by Andrew Duff
By 25 March, the Dalai Lama and his party had reached the safety of a small monastery, where they met two of the CIA-trained guerrillas. A message was sent back to Washington by radio. At that point the members of the CIA’s Tibet Task Force were the only ones with a general fix on where the Dalai Lama was. Aware that the Chumbi Valley would be the expected route and would be packed with Chinese soldiers, his advisers had instead chosen a route through the Tawang Valley, on the other side of Bhutan in India’s north-east. As they made their way towards the Indian border, the question of exile became the main topic of discussion. Given Nehru’s pronouncements and his continued belief in Asian unity, there was some doubt as to how he would react. It took pressure via the Americans to extract a confirmation from the Indians that the Tibetan leader was welcome.
Just two weeks after leaving Lhasa, the Dalai Lama finally crossed the border into India, near Tawang, to the east of Bhutan. Mikel Dukham, author of Buddha’s Warriors, captured the final moments:
Late in the afternoon of March 31, the Dalai Lama, significantly weakened by his ordeal, rode into a clearing with tall bamboo gates up ahead. He dismounted his dzo [mule]. Gurkha soldiers offered him khatas*. With Phala by his side, the Dalai Lama put on a brave smile and walked through the proscenium of exile. The ruler was twenty-three years old.52
Just under two decades after he had been brought to Lhasa as a four year old, the Dalai Lama, ‘a God turned refugee’, stepped out of Tibet, almost certainly for the last time.53
It would take a few months for Nehru and India to fully comprehend the ramifications of the Dalai Lama’s flight to India. The Indian prime minister’s dreams of pan-Asian unity were in tatters. Thousands of Tibetans followed the Dalai Lama out of the country and into India, most accompanying him to Mussoorie and then on to McLeod Ganj, an old British hill station that would eventually become the seat of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile.
The impact on Sikkim was just as substantial. On a practical level, streams of Tibetan refugees started pouring into the country. Nari Rustomji, who would soon leave Sikkim, recalled that not everyone welcomed them. ‘Many in Sikkim had not forgotten the air of cultural arrogance assumed by the Tibetans in the past towards their remote and “backward” brethren, and decided it was now their turn to swing the lead.’ Thondup’s mother, a Tibetan by birth, and Coocoola, married to a Tibetan, led the efforts to attend to the needs of the refugees, finding land and employment where they could and helping them to establish a new life.
There was another curious consequence arising from events in Tibet: suddenly Sikkim became newsworthy. In January, Time magazine included a page-length feature on ‘little Sikkim, the size of Delaware’, a country that they said had ‘managed to preserve its identity over the centuries’. The author portrayed Sikkim as a mystical land, mocking 65-year-old Tashi who, he wrote, spent all day painting and praying: ‘Recently he had a “vision” of the Abominable Snowman, put him on a canvas as a skinny, jet-black creature with a red face, carrying a naked pink lady across the peaks of the Himalayas.’ Thondup, the article went on, was ‘the real power’ in ‘the battle against “evil outside influences”’, alongside ‘buoyant N. K. Rustomji’.
‘What happens in Tibet,’ the article concluded with some prophetic power, ‘has always echoed in Sikkim.’54
By the summer of 1959 Thondup was weary, feeling the loss of his wife, the strain of the refugee crisis and the pressures of bringing up three children under the age of ten. The influx of Tibetans had only multiplied the political complexities he was facing. The most recent proposal from the politicians in Sikkim was to increase the number of seats in the council yet further, again diluting the Bhutia-Lepcha community. With his ally Rustomji leaving after five years in Sikkim, Thondup knew he would also have to deal with a new dewan.
He found himself increasingly focused on the simple pleasures – the walks around Gangtok, and the regular trips he made to Darjeeling, where his two sons were thriving at school.
It was on one such trip in the summer of 1959 that he met a 19-year-old American woman who would have a considerable bearing on the events of the next 15 years.
Hope Cooke was about to arrive in Sikkim.
* The 13th Dalai Lama subsequently spent more than a year in exile in Darjeeling, during which time Bell carefully developed the British government’s relations with Tibet.
* ‘Hindi-Chini-bhai-bhai’ (literally ‘India China brother brother’) became a popular press catchphrase.
* Perhaps akin to a top English civil servant deciding to wear a kilt every day while serving in the UK government’s Scottish Office in Edinburgh
* On the same principles as a ski-tow or chairlift.
* The 10th incarnation of the Panchen Lama was a point of dispute between the Chinese and the Tibetans. After the death of the 9th Panchen Lama in 1937, the Chinese nationalists declared that they had discovered the next incarnation, but he was never approved by the Lhasa government. Mao continued to support the same candidate, and the 17-Point Agreement was seen, in part, as being a legitimisation of the choice of candidate.
* For Thondup’s brother, George-la (considered ‘highly sensitive’), the visit had a very different effect. He turned up at Rustomji’s house in a ‘state of acute emotional distress’ due to what he called the ‘impact on a highly sensitive mind of the accumulation of forces, or thought-currents, emanating from the unprecedented number of reincarnate lamas that had gathered together at Gangtok’. Like a ‘bulb fused by an excess of electric charge’, he was in need of rest and quiet. The remedy initially prescribed by the lamas was circumambulation, but he ‘eventually proceeded abroad for treatment on more conventional lines’.
* An acronym of the three leaders’ names.
* One British civil servant, James Scott, recalled her serving the delicacy abalone, whispering into his ear that it was ‘good for men’s vigour’. The next morning, after a particularly long night drinking chang from bamboo cups, blond-haired Scott awoke sprawled on his bed to find the princess and her two young children at the end of the bed, with Coocoola saying, ‘Look children! It’s a Yeti!’
† A community of traders originally from Rajasthan, belonging to the trading caste of banias.
* Initially the airdrops consisted of the old British-made Lee-Enfield rifles and ammunition, because that was what the Tibetan army had used and was familiar with. Over time the Tibetan resistance migrated to American-made weapons.
* Also known as khadas, a white silk scarf offered as greeting in Buddhist custom.
CHAPTER THREE
Where There’s Hope
1959–65
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One evening in the summer of 1959, Thondup pulled up outside the Windamere Hotel in Darjeeling in his Mercedes, walked into the lounge and ordered his usual evening drink. The Windamere, a throwback to the colonial era, was fast becoming an iconic establishment in the hill town. Thondup often dropped in after visiting his children in the local boarding school. He always knew that he would find friends who would allow him to relax and forget his troubles.
On this particular evening, his eye was drawn to a pretty young girl in the corner of the room. She was dressed in an Austrian dirndl, the kind of aproned dress that would soon become famous as a result of the film The Sound of Music. Within minutes he had established from his friends that she was American, a student, on holiday in India, and that she had been at the Windamere for a few days.
The two soon found themselves ensconsed in deep conversation.
From the moment Thondup and Hope Cooke met, there was a strong attraction. He was a widower, with three young children, 36 years old, endearingly shy and with a slight stammer. She was an adventurous, naive, nervy 19-year-old on the trip of a lifetime. ‘My friends tell me I was travelling on a pink cloud, yet I did not recognise fate when I first met it,’ she wrote a few years later.
It must have made a most unusual site: Hope in her dirndl, Thondup in ‘a cream-coloured Bakku, his
national dress, high-collared, ankle length, long-sleeved, and folded back tightly around the waist with a crimson sash’.1 To Hope, this man, ‘tall and straight . . . his face, its skin drawn smooth across high cheekbones, looked lightly sunburned’, was ‘truly, truly handsome’; he, intrigued by the unusual sight of a pretty young American girl in Darjeeling, felt the attraction too.
At that first meeting they talked for some time about ‘ballet and Oriental religions’, the young American hanging on Thondup’s every word. Over the next few days they met a number of times. ‘I found it exciting just to sit and, mostly, listen to him talk,’ she wrote in a magazine article a few years later.
In one conversation Hope recalled a particularly ‘skilful dissection of United States foreign policy in Southeast Asia’, also noticing how Thondup was taken up with the plight of the Tibetan refugees pouring over the border into makeshift camps. He told the teenage girl ‘painful stories’, providing his own historical context:
You must understand. Back in the fifties when I tried to help Tibet, the only time they could be helped, your government let me down. Some pipsqueak in the Calcutta consulate told me ‘Your Highness, you must realise that we with all our resources and intelligence have a clearer view of what should be done than you ever could.’ We had everything lined up – pilots, supplies. All we needed was a few planes. A few planes. Now they’re helping. They’re helping this Johnny-come-lately crowd of Tibetan politicians – and what happens? The weapons all fall into Chinese hands and more Tibetans are killed. It had to be earlier. Now it’s certain death to encourage the Tibetans to fight rearguard. Certain death.2
Hope listened, spellbound.
If fate had already thrust Thondup into his position as heir-apparent in Sikkim (through his elder brother’s fatal crash in Peshawar in December 1941), it was another fateful crash on the other side of the world just two weeks later that had shaped Hope Cooke’s life.
On 4 January 1942 Hope Cooke’s mother, a free-spirited 25-year-old, had taken off for a solo flight from an airfield in Nevada. When a search party eventually found her plane in the snowy desert – with an empty fuel tank – there was no avoiding the obvious conclusion: she had set off with no intention of returning. She left behind two daughters. The younger was Hope Cooke, only 18 months old.
Thondup’s life had been drastically altered by his brother’s crash; within a fortnight, the course of Hope’s had also been changed irrevocably.
The extraordinary circumstances of her upbringing had eventually led to the bid for freedom that had taken her to Darjeeling. By the time of Hope’s mother’s death, she was already under the guardianship of her wealthy maternal grandparents, shipping company president Winchester Noyes and his wife. Hope’s father, John Cooke, had been a handsome flight instructor at Roosevelt Airfield in Long Island; by the time Hope’s mother met him, she had already been married and divorced once. Possessed by a desire to fly, she had signed up for courses at the school and fallen in love. It was not a match that Hope’s mother’s parents had approved of – John Cooke was Irish and from a ‘fairly poor’ background. The couple had moved around the States without apparent purpose, living in Long Island and Los Angeles before settling briefly in San Francisco, where Hope was born in 1940. At the time of her death, Hope’s mother was suing for her second divorce. John Cooke was long gone.
So, from before the age of two, Hope – and Harriet, her half-sister from her mother’s first marriage – lived with their grandparents in New York.3 Installed in a separate apartment across the corridor on smart 62nd Street between Park and Madison Avenues, Hope and her half-sister fell under the influence of their strong-willed grandmother. A series of governesses looked after them and escorted them to the local school and to summer breaks in either Long Island or Maine. Hope later wrote that even in these early years she ‘rebelled against the stuffiness and smugness’ at Miss Madeira’s, the New York school she attended. When she needed an escape, she would turn to a letter her mother had written from Nevada about her love of flying: ‘It seemed to me as if the stars and sky had some powerful pull on my mother – that she had been caught between the gravitational spheres of earth and a galaxy where she remained spinning in space.’4
In 1956, shortly before her 16th birthday, Hope’s grandparents died within weeks of each other; overnight the two girls became wards of their maternal Aunt Mary and her husband, Selden Chapin. Chapin was a career diplomat, highly respected in US Foreign Service circles; before the war he had held posts in North Africa and China (where the couple had married), he had worked with de Gaulle during the war, and had been serving in Hungary when the Iron Curtain descended. By 1956 he was US ambassador in Iran, newly ‘liberated’ by an American-sponsored coup that installed the Shah. The important posting was a recognition of both his status within the US Foreign Service and his reputation as a ‘rather well-known anti-communist’.
That summer Hope and Harriet flew to Iran for the summer holidays from their Virginia boarding school. Iran’s capital Tehran was a whirl of excitement. A sparkling expatriate social scene had sprung up, much of it centring around the tennis court of the US embassy. For the first time in her life, Hope ‘had a really true feeling of being part of a family’. As the summer came to an end she pleaded in vain not to be sent back to school in Virginia.
In the summer of 1957 she returned to Tehran. Again she implored her uncle and aunt not to send her back to Virginia. This time her new guardians agreed and Hope was enrolled in the community high school in Tehran. Suddenly she had the freedom to make ‘slightly radical’ new friends, sparking a sense of her own identity for the first time. She became intoxicated by the sounds, smells and sights of the Shah’s Iran, dressing in a shador as a disguise on trips into the bazaar, or heading up into the Elburz Mountains with a young colleague of her uncle’s. Her mind fizzed with the possibilities of ‘the East’. She was ‘intellectually and emotionally captivated by Central Asia’.
In the spring of 1958 she jumped at the chance to accompany her aunt on a short holiday to India. As they toured through Delhi, Agra and the holy city of Varanasi the breathless 17-year-old fell in love with everything she saw. ‘India! My heart explodes,’ she wrote in her autobiography, trying to capture how she felt visiting the subcontinent for the first time. But she returned feeling frustrated from touring with her 55-year-old aunt. ‘I suspected even then that I would have enjoyed the out-of-the-way places much more,’ she wrote in a 1963 magazine article. ‘Before I returned to Tehran, I was planning – no, scheming – how to get back to see the entire subcontinent.’
Back in Tehran that summer she came out as a debutante: ‘Though I was not, at least in my own estimation, a debutanty type . . . on my eighteenth birthday, Aunt Mary and Uncle Selden gave a dance at the Embassy, at which Princess Shahnaz, the Shah of Iran’s daughter, and I shared the honours. It was an extremely glamorous party . . .’5
That autumn she returned to study at Sarah Lawrence College, a liberal arts school in Westchester County, New York. Soon she had established strong friendships with a group of bright and intelligent girls, finding herself ‘spun around by the intellectual possibilities’ on offer, enrolling in history classes and taking every opportunity to incorporate Asia into her studies. Outside college she became increasingly bohemian, ‘testing my boundaries or lack of them’.
By the spring of 1959 she was desperate to return to India, the youthful country run by Nehru, ‘the beautiful visionary with a dreamy smile’. A college-led trip to the USSR provided an opportunity. A friend helped her draft a fictitious itinerary for a trip through India, complete with an imaginary accompanying group. Her aunt and uncle bought it. After a month in the USSR, she flew on to Nehru’s India, finding it (in contrast to the USSR) ‘aflame with ideas as well as national spirit’.
Within a week she was on an adventure through the country. In New York, the two girls had searched through brochures for suitable hotels that would please Hope’s aunt. They chose one in
Darjeeling – the Windamere – partly because its name was ‘the most Englishy hotel we’d found in the brochures’, and partly because ‘the name sounded wonderfully romantic’.
‘It seemed,’ she wrote four years later, ‘just the place to get the real feel of the East.’
Meeting Thondup would turn out to be a defining moment in Hope Cooke’s life. But after their first encounter in late summer 1959, she had to return to college for the autumn semester at Sarah Lawrence, satisfied only with relaying the news of her Asian adventures to her college friends.
Hope and Thondup would not see or talk to each other for another two years, but the young American could not get the Sikkimese prince and the impression he had made on her out of her mind:
[His] rueful, droll manner, his obvious integrity, and his extraordinary, handsome looks: intelligent dark eyes, smooth bronze skin, sloping cheekbones, and sensual mouth. I imagine him in the countryside up the river by a pool of light. By chance, on the several occasions when we’d looked up across the Tista River to the foothills in Sikkim, the sun, as it tends to do during the monsoon in the Himalayas, had broken into a yellow burst.6
If it was a crush for the young American, it was a serious one.
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Thondup, too, had enjoyed meeting Hope. But thoughts of the young American in the dirndl soon faded as he returned to Gangtok, where he found there were other more pressing matters to deal with.
With the flight of the Dalai Lama into India, the international community had to face up to the fact that the Chinese were de facto in full control of Tibet. Since Sikkim lay on the only feasible overland trading route between Chinese-occupied Tibet and India, its geopolitical importance became more glaringly obvious than ever.