The Open Road (24 page)

Every month, once or twice, a bus labors up the hill into McLeod Ganj, and after bumping over potholes and squeezing between the unceasing lines of pilgrims, stops at a rickety little three-story building on a barely paved slope, and fifty or sixty wild Tibetans step out. They seem to belong to a different universe from the worldly exiles all around in leather jackets and sunglasses, speaking the hipster lingo of Bombay or Delhi. The girls wear no makeup, and the boys, even in their American T-shirts and caps, bring an air of otherness into the street. Their faces are untamed somehow, their clothes torn. They seem to be blinking as they step out into a world they have been dreaming of for all or most of their lives, only to find that it is cluttered and full of signs that say, bewilderingly, “STD” or “PCO,” the opposite of peaceful or exalted (at home the streets are cleaner, and much more of a piece). Their noses are running, often, and some of their clothes bear the accumulated grime of twenty days of hard travel across twenty-thousand-foot peaks and in long-distance buses, nights spent in interim shacks for transients.

When they arrive at the reception center, they will stay, sometimes two to a bed, for a month or more, getting elementary lessons in English and Hindi and waiting till the Dalai Lama is back in town and they can see him at long last. After their brief audience, the children will be assigned to schools, the monks will be sent to monasteries, the elderly will often return to Tibet, hearts satisfied, and the rest will be sent where there is room or need for them. For those who, having seen the Dalai Lama, are ready to return to Tibet, the trip back is as hazardous as the trip out, and if they are caught by police on either side of the border, they will be sent to prison, sometimes in a large building in Shanghai known, with killing irony, as “the New Tibet Reception Center.”

I met a newcomer in the Dharamsala center one sunny morning, crowded among the two hundred or so sitting listlessly on shared beds or walking around the corridors, not really in any fit state to join the larger world yet, and gathered that he had managed to get out through resourcefulness alone, learning fluent English, applying for a Chinese passport, and, having taken pains to send his younger brother and sister through college before he left (since it is they who would suffer if his absence was noted), leaving through legitimate channels. Strikingly enterprising—as many in Communist systems are, especially if from unapproved backgrounds—he told me how he got jobs with foreign NGOs in Tibet, traveled all around his homeland in the spirit of a journalist, saw how, when the World Bank sent fact-finding delegations to an area, “the Chinese township cadres pretended to be monks.”

He had come out, he declared now, in order to tell the world the truth about Tibet, and to me it seemed he already spoke the language of the world at large, fluent in talk of “primary health care” and stories about getting arrested along with some foreigners (one of whom tried to jump out of a third-floor window in order to protect his research materials). In Tibet, he said, “hospitals are a marketplace,” and “even the doctors don’t know about blood-transmitting diseases. Hepatitis. T.B.” Having been trained from birth to talk in terms of “patriotic reeducation programs” and “Public Security Officers”—the phrases came trilling out—he now spoke the language given him by activist foreigner friends, members of Médecins sans Frontières.

And yet something still came through. When he finally managed to leave his homeland, the trim young man in the smart North Face “Wind Stopper” told me, “I cried. The Nepali people, they are poor, but they are enjoying basic human rights. Poor is no problem if you are free.” Someone who had freedom but no food might think differently, I thought to myself, but said nothing. “I saw on the street, on a busy road in Kathmandu, there was a small temple—there in the middle of the road—and they have to protect it. In Tibet, even a huge monastery they destroy if they’re building a road in the same town.”

Around him, grubby children stared up, transfixed. Eight hundred and twenty-four refugee children arrived at the Tibetan Children’s Village in 2004, a more or less typical year, swelling the already crowded classrooms and living spaces beyond the breaking point. Though many of them would go back to Tibet once their education was complete, they would go back as real Tibetans who knew their language and their history.

Another day, I chanced to run into Manuel Bauer, the photographer who was compiling an extraordinary archive of the Dalai Lama by following him around from dawn to dusk on most of his travels. As we repaired to a nearby restaurant for lunch, he told me how he had come to the Dalai Lama’s attention by becoming the first photographer, anywhere, to chronicle the flight of modern Tibetans across the Himalayas, to freedom, risking his life to bring back the story.

It was April when his small group left, he said, just he and a Tibetan man and the man’s daughter, only six years old. But already it was hideously cold. Chinese soldiers were everywhere, some of them ready to shoot simply because they were bored. Even on the brightest blue days, the wind was so fierce that it was known to blow snow into travelers’ mouths, and the snow entered their systems and melted inside their bodies, causing many to die even in warm weather.

As a group of only three, he said, they moved quickly; they were able to travel by day, because they were so inconspicuous, instead of only after dark, as most refugees do, and they completed the trip in only sixteen days. But still there was derangement. “I lost my mind,” the calm Swiss photographer said matter-of-factly in the quiet, sunlit restaurant. “For two, three days, I was in delirium. And in the delirium I was thinking, ‘This six-year-old girl, she can move so fast. Why doesn’t she carry bags? I have twenty kilos of equipment and bags to carry.’ I was aggressive with her because I lost my mind.”

When they crossed the Chinese border, he recalled, the trip grew only more hazardous. Many Nepali officials send Tibetans back to captivity, to satisfy the rulers in Beijing, though often they rob the Tibetans first. Even if the refugees can get to Kathmandu and the care of an official from the U.N. High Commission for Refugees, their problems are not over. “Sometimes the U.N. van, even with a U.N. person there, is stopped. And the Nepali police take everything! These refugees, they have come out with only a carpet, one bag, and they take that, the Nepali police, and send them back.” The same story known around the world, among boat people from Vietnam, and Cubans, even Chinese trying to steal into America; refugees, already the most vulnerable people in the world, are perfect prey for pirates and corrupt officials.

“So you’re safe only when you get to India?”

“No. I’m sorry to say this”—he had guessed my Indian heritage—“but the Indian people are not always honest. Sometimes they attack these refugees. They know they are defenseless.”

“So you’re really only safe when you get to Dharamsala?”

And here Manuel said nothing at all.

“When you got there, the man stayed with his daughter?”

The photographer’s eyes now were red. The father deposited his daughter safely in the Tibetan Children’s Village, he said, confident that she had a new life and home there, and then turned around and made the long, treacherous trip back into Tibet, alone.

There is a real excitement, inevitably, in walking through a community that has been devised by a single man, and that man not a Castro or Disney or Kim Il Sung but a philosopher and a monk: you feel that an experiment is being conducted on behalf of one of the fastest-growing nations in the world—the land of the deracinated (since by some counts there are now one hundred million refugees in the world, part of a tribe that is twice as populous as Australia and Canada combined). There is a quickening sense—a Buddhist sense, perhaps—of things (at least in theory) being always in movement, everything becoming a work in progress; I return after two years away and find that nearly all the restaurants in the area have stopped serving beer—in deference to classical Buddhist disapproval of intoxicants—and experts are now being brought in from Sweden to help with the epidemic of wild dogs running around.

The Dalai Lama is even in the rare position, for a ruler, of trying to conduct a coup against himself, attempting to give up power as fast as his people push it back at him. At its best, to step into a community based on spiritual and not political values is to enter a world turned on its head, where—this the Dalai Lama’s hope—freedom means freedom from fear and wealth means inner resources. Power, ideally, means self-sovereignty, in the democratic and the inner sense.

As I walked along the streets of McLeod Ganj, therefore, I found myself besieged by whole notions of possibility: Jewish leaders were here to tell the Dalai Lama how they kept a culture going after the First and Second Temples were destroyed, civil rights workers who marched with Martin Luther King were sitting in the drafty rooms trying to see what they could lend to this nonviolent struggle, a new garbage collection system and cleanup operation had been organized by Richard Gere. Once, talking to some young Tibetans about whether to follow their political urges or their leader’s advice, I heard two young people pipe up, and learned they were Mexicans; they had come here in part to ask Tibetans how they might resolve their own differences with an insurgency in Chiapas. Another time, in the garden of my guesthouse, I found myself enjoying breakfast daily with philanthropists and government officials from Germany, Romania, America, here to do what they could to help. In its starriest aspects, Dharamsala is consecrated to the idea that the problems of one place are the concerns of every place, in our ever more linked universe.

The sixth road that sprays out from the central square at the traditional entrance to McLeod Ganj zigzags all the way down the slope, between Himalayan oaks and deodars, past the Anglican church and the “Officers’ Mess” buildings, past tea plantations and terraced fields, over a bridge, and into an open space where, with the help of a local Japanese architect, the Tibetans have built a glittering center called the Norbulingka Institute, whose pathways and reflecting ponds and gold-roofed central temple and flowering trees against the snowcaps are closer to most people’s vision of Shangri-La than anything in congested and noisy McLeod Ganj, forty minutes away by car. Among its pavilions and elegant classrooms, master
thangka
painters and statue artists and woodcarvers from Tibet pass down their training to new generations of apprentices, many of whom study with them for ten years or more, and out of these workshops come the golden Avalokitesvaras, the intricate mandalas, the woven snow lions that will be sent around the world. Walk to the back of the compound and pull open a little gate, and, after a three-minute stroll beside open fields, you come to the Dolma Ling Nunnery, where two hundred nuns, most of them newly escaped from Tibet, are lunging back and forth in classical debates in the quiet afternoons, taking the traditional form of the monks and making it something more murmurous, less martial.

A little down the road, in Sidhbari, the Karmapa, having escaped from China and arrived in Dharamsala just as Tibetan hopes were beginning to fade, still stays, regarded by many Tibetans and foreigners as a new, young embodiment of Tibet’s prospects, in spite of his restricted movements. And a few hours after watching the state oracle go into his trance one spring Saturday, I came down to this spot to see the Dalai Lama open a new Gyuto Temple, replacing what was for five centuries one of the most celebrated and advanced establishments in Tibet. A Tantric college set up for the equivalent of postdoctoral students of Tibetan Buddhism, Gyuto was—now is—one of the two places in the Tibetan world where monks traveled to the farthest reaches of consciousness and thought, in part by performing austerities barely comprehensible to the rest of us: for nine years in Tibet, each of the monks was not allowed to return to his own room or to take off his robes, and had to live, meditate, and sleep on the same eighteen-inch-wide pallet, using his wooden tea bowl as a pillow. Trained by such hardships, perhaps, the thirty (out of nine hundred) who managed to escape to India were able to continue their meditations when they came out into exile, in dirt parking lots and under trees, finally receiving permission to make and sell Tibetan rugs to keep themselves alive.