The Night Before Losar

This is an original story, written for this site. It is fiction, not a teaching or a traditional account. The family, their flat and everyone in it are invented.

The week before

Yangdon had been cleaning for a week. She was seventy-nine, and her flat on the fourth floor of an old block above the river in Zurich was already the cleanest flat in the building. But it was nearly Losar, the Tibetan New Year, and the dust of the old year has to be gone before the new one comes in.

She had come to Switzerland in 1964, at seventeen, among the first thousand or so Tibetan refugees the country took in, and worked in a metalware factory in the Töss valley. She married Gyaltsen in Zurich and raised two children, who now lived in London and Sydney.

Tibetan families close the old year on the twenty-ninth day of the twelfth month with a special soup, and spend the thirtieth getting ready for the new one. Households disagree about which is the great cleaning day. In Yangdon’s flat it was both.

New work

By the afternoon of the twenty-ninth, most of the family had arrived. Lhakyi, seventeen, had flown in alone from Sydney and was awake at all the wrong hours; her father could not get away from work. Kalsang, forty-six, had come from London with her son Kunga, sixteen, and was on a work call in the hallway with a finger in her other ear.

Yangdon stood on a stepladder, wiping the top of a wardrobe that had been wiped on Tuesday. Gyaltsen, eighty-two, had taken refuge on the balcony, in February. Tibetans joke that Losar is not the new year but the new work. Nobody in the flat was laughing.

“Ama-la, it’s clean,” said Kalsang between calls, using the respectful word for mother. “You could eat off it.” “Nobody eats off a wardrobe,” said her mother, and moved on to the lampshades.

The guest

At six the buzzer went. It was Iain, from Edinburgh, Kalsang’s partner of two years, meeting her family for the first time.

He had practised the Losar greeting on the plane. “Tashi delek!” he said at the door. Yangdon put a white khata, the silk scarf Tibetans give in welcome, round his neck, and told him kindly that the new year was the day after tomorrow. “It is fine for today too,” said Gyaltsen from the balcony door. “It is fine for every day.”

He had brought yellow tulips and a tin of shortbread, and he took his shoes off before anyone asked. This was noticed.

Guthuk

Supper was guthuk, the soup Tibetan families eat once a year, on the night of the twenty-ninth. Gu means nine, for the date and for the ingredients; thuk is noodle soup. Yangdon’s had beef, white radish, dried cheese, peas, spinach and little shell-shaped noodles pinched by hand.

“So this is the night before Losar,” said Iain. “The night before the night before,” said Lhakyi.

In every bowl sat one big dough ball with something hidden inside, a joke about the finder’s character. Every household has its own list. In this one, wool meant a kind heart, salt laziness, chilli a sharp tongue, the sun good fortune, and charcoal a black heart.

Kunga got salt and accepted it as fair. Lhakyi got chilli and said this was slander, at length, which proved it. Kalsang got the sun, and checked her phone under the table. Gyaltsen, who had not raised his voice in fifty years, got charcoal, and laughed until he had to take his glasses off. Iain opened his slowly and found a tuft of white wool.

There was a bowl for Rinchen in Sydney too, because someone absent still gets a share. Lhakyi broke it open: a thread wound outwards, for a person who lets money slip through his fingers. She phoned him, at six in the morning his time, to tell him. He had bought a kayak in January.

Don’t look back

Then Gyaltsen shaped a little figure from tsampa, roasted barley flour, and set it in a cracked old bowl that would be thrown away at the end of the night. This is the lue, a small effigy that comes to stand for everything a household would rather leave in the old year.

Everyone squeezed a lump of dough in their fist and pressed it wherever it hurt. Gyaltsen did his knee. Kalsang did her neck. Lhakyi did her whole head. Iain did his shoulder, which had carried two suitcases up four floors because the lift holds one person and a coat.

The dough went into the bowl with the last of everyone’s soup and a tea light. Gyaltsen went through every room calling anything unwanted to come out, with a candle instead of a straw torch, because of the smoke alarms.

Kunga and Iain carried the bowl to the corner by the tram stop. You set it down at the crossing and walk home without looking back, so whatever is following gets lost. They did not look back. Ten minutes later Yangdon sent Kunga down again to put it in the bin, because this was Zurich. He went without complaining. Kalsang noticed, and said nothing.

The last day

The thirtieth was the last day of the year, and the day for filling things, so that the new year begins full: the rice tin, the flour tin, the water jugs. Yangdon also filled the watering can. Lhakyi and Kunga beat the rugs on the balcony, the lake grey below the roofs and the Alps sharp and white along the sky.

In the afternoon came the khapse, the fried pastries of Losar, and the small frictions came out with the hot oil. Kalsang said Kunga would have more Tibetan if his grandmother spoke it to him on the phone instead of German. Yangdon said Kalsang had answered her in German since she was eight, in front of her teachers.

Kunga, twisting dough into the long loops called donkey ears, said quietly that he was right here. Iain, who had been given the same job, made a donkey ear that looked like a pretzel. Yangdon put it in the oil anyway.

By evening the shrine was ready. On the shelf stood the chemar bo, a painted box heaped with tsampa and butter on one side and barley grains on the other, crowned with ears of barley. Beside it were khapse, the tulips, and Iain’s shortbread on its own white plate. Yangdon had put it there without a word.

One in the morning

Everyone went to bed tired and a little cross, the way families do the night before a holiday. At about one, Yangdon got up, as she often did now, sat on the low cushion by the shrine in her dressing gown, and began the Seven-Line Prayer under her breath.

It is a short prayer to Guru Rinpoche, the eighth-century teacher Tibetans remember for helping Buddhism take root in their country. She had said it as a child in Tibet, in a refugee hostel, and in this flat for fifty years. She said it the way you check the door is locked.

Lhakyi was awake, because Sydney was. She came in with a blanket, sat on the rug, and said nothing. She knew the first line and the tune of the rest, from years of her grandmother’s phone calls, so she hummed.

Gyaltsen came next, slowly, because of the knee, took the armchair, and joined in half a line behind, in his deep voice. Kalsang came to tell them all to go to bed, stood in the doorway, and after a while sat on the arm of the sofa. She had known the words at eight. At the fifth line she lost her place, and her father carried her across it.

Kunga appeared in his hoodie and sat down by his cousin. He did not know them. He listened to the words come round again, and again. Iain sat at the edge of the rug with a cup of tea going cold. Nobody told him what to do, so he did nothing, very carefully, which seemed to be right.

A gathering

Later, in the kitchen, Iain asked about the line where her father had caught her. Kalsang thought. “It says he’s surrounded,” she said. “By a great crowd of dakinis.” In Tibetan Buddhism dakinis are female embodiments of enlightened energy; the word is usually explained as “sky-goer”. “He’s never on his own in it. There’s always a whole gathering round him.”

Iain looked through the doorway: one grandmother, one grandfather with a bad knee, two teenagers under a blanket, a laptop closed on the sofa. “It isn’t about us,” Kalsang said, before he could. “It just felt a bit like it tonight.”

Losar

Nothing was mended. In the morning Kalsang and her mother argued about whether a hoover counts as a broom, since nobody sweeps on the first day of Losar. Kunga asked, on his way past, whether his grandmother would do “the night one” again some time. She said some time was fine.

Iain was up first after Yangdon. He found her on the balcony with her tea, the snowy roofs going pink, and said “Losar tashi delek”, on the right day this time. She said it back, and told him the shortbread had looked very good on the shrine.