Free Kingdom by Tom Martin Page B

amongst other Tibetans, living a religious life. He worked as a waiter and chef at a café when he wasn’t fasting, or walking in the hills.’
    ‘So, how did he end up there – in Delhi?’
    ‘That was in 1989. It was the year of a brutal crackdown in Lhasa. So many people were tortured and murdered. And many of the last remaining monasteries and shrines were destroyed. You cannot imagine the pain for the Tibetans. It was as if the Chinese were destroying their soul. Gyurme went down to Delhi to protest. He was so upset, he wanted to do something. Lots of Tibetans were hunger-striking, others were sitting in the road. The army moved in to remove them – the Indian government had buckled to Chinese complaints. None of the other countries round the world did anything. No one had done anything in 1959, when the Chinese destroyed four thousand monasteries and smashed the lamas and forced the Dalai Lama to flee to India. The Americans and the British and the French all just stood by and watched. It is a shameful period of history . . .’
    Nancy sighed heavily. She had read about it and it was a sad, sad day for the world. But what could any of the world powers have done? China considered Tibet to be her own sovereign territory. The Chinese government made it quite clear: if they were left to do what they wanted in Tibet, they would never use their veto in the United Nations. It was a cynical trade-off. So the great powers of the time just sat by and did nothing about Tibet; they had other priorities around the world for which they needed China’s cooperation. Tibet was a long way down the list.
    Nancy looked up at Krishna and said, ‘Why was Anton filming it?’
    Krishna looked over at Herzog’s chair out of habit.
    ‘Oh, he was always interested in Tibet, but after that day he changed. He had been something of a playboy before then. He was always a great journalist of course, and even then he was a voracious reader, but after seeing that he was a different man.’
    ‘In what way?’
    ‘Well, he went up to Macleod Ganj for the cremation of Gyurme Dorge. I spoke to him about it only once. The other times he dismissed my questions, simply wouldn’t be drawn. But on that one occasion he said that after the ceremony, which was attended by great crowds of Tibetans in the exile community, he went for a walk. He didn’t know where he was going so he just wandered at random until he found himself standing in front of a small tin-roofed hut down a quiet back alley. An old man who was sitting near by told him that it was Gyurme Dorge’s home. Anton said he already knew that, that he had just walked straight there. He didn’t know how he had managed to do this but he had. The hut was tiny, no bigger than eight feet by six feet, and he had to bow his head when he was inside to avoid scraping the corrugated iron roof. Outside, the garden had been carefully maintained. There were bright red snapdragons and beautiful pansies in the little flower beds and there was even a small hedge that Gyurme Dorge had clearly tried to carve into the shape of a bird – a symbol of freedom.
    ‘Inside the hut, there were several shelves that served as altars – they had three Tibetan flags on them and an image of the Dalai Lama. On the bed were two neatly folded and perfectly ironed shirts. Apart from that there was really nothing there. Anton said that seeing the hut and understanding how this man must have lived had a profound effect on him. Anton was a great scholar and he had read of the tea masters and poets of old who cultivated a “refined poverty”, but he had never actually understood it until then. Gyurme Dorge wasn’t a lama, after all, he wasn’t a practising monk or anything like that.
    ‘Anyway, Anton changed after he went to Macleod Ganj. Tibet became his personal cause. And it wasn’t just a political obsession – he had been affected at a much deeper level too. He stopped going out so often in the evenings, he became