What We Talk About When We Drink With Tibetans

The first matter in Dharamsala was to confront Indian beer. We chose McLlos pubhardly an ideal Indian venue, the decor of the place being clearly inspired by TGI Fridays, but authenticity matters little to the travel-weary and unshowered. Besides, only two places in McLeod Ganj serve alcohol. McLlos is a three-story monster overlooking the town square, serving up expensive curries and paneer pizzas, and offering a wide selection of Himachal Pradeshs finest brews. Over the entrance hangs a photo of Pierce Brosnan posing with the wait staff, an oddly reassuring sight, though its a stretch to imagine Pierce spending a languid evening pounding back bottles of Thunderbolt Lager. We opt instead for Godfather, and it tastes like fermented hell. Some stylish Tibetans sit down at our table. The Tibetan youth are quite the party animals, it turns out, and lead a cosmopolitan life as far as North Indian hill stations go. Oblivious to the limitations of their surroundings, they live as though McLeod Ganj were NYC. They pile onto noisy motorbikes (often blaring dance music through speakers under the seat), speak English capably, abuse the Indian waitstaff in Hindi, stay out all night with tourists, chat up girls, drink their faces off, dress as sharply as anyone. Their calm, peaceful outward mien, their sharp eyes and Buddhist smiles, seem to melt away under the acid-bath of Indian ale. Bad booze, the great equalizer. One of the Tibetans, Sangye (which means Buddha in Tibetan, I believe), has just returned to Dharamsala after two years spent abroad in Austria, and couldnt be happier about it. He looks around the room excitedly, almost unable to believe hes home. I practically have to strap him to his chair. I love this bar! I love Dharamsala! I love it! I love it! This is the best bar in the world! Jamyang, another Tibetan, buys me a Thunderbolt. Rotten. I notice that the quality of Indian beer varies by the bottle, owing to the complete lack of quality control. Even the shape and colour of the bottles themselves are subject to the laws of chance. Youre as likely to get a green or brown bottle as a clear one, which causes me to consider what other random variables are at work in the breweries of Himachal Pradesh. We drank deeply, we drank hard. We drank with a professional cricket team, and we drank with Austrian hippies and American expats. So swept up in the moment we were, that we neglected to note the closing time of the front gate of our hotel: midnight. It was now well past, and we were locked out. I climbed the gate, as the monkeys do, but it was impossible to reach my room from the balcony. So Sangye brought us back to his place, escorted by packs of yammering street dogs vying for our loyalty, and we all slept on the hard floor of his tiny apartment, underneath posters of Tibetan pop stars and Lenny Kravitz. It was there that Sangye drunkenly, but seriously, gifted me with his personal theology: The main purpose of Buddhism, and of every religion, is to loosen the bowels. Religion allows you to shit freely. Think about it. I had never conceived of religious worship in gastric terms, but I had to admit it warranted further study. The next day, Jamyang took me to his familys cafe on Bhagsu Rd for some Tibetan thentuk (noodle soup). I met a Dutch couple who had taken a six-month leave from their jobs to teach English and study Buddhism at the relevant local institutes here in McLeod. They ran an English conversation class at a local school at the base of the hill, and asked me if I might like to give it a try some time. An hour a day was all they needed, and no qualifications necessary. Sure, why not, I said. I showed up at the school that evening at 5:30 PM, where I was matched with a group of eight students, Tibetan refugees, some newly-arrived, some longtime residents of McLeod Ganj. A few were monks or nuns, and all ages were represented. I sat at the center of a semi-circle and went around the room, trying my best to spread the conversation around equally. A few were better in English than others, and helped those who were having trouble. The monk to my right, in particular, understood almost nothing and got constant verbal cues from the well-dressed girl on my left, whose English was almost fluent. I wondered why she bothered with conversation classes, as she spent most of the class helping the others. But the conversation classes were also a great social institution of the town, and they seemed to be full of Tibetan twentysomethings who were presumably single. I left it at that. I asked the students about their life history, where in Tibet they were from, and how long theyd been in India. A couple of them were born in Dharamsala, others had fled Tibet in childhood. Two of them fled later in life, because theyd been in jail in Tibet for political reasons, distributing leaflets or joining in rowdy protests. The oldest guy in the group, a leather-jacketed man of 38 years, had spent twelve of those years in the slammer. They told me this with a shrug, as if it meant nothing to them, like it was just a part of the Tibetan coming-of-age. The story of the Tibetan exile is a familiar and sad one, and every visitor to Dharamsala hears it, for it is in fact the story of many of the towns residents. Fleeing the oppression and brutality of the Peoples Republic of Chinas military presence in Tibet, the exile makes his way to Lhasa, leaving his family behind, probably for good. From there, they hire a kind of rogue sherpa who takes them on a punishing month-long trek over the Himalayas, through deep forest and under the cover of night so as to avoid snipers. They eat little (one guy told me he ate nothing but boiled grass), sleep barely a wink, suffer severe frostbite and snow blindness and often death, walking tirelessly towards the Nepalese border, where they are received by monks and kept in Kathmandu until they regain their health. From there, they are taken to Dharamsala to meet His Holiness, and brought into a monastery if they so desire, and their life as a refugee begins. Things are much better here, the students insist. They rarely speak of China. Its in the past. Their indifference amazes me. Tibet was once the great terror of Central Asia, the empire of the steppes. There is little of the conqueror in these Tibetans. They seemed to have moved past their own history. Sure, there are political rallies and uprisings in Lhasa, for which the Dalai Lama is typically blamed, but in general they have turn the other cheek (in the direction of the West, as it were). No Tibetan that I met spoke ill about the Chinese as a people, only as a government, and I never once heard a warlike word. The easy answer is that Buddhism played a role in their pacifism, but Buddhism was introduced to Tibet in the 6th century; I doubt that it took fourteen additional centuries to finally settle in. I dont know. I kept going with the conversation classes, but I found a monk to tutor one-on-one instead. Next post is about him. (A note on the publishing schedule of this blog: I realize Im way behind here, but there are lots more posts in the pipeline. Right now Im in a country with little to no Internet access, much of it highly restricted [if I tell you it's in Southeast Asia, I'm sure you can guess the country]. But I am not dead, not even slightly. And this blog will rise from the ashes and terrorize the world anew, but only after Ive had a proper week in a suitably cool place [did I mention it's hot in this part of the world?]. So Ill see you then.)