In Exile From the Land of Snows (17 page)

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.

W
HILE 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 his 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.”

His efforts, nevertheless, proved out. As a result of them, Ireland and Malaya co-sponsored Tibet’s case to the Steering Committee of the General Assembly, where, unlike its cursory dismissal in 1950, the issue was now debated in depth. In many respects the discussion reflected that of India’s Parliament. As introduced by the sponsoring nations, Tibet’s plight was depicted primarily as one involving human rights; the underlying issue of its nationhood was ignored, as the Chinese Nationalists on Taiwan, though not in occupation, also claimed sovereignty. In his opening comments, Dato Ismail Kamil, Malaya’s representative, cited the conclusions of the International Commission of Jurists’ initial report, which maintained that “almost all the rights which together allow the full and legitimate expression of human personality appear to be denied to the Tibetans at the present time, and in most cases for some time past.” “On
the basis of the available evidence,” the report concluded, “it would seem difficult to recall a case in which ruthless oppression of man’s essential dignity has been more systematically and efficiently carried out.” In his rebuttal, Vasily Kuznetsov, the Soviet Union’s representative, dismissed the report’s validity, accused the appeal’s sponsors of attempting to “utilize the United Nations in order to intensify the Cold War,” and maintained that “a nonexistent Tibetan question has been fabricated in order to worsen the international situation and the atmosphere in the Assembly.” Like India’s own Marxists, the entire Communist bloc, following Russia’s lead, voiced Peking’s view of the Tibetan issue as a matter “wholly and completely within the domestic competence of the Chinese People’s Republic,” even the discussion of which “would constitute a gross and wholly unjustified interference” into China’s internal affairs. Thus, Tibet’s case—just as Nehru had predicted—fell immediate victim to the broader global conflict. Nonetheless, by meeting’s end a large majority voted to include the issue on the agenda of the 14th General Assembly, where many Third World countries joined Western democracies in passing a resolution in Tibet’s favor by a vote of 45 to 9 (with 26 abstentions). Though not identifying the People’s Republic of China by name, it called for “respect for the fundamental human rights of the Tibetan people and for their distinctive cultural and religious life.” As continued reports of atrocities and wholesale destruction were brought out by repeated waves of refugees from Tibet, two more resolutions were passed in 1961 and 1965. In these the United Nations considerably stiffened its language. It not only registered, as in the second resolution, “grave concern” and “deep anxiety” over the “severe hardships” imposed on the Tibetans through the “suppression of their distinctive cultural and religious life,” but “solemnly” renewed its call “for the cessation of practices which deprive the Tibetan people of their fundamental human rights and freedoms, including most importantly their right to self-determination.”

In December 1959, with the initial UN appeal behind him and the end of his first year in exile drawing near, Tenzin Gyatso went on pilgrimage. At Bodh Gaya, site of the Buddha’s enlightenment, he stayed in the Tibetan monastery within sight of the great second-century Mahabodhi Temple next to the Bodhi Tree, under which the Buddha had attained nirvana. Here the Dalai Lama met with some sixty representatives of the refugeees, who pledged their continued efforts to fight for Tibet’s freedom. Afterwards, for the first time in his life, he ordained a group of 162 monks. Then, traveling on to the Deer Park at Sarnath, where the Buddha’s first sermon had been delivered, the Dalai Lama drove with a typically reduced entourage of sixteen through a crowd of 2,000 weeping Tibetans who were
camped around tea stalls beneath the trees, selling old clothes and a few of the valuables that they had managed to retain. Remaining for two weeks, he gave religious teachings in the traditional Tibetan style, seated on a high brocade-draped throne before the crowd. At their conclusion, Tenzin Gyatso spoke for an hour in the advisory manner he would address his people with from now on, presenting a long-range plan he had conceived, in which the exiles’ reconstruction and their struggle for Tibet’s independence would be combined. “For the moment Tibet’s sun and moon have suffered an eclipse,” said the Dalai Lama, “but one day we will regain our country. You should not lose heart. The great job ahead of us now,” he revealed, “is to preserve our religion and culture.”