On a cold, grey day at the end of March, five weeks after my return from India, I first met a Tibetan in Western surroundings. The setting was a London hotel lounge and the Tibetan was a young man of twenty-one who had just arrived from Switzerland, where he had been helping with a resettlement scheme since the previous December. I’m not sure what I had expected four months in Europe to do to a Tibetan but they seemed to have done no harm to Lobsang. He brought with him a calmness and dignity which I personally found very soothing at that time, suffering as I was from my first dose of concentrated publicity.
Now I could see for myself the famous Tibetan adaptability. This boy was superbly at ease, though at the same time one was aware of his essential ‘differentness’. Unlike many Orientals met in Europe he was not striving to ape Western ways and attitudes but was simply accommodating himself to his new environment to the extent required by good manners.
After the discussion for which we had met I accompanied Lobsang to Waterloo, and it was on the Underground that he made me realise how quickly I had become reinfected by the feverish maelstrom of our Western civilisation. As we descended the stairs a train could be heard approaching – whereupon everyone sprinted desperately down to the platform and leaped on board as though devils were following. Only one solitary figure was left behind – Lobsang, who crossed the platform at his usual pace and sedately entered the train a moment before the doors closed. Sitting opposite me he remarked with a slight smile, ‘It is not necessary to get worried and run to these trains. I have seen that if one goes away another comes very soon.’
Before we said goodbye that evening we had arranged that Lobsang should spend his summer holiday in Ireland.
Lobsang was the second youngest of a family of eight and both his parents died in 1945. To quote his own words, ‘My mother died when my youngest brother was born and my father died six weeks later because he was so sad.’ This cause of death being accepted as something entirely understandable reminded me once again of the strange fate of Sonam No bo’s mother at Dharamsala.
Lobsang’s father had been a government official in Lhasa and in addition to his Civil Service duties – or possibly as part of them – he practised as an oracle. This information was given me in matter-of-fact tones as we crossed St James’s Park, where the idea of anyone’s father having been an oracle struck a delightfully exotic note. Yet this reference to an occupation so remote from our world highlighted those barriers which always divide East from West, however easy the rapport between individuals.
At the age of four Lobsang was adopted by his father’s brother, an Incarnate Lama of the Gelugpas who was then Abbot of Tubung Churbu Monastery, twenty miles west of Lhasa. This small community of a hundred monks was one of two monasteries which the Abbot had founded, and here Lobsang spent his school holidays. His childhood was secure and contented, despite the rigorous régime traditional to Tibetan schools, where a pupil’s powers of concentration are developed to the highest degree and the minimum of recreation is allowed. One of his aunts, who lived in Lhasa, was especially kind to him, and though his uncle was a very austere man, with whom it was impossible to have an informally relaxed relationship, Lobsang knew that he could rely on the Abbot’s constant affection.
When the Lhasa uprising began on 17 March 1959, Lobsang at once fled to Tubung Churbu. Already his only sister – a pioneer of agricultural improvement – had been murdered by the Chinese and the family was sufficiently prominent for each member to be in grave danger at that time. In the Monastery preparations were being made for an escape to India, and two weeks later the Abbot set out with twenty-five followers – including Lobsang – and a train of sixty mules. Many of these pack-animals carried priceless loads, for the Abbot was intent on saving his library of ancient Sanskrit manuscripts and his famous collection of thankas. As the main routes to the frontier were then being vigilantly patrolled by the Chinese all refugee caravans had to use unfrequented tracks over high passes and this comparatively short journey – during which half the mules were lost through injury – took more than three gruelling months.
The first man who heads for the moon will have a much clearer picture of what to expect on arrival than Lobsang had en route to India. In the course of this trek he suffered acutely from loneliness and often wept at leaving behind him his brothers, his friends and his country. As yet he had no conception of what it meant to be a refugee and his imagination could not begin to visualise the sort of world towards which he was travelling. In Tibet he had never known the significance of money; his needs had always been provided for and the idea of earning was completely foreign to him – but soon he was to be alone in an environment where money is the determining factor in most people’s lives.
When the caravan at last reached Kalimpong the Abbot retired to a local monastery to recover from an illness brought on by his ordeal and Lobsang lodged for three months in the home of Sherpa Tenzing of Everest. Most of the Abbot’s retainers now dispersed to fend for themselves, but those who were too old or infirm to do so are still with him in Benares, where for the past few years he has held the chair of Sanskrit Studies at the famous Hindu University. Fortunately most of his manuscripts and all the thankas survived the journey, and these latter were one of the chief attractions at an International Exhibition of Oriental Art held recently in Delhi.
At this stage Lobsang spoke only Tibetan and some Chinese, so his months in Kalimpong were spent studying Hindi, Nepali and English. Then he decided to find a job which would make him financially independent, while enabling him to perfect his English, and a few weeks later he had become house-boy to an American family in New Delhi.
In our society this would not seem very remarkable but in the East such a step required considerable strength of character from a young man who had been accustomed to three personal servants and had never been allowed to put on his own boots. In some refugee circles Lobsang now found himself regarded as a fool; with his connections he could have lived comfortably in idleness. But to him this would have been infinitely more degrading than working as a servant and, apart from his desire to be independent, he also wished to equip himself with some means of helping the thousands of his illiterate fellow-countrymen who were then drifting about northern India in bewildered misery. Realising their difficulties he felt that a core of educated, English-speaking Tibetans could achieve a great deal by acting as liaison officers between them and the twentieth century.
Lobsang’s employers were kind and appreciative but as a house-boy he found himself with insufficient time for serious study, so after nine months he left the Americans – despite their offer to double his wages – and went as a voluntary worker to Mrs Bedi’s School for Young Lamas. A few months later Miss Joyce Pearce, of Ockenden Venture, visited this school, met Lobsang and offered him the opportunity to study in England.
For the next six months, while the necessary formalities were being completed, Lobsang worked as an assistant secretary in His Holiness’s office at Dharamsala. Curiously enough we never met there, though our terms overlapped by three months, but we had many mutual friends in the area – and a few mutual enemies, despite Lobsang’s reluctance to acknowledge any man as an enemy!
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On the day of Lobsang’s arrival in Ireland flights to Cork were delayed by fog and I asked an official at the bus terminus to contact my hotel when Mr Lobsang arrived. In due course the telephone rang and a voice in rich Cork brogue asked, ‘Is that Miss Murphy? Well, I’ve got a Tie-bet-an here and I’m keeping him for you to take – would that be right?’ I replied gravely that it would indeed; the implication that a Tie-bet-an was a species of dangerous wild animal made me feel that I had been cast in the role of a qualified circus-trainer. Yet when I arrived at the terminus fifteen minutes later Lobsang and the official were deep in conversation, and as we left the building the Cork man whispered to me, ‘Gorr, he’s a terrible nice little fella after all – real polite and friendly-like – good luck to ye!’
Two days later we left Lismore to hitch-hike to Galway, en route for the Aran Islands. Lobsang was an ideal travelling companion, so indifferent to what most Europeans would regard as discomfort that after a five-mile walk through pouring rain he still looked cheerful. Also he took it for granted that everything must be accomplished on a shoestring and this, when one belongs to a society in which all one’s friends have considerably more money than oneself, makes a welcome change.
I had been looking forward to a return to Inishere – the smallest of the three Arans – during all my time abroad. The way of life on this little island is as primitive as one could find anywhere in Europe. The only roads are rough dirt tracks, the traffic consists entirely of donkeys, water is drawn from wells, clothes are home-spun, Irish is the spoken language, and apart from vegetables, milk, eggs and fish all supplies must come out from the mainland. There may seem to be little affinity between landlocked Tibet and an isle in the Atlantic, yet I had felt – and Lobsang soon confirmed this feeling – that a Tibetan would find himself at home on Inishere.
The two and a half hour journey from Galway was Lobsang’s longest sea voyage, but luckily it was calm and when we anchored off the South Island a small fleet of currachs – frail craft of wood-lathe and tarred canvas – immediately surrounded us to ferry passengers and goods ashore.
The island was looking its loveliest on this cloudless August morning, with the sharp Atlantic light heightening the contrast between silver sands and vivid little fields. On the strand sturdy donkeys queued to take sacks of coal, flour and sugar to the two tiny shops, and the community’s only mule-cart – a recent innovation – stood by to bring the mail to the Post Office. So still is the island on such a day that the rattle of the anchor-chain sounded almost aggressive, and so easily do the Islanders move about their tasks that my own impatience to board a currach suddenly appeared ridiculous.
Boat-days are something of an event and a vast crowd of twenty or thirty people, plus three or four dogs, usually assemble to welcome the Naomh Eanna. Inevitably Lobsang’s arrival created a sensation and I couldn’t help feeling embarrassed at the uninhibited curiosity with which he was regarded. But I needn’t have worried; it transpired afterwards that he had observed a family party weeping as they said goodbye to an emigrant daughter and with refugee understanding he had been much more aware of this pathetically permanent feature of island life than of his own conspicuousness.
During the next few weeks we shared a friend’s rented cottage, washed at the well three-quarters of a mile away, slept flea-bagged on the floor and played Mah Jong by candlelight – and Lobsang obviously revelled in this escape from the suaveness of Europe to the sternness of Aran. He enthusiastically appropriated many of the daily chores and within hours of our arrival had dug a very splendid Asian-type latrine, while his zeal for fetching water soon earned him the nickname of ‘Choo-Lin’ – ‘Water-Carrier’. He was no less zealous to collect dung for the fire, but here slight complications arose; some cow-pats contained insects and were therefore not considered eligible, by a Buddhist, for burning. Similarly, forays to pick barnacles and periwinkles were quietly avoided.
Another aspect of Buddhism was revealed by Lobsang’s dealings with the Islanders, some of whom are not conspicuously friendly, even to visitors from the mainland. At first Lobsang found one of the men downright insulting. On the day after our arrival he returned from the village looking somewhat disconcerted and, telling me of this encounter, concluded, ‘I was very angry, but my uncle taught me never to seem angry, even if I can’t help feeling it, so I said nothing. Perhaps if I keep nice to him he will become nice to me. He can’t help being ignorant of outside things and having these terrible manners.’ A few days later I met the man concerned and to my astonishment he was extravagant in his admiration for Lobsang and was most sympathetic towards Tibet, a country of which he had never previously heard. And when we left Inishere three weeks later – by which time Lobsang had become a universal favourite – the ‘Tie-bet-an’ was presented by this man with a farewell gift.
In conversation with Lobsang I often became uncomfortably aware of the crudeness of my own attitudes and reactions. We frequently discussed the general Tibetan problem and the personalities we both knew in India, and as time passed I noticed that my tendency to make harsh criticisms was being curbed by Lobsang’s disinclination to impute evil to anyone. He managed to assess all types of people astutely, without ever being malicious, and if an individual’s misbehaviour was too blatant to be ignored he would, without condoning it, refer to some extenuating factor which should be taken into account before judgement was passed. Nor was this merely esprit de corps; he showed equal charity towards non-Tibetans – except when vigorously denouncing what appeared to him to be the barbarically low standard of Western sexual morality.
Yet Lobsang was no devitalised prig, and I suspect that he followed his uncle’s precepts only when they were acceptable to him personally. With a mischievous gleam in the eye he told me about the elaborate Tibetan carpet, woven in his parents’ home, which he had brought to Switzerland. His uncle had instructed him never to part with this treasure, but as Lobsang wanted a transistor radio and as the Abbot had confiscated the one he bought in India – ‘Because it distracts the boy from his studies’ – Lobsang promptly sold his carpet and acquired a de luxe short-wave set on which he can get All-India Radio and Radio Peking. This transistor was of course brought to Inishere but Lobsang obviously realised that the object of the expedition was to escape such irritations, and we only learned afterwards that it had been used regularly in the small hours of the morning.
In the evenings, after supper, we used to sit around the open fire and return to Tibet with Lobsang. ‘Choo-Lin’ had seen far more of his own country than do most Tibetans, for at the age of fifteen he was taken by his uncle on an eighteen months’ journey to a sacred mountain in west Tibet. This pilgrimage of a Very High Lama to a Very Sacred Mountain was obviously a major operation. The caravan consisted of 100 horses and mules and 300 yaks, carrying camping equipment and stores for sixty monks and servants. The desolate nature of the country in west Tibet made it necessary to carry this vast quantity of food, and Lobsang’s reference to sacks of dried meat and compressed vegetables reminded me that our dehydrated foods are not, after all, unique.
At nightfall, during this trek, everyone except the Abbot helped set up camp and Lobsang remarked that this was excellent training for him and his young companions. Occasionally there was some excitement – when a panther killed a dog or hundreds of wild horses were sighted galloping across the steppes. Quite often dangerously flooded rivers had to be negotiated and then the mules and horses swam with their riders through the swift, icy water and the yaks were ferried on square, flat-bottomed boats of wood and yak-hide. But on the whole this sounded a happy and peaceful journey, and Lobsang looks back on that period with inevitable nostalgia, realising that his Tibet has by now been changed for ever.
At that time Tubung Churbu employed three traders who travelled regularly between Lhasa, India, China and Mongolia. The Monastery also had its own ‘Civil Service’, and a group of these officials annually toured the countryside to collect the dzo-butter tax. It was soon after returning from the pilgrimage, and shortly before the Uprising, that Lobsang was appointed to one such group which, in the course of its tour, encountered a battalion of Chinese soldiers. As the Chinese were then feeling daily more insecure they refused to accept the leader’s explanation of his business and captured all but two of the party. On the following night, while the guards were being distracted by an attempted escape from another of the prison tents, Lobsang managed to break out from his tent, seize a horse and flee towards Lhasa. For ten days he rode alone, avoiding the Chinese-infested main road, sleeping out in freezing temperatures and living on a few handfuls of tsampa: but he says that the loneliness and the fear of recapture were even worse than the cold and hunger. When he finally reached Tubung Churbu he collapsed and was ill for six weeks. A month or so after his recovery the Uprising took place and he never heard what happened to the other members of the group.
I found that forming a friendship with an individual refugee helped me to understand certain aspects of the general problem which I had not fully grasped while working at Dharamsala.
Lobsang’s conversation emphasised the fact that most people depend, perhaps more than they realise, on the stability of that material and moral environment which gives shape and significance to individual lives. Even when families leave their homeland for years at a stretch the consciousness that they belong there in a special sense, and can return in time to their own niche, makes for security and self-assurance. Therefore the sudden violent dispossession accompanying a refugee flight is much more than the loss of a permanent home and a traditional occupation, or than the parting from close friends and familiar places. It is also the death of the person one has become in a particular context, and every refugee must be his or her own midwife at the painful process of rebirth.