the bread with the schoolteacher. We eat the Tibetan bread; it is tough and hard and has a nutty flavor.

The bus bounces us away from Nako, down off of the ridge, and takes us further down the road.