Photo: Lha
I was born in Lhasa, the capital city of Tibet. I came here to India in the year 1995 when I was 8 years old with my younger sister who was 6 years old at the time. Since then I have been staying in India. I did my schooling at Upper Tibetan Childrens Village School. It was on one cold morning in the month of January in 2005 when I was in class 10, I got a call from my home in Tibet it was my father on the other end, he asked me do I want to come back to Tibet for a vacation. My immediate reply was yes, then he explained to me everything about the traveling and documents and we set to leave right after the exam in March.
I was going back to Tibet after 10 years with a very vivid memory of my early childhood. My younger sister and I start our journey from India through Nepal, and then we cross the border at Dramo. The air is fresh and freezing with beautiful landscape, snowcapped mountains and vast grassland, beautiful prayer flags floating freely in the air gives me the real feeling of heaven on earth. As we go deeper and deeper the more and more the truth reveals itself with poor underdeveloped villages, the people looking tired and worn out with the day’s hard work, the children wandering on the street with their torn and dusty clothes seizing every opportunity to beg money from travelers. The frequent security check posts with stone face Chinese armies.
We reached Lhasa around 3 o’clock in the morning and my parents were waiting for me at home. I was left speechless and numb at the first sight of them and there were tears falling from my eyes but I don’t know the reason. I had a very nice time in Lhasa with my family and all our other relatives, beside a constant fear and uneasy feeling that grows within me, the feeling like that of a convict who is being constantly watched like those in Hollywood movies. I always felt uncomfortable to go around in the city alone, and was always afraid to take random pictures. It happened many times that a man in casual dress came to me and asked for my ID and passport in the middle of street. The police even called me to the police station to interrogate me, asking the same questions again and again, that made me feel like a prisoner in my own home. I spent almost a month in Tibet with my family visiting holy pilgrimages with a mixture of happiness and fear.
If I stay in Tibet I would have to learn Chinese to get a job as a tourist guide in a private tour company, on an irregular pay basis. There is nowhere that I will get a decent job as I have come from India, that’s what my parents told me. There was a lot of constraint, such as no internet access, no freedom of speech: life in Tibet is like hidden from the world of knowledge and wisdom with a delusion of physical and material comfort. There is zero chance that I can have a good life in Tibet without believing the ideology of communism and following the interests of the Chinese authorities. So I have decided to return to India again, to leave my family for the second time. I made my return journey alone on the same route passing through all those check posts again. It was hot in Delhi in mid-May and I was totally exhausted from my long, melancholy journey. When the bus drove up the hills of Dharamsala early in the morning, there was a strange feeling of happiness and relief. The familiar smell of the cool breeze that had blown through the woods really makes me feel like I am back home.
You may say that it I feel at home in Dharamshala because I have been staying here for a long time but I think this is what it feels like to be staying in a free country, this is the joy of freedom where no one follows you on the street, where no one ask for your passport after every ten steps. I got down from the bus, looked down through the beautiful Kangra valley and told myself “my land is much better than this place, much more beautiful; the air is much fresher and the people are more peaceful, if only we had the freedom” and there grows a deep longing to return back to a free Tibet, to a peaceful Tibet.
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