Escape from the Land of Snows (27 page)

His father received a sentence of twenty years in prison. The elderly man was taken to a small room in Upper Khamba and left there until he could be transported to the prison. Alone, unable to bear the shame, he drew out a long knife he’d hidden in his
chuba
. With it he sliced off his testicles.

“I couldn’t think,” Norbu remembers. “I felt terribly depressed.” The poor villagers came and took the rest of his possessions, his food and silver cups, even stealing his
chubas
. They stopped to complain to Norbu that the coats were made of inferior wool. Norbu began to hate his fellow Tibetans.

He watched them walk away from his house, numbed by the image of his father alone with a knife. “Something had happened to me,” he says. He didn’t regret losing the furs and the
chubas
. He didn’t seem to have any feelings left at all. But he did have an urge to leave Tibet. One thought dominated his mind: “I thought it would be enough if I could see His Holiness the Dalai Lama even once.” He started off for nearby Bhutan with his two wives, whom he’d never really been happy with. But they were all he had left.

As Lhasa fell, Soepa, the official who’d returned to the Norbulingka out of a nagging sense of duty, was a prisoner of the PLA. He lay in a huge prayer hall called the Offering Temple, which had been made into a makeshift hospital, or at least a storehouse for the injured and dying: “The floor was a puddle of blood, and the room was filled with stench and groaning.” Freezing now, dressed only in his pants and a thin shirt, Soepa shivered as night came on. As the
temperature dropped, he noticed lightly wounded Tibetans watching the critical patients, waiting for the moment of death so they could pull the clothes off the fresh corpse. Lying next to Soepa was an old man, a Khampa with white hair, badly wounded in the fight. He was breathing heavily, struggling for air. The desire for life had returned to Soepa, and when the man’s breath got shallower and shallower and it appeared he was near death, Soepa did a shameful thing: he pulled off the heavy cloak the man was wearing. He was about to wrap it around himself when he noticed it was drenched in blood. He put it on anyway.

The next afternoon, Chinese military doctors arrived. The bone in Soepa’s injured leg was shattered, and he was loaded onto a jeep for the ride to a hospital. The road was filled with ruts and bumps, and Soepa writhed in pain as the jeep smashed its way along. When he got to the hospital, he was left on the floor of a bare room (there was no bed). An armed PLA soldier was stationed at his door. Soepa lay there all night in a thin white hospital dress, covered by a blanket. The cement wall was pockmarked with bullet holes from rounds that had come in through the windows during the uprising. The next morning, a Chinese doctor came in to treat his leg, which he did while jabbing his finger at the bullet holes and telling Soepa that the Han had come to Tibet to help the natives and this is what they’d gotten in return. The doctor was so rough that during the examination, he reached down and pulled a piece of flesh from the wound and held it in his fingers. Soepa instantly passed out.

hile Tibet was being turned upside down, the Dalai Lama raced toward the Indian border, certain he would encounter a Chinese patrol at every turn in the path. As the fugitives got closer to the dividing line, they began to descend from the Tibetan highlands to the tropical landscapes of northeast India. The air turned from bitingly cold to almost sultry. It started to rain on the exhausted travelers, which at first was a relief but soon bred colds and illness in the escapees. On the 30th, they reached the village of Mangmang, a tiny outpost that represented the last
Tibetan settlement before India. It was a place that seemed firmly ensconced in the thirteenth century. “
There were very few houses available,” remembers Choegyal. “Those that we did find all had stables underneath and the living quarters above, with wood planks for floors. It was how people in Europe lived centuries before, and they were filled with bad odors.”

The Dalai Lama was forced to sleep in a tent. Rain lashed the tarpaulin. As with so many of the thousands of Tibetans who were flowing in a huge exodus behind him, the warm air seemed to attack his constitution. The next morning, he awoke feverish and weak. “My stomach’s not well,” he told his younger brother, then lay back down, unable to travel. On the cusp of freedom, His Holiness had caught dysentery. “I watched him grow sicker and sicker,” Choegyal recalls. Dysentery is usually caused by a
Shigella
bacillus or an amoeba,
Entamoeba histolytica
, which most often enters the body through polluted water or rotten food. The illness is a familiar one in Tibet, and often fatal: it is the leading cause of infant mortality in the nation’s rural villages and hamlets. Traveling through some of the most isolated and poorest parts of his country, the Dalai Lama had caught one of his people’s biggest killers. And there was no medicine to treat him.

His Holiness lay in a high fever all that day, thirteen days into his escape. His handlers moved him to a nearby house, where he tossed and turned before finally falling asleep. It would have been ideal to keep His Holiness resting and drinking fluids, the only treatment his ministers could offer him, but soon word arrived that the Chinese were approaching the nearby town of Tsona, to the rear of the escape party. The next morning, the Dalai Lama was taken from his bed and put on a black
dzo
, a hybrid of a yak and a male cow. He leaned forward in the saddle, “
in a daze of sickness and weariness and unhappiness deeper than I can express.”

As they approached India, he began to say good-bye to the Khampas who had guarded him on his escape, many of whom were now turning back to fight the Chinese. Tears stung his eyes as he blessed the men. “
That was a powerful moment for me in my life,” His Holiness said, “as I watched those Khampa horsemen who had saved me and were the patriots of my country.” He pulled the reins on the
dzo
and began trudging toward the border, knowing he would never see the Khampas again. “I turned my back to Tibet and looked toward India. I looked around me and I didn’t have a friend in the world.”

Without his protectors, the Dalai Lama was left with some elderly ministers and tutors, his family, and a skeleton crew of guards. He was dressed in clothes that stank from the journey, and he was sick with a poor man’s disease. The young incarnate had truly been stripped bare.

The trails dropped down toward India, crossing into forests lined with burbling streams. The escapees began to relax. Whatever it did, the PLA wouldn’t cross the Indian border. And the weather was languorous compared with what they’d faced. “
We didn’t have to pull on the reins, just lean back in the saddle,” remembers Choegyal. “Some of our guys, they got so relaxed, they fell asleep and fell off the horse.”

As he traveled the last few miles in Tibet, the Dalai Lama, sick and depressed, listened to a small battery-operated radio. He heard a report on All-India Radio that he’d fallen from his horse and been seriously injured. It was the latest rumor that had emanated out of the press corps. The
Times
of London had led with the story on the morning of March 30: “The 24-year-old Dalai Lama has been seriously injured while making a fantastic day-and-night trek to safety across the perilous mountain passes of Tibet,” read the front-page story filed by a Kalimpong correspondent. “He slipped while
making a detour on a lonely 19,000-ft.-high footpath at dusk.” The story went on to report that His Holiness had suffered “multiple fractures” and was being carried on a “makeshift stretcher or hidden in mountain caves by five members of his Cabinet escaping with him.” The Dalai Lama smiled.

His Holiness knew he had to compose himself for his emergence into the world. He had to arrive at a way of expressing who he was and what his philosophy was toward the Chinese. He’d left Lhasa still believing that cooperation with Peking was possible, that their humanity, which he’d been so relieved to discover on that first meeting with the Chinese general, overrode all other considerations. But he’d left that naïveté on the trail. The Chinese had attacked and killed thousands of his countrymen. The events of the past two weeks had forced him to confront evil in the world, really for the first time.

Watching him, the thirteen-year-old Choegyal understood that his brother was facing a life he knew nothing about. “
It was a reality check for him,” his brother acknowledges. “Before, no matter how practical he wanted to be, the atmosphere he grew up in as the Dalai Lama was not in any way realistic. Now he had a taste of real life.” Narkyid, the Norbulingka official, concurs. “
He got experience of how things are. He thought people are so good, but what they are saying and what they are doing are not the same thing. Now he saw the truth.” The Dalai Lama knew that the uprising and escape had washed away any lingering fantasies of his boyhood. “
You discover a cynical brutality, the crushing use of force, your own weakness.” With his ministers scattered, his palace occupied, his place in the world gone, the struts of his former life were knocked away.

At around 4:00 p.m. on the last day of March, the Dalai Lama and his party emerged into a small clearing where a group
of six Indian guards—Gurkhas in pebbled leather boots and jungle hats—waited at attention, silent against the guttural monkey calls and the singing of birds that emerged from the jungle behind them. As the Dalai Lama came up to them on the awkward
dzo
, the Gurkhas presented arms crisply and their commander advanced toward His Holiness, a
kata
in his hands. The Dalai Lama climbed down, took the scarf with a small bow of his head, then began to walk, followed by his ministers. He was in India now.

The Dalai Lama was unaware that thousands of Tibetans were now following in his tracks and that he would soon head a large exile community inside India. But he did know that the court of Lhasa had in effect disintegrated, that a way of life was gone, perhaps forever. And he didn’t mourn all of it. He’d been happy in India before, during a 1956 visit to pay tribute to Gandhi, and he knew that the stifling and often vicious politics of Tibet, the rituals that had kept him from expressing himself as a simple and compassionate monk, could now be remade. As painful as the fall of Lhasa was, it had sprung him from the gilded cage of the Potala.

“His Holiness was very happy to be free,” says Choegyal. “Now he could really say what was in his heart.”

The escape had been a kind of dream fulfillment for Choegyal. He’d played soldier, he’d mixed with the Khampas as a kind of mascot, if not an equal. But as they passed by trails lined with Tibetan peasants standing and weeping, he couldn’t ignore the tragic aspect of what was happening. “The villagers were welcoming, but there was so much sadness in their faces.” And the images of those he’d left behind in the Norbulingka had stayed with him and were paired with the stories of the violent deaths so many of the palace’s defenders had met. The escape had been the great event of his boyhood. But it had, in some ways, brought that boyhood to an end.

“
It forced me to grow up,” he reflects. “I think those two weeks had given me a crash course in life.” He’d lived out an adventure, but he was now rootless and unprotected by the layers of staff and minders who had watched over him from birth. In later years, he would mark a change in his character to those days on the trail. “The whole experience had a very transformative effect on me—it made me decisive, practical,” he explains. “And it taught me that anything can happen. The mind becomes more pliant, more flexible.” From being a pampered brother to His Holiness, he was now a penniless refugee. He took the warm clothes that he’d brought with him from Tibet and sold them, earning 15 silver coins. But instead of going out and spending the money on toys or ammunition for his Luger as he would have done just a few weeks earlier, he bought food. “I can still remember what I got: cream crackers, butter, and jam,” he says. “They were delicious.”

The race for the story of the escape, and to explain who the Dalai Lama was, only ratcheted up once word got out that His Holiness had crossed the border. His Holiness was safely in India, but he was still in the remote North East Frontier Agency, a huge border area that was off-limits to foreigners, especially journalists.