Namgyal Dorjee or fondly known as N Dorjee and his friends are all hopeful that Tibet will soon be free and he will be able to reunite with all his relatives in Tibet.
The 67-year-old man was born in a small village of Dakney in Zonga in 1948. Soon after the Chinese forced Tibet’s god king The Dalai lama to flee to India and along with him, thousands of Tibetans followed, one of the thousands refugees was this 12-year-old boy, a young Dorjee.
Dorjee sells sweaters, jackets and blankets by the day and reads books and meditates in the evening at the Jharkhand Dharamshala at Upper Bazaar in Ranchi. He is also busy spreading awareness about the climate change in Tibet and the upcoming conference on the same in Paris on November 30.
Most of these tough looking old men and women from the far away land of Tibet have incredible stories to tell. Tales of the Himalayas, crossing borders, struggling to free their nation and the never-ending wait for this war to end are among many.
Dorjee is believed to be the oldest Tibetan sweater-seller at the Patola Market in Ranchi visiting the city for the past 45 years. Despite over four decades of selling woolen garments in the plains of India, Dorjee’s Hindi is not even basic and the number of English words he knows would not be more than 20. He is an old man who devotes most of his time in offering prayers to lord Buddha and meditation. The wrinkles and the fine lines on his face clearly show the kind of hardships he faced as a child and even struggling with, now.
“I am very thankful to this country to have given me shelter and even scope for earning a living for these many years. Though, I would not say I am fed up of this life, but I am indeed, tired of waiting for my country to be free and go home,” said Dorjee in nostalgia.
Dorjee says how his entire big family comprising three brothers and two sisters along with his parents had crossed borders on foot braving the Himalayan weather and the wild. Soon after they reached Himachal Pradesh, his parents put all of them in a Tibetan School in Shimla that provided education, fooding and lodging for free and themselves moved on to Kulu Manali where they worked as coolies in building road from Manali to ladakh.
When asked about his parents and the family, he said, “We lost our father several years back due to health reasons. My mother still lives with my wife, two sons and two beautiful daughters at the Tibetan Colony in Dehradun. We also run a sweater shop there in Dehradun in the summers for the tourists. The only thing that we yearn for is to rest in peace in our free homeland after being lost in foreign hills and forests.”