PANGONG LAKE, India—At dawn, the old man stood outside his home on the Indian side of Pangong Lake, thumbing his prayer beads and chanting, “Om mani padme hum.”
The sun was rising from behind a wall of Himalayan peaks on the opposite shore, which was Tibet.
The old man’s face, which had been darkly tanned by a lifetime in the high-altitude sun, was as carved and as wrinkled as the Himalayas. His mouth moved almost imperceptibly as he chanted his mantra and stared across the burning blue water toward his homeland, from which he has been exiled for more than half a century.
The old man, whose name is Tsering Tunduk, fled Tibet in 1959 with his little sister, Khunda, after Chinese soldiers executed their parents. It was the same year the Dalai Lama escaped Chinese artillery in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa to seek exile in India.
Orphaned and alone, Tunduk and his sister joined a group of refugees for a treacherous two-month-long journey across the Himalayas into India. Along the way they faced hypothermia and frostbite, a lack of food, and persistent attacks by Chinese troops. Once they arrived in India, the two children began the hard life of refugees.
Ten years later, after he had completed his studies in Mussoorie in 1969, Tunduk volunteered for a secretive all-Tibetan unit in the Indian army called Establishment 22, which the U.S. CIA helped stand up and train when China attacked India in the 1962 Sino-Indian War. Tunduk went through six months of basic training, which included jump training taught by CIA instructors, whom Tunduk remembered as “blond and tall.”
As a new recruit Tunduk made only 80 rupees a month (when he retired in 1996 he made 1,300 rupees a month, about $20), but life in the military offered Tunduk an opportunity more valuable to him than money.
