The Dalai Lama's Cat and the Power of Meow Read Online Free PDF Page B

expression in my sapphire-blue eyes.
    What was the big deal? Hadn’t anyone seen a cat drink water before?

    Later that afternoon I decided to get away from Namgyal Monastery and the chaos of all the TV people with their lights and cameras and endless, snaking cables. Instead I took myself off to another one of my favorite places, first introduced to me by Serena. It had come to have a personal significance much deeper than I would ever have imagined: the Downward Dog School of Yoga.
    Perched on a hillside a short distance away, the studio directly overlooked the Himalayas. It had become something of a ritual for me to take my place on a wooden stool at the back of the late-afternoon class and watch the students, silhouetted against that spectacular backdrop, as they progressed through their sequence of stretches. Afterward, feeling more settled, they would step out the sliding doors onto a broad and spacious balcony. They’d gather around their teacher, the tanned and timeless Ludo, whose silvering, close-cropped hair and faint German accent gave him the air of a guru.
    In the falling twilight green tea and conversation would flow freely, and up above us the icy peaks of the Himalayas would change color from molten gold to burnished red to faint pink—the same color as the frosting of Mrs. Trinci’s cupcakes. All this was exactly the kind of gentle ritual that appeals to us cats.
    It was at the Downward Dog School of Yoga that I had first met Sid, the handsome and enigmatic Indian man who had won Serena’s affections. It was here, too, that I had noticed a small, black-and-white photograph of a Lhasa apso hanging on the wall. I had guessed it was probably the particular dog after which the studio had been named. I never imagined that it had anything to do with me.
    Some months ago, I had had the most vivid dream of my life. In my dream I watched a much younger version of the Dalai Lama enter his rooms at the Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet. There had been a sense of danger and haste. His Holiness came over to me and, picking me up, explained that he had to leave Tibet because the Red Army was bearing down on Lhasa. He would hand me over, for safekeeping, to Khandro-la, a Tibetan lady accompanying him who had a kind but fearless face. He promised to find me again—if not in that lifetime then definitely in a future one.
    It had been a dream truly startling in its implications. The most shocking of which, dear reader, was that in it I was a dog.
    Yes—really! A Lhasa apso , to be precise.
    Because the quality of the dream was so abnormally clear and in it I had felt so normal, I never doubted the truth of it. Indeed, its veracity was soon confirmed by a subsequent event. When His Holiness was asked to officiate the reopening of the Downward Dog School of Yoga—it had been closed for repairs from a minor fire—he caught sight of me on my wooden stool at the back of the class. He glanced up at the faded photograph of the Lhasa apso.
    Turning to yoga teacher Ludo, eyes twinkling, he said, “I’m so pleased she has found her way back to you.”
    It seemed that I had made the journey from Tibet to India during my life as a dog, and that Ludo had played an important part in taking care of me. Why not the Dalai Lama? Where had he been when I reached Dharamsala? Had His Holiness fulfilled his promise in the way he found me again in this lifetime?
    Questions, so many questions. But also a recognition that has stayed strongly with me ever since that revelation: Be careful not to heed even your most instinctive hatred of other kinds of beings, dear reader. You were almost certainly one of them in a previous lifetime.

    This evening’s class followed the reassuringly similar pattern of stretching and self-discovery as most previous evenings’. All the usual people were there, including my friends Serena and Sid, on their mats directly in front of me. Ludo talked through a sequence of