In Exile From the Land of Snows (35 page)

Outside, explosions rend the air, crows cawing frantically after each.
A celebration is in progress and the thunderous noise comes from fireworks. Three thousand Indian Buddhists have convened to unveil a statue of a Burmese monk who lived and recently died in Kushinagar. After a brief stop at the small Tibetan monastery staffed by a lone monk, south of the temple, the Dalai Lama is driven over to address them.

From its start, the gathering has been in a semi-delirious state. Far into the previous night the celebrants blasted Indian film music over a public-address system erected under a billowing red tent, suspended by a forest of old bamboo poles. The bodyguards turned uneasily in bed, their shoulder holsters creaking. There was a good deal of rustling in the other rooms until finally, incredulous, Ngari Rinpoché strode through the “tunnel of love” and across the street to request silence. The organizers insisted they had only meant to express their joy at the Dalai Lama’s presence, but early the next morning, irrepressibly, the commotion picked up again, with cherry bombs booming across the countryside and a flushed skinny man zealously exhorting the crowd, in the style of Indian political rallies, to cheer for the Dalai Lama. Thus, along with breakfast, “
Dalai Lama Khi Jai!
” and “
Buddha Bhagavan!
” (“Long live the Dalai Lama!” and “The Buddha is Victorious!”) are pelted over the P.A. in crescendoing waves, continuing right through to the Dalai Lama’s arrival hours later, the haranguer still at his fearsome task, now hoarsely leading the frenzy while jumping about onstage, gesticulating wildly, his microphone jammed every few moments into an armpit to permit him the requisite round of applause topping each cheer. Like most Indian Buddhists, the people are members of the “scheduled classes” or “untouchables,” millions of whom converted to Buddhism in the mid-fifties without any knowledge of the religion, simply to escape their caste designation.

As the Dalai Lama begins his speech, a troop of Indian monks dressed in a motley array of yellow, orange, tangerine and maroon robes, all wearing sunglasses, doze in the heat at the back of the stage. “Yellow Robbers—none of them study, they just live off the people,” observed a disgruntled Western pilgrim earlier in the day. “Did you see those sleeping idiots?” he offers later, still disgusted by the often less than spiritual incentives for a religious vocation in India. “Not one of them knew the words to the prayer. Don’t they even know monks look terrible in sunglasses?” he adds, flabbergasted. Meanwhile, during the Dalai Lama’s speech, large portions of the crowd, like overexcited children at a party, boisterously exit the tent, their declaimer madly policing the aisles to force them back to their seats. When the Dalai Lama departs, the man hurtles to the stage to set off more cheers, which, however, never come. The crowd has found better sport. With the honored guest in their midst, they mob his party,
not so much for blessings, as to be compressed with the object of their passions in the ultimate climax to their festival. After a great deal of trampling and commotion, the Dalai Lama finally arrives at his car and drives away, the mob scene behind oddly unchanged from the squabbling over the Buddha’s remains reported to have occurred after his demise two and a half millennia before.

An hour and a half later, Tenzin Gyatso enters a large auditorium. A thousand professors and graduate students, members of the Nagarjuna Buddhist Society (one of the foremost Indian academic groups researching original Buddhist texts), convened at the University of Gorakhpur, give him a standing ovation. Speaking extemporaneously, the Dalai Lama reflects on the relation of scholarship to Buddhism, noting that despite India’s fervid desire to import scientific knowledge from the West, it must not forfeit its ancient learning. It is not a religious seminary. It is a large university, yet virtually all of the introductory speeches refer to the Dalai Lama as the living manifestation of the Buddha, unselfconsciously joining intellect and faith. When the talk is over, the Dalai Lama receives a long line of well-wishers in an adjacent room; hundreds, though, ignore him completely. Compelled by a greater force, apparently, than reverence, they descend on the long tables of chipped teacups and plates adorned with free cakes and sandwiches. The professors, in fact, act as though they are half starved. After ten minutes of unabated gulping and chewing, the food and drink has vanished. Conditions in Gorakhpur—the city of almost 300,000 in which the next two nights will be spent—illustrate why.

Though no one is dying in the streets, clearly, very little food is available. The best restaurant in town caters to the Dalai Lama’s entourage. On both days the menu is identical: cauliflower, rice, a bony meat dish and, for dessert, rice pudding, invariably coated with insecticide. The diet for those unable to eat such relatively resplendent fare is a lifelong pinwheel of rice, bread and
dhal
broken only by an occasional egg or fish caught from the flat soupy waters of a nearby river. Here is India’s major problem, not the burgeoning famine of Bihar, but chronic malnutrition affecting hundreds of millions, shortening lives and abetting disease. Gorakhpur is not a happy place. In particular, it evinces the ever-increasing implosion of people that is consuming all India’s cities. And with a spiraling population pollution is legion. A thirty-foot-thick canopy of pungent smoke, spewed from tens of thousands of cooking and coal fires, wraps the town, so dense that at night headlights penetrate no more than a dozen yards through the gloom. A continual citywide conflagration seems to be in progress. At its very center, not far from the train station, the party is boarded in two government guest houses. Their staff is bemused and venal
both; alternately in awe of the guests and vicious to one another when work must be done. It is clear in the murderous grimace of the manager and the craven, half-fed slouch of his assistants what price a life of deprivation extracts from the human character; the impulse to put self before others is a constant prerequisite for survival. Their antagonistic inertia, too, is a form of endurance, so much so that, with the first guest house filled, Mr. Dhawan himself has to organize relocation for half the party to a second.

“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.