Late Prof. Dawa Norbu

Late Dawa Norbu’s ‘The Road Ahead’ opens with a throwback to his early childhood. His father is seated on a worn-out, old carpet, alternately gulping down mugs of chang and snorting clouds of snuff, and his mother is plopped on a manure-container, next to a blackened hearth on which is cooking their evening meal. Scurrying around on his all four, as toddlers are wont to with such apocalyptic relish, he is stopped short in his track, and is now gawking wide-eyed at his father on one side and his mother on the other, both beckoning him in their love-filled voices, “If you are my son, come to me. Come, Dawa Norbu.”

“If you are my son, come to me. Come Dawa Norbu!”

These lines contain a whole culture, an entire way of being and living, a parental more borne on teasing competitiveness and competing tease, an emotional context that is uniquely Tibetan; and they sing, fly off the page, every time one opens the book, his fingers flipping over the inside cover, past the introduction, right where the first chapter begins, called “The Life of a Missionary.”

And for many years to come, fifty, hundred, two hundred, thousand, these lines will continue to sing, brush past one’s ears and kiss one’s heart, as will his two books (the other being “Red Star over Tibet”) offer their readers a look at one of the first Tibetan writers to approach his people’s history and his nation’s destiny with a critical eye and calm mind that had hitherto seemed the domain only of Western scholars and authors.

That man is today no more. Witness time’s trickery that the wide-eyed child, scurrying on his all four, had since grown into a boy, then an adolescent, an adult, a middle-aged man, and as suddenly as such things happen, he is gone, just like that.

I remember listening to and watching Dawa Norbu la the few times I had heard him speak. I remember how his two books had revealed to me that exquisite face of Tibetan history, that sense of real time and place, where lives were felt and not just imagined, where events unfolded in their layered phalanx and were not just distilled from dry data, where system and society were backdrops to struggles of the individual. Something that few Tibetan books in English had done for me before.

I remember thinking about something from my first sighting of him that had since stayed with me: the way his belt rounded his waistline, skipping two or three loops a time, as if he had been unsure whether it was a Tibetan chuba he had on, or modern-day trousers.

I remember looking at this man, all but non-descript in physical details, and marveling how in the single unit of his mind he held an indefatigable reserve of corroborated knowledge about our history, our politics, our culture, our art, that the rest of us Tibetans make it our business to surmise in our everyday vernacular of rumor-mongering and propaganda-peddling; and which if people like him had not made it their mission to salvage from such dung-pile of hysteria and hullabaloo, perhaps we would be walking the streets of New York having sold a thankga painting for so much money and upon glancing at a building’s glass reflection, we would still be seeing ourselves as the very Buddha we had betrayed.

Few weeks ago, when the news reached me that Dawa Norbu la was no more, like many others I was devastated. More than that, I felt cheated.

I had never had the chance to get to know the person behind the writer and scholar, in the way I had gotten to know say our handful of intellectuals like Jamyang Norbu la, Tsering Shakya la, Thupten Samphel la and Tenzin Sonam la, and all this while I had thought that if my life was singular in any way, it was because somehow destiny had favored me - not with wealth, not with power, not with success, but - with a close proximity to people who not with the nobility of their birth, nor the power of their chair, but with the genius of their crafts bring to us that which is exalted about our collective selves, and safeguard our self-worth from so much balderdash that comes from people in high chairs and of noble births.

Hearing about his death, I felt cheated that I have not had one drink with him. Not one glass of beer. And that it will always remain a mystery in my one enduring memory of him, when during a seminar that he was presiding over, with all the Kalons and Kudrags spinning their yarns, when it was now his turn to take the mike, Dawa Norbu la could be seen not in his chair, but outside from the window, calmly chewing on his tobacco and sashaying the length of the sidewalk, where he had bolted off as soon as he had finished presenting a speaker, giving not a shit to the self-importance and formality pervading the cloistered room, because why should he, and it seemed such a joke that the rest of us - who in our everyday life care so little about credible history and ideas - should want to fit in a two-day seminar what this man had spent learning his whole lifetime. And I thought it was great that he kept us all waiting, for showing the farce that we all were!

* Topden Tsering is the President of RTYC, Bay Area, California. He can be contacted at stopden@yahoo.co.uk