Reincarnation in Exile

When I was posted in Madrid as a foreign correspondent in the late 1980s, Spain was still a very Roman Catholic country, which is why a newspaper story in El Pais caught my attention: a little Spanish boy living in the mountains had been recognized as the reincarnation of a famous Tibetan lama. I decided to see the boy and made the mistake of taking along the only photographer I knew, Derek, a paparazzo for the British tabloids.

I knew nothing about Tibet, lamas, or reincarnation. But the story seemed splendidly improbable. This was, after all, Spain, the country that had lent its name to the Inquisition. And the story seemed to show that Spaniards, at last, were shaking off their hair-shirted Catholicism and exploring other means of spirituality. The boy’s name was Osel Hita Torres, and he lived in Bubión, in the Alpujarras Mountains above Granada.

The village was hard to reach. It had snowed the night before, and the road spiraling up the mountains was glazed with black ice. At a mountain inn, Derek and I stopped for a typical Spanish breakfast of espresso and cognac. After downing his cognac in one swallow, Derek reached into his photographer’s vest and, grinning, pulled out a matador’s cap.

I had known Derek long enough to fear the worst.

“We have to make it clear from the get-go that this kid is Spanish. So we pose him as a mini-bullfighter!”

We reached Bubión in late morning, the sun glinting on rock, rushing water, and snow. A villager directed us to two stone cottages that Western followers of the late Lama Thubten Yeshe—Osel’s parents among them—had turned into a Tibetan Buddhist retreat. I heard a child howling. Derek and I got out of the car and saw a young kid tussling with a buzz-cut Spanish nun. They were standing inside a wintry vegetable garden. The boy was in mid-tantrum, and his cheeks were as flushed as his burgundy lama robes. It was Osel, age four.

Exasperated, the nun turned to us.

“He wants to scrape the snow off all the plants before the ice kills them. But look, his hands are blue, and he won’t put on his mittens!” the nun complained.

This struck me as unusually caring behavior for a four-year-old. My own two young sons, left alone in that garden, would have invented some game of gladiators and started flogging each other with the frosted tomato vines. Osel was meticulously brushing the snow off cabbage leaves. His blue hands moved with urgency.

The telephone rang in one of the stone cottages.

“Watch him for me, will you?” the nun said, and without waiting for an answer she dashed...