(Published as part of the Penguin Book of Modern Tibetan Essays, 2023)
Excitement mounted as the days counted down to Losar, the Tibetan New Year. A sure sign of its impending arrival was when my mother took me to Shamsu & Sons to get me outfitted for a suit. Darjeeling’s long history as a British hill station, replete with sahibs and boarding school students, had undoubtedly left its mark on its citizens, who were fond of wearing Western-style suits for festive occasions. Mr Shamsu, an old-school Muslim gentleman, distinctive in his trademark astrakhan hat, was known both for his skill as a bespoke tailor and his inability to deliver on time. Any order placed with him inevitably required multiple failed trips and long harangues from my mother. But such was his workmanship and his honey-tongued spiel that all would be forgiven. Visiting his narrow shop and being briskly fitted by him always made me feel special and I couldn’t wait for the day when I would finally get to wear the suit.
As Losar approached, miscellaneous preparatory activities kept our household in a state of feverish hustle and bustle. In those days, in the early 1960s, our home was swamped by an assortment of relatives and acquaintances, most of who had only recently escaped from Tibet. A set of unusual circumstances had forced my parents to settle in Darjeeling a few years before the Dalai Lama escaped from Tibet in March 1959. Because of its proximity to Tibet, Darjeeling and nearby Kalimpong were important towns on the Indo-Tibetan trade route and had always had a substantial Tibetan population. The Tibetans who came into exile after 1959 called them Bodpa Nyingpa, old Tibetans.
Three of my mother’s relatives from her village of Sangta, not far from Lhasa, made their separate ways to Darjeeling after fleeing Tibet and tracing her whereabouts. They lived with us for a while. My two younger sisters and I cruelly nicknamed them: Shashang Sweater-Nagpo (Uncle Black Sweater) for the eponymous garment that he always wore; Shashang Pemo Renjo (Uncle Torn Knees) for his trousers frayed at the knees; and Shashang Kangpa Kyokyok (Uncle Crooked Feet) for his pronounced limp. There was also Somola (Aunty), my mother’s first cousin who showed up one day with her husband and his younger brother after a difficult and dangerous journey from Lhasa. Whenever someone new arrived at our home from Tibet, their haggard and unwashed appearances were signs to me of the terrible situation they had just fled from. There was no shortage of visual references to the state of affairs in Tibet. Cartoons in the local Tibetan newspapers depicted horrifying scenes: monks and nuns bayoneted alive by Chinese soldiers; Tibetans in chains watched over by gun-toting overseers; the Potala Palace in flames. I would look at the Kanchenjunga range that towered over our town and try and imagine my homeland which supposedly existed just behind its lofty ramparts, a land as mythical as it was godforsaken, overwhelmed now by barbaric and evil Chinese soldiers. But in the benevolent setting of Darjeeling, in my child’s mind a gentle and happy place, these troubling ruminations did not last long.
In contrast to my mother’s numerous relatives from Central Tibet who passed through our home, there was only Jola (Elder Brother) from my father’s side who lived with us. He was my much older first cousin who had joined my father in India in the late 1950s from our ancestral village of Nagatsang, a few kilometres from the famous monastery of Kumbum. Situated not far from the Silk Road cities of Xining and Lanzhou, Tibetans in these borderlands had long been a minority and coexisted with communities of Han Chinese, Central Asian Muslims and Mongolians. In Tibetan, Xining is called Siling and Tibetans from this area are referred to as Silingpas. Very few Silingpas made it to India in the early days of exile because of the great distances involved, and those that did formed small but close-knit communities based on their distinctive language—a version of the Siling dialect, which has closer affinities to Chinese than to Tibetan—and their culinary habits which revolved around a love of noodles. Jola, then in his early twenties, was a soft-spoken and loving older brother who showered my sisters and me with an abundance of affection. Although he was our only relative from Kumbum, a number of other Silingpas were an integral part of our household.
Chief among them was Damba-la, a stony-faced giant of a man, who dominated our kitchen. His hair was close-cropped and a deep, vicious dent marked his forehead. Rumour had it that this was the result of a knife fight with a rival-in-love in Tibet but I later discovered its true provenance. Damba-la was part of a caravan expedition on the Kumbum to Lhasa trade route when bandits attacked them. He and his companions successfully repelled them but in the melee, one of the bandits struck him on the forehead with a knife. A falling tent pole then hit him on the same spot and exacerbated his wound, leaving him cruelly marked. Many of the Tibetans who found themselves in Darjeeling and Kalimpong before the fall of Tibet were colourful characters with ambiguous pasts who had fled to India to start new lives. Damba-la was no different; the discovery of an affair (and an illegitimate child) with a married lady of high standing had forced him to run away. In Kalimpong, a long apprenticeship at the famous Shanghai Restaurant revealed his true passion—cooking—and he established himself as a master chef in the exile Tibetan community in Darjeeling.
Damba-la was adept at making both Central Tibetan delicacies, particularly those favoured by the aristocracy, and more uncommon ones from Siling, including hand-pulled noodles, chickpea flour polenta, and round loafs of fenugreek infused bread. As children, we were in awe of him and afraid of his sharp tongue. But behind his stern demeanour and quick temper nestled a kind and generous soul whose craggy face lit up after a few sips of his favourite drink, payi—a fermented mash of millet steeped in hot water, served in a bamboo container and sipped through a bamboo straw. This sweet and potent brew, not unlike good Japanese sake, was a speciality of southeastern Tibet and a popular tipple in the area around Darjeeling. In later years, Damba-la developed Parkinson’s disease and his hands trembled so violently that desperate rattling accompanied even the simple act of lifting a lid from a pan. But this did not stop him from continuing to cook. By this point, my sisters and I had lived away from Darjeeling for many years and the only child left at home with my parents was my young niece Diki, Jola’s daughter. The apple of Damba-la’s eye, she mercilessly teased him as his disobedient hand struggled with ladles and pots. “Uncle Damba-la’s drumming again!” she would shriek, giggling helplessly. And our once-fearsome cook would shake his head and smile indulgently, regarding her affectionately through rheumy eyes.
Another Silingpa who was in and out of our home during my childhood was Majen (Cook) Yamphel. Yamphel had trained at Kunga Restaurant in Calcutta’s Chinatown, the headwaters of a stream of Tibetan cooks who eventually spread out to Tibetan and Chinese restaurants from Kathmandu to New Delhi, and in the process helped to evolve a distinctly Indian-Chinese style of cooking that has now become an accepted feature of the Indian culinary landscape. Much to the consternation of my parents, Yamphel loved to drink and gambled away his earnings playing mahjong, sometimes disappearing for days on end. Although not as accomplished a cook as Damba-la, he was nonetheless very much a part of our household and took over the cooking chores whenever Damba-la was otherwise engaged (he was in much demand around town and often hired to cook at parties and other social events). I have fond memories of my father, Damba-la and Yamphel sitting together after dinner, sipping payi and speaking in the incomprehensible Siling dialect.
I caught up with Yamphel many years later, in 1995, when my partner Ritu and I visited Tibet for the first time. He had moved back to his home a few years before and now lived among his many relatives as a respected elder. Meeting him in the unfamiliar environs of Kumbum brought back many happy memories of my childhood in Darjeeling, which, in the context of where I now found myself, seemed impossibly distant. I finally understood just how far my father and his companions had travelled to end up as exiles in Darjeeling. Visiting Nagatsang and meeting various cousins, nephews and nieces for the first time was a confusing and disquieting experience, tinged more with sadness and a sense of alienation than with the joy I had hoped for. My relatives only spoke in the Siling dialect and had it not been for my cousin Yonten Nyima, Jola’s younger brother, who had come to India some years before and learnt to speak Tibetan, I would not have been able to communicate with them. I regretted not having paid more attention to the Siling dialect when I was growing up but my father never encouraged my sisters or me. Perhaps, in the climate of heightened anti-Chinese sentiment that prevailed in the exile community at the time, where Tibetan was the dominant spoken language, he was uncomfortable with this linguistic distinction that separated the Tibetans of his native region.
The mix of Lhasawas and Silingpas in our home made for an interesting fusion of customs and traditions. Damba-la presided over one of the key preparatory rituals of Losar, the making of khapsey, deep-fried snacks made of dough that come in an assortment of shapes and sizes. For two days, Damba-la, assisted by my mother and other members of the family, slaved over giant cauldrons filled with bubbling oil, frying khapsey. We children couldn’t contain our eagerness to sample the freshly sizzling goodies and were shooed away if we got too close to the splattering oil. The crowning moment of the khapsey-frying session was the making of senz, a speciality of my father’s home region. The preparation of these intricately coiled strings of dough, subtly flavoured with ground Szechuan pepper and deep fried in bundles, requires special technique and Damba-la was famed for his senz-making skills. We loved to dunk strands of senz into salted, buttered Tibetan tea and then to use another piece of khapsey, broken to resemble a spoon, to fish them out. The trick was to eat as many of the senz bits before the ‘spoon’ itself collapsed into the tea, at which point, we continued with a new ‘spoon’. Huge quantities of khapsey of all sizes and shapes were neatly packed into large, newspaper-lined cartons. These would last us through the Losar period and for many weeks afterwards.
The 29th of the 12th Tibetan month was when Losar began in earnest. That evening, we gathered for the ritual guthuk—literally, ‘noodle soup of the 29th’—bowls of handmade, shell-shaped pasta in a meaty broth. This was more of a Central Tibetan tradition and my mother and her relatives were in charge of its preparations. Each bowl of guthuk contained a dumpling with a secret ingredient hidden in it. This could be a fluff of cotton wool, a small chilly, a piece of charcoal, a wild root delicacy called doma, or any of a number of other prescribed items. Each item symbolised a trait that ostensibly described the person who ended up with it. Much hilarity and ribbing accompanied the opening of the dumplings but for us kids, this was a serious and tense affair: we just could not end up with one of the more unpleasant objects, like chilly (sharp-tongued and hot-tempered) or charcoal (scheming and malicious). But miraculously—or as I now suspect, with some help from the kitchen—we rarely got anything too negative.
For Silingpas, the next day, the eve of Losar, held special significance. The centrepiece of dinner on this occasion was a glistening pig’s head, cooked in dark soy sauce and star anise along with a dish of pig’s trotters. This was a Siling tradition peculiar to our household as pork is not commonly eaten by other Tibetans, who prefer yak meat, mutton, or beef. On this special evening, Silingpas also considered it important to eat gyathuk, egg noodle soup, the fine strands of noodles auguring long life. These traditions probably had roots in Chinese customs that the Tibetans in the Kumbum region had adopted over generations of close coexistence. The more typically Tibetan dish of boiled chunks of beef and mutton with potatoes and radish was also part of the spread, along with smaller plates of stir-fried vegetables. The first time Ritu visited my parents in Darjeeling coincided with Losar eve dinner. The grinning pig’s head on its platter, slices of which my father enthusiastically plied her with, compounded by a surfeit of payi, proved too much for her constitution and she had to be gently escorted to bed, much to the amusement of my family.
That night, my sisters and I would go to bed, restless with excitement, our new clothes laid out next to us in readiness. We tossed and turned and whispered in the dark until finally, lulled by the comforting murmur of the adults chatting and drinking in the background, we fell asleep. It seemed like we had barely nodded off before we were shaken awake. The time was 3 am and it was pitch dark outside. Loud bursts of exploding fireworks rent the early morning air. My father, already up and dressed, was ushering in the New Year with crackers to dispel bad spirits and negative forces. We hurriedly put on our chuba—the traditional gown worn by men and women. One of the first things we did was to prostrate before our family altar and offer khatag to it. These long white scarves symbolising pure intention and compassion are used as an offering by Tibetans for every imaginable occasion, from births and weddings to deaths and farewells. Our altar, which contained statues of various Buddhas and photographs of the Dalai Lama and other high lamas, soon piled up with the khatag. My parents then sat down and it was their turn to receive khatag from all the younger members of the family. But first, we took turns to prostrate in front of them. Paying homage to one’s elders in this manner was yet another Siling tradition and I only realised much later that it was not practiced by other Tibetans. In return, our parents gave us gifts of money, which my father neatly packed in red envelopes. Money was freely given to children by their elders during Losar and was an important part of why we so eagerly anticipated it. We were then served changkoe, a hot, mildly alcoholic broth made of home-brewed chang (barley beer) mixed with tsampa (roasted barley flour), dried cheese and sugar. Changkoe was a true Losar treat, not least, in retrospect, for the unfamiliar but pleasant flush of warmth and light-headedness it stimulated in us children. Later, after the morning ceremonies concluded, I finally changed into my new suit and from then on, wore it for most of the Losar period.
It was still dark when the first of our guests arrived. A shout would go up—“The Toongsoong students are coming!”—and a flurry of activity electrified the household as last-minute preparations were made to welcome them. We could hear distant but advancing bursts of fireworks accompanied by loud shouts of “Tashi Delek Phunsum Tsog!”, the traditional Losar greeting that translates roughly as “May you have good fortune and good health!” The ‘students’ were a group of young men in their late teens and early 20s who lived together, first in the suburb of Toongsoong (from which they got their moniker) and later, in a large, dilapidated British bungalow not far from our home. For a number of years in the early 1960s, they could be counted on to be our first Losar visitors. Years later, I found out that they were part of a select group being readied for underground resistance activities. The rambling house they lived in was a safe house from where they were transferred to the next phase of their covert missions. Some would go on to be trained by the CIA, which supported the resistance for more than a decade from the late 1950s. They would travel covertly from Darjeeling to Camp Hale, a top secret facility in the Colorado Rockies created specially for the CIA’s Tibetan operation. They would then return to serve as instructors in the Mustang Resistance Force, a clandestine guerrilla army based in northern Nepal on the border with Tibet, or go on undercover missions as radio operators along the Tibetan border, or be assigned to the joint Indo-American-Tibetan intelligence office in Delhi.
Unbeknownst to me, my father was a key figure in these operations. During my childhood, he often disappeared for extended periods. We were told that he worked for the Tibetan government-in-exile and had to travel frequently as part of his job. Even when he was home, my father was always locked away in his office, which was in one corner of our home, and other than at mealtimes, we rarely saw him. Endless lines of Tibetans came to visit him. There was a sense of purposefulness in their serious expressions as they awaited their turn outside his office. My sisters and I were under strict orders not to disturb these meetings. In 1974, I was in boarding school when I came across a news item in the daily newspaper that was pinned to our notice board. The article described the arrest of Tibetan resistance leaders in Nepal, following a standoff between a rebel force in Mustang that they were commanding and the Nepalese army. The news caught me by surprise; until then, I had no inkling of the existence of a Tibetan guerrilla army, far less of my father’s involvement in it as one of its leaders. I reread the article several times but there was no mistaking my father’s name—Lhamo Tsering—an unusual Tibetan name for a man. A few days later, my mother came to visit me and confirmed the story. And that is how I found out that my father had an entirely different side to his life.
My father was the personal assistant and confidante of Gyalo Thondup, the Dalai Lama’s elder brother. They had met when my father was a student at the Institute for Frontier Minorities in Nanking in the 1940s and Gyalo Thondup had arrived in the city to continue his studies under the auspices of the Kuomintang government. They quickly bonded; they were both from the Kumbum region and had the Siling dialect in common. The two fled the Communist takeover of China in 1949 and arrived in India, travelling by sea. The People’s Liberation Army invaded Tibet soon after. Following a brief visit to Lhasa in 1952, Gyalo Thondup and my father returned to India, determined to publicise the situation in their homeland and muster international support. They were part of an émigré group of political exiles based in Kalimpong in the 1950s who were actively working to oppose the Chinese invasion.
When Chushi Gangdruk, the Tibetan guerrilla army fighting the Chinese in Tibet, sent messengers to Gyalo Thondup seeking support, he put them in touch with the CIA, which had already reached out to him. As his trusted associate, Gyalo Thondup assigned my father to liaise between the Tibetans and the CIA, and that was the beginning of his long involvement in the resistance. My mother told me many years later that when she was pregnant with me, my father had disappeared without warning. She had no idea where he had gone and no way of communicating with him. Gyalo Thondup reassured her from time to time and told her not to worry. Jola was the only family member with her when I was born in early 1959. My father reappeared a few months after my birth, as unexpectedly as he had left. He had been away in the US being trained by the CIA. Until his arrest in 1974, he served as Chief of Operations of the Mustang Resistance Force. All the times he had disappeared during my childhood, he had been on secret missions to Calcutta to meet with CIA officers, or on extended field trips to Mustang.
I later learnt that even Jola had actively worked with my father. He was sent to Tibet in 1958 after a quick training in the basics of photography at Das Studio, a well-known photography studio in Darjeeling, armed with CIA-provided camera equipment. He was responsible for some of the only extant photographs of the Chushi Gangdruk at its headquarters in Lhokha in Southern Tibet. One photograph shows Jola, barely out of his teens, standing proudly with Chushi Gangdruk leaders, one hand gripping a machine gun, his camera hanging from his neck. When the Mustang Resistance Force was established in 1960, he accompanied its first commander, Baba Yeshe, as part of the advance party to scout out the desolate Mustang region and spent a difficult winter when nearly 2000 men unexpectedly showed up before proper arrangements had been made. The men were reduced to boiling the leather from their shoes for sustenance before the CIA sent supplies.
But we knew nothing of any of this as we waited with excitement for the ‘students’ to arrive. Preceded by salvos of fireworks and accompanied by loud cries, they made their entrance, a good-looking bunch in their chubas and knee-high boots, with slicked back hairstyles in what was then called the “Bengali” fashion. Most men in Tibet kept their hair long and braided; cutting it short was the first step that marked their transition as exiles. The ‘students’ were ushered into our living room where they offered khatag to my father who they looked up to as their guide and mentor. Tea was served along with stronger libations, khapsey and other snacks. The house soon filled with a stream of visitors who arrived to pay their respects. At some point in the morning, Jola or Shashang Sweater-Nagpo, or perhaps both, headed out as our representatives to make the rounds of close family friends. They would stagger back a few hours later, completely inebriated, barely able to stand. Losar etiquette dictated that guests had to be liberally plied with drinks and the drunker they got the more auspicious it was considered. By lunchtime, our flow of guests slowed down and our extended family settled into a slow afternoon of food, drinks and games of cards. We kids were allowed to play, for small stakes, a popular card game called hrithempen, a Chinese version of Blackjack.
On the third day of Losar, we set out to perform sangsol, a propitiatory incense burning ritual to our tutelary deities and an important Losar tradition to usher in the new year. Dressed in our Losar finery, we proudly walked through town past Chowrastha square and up a steep slope to Observatory Hill, one of the highest points in Darjeeling. A temple to the protector deity, Mahakala, worshipped by both Buddhists and Hindus, stood at its apex and was the focal point of many of the town’s religious events. We joined hundreds of festively attired Tibetan families who gathered from all over town. Friends and acquaintances bumped into each other and exchanged loud Losar greetings. We thronged the narrow inner sanctum of the temple to make our offerings. Bells of all sizes hung over the entrance and ringing them was especially entertaining for the children. We jostled to add our share of juniper sprigs, powdered herbal incense, tsampa and splashes of alcohol into roaring oven-shaped incense burners. Smoke from their chimneys wafted thickly over the pine trees that surrounded the temple and released the comforting fragrance of burning incense. Young men from each family clambered up the branches to hang fresh strings of multi-coloured prayer flags, adding to the thick accretion of older prayer flags that knotted the trees. An atmosphere of religious activity pervaded the place, punctuated by the clanging of bells, the low drone of chanted prayers, and the auspicious fluttering of hundreds of prayer flags. The most fun part came at the end: a large group of us, young and old, stood in a circle, clutching fistfuls of tsampa in our right hands. Slowly chanting “So” in unison, drawing the syllable out as long as we could, we raised our fists once, then twice, and then, crying at the top of our lungs—“Kyi kyi so so, lha gyal lo!” (Victory to the gods!)—flung the tsampa to the skies in a powdery explosion of white flour.
The days that followed were a whirlwind of parties at our home and at the homes of various family friends. For us children, it was a chance to meet our friends and play boisterous and largely unsupervised games of hide-and-seek or cowboys-and-Indians. Hollywood Westerns were a popular staple of Darjeeling in those days and had thoroughly colonised our imaginations. We loved nothing better than to emulate our screen heroes of whom John Wayne, without question, was our favourite! The adults were either busily rushing in and out of kitchens, or eating and drinking and playing cards. Sometimes, there were separate areas where the serious gamblers played mahjong. If we happened to be near one of them when they won a round they would, much to our delight, give us some money for more luck. At some point, after dinner was served and plenty of alcohol had been imbibed, one of the guests would be prevailed upon to sing. This might be my mother’s friend Andrugtsang Kusho, who had a good singing voice. Her speciality was namthar, arias from Tibetan opera that were hugely popular but technically difficult to sing. Or it might be Jigme-la, who would sing a lu, a style of nomadic yodelling from his home region of Amdo, that to my ears sounded foreign and strangely melancholic. Soon, more guests joined in and before long, the singing gave way to dancing.
More often than not, it was my mother and her friends who took the lead. High-spirited and a little flushed, they cleared some space in the middle of the living room and initiated the dancing. In my childhood, the women always seemed to be the driving force behind these social events, whether behind the scenes overseeing preparations, or being right in the forefront of the festivities. Their dances, usually folk dances from Central and Western Tibet, started at an easy pace. Singing together, the women shuffled their feet in time, their arms gracefully swaying. Midway, the song picked up speed and the dancers shifted gear, their feet stamping ever faster and more frenetic syncopated rhythms. Some of the men soon joined them and the dancing continued, full-throatedly and uninhibitedly, late into the night. By then, we children would long have fallen asleep and if the party was in someone else’s place, we would be woken up at an unearthly hour and dragged home, stumbling half-asleep through silent, nocturnal streets.
My mother’s close friends included an unusual and distinctive group of women who had only met each other after coming into exile and settling in Darjeeling. They were from different parts of Tibet and came from varying backgrounds, and it is unlikely that they would have crossed paths under normal circumstances. Most of their husbands were involved in the resistance and this was perhaps the catalyst for their friendship. One of my mother’s best friends was Jigme-la Nyila, who was from Lhasa. Her name was a composite of Jigme-la, her husband’s name, and nyila, a common designation for ‘lady’. She and her husband ran a popular Tibetan restaurant in town called Café Himalaya and also a shop selling Tibetan curios and tourist trinkets. Running restaurants and shops was a common way for the more entrepreneurial of the recently arrived refugees to make a living. Jigme-la worked closely with my father. One of his responsibilities was to escort small groups of men—including the ‘students’—by road from Darjeeling down to the plains near the town of Siliguri. From there, under the cover of darkness, he led them covertly across a fast-flowing river that marked the border with what was then East Pakistan. Once they had safely forded the river, Jigme-la handed the men over to East Pakistani soldiers who were waiting for them at a predetermined spot. He then returned the way he had come, having accomplished the most dangerous part of the mission. The men were taken to a military air strip near Dacca where CIA operatives received them. From there, they continued their journey by transport plane, stopping over at US military bases in Okinawa or Saipan before flying on to Colorado.
Andrugtsang Nyila, a gentle and dignified lady also from Lhasa, was the wife of Andrug Gompo Tashi, the renowned leader of Chushi Gangdruk, who passed away in Darjeeling in 1964, succumbing to wounds he had sustained during campaigns against the Chinese. I clearly remember his funeral cortege winding its way along the narrow mountain road from Darjeeling to Ghoom Monastery. The atmosphere was charged with patriotic fervour as a long line of mourners chanted anti-Chinese slogans. I was in the front with Gompo Tashi’s sons—Dhondup and Dakpa—all of us around five or six years old. Swept by the emotion of the occasion, we raised our fists and shouted at the top of our voices, “Tibet is independent!” and “China out of Tibet!” My father had worked closely with Gompo Tashi before his death, especially in the formation of the Mustang Resistance Force to which many Chushi Gangdruk soldiers were relocated after coming into exile. Many years later, Ritu and I visited Andrugtsang Nyila in a small, downtown Manhattan apartment where she then lived with her surviving family. By then, almost everyone I knew from my childhood had left Darjeeling. Many ended up in the US, driven by the migratory instincts of the exile to find a better life. I hadn’t seen Andrugtsang Nyila for many years; I left India when I was 20 and had lost touch with people from my past. She appeared frail and melancholic. The roar of New York traffic, punctuated by its signature wailing sirens, provided a melancholic backdrop against which we relived a few happy memories from our Darjeeling days. Not long after our visit, she passed away.
Then there was Toongsoong Nyila (who, naturally, lived in Toongsoong). A shy and retiring lady, she was from Markham in eastern Tibet and lived alone with her two children. She had a tragic story that I was completely unaware of when I was a child. Her husband, Yeshi Wangyal, an early trainee at Camp Hale, was parachuted into Tibet on two separate occasions. His second mission in 1960 was to his native area of Markham where he and his team were to locate his father, the local chieftain Phurpa Pon, who was leading a guerrilla force. The mission was doomed from the start. Phurpa Pon had already been killed by the Chinese and his greatly diminished group was on the run. Coming under fire from almost the time they landed, Yeshi Wangyal and his men made their last stand in a fierce gun battle where, except for one man who was wounded and captured, they all perished.
The most flamboyant and extravagant of my mother’s friends was ABC Nyila, so known because she was the proprietor of ABC Restaurant. She was from Lithang in eastern Tibet. With her flashing gold tooth and her outgoing personality, she had a larger than life quality. We children were especially fond of her because she was generous with her gifts of money. ABC Nyila was fond of playing mahjong for high stakes, which put her in another league from my mother and most of her friends, who stuck to playing cards for small amounts of money. Her husband, Bugen Gyatotsang, was a relative of Andrug Gompo Tashi and a Chushi Gangdruk veteran. His younger brother, Wangdu, was a legendary figure, one of the first group of six Tibetans trained by the CIA in 1957 on the Pacific island of Saipan. He was parachuted by the CIA into his native region of Lithang in 1958 to team up with rebel forces fighting the Chinese. After several battles where his companions were killed, he made an epic escape back to India, journeying on horseback and then on foot for months across the Changthang, the wild and desolate Northern Plains.
My father and Wangdu worked closely together and I remember him clearly, a tall and strikingly handsome man who, like ABC Nyila, freely handed out large amounts of money to us kids. In the late 1960s, he replaced Baba Yeshe as the commander of the Mustang Resistance Force. My father spent several months with him in Mustang during a tense period of in-fighting that threatened to split the force. In 1974, under pressure from China, Nepalese troops marched on Mustang and demanded the disbanding and surrender of the force. This was when my father was arrested and used as a bargaining chip. Wangdu made plans to rescue him by force. A showdown was narrowly averted when the Dalai Lama intervened with a taped message calling on the guerrillas to lay down their arms. The guerrillas surrendered but Wangdu, along with a small band of men, made a run for the Indian border. He was ambushed by Nepalese soldiers and shot dead. My father and six other guerrilla leaders would spend nearly seven years in a Nepalese prison for their role in the resistance.
But I would only piece together these events and understand their significance much later in life. Whatever fears, anxieties and sorrows our elders carried with them in their hearts at the time, they did their best to ensure that our carefree and happy childhoods were not impacted in any way. Our Losar festivities continued unabated until the 15th day and then they officially came to an end. Life slowly returned to normal. My suit, which I had worn throughout, was packed away. I would soon go back to school. Our dwindling stock of khapsey was the only reminder of that special period and one day this too was depleted. Soon, this brief phase of our lives also came to an end and our Losar celebrations were never the same again.
I look back at those days and see it as if from the wrong end of a telescope, dreamlike and distant. I see my mother, her friends and other family members and acquaintances sitting together, laughing and drinking around tables laden with bottles of beer and large, communal containers of payi with several bamboo straws stuck in them. I see them singing and dancing until late at night, fuelled by the flush of alcohol and the memory of their recently abandoned homes. There is a youthful and reckless energy to their merrymaking. Despite personal tragedies and news of the worsening situation in Tibet, the future still seems ripe with possibility. They seem determined to keep their spirits up, to reassure themselves that their situation in exile is temporary and that they will soon return to Tibet. But none of them will go home. The years will pass and they will settle into a liminal state of exile, one foot precariously planted on foreign soil, the other always dangling helplessly towards a homeland receding ever further away. Their children—my generation and younger—will grow up knowing Tibet only through their increasingly blurred and rose-tinted memories. One by one, they will pass away and our own children will not even have that living link to our past. We will leave Darjeeling and start new lives and families in faraway places. Darjeeling itself will change and undergo political turmoil and transformation. It will cease to be the halcyon place of my childhood memories. But I will always remember how, for a short period in the early 1960s, when our connection with Tibet was still fresh, when our elders were optimistic and filled with single-minded determination to reclaim our homeland, we celebrated Losar with total commitment and joyous abandon.