Chai & Chatter in Little Tibet

I returned to Dharamsala for my last week in India. I was worried I would be a bit bored - but not at all! I have been busy busy busy, which is a nice relief from the slow pace and occassional boredom I have been feeling while traveling alone. I like to have a base when I am spending a lot of time hopping from place to place on the road, so I left a small bag at Jamyang-la's apartment, and I wanted to end up back here in my last days to spend some quality time in a familiar place with this good family friend.

On my second day back in Dharamsala, Jamyang's cousin Nima Dolma put aside her entire day for me. She is a nun, though since she is living with and taking care of Jamyang she does not wear robes. She is also a recent refugee from Tibet, only having come here about seven months ago primarily to take care of Jamyang, who has tuberculosis. Nima Dolma is a bit of a crack-up, constantly making faces and blurting out random new words she has learned in English or Hindi. Every one of her facial expressions is a form of a smile - sometimes a worried smile, sometimes an "I'm sorry, food no good" smile, but often a very proud and happy smile, showing the white rows of her teeny teeth.

So after breakfast on Wednesday, when she finished cleaning up the apartment, we went on a walk up the mountain to a waterfall. As we were hiking up the trail, we came upon an Indian woman herding her goats. Out of nowhere, Nima Dolma breaks the silence with an obnoxiously loud "Baaaaaaaah! Baaa-haaa-haaa!!!!" imitating the goats. The woman turned and gave an amused smirk, and Nima Dolma kept baa-ing her way up the mountain. Then the woman said something to her in Hindi (Nima Dolma doesn't speak Hindi), to which she replied in Tibetan, and the woman turned around, passed Nima her herding stick, and walked away back down the mountain. So there we were, suddenly herding someone else's goats up the hill. Nima Dolma told me in Tibet she used to herd yaks, so apparently we were good to go. Later, we left the goats to graze in the grass near the path, and after that I don't know what happened to them, but Nima Dolma didn't seem too worried about it.

After a visit to the waterfall, we headed to some natural pools that have a constant flow of Himalayan glacier water coming through them. Nima Dolma wanted to swim, so I swam too. It was full of Indian tourists - mostly men in their underwear (women have to swim fully covered in their clothes). So I took off my shoes and jumped in to discover the water was painfully ice cold. I jumped in three times total, but swimming around in there was impossible.

In the afternoon, Nima Dolma took me to visit her Tibetan friends who she met in Nepal when she was on her way to India. We walked through the market and found the two women sitting on the side of the road watching shoppers go by. We drank some chai together, then went off to walk around the Dalai Lama's residence.

The women live in one tiny room in a dorm near the temples around the Dalai Lama's house. They have one gas stove on a table, with food cluttered around it on the floor. There are two twin beds, and a shelf built into one wall. There is not space for anything else in the room. The bathroom and the sinks for washing dishes are outside in the hallway. The women made us chai and cooked up four bowls of ramen noodles for a snack. One of them spoke a little English, so I asked her some questions about Tibet.

She said they left because "no freedom." They came to Dharamsala to be near the Dalai Lama, whereas in Tibet, even his photograph is banned. To get here, she and a small group of people hired a man to guide them through the mountains, traveling by night and sleeping undercover by day. They walked for 28 days before arriving clandestinely in Nepal, though they did not even possess passports to enter the country legally. From Nepal they traveled by bus to Dharamsala, India. The woman who spoke English has a husband living in New York, who periodically sends her money. There is no work for her in Dharamsala, so she and her friend attend a free English class for one hour every day, and literally spend the rest of their time bumming around town, which is why we found them just sitting on the roadside people-watching. Now that she is here in India, she cannot talk to her family in Lhasa because the Chinese have banned incoming telephone calls from Dharamsala. So she does not know anything more about her family.

Today, I accompanied Jamyang-la to the local hospital for a check-up. While we were waiting our turn to see the doctor, we walked around the government-in-exile offices and toured the library. All over Dharamsala and McLeod Ganj are giant wall-sized posters with pictures of Tibetans who have recently gone missing in protests of 2008. Jamyang pointed to one small photograph on one poster who he identified as his sister. She is only 17, and just this summer she participated in a Free Tibet protest during which she was arrested and subsequently disappeared. The family has no idea where she is or what happened to her.

Stories like these are commonplace. And it breaks my heart to see how much Jamyang and Nima Dolma miss their homeland. Jamyang-la repeatedly asks me if I will go to Tibet one day. He says (in bad Hindi), "If you go Tibet, you are veeeery happy." And every free moment she gets, Nima Dolma plops herself in front of the television to watch home videos on DVD from her family's Tibetan New Year's celebration. I don't know if she brought it with her from Tibet, or if her family mailed it to her, but she watches it over and over, pointing out her parents and siblings and cousins performing traditional dances in circles outside of their home. Other videos will simply film the family standing in a line in a meadow surrounded by spectacular mountains, or film a monk friend giving a tour of the family home or local temple. Another favorite video she calls "Black Yak," which literally just has scenes of mountains and grazing yaks accompanied by traditional Tibetan music.

On a more positive note - I saw the Dalai Lama! Finally! I was walking by myself down the street from McLeod Ganj to Dharamsala. Suddenly I heard sirens coming from the road below, and the man walking in front of me shouted something in Tibetan. Everyone around me hurried to the side of the road, dropped their bags, and crouched down. I asked what was going on, and he said "Dalai Lama-ji. Second car." I realized everyone around me was already crouched into a bow, so I pressed my palms together as well as the entourage of cars approached. And there, in the front passenger seat of the second car, was Dalai Lama-ji, sitting and smiling and looking exactly as he does in all the pictures. I was elated. Just seeing him for a split second was such a rush!