On March 17th 1959 the fourteenth Dalai Lama, fearing incarceration by the Chinese, fled his native Tibet. Three weeks later, after a gruelling journey over some of the highest mountain passes in the world, he was welcomed at the Indian border. To this day he has lived in exile, with thousands of other Tibetan refugees, at Dharamsala, near the Tibetan border. Amongst them is his sister, Jetsun Pema. She calls her book Tibet: My Story, but it is much more than an autobiography: it is also a testament revealing the plight of Tibetan refugees scattered across the world.
There are fifty-six Tibetan colonies in India alone, and Jetsun tells their story with simple but powerful honesty. Throughout the book, her great sadness at what China has done to Tibet can be felt. Yet her Buddhist beliefs are so deeply rooted that one never senses hate; if anything, she pities the Chinese.
Jetsun was born in 1940, five years after her brother. She says that her birth was gifted with good Karma: not only was she the sister of the Dalai Lama, but she had been born in the shadow of the Potala, the great palace that overlooks Lhasa. After her brother's recognition the family moved from a small peasant village in the north-east of Tibet, to a sixty-roomed house in Lhasa. For the first nine years of her life she led a privileged existence: she had beautiful gardens to play in, fine clothes, servants, even, on the roof of the world, Pears soap and English biscuits. She recalls Heinrich Harrer (author of Seven Years in Tibet) teaching Tibetans to ski. But in 1949 all this was to change. Her sister, already married, fell seriously ill and had to be taken to India for treatment. A worried mother accompanied her sick daughter and took the young Jetsun with her.
At home, troubles were brewing: China had begun massing troops along the Tibetan border. Jetsun's mother, worried about bringing her daughter back to a land under threat of invasion, thought it best to wait until things settled down. So Jetsun was boarded in one of the many missionary schools. This, of course, was meant to be for a short period, but China invaded and she was not to return to Tibet for another three decades.
She spent the next ten years of her life being educated by Irish nuns, first in Kalimpong and later at the Loreto convent in Darjeeling. The nuns spoke no Tibetan, so all classes were in English. (One wonders if Jetsun speaks English with a touch of an Irish brogue.) When she tells the story of her brother's flight from Lhasa, she recalls that it was on St Patrick's Day. She also talks of the Easter holidays, and her schooldays will remind many Irish readers of theirs. The nuns, she says, "were very strict. Every day we went to mass and in the evening we said our prayers." Like all children she was interested in the stories from the Bible:
"For a Buddhist, all faiths share the same essential belief: you must be good, and not lie, steal or kill. I was very interested to read the stories in the Bible about Moses, Isaac, Mary and, of course, Jesus. But our religious education remained very rigid. We learnt to recite prayers such as `Our Father' and `Hail Mary', as well as psalms and songs." Pema is kind enough to say that most of the nuns were very sympathetic to her Buddhism. However, some of the sisters (particularly, a certain Sister Antoinette) "showed a highly developed sense of missionary zeal", and some of the things she said bothered her, for example, that only Catholics would go to heaven, "with everyone else being burnt in hell". This would have offended not only Jetsun, but most of the girls in the convent, as 80 per cent of them were Buddhists or Hindus.
Jetsun does say that even when confronted by strong missionary conviction, such as that of Sister Antoinette, her Buddhist roots were sound, and her faith only increased. "In fact, my spirituality developed under the influence of the nuns." As Sister Antoinette might say, God moves in mysterious ways. After Darjeeling Jetsun went to Europe to a convent in La Pelouse, Switzerland. Here she found the nuns (whose classes were all in French) to be more liberal than their Irish counterparts. They regularly showed films. However, they were not that liberal: "as soon as somebody was going to be kissed on the screen; a nun placed her hand over the projector." My own memory of those clicketty old projectors is that, at those romantic moments, we boys wanted the Brother to place his hand over the lens.
In March 1964 Jetsun returned to Dharamsala. Strangely enough, after all the years she spent in convents, it is only at this point in the book that one feels she is entering a spiritual institution. For it was in Dharamsala that her true life's journey began. Pema has dedicated her life to helping Tibetan refugees, firstly by assisting her sister in the enormous task of feeding, housing and educating the more than 800 orphans in Dharamsala, and later in her different role as sister of the Dalai Lama.
With the taking up of these tasks she, and the book, deliberately change. Jetsun's story fades. For instance, we hear that she marries, but we next hear of her husband fifteen years later, when he was killed in a car crash. The "autobiography" now focuses on the plight of the Tibetan refugees, women and children being her particular care. Of herself she says, "I attach major importance to universal notions of truth, justice, compassion and goodness; I am therefore extremely wary of my ego, which I do not impose on anyone." Throughout these chapters there are many sad stories; saddest of all, her return to Tibet after thirty years as part of a fact-finding mission.
Jetsun Pema's story is an unfinished tale. She is aware that her "ancestors have left us what is probably the richest collection of religious literature in the world. On the other hand, writings on the role of women in the evolution of Tibet over the last 2,000 years are very few." So hers is an important voice, a woman's voice planting, in her own words, "seeds of the future".
Tony Curtis's new collection of poems, Three Songs of Home, to be published next month, is set in Tibet