Paro, Bhutan

She is seventy-six years old, but looks older. Her name is Tsherine. She is dressed in a maroon kira, Bhutan’s national dress, that is ragged and bleached by the sun. Her grey hair has been cut very short and looks oddly modern in her surroundings for she sits outside the ancient temple of Pana Lhakhang in Paro, beneath the shade of a bodi tree. She has spent every day for the past nine years sitting in this spot, beneath the tree of Buddha’s enlightenment, on a small square wooden platform, surrounded by a swarm of flies that land lazily on her arms, her hands, her face, the only exposed parts of her body. She does not brush them away.

A pile of mustard leaves lies in her lap. Occasionally she picks up a handful in her left hand, scoops the leaves in her palm and ritually filters them through her fingers. Her right hand pulls on the worn rope that turns the prayer wheel next to her in a clockwise direction, around and around all day long. It whirls. The sound of it fills the air.

As she sits she recites silently to herself the Mani prayer, the words spoken by Chenresig, the God of Compassion. She recites this prayer ten thousand times each day, keeping count on the wooden beads that hang around her wrinkled neck. She has spent the past three thousand, two hundred and eighty five days reciting this prayer. Nearly thirty three million prayers has she uttered, over and over, hour after passing hour.

“Om-Ma-Ni-Ped-May-hu,” she whispers, rocking slightly back and forth on her hard wooden seat. “Om-Ma-Ni-Ped-May-hu,” again and again, trying to make amends for the past wrongs she has done, trying to climb closer on the path to enlightenment.

As I walk past I give her the betel nut leaves that I brought in Paro earlier that morning. She takes them with a sweet broad smile that creases up her eyes, gripping the leaves in her hand as if they were pieces of gold. She puts one in her mouth and begins to chew, slow cow-chew motions that match the rhythm of her prayre.

Before she came to the temple Tsherine was a farmer. She came from a village near Punakha in the centre of Bhutan, more than a day’s walk from the nearest road. She tended goats, cows, grew her own vegetables, her own corn. Nine years ago she came to Pana Lhakhang to pray. It was a pilgrimage. A pilgrimage that was meant to last two weeks. But whilst here she fell and broke her leg. She has been here every since, stuck, unable to get home. Everything happens for a reason, she believes. This is the life that was chosen for her, the path she was meant to take. So she lives now in a small one roomed stone hut at the bottom of the garden of a nearby house that smells of damp and the vegetables that used to inhabit it, and every morning she sets off, propped up by a wooden crutch, down the stony path to her prayer wheel.

The sun is low in the sky by the time I have looked around the temple and Tsherine is heaving herself up off the wooden platform. Her teeth and mouth are stained red from the betel nut leaves. She smiles as I pass, bright eyed and creased with lines, nodding thanks once again as she slips into the pale blue sandals that were given to her by a kindly neighbour. She grabs hold of her crutch, leaning against it, her arms shaking with the effort to move slowly forwards, one step at a time. Her bent back stoops low, stiff from her day’s praying. I watch her hobble off, shuffling across the uneven stone flags and disappearing around the side of the temple. She will return again at dawn the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that. She will return every day, till death prevents it and only then will she know what her prayers have amounted to.

The Prayer Wheel

The Odd Couple