The Tibetan: Tashi གཉིས 2

The faceless guards led me through a series of dark, narrow, bending hallways and brought me to another cell, another icebox. It had lights overhead. They were golden and intensely bright lights. They were lights like spotlights on a stage.

In the cell were 15 other men, all Tibetans, except for one Chinese, who appeared mute or deaf and was missing about half his left arm.

We weren’t allowed to speak. And we didn’t want to, either. A bird-faced jailer sat on a plastic stool, staring at us from the shadows, behind the harsh light. He’d sit pensively, somewhere behind the cell, and would emerge, with a truncheon, and rattle at the bars if anyone spoke. Another jailer, also with enraged eyes, brought us our food, and, in the evenings, wheeled in a TV, that we were required to watch. It’d show Chinese state propaganda, generally news, documentaries, and sometimes soap operas of happy Han families.

We slept on the floor. We used a bucket in the corner for piss and shit. There was one small, grimy sink, with a single cold-water tap, next to the bucket for washing. We were fed twice daily, a small bowl of rice and a bowl of clear soup with a chunk or two of pork fat and slice or two of cabbage.

I was there a while. I wouldn’t find out how long until I left. The days and nights, time, became irrelevant. There was no window in the cell, no clock, and the lights were kept on 24/7, so time didn’t really exist there.

In that deathly, luminous cell, we all just sat staring at the gray wall. Since I thought I might be sentenced to death, my thoughts, at first, were of my next life, where I’d be, who’d I’d be, what I’d be, and how much karma I’d earned and how I might be reincarnated.

But then my thinking turned to fear, wondering what I’d be charged with, what my “crime” could possibly be. I worried about being sent to one of the worst labor camps. I feared never seeing my family again.

It sounds horrible. I sound like a monster when I say it, but I actually didn’t think too much of my family during this ordeal. Firstly, because it was too painful. Secondly, though, because I thought, perhaps, that they’d turned me in, for whatever my crime was, and that hurt so much more.

Thinking, about anything, became too difficult, so I stopped. I stopped my mind from racing, from conjecture, and I accepted karma. I began to silently recite Buddhist mantras, over and over, and I’d meditate, revisit the calm of dreamless sleep...

Eventually, the faceless men in turtle helmets returned, took me to another room, in another part of the jail. This room actually had a window, and I saw the sun for the first time in ages. The sun! The glorious sun! Its yellowy light pouring into the room, like the aura of a deity.

Sitting down to a hard metal chair, I was not strapped in or bound, but my back and shoulders still ached, from the first day’s beating, and from sleeping on the cold concrete floor. But I could feel the beautiful, merciful touch of the sun’s rays, shining in from that window, and the sunlight tickled and warmed me and brought me back to life, and I shifted my weight toward its glow, like a flower.