Beautiful Ghosts Read Online Free Page A

girl, her glee disappeared. She motioned the girl back toward Surya and the younger chanter.
    But as Shan retreated several steps, the girl followed him. He lowered himself onto a rock and after a moment’s hesitation the girl sat beside him.
    “Is it all right?” she asked him in a timid voice. She had switched to Chinese.
    “All right?” Shan replied in Tibetan.
    “May they do this?”
    Suddenly Shan could not bear to look into the girl’s face. When he did not answer the girl began to nervously wipe the flour dust from her cheeks.
    He reached out and gently pushed her arm down. “They did not have to ask me.”
    “You’re Chinese.”
    He recalled a day five years earlier when soldiers had heaved him from a truck into the gulag compound near Lhadrung. He had lain facedown in the cold mud, semiconscious, not knowing where he was, bleeding from one ear, pain spiking from his arms and belly where electroshock clips had been fastened, his eyes and mind struggling to focus because of the interrogation drugs still in his system. “From this day forward, your pain will subside,” a quiet voice had suddenly whispered, and Shan had forced his eyes open to gaze into the serene face of an old Tibetan who, Shan soon learned, was a lama in his fourth decade of imprisonment. “In all your life it will not be so bad again,” the lama explained as he had helped Shan to his feet. But during the year since his release Shan had discovered a new pain that not even the lamas could cure, an agony of guilt that could be triggered by the innocent question of a young girl.
    He put his hand on the girl’s arm to stop her. “I wish the Dalai Lama was with his people,” Shan said in a near whisper. “I wish him a long life.”
    “You mean you’re Buddhist?”
    A bowl of buttered tea was thrust over Shan’s shoulder.
    “Something like that.” Lokesh chuckled and squatted before them, sipping a second bowl. “When I was young,” he continued, gazing solemnly at the girl, “my mother would take me deep into the mountains to see old suspension bridges over bottomless chasms. The bridges connected us to the outside world. No one knew how they were made or what held them up. They seemed impossible to build. When I asked, my mother said they were just there, because we needed them. That is our Shan.”
    “But is it all right?” the girl asked Shan again in her meek, earnest tone.
    “What is your name?” Shan asked.
    “Dawa. My father is a model worker in a Chinese factory,” she added quickly. “He saved all year to be able to send me here. He could afford only the bus fare for me. I have never been out of the city.” Shan glanced at Lokesh. Listen to the little girl, Surya had said as if in warning. But Dawa did not even know Tibet.
    “Dawa, I want it to be all right. Do you want it to be?” Was that Surya’s point, Shan wondered, that they could only understand the day’s strange events by looking on them as an outsider?
    The girl shyly nodded, searching Shan’s face. “How can a Chinese do such things?” she asked. “Be a bridge. Does he mean you are part Tibetan?”
    “Other Chinese put me in prison, not because I committed a crime but because they feared I would tell the truth. I wanted to die then. I was going to die. But Lokesh and others like him taught me how to live again.”
    The girl seemed unconvinced. Shan lifted a jar of flour and extended it toward her. She slowly shifted her gaze to the jar and then, her fingers trembling, she pulled some flour from it. A shiver of excitement seemed to course through her, then she threw the flour over their heads and solemnly studied it as it drifted downward. “I saw where they go. I think I know the way to the hidden land,” she declared uncertainly, looking at Surya, who had risen from his seat beside the younger chanter and was now moving across the yard in a slow, graceful gait.
    Shan looked at her, not understanding, then watched as the girl followed the monk