Butter Lamps

Tara had two problems with Losar. Problem one: It was in the middle of winter break when everyone else was doing other things. Problem two: Everything about it was old. The prayers were old. The dough sculptures were old. The butter lamps were old. The songs Nani sang while making the Losar Torma were old in a way that made Tara feel like she had accidentally walked into someone else's century.

Tara was twelve. Tara wanted: New things. Fast things. Things that didn't require three days of preparation and flour on everything including the dog.

The dog was called Rinchen. Rinchen had flour on him every Losar without fail and had long since accepted this.

Nani started preparing on the twenty-eighth day of the twelfth month of the Tibetan calendar which Tara could never remember but which Nani knew in her bones the way some people know the weather is changing before the clouds arrive.

The kitchen became: Flour. Butter. Tsampa. The smell of something ancient and warm that Tara associated entirely with having to help when she would rather not.

"Come," said Nani. "I have homework," said Tara. Nani looked at Tara. Nani had the look of someone who had crossed the Himalayas on foot in winter and was not particularly impressed by homework.

Tara came.

The Losar Torma was a sculpture made from dough and butter — elaborate geometric hours of work for something that would sit on the altar and then be thrown away at the end.

"Why do we make it if we throw it away?" said Tara. "We are throwing away the old year," said Nani. "The bad things. The things we don't want to carry forward."

Tara looked at the sculpture. Hours of work. Thrown away. "That seems wasteful," said Tara. Nani smiled. "Most important things look wasteful from the outside," she said.

Tara rolled dough. Badly at first. Then less badly. Her hands learning from Nani's hands the way hands have always learned — by watching and trying and failing and trying again until the thing becomes familiar and then becomes yours.

That evening they cleaned the house. Every corner. Every surface. Throwing out everything broken everything unnecessary everything that belonged to the year that was ending.

"We are making room," said Nani. "For the new year to enter. If the house is full of old things there is no room for new ones."

Tara looked at her room. Full of old things. Most of them hers. Most of them necessary. She threw away three broken things and a notebook she had never used. It felt — slightly better than expected.

The night before Losar. Nani brought out the butter lamps. Small clay cups. Filled with yak butter. A wick. Twenty seven of them. One for every year of Nani's life in Ladakh before she came here.

Tara helped fill them. The butter was cold and solid. Her fingers went numb. The kitchen smelled like something that had been warm in a cold place for a very long time.

"Why twenty seven?" said Tara. Nani was quiet for a moment. "Because that is how many years I had there before I had years here," she said. "The lamps remember what I cannot always carry in words."

Tara looked at the lamps. Twenty seven small flames. Twenty seven years in a place Tara had never been. Twenty seven pieces of a life that had become the life that had become Tara.

Oh, thought Tara.

Not out loud. Just — the small internal oh of understanding something that was always there and suddenly is visible.

"Can I light one?" said Tara. Nani handed her the match.

Tara lit the first lamp. The flame came small and certain and cast a light that made the kitchen look like somewhere else entirely — somewhere older and warmer and further away and closer than she had ever felt it.

She lit the second. The third.

By the twenty seventh the kitchen was entirely transformed. Twenty seven small flames. Flickering. Warm. The shadows moving the way shadows move when the light is alive.

Nani sat beside Tara. They looked at the lamps together.

"Is it old fashioned?" said Tara. Not sarcastically. Actually asking.

Nani looked at the flames. "Everything that lasts was once new," she said. "And then it lasted. And then someone called it old. And then someone else asked why it lasted."

She looked at Tara. "Why do you think it lasted?"

Tara looked at the lamps. Twenty seven flames. Twenty seven years. Twenty seven pieces of a life that had crossed mountains and oceans and decades to end up in this kitchen on this night with these hands that had learned from those hands that had learned from hands before that — all the way back to the first person who filled a small clay cup with butter and lit it in the dark of a Himalayan winter and felt less alone.

"Because it works," said Tara.

Nani said nothing. Which meant: yes.

They sat in the light of twenty seven lamps until the butter burned low and the shadows settled and the old year went quietly out the door — making room for the new one to come in.

Tara went to bed smelling of butter and tsampa and the particular warmth of something old that had just become entirely hers.

Rinchen the dog still had flour on him. Some things don't change. Some things don't need to.