Blue Poppies by Jonathan Falla

Author:Jonathan Falla
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307422804
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2009-03-08T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWO

A PAIN GNAWS: we pinch another limb for distraction. As the caravan moved on, the thought of what might have become of Puton in Jyeko was more than Jamie could bear. If he allowed his mind to slink back to her, he’d feel his throat tighten, his eyes sting, his brain throb, the start of panic . . . and in desperation he would drag his unruly thoughts elsewhere. Thus he had given full rein to his less generous feelings about Tibet. This was not so hard: he held all Jyeko responsible for Puton’s plight.

He rode in silence over the frozen ground, letting his pony find a path among the burrows of the pica. In the Jyeko throng, Jamie spoke to no one. These people did not look so charming now. The wind had stirred up white dust, filling the wrinkles on every face, leaving every eye bloodshot. Jamie felt no charity for any of them, neither monk nor merchant nor the children who had stoned Puton. His mind filled with grim images that he had, maybe, stored away for this moment of need. Things in Jyeko, in Lhasa; things that were not pleasant.

He recalled the beggar-criminals, miserable amputees. It was a routine punishment to manacle a man’s legs and turn him loose without his hands, or his feet, or his eyes. Unable to work, he’d creep from shelter to shelter, begging food. Jamie had seen them in Jyeko: who had done that to them—Wangdu? The only “police” were there in the monastery. One could not take a life in ohso-Buddhist Tibet, of course, but he’d heard that monastic officials might flog a thief to within an inch of his life then dump him on a blizzard-swept mountainside at nightfall. It could not strictly be said that they had killed him. Just as it could never be said that a good Tibetan had taken the life of a yak or sheep. There just happened to be a profession of bad Tibetans, despised outcasts, to do the butchery for them. So much for tradition!

He’d heard whisper of other things: of pepper forced under eyelids to obtain confessions; of the ritual sacrifice of babies (could that really be true? Just now Jamie was disposed to believe it); of the huge Lhasa monasteries where, it was rumored, a steady supply of young novices was buggered ragged by the monks. An Indian government doctor in New Delhi had worked in Lhasa and warned him, “There’s hardly a Tibetan doesn’t have the clap. Believe it, sir! When their husbands are away they’ll fornicate with their brothers—the nearest merchant, the meanest shepherd will do. I’ve treated ghastly things . . .”

Jamie had been told things that he’d not credited—until he saw them in Lhasa. People copulating openly on rooftops in the summer sun. Monks from rival monasteries fighting in the streets with wooden clubs. The squalor of the city lanes where everyone upped skirts and shat as they liked. The filth of the houses, where women gave birth in piss-soaked stables, then licked their babies clean.

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