In Exile From the Land of Snows

by John Avedon

  In the middle of October 1959, Chopel Dhondub led his family out of Drumpa. Departing after midnight, his wife and their five- and eight-year-old daughters hurried from the village in silence. A short while later, he and Tempa followed, leaving the door of their home unbolted so as not to arouse suspicion. Trailed by their dog, who refused to be turned back, the family walked east, carrying a few bags of food and clothing, before heading south, off the track, into the mountains separating Lhoka from Bhutan. Climbing all night, they ascended to 18,000 feet. The two girls clung to their parents’ backs, Tempa walked between, holding their hands. With each step forward the adults sank waist deep into freshly fallen powder that rendered the ascent extremely difficult. As dawn broke, they stopped to sleep behind a boulder, huddled together on a blanket on the snow. Only then did they realize that their dog had disappeared, stuck, most likely, in a drift and unable to free himself.

  On waking at sunset, Tempa’s family gazed out over a vaulted world of jagged peaks and indigo sky, the sere umber-colored hills of Tibet beginning to glow in the fading light far below. After a brief meal of melted snow, dried meat and roasted barley, they moved upward again, the moonlight so bright on the snow and ice that their eyes had to be shielded every few steps. By dawn all were exhausted. Tempa’s youngest sister had started vomiting from the thin air and altitude; the others had lost their appetites. Without eating, they fell asleep under an overhang in a depression between spires. The next night the trek continued. At three in the morning a needle-thin ridge suddenly loomed ahead. One at a time, Chopel Dhondub led his children and wife carefully across an invisible chasm dropping away in the darkness to either side. Once the ridge had been safely negotiated, however, the incline gradually descended. Camping again in the snow, they awoke the following afternoon and, less fearful of capture, traversed a wide, saddleback slope until, with the sun setting and the wall of mountains they had passed through now rising behind them, the foothills of Bhutan came into view. The family would have been greatly relieved if it was not for the condition of their youngest child. For two days she had refused to eat or drink. Throughout the last march she had lain limply on her mother’s back, unresponsive to attempts at reviving her. Listening anxiously to her daughter’s labored breathing, Tempa’s mother called out toward four o’clock that the child was “not keeping well at all.” The group came to a halt about an hour above the tree line. Sitting down, Tempa’s mother lifted her daughter from her back and began to rock her. At that moment, while the others looked on, the little girl stopped breathing. “It was a shock,” recalled Tempa. “One moment she was alive and the next, just when the worst of the climb was over, she died.”

  As the sun sank below the last ranges, Tempa and his family wept over the corpse. Finally, Chopel Dhondub took his youngest daughter’s extra clothes from one of the bags they had brought, dressed her small body in them, and scooped out a shallow grave. He then buried his child, covering her face with packed snow. Still weeping, the family set off down the mountain. Four hours later, among boulders and waist-high shrubs, they laid out their blanket, made their first hot tea in three days and fell asleep.

  Tempa and his family now lay on the edge of a world that in every respect was unknown to them. Once before Chopel Dhondub had traded in Bhutan. He, at least, had seen a forest. The others never had. As with many of the refugees coming from Tibet, their knowledge of the globe consisted of a vague image of China and India, beyond both of which, they thought, stretched only the great ocean. Unaware that the Dalai Lama had escaped—the Chinese having kept his departure secret—the family, now that its flight was complete, had no further goal. As a result, on the following day they simply took the first path they found, which, after another night’s camping in the forest, led to a village.

  To the Tibetans, the local Bhutanese, wearing knee-length checkerboard robes and short, braidless hair, looked like fellow countrymen who, lost for generations, had fallen into an odd, half-remembered mimicry of their ancestors’ ways. To the Bhutanese, however, the refugees were anything but strange. Since early spring thousands had already come this way, disoriented and sick, not a few of them starving. In the immediate aftermath of the uprising, the Bhutanese government had closed the main passes, fearful that China would exact reprisals if the refugees were permitted to enter. But with the great influx of religious and political figures, some of whom were related to the royal family itself, they finally modified their policy. Tibetans were subsequently permitted to pass through the kingdom on condition that they proceed to India. Although some 4,000 refugees eventually remained in Bhutan, the rest were forced to beg their way across the country, bartering the few pieces of jewelry, images and thankas they possessed, so that, on their egress a month later, most were destitute. Following the pattern, Tempa, his parents and sister traversed Bhutan, camping in the woods by night, begging in hamlets each day.

  Within a week a routine emerged. Arriving at the outskirts of a village, the family divided into two teams, mother and daughter in one, father and son in the other. Passing from house to house, they appealed for whatever leftover food, mainly rice and vegetables, the inhabitants would spare. Returning to their camp outside the town, they ate and then continued traveling. Discovering that people were more generous to the children, Chopel Dhondub instructed his son to beg alone, but this, though profitable, only increased Tempa’s already persistent fear of getting lost, an anxiety they all shared. Unlike Tibet’s limitless vistas, the abundant forest, so thick that it often blocked out the sky, created intense claustrophobia worsened by the constant fear of separation. Dread of what lay hidden among the trees increased the Tibetans’ unease. Tigers, wild boars and poisonous insects were all present. Tempa’s father warned the children about snakes, describing them as creatures who resembled the black and white ropes used by Tibetan traders but who moved. No vigilance, however, was sufficient to guard against the omnipresent leeches. Each day they would latch on unnoticed and gradually swell with blood up to two inches in length. Salt and fire were the sole antidotes. Preserving their few matches for campfires, Tempa and his family begged for salt for the leeches and wrapped themselves in their hot Tibetan clothing. Through it all, Tempa’s mother wept continually over the loss of her daughter. In the few words they exchanged before sleep each night, the others never mentioned the tragedy for fear of upsetting her more.

  As the family’s trek across Bhutan progressed, they met other refugees, flowing like so many rivulets down through Thimbu, the capital, and thence to India. Finally, after five weeks of walking, they entered a large meadow in the woods filled with Tibetans preparing to cross the Indian border two days beyond. Among them, Tempa’s father found a family he knew. He joined their cooking fire, and the two groups exchanged accounts. Entering India together, they arrived a few days later at Buxa.

  Located in an airless pocket between three jungle-covered hills, Buxa’s thirty concrete barracks, enclosed by a high barbed-wire perimeter, presented a dismal setting. At the time of Tempa’s admittance, thousands of refugees were bivouacked inside and outside the camp’s gates, the majority incapacitated from the heat and low altitude. To relieve overcrowding, the Indian government had begun shipping out sizable contingents, either for road work or to the more spacious transit camp at Missamari, where, after two weeks, Tempa and his family themselves were transferred. “We left Buxa in a large group and walked about two miles to the railroad,” recalled Tempa. “Everyone was discussing the train. No one had ever seen one; we had only heard its new Tibetan name, rili, from the English word ‘rail’ I was very excited listening to people talk about big houses that moved, but when we first arrived there was so much rushing that I had no chance to look.” Herded by Indian police into a narrow passage dividing two stacks of triple-level wooden bunks, Tempa managed to get a window seat, from which vantage point he soon received a terrific shock. “It was so funny,” he remembered. “When the train started I actually thought the mountains were moving out, not us.
I was staring through the window and thinking, ‘How do these mountains move so quickly?’ I just couldn’t understand it.” By nightfall, though, as the train turned south and the Himalayas vanished, he had begun to adjust. Then, after a second night, they arrived at a town called Rangapari from where the refugees were driven in trucks to the new camp.

  Externally, Missamari was larger and less depressing than Buxa. Built on a sandy flat by a river in the jungle, the camp comprised 150 bamboo barracks laid out in neat rows. Up to 100 people lived in each. Around them grew a profusion of kitchen vegetables; cucumber vines, which had blanketed many of the buildings’ roofs in only a few months, offering a modicum of shade against the tropical sun. Up until the arrival of Tempa’s family, Missamari’s almost 15,000 inhabitants had been predominantly men: Khampa fighters and monks who had fled Lhasa in the midst of the uprising. They had already experienced the worst of camp life. At Missamari, erected for the Tibetans in little more than two weeks, the water supply was contaminated, sanitation was inadequate and the rations of potato curry, rice and lentils, though plentiful, were detrimental to a people accustomed solely to a diet of barley, butter and meat. The result had been an epidemic of deadly amoebic dysentery. Smoke from the cremation ground on the riverbank five hundred yards away drifted over the barracks daily. Old and young died first, unable to resist the infection, succumbing usually in a day or two. Weeping was the most noticeable sound in the campground, occasionally mixed with the rapid hum of a sutra, recited by a lone monk now dressed in government-issue clothing like all the rest.

  Tempa spent almost three months in Missamari. Each day his family sat listlessly on their beds, hearing of a new death. Their sole consolation was the hope that soon, led by the Dalai Lama, they would return to Tibet. Constantly, illogically, they spoke of it. There seemed little doubt that their stay in India could only be temporary. By late winter of 1960, however, a Tibetan official in the camp announced that they would soon be sent north for road work. Chopel Dhondub deduced that a return to Tibet was far less likely from a road gang than from Missamari itself. With this realization the family lost their resolve. Unaffected till now, both Tempa and his remaining sister contracted dysentery. In spite of the small white tablets given to her at the camp’s dispensary, the little girl’s health failed rapidly. Her periodic outdoor playing—from which she often ran inside, frightened on seeing a dark-skinned Indian—ceased. She stayed in bed all day, too weak to move or eat. A short while before the family was to leave for road work, Tempa’s second sister died.

  Two days later, Tempa and his parents were put on a train, their destination unknown. During the ride Tempa’s mother refused to let go of him. Too distraught to eat, she wept continually, repeating over and over, “We escaped the Chinese only to bury our bodies in a foreign land.” Tempa’s father sat listlessly beside his wife, speechless from the loss. After three days on the train, the 160 refugees on board disembarked at a small town before the foothills of the western Himalayas. A Tibetan government official greeted them at the railway station, but his Indian counterpart had failed to show up. For three days more the travelers camped on the platform, during which time their first Tibetan New Year’s in exile came and went without celebration. When their presence was eventually discovered, they were taken by truck to a group of old army tents, torn and patched after years of use, pitched in uneven lines on a rocky slope near an Indian village called Bawarna. A few hundred yards distant, down a path through pine trees, lay the head of the road construction.

  Work began a week later. A whistle blew at 7:45 each morning and the refugees proceeded through the woods to the road. Standing for roll call taken by Indian overseers, they were divided into groups of ten; men were given axes and crowbars to cut and clear trees, women shovels to dig the roadbed, children baskets to remove dirt and stones. With an hour’s break for lunch, they labored until 5:00 p.m., receiving little more than a rupee, or 10 cents, a day, just enough to purchase rice and once a week some meat and vegetables. Shopping in the village after work, the refugees had their first unofficial contact with Indians.

  As they discovered, in common with one road group after another, contact with the local people, though necessary, was often hazardous. Whatever infectious diseases were present among the inhabitants—tuberculosis in particular—passed indiscriminately to the Tibetans, who, lacking the proper antibodies, most often died. Within a few months of the exiles’ arrival in India it became clear that the task of transition was not only more threatening than that of escape, but so universally destructive, affecting virtually every family, that the survival of the refugees as a coherent group was itself called into question. In many cases, a visible illness could not even be found as the cause of death. The Tibetans themselves attributed such fatalities simply to heartbreak and the shock of exile. Tempa’s mother now appeared afflicted by just such a malaise. After two weeks on the road she lacked the strength to work and took to the straw and blanket the family used for a bed in their tent. Compelled to labor in order to eat, Tempa and his father were unable to tend to her. In the evenings they carried her to Bawarna’s small clinic, but the medical worker in charge could find no specific symptoms to treat. Still devastated by the loss of her two daughters, she lingered alone until, one Sunday, the Tibetan official in charge of the road camp arranged for a visit to nearby Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama’s new residence, to which he had shifted from Mussoorie a few months before.

  After driving for two hours, the road workers were let off in a small hillside hamlet called McLeod Ganj just above the main town of Dharamsala. From there, Chopel Dhondub carried his wife on his back up the steep cobblestone path leading to the Dalai Lama’s residence. At its entrance, the group passed through a security check and then were directed onto a narrow strip of lawn before a veranda on the south side of a large house. The Dalai Lama appeared and they all prostrated. The young leader spoke of plans and improvements underway, after which they filed by to receive his blessing. Then the brief audience ended. Two days later, back in Bawarna, Tempa’s mother looked up at her husband and son from bed and said, “Now that I have seen His Holiness I feel relieved. If I die, that is my fate. I’m satisfied.” The next day Tempa’s father sent him to work alone. That night his mother held his hand and remarked, “Now you must take care of your father. One day, I know, you will go back to Tibet.” When Tempa returned from work the following day, his mother was dead.

  Two weeks later Chopel Dhondub began vomiting. As with the children, his state quickly deteriorated. He was taken to a hospital in Palampur, an hour’s drive away. Tempa, just approaching his eleventh birthday, was left alone in the tent his mother had died in. In the mornings, the Tibetan government official collected him for work, telling the Indian overseers not to demand too much labor from him. In the evenings, he walked the boy into Bawarna to buy him sweets. Each night Tempa lay alone crying, terrified that his father would die as well and leave him orphaned. Miraculously, Chopel Dhondub returned a week later, enervated but alive.

  Yet another separation was in store. There were forty children in Tempa’s road gang, all of whom, it was decided, were to be sent to the newly established nursery in Dharamsala, set up in the spring of 1960 to care for the hundreds of young people left bereaved on the roads. On hearing the news, Tempa refused to leave his father. Even when Chopel Dhondub assured his son that he was out of danger, insisting that there was no future for him carrying dirt and stones on a road gang, Tempa remained obdurate. But the adults were not dissuaded. Distraught, Tempa was packed onto a bus and driven in tears to Dharamsala, separated, finally, from everything he had known. It was a year before he heard from his father again. In the interim, a new life, pieced together by the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government-in-exile, began to take shape for him and the others of his generation.

  WHILE REFUGEES CONTINUED to descend throughout the summer and autumn of 1959, the Dalai Lama pushed forward his effort to obtain international support for Tibet. Responding to h
is call for an impartial inquiry, the International Commission of Jurists launched an investigation into the manifold accounts of Chinese atrocities as well as Tibet’s international legal status. After compiling an initial document by the end of July, a full report was issued one year later. In it, the commission concluded that, despite the ambiguity shrouding its legal status, Tibet had, in reality, been a fully sovereign state, independent in both fact and law of Chinese dominion. Regarding violations of human rights, the commission determined that Red China was guilty of “the gravest crime of which any person or nation can be accused—the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such”—genocide.

  Bolstered by the International Commission of Jurists’ preliminary findings, the Dalai Lama left Mussoorie by train on September 8. Arriving at the Old Delhi station by six o’clock the next morning, he was greeted by thousands of Indian supporters, driven to Hyderabad House, the Indian State Guest House, and then on to confer with Nehru at the Prime Minister’s residence Teen Murti. There, he disclosed the reason for his trip. “It was my decision, despite strong opposition from India, to approach the United Nations,” recounted the Dalai Lama. “To begin with, I personally met with the Prime Minister to explain our stand. After listening, Nehru said, ‘Now that you’ve decided to appeal, all right, go ahead.’ At that moment, I really felt how beautiful freedom is. Our right was accepted although we had been discouraged against this whole idea of approaching the UN. Because of my past experience with the Chinese it was almost unthinkable; an extraordinary surprise within my lifetime.”

  Having obtained Nehru’s assent, Tenzin Gyatso cabled the United Nations Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjöld, the same day, prepared a delegation to follow and then embarked on an unprecedented round of diplomatic calls, attempting to raise support for the appeal. “Compared to the Dalai Lama of today, I myself was a bit confused,” said the Dalai Lama, reflecting on his visits to New Delhi’s diplomatic corps. “It’s always more useful to talk person to person, but sometimes it was hard to know how to start. Then, gradually, my own style grew. I had more courage to express myself and was less concerned about diplomatic formalities. During 1959, though, I lacked this confidence in myself. Therefore it was very difficult sometimes. I used to be quite anxious.”