In the tiny Current Event café, tucked into a slip of hillside in Dharamsala, in northern India, the nomadic songs of the Amdo region, in northeastern Tibet, roll out across the evening like the expanse of space itself. You can see large horizons, the skies playing tricks on the high, intense plains more than 14,000 feet above sea level. You can catch the silence expanding across spaces that may separate one community from another by hundreds of miles. You hear a loneliness, too, and plangency, as the round-faced young Tibetan man with hair down to his shoulders (and turquoise in one ear) sings, in his bare, ringing voice, a song that becomes one of homesickness, recalling the nomads he has left to come to join the Dalai Lama in exile.
The people around him in the cozy twenty-seat café are nomads too. Beaded girls from San Francisco, and bangled boys from Switzerland. Other Tibetan boys who have walked for twenty or maybe forty days across the highest mountains on earth to win the freedom they associate with exile. Indian-born Tibetans who have never seen Tibet but, raised abroad, have been moved from one refugee settlement to the next, in some less shapely and rhythmical way than their nomadic forefathers. We're nearly all of us in the room seasonal travelers, though longing for the sense of continuity, of pattern and prudence and a closeness to the land that comes to us in the haunting, echoing songs. (I, in fact, have been returning to Dharamsala since 1974, and this time am here to write a book on the most inspiring global nomad of our times, the Dalai Lama, and the paradoxes of exile.)
I remember the first time I went to Tibet, in 1985, seeing the nomads in their black yak-hair tents at the edge of Lhasa, the old capital, camped out near the holy city as I went to watch a sky burial on a distant bluff (a few Tibetans deputed to cut up the corpses of the recently dead and leave them out for birds, in the traditional way). Often, in those days, and even now (I was most recently in Tibet in 2002), you see people who are not just nomads with a circular pattern to their lives but pilgrims with a pointed destination, prostrating themselves flat out on the ground every step of the way as they walk 800 miles or more to the Jokhang Temple, at the center of Lhasa.
By some accounts, indeed, half the six million people in Tibet before it was invaded by China in 1950 were nomads. The people featured in these pictures belong to the Changpa group of nomads, and are here found in Ladakh, now a part of India. They live, like most Himalayan nomads, in tents occasionally large enough to hold 200 people. They sleep on sheepskins, under yak-hair blankets and under the stars in summer. In the warmer months, they move from one grazing area to the next on the Rooftop of the World, and then in winter they move down from the snowy plains to the foothills and trade in salt and butter. Because the men are so often away, a woman will sleep with several brothers, in different seasons, to ensure that the race doesn't die off.
If you are going to live with no solid ground under your feet—with only the seasons to guide you—you need something changeless to steady your heart. The central objects of a Himalayan nomad's tent (secured in the ground with animal horns or iron pins) are a stove and an altar. Prayer flags fly from the roofs of the four-sided tents, and the people who move across the plateau burn with the unwavering intensity of their devotion to the Dalai Lama and the tradition for which he stands. In some ways they live out as much as anybody the principle their beloved leader always extols, of constructing a center and a home within, especially if you have no piece of property to return to.
