A dance of devotion where time beats in circles.

I arrived at Hemis with dust in my teeth and a drum already in my chest. The road had been arguing with the Indus all morning, trading shade for shimmer, ravine for river, and at some modest bend a signboard announced the monastery with the unadorned confidence Ladakh prefers: HEMIS. No exclamation, no pitch. As if to say, if you know, you know.

It was 2012, a summer of new notebooks and old roads, the year I learned that festivals are not events you watch but weather you enter. Hemis lay tucked in a side valley like an altar behind a curtain. The gompa rose from the slope in tiers of white, red ochre, and shadow, a geometry that felt inevitable once you’d seen it of course devotion would take this shape in the mountains; of course walls would climb where prayer already knew how.

The courtyard was empty when I first stepped onto its wooden planks, late afternoon sun making everything blunt and orderly. A novice with a broom performed a private rite of dust and gesture. Two tourists argued softly about aperture near a prayer flag as if clarity were a matter of settings. From the open door of the assembly hall came the thin metal breath of butter lamps and the sweet fatigue of juniper smoke, sang writing its vanishing calligraphy in the air.

A caretaker monk appeared like a clause in the sentence of light blue wool cap, maroon robe lifted neatly above sandals. “Tomorrow,” he said, nodding at the floor as if it were a sleeping animal, “Tsechu begins.” His English carried the rhythm of Ladakhi, vowels softened by altitude. “Today you see quiet. Tomorrow you see the Guru’s play.”

“Padmasambhava,” I said, because names can be a bridge.

He smiled. “Yes. Guru Rinpoche. Guru Tshengye eight faces, eight moods.” He pointed to the galleries above, where thangkas slept behind rolled cloth. “Time turns here, rounded. You will feel.” He made a small circle in the air with one finger, a drummer drawing a beat before the song starts.

I wandered the galleries and museum, looking at fabrics that had outlived many different versions of me. Silk brocades that seemed to remember fingers more accurately than cameras; copper images of wrathful deities with compassion hidden in their teeth; a drum whose skin had learned thunder so well it simply glowed. In one quiet room, a thangka of the Wheel of Life held the entire predicament in a single circle: the moon of liberation, the six realms, the grasping demon of impermanence holding the rim as if counting time by chewing. I stood longer than I meant to. The monk passed behind me and said without stopping, “The circle is not a trap if you know where to look.” He left me to find the hinge.

Outside, the courtyard boards creaked like the old floor of a stable. Swallows took attendance in the rafters. Somewhere a boy practiced cymbals rolmo with the clanging tenderness of first love. I bought apricots from a woman in a woolen dress the color of afternoon shadows and she tried to sell me a small tiger mask painted with homemade impatience. “For your wall,” she said, “for your fear.” I told her my wall would not be improved by a tiger, and she laughed the laugh Ladakh uses to forgive city people.

Night came without theatre. A thin crescent caught on a prayer pole and stayed. I slept at a homestay in a side lane where the family ate quietly and the dog patrolled the moonlight. In the dark, the drums I hadn’t yet heard assembled themselves in my chest and then dissolved. Somewhere a kettle surrendered to boil, somewhere a novice tugged his blanket higher, somewhere a monk reviewed the text he would not read tomorrow because the dance does the reading. The festival stretched its shoulders in sleep.

The Morning of Circles

Before sunrise, the valley lifted its own lid. Hemis woke as a practical arrangement: rice set to steam, tea stirred into its two opinions (salt or sweet), boots tugged on, scarves negotiated. I joined the procession of modest errands up the stone steps pilgrims, shopkeepers, families tying coins into corners of khatas; a grandmother counting mala beads in a tempo I wanted to learn; a soldier stepping softer than his boots wanted to.

The first long horns dungchen spilled their bronze into the air from a balcony above the courtyard. If thunder could be persuasive rather than coercive, it would sound like that. The valley answered with its own arrangements: a raven’s low comment, the small chorus of sandals, the creak and click of shutters opening to let in the festival. A thin cloud moved across the sun as if to ensure nobody would start too soon.

In the courtyard, the flagpole karchhung wore its verticals of cloth like the axis of a private world. Galleries lined the square on three sides, their pillars flaking red and white. Small ladders ascended into shadows where musicians would sit gyaling (oboes) warming reeds, nga (drums) waiting for wrists, rolmo ready to be reason and cymbal both. The planks underfoot had learned every drum long ago but pretended surprise.

I found my place against a pillar, copying the elders who understood both sun and shade better than almanacs. Traders unfurled their blankets and an economy assembled itself: beads, bells, yak-wool, prayer wheels, postcards, the whole tender taxonomy of things a day thinks it needs. A boy spun a cheap plastic windmill in the breath of the festival until it pretended to be holy. He caught me watching and raised an eyebrow with professional pride.

When the abbot appeared, the courtyard drew breath. Monks in maroon and saffron took their places with the unshowy choreography of people who have rehearsed for centuries. The abbot’s hand moved and a cymbal took the time out of the air and made it visible: tshing tshing a circle at the edge of hearing. The first drum arrived like a heartbeat you had forgotten you owned. A page turned. The festival began.

Black Hats and Births of Thunder

The Black Hat dancers Zhanag Chham entered first, brims broad enough to carry weather, robes heavy with the patience of brocade. Their steps were measured, each pivot a compass point. In their hands, ritual daggers phurba that cut only what ought to be cut: obstacles, excuses, the slack rope of inattention. Their faces were uncovered, human and specific, because the hat itself is a mask, the rim a planet, the crown a field where intention settles its debts.

They circled clockwise, then again. The cymbals folded and unfolded their winged metal. The flutes threaded a higher hunger. The drums nga chen found the courtyard’s old bones and woke them. The dancers moved not as if to entertain, but to adjust as one adjusts a picture frame so the whole room becomes level.

A child near me tried to imitate one step and fell into his own invention, a dance of shoelaces and delight. A grandmother tapped the beat with the end of her cane. A vendor took a coin with her left hand because the right belonged to the rhythm. A dog threaded through ankles with the aim of a scholar finding the title page.

The protectors followed masks that remembered teeth, eyes painted as if to correct our eyesight, color so saturated it became a verb. Fear and compassion sat so close together on those faces I couldn’t tell which was escorting which. Mahakala’s black laughed softly without moving. The dancers’ boots, the courtyard boards, the lungs of everyone who had ever stood in that square everything kept time. My notebook remained shut. Some days words are a poor chisel for a living rock.

The Atsara Interrupt Laughter as Instruction

And then, as if to remind us that devotion without laughter becomes brittle, the atsara the clowns arrived. Two of them, in half-masks that rendered their faces demonically human, wielded wooden phalluses like scepters of absurdity. They teased the monks, poked a tourist’s lens with the concentration of scientists, pestered a toddler into shrieks of delight, then bowed to the abbot with exaggerated gravity, as if to say: We are the relief valves of this world; we let the pressure out so the container doesn’t crack.

Their jokes were local and precise. One borrowed a shopkeeper’s prayer wheel and spun it like a roulette until the beads rebelled; another stole a novice’s cymbal and tried to wear it as a hat. The courtyard laughed in the dialect of families. I remembered what a monk had told me in a different monastery on a different day: “Wrathful deities frighten away what you shouldn’t carry; atsaras make you drop what you can’t help carrying.” Between them, a lighter soul.

The atsaras bowed to the gallery and left. The space they made was not absence; it was clearance. Into it the drums returned, not louder truer.

Eight Faces of the Guru

The Guru Tshengye, eight manifestations of Padmasambhava, entered with a craned grace that arranged the day into an octave. Guru Orgyen Dorje Chang primordial and calm; Guru Shakya Senge the scholar with the lion’s silence; Guru Nyima Ozer sunbeam, rainbow, a proposition for light; Guru Loden Chokse seeker, collector of knowledge; Guru Padma Gyalpo the king whose laughter unsettles palaces; Guru Senge Dradok lion’s roar made into instruction; Guru Pema Jungne born of the lotus, patient as water; and finally, Guru Dorje Drolö wrathful, riding the tigress into the dark forests of our resistance.

The masks were not pretty. They were correct. Their eyebrows were a doctrine; their mouths, a gate. Each figure circled the flagpole in slow assemblies of meaning, pausing at the cardinal points to let the corners of the world know they had not been forgotten. The gyaling sang sideways, bending notes into ladders. The cymbals stitched the sky to the floor. I watched their feet, realizing that all my life I had watched faces for meaning when meaning had always been in the footfall: where it lands, how it lifts, whether it pauses.

When Dorje Drolö entered tiger mask furious with compassion, robes ignited with wrathful saffron the courtyard thickened. His leap was not high; it was decisive. A small pivot, a stamp, a spring that traveled vertical and then outward into us, as if to remind the bone that sometimes the shortest path to liberation is a pounce. The tiger’s mouth gaped, and from behind it human eyes looked out and saw us seeing. The leap again not circus, but surgery. I felt my own shoulders unclench as if a sound had loosened a stubborn screw.

At the pillar beside me a boy moved closer to his grandfather. The old man’s hand dry as a page rested on the child’s head and did not move. Time beats in circles, I wrote, finally, and underlined it until the pencil refused to darken. The drummer inside my ribs conceded leadership to the courtyard.

Dorje Drolö circled, bounded, pivoted. If you came to Hemis with a private tiger, you left with it persuaded.

Noon Offering: Bread, Broth, and Brass

At midday, the festival fed itself. Bowls of thukpa broth and noodle courage took laps around the courtyard. Khapse fried knots of sweetness crackled between finger and tooth. Butter tea salty, necessary, like an argument you are better for having warmed the corners of the mouth that had been too busy watching to speak. The dungchen slept with their bells tilted toward the floor. A novice balanced six steel cups in two hands and moved like a stork through shoals of shoes.

I ate against the shadow, which had slid halfway across the planks like a giant hand cupping the day. A woman shared her stool and her apricots, their flesh the exact color of the monastery’s ochre base. She told me, simply, “This is the Guru’s birthday,” then asked if I had children. I said no. “Then take two more apricots,” she said, “for when you do.” Prophecy or courtesy I didn’t ask.

In the small museum a line formed to see a mask too delicate for sunlight, a sliver of turquoise that had remembered a queen, and a drum that had outlasted several drummers. The museum was cool and smelled like linen sweating dust. Label cards performed their modest duties in English and Ladakhi, but most people looked with unmediated eyes and then left with more attention than when they entered.

From the balcony, a monk began a low chant, just one voice. The festival smiled and tried, collectively, not to interrupt.

Afternoon Thunder, Gentle Exit

Afternoon found its pace the way streams find the river by joining what is larger than them. The dances grew more narrative: a deer with velvet antlers fled a hunter who never quite learned his lesson; skeletons chitipati gambolled with comic authority, reminding us that death is a cousin not a stranger; a masked noble took a ridiculous fall and stood up pretending to have intended grace all along, which the crowd recognized as a parable too useful to be exotic.

The atsara returned for one last trespass, collecting sins with their mockery and redistributing blessings by mistake. A toddler shouted “Julley!” at everything, including a pigeon. The pigeons answered with their job description. Somewhere in a dim room behind the courtyard, tea leaves met water again and remembered their higher purpose.

A wind came down the side valley with elbows out. It lifted the edges of brocade and turned prayer flags into specific grammar. The long horns rolled their final paragraph and closed the book. The abbot stood. The cymbals drew a ring we could step out of without breaking it. The dancers left as precisely as they had entered no flounce, no stray gesture, no stray thought.

People clapped as people everywhere clap when the spirit has done heavy lifting and the body wants to help. Vendors re-sorted their hope into boxes. A child practiced a step and nailed it, almost, then certainly. Someone’s phone rang a jarring melody and was tenderly scolded with a finger. Time, which had been beating in circles, returned to a line and promptly forgot where it had put its keys.

Between Days: The Quiet Hinge

Hemis Festival is two days long. The hinge between them is not a pause; it’s a gratitude. I walked into the juniper grove above the monastery where birds discover what to do with evening. The path smelled like resin and old smoke. A novice boy named Sonam sat on a rock reading a small book with the seriousness of a man being watched by his future. He looked up when he felt my shadow.

“From Leh?” he asked. It is what one asks when one wants to begin gently.

“From farther,” I said. “First time?”

He nodded. “First time for being old enough,” he said. “Last year I only carried cups.” He held up his book and smiled shyly. “Today I carried drum.” He patted his heart, then shook the drum invisibly with his right hand, miming a small damaru. “Tomorrow I carry fear,” he added, grinning, and mimed the tiger leap so badly we both laughed. Laughter turned to quiet without either of us forcing it.

“Dorje Drolö,” I said.

He nodded. “Wrathful to protect. The tiger moves across,” he gestured with his hand, “not up. Up is pride.” He thought about his own sentence and then seemed pleased. “Across is towards.”

“Towards what?”

He shrugged in that Ladakhi way that means everything and stood. “Toward the one who needs,” he said. “And the one who needs is also you.” He trotted down the slope and I memorized the sound of sandals moving over pine needles: a dancer’s future.

Night collected moths and the day’s mistakes, which turned out to be few. In the homestay, the family ate with the contentment of labor well-used. An uncle told a story about a previous festival when the wind had tried to steal a mask and failed. A girl traced the brocade pattern of a hand-me-down robe with one finger as if discovering a map to a country she would one day govern. I fell asleep and the drums I had handed over returned just long enough to say good night.

Day Two: The Tiger’s Leap

The second morning began louder. The courtyard had absorbed the first day and was ready to conduct. I watched the galleries fill: soldiers on leave, shepherds with eyes still trained on distance, hotel staff from Leh in their most defensible jackets, grandmothers wearing turquoise with the casual authority of mountains. A photographer arrived with a lens longer than certain arguments, and a novice gently guided him to a seat with a hand placed exactly where it would not offend. This is Ladakh: firm courtesy.

The Black Hats returned to sweep the ground; the protectors returned to guard it; the atsara returned to remind us that guarding is best done with a loose jaw. When Guru Tshengye entered, the courtyard’s humidity changed a sweat made of attention. I stood where I had before, because repetition is also prayer.

If the first day taught me to see, the second taught me to count: the pattern of steps, the numbers of circles, the measure with which a dancer will stamp before he rises. The drums became an arithmetic the body can pass. Even my city feet learned a little subtraction: take away hurry, take away commentary, take away the muscle that overexplains. What remained held me upright.

The moment arrived without trumpet (though the horns helped). Dorje Drolö, tigress underneath, wrathful compassion above, paced the square. The atsara teasingly trailed him, mimicking fur and fury in clown language. The drums tightened. The cymbals folded their metal tighter. The gyalings sent up a ribbon of sound for the leap to grab. Then the leap. Not the longest, not the most athletic, not the most photogenic. The right one. A small, perfect diagonal of intention landing into the place that had been waiting for it all year.

A wind that had merely been weather turned witness. The flagpole did not move, but the flags above did, and in their motion I felt the hinge of the Wheel of Life, the place the caretaker monk had pointed to: not at the rim where we get chewed, not at the center where we pretend to be saints, but at the small break where a leap could be counted as a step towards freedom.

My throat warmed and then ached. Not from the cold from recognition. I have leapt badly in my life. I have leapt at things that weren’t tigers and run from the ones that were mine. And still here was a dancer, inside a mask that makes a mouth terrible and eyes stern, landing inside a circle that includes even me. The circle widened and, rather than being trapped by it, I felt held.

The dance continued more circles, more stamps, more precise breaths until the courtyard’s time had been tuned. At the end, Dorje Drolö stood in one corner, still as a threat that has become a friend.

What the Drums Remember

In the slowness after, I borrowed a particolored cushion of sun from a boy who had abandoned it for better adventures and sat with my back to the warm wall. The drums throbbed on in my ribs, in the beam of the roof, in the broken molar the Ladakhi dentist would fix years later. Drum as archive: a memory solid enough to be played.

I noticed small things then, the way you do when the spectacle has taught your eyes humility. A pilgrim quietly retying the knot on her perak (turquoise headgear) where the braid had become a minor rebellion. A novice sliding a cup under a table for later and making a note aloud to himself so he would remember. Two men discussing the weather in a full syntax of shoulders because words were too far. A foreigner crying without touching her face. A boy humming the drum-line just off-beat and still correct. A line of ants crossing the plank in brave, foolish courage, and a woman moving her foot so as not to test philosophy.

The Wheel of Life flickered in my mind again: a circle chewed, a circle fled, a circle broken by a finger pointing to the moon. The drums, the circles, the way the dancers never step backward but never claim forward as conquest time beating in circles, not to imprison but to teach pacing.

I looked up to the gallery where the musicians sat, cheeks ballooning against reeds, arms tireless above skins. One elder met my gaze and did that mountain thing with his mouth that’s neither smile nor refusal. It says: You are here. That will do. I bowed my head the way you do when words aren’t the right tool.

Breaking Bread with Wind

When the festival paused again for food, wind took our place in the square and danced human-less: flag with flag, shadow with shadow. I followed a stream of people down a lane where a woman I’d met the previous day had set out bowls of skyur (yogurt), tsampa (roasted barley flour), and butter tea with floating islands of fat like promises. We ate sitting on the step. She told me of a leopard that had visited last winter and what prayer one says when you hear someone else’s hunger at your window. I told her of a city where you cannot hear your neighbor and we both shook our heads in disbelief, hers pitying me, mine envying her.

A man with a tray of amchis’ herbs passed, and she bought a packet for her cough. He practiced a sales pitch that sounded like medicine and myth braided together. I bought nothing, and he blessed me anyway, which was either good manners or good business or both. In the corner of my vision, a boy tried on my shoes without asking and discovered the soles are different when the feet are wrong. He put them back neatly and ran away to find a better fit in his own.

When the horns called us back, the wind obeyed them too, untangling itself from our food and returning to its other duties.

The Ending That Doesn’t End

Festivals conclude the way rivers do by joining something that keeps moving. Late afternoon brought the final cham, a set of steps that felt like closure not because they ended but because they completed. A monk scattered grains in a wheel that promptly ceased to exist in the minds of sparrows. The abbot raised a serkyem offering and the sun slid down the valley behind him as if it had been waiting for its cue. We stood, we sat, we stood again. The cymbals made a last circle in the air and tucked it away where circles go when they are not in use.

The dancers filed out not in triumph but in rest. The masks vanished through a door too small for their grandeur, which felt perfect. Greatness should be put away humbly, or it turns on you. People began to leave not in a hurry but with decisions: who to visit, what to cook, which child to scold later and which to forgive now.

I lingered. The courtyard boards cooled under the new shadow. A novice, solemn with responsibility, swept petals and dust toward a corner where they might become a different ceremony. The flagpole stood, a bare spine of the day’s song. The dungchen on the balcony caught a strip of sun and turned it to brass the physical kind and the other.

A man tapped my elbow. “You go?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I go.”

“Come next year,” he said, as people say when what they mean is let this not be a single sentence. I promised nothing because the right promises require fewer words and more roads.

The Tiger’s Leap on the Road Home

The drive down felt like dismounting from a story. The Indus took us back into the general tense. Apricot trees rehearsed their green. On a stretch of road where the rock tried to be the river and nearly succeeded, a fox crossed with the lightness of those who have not been heavy in a long time. It paused, looked at us with the ability wild animals have to weigh your soul, and then hopped onto a boulder with a neatness I recognized. A little diagonal. A landing into the place that had been waiting. The tiger’s leap, rewritten by a fox. I laughed aloud, and the driver, who had not seen the fox, laughed with me because joy is sometimes contagious without evidence.

In Leh, Dosmochey’s thread-crosses still hung above doorways from earlier in the season, the city remembering its own circles. A child colored in a picture of a tiger without caring whether tigers are local or imported by myth. A teacher walked past wearing sunglasses like an argument against glare. The wind lowered a note it had been carrying since Hemis and filed it under complete.

That night at the guesthouse, I lay awake long enough to discover that the drum had taken permanent lodging in the room behind my ribs. When it beats, it does not demand; it reminds. Walk clockwise around what you revere, it says. Bow when the drum is bigger than you. Laugh when the clown asks you to drop what you cannot use. When the tiger appears, don’t run or reach step toward. Leap a little, not up across.

I dreamed my bones were galleries around a courtyard and every time my heart struck the rolmo, a circle of breath moved through me, exactly once, and then again. In the morning I woke with the taste of butter tea and dust and a line I could finally write without embarrassing it:

At Hemis, the masks teach the faces. At Hemis, time beats in circles until you learn where to step in. At Hemis, the tiger’s leap is not a threat; it is a path across a gap you drew yourself.

Afterword: Circles to Carry

I left Ladakh a week later with none of the masks and all of their instruction. In cities where festivals are events you buy and schedules you defend, I keep the Hemis circle in the pocket where other people keep earbuds. I take it out when a day turns too angular. I place it under a cup when talk becomes sharp. I trace it in the air above someone sleeping, a quiet protection against alarms. And sometimes on a stairwell, in a queue, before a conversation that makes my jaw set I catch myself performing a small, almost invisible diagonal with my shoulders, a practice leap from where I am to where I might be kinder.

2012 has fallen behind many mountains now, but if I stand very still I can hear the dungchen find the vowel of dawn, the gyaling thread its silver through stone, the nga turn wooden floors to ribs and ribs to wooden floors, the atsara whack a friend into laughing sense, and the tiger patient, necessary making the leap that is not escape but entry.

The caretaker monk’s circle hangs in the air where he drew it. I step into it again when I need to remember what devotion sounds like: a drum, a footfall, a breath, over and over until even the fox knows how to land.