What My Tibetan Grandmother Taught Me About Lasting Love

In one of my favorite photos of my Tibetan grandparents, they’re dancing at a New Year’s Eve party in Darjeeling around 1940. My grandfather wears a party hat and a tuxedo, my grandmother a long silk chuba dress. Smiling broadly, they’re holding each other, one arm outstretched and hands clasped as they foxtrot across the floor. Their pose is emblematic of who they were: in love with each other and with life.

My grandmother planned never to marry. I first heard this in my twenties, when I stayed with her in Darjeeling after graduating from college. I wondered if, like me, she didn’t trust marriage. Having seen my parents and most of my friends’ parents divorce, I’d made a pact with myself: I would never marry; I’d live alone with a dog by the sea and write. While girls I knew daydreamed about wedding dresses and honeymoon destinations, I pondered the design of my future house and what breed of dog to get.

I learned my grandmother hadn’t wanted to marry because she intended to take care of her father. She felt sorry for him since he’d lost his first wife, her mother, whom he’d deeply loved. But she discovered her father had other plans: He was determined my grandmother would marry. This wasn’t due to traditional expectations for girls, but because he wanted her to have her own life and to know the happiness of finding a true partner.

My grandmother enjoyed great autonomy thanks to her father’s enlightened outlook. At eighteen, she rode her pony hundreds of miles north over the Himalayas from Darjeeling to visit her father in Lhasa, where he was working with the Thirteenth Dalai Lama to establish Tibet’s first police force. Because she wore breeches and went about the city on her pony, everyone thought she was a boy. As soon as they discovered she was a girl, proposals began coming in.

One morning, her father said, “There’s a cabinet minister’s son who wants to get married to you. Are you interested?”

“Father, I wouldn’t like to,” my grandmother replied. “No, I’m afraid not.”

My grandmother planned never to marry. I wondered if, like me, she didn’t trust marriage.

If you were a nobleman’s wife, my grandmother explained to me, “every day you had to wear that Tibetan headdress and lots of jewelry, lean forward all the time. Very heavy. I hated it. You had to only live like a lady and play mah jong. I would have died of boredom. And the traditional wives have to respect the husbands with the hands pressed together, worship the he-man.”

After arriving back home in Darjeeling the following year, my grandmother—keen to honor her father’s wishes—got engaged to the son of a prominent local trader. The horoscopes were given to the astrologer lama; when he reported that the signs were auspicious for a match between my grandparents, plans moved forward and the wedding took place on July 12, 1930.

“Marry once, you can’t marry twice,” my grandmother liked to say. But if couples should remain together at all costs, I asked, what did she think about my mother divorcing my father? She replied in her usual no-nonsense manner: My parents hadn’t made sure they were suited to each other, and you shouldn’t stay married if you’d chosen the wrong person. My grandparents were horrified when my mother fell in love with my father, a New Jersey boy with movie-star good looks she met at medical school in America, and married him on the spur of the moment, as my mother told it, dashing down to the courthouse one sunny June morning. “They didn’t go through the horoscopes carefully,” my grandmother said with a frown. “We don’t get married just like that, falling in love with somebody!”

Along with their horoscopes being compatible, had my grandparents stayed married because they lived in a culture where few couples divorced? As my grandmother told me about their marriage, I saw that, on the contrary, the happiness of their union was rooted in their love for each other and how they expressed it. Here are some of their principles:

Spend time together. My grandfather, Pala, was busy with his work as a magistrate and my grandmother with running the household and taking care of their five children. But they always prioritized their relationship. “Pala would come home and straight off, he’d call to the maid, ‘Where is the darling, where is she, where is she?’” my grandmother said. “Then we’d go to the study and he’d tell me what he’d been doing and all that. We discussed any important decisions.” To have more time for themselves, my grandparents would rise at dawn and take a ten-mile walk; in the evenings after the children were asleep, they went to the Gymkhana Club to see friends or, my grandmother loved to remember, “took a joy ride, whatever we felt like, and another perfect day would come to an end.”

Be adventurous. In the 1930s, my grandparents were among the first to fly in a Tiger Moth biplane in Calcutta. There was no airport, just a grassy area with a little shack. The pilot could take only one passenger at a time, so my grandfather led the way, waving to my grandmother and holding tight to his muffler as the plane climbed high over the patchwork of green and brown fields surrounding the sprawl of the city, the silvery Hooghly River snaking down towards the Bay of Bengal. My grandmother asked the old Tibetan gentleman standing next to her if he was going to take a turn but he said, “Thank you, I don’t want to get killed.” “First, Pala and I felt hesitant,” my grandmother told me. “Then we thought, ‘Why not?’ We went for a spin because we thought it a pity not to give it a go!”

Write love notes. My grandmother wrote this note to my grandfather, slipping it into a Tibetan prayer book she got him as a present:

To my dear old hubby
with my best love
 and kisses from your beloved wife 
3rd July 1939.

When my grandmother was away for a few weeks seeing to family affairs in Calcutta, my grandfather sent this note:

Sunday
29th Sept. 40.
My own darling wife,
Hope you have had no hard journey and that you are feeling well. I will send the car for you on your return, so please make best use of it. Please drive straight home where I am dying to meet and see you.
I have got everything ready for you here. Please don't halt on the way and drive straight home. Take greatest care on the way.
Looking forward to see you after such a long time. I feel years passed.
With love and kisses to you.
Your only loving
Husband

Talk things over. People often asked my grandparents how they managed so many years together. “Give and take,” my grandmother said. “If you only want to take, the thing must explode. At the same time, you listen to what the other says, but you also have your own ideas. It does more to speak it out. We know how important the balance is because here in Darjeeling, we’re advanced people.”

In the end, my grandfather suffered a heart attack in Calcutta and my grandmother brought him home to die. He passed away with his head on her arm, as she was showing him photos of their Golden Anniversary celebration. “More than fifty years we were married,” she told me. “We’d seen good days and bad days, we had been through everything, side by side. For me, there was never anyone else.”

*

I enjoyed hearing about my grandparents’ marriage and was glad they’d been so happy, but I felt sure my grandmother’s stories, her faith in marriage, had no bearing on my life plan. Seated across from me in her silk chuba and gold-and-coral jewelry, my grandmother looked like the Tibetan incarnation of Pride and Prejudice’s Mrs. Bennet, talking about girls who’d ended up “spinsters” and girls who’d almost “missed the bus.” She didn’t understand that marriage wasn’t right for everyone. I paid polite attention—“That sounds terrible!” “What a close call!”—trying not to show that as far as I was concerned, the bus could drive right on by.

Having seen my parents and most of my friends’ parents divorce, I’d made a pact with myself: I would never marry; I’d live alone with a dog by the sea and write.

I never would have believed what the future held in store for me. I left Darjeeling to teach English in Japan and had been in Tokyo for three weeks when an acquaintance invited me to a party. My plan was to stay home and read Kawabata’s Snow Country in the spartan tatami mat room I’d rented in the northwestern part of the city—it was a wet March night and the gathering was an hour away on maze-like train lines. But I felt lonely, so I threw on a little black dress and set off in the rain. Standing near the door when I walked into the party was a tall man with gray-green eyes, glasses, and light brown hair, the bookish good looks I found so attractive. His name was David, he said as he helped me with my coat, and he’d come to Tokyo to teach English before starting graduate school in anthropology. We fell into animated conversation about books and movies, and I was captivated by his high-energy intelligence and irreverent sense of humor.

We began dating and soon were spending all our time together. My feeling of entering uncharted terrain as we got to know each other was intensified by the newness of the surroundings. We roamed the byways of Tokyo, exploring hole-in-the-wall jazz cafés and sake bars, rock gardens and temples, art-house cinemas and antique shops. We ate foods I’d never encountered: eel, persimmons, seaweed. We took Japanese lessons, our struggles with things like keigo polite forms and bowing at the correct angle a source of great hilarity. We saved our money from teaching and traveled the world, horseback riding in Burma, motorcycle touring in Nepal, drift diving in Fiji.

With David, I found the love and kindness I hadn’t known I was looking for. Surprised again and again that he cared about how I felt, what I thought, I began to realize the extent to which I’d ended up being collateral damage from my parents’ divorce. I reveled in our relationship, secure in the knowledge it wouldn’t last—my plan never to marry, to live alone, remained unchanged, like an amulet worn over my heart.

Back in the States for graduate school, David and I went for a walk one bright California morning, hawks circling in the azure sky and the crisp air redolent with sage and eucalyptus. “Let’s stop for a minute,” he said. We sat on a wooden fence and then, just like that, he asked me to marry him. “Yes!” I heard myself say to my astonishment. Joy flooded me, along with delighted wonder at whatever deeper force was leading me toward something that felt very right in spite of my intention to spend my life alone.

But as we planned the wedding over the following months, my elation gave way to near-incapacitating doubt: Would I regret breaking the promise I’d made to myself? Would I end up toiling in the kitchen with a baby on my hip, writing grocery shopping lists instead of books while David advanced his career? Would our marriage end in divorce?

I realized it wasn’t that I didn’t want committed love—I just hadn’t believed I could find it or deserve it.

It didn’t help that drama arose around the wedding. I was anguished when my father and some of my other family members announced they would not be coming. Reasons were given, grievances aired, but it was a slip along the family fault lines, fallout from the years of bitter acrimony between my parents. Pushing through those difficult days, I felt something in me shift. “The failure of my parents’ marriage doesn’t have to be the only story,” I said to a close friend during one of our frequent late-night calls; there were other stories, like the one my grandmother had related in such detail about her soul bond with my grandfather. I realized it wasn’t that I didn’t want committed love—I just hadn’t believed I could find it or deserve it. “When we started going out,” David told me once, “I thought you were the saddest person I’d ever known.”

We got married on a sultry August afternoon at a bed-and-breakfast in upstate New York, four years after we met. Relatives flew in from around the world, including my eighty-three-year-old grandmother, who journeyed all the way from Darjeeling. David and I exchanged vows under a blue-and-white Tibetan tent, the same kind of tent my ancestors sat under when they celebrated Losar New Year with feasting and merrymaking. At the end of the ceremony, my grandmother, beaming, joined us under the tent and draped traditional white khada blessing scarves around our necks to wish us luck and happiness.

My grandmother was psychic. She foresaw her father’s and her husband’s deaths; she dreamed my mother’s marriage would be unhappy and wrote my mother a letter: What you want to do now, don’t do it. During the talks my grandmother and I had in Darjeeling, it wouldn’t have taken a clairvoyant to recognize my dismissal of what she was saying about marriage, to see the pain I thought I was hiding so well. But maybe my grandmother divined what I wouldn’t allow myself to imagine: a future where I was walking by the sea with my husband and children and dog. My grandparents’ marriage was one of the great love stories and, in telling me about it, my grandmother offered me a new story, opened a door for me to step through when I was ready. In the thirty-six years since that rainy March night when David and I met, I’ve discovered that “not missing the bus” means not missing the companionship and love that come when we walk side by side with the right person through life.

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