Tenzin Tsundue, a Tibetan writer and activist presents vignettes of Tibetan experiences in India.

The story is told about the first Tibetans who came to Mumbai. They went to the top of a BEST double decker. The engine roared to life, and the bus began to move. The whole group of Tibetans poured down the stairs in ashen-faced panic. The conductor asked them what the problem was. They all stammered in unison: “There is no driver up there, and still the bus is moving.”

Some may tell it to show how simple we mountainfolk are, I say it to prove another trait: Tibetans are extra-cautious people. They have to be in a city like Mumbai.

Over the years, they have become a permanent seasonal feature, like mangoes in other months. If there are Tibetans squatting outside Mumbai
Central and CST with their rainbow piles of sweaters, you know that winter has come to a city which usually lives in only two seasons, monsoon and summer.

Some 200 Tibetans leave their different refugee camps and lug their sweaters on Mumbai’s pavements. This is a great city to make a living. After two months, like migratory birds, they return to their ‘homes’ to celebrate Losar, the Tibetan New Year which falls around February.

I first met the sweater people at a Tibetan protest rally organised at Azad Maidan. Since I was a fellow Tibetan and studying in college then,
I was asked by the elderly ones to handle the media. This fast paced, non-sleeping city gives no easy foothold to mountain people. Tibetan students in Mumbai never number more than six at a time.

It is believed that the first Tibetans came to Bombay in early 1950s, when their country was still independent. Two Tibetan families arrived here with some Chinese who had run away from the land of their ancestors after the 1949 communist revolution. We don’t know if they were on that bus together, but we do know that they were tied by a noodle. They were both in this business.

The partnership has endured even after those early friends became history. Some of Mumbai’s best restaurants still source their noodles from small Tibetan factories based here. About 30 youngsters work as cooks in “Chinese” restaurants. Kunga, 40, who has trained most of them, was asked by a journalist about this incongruity. He replied blandly, “Cooking is a skill. If you have it you can do Tibetan, Chinese or South Indian”.

Tibetans in Mumbai are no longer considered exotic mountain people.
They’ve come to be regarded as “chalta hai” as any regular Bambaiya.
The city demands this easygoing attitude to life. We learn, but it is a tough lesson.

As a student and later as an activist for a free Tibet, I garnered so much from this vivacious city. There were no snowy mountains to remind me of Tibet, but it trained me to be the fighter I became.

In this cosmopolitan city, it was such a joy to talk and laugh in Tibetan. On occasions like the birthday of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, all of us would gather for a good Tibetan feast. Then someone would break into a mountain song — it never seemed out of place with the background music of traffic sounds, and the counterpoint of a Bollywood hit blaring from the nearby jhopadpatti. We took our Tibetan visitors to Marine Drive to show them the wonder of the boundless sea, but if the new arrivals planned to stay longer, we took them instead to local trains during rush hours to hone their skills for living in this implacable city.

We are still called ‘Nepalis or ‘Chinese. That hurts more, because the whole problem of Tibet is a political one created by China’s occupation of our homeland. We’ve gone through half a century of displacement, just to keep our identity. I can put up a fight and explain to individuals. But when I hear street-side taunts of “Ching-Chong-Ping-pong”, I move on.

Sadly.

Once on a visit from Dharamshala, I was carrying a letter from a friend to his old mother. I couldn’t deliver it on the day of my arrival, and early next morning, I was informed that the lady had passed away in her sleep that night. She was 79. I kept assuring her that Tibet would soon be free and that we could all return home.

We are quickly losing our elder generations, and soon there will be no one left who has seen Tibet, who can tell us about life in Tibet. Till we return home, we have to keep passing on our stories and songs.

Tenzin Tsundue is a writer and activist for free Tibet

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