Waiting at the Mountain Pass

An intimate meditation on aging and dying in exile among elderly Tibetans in Dharamsala, India

In a Tibetan saying, the journey of life is likened to a climb up to a mountain pass. Upon reaching it, the journey concludes and one must cross over into death and the next rebirth. The impermanence of life—described by the Buddha as the nature of reality—crystallizes at the mountain pass, manifesting itself through the painful and arduous descent ahead and a series of sufferings.

In this book, Harmandeep Kaur Gill offers an intimate meditation on the last part of the journey at the mountain pass through closely drawn portraits of elderly, exiled Tibetans who aged in Dharamsala, India, far away from their beloved homeland of Tibet, and often alone, in the absence of family. In Gill’s work, the mountain pass represents a “borderland,” an in-between world, where the elderly found themselves living at the crossroad between life and death, belonging fully to neither of them. It was a time-space where everyday life traversed between past and present, in darkness and light, and in dream and reality, as the elderly attempted to come to terms with the realities of their old age.

By placing relational entanglements and sensations at the heart of its theorization, Waiting at the Mountain Pass foregrounds an embodied knowing that is care-ful, hesitant, and unresolved in its claims. Aiming to bridge the gap between ethics and epistemology, Gill invites the reader to see and listen in a relational and imaginative way where the other reflects back upon the self, making the assumed separations between subject and object blurry and unsettling. Through meditations on the interrelations of body and mind, society and individual, and the real and the imagined, Waiting at the Mountain Pass provides a sensorial and compassionate understanding of the singularities of life and death in a Tibetan Buddhist world in exile.