‘He came back absolutely appalled. “This is a terrible place. It’s hell. I can’t leave you here,” he said. I didn’t know what to do. “If someone doesn’t come for us in half an hour I will come on with you to Japan,” I finally agreed. We had waited for another twenty minutes when a man suddenly came rushing towards us waving a letter. “You wrote to my daughter – but she is not at home, so I opened it. It only came by this morning’s mail. I rushed here immediately,” he said. Such is the fine-timing of fate. I remember crying myself to sleep that night, thinking of leaving my boyfriend. The next morning, however, I woke up and felt quite cheerful! Ah, never mind, I thought.’
So Tenzin Palmo and her girlfriends made their way to Dalhousie, in northern India, and Freda Bedi’s school for young lamas. It was March when they arrived, Tenzin Palmo having trudged the last two hours through the snow in sandals. Her feet might have been wet but her spirits were ebullient: ‘I was going up into the mountains and more and more Tibetans were appearing. When I finally reached Dalhousie there were thousands of them. There were snow mountains all around, the sky was bright blue - it was so lovely.’
She continued: We found Mrs Bedi in the kitchen standing over a stove which was gushing out smoke with no heat coming from it at all. She was cooking porridge made with some Tibetan cheese. It was disgusting. She was a tall, plump woman in her mid fifties with blue eyes, an aquiline nose and grey hair pulled back in a bun. I remember she was wearing a maroon sari made of heavy woollen cloth, which made her look enormous.’
Freda Bedi was indeed a fascinating character, now a legend within Tibetan Buddhist circles. She too had led a colourful life. Born and brought up among the English upper classes, she had scandalized society by marrying an Indian she had met at Oxford before returning to the subcontinent to live with him. She followed this by taking up arms against her own country to fight the British in the independence movement, and was duly imprisoned for her pains. On her release, a heroine to her newly adopted country, her career took another dramatic twist when she was dispatched by the Central Social Welfare board to work with the newly arrived Tibetan refugees who were pouring into India in the wake of the Dalai Lama’s flight in 1959. Once ensconced among them, Freda had been so caught up by their plight and the potency of their message that in middle age, married and with five children (one of whom is Kabir Bedi, the famous Indian movie star), she had become a nun, the first Western woman ever to do so, taking the name Khechok Palmo.
’She was definitely a character – a strange mixture of Indian and English county. She never completely shed her roots. Everyone called her Mummy. I loved her very much,’ commented Tenzin Palmo. ‘The thing was she was very good at initiating ideas and excellent at getting money. At that time Tibetans were not yet organized, did not know English or about aid agencies and how to apply for help. Freda Bedi on the other hand was extremely organized and excellent at presenting her case. She got a lot of money. Her main fault, however, was that instead of buying property, which was very cheap then, and getting herself established, she dribbled the funds away on buying things like bedlinen, towels and this and that. She was not very practical. After a few years the land prices had sky-rocketed and the aid agencies were giving to others and she lost out. Still, the nunnery that she started is still going and so many Tibetan teachers who came to the West, like Trungpa, got their basic English at her school. So in fact she contributed a lot.’
Dalhousie was a beautiful place, spread over a number of hills covered in stately pine trees and inhabited by gangs of raucous monkeys. It had been established as a hill station by Lord Dalhousie in 1854, and by the time Tenzin Palmo got there it was full of decaying officers’ clubs, Anglican churches and English brick houses with high ceilings, large verandas and gardens filled with roses and dahlias – now relics from the Raj. At 7,000 feet it not only provided blessed relief from the searing summer sun, but also commanded breathtaking views of the Indian plains on one side and the Himalayan foothills on the other.
Tenzin Palmo had managed to time her journey to arrive at an interesting moment in history – the point where some 5,000 Tibetans had congregated in Dalhousie, making it the major refugee centre in India. Later they decamped and went to Dharamsala, to southern India and other settlements, but in 1963 they were there in their masses, valiantly re-establishing replicas of the great monasteries that had flourished in their homeland, Sera and Drepung, and trying to resurrect at least the remnants of their unique culture. ‘It was a lovely place then. There were no cars and it had a very special atmosphere. In the morning and the evening all the Tibetans would be out doing kora around the hills,’ Tenzin Palmo remembered.
Interesting it may have been, easy it wasn’t. The Tibetans had witnessed unspeakable atrocities. They had seen their mighty monasteries sacked, their monks and high lamas tortured; they had been traumatized by the dangerous journey out; they were destitute, displaced and in a pitiful state. ‘They were desperately poor and the conditions they were living in were dreadful. They had tents made from flour sacks which of course were hopelessly inadequate and they were trying to make their butter tea from lard. The Indian heat was also terrible for them after the crisp coldness of Tibet. Many of them got sick and died.’
The situation that she found herself in was not much better. She was put first on to the covered veranda of the nunnery that Freda Bedi had started for Kargyu nuns, and then into a little room by herself. ‘It was cold, freezing cold, and when it rained, it rained outside and in. It was so wet in fact that I had to sleep under the bed. And then there were the rats. They were everywhere. They were also enormous and would eat everything, including cloth and my prayer beads. They used to keep me awake at night by jumping on me. Actually I didn’t mind the rats as much as the spiders. I remember there was one huge spider with little glassy eyes. That was far worse.’
Every day she walked round the hill from the nunnery to the quaintly named ‘Young Lamas’ Home School’, which Freda Bedi had set up in one of the abandoned but magnificent former English houses. It had many rooms, was perched right on the edge of a hill and was surrounded by a beautiful garden. (The first of the Dharma Bums, the American poet Allen Ginsberg, had been there just before Tenzin Palmo, gathering the inspiration which would launch a cult.) Tenzin Palmo was given two jobs, acting as Freda Bedi’s secretary and teaching the young lamas basic English. Her pupils were not ordinary lamas, however, they were the tulkus, the recognized reincarnations of previous high spiritual masters, in whose hands lay the future of Tibetan Buddhism itself. Choygam Trungpa was among the many future eminent teachers in the West who learnt their first lessons in rudimentary English here.
In spite of the spartan living conditions, Tenzin Palmo loved it, as her letter to her aunt back in England reveals:
My dear Auntie Joan,
Many, many thanks for your 2 letters, really I loved receiving them once I could decipher your handwriting knowing Tibetan script helped! …
I am now teaching some of the beginners’ class all morning. There is the youngest lama of 12, a lama of 25 who is so sweet and a very good lama but rather hopeless at English, and also there is a lama of 22 who is really so gorgeous and was working on road-making for 2 years before coming to the school so his physique is wow! Added to this he is very intelligent and is learning very fast. It is like a village school with lots of classes going on in the same room – rather noisy but great fun.