For Tenzing Sonam and “the generations of Tibetans now raised in exile, ‘home’ has taken on a complex tapestry of meanings.”

After 2008, the numbers of new refugees escaping to India was dramatically reduced, as China beefed up its border controls. Movement between the exile community and Tibet has also been curtailed. Nonetheless, the links that were established during the previous two decades remain vibrant and resilient. In the meantime, the Tibetan diaspora has spread across the world. Relatively large communities have taken root in New York, Toronto and various other cities in the US and Europe. For these Tibetans, home no longer automatically refers to Tibet. For all intents and purposes, it usually means Tibetan India, with its capital in Dharamsala, an indication of how strongly entrenched the exile Tibetan world has become and how separate its identity is to the homeland it set out to recreate and preserve.

The strength and depth of this affinity to a home away from home was vividly illustrated by an encounter I had in eastern Tibet in the summer of 2006. I was travelling with my family through the Kham areas of Szechwan and Yunnan. On the streets of one dusty town, I was startled to hear my name being called out. A young monk I knew from Drepung monastery in South India was excitedly greeting me from across the road. He had escaped to India as a teenager, and had now returned home for a visit after nearly 15 years. Thrilled to meet a fellow Tibetan from India, the first thing he said was, ‘You must be missing sweet tea! I brought some with me. Come home and I’ll make you some.’ As anyone who has travelled in Tibet or China knows, outside of Lhasa and some of the larger towns in central Tibet, sweet tea made in the Indian style is a completely unfamiliar concoction. Later, in the security of his home, he told us how much he missed India, not just the relative freedom that he enjoyed in his monastery but also the simpler pleasures of life, such as eating dosas and vadas. Although he was happy to have met his family after so many years, he said he could hardly wait to go back to India. ‘Home’, even for this second-wave refugee, was no longer his birthplace, but rather an abstract construct that had its physical roots in a foreign land.