The Ninth Buddha

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Book: Read The Ninth Buddha for Free Online
Authors: Daniel Easterman
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    Kalimpong had scarcely changed.   The main street, a rambling affair of little shops, rang to the sound of hawkers and muleteers as it had always done.   Here, Bengali merchants rubbed shoulders with little Nepali Sherpas and fierce-looking nomads from Tibet’s eastern province of Kham; pretty Bhutanese women with their distinctive short-cropped hair collected glances from young trap as making their first pilgrimage to Buddh Gaya; cheerful Chinese traders argued with sharp Marwari merchants and made a profit out of it.   On a flat stone in the middle of the bazaar, a blind man sat begging, his eyes running sores, his fingers bent into an attitude of perpetual entreaty.   Christopher tossed a coin into the upturned hand and the old man smiled a toothless smile.
    Christopher’s father had always preferred the bustle and anarchy of Kalimpong to the stiff formality of Darjeeling, the British administrative centre some fifteen miles to the west.   How many times had he told Christopher that, if he was to live in India, he must learn to be an Indian?   Arthur Wylam had in many ways despised his own caste the Brahmins, the heaven-born of the Indian Civil Service and Indian Political Service for their insularity and prejudice.
    The Civil List, with its tedious enumerations of precedence, the clubs
    with their ridiculous rules of etiquette and protocol, the effective
    apartheid that made even high-born and educated Indians outsiders in
    their own country all had at one time or another drawn his wrath.   His
    love for the Indian people, for their languages, their customs, their
    religions, their foolishness and their
    wisdom, had made him an effective and eloquent intermediary ‘ between the Government of India and the various native rulers to whose courts he had been assigned.   But his scorn for convention in a society riddled by it the way a chest of drawers is riddled by worms had earned him enemies.
    1 Christopher left his pony at a stable and took his bags to a small t rest-house run by an old Bhutanese woman near McBride’s Wool Depot. The rest-house was noisy and smelly, and it teemed with energetic little Kalimpong fleas whose great-great-grandparents I had come to town in a particularly noxious sheepskin from Y Shigatse; but it was the sort of place where no-one would ask too many questions about who a person was or what he was doing in town.
    i He could have stayed in the Government guest-house, a small dak-bungalow just outside town, complete with potted plants and f ice and servants.   But that would have involved getting chitties in Calcutta and travelling as a Government official the last thing either Christopher or Winterpole wanted.   As far as the Governt ment of India was concerned, Christopher Wylam was a private , citizen visiting the hill country merely to relive some pleasant childhood memories and recover from his wife’s death.   If there was trouble and questions were asked, Mr.   Wylam would not officially exist.
    When Christopher came downstairs, the rest-house was in turmoil.   A
    party of Nepalese had arrived after a journey of almost three weeks
    from Kathmandu.   They had come to find work in
    India, in the tea-plantations round Darjeeling.   There were about a dozen of them, poor men in ragged clothes, farmers whose barley had failed that year, leaving them without enough food for the winter. They had come to the rest-house on the recommendation of a Nepalese trader whom they had met on their way, but now the bossy little landlady was telling them there was no room for so many.
    There was little likelihood of the scene turning genuinely ugly such outbursts seldom went beyond words or, at the most, some harmless pushing and shoving.   But Christopher felt sorry for the men.   He had lived with peasants just like them in the past, and had travelled widely in Nepal: he could understand what it was that had forced them to leave their homes and families at this time of year to

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