Whenever the spiritual and temporal leader of Tibet, the Dalai Lama, visits eastern or northeastern India, he makes it a point to stop at Kalimpong - the north Bengal town in the foothills of the Himalayas. Last week, when he visited the Tawang Monastery in Arunachal Pradesh, was an exception. Perhaps it had to do with the brouhaha raised by China over his visit, perhaps it was something else - one can't say for sure.

But that detour to a certain three-acre compound, up a hill and off Kalimpong's 8th Mile area is something the Dalai Lama doesn't like to miss. Inside that compound is a noodle factory and a single storey house - Takster House. Both factory and house belong to Gyalo Thondup, elder brother of the Dalai Lama - named Lhamo at birth. He is third of seven siblings and the spiritual guru is the fifth.

After the Dalai Lama, Thondup is perhaps modern Tibet's most important figure. Formerly chief of staff of the Tibetan government, Thondup is deeply versed in China's Tibet policy and has dealt with many top Chinese leaders on Tibet's autonomy until he retired in 1999.

The issue in a nutshell: China contends that Tibet is an intrinsic part of it; Tibetans, their homeland is an independent political entity. And representing the Tibetans - six million in China-occupied Tibet and 2,00,000 across India - in this claim is the Dalai Lama.

Thondup has a deeply lined octogenarian's face; it's tough to imagine that once upon a time in 1950 he used to be a key member of the Tibetan resistance movement. Two years ago, Thondup shared his extraordinary life experiences in the memoir, The Noodle Maker of Kalimpong.

Our meeting is somewhat serendipitous. I am browsing through the shelves of Blessings, a dusty little bookshop in the heart of Kalimpong, when the owner - one Girish Kaul - shows me the memoir. The red tagline on the cover and above the title reads "Brother of HH the Dalai Lama". Kaul hints he could arrange a meeting with the author if I buy a copy. I do, and he promptly scribbles down an address and draws a map. "Read the book and carry it with you to get it autographed by him," he says.

A hurried reading reveals why the memoir has ruffled so many feathers. It has next to no heroes. China's Communist leaders have been portrayed as villains and Tibetan aristrocrats, who accepted titles and cushy jobs from Chinese occupiers, as greedy. Thondup has also made no attempts to hide his contempt for Western secret intelligence services, especially the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

The next morning, after a brief uphill trek, I ring the doorbell at the turquoise entrance of Takster House. From the nearby St. Philomena Catholic Girls' School, a hubbub of praying floats about in the air.

The man ambling towards me with a walking stick looks like a carbon copy of the Dalai Lama - except for his head full of hair and spectacles. The conversation begins with China, but of course. "The current regime is too stubborn," says Thondup. "I had a series of talks with them, but they don't try to understand the Tibetan issue; neither do they want to understand the problems of other minorities in the country - the Uyghurs, the Manchus..."

Thondup's China odyssey began in 1945, when he was 17. He was sent from Tibet to China to be readied for his role as his brother's chief adviser on temporal matters. Under the patronage of Chiang Kai-shek, the Chinese nationalist leader, he studied Chinese history at Nanjing University. In fact, it was during this time that Thondup met Di Kyi Dolkar, a "pretty young [Chinese] girl with a beautiful smile". The two got married soon after.

The Communist victory in 1949, followed by the invasion of Tibet by the People's Liberation Army brought the curtains down on Thondup's China chapter. After a brief stopover in Hong Kong, he made his way to India where his life as a diplomatic go-between began. As he travelled all over the world on work, his wife made Kalimpong their home base and started the noodle factory.

The China link eventually cast its shadow on Thondup's equation with Tibet. At the time of his last visit in 2002, he was allowed to stay just a week. He met up with old friends. He says, "They said they missed the freedom of speech. Their movements are restricted, they are not allowed to visit their relatives in India."

Thondup believes things were not so bad when Deng Xiaoping headed the Communist Party in China. "Deng was most knowledgable about Tibet. He knew the sufferings of Tibetans." However, in a one-on-one meeting in 1979, Deng made one thing clear - complete independence for Tibet was non-negotiable.

Deng, according to Thondup, sincerely wanted the Dalai Lama to return to China and promised to restore his position in Tibet. All Tibetans in exile would also be welcome to return. "Quite surprisingly, Deng was amenable to a number of suggestions I made," he reminisces. He ordered the Chinese government to open the sealed India-China border so that Tibetan refugees from India could visit their relatives in their homeland. He also allowed a number of Tibetan teachers from India to travel and revive teaching of their native language. Young Tibetans were largely being taught in Chinese and the Tibetan language was on the verge of extinction.

Then Deng died.

With his death in 1997, Jiang Zemin took over the party reins. The talks, the agreements - all crumbled. Two years later, Thondup decided to hang his boots and settle down in Kalimpong. "The town is just across the border from Tibet and was then still the centre of Tibetan trade in India. I felt closer home here," he says.

Any enduring regrets? The biggest seems to be his decision to accept the CIA's military aid and training to raise guerillas against the Chinese regime in the early 1960s in Nepal. He believes this provoked the Chinese to kill thousands of Tibetans and stir up trouble between India and China that culminated in the Sino-Indian war two years later.

Now, all opportunities to open a dialogue between the Tibetan government in exile in India and China have closed. In today's reformist China, Beijing's grip on Tibet has tightened.

Despite everything, Thondup believes the Tibetans' struggle for independence will never die. In his memoir he mentions how his brother, the Dalai Lama, paid him a visit when he was ailing and insisted that he could not die. He writes: "'We have to return home together,' he told me."

A brother's sentimental appeal.