One of designer, illustrator and graphic artist Leo Lionni?s famous books is Frederick, a story about a mouse who gathers words and colours for the winter just like his fellow mice collect food. In the dead of winter, after all the food is gone, Frederick, the mouse-poet, warms the mice by willing them to think about flowers and colours. ?And when he told them of the blue periwinkles, the red poppies in the yellow wheat, and the green leaves of the berry bush, they saw the colours as clearly as if they had been painted in their minds.?

Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, whose parents fled Tibet in 1959 and who was raised in India and Nepal by her mother, heard many stories and images of Tibet from her mother. The idea of Tibet was kept alive through a string of memories till she was able to go back and connect the dots and write it down. ?Every summer my mother culled images of flowers from her childhood. There were the ones with white lollipop heads? there were the lissome blue beauties? the turquoise and perfectly petalled flowers that hid in the shadow of rocks and caves??

When Tsering would hold up buttercups and primroses, and ask whether these were her childhood flowers, her mother would quip: ?The flowers in Tibet were more beautiful.?

All of her exiled life, her mother waited to return home, but that was never to be, her life cut short by an accident.

So Tsering, a poet and writer based out of San Francisco, takes it upon herself to return to Tibet and scatter her mother?s ashes in her beloved nomadic village Dhompa in east Tibet.

When we think of Tibet, we think of Lhasa, a forbidden land, we think of the Chinese invasion, we think of monks in maroon robes. In A Home in Tibet, Tsering gives us a glimpse of life in remote Tibet and how the Chinese presence is changing their lives.

The people of Dhompa are drokpas, or nomads, high-pasture herders, who own yaks and sheep, and in this place of relentless beauty, where the green goes on and on, Tsering finds stirrings of change. And yet, the old who live there don?t seem to want more changes, while the young are restless.

?The idea of Tibet is where fable and fantasy coalesce,? writes Tsering. ?Tibet with its gentle monks, horse-riding warriors and reincarnate human-divinities is fantastic and far away, so much so that many people often forget it is an occupied country.?

This is exactly what writers like Tsering are attempting to do?keep Tibet alive in public memory.

Sudipta Datta is a freelancer