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DHARAMSALA
by Pico Iyer
One day, I chanced to run into Manuel Bauer, the photographer who was
compiling an extraordinary archive of the Dalai Lama by following him
around from dawn to dusk on most of his travels. As we repaired to a
nearby restaurant for lunch, he told me how he had become the first
photographer, anywhere, to chronicle the flight of modern Tibetans across
the Himalayas, to freedom, risking his life to bring back the story.
It was April when his small group left, he said, just he and a Tibetan
man and the man's daughter, only six years old. But already it was hideously
cold. Chinese soldiers were everywhere, some of them ready to shoot
simply because they were bored. Even on the brightest blue days, the
wind was so fierce that it blew snow into travelers' mouths, and the
snow entered their systems and melted inside their bodies, causing many
to die even in warm weather.
As a group of only three, he said, they moved quickly; they were able
to travel by day, because they were so inconspicuous, not only after
dark, as most refugees do, and they completed the trip in only sixteen
days. But still there was derangement.
"I lost my mind," the calm Swiss photographer said matter-of-factly
in the quiet, sunlit restaurant. "For two, three days, I was in
delirium. And in the delirium I was thinking, `This six year-old girl,
she can move so fast. Why doesn't she carry bags ? I have twenty kilos
of equipment and bags to carry.' I was aggressive with her because I
lost my mind."
When they crossed the Chinese border, he recalled, the trip grew only
more hazardous. Many Nepali officials send Tibetans back to captivity,
to satisfy the rulers in Beijing, though often they rob the Tibetans
first. Even if the refugees can get to Kathmandu, and the care of an
official from the U.N. High Commission for Refugees, their problems
are not over.
"Sometimes the U.N. van, even with a U.N. person there, is stopped.
And the Nepali police take everything! These refugees, they have come
out with only a carpet, one bag, and they take that, the Nepali police,
and send them back."
The same story known around the world, among boat people from Vietnam,
or Cubans, even Chinese, trying to steal into America; refugees, already
the most vulnerable people in the world, are perfect prey for pirates
and for corrupt officials.
"So you're safe only when you get to India ?"
"No. I'm sorry to say this" – he had guessed my Indian
heritage – "but the Indian people are not always honest.
Sometimes they attack these refugees. They know they are defenseless."
"So you're really only safe when you get to Dharamsala ?"
And here Manuel said nothing at all.
"When you got there, the man stayed with his daughter ?"
The photographer's eyes were now red. The father deposited his daughter
safely in the Tibetan Children's Village, he said, assured she had a
new life and home there, and then turned around and made the long, treacherous
trip back into Tibet, alone.
This passage is taken from a new book by Pico
Iyer, called The Open Road: The Global
Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama (Alfred A. Knopf; New York),
and out this spring. Iyer is a longtime resident of Japan and has been
contributing to KJ almost since its first issue. See KJ online
special profile: Pico Iyer
is Lost by Mark Mordue.
Copyright
held by the author
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