by Iyer, Pico
In Tibet itself the government in Beijing has brought in, by one count, 224 karaoke parlors, 658 brothels, and one thirteen-story Public Security Office on the main streets of Lhasa alone, to create a look that would not be out of place in Atlantic City. The small capital now has a population of two hundred thousand, ten times its size in 1950, and it has been swollen to cover twenty times as much area as it used to occupy. The idea is that material plenty will liberate people from the feudalism of worship, and that modernity means having access to satellite television, sexy dance halls, and the spoils of Wal-Mart and Nike (the Chinese government even recently increased the salary of Tibetan officials by a factor of three, as if to enforce the belief that what machine guns had failed to achieve, material temptation might).
Dharamsala has all that, too—the Tibetans have always been a highly mercantile and shrewd group of traders—but it is built on the idea that modernity has to do with a set of values rather than with a set of goods, that it is the result of a cast of mind, even more than of a way of life. In their loftiest moments, those who are intrigued by the case study could even see the temples scattered across the slopes of Dharamsala as offering the beginnings of a Buddhist vision of a city on a hill (looked over not by God but, as befits the Buddhist tradition, by men).
To walk around the little lanes and the kerfuffle of dirty cafés and dusty shops, past signs saying, “the only Internet café where all proceeds go directly to the Tibetan cause” or “Charitable Trust Handicrafts,” is to see how great a distance separates vision from reality—and how, indeed, vision can arise from reality only inch by inch. Dharamsala, as if in deference to the notorious filth of old Tibet, has often had almost no garbage collection, and refuse clogs its ill-kept streets; the path leading down to the idyllic Tsechokling Monastery starts next to a huge pile of trash. One day, as I walked along the always cluttered main street, barely wide enough for the single cars that barrel through it, horns screaming, I found, amazingly, a small opening in the thoroughfare, but that was only because a crowd had gathered around a space in which an Indian boy and a Tibetan were engaged in a fistfight.
One bright Saturday in the spring I went to see the Dalai Lama while he was in the midst of presenting forty-six days of uninterrupted teachings (he saw me just after he had completed his morning session of initiations and empowerments in the temple next door, on his lunch break, in effect), and I asked him how the Tibetan experiment in exile could offer a model for the world. I could tell that modesty—and realism—prevented him from making any claims for himself or his people, but at the same time he had clearly thought about the challenge as few political leaders ever had the chance to do. The minute I posed the question, he referred, with characteristic precision, to encounters he had had in Germany, in Australia, in North America and Chile, with other groups likewise addressing the issue of how to keep their traditions alive. He remembered one indigenous leader who had delivered a long, long speech demanding that all his precious land be given back to him—“Unrealistic!” as the Dalai Lama put it, with a great accelerating burst of laughter. He recalled frictions within the Tibetan community in 1951, and proposals that had been offered about how to set up exile settlements in 1959, and what to do with Tibet’s small group of guerrillas in the 1970s. One idea had been advanced by a member of his family, one by a first cousin of the private secretary who was sitting by his side, but both, he remembered now (as if it had all happened four days, and not almost five decades, before), were wrong.
When first he decided that the Tibetans should set up whole settlements, with central monasteries and laypeople around them, in southern India, his people said they could not survive, he told me. The heat, the unfamiliar food, the absence of snow mountains led them to tell him they were going to die. “The next time I visited, they’re still there! So I said to them, ‘You haven’t died yet!’” he went on, the infectious laughter breaking out again.
Much in Tibetan culture—many customs, the clothes, the long plaits, the heavy coats made for the Himalayan winter—had to be abandoned, he said, in the heat of the tropics. Since these are fading already in Tibet, “no need worry, no need effort! Cultural heritage—not relevant in today’s world, so let it go.” But in terms of a language, a way of thinking, the attempt to pass on to children, say, a compassionate feeling for animals, those are relevant anywhere, beneath the surface. “A young child has no idea of next life or sin or these things, but in their family tradition, from an early age, they hear ‘It’s not good to kill animals.’ So these things are worthy of being preserved. And can be preserved.”
I came out from the talk buoyed, not just by the ideas he had outlined but, more, by the precision with which he had cited specific precedents and parallels, and the modest limits he seemed to be setting for himself. He had told Aboriginals in Australia, for example, that they should keep their own indigenous names even if they were going to take on, for practical purposes, European names; in the same spirit, he actually urged some Tibetans to receive initiations from Chinese teachers, since in places the Chinese tradition of Buddhism was flourishing more than the Tibetan. In the context of trying to lead an exiled group into a new definition of itself, realism seemed at least as valuable as optimism.
Yet just twelve hours before, the previous night, I had been in a little room down the road, talking to some of the most vocal members of the new generation of Tibetans, who had experienced only displacement and a longing for a place they knew mostly through their parents’ stories. Seven of us had been crowded into a single room, in a block of small cells (although the flat belonged to one of the senior members of the Dalai Lama’s government in exile). The wife of the household was away in Boston, leaving her little kids to run around, barely tended by their aunt and grandmother, and one of those present, stationed abroad, was mourning the fact that his teenage daughter was entirely European in manners and dress.
The refrain of the younger Tibetans in the room—and they could have been speaking for Tibetans all around them—was loss: they were lost souls from a lost generation, with no sense of who they were or where they belonged. They spoke fluent Hindi and had grown up entirely in India, with Indian friends and tastes, but they did not wish to become Indian. They spoke good English and had contacts in the foreign world, but each step toward England or America would take them farther from Dharamsala and, most of all, Tibet.
They were Tibetans who knew nothing about Tibet, and who fought and prayed for a place that at one level they knew could not be the place they imagined.
One of them, in desperation, had stolen into Tibet for three months. Almost as soon as he crossed over into his homeland from Ladakh, Tenzin said, he was apprehended and put into detention. “They beat me every day in prison,” he went on softly in the ill-lit room, “though they took care not to leave any marks.” We walked out into the full-moon quiet of the spring evening, the broken offices and half-neglected rooms all around somewhat hopefully outlining a government in exile. “I was a romantic boy,” he declared, though not yet thirty. “I thought I would go to Tibet and somehow win independence by myself.”
Now he tried to agitate in different ways, writing poems and, when the Chinese premier was paying a visit, climbing all fourteen stories of the Oberoi Towers in Bombay to unfurl the banned Tibetan flag and a red banner that said, “Free Tibet.” “We are Tibetans with Chinky faces,” a friend of his said in disgust as we walked up the slope to where the Dalai Lama’s house sat and slept in the clear night.
The young Tibetans at the dinner had presented me, before I left, with a book they had just brought out, the first collection of Tibetan poetry in English in the history of their people. The book seemed mostly a mix of cries and shouts and, especially, questions. What am I, where am I going, how can I help the country I’ve never seen? What do I do with my Indian accent and Western dress? What is the price of going against those elders who have seen Tibet and fled from it? The most striking feature of all the poems, from young and o
ld, from every corner of the globe (such is the state of the Tibetan diaspora today), was its lack of answers.
One poem began, somewhat typically,
I am just a soul in a fix
Crying for the right direction
My mind is so mixed
It’s in total confusion.
The biographical note at the end said that the poet had been “something of an enigma amongst his small circle of friends” and had lived a “life of dreams, drugs, desperation and rift.” He had died at twenty-eight, leaving behind a dark blue diary full of poems about Tibet.
Perhaps these boys, as they often were, would have written similar poems had they grown up in Lhasa at a time without occupying Chinese. Many of their gestures, the romanticism of their sorrow, sounded like what you find when you open up any collection of university poems in Bombay or Guangzhou or, for that matter, New Haven. Perhaps they’d have begun, wherever they were, with a quotation from Sartre: “Human life begins at the far end of despair.” Identity crises, the search for something, a sense of pervading sadness or frustration that reaches no farther than the small cosmos of the self, are, to some extent, the universal currency of the young.
But of course there was an extra component here, among people whose culture had, not long ago, been among the most self-contained and changeless in the world, and now had been propelled into a new kind of nomadism. When we came up into the center of the Tibetan settlement at the end of the evening, many of the people around us had faces that were tomato red, having been smeared with color by Indian boys celebrating the Hindi holiday of Holi. Two days from now, in the St. John in the Wilderness church down the road, the cheerful Indian priest who slept each night on the cold floor would spring to life and, putting a cassock over his sneakers and jeans, hand out two photocopied pages with the lyrics to “Morning Has Broken” on them (and “Have a Nice Day” at the end), so that the small congregation of foreigners could join him in singing Cat Stevens’s modern hymn on Easter Sunday. A cappella because the old church was lacking an organ. The boys were outsiders, really, wherever they happened to find themselves. The Dalai Lama’s injunction to build a home within was like an idea they knew already but could not begin to see how to implement.
Every month, once or twice, a bus labors up the hill into McLeod Ganj, and after bumping over potholes and squeezing between the unceasing lines of pilgrims, stops at a rickety little three-story building on a barely paved slope, and fifty or sixty wild Tibetans step out. They seem to belong to a different universe from the worldly exiles all around in leather jackets and sunglasses, speaking the hipster lingo of Bombay or Delhi. The girls wear no makeup, and the boys, even in their American T-shirts and caps, bring an air of otherness into the street. Their faces are untamed somehow, their clothes torn. They seem to be blinking as they step out into a world they have been dreaming of for all or most of their lives, only to find that it is cluttered and full of signs that say, bewilderingly, “STD” or “PCO,” the opposite of peaceful or exalted (at home the streets are cleaner, and much more of a piece). Their noses are running, often, and some of their clothes bear the accumulated grime of twenty days of hard travel across twenty-thousand-foot peaks and in long-distance buses, nights spent in interim shacks for transients.
When they arrive at the reception center, they will stay, sometimes two to a bed, for a month or more, getting elementary lessons in English and Hindi and waiting till the Dalai Lama is back in town and they can see him at long last. After their brief audience, the children will be assigned to schools, the monks will be sent to monasteries, the elderly will often return to Tibet, hearts satisfied, and the rest will be sent where there is room or need for them. For those who, having seen the Dalai Lama, are ready to return to Tibet, the trip back is as hazardous as the trip out, and if they are caught by police on either side of the border, they will be sent to prison, sometimes in a large building in Shanghai known, with killing irony, as “the New Tibet Reception Center.”
I met a newcomer in the Dharamsala center one sunny morning, crowded among the two hundred or so sitting listlessly on shared beds or walking around the corridors, not really in any fit state to join the larger world yet, and gathered that he had managed to get out through resourcefulness alone, learning fluent English, applying for a Chinese passport, and, having taken pains to send his younger brother and sister through college before he left (since it is they who would suffer if his absence was noted), leaving through legitimate channels. Strikingly enterprising—as many in Communist systems are, especially if from unapproved backgrounds—he told me how he got jobs with foreign NGOs in Tibet, traveled all around his homeland in the spirit of a journalist, saw how, when the World Bank sent fact-finding delegations to an area, “the Chinese township cadres pretended to be monks.”
He had come out, he declared now, in order to tell the world the truth about Tibet, and to me it seemed he already spoke the language of the world at large, fluent in talk of “primary health care” and stories about getting arrested along with some foreigners (one of whom tried to jump out of a third-floor window in order to protect his research materials). In Tibet, he said, “hospitals are a marketplace,” and “even the doctors don’t know about blood-transmitting diseases. Hepatitis. T.B.” Having been trained from birth to talk in terms of “patriotic reeducation programs” and “Public Security Officers”—the phrases came trilling out—he now spoke the language given him by activist foreigner friends, members of Médecins sans Frontières.
And yet something still came through. When he finally managed to leave his homeland, the trim young man in the smart North Face “Wind Stopper” told me, “I cried. The Nepali people, they are poor, but they are enjoying basic human rights. Poor is no problem if you are free.” Someone who had freedom but no food might think differently, I thought to myself, but said nothing. “I saw on the street, on a busy road in Kathmandu, there was a small temple—there in the middle of the road—and they have to protect it. In Tibet, even a huge monastery they destroy if they’re building a road in the same town.”
Around him, grubby children stared up, transfixed. Eight hundred and twenty-four refugee children arrived at the Tibetan Children’s Village in 2004, a more or less typical year, swelling the already crowded classrooms and living spaces beyond the breaking point. Though many of them would go back to Tibet once their education was complete, they would go back as real Tibetans who knew their language and their history.
Another day, I chanced to run into Manuel Bauer, the photographer who was compiling an extraordinary archive of the Dalai Lama by following him around from dawn to dusk on most of his travels. As we repaired to a nearby restaurant for lunch, he told me how he had come to the Dalai Lama’s attention by becoming the first photographer, anywhere, to chronicle the flight of modern Tibetans across the Himalayas, to freedom, risking his life to bring back the story.
It was April when his small group left, he said, just he and a Tibetan man and the man’s daughter, only six years old. But already it was hideously cold. Chinese soldiers were everywhere, some of them ready to shoot simply because they were bored. Even on the brightest blue days, the wind was so fierce that it was known to blow snow into travelers’ mouths, and the snow entered their systems and melted inside their bodies, causing many to die even in warm weather.
As a group of only three, he said, they moved quickly; they were able to travel by day, because they were so inconspicuous, instead of only after dark, as most refugees do, and they completed the trip in only sixteen days. But still there was derangement. “I lost my mind,” the calm Swiss photographer said matter-of-factly in the quiet, sunlit restaurant. “For two, three days, I was in delirium. And in the delirium I was thinking, ‘This six-year-old girl, she can move so fast. Why doesn’t she carry bags? I have twenty kilos of equipment and bags to carry.’ I was aggressive with her because I lost my mind.”
When they crossed the Chinese border, he recalled, the trip grew only more hazardous.
Many Nepali officials send Tibetans back to captivity, to satisfy the rulers in Beijing, though often they rob the Tibetans first. Even if the refugees can get to Kathmandu and the care of an official from the U.N. High Commission for Refugees, their problems are not over. “Sometimes the U.N. van, even with a U.N. person there, is stopped. And the Nepali police take everything! These refugees, they have come out with only a carpet, one bag, and they take that, the Nepali police, and send them back.” The same story known around the world, among boat people from Vietnam, and Cubans, even Chinese trying to steal into America; refugees, already the most vulnerable people in the world, are perfect prey for pirates and corrupt officials.
“So you’re safe only when you get to India?”
“No. I’m sorry to say this”—he had guessed my Indian heritage—“but the Indian people are not always honest. Sometimes they attack these refugees. They know they are defenseless.”
“So you’re really only safe when you get to Dharamsala?”
And here Manuel said nothing at all.
“When you got there, the man stayed with his daughter?”
The photographer’s eyes now were red. The father deposited his daughter safely in the Tibetan Children’s Village, he said, confident that she had a new life and home there, and then turned around and made the long, treacherous trip back into Tibet, alone.
There is a real excitement, inevitably, in walking through a community that has been devised by a single man, and that man not a Castro or Disney or Kim Il Sung but a philosopher and a monk: you feel that an experiment is being conducted on behalf of one of the fastest-growing nations in the world—the land of the deracinated (since by some counts there are now one hundred million refugees in the world, part of a tribe that is twice as populous as Australia and Canada combined). There is a quickening sense—a Buddhist sense, perhaps—of things (at least in theory) being always in movement, everything becoming a work in progress; I return after two years away and find that nearly all the restaurants in the area have stopped serving beer—in deference to classical Buddhist disapproval of intoxicants—and experts are now being brought in from Sweden to help with the epidemic of wild dogs running around.