Oh hail...

Just as I finished my last post, the power went out in the Internet shop. I paid my 35 rupees (75 cents) for an hour's Internet time and stepped out onto Bhagsu Road to notice two things: the power was out everywhere, and the air temperature had dropped from 65 degrees to about 35 degrees. The sky was dark, and it was only about 1:30pm. There was a sudden sense of urgency in this otherwise slow paced town. Everyone was in a hurry. Motorcycles and scooters raced by, threading through the hasty foot traffic. It seemed everyone was in a hurry to do something. Then I heard a woman shout "Bring in the clothes before it rains!" and I remembered I was in the mountains.

I flashed on camping trips in the Sangre de Christo mountains in New Mexico and the daily afternoon showers there. Once my dad and I were stuck in a tent in the Latir wilderness playing gin rummy for about six hours. I quickened my pace down Buddha Temple Road as thunder rippled across the sky over the Kangra Valley below, seemingly at eye level. A couple cracks of lightning made me glad I had only about a hundred yards to go when the sky opened up. The hard rain did not hit until I stepped into my hotel lobby, just in the nick of time.

By the time I was in my room and settled in to study Tibetan consonants it began to hail, in small pellets at first, then in big marble sized stones that cracked agaisnt my third floor window. I looked down onto the street and it was empty, and the vendors had covered their cauliflowers, daikon, oranges, apples and kale with tarps. They were prepared.

I am typing this from another "cybercafe" closer to my hotel. The rain is over, the sun is shining, and this shop is operating on noisy gasoline-generator power. Generators can be heard from about every fifth building or so (in front of businesses that can afford them), and so I guess power outages are a way of life here.

The Tibetans I have spoken to so far do not say they love it here in Dharamsala. For some it is certainly better than what they faced at home in terms of freedom of expression, but this hilltop town is an odd kind of limbo for them. Some get so homesick that they go back to Tibet even with the risk of imprisonment and certainty of poverty.

I spoke to a man yesterday who was standing on an outcropping on the back side of town, looking at the 17,000 foot mountains that dominate the northern and eastern skylines. He was holding his 18 month old son. He said he was from Chamdo, where the Mekong River begins as ice-melt, and he told me his name is Nyimon, which means "sun", joking that he has his very own day, Sunday. I asked him his son's name and he said "Tenzin, after the Dalai Lama." I asked him why. He told me he escaped from Tibet in 1991 and came to Dharamsala where, like most escapees, he was greeted by the Dalai Lama. For a couple years Nyimon took a four hour bus ride every day to a free English class provided by the Tibetan goverment-in-exile. He hoped learning English would give him a chance at prosperity. He said it has not so far. He is stuck in Dharamsala without a passport, without official status, without job prospects (since most Indians do not want foreigners taking theirs), and without his extended family. "But I named my son after Tenzin Gyatso, the Dalai Lama, because at least he gives us a chance."

I asked Rinchen whether she is happy here, and she said that yes, sometimes she is, but on some days she is terribly homesick for Dege. She talks about Dege as if it were the most beautiful place on earth. The Yangtze River starts there, the mountains are beautiful and the valleys are green with farms and pastureland, she says. Her cousin Tashi Dolma told me I must come see it and stay with her after she returns there in a few months.

Rinchen divides her time between cooking in a restaurant and studying English, which she does fanatically, carrying a notebook with her everywhere.
In it are lists of words she has written down to increase her vocabulary, words like alert, loyal, association, requirement....and homesick.