Dreams, demands, Dharamsala: Notes on when a place has purpose.

“Dharamsala…can seem very much like a community founded on longing, on homesickness and restlessness and dreams.”

– Pico Iyer, The Open Road 

The weather turned Saturday night.

Just after we’d switched the light off, a gust of wind blew so strong and fierce that Kim and I immediately sat up in our beds and asked each other, “What is that?”

It sounded unnatural, metallic even, as though something were being dragged down the street, but the bunch of wires hanging outside our window, now swaying wildly like a hammock caught in a cyclone, said differently. It hadn’t died down by the morning, but we ventured out anyways, my new yak wool shawl pulled tight around my shoulders; as tempted as we were to stay inside, this was no ordinary Sunday morning in Dharamsala.

No matter how spontaneous our trip might have been, as fate would have it we just happened to be in town on March 10th, otherwise known as Tibetan Uprising Day. This year, it marked the 54th anniversary of the rebellion in Lhasa, when thousands of Tibetans revolted against Chinese invaders and the Dalai Lama himself was forced to flee to India.

To commemorate these history-altering events, there was to be a ceremony on Sunday morning at the Dalai Lama’s temple complex – a ceremony we knew we couldn’t miss.

And as the morning unfolded – with hundreds of schoolchildren filling the temple, the Tibetan national anthem ringing out, and a sea of red, blue, gold and white flags rippling across the complex – I actually found myself grateful for the wind.

Grateful that the flags – banned from being flown in their own homeland – could wave here in Dharamsala all the stronger.

* * *

When you make a deliberate choice to go somewhere – not because it’s on your way, but precisely because it couldn’t be further out of your way – you sometimes arrive looking for validation, for reassurance that your trip was indeed worth it.

I spent two days debating the decision to come to Dharamsala. Although my plans were set to go straight from Goa to Tamil Nadu, via an easy pair of train journeys I’d already booked, in the end I went with the less sensible option: to go nearly as far north as possible, only to turn right back around and head south again.

Why? Because as I walked the palm-lined streets of Colomb Bay one afternoon last month, I said to myself – it doesn’t matter. You will go to Dharamsala and there will be a moment that you could not have imagined missing, a moment when you say, this was why I came; or you will stay in Goa and there will be an equally significant moment, perhaps a breakthrough in your book, when you say, this is why I stayed.

So it was that I hopped on a train to Delhi, where I met up with Kim and Wendy and caught the midnight Andaman Express to a tiny town in the Punjab called Chakki Bank, where we then booked a taxi and arrived in Dharamsala three or so hours later. And over the course of that afternoon and evening, after our driver Mr. Singh deposited us in the main square and we began to explore our new home for the weekend, I did indeed feel an overwhelming sense of I’m-glad-I-came.

But it was an epiphany of epiphanies, an ever-growing revelation – not some singular moment to which I could point and say, this is why I came.

When we sat down at a café and ordered yet another plate of momos and homemade thenthuk noodles and gushed about the place, saying how much we loved it here, here being the café but really Dharamsala as a whole – we loved the mountains, the smell of pines, the cold, the fact that we weren’t hot, the Buddhist monks bent over their iPads, the different food and different air.

When we visited the temple for the first time on Saturday and spun prayer wheels that were cold to the touch and met a man named Ven. Bagdro, a monk and former political prisoner who told us about escaping Tibet in 1991 and walking for three months through the Himalaya, about all the letters he’s sent to world leaders since then and all the answers they haven’t given him.

When we walked the Kora, a ceremonial mile-long path that circles the hill on which the temple sits, where mani stones have been carved with the six-syllable prayer, Om mani padme hum, and set out in clusters, where prayer flags of every size and shape flutter in the wind, where old and wizened men say hello, prayer beads in their hands, where the path itself is a prayer.

But it was Wendy who nailed what it was about Dharamsala. “This place has a purpose,” she said on our first night, as we walked off our momos and noodles beneath a dark and starry sky.

“If Tibet was given its freedom, what would happen to Dharamsala?” she asked, and neither Kim nor I had an answer.

“What hits you most about this highly improvised, unorthodox assemblage of houses and hopes is that it seems to stand for so much else.” 

– Pico Iyer

* * *

The weather turned Saturday night, but by the time the ceremony had finished on Sunday morning, by the time the entire complex began to form together for a march of protest, the sun was out, so strong and fierce it was hard to remember why exactly I’d brought along my new yak wool shawl in the first place.

After two hours of shivering and sitting in the cold, to suddenly be on our feet, to be racing downhill in one great heaving mass of humanity was thrilling. My flip-flops broke within minutes (yes, the very same pair that broke last month and I’d tried to fix with a five-rupee tube of super glue), but I merely shoved them in my backpack and carried on.

I didn’t have time to worry about the hazards of going barefoot in India right then, for something much more important suddenly occurred to me – I was back in my element.

Because here’s the thing: I’ve always loved protests.

As I ran up and down the march, my heart racing as much from the Tibetans’ cries for freedom as from the speed of our pace, I realized how much I’ve always been drawn to protests and rallies, how much I’ve always loved to document these demonstrations that fill the air with the dreams and demands of a group of people.

There was that time in Wellington when Prince William arrived to open the new Supreme Court building. But what I found even more fascinating than the Prince himself were the various protestors who’d gathered – those holding up placards in support of the monarchy, and the groups of Republicans (i.e. those in favor of New Zealand becoming an independent republic) who were very much against it.

There was that time in London when the government announced it was lifting the cap on university fees and the students took to the streets to show how little impressed they were. Even though they were protesting a system that is very much in place in my own home country, I couldn’t help chanting along with them as they waved their hot pink signs in the air and yelled, “No ifs! No buts! No education cuts!”

And now I can say there was that time in Dharamsala when a people cut off from their country and, in many cases their families, marched for two hours in protest, demanding action, dreaming of home. I can say I walked beside them, caught up in the crowds and chaos, the chants and cheers, the cries for change and the challenge to the way things are. I can remember how grateful I felt, to have a home I can go home to, a family I can call at anytime, and a flag I can fly without fear.

I whispered their chants along with them, in protest and in prayer. This is why you came, I said to myself, and I knew without a doubt that it was true.

What we want? // We want freedom!

Long! Live! // The Dalai Lama!

China China China! // Out! Out! Out!