The Open Road (23 page)

Centered in a ramshackle collection of huts remote even by Indian standards, joining together a group of people (no more than 150,000 worldwide) smaller than the citizenry of a typical Los Angeles suburb, Tibet in exile can at best only whisper a new possibility to the world, though the outsized popularity of its leader and the longtime talismanic appeal of the culture itself have given it a much larger appeal than it would have otherwise. The Dalai Lama’s first priority always has been (and will continue to be, if there is another Dalai Lama) the protection of his people in Tibet, who still represent 98 percent of the Tibetans in existence, and who cannot, yet, participate in his democratic experiment at all. But so long as he cannot get to them, he will bring Tibet into the world and offer a Buddhist vision of policy making: reform Tibet by reforming the inner heart of Tibet.

In Tibet itself the government in Beijing has brought in, by one count, 224 karaoke parlors, 658 brothels, and one thirteen-story Public Security Office on the main streets of Lhasa alone, to create a look that would not be out of place in Atlantic City. The small capital now has a population of two hundred thousand, ten times its size in 1950, and it has been swollen to cover twenty times as much area as it used to occupy. The idea is that material plenty will liberate people from the feudalism of worship, and that modernity means having access to satellite television, sexy dance halls, and the spoils of Wal-Mart and Nike (the Chinese government even recently increased the salary of Tibetan officials by a factor of three, as if to enforce the belief that what machine guns had failed to achieve, material temptation might).

Dharamsala has all that, too—the Tibetans have always been a highly mercantile and shrewd group of traders—but it is built on the idea that modernity has to do with a set of values rather than with a set of goods, that it is the result of a cast of mind, even more than of a way of life. In their loftiest moments, those who are intrigued by the case study could even see the temples scattered across the slopes of Dharamsala as offering the beginnings of a Buddhist vision of a city on a hill (looked over not by God but, as befits the Buddhist tradition, by men).

To walk around the little lanes and the kerfuffle of dirty cafés and dusty shops, past signs saying, “the only Internet café where all proceeds go directly to the Tibetan cause” or “Charitable Trust Handicrafts,” is to see how great a distance separates vision from reality—and how, indeed, vision can arise from reality only inch by inch. Dharamsala, as if in deference to the notorious filth of old Tibet, has often had almost no garbage collection, and refuse clogs its ill-kept streets; the path leading down to the idyllic Tsechokling Monastery starts next to a huge pile of trash. One day, as I walked along the always cluttered main street, barely wide enough for the single cars that barrel through it, horns screaming, I found, amazingly, a small opening in the thoroughfare, but that was only because a crowd had gathered around a space in which an Indian boy and a Tibetan were engaged in a fistfight.

One bright Saturday in the spring I went to see the Dalai Lama while he was in the midst of presenting forty-six days of uninterrupted teachings (he saw me just after he had completed his morning session of initiations and empowerments in the temple next door, on his lunch break, in effect), and I asked him how the Tibetan experiment in exile could offer a model for the world. I could tell that modesty—and realism—prevented him from making any claims for himself or his people, but at the same time he had clearly thought about the challenge as few political leaders ever had the chance to do. The minute I posed the question, he referred, with characteristic precision, to encounters he had had in Germany, in Australia, in North America and Chile, with other groups likewise addressing the issue of how to keep their traditions alive. He remembered one indigenous leader who had delivered a long, long speech demanding that all his precious land be given back to him—“Unrealistic!” as the Dalai Lama put it, with a great accelerating burst of laughter. He recalled frictions within the Tibetan community in 1951, and proposals that had been offered about how to set up exile settlements in 1959, and what to do with Tibet’s small group of guerrillas in the 1970s. One idea had been advanced by a member of his family, one by a first cousin of the private secretary who was sitting by his side, but both, he remembered now (as if it had all happened four days, and not almost five decades, before), were wrong.

When first he decided that the Tibetans should set up whole settlements, with central monasteries and laypeople around them, in southern India, his people said they could not survive, he told me. The heat, the unfamiliar food, the absence of snow mountains led them to tell him they were going to die. “The next time I visited, they’re still there! So I said to them, ‘You haven’t died yet!’” he went on, the infectious laughter breaking out again.

Much in Tibetan culture—many customs, the clothes, the long plaits, the heavy coats made for the Himalayan winter—had to be abandoned, he said, in the heat of the tropics. Since these are fading already in Tibet, “no need worry, no need effort! Cultural heritage—not relevant in today’s world, so let it go.” But in terms of a language, a way of thinking, the attempt to pass on to children, say, a compassionate feeling for animals, those are relevant anywhere, beneath the surface. “A young child has no idea of next life or sin or these things, but in their family tradition, from an early age, they hear ‘It’s not good to kill animals.’ So these things are worthy of being preserved. And can be preserved.”

I came out from the talk buoyed, not just by the ideas he had outlined but, more, by the precision with which he had cited specific precedents and parallels, and the modest limits he seemed to be setting for himself. He had told Aboriginals in Australia, for example, that they should keep their own indigenous names even if they were going to take on, for practical purposes, European names; in the same spirit, he actually urged some Tibetans to receive initiations from Chinese teachers, since in places the Chinese tradition of Buddhism was flourishing more than the Tibetan. In the context of trying to lead an exiled group into a new definition of itself, realism seemed at least as valuable as optimism.

Yet just twelve hours before, the previous night, I had been in a little room down the road, talking to some of the most vocal members of the new generation of Tibetans, who had experienced only displacement and a longing for a place they knew mostly through their parents’ stories. Seven of us had been crowded into a single room, in a block of small cells (although the flat belonged to one of the senior members of the Dalai Lama’s government in exile). The wife of the household was away in Boston, leaving her little kids to run around, barely tended by their aunt and grandmother, and one of those present, stationed abroad, was mourning the fact that his teenage daughter was entirely European in manners and dress.

The refrain of the younger Tibetans in the room—and they could have been speaking for Tibetans all around them—was loss: they were lost souls from a lost generation, with no sense of who they were or where they belonged. They spoke fluent Hindi and had grown up entirely in India, with Indian friends and tastes, but they did not wish to become Indian. They spoke good English and had contacts in the foreign world, but each step toward England or America would take them farther from Dharamsala and, most of all, Tibet.

They were Tibetans who knew nothing about Tibet, and who fought and prayed for a place that at one level they knew could not be the place they imagined.

One of them, in desperation, had stolen into Tibet for three months. Almost as soon as he crossed over into his homeland from Ladakh, Tenzin said, he was apprehended and put into detention. “They beat me every day in prison,” he went on softly in the ill-lit room, “though they took care not to leave any marks.” We walked out into the full-moon quiet of the spring evening, the broken offices and half-neglected rooms all around somewhat hopefully outlining a government in exile. “I was a romantic boy,” he declared, though not yet thirty. “I thought I would go to Tibet and somehow win independence by myself.”

Now he tried to agitate in different ways, writing poems and, when the Chinese premier was paying a visit, climbing all fourteen stories of the Oberoi Towers in Bombay to unfurl the banned Tibetan flag and a red banner that said, “Free Tibet.” “We are Tibetans with Chinky faces,” a friend of his said in disgust as we walked up the slope to where the Dalai Lama’s house sat and slept in the clear night.

The young Tibetans at the dinner had presented me, before I left, with a book they had just brought out, the first collection of Tibetan poetry in English in the history of their people. The book seemed mostly a mix of cries and shouts and, especially, questions. What am I, where am I going, how can I help the country I’ve never seen? What do I do with my Indian accent and Western dress? What is the price of going against those elders who have seen Tibet and fled from it? The most striking feature of all the poems, from young and old, from every corner of the globe (such is the state of the Tibetan diaspora today), was its lack of answers.

One poem began, somewhat typically,

I am just a soul in a fix

Crying for the right direction

My mind is so mixed

It’s in total confusion.

The biographical note at the end said that the poet had been “something of an enigma amongst his small circle of friends” and had lived a “life of dreams, drugs, desperation and rift.” He had died at twenty-eight, leaving behind a dark blue diary full of poems about Tibet.

Perhaps these boys, as they often were, would have written similar poems had they grown up in Lhasa at a time without occupying Chinese. Many of their gestures, the romanticism of their sorrow, sounded like what you find when you open up any collection of university poems in Bombay or Guangzhou or, for that matter, New Haven. Perhaps they’d have begun, wherever they were, with a quotation from Sartre: “Human life begins at the far end of despair.” Identity crises, the search for something, a sense of pervading sadness or frustration that reaches no farther than the small cosmos of the self, are, to some extent, the universal currency of the young.

But of course there was an extra component here, among people whose culture had, not long ago, been among the most self-contained and changeless in the world, and now had been propelled into a new kind of nomadism. When we came up into the center of the Tibetan settlement at the end of the evening, many of the people around us had faces that were tomato red, having been smeared with color by Indian boys celebrating the Hindi holiday of Holi. Two days from now, in the St. John in the Wilderness church down the road, the cheerful Indian priest who slept each night on the cold floor would spring to life and, putting a cassock over his sneakers and jeans, hand out two photocopied pages with the lyrics to “Morning Has Broken” on them (and “Have a Nice Day” at the end), so that the small congregation of foreigners could join him in singing Cat Stevens’s modern hymn on Easter Sunday. A cappella because the old church was lacking an organ. The boys were outsiders, really, wherever they happened to find themselves. The Dalai Lama’s injunction to build a home within was like an idea they knew already but could not begin to see how to implement.