Tibetan Foothold (4 page)

At the Kangra School for Tibetan girls, about two miles beyond the town, Jill and I were welcomed by a most engaging couple, who fed us more tea and biscuits before taking us to count the holes in the roof directly over their new supply of beds and blankets.

Then a group of the girls spontaneously decided to perform some of those extraordinary dances which were later to become so familiar. Observing the happiness of these youngsters I was astonished. Many had been forced to leave family and friends behind them when they escaped to India and some had certainly witnessed terrifying scenes of cruelty, as the Chinese tightened their grip on Tibet. I wondered then to what extent suspense, loneliness and the memory of past horrors still affected them emotionally. Later, at Dharamsala, I noticed that some of the adolescents, and a few adults too, were prone to sudden hysterical outbursts for trivial reasons. Yet on balance it appeared to me that the Tibetans’ racial temperament and religious faith did enable them to overcome cheerfully the distresses of a refugee life.

That evening Jill and I camped between Kangra and Lower
Dharamsala.
On our left the narrow road was overhung by high cliffs of earth and rock, while on our right there was a two-hundred-foot drop to river level. Arabella had to be parked on the edge of the precipice to leave room for passing military traffic and at about 9 p.m. I curled up in my blanket just behind her. After the disturbed rest of the previous night I was soon asleep – but before long a passing peasant prodded me in the ribs and considerately pointed out that rockfalls on this stretch of the road normally landed precisely where we were sleeping. I in turn woke Jill and we blearily proceeded to what seemed a safer spot, but this time, just in case it wasn’t, I settled down under Arabella’s protection.

The next diversion came at 11 p.m., when an army officer returning to Upper Dharamsala mistook me for a dead body. Assured that I was nothing of the sort he remarked encouragingly that at the present rate of progress I soon would be and then proceeded on his way. After this I didn’t go to sleep for sometime – not because the officer’s pessimistic prophecy had unnerved me, but because I am much addicted to thunderstorms, and a particularly impressive specimen was now taking
place. There are few experiences more stirring than the arrogant reverberations of thunder in high mountains.

Soon after midnight the storm abated and I dozed off, to be reawakened just after 3 a.m. by Jill shining a torch under Arabella and yelling: ‘Are you all right?’ Her voice was barely audible above the continuous crashing of thunder overhead and the rushing hiss of torrential train. I was about to reply sleepily, ‘Yes, thank you’, when I woke up enough to realise that I was very far from being all right. A young river was racing down the road and I was lying in inches of water. At that moment we heard a menacing bumping near by, as dislodged rocks rolled down the precipice. Jill exclaimed: ‘For God’s sake get out of that! We must move or the road will collapse under Arabella.’ So off we went again, though visibility was almost nil and gigantic waterfalls were roaring off the cliffs onto the road. Above the din Jill shouted cheerfully: ‘If anyone saw us now they’d say we were mad – and they’d be right!’ Actually we were enjoying ourselves enormously and for me this was an unforgettable introduction to the annual drama of the breaking of the monsoon.

A few miles further on we came at last to a really safe spot. By now the water on the road was six inches deep so I squeezed into the back of Arabella – which was not dry, but slightly less wet than the road. Here, reclining on crates of Heinz Baby Food, I slept from 4 to 6 a.m. – when I was quite surprised to wake up of my own accord.

Dharamsala is divided into two sections – Lower Dharamsala, at 4500 feet, and Upper Dharamsala, at 6000 feet. Lower Dharamsala is the headquarters of Kangra District and, like many towns whose prosperity depended on the British, it now seems slightly sorry for itself. Upper Dharamsala, which was a popular hill-station before the earthquake of 1905 levelled most of the houses, is at present famous as a Tibetan enclave. Here are the Palace of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the
headquarters
of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile and the training centre of the Tibetan Drama Party. These institutions, together with the Nursery for Tibetan Children and the hundreds of Tibetan squatters who have occupied nearby hamlets, give the whole area such a Tibetan
flavour that within a week of coming here I found it difficult to remember that I was still in India.

It is possible to walk from Lower to Upper Dharamsala in fifty minutes, using the old path which climbs through forests of giant rhododendrons and deodars, at times becoming a stairway of rock; but by the new motor-road that swivels dizzily around the mountains this is an eight-mile journey. When we drove up on 29 July the violence of the monsoon was almost frightening. Everywhere water forcefully had its way, making a mockery of the apparent solidity of the hills as it ripped great wounds in their flanks and uprooted their bushes.

One could smell the Nursery before it became visible through this downpour. Up on our right the earth embankment of the compound was covered with excrement, now being distilled by the rain. Already this dominant stench had become for me one of the hallmarks of a Tibetan camp – that and the ragged, faded prayer flags which flutter indomitably wherever Tibetans gather – but here at Dharamsala the stench was a classic of its kind, with 1100 contributors concentrated in one small area.

Jill drove carefully across the compound – a sea of sticky mud – and then backed up to the SCF bungalow. The strange sight of a Land-Rover brought hundreds of excited children from the shelter of those crowded rooms to which they are confined twenty-four hours a day during the monsoon. Hungry, dirty and covered in sores, they stood watching intently while we unloaded the clothes, medicines and tinned foods which would make life a little easier for some of them.

Chumba and Kesang helped us to unload. Chumba was the camp cook, whose broad smile and kindly eyes were almost warm and bright enough to dispel the rains; Kesang was Juliet’s young servant, who shared our bungalow, unrolling her bedding each night on one of the hard, wooden Tibetan couches. As Juliet pointed out, it was essential for a personal servant to ‘sleep in’ if she were to be kept sufficiently licefree to look after our food and clothing. The other twenty ayahs on the compound showed the traditional Tibetan distaste for removing extraneous matter from the skin and were chronically lice-ridden. Most
of them had no rooms of their own, and at nightfall one found them sleeping in corners, looking like so many rolled-up bundles. The few who were married, or living with the man of their choice, had ‘homes’ in tiny, airless rooms measuring about six feet square. Yet they were all good-tempered and seemingly happy on a wage of fifteen shillings a month, though they worked a seven-day week.

We were joined for lunch by Oliver Senn, a Swiss Red Cross doctor who had arrived at the camp only two weeks previously. Already, at twenty-seven, Oliver was almost a caricature of the absent-minded professor and I wasn’t in the least surprised to discover, months later, that during his university career he had published a treatise on some impossibly abstruse branch of modern medicine. Tall, slim, slightly stooping, slightly bald and slightly near-sighted, Oliver spoke English fluently but quaintly and was given to blinking rapidly when brought up against the bewildering practicalities of life. To offset his prodigious erudition on a variety of subjects he had a child’s capacity for enjoying the simplest pleasures. And when you met Oliver you also met Claudia, his fiancée, who at that time was doing her medical finals in Switzerland and who was by a long way Oliver’s favourite topic of conversation.

Oliver lived in a damp, windowless cell behind the Dispensary – the sort of place in which no Englishman would keep a dog. Here he wrote official reports and did laboratory tests until the small hours of every morning and, since much of this lab work was research on dysentery, the atmosphere of his bedroom wasn’t too pleasant. He also acted as unofficial night-nurse; all the seriously ill children lay in rooms leading off his own, and he was frequently called to attend to complicated cases. But despite the numerous difficulties encountered when practising medicine in Dharamsala Oliver was already, within a fortnight, as enthusiastic about the Tibetans as I was soon to become.

During lunch Juliet instructed me in the geography of the camp. It was divided into three sections – Upper Nursery, Lower Nursery and Kashmir Cottage (see sketch). The Upper Nursery consisted of a group of ramshackle buildings a quarter of a mile higher up the mountain where about 380 children, aged eight to sixteen, were looked after by Doris Murray, an SCI Quaker volunteer who had come to Dharamsala in November 1962.

At the Lower Nursery, where we lived, some 600 children from one to eight years old were packed into five rooms. Two of these rooms had been recently built, but already the dormitory roof leaked so badly that during the monsoon umbrellas were needed when walking through it. The second new building had been designed as a recreation hall, with a stage for dancing, but because of overcrowding it was now used as another dormitory. It had no beds, which horrified some visitors, though in fact the children were perfectly happy and comfortable sleeping in rows on the wooden floor of the stage. Beds are not essential for Tibetans and can actually be a nuisance where bed-bugs abound; the wood-panelled walls of the old bungalow which formed the nucleus of the camp were swarming with them and unfortunately they soon solved their overpopulation problem by emigrating to the new rooms and to our bungalow.

The Dispensary, which was the pivot of all our work, was an extremely dilapidated bungalow, approached by crossing the road and descending the usual steep path to another ledge on the mountainside. It contained five small rooms; two were used as wards, where as many as eighty dangerously ill children were sometimes crowded together, one was the Dispensary proper, where medicines were stored and outpatients received attention, and the two narrow rooms at the back were allocated to Oliver and the Dispensary ayahs. These three young women, Nema, Lhamo and another Kesang, had all received some nursing training at Safdarjang Hospital in Delhi and spoke a little English, though not enough to avoid frequent linguistic crises in the course of a day’s work.

Kashmir Cottage was another dilapidated bungalow, an hour’s walk from the Lower Nursery. There about 120 six-to eight-year-olds were in the charge of a Tibetan woman named Dolma, who spoke fluent English. Both she and Chumba had left Tibet in 1954 and had been profitably employed in Calcutta before forefeiting their jobs to help at Dharamsala. When necessary Dolma brought the children who were
in her care up to the Dispensary and every week Oliver and Juliet went down to inspect them.

We had just finished lunch when Doris Murray paid us a brief visit. I now think of this extraordinary woman as being in a category apart from the average refugee-worker, for she possesses a combination of qualities which in another age might well have caused her to be revered as a saint. She was not among the Tibetans to escape from an uncongenial background, to enjoy a well-paid job in exotic surroundings, or because this was an interesting new experience. She worked here to serve humanity and though this motive may sound uncomfortably sentimental its results, when seen in action, make the ordinary helper feel very humble indeed. Doris has written to me:

With dignity and discretion she kept aloof from the endless petty squabbling which bedevils life in Tibland, and though the more unsavoury members of the Tibetan ruling clique repeatedly took advantage of her forbearance she was adept at devising excuses for their unpleasantness. Doris had come to Dharamsala to teach, but when she found the health problem so appalling she temporarily discarded her original intention and undertook what most fully trained nurses would consider an impossible task. But all the time she was quietly deepening her knowledge of Tibetan culture, since she hoped eventually to be free to work out that synthesis between Eastern and Western educational systems which she recognised as essential for the children’s future. Her bed-sitting-room-cum-dispensary at the Upper Nursery was cramped, dark and rat-infested and she lived on the usual SCI allowance of one and sixpence a day. Doris spoke less than any of us about the lovableness of Tibetans, yet she did more to help them than all the rest of us put together.

I got off to a gruesome start this morning. When we arrived at the Dispensary at 5.30 a.m. my first job was to put two children, who had died during the night, into the cardboard boxes which serve here as coffins. They were both four-year-olds but malnutrition had left them as small as an average two-year-old; it’s quite impossible to cure such miserable scraps once they get measles, bronchitis or dysentery. To make matters worse there is no possibility of notifying their parents, though the majority of the children have at least one parent living; so one often finds a mother or father wandering around the compound searching for their child, who has died perhaps several months ago, clutching the pathetic little bag of cheap sweets that was to have been the reunion present. Most of the parents are working on the roads in the Chumba or Kulu valleys, and they save up until they can pay the bus fare to Dharamsala and provide a few ‘extras’ for their children.

The Tibetans’ religion says that the dead must be given to one of the four elements – earth, fire, water or air. In Tibet the custom was to dismember corpses on a ‘cemetery’ hilltop, where birds ate them in a few hours, bones and all. This was considered giving the dead to the air and the custom obviously arose because in Tibet the earth is frozen hard for most of the year, wood is too scarce a fuel to be used on funeral-pyres and indiscriminately throwing bodies into rivers is unwise. But now, in India, Tibetans are cremated like Hindus.

This is our daily timetable, as devised by Juliet. Of course various adaptations have to be made to meet emergencies.

I must confess that tonight, after my first day in the camp, I’m feeling as depressed as anyone could be among these jolly Tibetans. It seems to me mathematically impossible that four Europeans, assisted by a handful of overworked, untrained ayahs, could ever make any significant impression on such a mass of misery.

This evening’s sunset was most spectacular. After a very wet thunder-stormy day the rain ceased for about an hour and the valley below us was hidden by an expanse of silver cloud. Suddenly the sky became a frenzied conflagration of orange, violet, red and lemon, and in the near distance a solid-looking black cloud wrapped itself round the dark rock of the jutting mountainside until you couldn’t see which
was which. In fact so curious were the cloud formations that the whole western sky looked as if it were full of buildings, floating in space.

The weather here suits me – it’s just like a warm, wet Irish July – but the humidity complicates our work beyond endurance. There is no way of drying clothes, so the children’s garments are either filthy, which leads to more scabies, etc., or damp, which leads to more bronchitis, etc. And of course a humid climate is in itself unhealthy for Tibetans, even if they are living under the best conditions.

This afternoon Mrs Tsiring Dolma, His Holiness’s elder sister and the Principal of the Nursery, came down from her office at the Upper Nursery to ‘vet’ me. She speaks no English but was accompanied by her two henchwomen, Dela and Diki, who were educated in a Darjeeling Convent School and speak perfect English. Mrs Tsiring Dolma welcomed me most cordially and was very sweet and charming and apparently deeply concerned about my comfort while in the camp; she was effusive in her expressions of sympathy for the children and of gratitude to all Western helpers. Obviously she is enjoyably aware of being the Dalai Lama’s sister, yet she seems unsure of herself in dealing with foreigners. I noticed that she wears dark spectacles, which effectively disguise all her reactions. Perhaps she finds this convenient at times.

This morning five-year-old Dolma, a most attractive child, died in Juliet’s arms while being taken to hospital in His Holiness’s jeep. She had been fed through a nasal tube for the past week and we had all longed to save her, as she didn’t suffer from that hopeless degree of malnutrition which means that there is no chance of normal health in maturity. But when we saw Juliet returning down the path to the Dispensary, soon after she had left carrying the little blanketed figure, we knew that Dolma was gone.

Poor Oliver was nearly in tears and quite convinced that somehow it was all his fault; he has not yet come to accept the death of a patient as one of the occupational hazards of his profession. Dolma was the fourth child to die within five days so at teatime a post-mortem was decided on lest some undiagnosed infection should have invaded the
camp. Oliver assured me that he and Juliet could easily cope without me, but I’m afraid that his consideration was wasted as I’ve always wanted to witness a PM and had no intention of missing this opportunity.

After supper we set to, having forbidden any Tibetan to enter the Dispensary, hung a blanket over the window, spread countless
newspapers
on the table and drenched the room in undiluted Dettol. The whole thing was extremely dangerous for Oliver; without adequate gloves or instruments the slightest nick in his hand could have proved fatal. In spite of my fondness for the child I was fascinated by the operation; somehow one doesn’t connect the corpse that’s being cut up with the human being one liked. After three hours’ hard work every organ had been removed and dissected, but the examination merely confirmed that Dolma had pneumonia in both lungs, an enlarged liver and intestines crammed with huge worms – which were still alive. It’s astonishing how much a body can contain: when everything was out in a big basin one could hardly believe that it had all fitted into the little space available. Oliver was very scrupulous about replacing every organ in its exact position, after I had baled bowlfuls of blood out of the torso, and then he sewed up the body as neatly as though after an operation. When we had replaced it in its little cardboard coffin he completed the ceremony by reading a short prayer for the dead from his German prayer-book.

It’s Sunday today so we have a free afternoon and I can write a longer entry. Really these Tiblets are most remarkable – I doubt if 600 children of any other breed could be so easily managed. Indeed it would be impossible to treat their complaints even as effectively as we do were it not for their extraordinary obedience and conspicuously high average rate of intelligence – even the tiniest tots respond to
signlanguage.
On my first morning at the Dispensary Juliet decided that we should administer cough-mixture regularly, so I went out to confront the multitude, bearing a huge flagon of mixture and a spoon. Not very hopefully I coughed exaggeratedly myself, pretended to drink
from the spoon and indicated the spot on the veranda where I wanted all ‘coughers’ to queue. My astonishment was considerable when, within two minutes, all concerned were lined up for their dose, beaming at me with that irresistible blend of spontaneous affection and trust so characteristic of small Tibetan children.

Of course the language problem is a nuisance at times as none of the children even speak Hindi, which Juliet would be able to understand. Neither she nor I hope to learn more than a few basic medical phrases in Tibetan, but Oliver, with his Swiss gift of tongues, is making rapid progress and should soon have a good working knowledge of his patients’ language. I envy him this facility, as it will enable him to get closer to the Tibetans than most Europeans do; already his sensitivity to their point of view has won him the affection and confidence of both adults and children.

There are two hamlets of tumble-down shacks near here – Forsythe Bazaar and Macleod Ganj – which have been taken over fairly recently by the refugees. Hitherto these adults have been wary of Western medicine, preferring their own ‘amchis’, who use a combination of herbal lore and quasi-religious charms – but now the sick from both hamlets are coming to the Dispensary in increasing numbers during ‘out-patient’ hours. Perhaps this is partly because Oliver sincerely respects their religious beliefs and also studies the old herbalist medicine; he believes in using simple local remedies when possible, rather than in concentrating on exorbitantly expensive drugs from abroad.

To return to the Distinguishing Marks of Tiblets. Their
consideration
for and politeness to each other positively makes me feel I’ve moved to another planet. I haven’t yet seen them quarrelling over anything – a most striking example of how deeply the Buddhist doctrine of non-violence has influenced the race. Not that Tibetans are incapable of quarrelling; many of them, especially the Khambas, have very hot tempers, and when drunk on chang or arak (their beer and spirits) they quite happily resort to fisticuffs. But fundamentally they are neither aggressive nor vindictive and their quarrels are always
short-lived
. In Simla I watched a practice soccer match between some of the
boys at Chota Simla School and there wasn’t one deliberate foul in the whole sixty minutes. Moreover, if a boy accidentally fouled he stopped playing immediately and apologised to his opponent. Incidentally, Tibetans seem to be wonderful natural footballers, though the idea of organised team sports is foreign to them, and this school recently beat five others to win the regional championship.

But the most endearing of all the Tiblets’ unusual traits is their generosity, which seems particularly impressive when one remembers how very little they have to be generous with. If a parent brings buns or sweets the lucky child will often divide them up and hand them round to those near by – without any prompting from anybody. Similarly, when I go on my rounds in the Dispensary with special foods for certain cases, the privileged patient will take a few mouthfuls and then point to those whom he considers are being unfairly neglected. It’s indescribably touching to see a worried five-year-old sitting up in bed looking from his mug of savoury soup to the mugs of soggy rice given to the others and emphatically indicating his disapproval of this
injustice,
before finishing his meal with an obviously guilty conscience. Unfortunately I can’t explain that food suitable for one case would kill another, so even those who can feed themselves have to be supervised at meal-times or the sharing of sieved spinach with dysentery cases might have fatal results. Some Tibetan children have already been sent to Europe and others are to follow soon. I dread to think of the effect our civilisation will have on them.

Most Tiblets don’t seem to form any special friendships: they play or chat together indiscriminately. Europeans often remark on their lack of playfulness, in our sense of the word, and attribute it to malnutrition. Obviously there is an element of physical lethargy involved, but I feel that some visitors to refugee camps over-stress this and misinterpret it as a symptom of misery, forgetting that Tiblets are not as restless as Western children and can be perfectly happy sitting immobile for hours on end, talking to each other quietly but animatedly. Yesterday provided a good example of the inherent self-discipline of these youngsters. Before lunch I captured Sonam Dorje, aged about six, and laid him on a bed in position for percussion treatment. Then Oliver
called me to help fix a drip on an emergency case so I abandoned Sonam Dorje, taking it for granted that he’d amuse himself until my return – but when I came back three-quarters of an hour later he was still lying exactly as I’d placed him, wide awake yet quite content to await developments for as long as might be necessary. And he is certainly suffering from no lack of energy, because when I’d finished tapping him he romped off and was soon to be seen aiming stones at a target rock down the mountainside.

All the children have names, except one chubby two-year-old who was found a year ago beside the body of his dead mother in Kalimpong. (I have now christened him ‘Ming Mindu’ – ‘The Nameless One’!) However, there are no family names in Tibet, apart from the nobility, and the range of Tibetan names – which are often common to both sexes – is strictly limited, so each child has a number written on a piece of cloth which is hung round its neck. Many Tiblets also wear as ‘necklaces’ a picture of His Holiness and a piece of red cloth blessed by a High Lama and guaranteed to protect them from evil.

The chief complaints here are bronchitis, pneumonia, TB,
whooping-cough,
chickenpox, measles, mumps, amoebic and bacillary dysentery, round-, hook-, tape-and wireworms, scabies, septic headsores from lice, septic bed-bug bites, boils, abscesses of incredible sizes, rickets, bleeding gums, weak hearts, asthma, conjunctivitis, trachoma and otitis media. The majority suffer from calcium and vitamin C deficiency and a heart-breaking number, no matter what is done for them now, will probably be partially blind or deaf, or both, in maturity. I was quite relieved by the deaths of three out of the four who went this week: it was obvious that they would have died young anyway, after a few more years of suffering. Worms are the main immediate cause of death. Juliet tells me that soon after she arrived she witnessed the unforgettably horrible sight of a fourteen-inch-long worm coming out of a year-old baby’s mouth. Naturally enough the child was choked to death. In extreme cases the worms sometimes infest even the brain. Scabies, which we tend to think of as a mildly annoying skin disease, is almost equally serious under these conditions of malnutrition, overcrowding and dirt. Many of the children are so covered with festering, open sores
that you couldn’t find room for a sixpence on a clear bit of skin. And when put to bed – six children lie across each bed – the heat so aggravates the itch and pain that they often lie awake whimpering quietly for hours. The only effective answer to scabies is cleanliness, but until the monsoon is over we are helpless to do anything about this. We can only try to keep the suppurating sores under some sort of control, and here again, if the Tiblets weren’t so co-operative our task would be almost impossible.