Mountains, Monasteries, and Myths: What I Discovered While Living in My Darjeeling Family Home

After a youth spent trying to ignore my Asian heritage, I came looking for it. My journey turned out to be the beginning of an excavation that continues to this day.

On a chilly Darjeeling morning, I sit in my grandmother’s living room. Billowy clouds sail past the 28,000-foot-high peaks of Mount Kanchenjunga, fifty miles distant as the crow flies. Sunlight spills through the lacy curtains, illuminating the thangka scroll paintings of the Buddha’s life that hang on the wooden walls. Wearing gloves with the fingers cut off, I tap out a few lines on the old Olympia typewriter my grandfather used to write letters to my mother after she left for New York in 1951. The train whistles—one long blast, two short—as it pulls into the station down near the bazaar. The smell of curry drifts from the kitchen at the back of the house, and my grandmother’s shaggy Apsos yap in the driveway at people real and imagined passing outside the tall iron gate. I put Peggy Lee’s Black Coffee on the vintage turntable, flip through albums of old family photos and magazines about the British royals. It’s 1984, and I’ve just graduated from college. I’d planned to make my life in Paris as a writer, but something has drawn me to my mother’s hometown of Darjeeling instead.

My first time in Darjeeling was at the age of three, when I traveled up the winding road into the Himalayas on my mother’s lap. My mother had left at nineteen to attend medical school at Columbia, married a classmate, and was visiting home with her American husband and two daughters. I wouldn’t return to Darjeeling until I journeyed there twenty years later to write and keep my recently widowed grandmother company.

The name “Darjeeling” comes from the Tibetan word “dorje,” which means “thunderbolt,” and “ling,” or land. The dorje is believed to be a bolt of wisdom, so Darjeeling, land of the thunderbolt, is a place where illusions can be shattered and enlightenment attained. Traveling to Darjeeling after college, I harbored no expectation of enlightenment—had little idea of what it even meant—but I did feel like I was on a quest as I ascended from the vast, dry plains north of Calcutta into the mountains.

The landscape itself invited meditation on pilgrimage: Giant bamboo and palms edged the road, along with myriad ferns and mosses, birch and maple and oak trees, orchids and rhododendrons. Emerald parakeets and doves, warblers and fairy bluebirds, flitted in the lush forest; monsoon-swollen streams flowed past. Soon swirling mist obscured the plains and sinuous hills receding into the distance below. Silvery waterfalls threading through dense foliage, the next hairpin curve, a glimpse of a mountain hut higher up as a fleeting window opened in the mist—everything beckoned me onward. As the driver rounded the last bend and we entered Darjeeling, the sky cleared. A ray of sun illuminated the golden roofs of a monastery perched above the road; the jagged, snowy peaks of Kanchenjunga materialized, massive and otherworldly, dwarfing the town spilling along and down a ridge.

In the eighteenth century, an ancestor of mine named Lama Rinzing had undertaken a pilgrimage from Sikkim to Darjeeling, now about a five-hour drive to the southwest but an arduous, weeks-long expedition at the time. One of my family members wrote an account of the journey:

On a summer’s day around 1750, Lama Dorje Rinzing, together with a handful of acolytes, left Sikkim on a spiritual quest. They passed through the sweltering Teesta Valley, stopped to camp the night by the cool shallows of the blue Rangeet River, and began their ascent next morning through beautiful virgin forests of rhododendron, magnolia and oak . . . After some hours, they began walking along a ridge that presented a magnificent panorama of Mount Kanchenjunga . . . and a dozen other snow-covered peaks stretching across the entire northern horizon . . . As the lama and his party climbed, they felt strangely uplifted and invigorated . . .

Setting out for Darjeeling as Lama Rinzing had, I felt like an explorer venturing into uncharted territory. I don’t know how it was for Lama Rinzing, but for me the journey had seemed improbable. About a week before leaving for India, I’d sat with my father on a sun-drenched San Francisco afternoon drinking smoky Lapsang Souchong tea and musing about the trip ahead: “How is it possible I’m just going to fly there?” In his usual pragmatic manner, my father assured me it was no big deal—I’d board a plane in the same way I would a bus, and get off in India. But I felt like I was going forth clutching a medieval map illustrated with sea monsters, sirens, fantastical islands.

I’d planned to make my life in Paris, but something has drawn me to my mother’s hometown of Darjeeling instead.

Darjeeling turned out to be very real: the dawn-to-dusk honking of car horns and the teeming marketplace; steep lanes winding between tightly-packed houses; uniformed school children, red-robed monks, and gray-haired Tibetan women walking along the town promenade. At twilight, ponies clip-clopping past in the street below my grandmother’s house and the earthy odor of incense drifting from the altar room, I’d have a crisp gin and tonic, and my grandmother would enjoy her usual “drop of sherry” as we chatted by the fire.

Gradually, I grasped why Darjeeling had taken on mythical proportions over the two decades since my first visit. I’d been one of the few Asian American kids in the 1960s and ’70s suburban American neighborhoods I grew up in, and the only Tibetan American. Determined that my siblings and I would feel we belonged, and eager to plunge into the land of the free after a traditional upbringing she’d found stifling, my mother raised us à la American, as she liked to say. We celebrated Halloween and Christmas; she didn’t teach us anything about Darjeeling or Buddhism. This suited me fine, because I wanted nothing more than to fit in. Yet my sisters and brother and I were surrounded by objects my mother had brought with her when she left for New York, signs and markers of another world. Our shingled New Jersey house and California ranch-style house were filled with Tibetan prayer wheels, silver and jade teacups, saddle carpets my ancestors used when riding over the Himalayas from Tibet to India, thangkas depicting mandalas and palaces and deities, a bronze statue of the goddess Tara. I spent long hours studying these objects, sensing they had a context somewhere in the physical (or non-material?) world, and wondering if I’d ever find it.

In Darjeeling, I discovered what I’d been seeking. My grandmother kept prayer wheels just like my mother’s in the altar room, where she’d taught my mother the old Tibetan prayers passed down through the generations. In my grandmother’s living room hung a Wheel of Life thangka like the one I’d pondered as a girl: fierce Yama, Lord of the Dead, holding a great wheel that, my grandmother explained, symbolizes the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, the ways of seeing we remain trapped in unless we liberate ourselves from ignorance. Next to the glass-front bookcase in the living room stood an elephant’s-foot stool. Sitting on it transported me back to my visit as a three-year-old, when I’d first examined the smooth leopard-skin seat, the leathery gray hide, the big brown toenails; I experienced a reassuring feeling of connection to that younger self who traveled to Darjeeling so many years earlier as a family member.

One evening, after we’d finished dinner and listened to the BBC News on the crackly radio, my grandmother contemplated the stool and reminisced about her father’s days as a Darjeeling District police officer. “That elephant,” she said, “your great-grandfather shot. It was a rogue elephant. There was no such a person that elephant didn’t attack.” And in 1936, she told me, her brother strode in and sat on the stool, having come to inform her that their father had died of a stroke while campaigning for an assembly seat in the nearby town of Kalimpong.

Hearing my grandmother’s stories about the stool and other things in the house, I saw that—like these objects—I didn’t exist in isolation. Each object held a nexus of stories I could delve into (What sort of police work had my great-grandfather done? What issues did he support when campaigning? How did his death affect my grandmother?) to find out more about my family, who my ancestors were, the legacy that had been passed down to me. I began to conceive of my childhood—and myself—as belonging to a history and a future that encompassed my family, Darjeeling’s Tibetan community, and Tibet not far to the north.

I spent a lot of time in my grandmother’s house, because I loved being there and my grandmother didn’t like for me to go out on my own. What if I lost my way? What if I got “spoiled” by one of the ganja-smoking hippie tourists with big backpacks and stringy hair, loafers with ideas at the back of their minds! But I’d grow restless and would put aside the typewriter to wander off to the Oxford Book and Stationery Co. or the Tibetan Refugee Self-Help Centre, to the prayer flag-wreathed temple atop Observatory Hill or Glenary’s Cake Shop for Darjeeling tea. These ramblings had an unexpected and profound effect. Like the Tibetan objects that had surrounded me as a girl, my looks—dark eyes and hair, olive skin—had pointed to another world, a context that eluded me. Making my way about Darjeeling, I waited, reflexively, for someone to say I looked “swarthy” or “exotic,” as people had when I was a girl. But no one did, and I soon experienced the astonishing ease of navigating an environment where I resembled most of the people.

I began to conceive of myself as belonging to a history that encompassed my family, Darjeeling’s Tibetan community, and Tibet not far to the north.

I did still worry: I’d heard stories of second-generation children visiting their countries of origin in the hope of feeling more at home than in the US, only to feel just as alienated because their family in the old country looked at them as Americans. But although my grandmother and other Darjeeling relatives often prefaced their comments to me with You American girls . . . , it was with a fondness and curiosity that never made me feel excluded.

After a youth spent trying to ignore my Asian heritage, I came looking for it. My journey to Darjeeling after college turned out to be the beginning of an excavation that continues to this day, a digging through layers of memory and myth, a deciphering of physical, emotional, and spiritual landscapes. I’ve spent decades researching and writing about my Tibetan family history, caught up in an archaeology of interviewing and reading, unearthing files and letters and photographs. Moving forward through the years, I’ve traveled back in time and memory—my mother’s, my grandmother’s, my own—imagining and reimagining the world and my place in it.