The Dragon's Voice

by Bunty Avieson

  Stories for the magazine start to arrive from all directions, written by editors on the newspaper and freelance writers. A couple of them are interesting personal stories about meeting the Kings; others cover aspects of Bhutanese culture. In a management meeting we settle on a name for the magazine – Faces of Bhutan – accompanied by the tagline ‘Extraordinary stories of everyday people’.

  Then we strike a major problem. Great stories, but the newspaper has no photos. It is a dreadful irony that tourists pour into the country with their Nikons and Leicas, taking beautiful photos that fill their albums at home, yet there are few photos in Bhutan available to us. There are no photo agencies or professional Bhutanese photographers. The newspaper’s photographer is self-taught, and his temperamental staff camera has only photos of MPs to go with newspaper stories. Tenzin says they will buy a decent SLR camera in Delhi and get someone to bring it across, but that will take time.

  So I look on the internet. Vogue Australia recently ran a fashion shoot set in Bhutan. Japanese photographer Kenro Izu is having an exhibition in New York of photos taken in Bhutan. Flickr is full of photos taken by tourists with good cameras. I email them all, requesting permission to publish their photos in a new magazine but explaining we have no budget to pay for them. I am astounded at the goodwill and selflessness that comes winging back to me. Kenro Izu, who is recognised as one of the world’s best photographers, uploads for us his whole exhibition about to go on display in the Rubin Museum of Art – a series of breathtaking black-and-white portraits of the Fifth King, monks and reincarnate lamas. The Vogue photographers are just as helpful, sending photos of Bhutanese life: a mass of monks draped across whitewashed monastery steps, a gaudily decorated truck, leering animal masks on display in a shop. Such generosity is not normal behaviour in the publishing world. There is something about this little country, nestled in the clouds, that creates fond feelings in everyone who visits. Normal rules of copyright and financial compensation need not apply. I love it.

  Still, we need more photos of the Kings. The features editor phones the palace to explain our problem, and two days later the secretary to the Fifth King arrives with the latest MacBook under his arm. He shows us slide after slide of intimate family moments: the Kings informally holding hands, sitting on matching thrones or inside private rooms at the palace; the Fifth King playing archery, posing with his dogs, wearing a bear fur hat and cuddling a little girl with a bamboo tepee on her head. They are all fantastic – the Fifth King is genetically blessed and seems unable to take a bad photo. But to my journalist’s eye, what is even better is that they are all new. Most shops and homes have the approved royal portraits on their walls, the same half-a-dozen or so formal poses. But these photos show the King and royal family as never seen before.

  The editors make a selection of 44 photos and it takes all my willpower to shut up and leave the decision to them. I know my place: as a foreigner, it would be inappropriate for me to join in this discussion about their King.

  Phuntsho hires Tashi, a graphic designer who works for the civil service by day and comes in late at night after I’ve gone home. I leave him piles of notes on a printout, and when I come in each morning there is a new page in my computer, beautifully laid out, ready to be edited.

  I try to understand the Bhutanese aesthetic, and Tashi and I produce four possible covers. I lay them out on Tenzin’s coffee table for the editors and management to choose. They all pounce on the same one, which shows the Fifth King cuddling a little girl. They explain that she is from the remote Layap tribe, one of the poorest in the country. When I see the image through their eyes, it is indeed the winning shot. The affection between the child and the King says it all.

  The finished Faces of Bhutan magazine is sent on a disc to Delhi to be printed on bright, white paper imported from Finland and trucked back to Thimphu. It is advertised in Bhutan Observer and sold in three Thimphu bookshops, as well as at the airport and a few tourist shops. It instantly creates a buzz.

  Druk Air wants hundreds of copies for their planes. Druk Seed Corporation phones to request 20 copies. Two Japanese tourists wander up the three flights of stairs of the Bhutan Observer building and into Phuntsho’s office, looking to buy copies of this magazine they keep hearing about. Government departments chase the advertising staff for copies. The office maid, who can’t speak English or read, asks for a magazine because she heard the sweeper had one. Phuntsho is delighted and tells her she is an important part of Bhutan Observer so of course she should have one.

  But we really know it is a success when the Fourth King’s secretary rings and says His Majesty would like a copy. He had been visiting his third Queen when he saw a copy lying on her table and thought it looked ‘interesting’.

  ‘We’ve never sent anything to the King before,’ says Phuntsho, who drops everything and personally drives up the winding road above Thimphu to deliver a magazine to the palace gates. She doesn’t stop smiling for a week.

  3

  Braying Donkeys

  Everywhere we go, people stare. Mal has been coming to Bhutan for 15 years and is used to it, and in the office I ceased to be exotic by the end of the first week. But Kathryn, as the only child with red hair and blue eyes at her school, is finding it harder to blend in. The other children tease her about the smell of her Vegemite sandwiches. A couple of kindy kids follow her into the toilet – all open cubicles – to see if she is the same under her kira as them, until Renee follows and shoos them out.

  People in the street reach out to touch Kathryn’s face, smiling and speaking to her kindly, but she hates it. She asks me not to sing in the car with the window down in case it draws further attention to us, and I am not allowed to pick her up from school unless I wear a kira and a black wig.

  Mal does his best to help. He puts the Vegemite away and asks her to describe what everyone else is eating. Chilli. Curry. Meat. Rice. He buys a flat skillet pan from the market and gets up early to make Indian-style chapattis for her lunch. He has never made them before, but having lived in India for 12 years and eaten his fair share, he thinks he can figure it out. He tries a little curry. Kathryn says it’s better than Vegemite sandwiches, but brings home her lunches untouched. Finally, they settle on fried rice. Mal buys a tiffin box and a plastic hand basket for her to carry it in, just like the other children do. And at the end of the school day he waits discreetly near the school gate, ready with a welcoming smile, but not too close or too visible.

  He helps with her homework and soon they can both draw the Bhutanese flag (orange and yellow with a black and white dragon), and name the national flower (blue poppy) and animal (takin). Kathryn learns to draw the four tools of a farmer – axe, hammer, shovel and bucket – and that pushing and shouting are ‘bad habits’, while helping and being quiet are ‘good habits’.

  At the office Phuntsho works hard to get me to wear a kira and I give it my best shot, really I do. Kathryn, by now skilled at dressing in her own kira, helps me into it. But whenever I wear it, well-meaning Bhutanese feel obliged to help. As I move through the day, people – from reporters to bureaucrats visiting the office to strangers in the street – step forward to adjust me. I feel gauche and realise that no matter what I do, to the Bhutanese I don’t look right. I settle on a compromise. Two days a week I struggle into the kira, and resign myself to being prodded, while the rest of the week I wear pants with knee-length Indian tunic-style shirts. This isn’t nearly as glamorous as the kira, but it is comfortable and no-one feels compelled to poke at me.

  The men in the office all wear ghos, beautifully tailored and vividly coloured, with a crisp white undershirt. The starched white cuffs fold back over the sleeves of the gho. Dressing in a gho is as complicated as trying to drape a kira. It is an oversized robe that must be folded, tucked and belted to create a pocket at the front and two knife-edge pleats at the back. Phuntsho says most wives help their husbands dress each morning. Sometimes I see younger m
en in the office, those without wives, fixing each other’s pleats at the start of the day. It always makes me smile.

  In their national dress, the Bhutanese men look impossibly stylish in a way that men in the West never do, except perhaps a Scotsman in a dress kilt. A dinner suit doesn’t come close. At Bhutan Observer, the staff wear their ghos with varying degrees of elegance. Some fuss with their hems, to preserve their modesty as they sit. Others plonk themselves down with gusto – bare knees akimbo above the low table, underpants on clear display.

  My news writing classes start slowly. The biggest challenge is getting the reporters and editors to turn up. It’s nothing personal. It would seem that few meetings are ever fully attended. Nor are people punctual. No-one else seems surprised by this behaviour, so I try to go along with it, smiling endlessly, which is what everyone else around me seems to be doing. But inside I feel like I’m operating through a fog.

  I’m told the Bhutanese are deferential to authority. In her memoir Beyond the Sky and the Earth: A Journey into Bhutan, Canadian schoolteacher Jamie Zappa writes that children learn not to question their parents, teachers, Kings, government officials or superiors of any other type. I imagine what I must look like to the reporters. I represent management, I’m the same age as their parents and I’m standing in front of a whiteboard. I’m also a chillip, which is slang for ‘foreigner’. While no Bhutanese will translate it for me precisely, I suspect it’s not entirely complimentary, reflecting their mixed views of foreigners. We seem to represent sophistication and modernity, but also moral decay.

  All these factors make for a stilted start. In our first classes I do a lot of talking while they look at me blankly. They don’t contribute or engage in discussion, but sit passively, their relief obvious when our time is up and they can file out the door.

  Before I left Australia, the then editor-in-chief of Bhutan Observer had emailed me the training program he believed the staff needed. Hard news, soft news, how to write news style, how to write a feature, how to prepare for an interview, how to write a profile, where to find stories, establishing beats, and so on. I’ve come prepared with notes, handouts and writing exercises I’ve used when teaching journalism students in Sydney, but with the material adapted for Bhutanese sensibilities. John Smith waving a gun in a Sydney shopping centre becomes Tashi Dorji waving his knife in Thimphu’s vegetable market. The journalists and editors practise writing a news lead from these facts. They are polite, but obviously uninterested.

  It is only when I ask them to write a lead about a fictitious government minister that I see a spark. A minister? They won’t talk to us, says a reporter. Bhutanese government ministers won’t answer questions. I ask why not. The change in the room is palpable: the reporters and editors drop their pens in their enthusiasm to join in. The reporters are struggling with access to ministers, as the MPs refuse to talk to them – at all. One reporter tells of how a minister ordered her to leave a public meeting, and how humiliated she felt to be singled out and publicly chastised just for doing her job.

  Freedom of the press has been written into the new constitution, and the Fourth King has made it clear that part of the role of the new newspapers is to hold the government accountable. And yet … the Bhutanese have lived for centuries with a rigid social hierarchy. Even ordinary people share the view that reporters should not question their superiors. Democracy or no democracy, it just is not polite.

  Since the 17th century, the Bhutanese have adhered to a code of behaviour called the driglam namzha. It was created by Zhabdrung Rinpoche, the founding father of Bhutan. Believed to be the reincarnation of a famous monk, Zhabdrung Rinpoche was made abbot of a Tibetan monastery, but fled to Bhutan in 1616, aged just 22, when the ruler of the region decided to install his own candidate. At that time Bhutan was largely lawless, riven by violent tribal feuds. Zhabdrung Rinpoche sought to unite the country, both politically and culturally. As the reincarnation of a revered Buddhist master, he had the moral authority to do so. In just three decades he founded a national government; imposed law and order; designed the national dress, including different coloured shawls to denote one’s social standing; created a new style of architecture; choreographed lama dances to be performed at new religious festivals called tshechus; and established rules of behaviour for civil society. This code of conduct for everyday life evolved out of monastic vows and cover the whole gamut of individual behaviour, from the Buddhist ideal of striving to be aware of one’s own state of mind to showing good manners, maintaining social harmony and always respecting superiors.

  The arrival of democracy – and the media – means that this social hierarchy is beginning to break down. When journalists wearing humble white shawls ask questions of government ministers in their superior orange shawls, the formality of centuries is turned on its head. The reporters seem to have adapted to the changing dynamic and are asking the right questions of government, but some of the MPs are having trouble with the new arrangement. Just because the country is now a democracy doesn’t mean VIPs are happy to be questioned by people they consider socially inferior. Many government ministers are also inexperienced in their roles and don’t feel confident under public scrutiny.

  I see the government attitude myself. A few weeks after arriving, a senior civil servant from the Ministry of Information and Communications invites me to his office for tea and asks whether I think it is ethical for a journalist to call a minister on Sunday when he is at his child’s birthday. It’s a loaded question and I’m immediately wary. This is the man who approved my visa. I know how sensitive Bhutan is about foreigners bringing their grubby ways to sully this new media industry. Phuntsho went to great lengths to assure this man and this department that I would be an ‘in-house consultant’ who would not influence the editorial line of the newspaper. This genteel tea in his office feels like a follow-up interview to check on me now that I’m in the country. I reply that I think it is ethical, though perhaps not polite. He seems satisfied.

  The mood of our writing workshops improves as we start to explore the specific needs of the reporters. How can they form relationships with ministers? How can they get the ministers to trust them without compromising their own integrity? We develop ideas for stories that are non-threatening – profiling a different minister each edition about what they have done that week, and so on. The discussions become lively and interesting.

  We have a session about finding stories, and talk about what makes news in Bhutan. There are familiar topics, such as accidents on the main highway, forest fires and fuel prices, as well as distinctly Bhutanese issues: the royal family, tshechus, yak diseases, potato harvests, stray dogs, elephants trampling maize plantations, and Gross National Happiness.

  My favourite part of the week is Monday morning, when Bhutan Observer holds its news conference to plan the next issue. The conferences are held in the grand, wood-lined boardroom on the top floor, signalling their importance in the scheme of things. As editor-in-chief, Needrup leads the meetings, which are also attended by the three section editors, six reporters, the political cartoonist, a photographer and me. We sit at tables set up in a big U, watched over by dignified photographs of all five Kings. The kitchen staff bring trays of sweet tea, then withdraw. On auspicious days, the sound of trumpets and horns wafts in from nearby homes or building sites where monks are conducting pujas.

  In this forum the reporters and editors are outspoken and informed. They gossip, argue and thrash around story ideas, giving me a front-row seat to everything that’s happening in the kingdom. Watching them, I feel extraordinarily privileged to be seeing their country through their eyes. Needrup says that working on the newspaper makes you see Bhutan as it is, not how you might like it to be, and at the news conferences I start to glimpse the complexity of this country. Corruption, domestic violence and the economy are discussed alongside miracles and the supernatural.

  One day the discussion moves from the government voting to
give itself a pay hike, and what that will mean for civil servants and poor villagers, to the rolong – tall zombies who ‘come at night from the dead place to perform mischief’. A reporter tells of new rolong activity in a particular village where she has relatives. She explains to me that many rural homes have small doors to stop the rolong entering their homes. ‘Rolong can’t bend at the knees,’ she whispers.

  A reporter suggests a story for the features pages on men in Thimphu wearing makeup. Her younger brother and his friends are copying the Korean rock stars they see on cable television. ‘They’re called “metrosexuals”,’ she announces. Needrup is bewildered. Men wearing makeup? Why would they do that?

  He writes the stories on the whiteboard. Government pay hike, civil servants’ pay rates, effect on village poverty, men and makeup, and rolongs. The traditional face of Bhutan and the modern: it’s the sort of balance he strives for in each edition. He needs all the stories by Thursday to make this week’s edition, which goes on sale on Friday.

  Although just 31, Needrup has the demeanour of a stern grandfather. When the reporters talk about the new nightclubs springing up around Thimphu, he looks baffled. He works long hours and goes home to his wife and young children. He talks about burying his head under the blankets to drown out his five-year-old daughter’s Hindi or Western music. ‘Why can’t she listen to nice Dzongkha music?’ he asks. When he tries to get her to listen to the traditional music of Jigme Drukpa, a Bhutanese hero, she clutches her belly and moans. He shakes his head with dismay.

  When people describe Needrup, they often use the word ‘solid’. He is tall and square-jawed, with the high cheekbones typical of the country’s east, where he was born. He speaks slowly, considering each word, which adds to his sense of gravitas.