Tales in Colour and Other Stories

be.

1

The Woman Who Lost Her Senses

I

T WAS ONE

of those lazy winter afternoons, we had been sitting in the sun for sometime, sheltered from the direct wind by the pile of firewood. We talked a little but stayed silent most of the time concentrating on soaking up the mellow warmth of the sun, as if fortifying ourselves for the cold night. Keba Lhamo was working on a spinning wheel, spinning wool, collecting the spools of thread in a basket near her. Spinning wool was one task that Keba Lhamo continued to do even after she stopped doing any other work. Perhaps she found some comfort in the droning sound of the spinning wheel. It was the same sound, the droning of the turning wheel which lulled me to a state of sleepiness that was deliciously sedating. Suddenly she shook me awake. She drew closer to me, casting quick glances in all directions as if we were being watched. She lowered her voice to a hoarse whisper, They tried to tame my mother’s divinities and to subjugate them. They could not subdue the deities but my mother died a broken woman, confused and humiliated.

The deities choose the mediums. Mediums do not have to choose their deities. My mother’s deities were powerful and it is their anger that makes me like this. Her tone was controlled and yet she had a wild look in her eyes. I had never paid much attention to Keba Lhamo’s ramblings in the past. But today perhaps because I was shaken out of my sleep so suddenly, I felt drawn to listen to what she was saying. She was speaking with such conviction and she appeared as normal as anybody else I knew. People in the village laughed at me and said that I took this woman far too seriously. They said she was a woman whose senses had long abandoned her. Others even went to the extent of calling her mad Keba Lhamo.

I had heard so many of her stories but she had, never in the past, talked of the divinities and her mother who had died as a broken woman, confused and humiliated. I looked at her, she looked grave and she had a far away look. She was recalling something from the past like she was searching for the shards of a broken memory; assembling the shards, handling them carefully not to hurt herself with sharp edges but at the same time trying not to distort the original. What she was telling me could not possibly be the inventions of a deluded mind. Sensing the implication of an underlying intrigue in her stories that went beyond herself, I felt compelled to go beyond the customary "aye and tseni, which means, uh and then?"

Why did they want to humiliate your mother?

To subjugate and tame her, she shot back impatiently.

To subjugate and tame her? I repeated foolishly, a little flustered by her sudden impatience.

Yes, tame her, that’s what they said. They said that she was a practitioner of the Bon tradition and it was the responsibility of the Buddhist to do away with the evil tradition, she said sadly. I noticed a trace of contempt and sarcasm in her quivering voice. What did we know of the Bon tradition? All we knew was that Bon was the religious tradition that was practiced widely before the people had converted to Buddhism a long time ago. Nobody really knew anything more. It was as if we never cared to find out, almost as if we were afraid to know more. Somehow, even in our scant knowledge of it, we vaguely knew that this faith had much to do with spirits and divinities, propitiations by mediums and live sacrifices. But then, mediums performed rituals in the village regularly for all sorts of reasons especially when people were sick. In fact, mediums were considered to be healers and we relied on them to help us, especially with our sick people. There was nothing sinister or evil about them; they were just like the rest of the people in the village. And now here was a woman who was believed to have lost her senses, telling me that her mother was subjugated, humiliated and broken by the Buddhists because she was a practitioner of the evil Bon tradition.

The warmth of the sunshine I had soaked up vanished and I felt a chill come over me. There was a sudden change in Keba Lhamo’s behavior, she too seemed cold and was shivering even as she appeared flushed and agitated. Her eyes flashed in all directions, moving her head jerkily like a mother hen looking for her scattered chickens. I wondered if she was going to have one of her spells of uncontrollable shaking. I was alerted, I must not provoke her further, I said to myself. Some said that her condition was caused by the deities who had chosen her to be their medium and her inability to fulfill their call because there was no teacher to help her learn the practice. We knew that the deities manifested their choice of a candidate by making them display symptoms of mental disturbance. These signs would disappear only once the person was taught to perform the rituals by a teacher. The teacher should be someone who worshipped the same deities as the medium. Normally, the person who displayed the signs of mental illness was apprenticed to the teacher for years until the pupil was capable of invoking the deities during the rituals and seeing them off at the end of the ritual. Failure to send off the deities would cause havoc and the medium would go mad. When apprentice mediums were able to do this on their own then they would become established practitioners, their services sought after and their livelihoods secured.

Why doesn’t her sister, the medium, take her on as an apprentice and help her? was the question on everybody’s lips, like a mantra said out of habit. Nobody really expected an answer. In fact people liked the atmosphere of speculative theories. It was conducive for further conversation around the hearths. Some said that Keba Lhamo’s instability was a charade put on to avoid work and responsibility in the house. What I saw now was no pretence; she was shaking uncontrollably, even her cheeks shook on her face like empty leather pouches as her eyes rolled in all directions without any focus. I tried not to show my own anxiety and tried instead to calm her. I held her hands. She looked at me and let out a hollow laugh, Heh, heh, and pulled away her hands from my grip and threw her head backwards gently. She saw my anxious look and was amused. She cast a questioning look in my direction and wiped her mouth with her palms as if to wipe away the laughter and shook her head as if it has suddenly grown heavy.

"They beat her repeatedly. They said it was a part of the kago ritual. The lama used leather straps to hit her."

What is she saying, I wondered? Now she is talking nonsense again, I say to myself. This cannot be true, for whenever a high and learned lama came to the village people would request for a ritual of kago. This rite was to remove all the negative and evil influences and all obstacles from an individual. I, myself, was a fortunate recipient of many such rites but I had never been beaten with leather straps. My experiences of the rites were pleasant; I actually liked the heady smell of burning mustard with other relics. I liked the prickly sensation of the mustard grains hitting my skin which the lama threw at the devotees to cleanse us. Hours after the ritual I liked to put my fingers in my hair and feel for the mustard grains stuck in my hair. But I was never beaten with leather straps. What Keba Lhamo was saying must be the distorted imagination of a woman who has lost her senses.

What kind of a lama was that…? I ask stupidly and quickly add, Who beats women with leather straps? I hear the strains of heretical sacrilege in my own voice. Where is she leading me to?

He was a wandering Tibetan lama who stayed in the village for a while. He convinced everybody in the village that the tradition of mediums was of the Bon religion and the mediums were responsible for keeping the tradition alive. ‘Do away with the mediums and the evil tradition will vanish he said repeatedly.’

There were these high heaps of dog fur she had to spin into wool, she gestured in jerky movements to indicate the size of the heaps. Another hallucination of a deluded mind, I imagine, but she was not finished.

Handling dog fur was to pollute my mother’s body, the home of the deities. They thought the deities would leave a body contaminated by pollution. Dogs are lowly animals.

I was not sure what to say so I resorted to the perfunctory, "aye, tseni."

She was plainly irked by my apathy.

We, women usually work only with sheep wool not dog hair. The dog is a lowly animal. Don’t you know that? Have you ever seen someone wearing a garment made from dog fur? Her eyes gleamed with passion, as she thrust her forefinger close to my face, waving it threateningly as she repeated her question, Have you ever seen a garment made from dog hair? I drew away as she came up closer, demanding an answer.

Keba Lhamo, because you say all these things people say you are insane. Stop it now. Don’t say these things anymore for your own good, I said in self defense, sounding like a messenger of goodwill. She ignored my advice, You can ask the villagers. There are still many people who are of my age group, people in their sixties and seventies. Ask them, they will remember. I was a child then but I was old enough to see it all and hear it, she challenged me. She was sure of all that she has said. She was in control of her thoughts and her diction was clear, not slurred and incoherent like a mad person’s. Perhaps she was not as confused as she was held to be. Her senses had not left her. All of what she said was real. I was convinced.

All of a sudden she turned to face me and gave me a long hard look. She waited for me to say something but I looked at her wordlessly, my mouth open and gaping. She looked away, avoiding my eyes and hobbled away muttering, I must go now. She gathered her wool and her spinning wheel and took a few steps away from me. I can only go northwards. You know I cannot face the south. All my enemies and demons are in the south. They torment me and beat me. They show their fearsome faces and the noises they make are terrible. Cocking her head to one side she listens, Listen, do you hear the cymbals and the drums? I hear the temple horns and the trumpets too. Can you not hear them too?

Of course, I heard nothing. Yet I felt obliged to hold still and listen. I heard the river thundering along its course in the valley, the chickens scratching in the dirt, cooing softly, I saw the pigs burrowing in the mud, grunting noisily and I heard a distant call of a raven, nothing else. The sun was close to setting and the evening chill was descending fast.

Maybe, she was confused after all, just as I was confused by my own fickleness, swinging between believing and doubting her simultaneously. Had I listened to the hallucinations of a deluded mind? No wonder the villagers laugh at me.

It was more than fifty years ago that the lama had tried to subjugate the deity in Keba Lhamo’s mother and the deity had not appeared in any medium after that. Perhaps the lama had succeeded in subduing the deity. But another deity had taken possession of her sister Tashi Pema soon after the ritual of subjugation was performed on their mother. Members of certain families were consistently chosen by the deities as their mediums; in Keba Lhamo’s house there were three mediums over two generations. Both of Keba Lhamo’s parents were mediums and her older sister, Tashi Pema was also a medium. Everybody in the village knew that Tashi Pema’s deity too was strong and powerful, demanding the villagers’ respect and propitiation. Tashi Pema’s chief deity was from the distant valley of Ha in the western part of Bhutan.

Keba Lhamo and her sister looked like twins although Keba Lhamo was much younger than her sister, who was the last practicing medium in the village. Tashi Pema’s body was shrunken to sort of a fluffy round ball swaddled in layers of her best clothes. She dressed in her best when she had to perform a ritual. She washed herself carefully before she dressed for each ritual in which she was to represent her deity. Her fingers were spindly; her neglected and overgrown nails were claw-like, giving her a sinister appearance. Her mind was sharp, her memory intact and she could recite the chants, citing the lineages and genealogies of the divinity effortlessly. Her chants had to be correct otherwise the retribution of the offended deities would be extracted.

Some days after my encounter with Keba Lhamo I happened to meet her sister who was preparing for a ritual in a villager’s house where a man had been ailing for many days. I sat beside her and watched her for a while before I said, Keba Lhamo has been telling me about the Tibetan lama and what he did to your mother.

Keba Lhamo often says strange things but what she says about our mother is true, confirmed the medium. She was shaping little effigies with dough in preparation for a ritual. I continued to watch her, fascinated as her gnarled and arthritic fingers expertly made effigies of humans and animals and placed them in rows on oblong wooden planks. Long years of practice had given a deftness even her blindness could not hinder. The ritual dough effigies would later be placed on the makeshift altar she had already constructed around a window sill. Mediums cannot use the Buddhist temples and altars for their rituals. She laughed with childlike amusement, when I pointed out that the circular butter decorations on the effigies were out of place. My useless blind eyes cannot see but I place them anywhere my hands can reach them. The deities know I am blind. She talked of her deities with an intimacy that came naturally, the deities knew that she was blind and would excuse any mistakes she might make. She wiped her mouth with her palms, reminding me of her sister. Tashi Pema was a well respected and sought after medium; although she was now beyond eighty years of age. She was frail and completely blind and unable to travel on her own unaided. People who needed her to perform rituals would carry her from house to house and village to village. Yet nobody was surprised by the fact that she could dance vigorously for up to three hours during the rituals she performed. She wore her wooden crown bearing bold motifs