On the Rituals of My Grandmother’s Tibetan Buddhist Funeral

“On a winter afternoon in 2004, I landed at a tiny airport north of Calcutta and began the sad journey into the Himalayas for my grandmother’s funeral. The taxi driver sped up the winding road that I’d first traveled over forty years earlier on my mother’s lap, when I was a small girl and visiting Darjeeling with my parents. Now I gazed out at the familiar tea gardens and villages, the dense forests of bamboo and palms and wild orchids.

Soon the car was enveloped in swirling mist, all coming and going as in dreamtime: a wizened man standing outside a cottage holding a sickle, monkeys scampering by the roadside, prayer flags fluttering over a gorge, four lamas walking single file down a dirt path, their robes vermilion in the gloom…”

Read the excerpt here.