'Home' is what Tenzin broods about -- the loss of home, imaginary homes, temporary homes, home meaning food and songs, home signifying a cruel absence, home among the camps and streets of Indian cities. We who have homes, walk about in our own lands, cannot know, or perhaps, are unable to feel what is home with the same intensity. As Emily Dickinson once pointed out:

Not One of all the purple Host
Who took the Flag today
Can tell the definition
So clear a Victory

As he defeated - dying -
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Burst agonized and clear

Home is what led Tenzin to activism on Tibet's behalf, home is what keeps his fires burning. After the publication of the 2003 interview, I slowly began to know a bit more about this poet, exile, and Tibetan freedom fighter. We exchanged emails intermittently, he sent me poems which I published, I heard about him from a poet friend in Mumbai--'he's such a tiny guy' she wrote me, carrying the weight of occupied Tibet on his shoulders. I remember seeing a well-known photo of him -- perched high up on a ledge outside the 14th floor of the Oberoi Towers in Mumbai where he had climbed to unfurl a Tibetan flag and hang a banner proclaiming 'Free Tibet' for the benefit of visiting Chinese prime minister Zhu Rongji in 2002.

Tenzin represented Tibet at the SAARC literary conference in New Delhi in January 2005. Hopefully he'll be invited again the next time around and we can sit around and talk about poetry and resistance and long desolate winter nights when there seem to be more enemies inside one's camp than outside. And the fact that the fight must go on.

Tenzin's poetry can be fiery, with short lines that can crackle in rapid fire, revealing the rage of those who have never known anything else except the life of a refugee:

I am a terrorist
I like to kill.
I have horns
two fangs
and a dragonfly tail.

Personally, I like those poems best where he simultaneously taps into a vein of sorrow, where rain in Dharamsala reminds him, almost unenduringly, of what could have been:

Three months of torture,
monsoon in the needle-leafed pines
Himalaya rinsed clean
glistens in the evening sun.

This slim book contains prose pieces too, where the language has the clarity of those forced to say very large things in a small space. One is 'My Kind of Exile', which won the 2001 Outlook-Picador Non-Fiction Competition. It begins:

"Ask me where I'm from and I won't have an answer. I feel I never really belonged anywhere, never really had a home. I was born in Manali, but my parents live in Karnataka. Finishing my schooling in two different schools in Himachal Pradesh, my further studies took me to Madras, Ladakh and Mumbai. My sisters are in Varanasi but my brothers are in Dharamsala. My Registration Certificate (my permit to stay in India) states that I'm a foreigner residing in India and my citizenship is Tibetan. But Tibet as a nation does not feature anywhere on the wold political map. I like to speak in Tibetan, but prefer to write in English. I like to sing in Hindi but my tune and accent are all wrong. Every once in a while someone walks up and demands to know where I come from...My defiant answer 'Tibetan' raises more than just their eyebrows...none of them can ever empathise with the plain simple fact that I have nowhere to call home and in the world at large all I'll ever be is a 'political refugee.'"

Tenzin may be wrong here. We Bengalis were once refugees too, in India, in 1971. We too were in camps, we too were beaten and chased and starved and died. So there are people in the world who have been where the Tibetan refugees are now. It may be small comfort, but it is a comfort.

One of his poems, 'My Tibetanness' ends with the hope:

I am Tibetan.
But I am not from Tibet.
Never been there.
Yet I dream
of dying there.

Amen, may Tenzin Tsundue be granted his wish!

Khademul Islam is literary editor, The Daily Star.