In Exile From the Land of Snows (21 page)

After he was transferred to Dr. Graham’s Homes, a missionary school in Kalimpong, Tempa’s anger at what he perceived to be a popular disregard for Tibetans, the notion that they were “backward and uncivilized,” manifested itself in competitive drive. Excelling in academic work, he became, during his five and a half years at Dr. Graham’s, head of virtually every sports team, earning the titles of proctor, vice-captain and finally captain of the school, under whom the entire student body was administered. With his name inscribed on the school’s commemorative plaque listing outstanding students, Tempa’s success was such that a special convocation—the first in Dr. Graham’s history—was convened after graduation to honor him. “I had to be independent,” he commented,
appraising the reversal in his character following the shock of his sisters’ and mother’s deaths. “Deep down I realized that I didn’t have anything unless I created it for myself. And I think that kept pushing me; the loss of Tibet, of my parents, the breakdown of the family—all of it. For my own good as well as the Tibetan people’s—there was so much personal as well as national loss—I just had to succeed in building it back up.”

When he arrived at Madras Christian College, however, one of India’s most prestigious schools, Tempa found himself, as the first Tibetan in the city, the object of constant racial harassment. Within a week the taunts became so frequent that he contemplated withdrawing. Instead, he walked into the principal’s office and requested permission to address the college. “I just told him that I was so disappointed and embarrassed,” stated Tempa. “Not only the students but even the teachers hardly knew the first thing about Tibet. ‘I can’t continue explaining to people where I come from,’ I said, ‘so I’d like to address the whole school at once.’ ” A few days later, Tempa walked alone onto an empty stage, a packed auditorium of amused undergraduates seated before him. Nervously he read a speech outlining Tibet’s recent history until, reaching the uprising in Lhasa and the subsequent flight of the refugees, he suddenly found himself departing from the text and relating the events of his own life. Save for a brief account he had given to a close teacher two years before, it was the first time that Tempa had spoken publicly of his personal tragedy. Overwhelmed by a standing ovation at the talk’s conclusion, Tempa went on to duplicate his success at Dr. Graham’s, studying now to become a doctor, there being at that time only three or four Western-trained Tibetan physicians. Despite three years of applying to aid organizations, though, he was unable to locate a sponsor for medical school. As a result, irrespective of his long record of outstanding academic work, Tempa Tsering faced the world with no prospects. It seemed a great defeat. The only option remaining was to join his father, now living in Byllakuppe, and become a farmer.

Tempa traveled inland by train, journeying from India’s eastern seaboard to Mysore. Boarding a battered country bus, he rode fifty miles south to the Cauvery Valley. On either side the country turned increasingly wild, until even the roadside fields gave way permanently to jungle. At the small town of Cauvery, he disembarked and set out on foot for the settlement. Crossing the Cauvery River, he saw men and women from Byllakuppe spreading their washing to dry on wide boulders painted in bright, primary colors with the national mantra of Tibet,
Om Mani Padme Hum
. Turning off the main road by the settlement workshop, he entered a wholly Tibetan atmosphere. Lush, undulating fields stretched to the horizon, crisscrossed by neat rows of haystacks crowned by prayer flags. At
high points rose the maroon and white walls of Byllakuppe’s six monasteries, including the rebuilt Sera and Tashilhunpo, interspersed by villages, schools, the old settlement office and a hospital. On the long roads uniting the camps, fringed in brilliant mauve and yellow flowering bushes, a cavalcade of monks, farm workers and women with babies tied to their backs, rosaries in hand, passed by. Only the heat and the jungle-covered hills circling the settlement’s perimeter remained as evidence of Byllakuppe’s un-Tibetan locale.

Tempa had visited Byllakuppe often since taking up his studies in Madras. Before, he had seen his father on only three occasions in the eight years subsequent to departing the road camp at Bawarna. Now, for the first time since leaving Tibet, father and son lived together. The changes in both were instantly apparent. Chopel Dhondub, like most of the elder refugees, had clung to all the old Tibetan views. Physically, he had altered by turning smaller and darker; emotionally, due to the strain of work, by becoming more temperamental—a trait usually suppressed in Tibetan society. Tempa, on the other hand, was now a hybrid, the product of circumstances and learning beyond his father’s understanding. Their differences reflected a threshold in the refugee experience: the maturation of the first generation in exile, and with it, a change in the Tibetan character. “As soon as I started living with my father again he immediately pressed for an arranged marriage,” said Tempa. “In Tibet this was normal, but I told my father that it was none of his business. It wasn’t his marriage but mine.” Though Chopel Dhondub couldn’t prevail, other families continued to arrange marriages for their children, life in the settlements, far more so than that of Dharamsala or other urban centers, clinging to conservative ideals even, on occasion, to the point of violence. As Tempa related, “When long hair and bell-bottoms came to India all the young Tibetans naturally took them up. The elders couldn’t understand it. They thought it looked disrespectful. In Byllakuppe, when we danced to the Beatles, our parents actually came out and threw stones at us. But we never reacted. We never said even a word to them. We just took it. Then, when things cooled down, we explained, ‘You have to change. We’re living in the world now. This is the way things are.’ Gradually, after lots of patient discussion, they began to accept it.”

A more fundamental shift concerned religion. Under the demands of exile life Buddhism’s all-pervasive influence was naturally reduced. Though they had studied the Dharma in their TSS syllabus, the younger generation found little occasion for its practice and they grew critical of Buddhism’s social function in a heretofore inconceivable manner. As a monk from Byllakuppe observed, “Many of these young Tibetans won’t
return my smile on the street. They see that I am a fellow Tibetan but these robes are just like a prison suit. The monks, they think, are the reason we lost Tibet.” “Too much religion, too little politics,” remarked Tempa, describing the widespread belief among his peers that religion, carried to the extreme it was in Tibet, had undermined the organization of the state. “Basically the younger generation is more political than religious. For my father, religion came first, politics second. But I think this generation, for the first time in centuries, feels the opposite.”

Young and old never differed, though, in their commitment to Tibet’s cause. “When I first began to visit my father in Byllakuppe,” said Tempa, “every time we met he would say, ‘I was born and bred in Tibet and I want to die in Tibet. I want my body buried there—not in India.’ I learned a lot from this. After my mother saw His Holiness she said, ‘That’s good enough for me. Now let me die peacefully.’ Then she gave up. But not my father. He’s never stopped fighting. All those that lived—the survivors—they’re all like that.”

Tempa remained in Byllakuppe for a year. In search of a more stimulating pursuit than farming, he volunteered to work part-time at the settlement office, while joining the local branch of the Tibetan Youth Congress. Founded in 1970 by a small group of young Tibetans, the Congress had quickly grown into the largest political party in the exile community. At its week-long inaugural conference in Dharamsala, Tempa had discussed for the first time his long-held thoughts on Tibet’s political struggle. Now, given the chance to work for the Congress, he enthusiastically took over its local adult education program, lecturing in the evenings on health care, still a major problem among the refugees. He obtained a film projector to show documentaries on Gandhi’s nonviolent fight for national liberation, the Satyagraha movement. Next, he requested books from the schools he had attended, assembling, a parcel at a time, the settlement’s only library. Within a few months his disappointment at failing to become a doctor passed as he was elected general secretary of the Byllakuppe chapter, the largest of the Youth Congress’s forty branches, containing between them 10,000 members.

Not long after Tempa’s election, the Dalai Lama came to Byllakuppe to offer the Kalachakra Initiation, a religious event attended by the entire settlement. At an audience with the Youth Congress, Tempa once more encountered the Tibetan leader: the first time he had met him in person since his childhood days at the Nursery in Dharamsala. “The example of His Holiness had the strongest effect on me,” said Tempa. “As the leader of his people he was so uplifting and farsighted. We all know how simply he lives and how hard he works and cares for the Tibetans, but when I
actually saw this in practice, I felt personally inspired to do something more for my country.”

A few months later, the entire government-in-exile appeared in Byllakuppe to hold its annual report meeting in the settlers’ presence. Attending the event as a Youth Congress observer, Tempa was captivated by the proceedings, conducted according to the democratic constitution promulgated by the Dalai Lama in 1963. During a break one day he was approached by Mr. Kundeling, a Cabinet minister whom he had known slightly in the past. On hearing that Tempa had graduated from college only to be a farmer, Mr. Kundeling insisted he leave Byllakuppe and join the government in Dharamsala. He then instructed the secretary of the Information and Publicity Office to give him a job. A few weeks later, a letter arrived from the office offering him a position as an assistant secretary. “After receiving the letter I discussed it with my father,” Tempa related. “I had just finished school and I felt a responsiblity to look after him. I told him this. I also told him that the Byllakuppe settlement office would not be happy if I left. Then I said, ‘This time you make the decision. So far, I’ve made almost every decision in my life without your knowledge. Now this is up to you.’ He replied immediately, ‘From our point of view Dharamsala is the central government, whereas here it’s just one office, looking after three thousand people in the old camps. So obviously, if you go to Dharamsala, you’ll be of more service to all the Tibetan people. For myself, if I know you are sincerely working for His Holiness, then, even if I have to die alone, with no one to pour cold water in my mouth in the last days, I won’t have a single regret.’ When he said that, everything was clear. I said, ‘O.K.’, and I went to Dharamsala.”

A few weeks later, still, after fourteen years in India, with few more possessions than his own clothing, Tempa said farewell to his father for what would be another six years. Taking a bus from Cauvery to Mysore, he boarded a northbound train to Pathankot in the Punjab, from where another bus deposited him on the fringe of Katwali Bazaar, Lower Dharamsala. There, he caught the local bus for the half-hour ride five miles farther up the hill to McLeod Ganj. On the way he watched intently through the barred windows as the road zigzagged up the pine-covered slopes leading to the military cantonment and the Tibetan Children’s Village above. After driving through Forsythe Ganj, another hamlet in the hills, the spindle-like ridge on which McLeod Ganj sat drew into view. In a few minutes more, St. John’s in the Wilderness passed, alone in the woods, and then the galvanized canopy of Nowrojee’s front porch hove in sight, a characteristic press of Tibetan monks, gaddis, or hill folk, and a few local tourists from lower in the valley beneath it, idly watching the
commotion at the head of town. As the bus halted, Tempa jumped off, retrieved his bag from its roof and entered the energetic press of “Little Lhasa,” as Upper Dharamsala had rather wistfully come to be known.

Since the first days of the Dalai Lama’s tenure, McLeod Ganj had shuddered through an onslaught of development. Its permanent population now approached 4,000, with hundreds of pilgrims, traders, government officials and foreign visitors in periodic residence. The serene colonial park at its center had been obliterated without a thought by the Tibetans. Three rows of buildings housing shops, restaurants and hotels had replaced it. At their center rose a tall gold-crowned
chorten
, dedicated, as its plaque explained, to the memory of all those suffering under Chinese occupation in Tibet. Day and night it was circled by a stream of faithful, spinning two lines of prayer wheels and reciting mantras. Outside of town stood their homes: an impromptu jumble of tin and stone shanties, ascending floor over roof like a ziggurat up the hill, graced by marigolds in the windows and hundreds of faded prayer flags strung between the trees overhead. The people of Little Lhasa were mainly sweater sellers who left their unheated huts in the cold winter months to ride the rails between Indian cities in search of commerce. When in Dharamsala, they made full use of their closeness to the “Precious Protector” by each day circumambulating a reconstituted Lingkhor or Holy Walk, similar to the one in Lhasa, surrounding his new residence, Thekchen Chöling. It was toward this that Tempa proceeded, walking out of the far side of town and turning down a narrow road to the knoll-like crest capping the farthest of the ridges surrounding McLeod Ganj.

Built in 1968, Thekchen Chöling or “Island of the Mahayana Teaching” enclosed a great expanse of forest and hillside through which the Dalai Lama could stroll, tend his flower gardens, look after wild birds and meditate. The green corrugated roofing of his modest private cottage dominated a kitchen complex, office building, security and secretarial quarters all located at progressively lower levels leading to the front gate.

Across a flagstone
chöra
or debating courtyard, used by the young monks of the Dialectical School and flanked along its southern end by the cells of Namgyal Dratsang, the Dalai Lama’s personal monastery, stood the new Central Cathedral, a three-story lemon-yellow hall topped by gold pinnacles and designed by the Dalai Lama himself in a modern idiom. Turning the battery of prayer wheels that lined its outer walls, Tempa entered the bright interior to offer prayers before its giant images of the Buddha and Tibet’s patron saints. Then, continuing down the hill via a rocky shortcut through the trees, he approached the new Secretariat compound of the government-in-exile, Gangchen Kyishong or “Abode of
Snow-Happy Valley.” Halfway to Lower Dharamsala, Gangchen Kyishong had been built out of the same necessity as Thekchen Chöling: to replace the cramped, perennially leaking quarters of the old British bungalows. On the white pillars that framed its front gate the government’s emblem—two turquoise-maned snow lions holding the eight-spoked wheel of the Dharma before snow-capped peaks, the sun and moon—proclaimed its identity. To maintain congenial relations with New Delhi, no Tibetan flag was flown. Within, on a long flat, surrounded by the more temperate foliage of the lesser slopes, rose the monumental edifices of the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives and the Cabinet building, its ground floor an assembly hall for government meetings. The library was flanked by an amphitheater of dormitories for its hundred resident scholars and the Cabinet, by tiers of buildings lodging the government departments, on the uppermost of which, set back in typically Tibetan style with a wide roofscape before it, were the two rooms of the Information Office. Tempa’s quarters, which he was shown after reporting to his new superior, lay in a chalet-like log building facing the secretarial mess, not far away. With the knowledge that he had arrived at the very heart of the political struggle for Tibet, he settled in his first night, eager to begin work the following day as an active member of his government.