Tibetan Foothold

by Dervla Murphy

  Of course in Tibet itself the average peasant did not have such luxurious meals. His staple foods were meat, milk, tsampa (barley flour) and the very nourishing salted butter-tea – a monotonous but healthy diet. Many people express disapproving astonishment when they hear of Buddhists eating meat, but vegetarianism was never a practical possibility in Tibet, where few crops can be grown; so the herds of yak and sheep have always been the chief source of Tibetan food – which may partly explain why they were such a renownedly healthy race. Some of the lamas and monks did abstain from meat, but most people were content to salve their consciences by somewhat illogically considering butchers as social outcasts and never ordering an animal to be killed. If you went to your local butcher’s tent and saw a dead sheep and bought it for your supper you remained innocent, but if you went along and told the butcher you wanted a sheep killed for tomorrow’s supper you were guilty of causing life to be taken. The blatant irrationality of this is childish – yet you could match it in some Christian teachings without having to think too hard.

  The diet of the children here is very different from ours – too different, I felt at first. Then, on reflection, I realised that although we might feel more at ease if living nearer their level, it wouldn’t help to have us falling sick. Yet I’m not satisfied that their menu need be quite so bad, considering the various money-allowances and per capita donations of foodstuffs that are supposed to come to the camp from the Indian Government and other sources. This is a situation that might profitably be investigated.

  At the moment they get for breakfast half a moo-moo (about three ounces), which contains very little of food value, and a small mug of slightly sweetened tea. That is at seven o’clock and the next meal is at noon, when they get a mug of rice and dahl, or a half-mug of watery soup containing about an ounce of meat, with half a moo-moo. Tea at three o’clock is the same as breakfast, and supper at six o’clock the same as lunch. However, Juliet has just obtained a special allowance from SCF to provide the Dispensary cases with one piece of fruit each per day, and she herself will be in sole charge of this fund, so that is one concrete improvement.

  7 AUGUST

  Today Herr Albert Eggler, Honorary Secretary to the Swiss Association for Tibetan Homesteads, came to Dharamsala, and Oliver, Juliet and I were invited to the ritual luncheon party which Mrs Tsiring Dolma holds at the Upper Nursery whenever VIPs visit the camp. Herr Eggler is in India to choose a third batch of thirty-three Tibetans (mostly adults) for permanent resettlement in Switzerland; the first two batches were chosen mainly from refugees in Nepal.

  This being Wednesday Juliet has her ‘day off’, which she spends working at the Kangra Schools, so she declined the invitation and Oliver and I set off together up the path through the forest. The monsoon was monsooning even more than usual and we were soaked to the skin after the fifteen-minute climb. But the lunch was worth it – a banquet of over a dozen savoury dishes, followed by bowls of delicious soup. The idea is that you drink the soup out of the bowl and then daintily extricate the residue of choice morsels with your chopsticks: but already I’d been so demoralised by the intractability of said chopsticks that I threw etiquette overboard and furtively fished the bits out with my fingers. It’s fascinating to watch Tibetans handling these elegant ivory sticks – they can unerringly pick up one grain of rice with them. In Tibet they are used only by the nobility, so a surreptitious survey of my fellow-guests soon revealed which individuals had risen from the ranks: if you haven’t learned the art from babyhood you can’t ever really master it.

  Herr Eggler – a famous mountaineer and lawyer – has a delightful sense of humour, and during lunch we amused ourselves by considering the effect polyandry would have on European officialdom. It’s a lovely thought; imagine the passport – Name of Husband (add an ‘s’ with pen): Sonam Dorje, Tsiring Sonam, Dorje Chumbe. Name of Wife: Dolma Tsiring. Children’s names: (here follows a long list) and then the bemused passport officer asking, ‘Whose father is which?’ or ‘Whose child is which?’ depending on the way it struck him. And Dolma Tsiring replying gaily in Tibetan, ‘Who knows – and who cares?’ Actually, of course, all such children are traditionally accepted in Tibet as being the eldest brother’s (among the Tibetans the husbands in polyandric marriages are always brothers) and Herr Eggler said the small minority of family units already built on this basis would be allowed to remain intact, though the young people who are settling in Switzerland would have to obey Swiss law and restrict themselves to one partner at a time. To me this seems unfair. It may suit a Tibetan peasant to have two or three husbands simultaneously, whereas a rich European woman may prefer to have two or three in rapid succession, but why should Tibetans be forced to conform to European standards? However, I’m sure this is now a purely academic question, as the social conditions which caused polyandry in Tibet will not obtain in Europe.

  In this camp and the surrounding area Tibetans live together in a virtually uncontaminated Tibetan atmosphere. Apart from the 1500 who are temporarily settled in Macleod Ganj and Forsythe Bazaar there are also many adults attached to the camp as lamas, cobblers, tailors, weavers, carpenters, cooks and ayahs, so one is able to study them as an ethnic group, though their community life is of course artificial in some ways.

  The first thing to impress me when I arrived here was the complete equality between the sexes, a phenomenon which seems all the more remarkable when one has just spent six months in Muslim and Hindu societies. Watching the Tibetans together I could easily believe that I was in a modern Western community and it is salutary to remember that this equality, so new to our society, has always been taken for granted in Tibet. Even in the religious field women can gain the preeminence of being regarded as a Bodhisattva, like Pol-den Lha-mo, Abbess of a monastery on the shores of Lake Yamdrok, who is considered to be a special protector of the Panchen Lama and the Dalai Lama. Incidentally, her Sanskrit name, when translated into English, is somewhat startling – ‘The Adamantine Whore’.

  One of the chief joys of my life here is the chanting of the ayahs’ night-prayers. These girls assemble near our door to pray from 8.00 to 8.30 p.m. and anything more beautiful you couldn’t wish to hear. Normally, Eastern music doesn’t move Europeans – at best one is neutral to it, at worst irritated by it – but this chanting really means something to me. It sounds oddly un-Eastern; my personal impression is of a cross between Gregorian Chant and Slav folk-music. And somehow the fact that during the day one has seen these illiterate, filthy young women carrying hundredweight sacks of stores up the steep slopes, laughing and joking among themselves, wiping babies’ bottoms, horseplaying with the young men from the Upper Nursery and sitting picking over each other’s heads for lice, gives a special poignancy to the solemn rhythm and fervent quality of their chanting. People may argue that Lamaism is a corrupt hotch-potch of esoteric teaching, worthless to the average Tibetan peasant, but these ayahs at their prayers belie this. They may know very little about their religion, yet unless they felt it as a significant force in their lives they could never render these hymns as they do. Even from a purely aesthetic point of view the performance is astonishing: I couldn’t help comparing it with the alarming noises that pass for hymn-singing in the average Irish country church. The children also chant their prayers before going to bed and show an equally remarkable talent.

  At the Upper Nursery today we saw some of the pictures painted by Doris’s art-students in the four-to eight-year-old age group. All the exhibits were good and two were quite exceptional. It is noticeable that Tiblets have a much bolder approach to design than most Western children, and one immediately suspects that this is the result of their total dependence, for amusement, on their own ingenuity. Watching them playing with scraps of torn paper, bottle-tops, cardboard boxes, bits of tinfoil or sticks and stones, one realises how damaging our elaborate toys can be. Here the children’s minds are kept alert and supple by the continual exercise of inventiveness and they probably get more pleasure from a brightly c
oloured Vim tin than European children get from a five pound doll or a twenty-five pound toy motor; between dawn and dusk that Vim tin will be a doll, a ball, a steamroller, a rattle, a boat and a rifle. Oliver tells me that an American tourist visited the camp a week before my arrival and was so appalled by the lack of toys that she promised to send ten crates of the things from New York on her return home. US AID (Ability for Impeding Development).

  9 AUGUST

  Every day more adults are coming to the Dispensary during out-patient hours and I notice that they have wonderful physiques; both men and women are muscular and well-proportioned and were obviously adequately nourished from birth – unlike the unfortunate present generation of Tibetan children. Most travellers in Tibet before the Invasion remarked on the fact that one rarely saw an underfed Tibetan; in those days the national economy was virtually self-sufficient, with enough surplus grain stored in the Government and Monastery granaries to insure against the occasional emergency caused by bad weather. Throughout recorded history Tibet has never suffered from famine – until the influx of Chinese soldiers and settlers sent prices soaring and wrecked her simple national economy. Judging by results a feudal system, however theoretically deplorable its persistence may have been, was very well suited to the people and conditions of Tibet.

  Most of the ills from which Tibetan adults now suffer are brought on by the change of altitude and by their exposure to diseases unknown in the antiseptic climate of Tibet. Naturally they have no resistance to the myriad bugs of India, and their peasant reluctance to adapt habits of clothing and personal hygiene to a hot climate doesn’t help. They wear so many clothes and the system of putting them on is so intricate that getting down to skin-level is a day’s work. En route one encounters a rich variety of lice, fleas and bed-bugs, and as all the refugees’ most precious possessions are stored around the waist, in a pouch formed by the upper half of the ‘chuba’, one has to look out for a shower of little bundles on getting that far. My original sample collection consisted of a few rupees tied up in a rag, a half-eaten lump of moo-moo, a letter addressed by a professional scribe in Tibetan, Hindi and English, a knife, an apple, a wooden cup, a comb, an empty condensed-milk tin and a picture of His Holiness looking somewhat the worse for wear. Having recovered this little lot from the floor I apologised profusely for my clumsiness and the patient nodded and smiled and conveyed the equivalent of ‘Not to worry’. I then proceeded with the disrobing, which only took another ten minutes or so – and meanwhile I was counting the fleas and/or lice which were rapidly transferring themselves to a European base. Not surprisingly, the patient is often incapable of re-robing single-handed when the examination is over and another Tibetan must come to the rescue, ending up, if a woman is concerned, by tying the inevitable baby onto ‘Amela’s’ back. With luck it’ll be another five years before she has to undress again – and perhaps if we too had grown up in stone huts at 14,000 feet we might have neglected to develop the habit of removing clothes at regular intervals. Yet in Tibet, when doing strenuous outdoor work, both sexes strip to the waist, which doubtless explains why they are so unselfconscious about medical examinations in public. Their dignified acceptance of the process seems both charming and wholesome; one hopes that Western workers will never try to replace it by our sort of fussy prudery.

  Today we scored a big, but rather sad, victory. Many Tibetan laymen wear their hair in long braids tied over the top of the head, and for the past week the chief cook from the Palace has been coming to us daily with an astronomical number of head-sores caused by infected louse-bites. Oliver gently tried to persuade him to cut his hair, but he obviously regarded it as being his crowning glory and there was no surrender – until this morning, when one of the sores had turned to a vast carbuncle and that was that. I felt so sorry for him, as he sat on a bench on the Dispensary veranda having those lovely (but oh! so lousy) locks shorn off, while his wife stood beside him in tears of sympathy.

  2

  Disease and Drama

  12 AUGUST

  A most extraordinary thing happened last night. Yesterday afternoon Jill paid us a surprise visit, on her way back to Delhi, and presented Juliet with a mongrel puppy rescued from the gutters of Dalhousie. As it was a bitch we christened her ‘Poomah’ (Tibetan for ‘girl’) and when Jill left she settled down very happily. Then came supper-time: Juliet was in the ‘bathroom’ and Oliver and I were sitting watching Poomah playing with a stick in the middle of the floor when Chumba, as usual, brought our meal on a big tray. From the doorway he took one look at Poomah and went rigid with fear. Normally he is all beams and greetings but now his face tautened and his eyes went quite glassy with terror. Oliver and I at once realised that this was no ordinary allergy to dogs, since Chumba adores the camp-dog – a big ginger mongrel. And anyway the emotion he showed was not merely physical fear. Meanwhile Poomah had stopped her frisking and was looking doubtfully at Chumba, though Jill had told us that she makes friends rather too indiscriminately. As I stood up to take the tray from Chumba, who obviously wasn’t going to come one inch farther, Oliver asked what was wrong, using his best Tibetan. Chumba looked piteously at us, gave a sort of shudder and said: ‘Very bad dog!’ Then he bolted. Oliver followed and on his return a quarter of an hour later explained that a black dog with a white tip to its tail was the reincarnation of an exceptionally evil man. So poor Poomah had to be banished; apart from anything else we were told that His Holiness would be most upset to hear that such an inauspicious creature was being kept in one of his camps. How true this is I don’t know, but I’ll never forget Chumba’s entry and first sight of Poomah. Something very curious happened to the atmosphere and before Oliver or I had the least idea what it was all about we both sensed the weirdness in the air.

  Today the monsoon has gone mad and turned the whole world to a liquid turmoil – the mountain sliding and slipping in chunks with rumbling roars, cascades of water tearing by on all sides, the road a racing brown torrent, the paths waterfalls and every roof in the place leaking like a sieve. At lunchtime our soup was diluted by raindrops sploshing down from the ceiling of this new bungalow and outside it was almost dark, with nothing, nowhere and nobody dry. The monsoon isn’t fun at the best of times, but in a refugee camp it’s hell. To go out on an evening like this and see rows of children lying on thin sacking laid over damp concrete under a leaking tin roof in a shelter open at both ends, and to listen to the pathetic coughing, would take a tear from a stone. On asking why these children were not in their rooms I was told that they couldn’t sleep because of the hoards of vicious bed-bugs which attacked them nightly. Already Juliet has a supply of Tik 20 ready for the anti-bug campaign – but this is a war that can only be waged in dry weather.

  13 AUGUST

  Today is Tuesday, my half-day, and I feel that it was uncommonly civil of the monsoon to ease off suddenly at 11 a.m. By the time we had finished lunch the sun was shining and one could see to the horizon – quite an experience after the enclosed greyness of the past fortnight.

  This afternoon I walked miles around the mountains on solitary paths that run through a glorious world of giant trees where today everything was freshly green and sparkling after the rains. Occasionally I turned some corner which gave me a sudden, grand glimpse of the 16,000-foot sheer rock range lying immediately north of the camp, with a few obstinate glaciers still unmelted near its summits. These are the peaks visible from the valley floor, but here we are too close to enjoy an unimpeded view.

  On my way back to the Nursery I passed Dall Lake, a place of Hindu pilgrimage overlooked by a tiny white temple. In fact the lake is only a lake during this season; throughout the remainder of the year it’s a lush green meadow. But today the water was over ten feet deep and looked appropriately solemn and sacred, shadowed on three sides by steep, forested slopes.

  Here I saw a sunset of matchless beauty. Against the deep blue sky a wide fleet of diaphanous clouds turned to gold, and for minutes there were just those two colours above a
hill whose crown of dark green pines stood out sharply against the radiance behind them.

  On my way back from the lake to the camp I had a terrifying view of the flooded plains below as the setting sun turned vast areas of water-covered land into glinting sheets of bronze, revealing the uncontrollable ferocity of the swollen rivers: God alone knows what damage is being done down there. Yet here everything quickly returns to normal: already the road that was a torrent yesterday is bone-dry.

  After a fortnight here I already feel so much part of the camp that I’m beginning to see how difficult it will be to disengage when the time comes. By now I’ve got sufficiently into the swing of the work to be able to take a quasi-professional interest in the serious cases, which makes a big difference. Also, having been Jack-of-all-Trades and Master of None during my first week, I decided that under these conditions satisfactory results could be achieved only by concentrating on one aspect of the general problem. So, with Juliet’s permission, I have taken over the 800 ears of the Lower Nursery – a job any untrained person can do as efficiently as a nurse. My system is to examine carefully every child’s ears, note down the name, room number and personal number of the infected cases and treat these daily; the uninfected minority I’ll clean out weekly. This is going to be a full-time job, judging by the numbers already on my list.