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surroundings who weren’t at the ritual—would be healed. That was part of the shine that was upon him.
    Having been initiated into many tantric teachings, he knew how to manipulate subtle forces—deities and demons—through ritual means. He could dispel curses, predict the future and even knew how to make and stop rain. Lay people came for his consultation; lamas came for teachings.
    Kunsang explained to me that Tso Pema was a place of pilgrimage for Tibetan Buddhist people from Tibet as well as those from the upper valleys of Himachal Pradesh—Chamba, Lahaul and Spiti—which verge on Ladakh and the Tibetan Plateau. To reach these valleys one must cross dangerous passes, snowed in for much of the year. They are some of the most inaccessible places in India and—especially in those days—truly remote. Emissaries from villages in these high valleys, one more remote than the next, started arriving at Tso Pema with invitations for Tulshuk Lingpa to come to their villages and take over their monasteries. After refusing many offers, he agreed to go to a village in the Pangi Valley in Chamba district, and it was there he had his first monastery.
    ‘He and my mother lived in Pangi for fifteen years,’ Kunsang concluded. ‘My sister Kamala was born there, and so was I. It is the first place I remember.’
    The window behind Kunsang shuddered. The large wind-driven raindrops sounded like knuckles on the windowpanes. The cloud hit the window with a thud and it flew open. Kunsang sprang from where he was sitting cross-legged on his bed to close it.
    Then he sat, dried his hands on an old face-towel and poured tea from the metal flask. The steam merged with the fog that now permeated the room.
    ‘In this weather it is difficult to imagine the landscape of my childhood,’ he said. ‘Nothing could be more different from this cloud-heavy greenery. The valley in which I lived had hardly any vegetation: just steep slopes of stones, boulders and sheer rock faces rising to snow, glaciers and mountain peaks. The Chenab River, which originated in the high glacial peaks of Spiti, roared over huge rounded boulders in the valley. Above the village, on the valley’s upper reaches, snow leopards stalked the wild blue sheep.’
    Pangi was one of the most remote places in the Indian Himalayas. Travel in those days was by foot or by horse. It is a vast landscape and—at over 10,000 feet—the winters are harsh. The villages are few and become cut off from each other—not to mention the rest of the world—during the long winter. Life in the valley was as it had been for centuries. Whether administered by a local kingly chief, the British or independent India, what dominated life in the Pangi Valley of Kunsang’s youth was meters-deep snow, avalanches and stony fields of barley.
     
    Lahaul
    ‘And for me,’ he said, ‘that landscape will always be imbued with my father’s magic and his mastery of the ancient ways of mystics and tantrics. The world does not produce them any more.’
    I was suddenly jolted back to the present again when another rain-laden gust of wind blew open the window to reveal the jumble of fog-enshrouded roofs of the busy Darjeeling market. Dusk had fallen.
    When Kunsang told a tale, I often felt transported to the particular plateau or mountainside he was describing. How many times did I put on my mud boots, feel my way along the pitch-black corridor, raise my umbrella to the incessant rain and descend the steep stone steps to the alley, every surface green with monsoon mould. Entering that sea of bobbing umbrellas, hemmed in between the narrow jostling alleys, it was as if I were returning from a distant journey.
    I’d have a peculiar feeling, as if I were walking in two worlds.

CHAPTER FOUR

Behind the Heart
of the Buddha of Compassion

 
    One day Kunsang told me, ‘My father always had followers, and always there were people who thought him mad.’
    Tulshuk means crazy—but it also means fickle, mutable