GUEST COLUMN

Ka, Kha, Ga in the Hill and ABC in the School
By: Buchung D. Sonam

BIt was my grandfather – the abbot of the local monastery in yesterday’s Tibet, and a shepherd in occupied Tibet – who, while looking after the flock of sheep and goats taught me to read Tibetan. Up in the hills and away from the eyes of local communists, he used charcoal on large boulders to write Ka, Kha, Ga …. Those secret lessons under the eternal blue sky were my first introduction into the mesmerizing world of ‘letters.’ During the early 1980s when there was a slight relaxation in Chinese policy over Tibet a few books such as the epics of King Gesar became available. Since I was the only child in the village who knew how to read, the elders called me to recite Gesar epics while they sewed the torn saddles of the commune’s horses and donkeys. Looking back into the fractured mirror of my life, I can say that this was my first literary enterprise.

It was sometime in 1972, when the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) was at its peak, that I was born. The labour took place in a cow barn as was very common in Tibet. When the whole of Tibet was shrouded in the madness of the Cultural Revolution, I was cocooned in a sheep skin bag. I was not destined to see ancient monasteries that disappeared during the mindless anarchy of Mao’s revolution. However, I had a better future in stored. Some day I would go to another country where I wouldn’t have my head hammered down if I sticks it above others.

My village at the time of my birth was a ghostly place. Stripped of her age-old buildings and monastery it resembled a bombed out village at the end of WW II. Despise for the four old (Old thought, old habit, old culture, old custom) initiated by Mao had taken its toll. The Red Guards demolished everything that was old except the old bridge over Yarlung Tsangpo (which eventually becomes Brahmaputra River), which they needed. Yarlung Tsangpo runs a couple meters from house and as kids my brothers and I used to swim and catch fishes. Once our grandfather found out that we caught fishes, and he reprimanded us severely. The famous Tibetan yogi, social reformer and mystic Thangthong Gyalpo (1361–1485 AD) built this bridge. He passed away at the age of 125 and his remain was preserved in his meditation room. At the height of the Cultural Revolution the Red Guards ordered my grandfather and four other monks to throw conserved into the river. The famous Stupa of Many Door was turned into a skinny skeletal. By the time I was big enough to remember there was a big red clay board in front of it with a slogan in Tibetan and Chinese “LONG LIVE CHAIRMAN MAO! LONG LIVE THE CHINESE COMMUNISM!”

In exile, I was sent to a new school at Lower Dharamshala in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. There was no clean drinking water and food was cooked with water from the nearby river. Bad water, doctors always say, causes bad stomach. More than half the students had prolonged chronic dysentery. I did three months of intense running to the toilet. My pants wouldn’t stay on. I had to use a shoe string to tie it around my waist. But I never lose sight of books.

I spent very little time on the playground which was little more than a battlefield. Balls bounced crazy. Only during the weekends I played football matches which often stopped in the middle because either the ball deflated or some one had a broken leg. There were more stones on the playground than potatoes we had.

The school opened many of my mind eyes that would otherwise have remained closed. During winter holidays, I and six other boys were the sole occupants of the huge school campus. Everyone else left for holidays. Empty rooms stared at us. We dragged ourselves through the cold days with frugal meals. However, for me books by Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Charles Dickens, Robert L. Stevenson and Mario Puzo sustained me through those hungry days in the deserted hostel room. At times my wearied mind became one with Crusoe’s trails and tribulations in his god forsaken island and at other times the money, riches and the power of Don Corleone drove me further into my despicable state. When the school reopened, the rest of students came back well oiled. I, in the process, became stronger. Loneliness, hunger and the books transformed me. I left my old self in the backyard of the cold freezing winter and began to walk the new road of dream and hope.

If I watch my life’s colour through a cracked prism, the ray that shines most belongs to the school. No matter how penniless you were and how uninspiring the teachers were, the school was a pleasant patch of meadow in the troubled landscape of exiled existence.

In my eighth grade English notebook I found following lines by David Allen dutifully copied from somewhere. The handwriting is no longer mine.
A little girl asks “Why must Johnny be a soldier boy?
How do all the wars begin?” People from different faiths, Many different creed and skin,
Over questions of religion, dear, every war begins!” Said mother of the little girl, knitting by the fireside.
The rickety desk on which I sat many years had long been broken down and dumped off. But the classroom still stands. Is the girl or a boy who sits in my corner still read story books hidden inside his/her textbook, while the teacher carries on his business? The answer, as Dylan sang, is blowing in the wind