The Nomad and the Rangers
She sings for the mountains alone, so they say. Clad in a chuba , in grey and silver, she springs to her feet and begins to sing the nomadic tunes in her dialect. Mesmerized, even the silence of the night wakes up to her music as the logs are being added to the fire. The man in the red bandana, popular to this land for his activism, erupts to the calm. He is a poet, a writer, and a refugee born with a ‘capital R’. He lives on his poetry and like a salesman sells it along the road. The words in that book are the tales of separation from his land, the land that lives in his heart, where he belongs, and where he cannot be. Tenzin recites to us ‘When it rains in Dharamshala’ a poem he wrote about the monsoons in this town that he says are a waterfall of its own will that pours like ‘cats, dogs and donkeys!’ The very next morning, it rains on us. “It is true. In Tibet, sometimes we whistle to make the wind blow." nods Thinley (name changed) at breakfast, an undergraduate like m...