Tibetan Foothold

by Dervla Murphy

  On our way back to Stirling Castle we learned that the direct Simla– Dharamsala road was now impassable, as the monsoon had already broken in the hills, so Jill announced that we would have to return to the plains and follow the Grand Trunk Road westwards for another eighty miles. We left Simla late that evening and, after a glorious moonlit drive through the mountains, stopped again at Kasauli.

  Soon after leaving the GT Road at Jullundur, on the following afternoon, the countryside again became beautiful in a quiet, green way. But soon the landscape grew wilder and rockier, as Arabella climbed smoothly into the hills that divide the Punjab Plain from the Kangra valley.

  We camped after dark near the little town of Dehra, on a cliff high above the Beas river – which made a splendid silver swathe in the moonlight. Within an hour Jill was fast asleep in Arabella and I was almost asleep, wrapped in a blanket on the grass verge of the track. But the night was hot, though dewy, so I threw off the blanket – an action which the local mosquitoes interpreted as an invitation to supper. Having dissuaded them by applying the relevant cream I had just fallen asleep when I was loudly sniffed at by a deputation of astonished dogs, investigating the mystery of the foreign body; then, after their departure, the dew became so heavy that I had to resume my blanket and I spent the remainder of the night restlessly sweating within its shelter.

  By 10 a.m. the following morning we were viewing from the south the long, east-to-west Kangra valley, with its tremendous northern backdrop of the Dhauladhur spur of the Himalayas. High on the side of one of these mountains, 4000 feet above the valley floor, I was to live during the next four months. As it happened, this was the last of the sunshine before the monsoon broke – had we come a day later I would have had to wait five weeks to see the snowy ridges above Dharamsala.

  Kangra town, overlooking the Ban Ganga torrent, is cobbled, hilly and smelly. Many of its streets are closed to motor-traffic so we walked to the Tibetan Boys’ School, run by the Tibetan Ministry for Education, in the town centre. Passing through the violently coloured bazaar, where flies swarm in millions, I studied the pale-skinned, cheerful faces of the locals and realised that they were as different from the people ‘down-country’ as their valley is different from the plains. Most of them are semi-nomad herdspeople who take their flocks to high summer pastures in the Himalayas and, though there is little wealth in this valley, they are sturdy and contented. Kangra is only 2000 feet above sea-level and is reputed to be one of the unhealthiest spots in India; it would be difficult to choose an area less suited to refugees from the ‘Roof of the World’.

  Approaching the school we heard the boys chanting lessons from the Buddhist scriptures, as they sat crossed-legged in tidy rows on the parched earth of the playground. Conditions here were much the same as at Chota Simla. This place was then being run by a Rimpoche, or Incarnate Lama, named Khantoul – a young man of twenty-five, dressed, most disappointingly, in slacks and a cotton shirt – who showed us round the dilapidated, rat-infested building. Then came the inevitable tea and biscuits in his tiny office, followed by a PT display for our entertainment. Wherever one encounters groups of Tibetan children in India PT, for some mysterious reason, ranks high on the list of their accomplishments. So far as I know there is nothing in their national tradition to account for this phenomenon and the only explanation I have ever heard is that each child is regarded by the Tibetan authorities as a future member of Tibet’s Liberation Army and that the PT cult is part of their military training.

  From the boys’ school we walked up hundreds of stone steps to the Canadian Mission Hospital. Here Dr Haslem – a remarkable woman who has been running this hospital for the past thirty years – told us that Juliet could return to Dharamsala on the following day, if she avoided overwork for another week. (It was, I noted, accepted that she would have to overwork once her convalescence had ended.) Then Juliet joined us; she looked pale and tired, but was obviously determined to persuade all concerned that she was again in perfect health. When we had been introduced Jill explained that I was coming to Dharamsala to work under her. I had been slightly apprehensive about this moment, in view of my total ignorance of medicine, but Juliet’s welcome at once reassured me.

  During the next four months Juliet and I were to share the small SCF bungalow which had just been built at the edge of the Nursery compound. It was clear from the start that we had absolutely nothing in common. I am incurably untidy; Juliet is miserable if any object strays a millimetre to right or left of its appointed place. I work until midnight but Juliet retires early. I fail to get on well with Indians and Juliet – who previously worked for eighteen months at Darjeeling and Delhi – is completely at home with them. Even our attitudes to the Tibetans were opposed; Juliet regarded them as so many patients to be nursed back to health and affirmed that she saw no difference between English, Tibetans and Indians – except that the lamentably uncivilised Tibetans needed lessons in hygiene rather more urgently than anyone else. I, on the other hand, had most unprofessionally fallen in love with all my patients and to me the Tibetans represented what Fosco Maraini describes as ‘Perhaps the only civilisation of another age to have survived intact into our own time’.

  At first sight it seemed lunatic to enclose two such dissimilar women in a confined space and expect them both to survive. And yet, miraculously, we never quarrelled. Juliet’s patience and thoughtfulness were monumental. She tolerated the nauseating clouds of cigarette smoke with which I filled our little bedroom and the piles of reference books and sheaves of manuscript that wandered all over our cramped floor space, apparently of their own volition. She never interrupted when I was writing and I soon acquired the knack of not hearing her transistor. Inevitably I felt the strain of never being alone, yet by the end of our four months together Juliet and I had developed a sincere mutual affection.

  At the Kangra School for Tibetan girls, about two miles beyond the town, Jill and I were welcomed by a most engaging couple, who fed us more tea and biscuits before taking us to count the holes in the roof directly over their new supply of beds and blankets.

  Then a group of the girls spontaneously decided to perform some of those extraordinary dances which were later to become so familiar. Observing the happiness of these youngsters I was astonished. Many had been forced to leave family and friends behind them when they escaped to India and some had certainly witnessed terrifying scenes of cruelty, as the Chinese tightened their grip on Tibet. I wondered then to what extent suspense, loneliness and the memory of past horrors still affected them emotionally. Later, at Dharamsala, I noticed that some of the adolescents, and a few adults too, were prone to sudden hysterical outbursts for trivial reasons. Yet on balance it appeared to me that the Tibetans’ racial temperament and religious faith did enable them to overcome cheerfully the distresses of a refugee life.

  That evening Jill and I camped between Kangra and Lower Dharamsala. On our left the narrow road was overhung by high cliffs of earth and rock, while on our right there was a two-hundred-foot drop to river level. Arabella had to be parked on the edge of the precipice to leave room for passing military traffic and at about 9 p.m. I curled up in my blanket just behind her. After the disturbed rest of the previous night I was soon asleep – but before long a passing peasant prodded me in the ribs and considerately pointed out that rockfalls on this stretch of the road normally landed precisely where we were sleeping. I in turn woke Jill and we blearily proceeded to what seemed a safer spot, but this time, just in case it wasn’t, I settled down under Arabella’s protection.

  The next diversion came at 11 p.m., when an army officer returning to Upper Dharamsala mistook me for a dead body. Assured that I was nothing of the sort he remarked encouragingly that at the present rate of progress I soon would be and then proceeded on his way. After this I didn’t go to sleep for sometime – not because the officer’s pessimistic prophecy had unnerved me, but because I am much addicted to thunderstorms, and a particularly impressive specimen was now taking place. T
here are few experiences more stirring than the arrogant reverberations of thunder in high mountains.

  Soon after midnight the storm abated and I dozed off, to be reawakened just after 3 a.m. by Jill shining a torch under Arabella and yelling: ‘Are you all right?’ Her voice was barely audible above the continuous crashing of thunder overhead and the rushing hiss of torrential train. I was about to reply sleepily, ‘Yes, thank you’, when I woke up enough to realise that I was very far from being all right. A young river was racing down the road and I was lying in inches of water. At that moment we heard a menacing bumping near by, as dislodged rocks rolled down the precipice. Jill exclaimed: ‘For God’s sake get out of that! We must move or the road will collapse under Arabella.’ So off we went again, though visibility was almost nil and gigantic waterfalls were roaring off the cliffs onto the road. Above the din Jill shouted cheerfully: ‘If anyone saw us now they’d say we were mad – and they’d be right!’ Actually we were enjoying ourselves enormously and for me this was an unforgettable introduction to the annual drama of the breaking of the monsoon.

  A few miles further on we came at last to a really safe spot. By now the water on the road was six inches deep so I squeezed into the back of Arabella – which was not dry, but slightly less wet than the road. Here, reclining on crates of Heinz Baby Food, I slept from 4 to 6 a.m. – when I was quite surprised to wake up of my own accord.

  Dharamsala is divided into two sections – Lower Dharamsala, at 4500 feet, and Upper Dharamsala, at 6000 feet. Lower Dharamsala is the headquarters of Kangra District and, like many towns whose prosperity depended on the British, it now seems slightly sorry for itself. Upper Dharamsala, which was a popular hill-station before the earthquake of 1905 levelled most of the houses, is at present famous as a Tibetan enclave. Here are the Palace of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the headquarters of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile and the training centre of the Tibetan Drama Party. These institutions, together with the Nursery for Tibetan Children and the hundreds of Tibetan squatters who have occupied nearby hamlets, give the whole area such a Tibetan flavour that within a week of coming here I found it difficult to remember that I was still in India.

  It is possible to walk from Lower to Upper Dharamsala in fifty minutes, using the old path which climbs through forests of giant rhododendrons and deodars, at times becoming a stairway of rock; but by the new motor-road that swivels dizzily around the mountains this is an eight-mile journey. When we drove up on 29 July the violence of the monsoon was almost frightening. Everywhere water forcefully had its way, making a mockery of the apparent solidity of the hills as it ripped great wounds in their flanks and uprooted their bushes.

  One could smell the Nursery before it became visible through this downpour. Up on our right the earth embankment of the compound was covered with excrement, now being distilled by the rain. Already this dominant stench had become for me one of the hallmarks of a Tibetan camp – that and the ragged, faded prayer flags which flutter indomitably wherever Tibetans gather – but here at Dharamsala the stench was a classic of its kind, with 1100 contributors concentrated in one small area.

  Jill drove carefully across the compound – a sea of sticky mud – and then backed up to the SCF bungalow. The strange sight of a Land-Rover brought hundreds of excited children from the shelter of those crowded rooms to which they are confined twenty-four hours a day during the monsoon. Hungry, dirty and covered in sores, they stood watching intently while we unloaded the clothes, medicines and tinned foods which would make life a little easier for some of them.

  Chumba and Kesang helped us to unload. Chumba was the camp cook, whose broad smile and kindly eyes were almost warm and bright enough to dispel the rains; Kesang was Juliet’s young servant, who shared our bungalow, unrolling her bedding each night on one of the hard, wooden Tibetan couches. As Juliet pointed out, it was essential for a personal servant to ‘sleep in’ if she were to be kept sufficiently licefree to look after our food and clothing. The other twenty ayahs on the compound showed the traditional Tibetan distaste for removing extraneous matter from the skin and were chronically lice-ridden. Most of them had no rooms of their own, and at nightfall one found them sleeping in corners, looking like so many rolled-up bundles. The few who were married, or living with the man of their choice, had ‘homes’ in tiny, airless rooms measuring about six feet square. Yet they were all good-tempered and seemingly happy on a wage of fifteen shillings a month, though they worked a seven-day week.

  We were joined for lunch by Oliver Senn, a Swiss Red Cross doctor who had arrived at the camp only two weeks previously. Already, at twenty-seven, Oliver was almost a caricature of the absent-minded professor and I wasn’t in the least surprised to discover, months later, that during his university career he had published a treatise on some impossibly abstruse branch of modern medicine. Tall, slim, slightly stooping, slightly bald and slightly near-sighted, Oliver spoke English fluently but quaintly and was given to blinking rapidly when brought up against the bewildering practicalities of life. To offset his prodigious erudition on a variety of subjects he had a child’s capacity for enjoying the simplest pleasures. And when you met Oliver you also met Claudia, his fiancée, who at that time was doing her medical finals in Switzerland and who was by a long way Oliver’s favourite topic of conversation.

  Oliver lived in a damp, windowless cell behind the Dispensary – the sort of place in which no Englishman would keep a dog. Here he wrote official reports and did laboratory tests until the small hours of every morning and, since much of this lab work was research on dysentery, the atmosphere of his bedroom wasn’t too pleasant. He also acted as unofficial night-nurse; all the seriously ill children lay in rooms leading off his own, and he was frequently called to attend to complicated cases. But despite the numerous difficulties encountered when practising medicine in Dharamsala Oliver was already, within a fortnight, as enthusiastic about the Tibetans as I was soon to become.

  During lunch Juliet instructed me in the geography of the camp. It was divided into three sections – Upper Nursery, Lower Nursery and Kashmir Cottage (see sketch). The Upper Nursery consisted of a group of ramshackle buildings a quarter of a mile higher up the mountain where about 380 children, aged eight to sixteen, were looked after by Doris Murray, an SCI Quaker volunteer who had come to Dharamsala in November 1962.

  At the Lower Nursery, where we lived, some 600 children from one to eight years old were packed into five rooms. Two of these rooms had been recently built, but already the dormitory roof leaked so badly that during the monsoon umbrellas were needed when walking through it. The second new building had been designed as a recreation hall, with a stage for dancing, but because of overcrowding it was now used as another dormitory. It had no beds, which horrified some visitors, though in fact the children were perfectly happy and comfortable sleeping in rows on the wooden floor of the stage. Beds are not essential for Tibetans and can actually be a nuisance where bed-bugs abound; the wood-panelled walls of the old bungalow which formed the nucleus of the camp were swarming with them and unfortunately they soon solved their overpopulation problem by emigrating to the new rooms and to our bungalow.

  The Dispensary, which was the pivot of all our work, was an extremely dilapidated bungalow, approached by crossing the road and descending the usual steep path to another ledge on the mountainside. It contained five small rooms; two were used as wards, where as many as eighty dangerously ill children were sometimes crowded together, one was the Dispensary proper, where medicines were stored and outpatients received attention, and the two narrow rooms at the back were allocated to Oliver and the Dispensary ayahs. These three young women, Nema, Lhamo and another Kesang, had all received some nursing training at Safdarjang Hospital in Delhi and spoke a little English, though not enough to avoid frequent linguistic crises in the course of a day’s work.

  Kashmir Cottage was another dilapidated bungalow, an hour’s walk from the Lower Nursery. There about 120 six-to eight-year-olds were in the charge of
a Tibetan woman named Dolma, who spoke fluent English. Both she and Chumba had left Tibet in 1954 and had been profitably employed in Calcutta before forefeiting their jobs to help at Dharamsala. When necessary Dolma brought the children who were in her care up to the Dispensary and every week Oliver and Juliet went down to inspect them.

  We had just finished lunch when Doris Murray paid us a brief visit. I now think of this extraordinary woman as being in a category apart from the average refugee-worker, for she possesses a combination of qualities which in another age might well have caused her to be revered as a saint. She was not among the Tibetans to escape from an uncongenial background, to enjoy a well-paid job in exotic surroundings, or because this was an interesting new experience. She worked here to serve humanity and though this motive may sound uncomfortably sentimental its results, when seen in action, make the ordinary helper feel very humble indeed. Doris has written to me:

  I believe in a world community. I believe in the mystery of life of which each religion reveals one facet. I believe that words are symbols, counters of common coinage used to express the meaning which lies behind, and to worship the symbol is idolatry. I believe in working where there is need – differences of race, colour, religion are incidental.

  With dignity and discretion she kept aloof from the endless petty squabbling which bedevils life in Tibland, and though the more unsavoury members of the Tibetan ruling clique repeatedly took advantage of her forbearance she was adept at devising excuses for their unpleasantness. Doris had come to Dharamsala to teach, but when she found the health problem so appalling she temporarily discarded her original intention and undertook what most fully trained nurses would consider an impossible task. But all the time she was quietly deepening her knowledge of Tibetan culture, since she hoped eventually to be free to work out that synthesis between Eastern and Western educational systems which she recognised as essential for the children’s future. Her bed-sitting-room-cum-dispensary at the Upper Nursery was cramped, dark and rat-infested and she lived on the usual SCI allowance of one and sixpence a day. Doris spoke less than any of us about the lovableness of Tibetans, yet she did more to help them than all the rest of us put together.