The Second Language

This is an original story, written for this site. It is fiction, not a teaching or a traditional account. Tsomo, her grandmother, her cousin and their family are invented, and so are the signs they make: they are one family's private invention, not an official sign-language version of the prayer.

Lips

Every morning of her life, in the apartment in El Cerrito, on the east side of San Francisco Bay, Tsomo had watched someone's lips move at the shrine shelf. First her mother's. Since last autumn, when her grandmother came from Dharamsala in India to live with them, Kunsang's.

Tsomo was fifteen and Deaf. American Sign Language was her first language. She had signed since she was tiny, with Deaf friends whose hands moved faster than most people talk. She did not think of herself as missing something. She thought of herself as someone whose family was still catching up.

Her mother signed well; she had taken classes when Tsomo was a baby. Her father signed enough to argue about curfew. At dinner the Tibetan went back and forth over Tsomo's head like weather.

And every morning Kunsang stood at the shelf, with its little brass water bowls and its folded white scarf, and her lips moved. That was the prayer. Her mother had once fingerspelled its name, letter by letter: the Seven-Line Prayer to Guru Rinpoche, the eighth-century teacher Tibetans remember for bringing Buddhism to their country. That was all Tsomo knew.

Two taps

Kunsang was seventy-four, small, with a long grey braid, a striped apron and almost no English. For months she called Tsomo's name across the kitchen, louder each time, the way hearing people do. Tsomo, reading at the counter, did not turn round.

In June her cousin Lhundup came to stay for the summer. He was sixteen, hearing, and had taken one year of ASL, which he believed made him fluent. On his first day he taught their grandmother the Deaf ways to get attention: two taps on the shoulder, a wave where Tsomo could see it, a flick of the light switch. Kunsang took to the light switch with alarming enthusiasm.

It was Lhundup she told, in Tibetan, one afternoon. “My mother gave me this prayer when I was a girl. I want to give it to Tsomo.” Lhundup said, carefully, that Tsomo could not hear it. “Not the sounds,” said Kunsang. “The prayer.”

The interpreter

So the three of them sat down at the kitchen table, and Lhundup interpreted. That is a generous word for it. Kunsang spoke Tibetan; Lhundup turned it into English in his head, and then into an ASL of his own, with his tongue between his teeth.

He fingerspelled G-U-R-U and lost his place in R-I-N-P-O-C-H-E. At the fifth line, which pictures Guru Rinpoche surrounded by a great gathering of dakinis, he asked his grandmother what dakinis were. “Sky-goers,” she said; that is how the Tibetan word, khandro, is often explained. Lhundup signed AIRPLANE, then PEOPLE.

Tsomo laughed until she had to put her head on the table. Then she sat up and signed to him slowly, so he could keep up: “Stop translating words. Ask her what she sees.”

The lotus

Kunsang, it turned out, saw everything. Each line held a picture, and she had been looking at those pictures for seventy years.

The second line is about a lotus: Guru Rinpoche, the prayer says, was born in the heart of one. Kunsang cupped her two hands into a bud and opened them. Tsomo knew ASL had a sign for lotus already, but this was not going to be ASL. It was going to be theirs. She held her left hand flat, like the surface of a lake, pushed her right hand up through it as a bud and let it open. Kunsang copied her. Then Kunsang opened it more slowly, and Tsomo copied that.

Linguists use the term home sign for the gesture systems a deaf child invents when no one around signs at all. This was not that. Tsomo already had a whole language. What they were making was smaller: a few kitchen signs, belonging to one kitchen, for one prayer.

She looked up whether Tibetans have a sign language. They do: in Lhasa, from 2001, members of the local Deaf club shaped a standard Tibetan Sign Language, mostly from the signing already used in the city. It is its own language, no more related to spoken Tibetan than ASL is to English. She did not know its sign for lotus. She added it to her list of things to find out.

The far land

The first line names the land Guru Rinpoche came from, Oddiyana, and its north-west. Kunsang pointed north-west from the kitchen. Lhundup checked his phone. “That’s basically Marin,” he said. Kunsang said it was not about Marin.

So one evening in July they climbed the hill behind the apartments, through dry gold grass, and practised pointing far. Tsomo's version won: a point that kept travelling, past the bay, past the fog, over the edge of the world.

A name for him

The fourth line gives his name: Padmasambhava, the Lotus-Born. Lhundup fingerspelled it, all thirteen letters. He reached the B and gave up.

In the Deaf community, Tsomo told them, you do not choose your own name sign. Deaf people give it, and the community agrees to it; until then your name is spelled out letter by letter. Even famous hearing people get name signs. “So he needs one,” she signed.

She built it from their lotus: the bud rising through the water-hand and opening, then the open hand lifting a little, as if to say, this one, the one who came from it. Kunsang asked whether a person may give Guru Rinpoche a name. In my world, Tsomo signed, everyone important gets one. Kunsang thought about it. In hers, she said, he had many names already. One more would not hurt.

The gathering

For the fifth line they kept the sky-goers and dropped the airplane. Tsomo's hands fluttered, fingers loose, and circled the open lotus like birds round a tree. At dinner she showed her parents. Her father tried it and knocked over the soy sauce. Her mother signed “Again,” and watched Tsomo's hands and then her face, because in ASL the eyebrows and the face carry grammar too.

Following

The sixth line is the wish to follow in his footsteps. ASL has a perfectly good sign for following. Kunsang wanted footprints. So on Sunday mornings they walked the greenway under the elevated train tracks, Tsomo in front and Kunsang behind, stepping where she stepped. Tsomo walked fast. Kunsang said she was following, but not that much.

The sign they made was two fingers walking across a palm, and then two more walking in their steps.

The request

The last line asks Guru Rinpoche to come and bless. Kunsang's gesture for it was the one grandmothers everywhere use to call a child in for dinner: the palm, beckoning. Tsomo added one thing. After the beckoning, both hands came to rest flat on the chest. Come. Here.

The one that got away

The third line would not be caught. It says he gained a wondrous, supreme accomplishment, which the tradition understands as enlightenment itself. Kunsang tried a lotus that kept on opening. Lhundup suggested a gamer's fist pump and was overruled. Tsomo tried a hand rising past the top of her head and did not like it.

On Kunsang's sheet of drawings, between the lotus and the name, Tsomo drew an empty square. “Later,” she signed.

August

Late in August, on a grey morning, Tsomo got up early. Kunsang was at the shelf. Lhundup was asleep on the sofa with one foot on the floor.

Tsomo went and stood beside her grandmother. Kunsang looked at her, and began: aloud, for herself, and with her hands, for Tsomo. Tsomo signed with her. Kunsang's hands were slower. At the far land she forgot to keep going and stopped at the window, and Tsomo waited. At the empty third line they both paused. Kunsang shrugged, and they went on.

Tsomo heard nothing. Nothing happened to her ears, and she did not want it to. She saw the prayer, the way she had always seen it; only now she could see what it said, in hands that were partly her grandmother's and partly her own.

Two taps, again

Lhundup went home in September, signing goodbye with two mistakes in it. That week Tsomo gave her grandmother a name sign: the letter K from the manual alphabet, for Kunsang, tapped twice on the shoulder, the way Kunsang had learned to call her. She checked it with her Deaf friends that evening on a video call, as you are supposed to. They approved.

Kunsang practised it all week, mostly on the wrong shoulder.

The third line still has no sign. Every Sunday Kunsang tries a new one. Tsomo watches closely, shakes her head and signs, “Not yet.” Neither of them seems in any hurry.