The Book of Lost Fragrances

Three

NANJING, CHINA

TUESDAY, MAY 10, 9:05 P.M.

The young monk bowed his head for a moment, as if in prayer, and then lit a wooden match. His stillness and calm were almost beatific, a moment of profound inner peace. His expression hardly changed, even as he touched the lit match to his ceremonial dress, doused in kerosene. Flames, the same color as his saffron robe, engulfed him.

Xie Ping turned away from the website and looked into Cali Fong’s eyes, not surprised to see them bright with tears.

“It’s an outrage,” she whispered, her lower lip trembling. At just under five feet tall, twenty-three-year-old Cali could pass for a teenager. She seemed the most unlikely creator of her sophisticated, oversize paintings-sometimes twenty feet tall. And the passion with which she discussed human rights and artistic freedom likewise belied her tiny frame. Someone that outspoken wasn’t Xie’s smartest choice for a close friend, but he’d decided long ago that avoiding the relationship would be just as suspect as entering into it.

“You should get off the computer,” Xie said. “And don’t cry, please. Not in public.”

Although many students and teachers were discussing their feelings about the newest spate of unrest in Tibet, it could be especially dangerous for him to attract attention.

“But this is important, and-”

“Cali, I need to get back,” he said, trying to focus her. “I have a project due and am going to have to work half the night as it is. Why don’t you wipe your browser now so we can go?”

Every PC bought in China came with preinstalled Web-blocking software to ensure no one could visit the BBC, Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia, and blogger sites. The government claimed that the effort was instituted to ban pornography, but everyone knew it was to stop the public from getting news about democracy, Tibet or members of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement. Surfing politically subversive or pornographic websites was a crime, as was taking advantage of any of the ways around the internet policing.

Ways that Cali had become expert at. While she erased her history, Xie closed his eyes and traveled inside his mind to find a place of stillness and silently intoned a mantra that he’d learned when he was just six years old.

Om mani padme hum.

He did this slowly, four times, and the bustle of the internet café disappeared for the few seconds Xie allowed himself. He was more shaken up by the footage than he could afford to show Cali or-worse-anyone else who might be watching.

Cali touched his arm and brought him back to the present. “How much more tragic is this going to get before the international agencies step in?”

“They can’t step in. There are too many financial ramifications. They all owe us too much money. China holds everyone hostage.” Xie sounded rational. He felt anything but. The travesty playing itself out in his homeland was exacerbating daily. It was time to get involved. He had no choice. Not any longer. No more hiding. No matter how hard the path ahead would be. No matter how dangerous.

Through the window, he spied a group of police in blue drab headed their way. There were regular crackdowns and searches for subversives, and he didn’t want to get caught in one. “Let’s go,” he said, standing.

“Already in the last six days, a hundred and three monks have set themselves on fire.”

“I know, Cali. I know. Let’s go.”

“A hundred and three monks,” she repeated, not being able to process the number.

He grabbed her arm. “We have to go.”

As they walked out the door, the four policemen he’d seen from the window crossed the street and headed toward the café. Safely clear of the threat, Cali asked the question that Xie had been thinking but wouldn’t voice. “How is any of this going to help that poor little boy? Will anyone ever find him? Why crack down on Order Number Five now? Didn’t they know it would just stir up more trouble? And how could they be so obvious about how they handled it? How dangerous can one little boy be?”

“When it’s a little boy like Kim? Very dangerous.”

Order Number Five was a regulation that came into effect in 2007 and gave the government the right to regulate the reincarnation of living Buddhas by requiring everyone to register in order to be reincarnated.

Approving incarnations was not the endgame. Disallowing incarnations that interfered with China’s oppression of Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism was. The order required that “living Buddha permits” be registered with the state and at the same time banned any incarnations from taking place in certain delineated regions. Not surprisingly, the two most holy cities in Tibet, Xingjiang and Lhasa, were on that list.

Xie remembered his grandfather telling him about hearing the news when the present Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism and head of state, had been identified in 1937. The toddler had been only two years old when he was found by a search party looking for the reincarnation of the thirteenth Lama, Thubten Gyatso, who had been Dalai from 1879, when he was three, until he died in 1933.

Their first clue as to the whereabouts of the child came to light when the head of the embalmed lama’s body turned. The corpse that had faced south was suddenly facing northeast.

Next a senior lama saw a vision of buildings and letters in the reflection of a sacred lake. These hints led them to a specific monastery in the Amdo region where monks helped them find the child.

And then they administered the final test used to reveal the veracity of a possible reincarnate: a group of objects, some belonging to the dead lama, some not, were given to the boy.

“This is mine, it’s mine,” he said as he selected only the relics that had belonged to the dead lama, ignoring the others. First prayer beads, then the dead leader’s glasses.

Thirteen years later, in 1950, the Communist Party of China invaded Tibet and took control of the government. Nine years after that, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, still only twenty-four years old, fled his homeland to live in exile in India. Since then-more than fifty years later-the unresolved conflict had grown more violent. This latest incident had led to a spate of aggravated restlessness and brutality.

The action that had sparked this newest and tragic rebellion had occurred in Lhasa two weeks ago, when a three-year-old child went missing twenty-four hours after being identified as an incarnated lama.

Since then, there had been rioting in the streets of all of Tibet’s cities, and heavy-handed and merciless police tactics had pushed the situation into a full-scale crisis more violent than any since the horrific protests and killings during the 2008 Olympics.

“This is the same thing that happened before, isn’t it?” Cali asked.

“Yes, almost exactly.”

More than twenty years before, days after a four-year-old Tibetan child was identified as the new Panchen Lama, the boy, along with his entire family, had disappeared.

For hundreds of years, the Panchen Lama helped to identify the next Dalai Lama. The Chinese government still officially claimed that boy was alive and well and was working as an engineer in Beijing. Unofficially, most people assumed that he’d been killed. Only a few held out hope that, one day, he’d resurface.

The two friends were quiet as they walked the last few blocks back to the Nanjing Arts Institute, where both were graduate students and teaching assistants.

At the entrance to the building, Xie kissed Cali good-bye on the cheek. “I’ll see you tomorrow?”

She nodded.

He took her arm gently, speaking in a low and determined voice. “I know how upset you are, but please don’t talk to anyone about what you saw. It’s dangerous, and I want you to stay safe.”

“I wish you were just a little bit brave.”

There was so much he wanted to say. Of all the sacrifices required of him, none made him ache more than not being able to explain the truth to Cali.

“I need you to stay safe,” he repeated.