Kingdom Read Free

cried out in agony and collapsed to the floor. Silence hung over the courtyard.
    Then the officer spoke, and Dorgen Trungpa realized with a dull sense of dread that he was addressing him.
    ‘So, boy, now that you have seen that justice is done, even in places such as Pemako that are far from Beijing, perhaps you can still be saved from the grip of these evil and insane old men. You are still young. Let us see . . .’
    He turned towards the broken gates and shouted an order. Dorgen Trungpa gritted his teeth and cried out in rage and desolation. Two soldiers were dragging a young peasant girl along. She was the daughter of the village’s biggest landowner. She was in her late teens, a beautiful girl, now emitting low moans of terror and struggling weakly against her captors. They marched her up to the young monk. The officer barked another order. The two soldiers holding her ripped off her clothes. Dorgen Trungpa averted his gaze from her naked form, as the soldiers held her upright before him.
    ‘Now, monk, let’s see you act like a real man. I order you to have sex with this peasant girl.’
    The light had gone out in Dorgen Trungpa’s eyes. Nothing in his eighteen years of life had prepared him for this. All he knew was the round of monastery ceremonies, the weeks of prayer and fasting and meditation, the festivals in the village and the order of a life maintained in unison with the forces of the universe. His breath came in short desperate gasps as the soldiers picked him up and thrust him towards the equally terrified girl. He would not look at her nakedness but he could hear her desperate low moans, like a dying animal. The officer shouted encouragement in a sardonic voice.
    ‘Come on, boy! Forget the lies of these evil old men. Vows of celibacy are nonsense. You have been brainwashed, that is all . . . Now my patience is running out . . . I order you to have sex with this girl and when you have finished you will set fire to the monastery library.’
    Before the monk’s eyes, all the horrors that The Tibetan Book of the Dead had described to him in rich detail seemed to be coming true: the soul afflicted by awful demons and unspeakable pain at the point of death. But this was life, an unspeakable sort of life, a life Dorgen Trungpa had no powers to comprehend. And he closed his eyes, calmed his breathing and tried, against all the odds, to free his mind.

2
    It was daytime. That was all that Nancy Kelly knew. Where she was, or what time it was, she couldn’t remember. The banging noise started again. Above her head an enormous fan hung from the ceiling, its giant blades turning morosely but failing to generate even the slightest whisper of a breeze. For a second she stared at the fan in confusion and then everything clicked into place: she was in India, in Delhi, in the company apartment. And there was someone knocking on the door.
    Cursing no one in particular, Nancy groaned with exhaustion and rolled over in bed. The curtains were little more than diaphanous white sheets and the room was bathed in light. She felt disoriented and sick but she had only been in India for a few hours.
    Surely I can’t be ill already, she thought, that would be just too unfair.
    She fumbled around on the bedside table, picked up her phone and stared at its clock in confusion, uncertain whether she had changed the settings from New York to Delhi time. She remembered that her plane had landed in the middle of the night, that a driver had ushered her through the crowds of beggars and touts offering to change her dollars and find her cheap hotel rooms, to the safety of the waiting Mercedes. She had sunk back into the almost uncomfortably large leather seat and stared out of the window, watching the colour and chaos of the Delhi night drift by as if it was on a television screen until finally the car had slipped into the darkness of an empty street and deposited her outside the apartment building.
    Nancy Kelly had come to Delhi to be the