Leh, Jun 24: She fled Tibet in 1988, arrived in Ladakh as a refugee, and for 39 years has sat behind the same small counter in Leh’s main market—punching numbers into a calculator, the only way she knows to keep accounts for a business she built from scratch.
Sonam Dolma, now 62, was just 23 when she crossed into India during communal clashes between Buddhists and Muslims in Leh. Three decades later, she still calls herself a refugee.
“I came here in 1988. There were clashes. I fled from Tibet. I am still a refugee,” she told Kashmir Convener at her shop, surrounded by stacks of dry fruits and packaged goods.
Never educated—”not even for a day,” she says with a faint smile—Dolma has run her trade through decades of change. From importing makmal clothes from Nepal to now sourcing them through relatives visiting Hong Kong, she manages both procurement and sales on her own.
Her husband runs another shop in Leh town. Their three children—two daughters and a son—are all settled in Canada. One daughter works in government insurance.
Asked what Ladakh has given her, Dolma did not speak of property or documents. “Peace. That is the best thing. The people here don’t care that you are a refugee. We are from Ladakh. That is why we settled here. Otherwise, I could have gone somewhere else,” she said.
With no complaints and no demands, Dolma returned to her stall—calculator in hand—a quiet testament to a woman who turned displacement into survival, finding acceptance not in official papers, but in the marketplace that embraced her.
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