Blue Aerogrammes and The Stars That Guide Us

    I lived, while in collage, for a short time with a Tibetan family in Dharamsala, India as an exchange student. On the first day in India, before we were due to traveled North to meet our new families, the program leader Jerome pointed to the ancient city of New Delhi just outside the hotel doors and said, “O.K. Have fun today. Go get lost, and see if you can find your way back. That’s what you came here for, no?”
The children in Delhi squatting before a puddle to brush their teeth as air-conditioned tourist buses rolled by; the shrill call of the tea hawker passing open train windows chanting, “chi-graham, chi-graham, chee-i-graham,” steaming glasses of milk-sugar tea balanced on a silver tray that rested on his head; a family of four perched on the seat of a speeding scooter weaving through traffic that streams like the gold, and indigo, and wild madder-red threads of so many saris. These images go around and around in my head still all these years later.
    Dharamsala, the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile, is an old hill-station town allocated to the Tibetans by the Indian government. In that makeshift town, a home away from home for the Tibetans--even though most of them these days were born there--I had a home too with Sangay, and her two children Tenchoe and Ketsun.  There, in Sangay’s one-room home that she opened to me I woke every morning, for nearly two months, to offerings of juniper smoke on the altar. Walking three miles everyday from their home at the Tibetan Children's Village (T.C.V.) to the near-by village of Metlo-Gange I attended language classes and lectures at the monasteries, and hospital, and library.
    My first dinner in my Tibetan family’s home I was nearly silent. Tenchoe and Ketsun, 8 and 6 years old, chatted and laughed. Amala (Mother) spoke lightly, maybe answering questions, telling a story, maybe telling them when their Pala (father) would be home from his trip south to sell his sweaters. I couldn’t know for sure because I was folded in my envelope of English. I only knew they looked to me and questioned with gestures. I smiled at their statements, which my ears took in only as lyric-less music. I knew they were speaking of me only when Tenchoe and Ketsun laughed; Amala lightly slapped Ketsun's hand, looked at me with peripheral vision and smiled--a sliver moon on her full-moon face. At night I wrote in my journal while the family watched the news or Hindi musicals on TV, and sometimes I found myself quietly wiping tears away to release the sense of strangeness that welled up. At times, I questioned why I decided to come all this way. What did I expect to find?
    In language class we repeated phrases. We recited the Tibetan alphabet like a mantra. My Tibetan language skills were childish. Tenchoe and Ketsun and I were almost on the same linguistic level; they had a few words of English and I a few of Tibetan. My Amala was a 3rd grade teacher at T.C.V. She had functional use of English. I was desperate to say more than hello; no thank you, my stomach is full; how much does this cost; goodbye, I’m going to school. I wanted to understand more when Amala took me to tea in her colleague’s room at the school to watch the Olympics. I did understand when they told me the endangered panda was from Tibet, not China, as the Chinese teams passed by in the opening ceremonies. They talked between themselves and looked to the old pictures on the wall. They clicked their tongues, shook their heads, and told me again and again, “the panda is Tibet,” their eyes implored me to understand more.
    My understanding of Tibetan did come in time. I jumped from word to word in sentences like fording boulders in a rushing stream. Most of the meaning flowed over me. At breakfast I knew my brother and sister were talking about me when I heard the word Ingei (foreigner). I ate the fried bread with the red jam that tasted like no berry I could name and listened for the next word in the morning conversation to which I could spring. Ketsun pinched Tenchoe's arm with sticky fingers. He liked to be the star of the show and grab all the attention he could. His voice was raspy for a young boy. He was like a baby panda, playfully rough with his sister growling and hiding behind Amala who busied herself in the corner kitchen drawing the curtain that served as a wall to avoid playing referee.
    “You brothers?" Tenchoe asked me.
    “Yes. I two brothers. My brothers they are older. I am the baby.” I answer in simple English, so she could understand me. I crossed the room in three small steps, reached for my pack under the bed by the window, and took out pictures of my family in the U.S. My new siblings and I sat together on my bed, Tenchoe to my right, Ketsun leaning over my lap from the left. I reached over his shoulder to point: my mom, my brother, my brother, and my boyfriend. I told my new little brother and sister the names of my older brothers and mother at home. I told them their ages. I repeated each phrase for each person. I had so few words; I wanted to make the conversation last.
    I attended lectures as the weeks passed. His Holiness the Dalai Lama was on a trip in the U.S., so we were not able to meet with him. Instead we met with his sister, and she told us about her work as the director of education for the Tibetan community in exile. We talked to government officials, and painters, and we met with elders who taught us songs that translated longing into poetry, “my beautiful homeland is my mother’s face, like the shining moon, it goes round and round in my head . . .” In one of the lectures we met with three nuns who were 22 years-old and had just escaped Tibet by walking across the mountains, maybe the harshest range in the world, to freedom in India. They were only three years older then me but they had much more presence; their self-possession made them seem wiser. They were in prison for four years, guilty of holding up a Tibetan flag in the main temple square of Lhasa. In prison, the guards starved them, penetrated them with electric cattle prods, forbade them to speak, to read, to write. They did not renounce the Dalai Lama as they were ordered to do. They refused to give up their vows. They clung to the Buddhist teaching that says your enemy is your greatest teacher, a “precious treasure very difficult to find.”
    One afternoon on my walk home from a day of lectures in the village my feet turned before I even had time to decide which path to take. I paused and looked back, only for a second, to make sure of where I was going before returning to my trek obscured by my wandering mind and the path ahead, which I instantly realized had become familiar to my feet before my mind recognized it. The green of the ferns, nettles, and firs were as sharp as the white peaks of the Himalayas, which were still tremendous though so distant. Just on the other side was Tibet. As I approached the first tea stall near my house I saw my sister standing at the top of the steep hill above the rope ladder that I had to climb to reach the house. She was waving with both hands yelling, "Tashi-delek ingi ajala! (Hello foreign sister)."
    When I reached the top she pumped cold water from the communal pump for me while I washed my hands and face and soaked my sweaty head. I wrung out my hair, and she took my hand as we went in for dinner. After dinner, Amala and I squatted and washed the dishes with a bar of soap and our hands. I convinced her to let me help after many pleas.
    “Why,” she finally had asked after several refusals to let me help.
    “I like to help you. You are nice to me,” I said.
    She smiled and tilted her head back and forth, which I had come to learn means yes, not the opposite, in Tibetan body language. She soaped the dishes. I pumped water and rinsed.
    Later at the closing party for all us visiting students and our families we played a party game. Dawa, one of the Tibetan fathers, held a large cup of homemade chang (beer) out to me with one hand underneath it as a show of respect, and he sang a song to me. When he was done I took the cup and drank till the next song, which he’d begun, was completed. Amala rescued me as Dawa began to serenade me for what seemed like the fifth time in a row. 
    “Stop, Dawa. Not too much. You'll make my daughter sick," she said in Tibetan. I felt a flush of warmth set in. I understood every word of her sentence. She called me her daughter.
    The night before I left she told me in simple Tibetan me how she, and her pregnant mother, and father escaped from Tibet. Her mother died in childbirth with her brother shortly after they arrived in India. She has never been to Tibet since then. Her brother has never been since he was born.

    In the weeks that followed we students traveled to Tibet for four weeks. I felt haunted by the barren and beautiful terrain. I was anxious and restless, feeling unwell, with altitude sickness a lot the time. I thought of the Tibetans in Dharmsala and my family there often. So easily I had come to a place they could never go and it filled me with sorrow because I felt connected to that place the minute I landed there. I could only imagine how lost one would feel to never be able to go home again. We visited monasteries, and villages, the Ja-Khung Temple, and the Potala Palace. In Lhasa, the Chinese officials mandated us to the Holiday Inn but in other villages we camped on the rooftops of the monasteries we visited. I woke covered in a thin layer of frost, and happy, every morning. Mastiffs, and bulls, and village children throwing rocks, or begging for pictures of the Dalai Lama, and pens chased us through the days. We bathed once in a natural hot spring at a nunnery after hiking all day from a monastery up the valley. On one occasion the frigid and arid plateau rippled with wind-blown snow and sand waves reaching out to the end of sight in all directions from the bus in which we drove to our next destination. In that incarnate-nothingness unknown, but comforting, place I had the strangest feeling of being home seep into me.
    Traveling overland all over Tibet and finally over the Friendship Bridge into Nepal, where my journey for the time being would soon come to an end, the faces of the people and the places I had seen shone as bright as the stars under which I slept in the crisp air on the roof top of this worldly realm.


    Weeks later I returned to America. Soon afterward I graduated from college. In the years to follow when friends or acquaintances went to Dharamsala I sent gifts to my family there. We exchanged letters, Sangay and I, folding the shorthand translations of our lives into aerogramme envelopes: When I moved from place to place I wrote to tell my Amala, still at the T.C.V. in Dharamsala, Himachel Pradesh, India; still in exile. When I married my boyfriend I wrote to let her know. While the kids were growing big she wrote to tell me, and to thank me when I sent small things like the backpacks that they loved. They were hosting another student, she wrote, but I would always be their first ingi pomo (western daughter). Pala died suddenly. My own son was born. And then he died six and a half weeks later. He passed through my life like a shooting star dazzling me, I wrote, nearly taking my breath away with him. She was sorry to hear we lost our baby boy.
    We exchanged these delicate, blue aerogrammes not frequently, but consistently. In each other we had satellite homes and lives connected by a few lines on paper so thin it could be a palimpsest.
    One aerogramme I received connected me to my Amala in a way that I regretted to hear. She got the gifts I sent in care of Geshe who was my Lama in Portland and apologized for taking so long to answer my letter. "My Ketsun has passed away," she wrote, "we're filled with sadness and crying always. He was only sixteen and now gone from us forever.”

    I remembered him clearly, my heart falling like a stone in water, when I read those words. Death can seem like the enemy, but it also has the greatest power to teach us about connection, and communication, and opening our hearts to one another if we don’t abandon our selves in the shear pain of it. My far-away family had almost nothing except what matters most—kind, loving hearts and each other—and they shared everything unhesitatingly with me. My thoughts, reading that letter rolled from Ketsun, to Amala, to Tenchoe, to my own son gone forever, to this new connection through loss that I now had to my Tibetan mother who seemed even more dear to me in our sisterhood of sorrow for our lost sons, and my thoughts rolled out further still to all the Tibetans who lost a homeland – have lost so many and so much, but not the treasured Buddhist teachings so compelling to me like bringing your mind home to its true nature where we recognize we are all the same.    

    My mind rippled back to the days in Amala’s home when my son was not yet born and hers was not yet gone. One morning Kutsun asked me where I was going as I opened the front door. I was going to the outhouse, and I told him that, I thought. His eyes and mouth popped wide open. Not till I saw the expression on his face did I realize what I had really said. In Tibetan, “go” and “eat” sound similar, and “toilet” and “shit” sound alike too. We burst out laughing.
One night when we were all in bed he called out across the dark room, "Ajala Katie (sister Katie)?"
"Ray (yes), Ketsun."
"You stay at my house," he continued, "one day I stay at your house.”
“Ray (yes). Yapo do (good),” I said, but I don’t know if he heard me because Amala nudged him.
"Shhh, Ketsun."

    The letter that arrived, so many years after those incidents when my young brother and I connected in puerile laughter and simplistic speculation of the future, the aerogramme which delivered the sad news of Ketsun passing was written on the same blue, delicate paper as all the correspondence before them. It traveled alone, vulnerable, from my home thousands of miles away in Himachal Pradesh, India to my house in Portland, Oregon.  It was signed, as it had been consistently for all those years, “with sincere love, your Ama.”  When I wrote my Amala back I told her what I remember most about Ketsun: honesty, energy, humor—all the things that came to me in those recollections when I read of his passing. I regretted that the one good day when he would come to my house, which we spoke of so long ago, never came. I sent pictures of Ketsun as a young boy with Amala, so at least she'd have those, although yes, he was gone forever. I thanked her for calling me her daughter. I mentioned that William Stafford wrote a poem, which suggests that knowing one another is what keeps us all from loosing our way and following the wrong star home.
    I find now, in my mind, that home-stay seems more important than it was long, and, like as seems-like-only-just-yesterday experiences can be, it’s still, rightly so, accessible from my heart.
    The years, our struggle—then and now—to find a common word, the weeks, our sons, the days, our memories, those moments when we were all together in India, and this moment now are all like stars in the constellation of our lives. We will always have our stars and, I hope, blue aerogrammes to guide us. What do I expect to find now that I went so far, and lost, along the way? I expect I will always find home in the strangest of places: in the words we struggle with so dearly creating stepping stones to reach each other where we abide more like each other than not, and, sometimes, in our losses when all words fail us.