The Breath of God. Jeffrey Small
hand-hammered tin cup.
Three men stood by the door, whose heavy timbers, painted a kaleidoscope of reds, yellows, and blues, provided the only color in the drab room. The men stopped speaking and turned their heads toward him.
“Where am I?” Grant croaked. His swollen tongue filled his dry mouth. He tried unsuccessfully to raise himself on his elbows. “What happened?”
The men approached his bed. Grant recognized two as monks because of their robes, sandals, and shaved heads, but the third was dressed in a gho—a plaid, knee-length woolen robe whose sleeves were rolled into cuffs exposing a hint of a white shirt worn underneath. On his feet the man wore leather shoes and argyle socks. Grant had first encountered the traditional Bhutanese garb on his arrival at the Paro airport. How many days ago, he was no longer sure.
The man in the gho responded in heavily accented in English, “Don’t try to move.” In answer to the confused look on Grant’s face, he said, “My name’s Karma. I am the Punakha drungtsho—the town’s doctor. You suffered a complete fracture of your right tibia. Worst I’ve seen.”
For the first time, Grant became aware of his right leg, elevated on a folded blanket. He touched the rough plaster cast that ran from his hip to his toes. Then he glanced at his watch, a digital sports model with a waterproof band of rubber. The push of a button gave him the barometric pressure, altitude, and temperature—all for under a hundred dollars. Grant’s favorite feature, though, was the tiny radio receiver that kept the time and date precisely set to the second. He was never late to an appointment.
When his eyes focused on the date, he shouted, “Four days!”
“You’ve been unconscious,” Karma told him. “Should have died on the river from loss of blood, but your wet suit acted as a compression bandage and restricted the bleeding until these two rescued you.” He nodded toward the monks.
Grant turned to catch a better look at them. The older one was dressed in a neatly wrapped orange robe that fell to his ankles. Judging from the salt-and-pepper stubble sprinkled across his shaved head, the monk was in his late fifties. His face was angular, with prominent cheek and jaw bones that joined to a point at his chin. The monk studied Grant with black eyes that were Asian in character but wide in shape, and placed close together. His unblinking gaze should have been disconcerting, but for a reason Grant couldn’t explain, he found it comforting. His younger companion, who couldn’t have been much over twenty, had a rounder face with a mixture of Tibetan and Chinese features. Several inches shorter than the older monk, and wearing crimson rather than orange robes, he was skinny in a still-filling-out sort of way.
“Thank you,” Grant said to all three men, his fingers tapping his cast. “But what ...” As if a projector in his head had suddenly come to life, the recent events replayed for him: the river, the rush of the cold water, grasping for his guide’s kayak, the panic of being trapped underwater. From the corner of his eye he spotted his PFD on the floor by the table. Instinctually, he touched the wool blanket covering his chest. He guessed what had happened. When he blacked out from the breaking of his leg and lack of oxygen, the current must have pulled him free of the boulder. The flotation device would have shot him to the surface.
“My guide, Dasho?” he asked, dreading the answer he already knew.
The older monk approached the bed and rested a warm hand on Grant’s shoulder. He answered in precise English with an unexpectedly clear British accent. “I am sad to report that our brothers found his body downriver from the dzong. He was upside down, still in his kayak.”
Grant swallowed back the acidic taste of bile that rose to the back of his throat. If he hadn’t requested to go on the most challenging section of the river, Dasho would still be alive. Maybe if I’d tried harder in the hydraulic? The friendly guide had been supporting his family.
As if reading Grant’s thoughts, the monk added, “You couldn’t have saved him. His neck was broken.”
Grant broke eye contact. He didn’t find comfort in the information. To distract his thoughts, he glanced around at his spartan surroundings.
“Is this some kind of hospital?”
“My apprentice and I found you lying on the riverbank about a mile from here,” the elder monk replied. “We carried you to the closest building where we could provide help—to the Punakha Dzong.”
The leftover haze vanished from Grant’s mind. The Punakha Dzong was his next stop. He remembered driving past the imposing five-hundred-year-old fortress rising from the peninsula where the Mo Chhu and the Pho Chhu joined. Constructed in traditional Bhutanese style, its massive inward-sloping walls of whitewashed stone starkly contrasted with the intricately carved and painted wood molding around the windows and doors—in the same style as the painted door to his room, he realized. A colorful cornice anchored the pagoda-style roof.
He recalled Dasho’s explanation that although the dzongs were originally forts built to protect the country from invaders who crossed the imposing Himalayan range and attacked from neighboring Tibet or India, today they served a dual purpose: to house both the local government offices and the country’s Buddhist monasteries. Evaluating the furnishings in his room, Grant guessed that he must be in the living quarters of the monastery.
The monk who spoke English so well held out his hand. “I am Kinley Goenpo, the senior monk here during the summer season, and this is my student, Jigme.” Jigme bowed from the waist but remained silent.
“Grant Matthews. Thanks so much for rescuing me, but ...” Grant struggled for the right way to express his concern. “Shouldn’t I go to a hospital—have a surgeon x-ray my leg?” He again drummed his fingers on the gray plaster.
The doctor shook his head. “Kinley and I debated the idea of moving you, but the nearest hospital is in our capital city, Thimpu, a three-hour drive over the mountains. My little office in town wouldn’t provide you any more help than I can offer you in this room. Fortunately, your leg sustained a clean break, though a severe one. If you stay off it for the next six weeks, it should heal nicely. You’ll go home with just a scar as a souvenir of your adventure.”
“Six weeks?” Grant felt the blood drain from his already pallid face. He still had many monasteries to investigate, and then he had to be back at school in ten days. His palms began to sweat.
Karma shook his head. “Any movement before your leg stabilizes risks permanent disability.”
“I shouldn’t have even gone kayaking,” Grant mumbled, feeling sorry for himself and guilty for his role in Dasho’s death. Grant glared at his cast as if the sheer force of his gaze would fuse his bones together. His original plan had been to spend just an hour or so in this monastery, to let his guide ask the monks some questions, and then move on if the legend about a boy named Issa didn’t ring any bells.
Kinley lowered himself to the edge of Grant’s bed. “I understand your frustration. We will work with you to make your stay as comfortable as possible.”
Grant craned his neck to search the room. “Did you find my stuff? I had a dry bag in my kayak—my credit cards and cell phone.”
“My brothers who found your guide’s body also found your kayak,” Kinley replied. “It was empty.”
Even though the room was cool from the September breeze flowing through the open window, Grant felt flushed with heat. He pushed the quilted blanket covering his torso to his waist so that he could breathe more easily. He looked down to find that he was wearing an off-white cotton shirt; the monks must have dressed him. The material was coarse, and Grant felt it start to scratch his skin.
“Can you lend me a phone? I need to call my professor and let him know what’s happened.” He owed his mentor so much. Grant refused to worry, much less disappoint him. Billingsly had gone to bat for him with the Emory admissions committee. He still recalled his professor’s words verbatim from seven years ago: “Grant has one of the best analytical minds I’ve seen. Harvard was foolish to reject him because of that incident.”
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