In Exile From the Land of Snows

by John Avedon

  “Raghh! Damn bugs!” rips the night. A door bangs open and out of the second guest house, clad in his underwear and waving a pistol in the air, leaps Ngari Rinpoché. “Damn bugs! Eat all of me, you buggers!” he yells. Then, his small automatic jammed back into its holster, he runs into the building and reappears dragging a mattress. Throwing it on the dew-drenched lawn, he tears off his watch and scowls at the time: 4:00 a.m. There hasn’t been a moment of sleep since going to bed at midnight. The sea of smog smothering Gorakhpur holds billions of mosquitoes, many malarial, but inside this guest house so many have collected, feeding on generations of Indian officials, that the air can barely be breathed. They swarm in clouds the size of basketballs, their buzzing irradiating the room. “Enjoy the concert tonight,” said Dawa Bhotia, bidding Ngari Rinpoché good evening earlier, while carrying over his shoulder the mosquito net he had not forgotten to bring along. Without one, sleep is impossible. Now, out on the lawn, silhouetted by the limp moonlight trickling down like saliva onto the black earth, Ngari Rinpoché earns only ten minutes of peace before, having located a new prey, the outdoor hordes converge. Sleep then is entirely forsaken.

  Regardless of the night, the coming day demands the utmost effort. For the first time in twenty-one years the Dalai Lama will enter the Kingdom of Nepal. Lhamo Tsering and the six guerrillas captured at Tinker Pass in 1974 are to be released in an amnesty on King Birendra’s forthcoming birthday. And as a further gesture toward the Tibetans, the King has agreed to allow the Dalai Lama to pay a brief visit—despite its consequences in Peking—to Lumbini, the site of the Buddha’s birth, seventeen miles inside the Nepalese border. For days most of Nepal’s 15,000 Tibetan refugees have been traveling down from Katmandu, Pokhara and adjoining towns to welcome the Dalai Lama, who, according to a prearranged procedure will cross the border for an eight-hour stay with no checks, visas or other record.

  Soon after sunrise a caravan of more than fifty Land-Rovers, Toyotas, Mercedes-Benzes and Cherokee Chiefs, all packed with Tibetans, lines up behind the stupa-crowned entrance gate to Nepal, dividing the border town of Saunali. In contrast to India, the scene is variously prosperous, the Tibetan refugees a visible cut above their Indian counterparts. Their wealth is well known throughout the diaspora—particularly that of the merchant chieftains of Katmandu, who deal, rather profanely, not just in jewelry and carpets but also in thankas and sacred images. Their affluence is displayed in their children’s blue jeans and mod haircuts, in their own thick, well-tailored chubas, spotless fedoras and traditional turquoise and coral pendant earrings. The number of cars owned by Tibetans, collected here in one spot, probably approaches the total possessed by all the refugees in India. But it is Nepal, not the people, which makes such wealth possible. Balancing East and West by extracting roads from the Chinese, cement from India, hotels, tape cassettes, watches and the latest-model cars from Japan and Europe, the monarchy has brought in a wave of consumer items during the past decade and a half. Though the government itself has been accused of rampant corruption, wholesale suppression of the student-based democratic movement and duplicitous dealings with just about everyone else, its ability to spread a smooth veneer of goods over the centuries-old primitive life in its isolated mountain valleys appears to keep the country content. And unlike the unwieldy behemoth of India, the kingdom enjoys compact proportions, which have allowed a semblance, at least, of entry into the twentieth century to become an overnight reality. Even the intelligence service evinces the most up-to-date training. Its observers are everywhere, dressed—unlike their Indian counterparts—in elegant suits, equipped with miniature radios and cameras, recording every corner of the crowd. Nothing more important is happening in Nepal on this gray Wednesday morning than the Dalai Lama’s non-visit. The Chinese ambassador has departed from Katmandu for Peking, fulfilling the requisite protest while claiming he is only going “for vacation,” to mute the point. The Tibetans know, though, that Chinese spies are amply spread through their ranks. As a result, the event is strictly regimented. Behind the 200 waiting to welcome their leader at the border, 8,000 more are being marshaled by young men, dressed in beige bush hats and robes tagged with red and green ribbons, into a receiving line more than a quarter of a mile long before Lumbini’s Tibetan monastery. In contrast, the Dalai Lama’s three-car column, leaving Gorakhpur by eight o’clock for the two-hour drive north, seems woefully small—distinguished solely by the personal authority of its chief occupant.

  The drive up is placid. Half an hour beyond Gorakhpur an unexpected lushness supplants the withered earth behind. The Himalayas stand fifty miles away. Bright fields of mustard, lentils and wheat grow abundantly. Unravaged trees reappear. Clumps of teak, each a perfect semicircular canopy, flat on the bottom, sprinkle the land like a story-book illustration, dark green groves of shiny mango rising between. The villages along the narrow one-lane road are sculptured from smooth brown mud, the porches, columns and walls of their homes all of a piece, thick pleats of thatch stuffing the roofs. Skin buckets distend from long poles ladling up and down in constant, tranquil movement in the nearby fields. The inhabitants show the same easy unity with their environment. They are tall, rich-skinned and fine-boned, with long elegant fingers, high cheekbones and clear deep eyes, their bearing instinctively noble.

  It is not much past eight, but there is a traffic jam clogging the road—a pristinely silent one, of bullock carts and farmers. In it a vestige of India’s ancient heartland is seen. Hundreds move to market in an orderly procession, all the carts triangular, mounted on two heavy-rimmed multi-spoked wheels, their beds piled twenty feet high with hay, lumber and produce. Each driver sits before the towering crest of his load, a switch in hand, his homespun robe spotlessly white. The animals are splendid. With long white faces, pink ears and scythe-shaped red-painted horns, some stand six feet at the shoulder, their sure, lolling motion and relaxed ambling gait matching the composure of their owners, who barely heed the honking passage of the cars.

  After a brief reception under the border arch, the Dalai Lama’s car drives at top speed over a modern bridge onto a smooth highway raised above a broad savanna. A cool breeze ripples down from the Himalayas, now only fifteen miles distant. For the third time in less than two hours the landscape undergoes a dramatic change; from waste to abundance and now to primordial expanse, stretching to the horizon like the East African plains, here at the foot of the highest mountains on earth. In half an hour a long grove of trees, surrounding a group of temples, appears on the right. In its center rise the tall maroon walls of a Tibetan monastery, a thousand tents pitched at their base. Before a yellow and red gate, wreathed in smoke from pine boughs burning in stone braziers on either side, the cars slow. Behind it the receiving line of 8,000 Tibetans has waited patiently in place now for five hours. The Dalai Lama’s gray Ambassador moves gingerly under the gate and down the line. As it does, a wave of emotion overcomes the people. Heads bowed, hands in prayer holding incense and scarves, they gaze into the rear window, where the Dalai Lama can be seen, and almost everyone begins to cry. Old women and children, the young and middle-aged, rugged shepherds from Dolpo, former Khampa guerrillas from Mustang, tall and broad-shouldered, their wind-worn faces hardened by the long years of fruitless war—all break into wide grimaces and the tears pour freely down. At the end of the line wait the monastery’s sixty resident monks, playing gyaling, thungchen, drums and cymbals and carrying brocade victory banners. Escorted inside the temple, the Dalai Lama mounts to the second floor, where he is heard laughing heartily with the abbot. After a time, he returns outside and, followed by a large but carefully chosen coterie walks briskly toward the sacred tree under which the Buddha was born, 2,525 years before.

  The tree grows out of a white brick island standing up, like a dolmen, thirty feet off the plain. Its luxuriant foliage sparkles in the late-morning sunlight; its root system spills exposed, like a wooden beard, down the entire eastern flank of the island. Bright red, green and blue prayer flags threa
d the branches, and the entire tree, top to bottom, stands entwined in extravagant umbilical-like vines, their abundance seeming more than coincidental. Unaware that the Dalai Lama is approaching, young boys climb through the branches to call one another from semi-concealed perches: below, three Tibetan women, each with a baby tied to her back, touch the trunk with their foreheads. The cool mountain breeze blows cleanly across the landscape. Nothing solemn or pontifical impedes the childlike ambiance of Lumbini, and despite its venerable array of roots, the tree under which the Buddha was born extends into the pastel sky in slender, supple and youthful lines.

  The green water of a square brick tank is the Dalai Lama’s first stop. By its side he enacts a simple ritual, pouring sanctified water from a silver vessel, then touching a drop of the tank’s own contents to his forehead in blessing. Beside this water, then a lake, Queen Maya, the Buddha’s mother, paused before giving birth. Reaching term, she had, according to Shakyan custom, set off from the capital city of Kapilavastu to give birth in her parents’ house. The child’s sublime nature was already known from portents and a remarkable dream of a six-tusked white elephant, the supreme symbol of royalty, entering the queen’s right side at conception. Now, accompanied by miraculous signs and a host of gandharvas or angels, the birth took place by surprise in the open country, while the queen was still en route to her destination. Pausing at the lake in the center of the Lumbini Gardens east of the city, Queen Maya entered labor and, attended by her younger sister and maidservants, delivered standing up, holding the lower bough of a palsa tree. According to legend, the child emerged from her right side, took seven steps in each of the four principal directions, raised a finger and spoke, saying, “This is my final birth.” Brought back to Kapilavastu, he was followed by a sage who, having been alerted by celestial messengers, arrived to identify the infant from the marks on his body as a fully enlightened Buddha. Seven days later, however, Queen Maya died, the Buddhist records attributing her demise to a reward of rebirth in a heavenly realm on the completion of her exalted task.

  “The very purpose of voluntarily reincarnating is to produce some good result for others,” commented the Dalai Lama, reflecting on the Buddhist belief in the regular appearance of spiritually evolved beings in the world. “The reincarnation takes rebirth with choice, intentionally, deliberately, with the definite purpose of serving humanity through religious or other means. Now there are many levels of such beings. Among the highest are advanced Bodhisattvas and Buddhas who have the ability to project emanations. Among them there are also many degrees. For those of lower realization it is necessary for the central emanator to control each emanation separately. The emanations of higher beings can control themselves. The degree of spontaneity or acting without exertion defines the difference. I know of cases in which among one hundred emanations each one knows what the other one is doing while all have an individual sense of self or ‘I,’ though there is only one central emanator. But this is difficult to explain. Until one experiences it oneself,” he concluded, laughing, “one might think that such talk was just senseless, something like science fiction, or shall I say religious fiction.”

  Led by a Nepalese archaeologist past a classical pillar built by King Ashoka in the third century B.C., the Dalai Lama offers a scarf and proceeds up two flights of stairs into the single dark room of a small shrine by the tree. Prostrating and making offerings, he chants prayers, accompanied by fifteen monks. In the close, hallowed quarters, lustrous and serene, the monks’ mellifluous recitation filling the room, the pilgrimage briefly regains a personal moment. The Dalai Lama’s thoughts naturally turn toward his mother. “Though originally there was another plan,” he recounted, “somehow Lumbini became the last place I visited. When I was there, I felt this was auspicious. Because Lumbini is the place of Lord Buddha’s birth, it represents the beginning of something. Now my mother has to take rebirth, so you see, that was nice.”

  After lunch the Dalai Lama is driven to an open field where, before a large tent enclosing a throne, the crowd is collected. At the conclusion of formalities, he begins his talk by beckoning all 8,000 to come as close to him as possible, which they do, bunching into a surprisingly intimate, tightly packed space at his feet. As though addressing his own family, the Dalai Lama speaks warmly for an hour and a half, on the necessity of living a good, moral and generous life day to day. Following his remarks he pauses and makes a pronouncement which astonishes his listeners: “The long night of our struggle is now coming to a close,” he says pragmatically. “I am sure that we will see one another very soon again—in Lhasa.” Stunned, the audience musters a clattering, uncharacteristic round of applause—their happiness more deeply revealed in dozens of tear-streaked faces as the implications of what they’ve heard begin to dawn.

  The Tito Gate: 2:00 a.m. January 21. In his private car the Dalai Lama has been asleep for many hours. Train 51 Up originating in Calcutta and going all the way to Jammu, beyond Pathankot, will not arrive until four in the morning. As the train pulls into Benares, the Dalai Lama’s saloon will be gently shunted from its siding and attached to the long line of sienna cars trooped behind the black steam engine. In the meantime, Samdong Rinpoché refuses either to leave or to nap. “His Holiness is in my station,” he announces. “Until he departs I must remain awake.” He and Ngari Rinpoché occupy a private retiring room beside the track. While they recline on fully made beds, their conversation ranges breezily from the world record for high-altitude parachute jumps, held by Tibetan commandos in the Special Frontier Force, to a debate on doctrinal points concerning the Buddha’s life. When the conversation pales and the men begin to get drowsy, Ngari Rinpoché manages to filch a silver-tipped ebony baton from a police officer sleeping nearby. With his prize in hand, he and Samdong Rinpoché abscond onto the dark platform to engage in a balancing contest: the stick held on the upright end of the middle finger. S. Rinpoché (endearingly referred to as such by his students) is a perfectionist by nature. Swirling around the platform, his well-pressed maroon robes gracefully distend like wings as he follows after the tottering stick. Dawa Bhotia and Mr. Dhawan walk up, returned from a jaunt to the movies in town, now that their duties are almost over. There is, as always, a great deal of talk about whether or not the train will arrive and if so, when. When it finally does, in the maw of the night, the baton is returned, brief partings are exchanged and the two-day journey to the Punjab commences, the interminable stops reeling back now in reverse order: Bela, Amethi, Jais, Rae Bareli, Lucknow, Sitapur, Shahjahanpur, Rampur, Ludhiana, Jullundur and finally, on a cold morning around nine, the dreary but familiar site of the Pathankot platform.

  The maroon Mercedes, newly polished, waits under the eaves of the station’s portico. Beside it stands Kunga, the Dalai Lama’s chauffeur and proprietor of the Kunga Cafe in McLeod Ganj, his face impassively drawn after a sleepless night waiting for the train. A line of Willys Jeeps and Ambassadors, their Tibetan drivers at the ready, receive the party. There are no police in sight, however. Himachal Pradesh, it seems, is under the weather and could not send an escort. The first snow of the year has fallen the night before. In Pathankot it is only rain—dismal and mean—turning the main road into a mud bath, cars and trucks slithering through the slop, splattering the stalls, stitching its rim with showers of umber spray. The baleful proprietors cower against the back walls of their cubicles. Hidden behind their piles of blankets and coats, soothed by radios and glasses of lukewarm tea, they watch helplessly as each behemoth adds its ration of mire to their goods. None move to rearrange things and—despite the total dearth of customers—certainly not to close shop. Even though winter comes for two months each year, its cold, in the normally sweltering subcontinent, is oddly denied, treated as a temporary aberration for which an open stall with no front wall will do just as well as in any other season. Past this oblique refusal of reality, the Dalai Lama’s column punches its way, charging the town, and the mile-long army base beyond, until, reaching the foothills, it crosses
into Himachal Pradesh and enters the ancient labyrinth of river valleys, up which Alexander the Great himself is believed to have once passed, leading to the Kangra Valley and perched above it on the shoulders of the Dhauladar Range, Dharamsala.

  There are no other cars on the road. Accordingly—with the Dalai Lama in his favored spot, the front seat—Kunga presses the accelerator to the floor whenever a straightaway opens in the forest between ravines. On one of them, a rear tire suddenly blows. The Mercedes skids to a halt, half off the road, followed by two Ambassadors filled with monks. Further back, the first jeep approaches at fifty miles an hour, its driver eager to keep up with the group, but, exhausted from his vigil at the train station, nodding at the wheel. Seeing the stopped cars at the final instant, he brakes too late and goes skidding into the rear end of the last Ambassador. Fortunately, no one is injured. At that moment a storm of hail and rain splashes down on the entourage, drenching Wangdrak, a tall Khampa in a green army jacket and heavy boots, frantically trying to change the Mercedes’ tire. Under sleek trees, the cars wait, hammered with hail, their occupants lost in thought.