A ‘refugee’ I brought home

IN THE 1960s, Inisheer’s only roads were narrow dirt tracks, the traffic consisted entirely of donkeys, water was drawn from wells, clothes were homespun, everyone spoke Irish — and there, two of my books were written by candlelight.

It seemed to me that a Tibetan would find himself at ease on Inisheer, an intuition soon confirmed by Lobsang.

Our two-and-a-half-hour steamer journey from Galway, on a cloudless August morning, was Lobsang’s longest sea voyage. When we anchored, a fleet of currachs — frail little craft of wood-lathe and tarred canvas — surrounded us, to ferry passengers and goods ashore. Boat days were an event for the 280 or so islanders, and inevitably Lobsang’s arrival provoked uninhibited curiosity.

This slightly discomfited me, but afterwards it transpired that the refugee had observed a family weeping as they said goodbye to an emigrant daughter, and had been more aware of this sad feature of Inisheer life than of his own conspicuousness.

For three weeks, we shared a friend’s cottage (Daphne was the only outsider living permanently on the island), washing at the well three-quarters of a mile away, cooking over an open, turf fire and sleeping on the floor. Lobsang enthusiastically took on many of the daily chores and had soon dug a splendid latrine for use with turf ash. He also volunteered to collect dung to supplement our expensive, imported turf, but here ethical complications arose; cowpats containing insects were ineligible for burning. Observing this, Daphne and I discreetly abandoned forays to collect barnacles and periwinkles.

After sunset, we sat around the glowing hearth and ‘returned’ to Tibet with Lobsang. He had seen more of his own country than most non-nomadic Tibetans. In 1956, Uncle had taken him on an 18 months’ journey to a sacred mountain in west Tibet. This pilgrimage of a Very High Lama to a Very Sacred Mountain generated a caravan of 100 horses and mules and 300 yaks, carrying camping equipment and stores for 60 monks and servants. West Tibet’s barrenness made it necessary to carry much food — mainly tsampa (roasted flour), cheese, dried meat and compressed vegetables, plus emergency fodder for the animals.

At nightfall, everyone but the Abbot helped set up camp — excellent training, Lobsang said, for him and his pampered young companions (all fledgling lamas). Several, flooded rivers had to be forded, the equines swimming through the swift, icy water, the yaks being ferried on square, flat-bottomed boats of wood and yak-hide.

Excitements were few: a panther killing a dog; hundreds of wild horses galloping across the steppes. Recalling that happy and peaceful journey, Lobsang had to pause occasionally to control his emotions. Already, he realised that, even as we spoke, Buddhist Tibet was being changed forever.

From him, I learned that the sudden, violent dispossession that prompts a refugee flight is peculiarly traumatic. Apart from the loss of a settled home and traditional occupation, and separation from close friends and familiar places, it is the death of the person one has become in a particular context.

Three years after our Inisheer interlude, Lobsang said: ‘Every refugee must be his or her own midwife at the painful process of rebirth.’ By May, 1965, I was back in Nepal with the Tibetans, running a children’s feeding programme in Pokhara’s refugee camp, overlooked by Machhapuchhare. On May 12, as I walked between ragged cotton tents, occupied by recently arrived nomads from west Tibet, piercing squeaks drew my attention to an object lying on the palm of Ngawang Pema’s hand. It was very small, very black and very vocal. Moments later, I had exchanged the equivalent of ten-and-sixpence (50 pence in new money) for a 12-day-old Tibetan bitch to be delivered once she was weaned. I wondered what the astrologists would make of the coincidence that this pup and I had entered Nepal on the same date: May 1.

Six weeks later, Tashi moved in to my mud-floored room in the bazaar and I took time off to help this ‘refugee’ adjust to her new environment. All afternoon she lay on my lap, while I wrote, but hours passed before her look of puzzled distress began to fade. Then, at last, she wagged her tail — a brief and doubtful wag, but this sign of dawning trust enchanted me. A night of unmothered whimpering would have been understandable, yet Tashi slept soundly, curled up on my stomach. As she was much too young to be left alone, I carried her everywhere, for the next month or so, in a cloth shoulder-bag.

By mid-September, Tashi’s furry cuddlesomeness had been replaced by a silky strokeability. Her black coat had elegantly-symmetrical white-and-tan markings and her ridiculous, brown feathery tail curled up and over her back. Several schools of thought debated the delicate question of her breed. A local ‘expert’ pronounced her to be a smooth-haired Tibetan terrier, which was absurd; but Ngawang Pema — hoping to sell the next litter to foreign visitors — agreed with him. An Indian UN official, who himself bred Afghan hounds, defined her as a miniature Himalayan sheepdog — a theory reinforced by Ngawang Pema’s occupation.

Personally, I regarded her as a perfectly good Tibetan mongrel or pi-dog. However, anyone besotted enough to go to the immense inconvenience and expense of transporting a dog from Nepal to Ireland must pretend, as a face-saving device, that the import belongs to some rare Central Asian breed of enormous snob-value. Therefore, the form I filled in on September 15, to begin the arduous process of obtaining Irish citizenship for Tashi, boldly proclaimed her to be a miniature Himalayan sheepdog.

A week previously, I had informed the Irish embassy in Delhi that on December 3 I planned to land in Dublin with a Nepal-born dog. In reply came a parcel of lengthy documents, making it plain that Ireland’s Department of Agriculture is allergic to alien quadrupeds. One could visualise the thin-lipped bureaucrat who had devised all these regulations to wither any imprudent relationships cultivated by expats.

Reading them hardened my determination to ‘import a domestic pet of the canine species into the State from a place abroad … separately confined in a suitable hamper, crate, box or other receptacle which must be nose and paw proof and not contain any hay, straw or peat-moss litter’. Impatiently, I completed the preliminary forms and wrote letters to ‘the approved quarantine premises’ and ‘the approved carrying agents’, while Tashi lay happily by my feet, unaware that during the next few months a lot of people were going to make a very big fuss about a very little dog.

Throughout October and November, all my ‘reminding’ letters to the Irish embassy in Delhi and the Department of Agriculture in Dublin were ignored. By November 26, Tashi’s entry permit should have been awaiting me in Kathmandu, but it wasn’t. From there, I sent many frantic cables to Delhi and Dublin, Tashi accompanying me every morning to the new ‘Indian aid’ telephone and telegraph office. While I drafted progressively less-polite messages, the staff eyed my companion derisively and commented on the unusual brand of lunacy revealed by the compulsion to import such an object to Ireland. After four days of impoverishing communications, I ended my campaign defiantly; at 3.20pm on December 3, a black-and-tan bitch from Nepal would land at Dublin airport with or without her visa, which had been applied for on September 15.

In Delhi, we stayed with friends for a few days, while Tashi received and recovered from numerous inoculations. At once, she displayed characteristic Tibetan adaptability, both to her new surroundings and her new friends. In a bazaar near the Red Fort, I bought the statutory ‘nose-and paw-proof’ basket that is still in use almost half a century later as a bathroom laundry basket. On the eve of our departure, I cunningly took Tashi to Air India’s central office and introduced her to the authorities. Nothing else was necessary; they agreed that it would be superfluous to imprison such a small passenger between Delhi and London. Moreover, it could easily be arranged to have an empty seat beside mine.

And so it came about that Tashi, conceived in western Tibet and born in a nomad’s tent at the base of Machhapuchhare, now had the run of a Boeing 707. It’s hard to believe that air travel was once so easy-going.

When we stopped at Beirut, Tashi expressed the need for a grassy spot — and promptly disappeared into the darkness of the night. As engine trouble in Bombay had already delayed us by three hours, the captain asked the passengers if they would be kind enough to forgive another delay — this time a short one — while Miss Murphy pursued her puppy. At Prague, I chained her, lest she might have anti-Communist prejudices.

The scene at Dublin airport was surreal. My final, defiant cable had activated a platoon of uniformed officials, who were falling over each other in their anxiety to ensure that the infinitesimal Tashi did not break loose and overnight turn the nation rabid. A grotesquely large, covered truck stood waiting to transport the mini-basket to the State quarantine kennels 10 miles away. To my fury, I was refused permission to accompany Tashi through the alien, cold wetness of an Irish winter night.

Next morning, I found that the kennels were exceptionally well-run, and during her six months’ isolation Tashi remained in perfect condition and grew a little more. Although my regular, fortnightly visits delighted her, she accepted my departures with composure — until, at last, came the day when she departed too, into breezy green fields and bright June sunshine. The joy she then showed, at racing free, can have been no greater than my own on seeing that little black body, again unfurling its ridiculous brown tail in the wind.

* Three Tibetans in Ireland by Dervla Murphy, appears in OxTravels: Meetings with Remarkable Travel Writers, introduced by Michael Palin, and featuring contributions from 36 top authors, published by Profile Books with Oxfam; €11.99 paperback/eBook. All proceeds to Oxfam.

* The Immrama Festival of Travel Writing, taking place in Dervla’s home town of Lismore, (June 9-12) Co Waterford, will present the inaugural Dervla Murphy Award for Teenage Travel Writing at the festival.