Leaving Mother Lake (6 page)

In actual fact, although Buddhism now dominates all Moso religious life, the Daba is the true Moso priest — the keeper of a much older tradition, who does battle with malevolent ghosts and sacrifices animals and drinks great quantities of wine. Unlike the lamas, Dabas have no temples or chapels or even written books, and they do not go to Lhasa to study in the monasteries. They learn all they know from their uncles and keep all the songs of their ceremonies in their memory. Of course, I was much too young to know any of these details, but at the time of Grandmother’s funeral, the Chinese authorities had long labeled the Daba a backward superstition and had forbidden its practice. This did not mean very much, since there were no police or officials to enforce the rule, but the Dabas had stopped teaching their nephews, and they were already so few and most of them so old, people feared that when time came for the last of the old men to join our ancestors, so would our most ancient knowledge and ceremonies go with him.

Now, when a person dies, we need to ask a Daba as well as several lamas (and the more lamas that come the better) to perform the funeral rites because we believe that a person does not have one soul but five, and that different fates await them in the afterlife. Thus, the lamas must oversee the cremation of the body and guide the departed on the path of reincarnation, while the Daba sends them to the land of Seba’anawa, the paradise where our ancestors came from and where they still dwell, which is somewhere north of Moso country in eastern Tibet.

The old Daba looked at my mother prostrate on the floor and took a sip of wine before he resumed chanting, his eyes half closed, his head slightly shaky. My Ama lifted herself off the floor, and with Ache, Zhema, and me in tow, she followed Aunt Yufang across the main room to the storeroom. As they were about to enter, Aunt Yufang told Ama that the lamas were praying in the family chapel and that an auspicious day had already been decided for the cremation. My mother suddenly looked very sad, but she said nothing, and then she disappeared into the storeroom.

“What’s cremation?” I asked Zhema.

“Hush. I’ll explain to you later,” she answered. “Let’s go in.”

But I did not want to go in. I wanted to go home. “Why are we going into the storeroom?” I asked.

“Because Grandmother is there.”

In our house the storeroom was where we slept when our mother needed privacy, but in all Moso houses, it is also where grain and other things are kept and where women give birth, secluded from their male relatives. And then, it is the place where we lay out the dead — so that at death people return to the place of their birth and the cycle of life is complete. Because there were no men in our family, my mother had given birth to her children near the cooking stove, on the floor in the main room of the house. But this, as many other things about our family, was not the usual custom.

I had never yet entered a place where the dead lay in wait. I had never been near a dead person before. And so I stepped in cautiously, reluctantly.

The little room was cramped — my aunts and great-aunts and uncles and Dujelema, my second sister, who had been given to Aunt Yufang, and my mother were all standing around Grandmother and sobbing quietly, almost silently. Poor Dujelema! She had been crying so much, her eyes looked like walnuts, and I could not help wondering if that was what I’d looked like when I had cried so much, when my Ama had given me away to Aunt Yufang. And here, too, the air was thick with smoke. Perhaps it was even thicker, more concentrated, because I could barely make out Grandmother’s face in the soft glow of the butter lamps.

Because we lived in Zuosuo, I had seen very little of Grandmother during my short life — a few times during the summer festival — and I could not feel true grief. I was also too young to understand what the death of a person meant. The only dying I knew was that of the animals Ama killed for us to eat. Yet, as I stood close to my grandmother sleeping so still in the hazy light, I felt moved by a strange and unknown emotion, and I looked about the room for a place to go to, perhaps to escape. And that was when I saw the pit in the earth floor. I looked at the pit, and I felt chilled, and I felt sick inside my stomach, and then I felt very, very hungry.

Without saying anything, I walked back into the main room and straight to the pantry, where I helped myself to a plate of rice cookies. Eating made me feel a lot better — at least, until my sister Zhema peeked through the doorway and saw me sitting by the cooking stove. She frowned and rushed over to me.

“People are dead and all you can do is eat! Namu, you have to show some respect!”

This scolding, coming after the pit in the storeroom and my mother’s silent tears and the fatigue of the long journey, broke me down. I began to howl in that peculiar tearless way I knew how to cry. And now it was Aunt Yufang’s turn to rush out of the storeroom.

“Hush,” she said gently. “It’s too early to cry. If we cry now, it will make Grandmother very sad, and she won’t want to leave us.”

Of course, I did not want Grandmother not to leave us. I did not want Grandmother to become a hungry ghost who would roam forever among the living. I wanted Grandmother to join our ancestors in the land of Seba’anawa and to take care of our family from there.

Aunt Yufang took my hand, and I walked back into the smoke-filled room, where I knelt in front of Grandmother and then, as instructed, kissed her forehead. Grandmother looked peaceful. She seemed simply to be asleep.

For the first time since we had set off on the road that morning, Ama turned her attention toward me. “We must go now,” she said in a flat voice. “Uncle and the helpers are going to bathe her.”

I reached out for my Ama. But she was so distant, and her face was streaming with tears. I was not sure that she knew I was holding her hand. Even as I think of this today, I do not believe that she had noticed my sister Dujelema standing next to her. I squeezed her fingers a little harder. Ama did not look at me, but she took my little hand in both of hers. My mother’s hands were very warm and very strong and very rough from all the hard work.

In the main room, a young man was waiting with a blue ceramic bowl filled with water and yellow chrysanthemums. And now that we had all left the storeroom, Great-Uncle motioned him in, while his helpers, one of whom was carrying the basket with the white strips of cloth, followed him in and closed the door. Zhema gave me a small push between the shoulders. “You should go in the yard with Ache,” she said.

I didn’t need to be told twice. I squeezed between the people and went out into the courtyard, but Ache and the other children had left to go and play somewhere, and I did not feel like going to look for them. I felt tired and disturbed. So I sat down on a little wooden bench on the porch and closed my eyes, taking in the warmth of the sun. I stayed there until I got bored and remembered that I was still hungry, and again I went into the house.

Ama wasn’t there. She wasn’t sitting by the cooking stove, and she wasn’t standing near the kang with the other mourners. She wasn’t in the storeroom either. Only the helpers and Great-Uncle and Grandmother were in the storeroom.

Great-Uncle was holding Grandmother, supporting her while the other men were binding her body with strips of white cloth — the strips they were cutting up when we arrived. They had folded her knees under her chin and were binding her arms around her legs. Her head was leaning to one side. Her nostrils were filled with butter.

I didn’t ask why. I knew I should not be there, but no one had noticed me. I squatted on my heels and made myself smaller, and I watched — at once dazed and fascinated — as the three men put my bundled-up grandmother into a big white sack and carried the sack from the table to the pit in the ground.

But that was as much as I was to see. For just as he was lowering Grandmother into the pit, Great-Uncle lifted his head and looked straight at me. His mouth dropped in surprise, but before he could say anything, I ran out of the room, wiggled through the crowd of mourners, and stepped over the doorstep and into the sun-drenched courtyard.

When I had caught my breath and my heart had grown quieter, I wondered how Grandmother felt in the hole in the ground, and how she could breathe with butter in her nose, and if she was afraid. Then I thought of how Great-Uncle had bundled Grandmother’s legs against her chest and wrapped her arms around her knees and I understood why Ama always scolded me when I sat at the fireplace holding my knees against my chest.

AFTER GRANDMOTHER WAS BURIED
in the storeroom, everyone was allowed back in again. But now the pit had been covered up and there was in its place a little white clay mound, like a strange termite mound, with two small flags sticking out of the top. In front of it was a small table with some food offerings and butter lamps. When everyone had taken a place around the mound, the Daba came in to sing the song for the dead.

O Grandmother,

When you reach the land called Seba’anawa,

All the ancestors will come to greet you.

Please tell my ancestors

That I wanted to bring them gifts

But the Pumi came down from the mountains

And blocked my path,

And I cannot speak their language.

Please tell my ancestors

That I wanted to bring them gifts

But the Han Chinese came down from the mountains,

And I cannot speak Chinese.

On the road, the horsemen lead the caravans,

But they have poor memories,

And I don’t dare trust them with these precious gifts.

Please, Grandmother, tell my ancestors

That I cannot bring them my gifts.

But you, since you must leave our village,

Since you must return to the ancestral land,

You must take my gifts with you.

These gifts are not heavy.

And the mountain wind will carry you

All the way to the ancestral land.

And when the Daba had finished, Aunt Yufang’s voice rose above the quiet sobbing:

O my Ama,

My heart will ache for the rest of my life,

You brought me up from when I was so little,

You chewed my food when I had no teeth, and you wiped

my bottom.

Now your house is filled with grown children and grandchildren.

Today even Latso returned with her children.

Why don’t you open your eyes? How could you just go

like this?

O my mother, how will I bring your tea tomorrow morning?

O my mother, how could you leave like this?

You promised you would help me finish the blanket,

Now the blanket is half woven and you have gone!

How could you leave me like this?

On hearing Aunt Yufang mention her name, my Ama had let out a cry and begun sobbing uncontrollably. But when her turn came to sing, she held back her tears.

O my mother,

I love you from the deepest of my heart.

I know I did a lot of things that made you sad.

I know you had a lot of hope for me.

But I never had a chance to prove myself to you.

You left me too soon.

I had never heard anything so beautiful as these songs. I had heard people sing for our mountain goddess, and I had heard them sing for Mother Lake. I had also heard my Ama and Dujema sing the working songs, and I’d heard my mother whisper love songs to Zhemi in secret. But I had never heard people sing from so deep in their hearts. And I had never heard such a beautiful song as my Ama sang for her mother, when she knew that she had come home too late. Forever.

WITHIN A FEW DAYS
, we all looked like Aunt Yufang. No one was allowed to wash until forty-nine days after Grandmother’s death, and our hair was covered in mud from all the kowtowing to the lamas and to the Daba and to every arriving guest. My mother’s face was drawn from lack of sleep and black from soot. Her eyes were red and swollen. But she was exhausted not only from sadness but also from cooking, and feeding the guests. Since my grandmother had three daughters, each was responsible for preparing one of three daily meals, which was then served on the banquet tables in the courtyard. Aunt Yufang, who was the oldest, was responsible for the evening meal, the most important. My Ama, being the youngest, had to cook breakfast. But since she was also the proudest and she did not want to be outdone by her sisters, every meal she prepared was a feast, and to do this, she had to get up very early in the morning.

People were still arriving from neighboring villages. The relatives with whom we had stayed on our way to Qiansuo had also arrived. Perhaps eight entire villages came to my grandmother’s house in those few days. Every guest brought a bamboo box with a gift of tea and salted pork for Grandmother’s family, and my mother and her sisters had not only to cook the meals, but also to make sure that no one went home with empty boxes.

There was so much food, and so many gifts of grain and pork meat and flowers. I had never smelled so many pungent things or seen so much wealth displayed at once. Inside the main room, my aunts had set up another table with more rice and cooked meats, and chrysanthemums and butter lamps. Above the table they had hung a set of brand-new clothes and two yellow-and-red umbrellas. This was Grandmother’s table. Grandmother should have no regrets. She was about to depart from this world, and she should enjoy eating her last meals with her family, she should wear beautiful clothes, and when she finally departed, she could use the umbrellas if it rained on the way to the ancestral land.

One afternoon, straight after lunch, my great-uncle and my uncle brought a large square wooden box into the yard. It was very pretty, made of a light pinewood and decorated with flowers and fishes. My uncles took the box into the house and into the storeroom, where the Daba hung yellow chrysanthemums from the rafters. Then they took my grandmother out of the earth and brought the coffin back into the main room.