The Dragon's Voice

by Bunty Avieson

  An expat friend warns me to be careful. Foreigners are tolerated, but rock the boat and your visa will be quietly cancelled. It could also draw unwelcome attention to Dolma. The refugee camps are a thorny issue. So is citizenship. So are foreigners.

  A new RENEW caseworker tells us that Dolma can apply for citizenship, but it will take 20 years from the day of her application. And she must pass a written Dzongkha test. Dolma never went to school and, like half the people in Thimphu and three-quarters of Bhutan, speaks little Dzongkha. It seems an impossible and unfair hurdle.

  But the good news is that her children are learning Dzongkha at school and, with their father’s level-four citizenship, they can sit the test at 16 and be registered as Bhutanese citizens. Level five. At least Dolma won’t have to go to Israel to fund their education.

  The caseworker tells us there is one way that Dolma can sidestep the 20-year wait. A marriage certificate. Unfortunately, Dolma doesn’t have one. Like most Bhutanese, she and Arjun just set up house together. Wedding ceremonies are for rich people. But if she can get the headman, the gup, in Arjun’s village to write down that to his knowledge they have been married for the past 16 years, it will suffice.

  A few days after returning, Dolma tells me that Arjun is very, very sorry for putting her in jail. He knows he went too far. He is ashamed. He has promised to stop drinking and assures her that if he breaks his promise, she can throw him out. Dolma says she believes him. She wants to give him another chance. It is better to take her husband back – for the children and her citizenship.

  She asks if I am disappointed with her, and my heart sinks. Dolma was born here, has lived her whole life here, but feels more secure in an abusive marriage than out of it, on her own. Her choices seem so woefully limited. I do not share her optimism, but it is not up to me. I tell her I think she looks like a woman in control and that has to be good.

  I have had virtually nothing to do with domestic violence in my own life and yet I discover I seem to know an awful lot about it. When Dolma says Arjun will change, a voice in my head says ‘it won’t happen’. I wonder how I know that. It seems that women’s rights and the cycle of abuse is so much a part of the Australian media landscape – through advertisements and newspaper stories, even Hollywood movies – that I have absorbed much about it by osmosis. Dolma didn’t even know it had a name.

  I cross my fingers and hope that I am wrong.

  For the first month Arjun stays sober. Each day Mal and I breathe a sigh of relief when we see Dolma walking into Tashi Pelkhil village with the other helpers. After two months Dolma quietly asks if she can hide her jewellery under our mattress. Mal and I watch on, our hearts in our mouths.

  Then one night, three months after her husband put her in jail, Dolma phones Mal on his mobile. She is hysterical. Arjun is drunk and going berserk. Her daughters have fled to a neighbour’s home.

  Mal drives the ten minutes to her apartment. Dolma opens the door, her face puffy. Arjun is immediately polite, half bowing to Mal, both hands out, palms upward in Bhutanese greeting. But it doesn’t last long. He’s too drunk to maintain the charade. He launches himself at Dolma, calling her a slut, but Mal steps between them.

  Arjun tries to talk to him. ‘My wife is a slut,’ he tells Mal. ‘She has slept with other men.’

  We know a little of Dolma’s story and it is not pretty. She was 12 when she left her parents and moved in with a rich family as a maid. She was not a virgin when she left, some years later. She was about 18 when she married Arjun and has always been faithful to him, but when he drinks he accuses her of sleeping around.

  ‘How would you feel if your wife had slept with other men?’ Arjun screams at Mal.

  ‘I know she has,’ says Mal. ‘So what?’

  Arjun stops dead in his tracks, mouth open, staring.

  ‘Before she met me, she slept with other men,’ continues Mal. ‘Is that what this is about? After 16 years of marriage you’re upset about a man she may have slept with before you were married? So you hit her?’

  Mal calls him a ‘pathetic little man’.

  Arjun objects. ‘You have no right to interfere.’

  ‘I’m here protecting your wife and your daughters from you,’ says Mal coldly.

  Arjun ignores him and lunges at Dolma, calling her a slut and worse, much worse. Mal steps in front. Arjun is small, drunk and angry. Mal is over six feet tall, sober and deadly calm. It’s not an even match. Arjun bounces off Mal’s chest. Without getting into a full fistfight, they keep up this strange boxing bout around the living room with Mal keeping Arjun away from both Dolma and the kitchen – where there are knives – until the police arrive.

  They take Arjun to the station and lock him up. Then they take statements from Mal, Dolma’s friend, Dolma and the two girls. One daughter tells of how she locked herself in the toilet and her father tried to bash down the door. She says she was very scared.

  Dolma sits with the girls, helping them make their statements. Mal finally stumbles home at 1.30 am, exhausted. Kathryn has taken his spot in our bed, so he gets into hers. His feet stick out the end and his head is on her elephant pillow. Mickey Mouse dances across the doona that covers him. It’s a different version of masculinity from Arjun’s, and the sight brings a lump to my throat.

  We don’t see Dolma for a few days, and when she comes, she’ll talk to me but cannot bring herself even to look at Mal. She tells me she is grateful to him but so shamed by what her husband told him. The language, the insults. She is humiliated. I try to reassure her that Mal doesn’t think that way.

  Dolma says she feels supported and protected – by Mal and me, the police, the girls; even Arjun’s parents have sided with her against their son. But the ramifications of Arjun’s arrest are a disaster. There is no going back this time and, with a divorce pending, no way she can get a marriage certificate. Without that, Dolma cannot get citizenship.

  I find the caseworker at RENEW starts to be less helpful. She says Dolma is committing a crime just by living here. Every day she doesn’t register with Immigration, she is committing an illegal act. But, I argue, if she does go to Immigration, they could deport her. Take her to the Indian border and deposit her on the other side, away from her children, never allowed back again.

  To me, it’s only a matter of paperwork, but it becomes clear that the caseworker sees it differently. In her eyes Dolma is not Bhutanese. The fact that she has lived here since birth is irrelevant.

  ‘You don’t want illegal immigrants in your country, do you?’ she asks me, with a distinct edge to her voice.

  I bite my tongue.

  If only we could prove she has been here all these years. I mention the family for whom Dolma worked as a 12-year-old. One family member is a retired government minister. Would a letter from him help?

  The caseworker looks horrified. It is illegal to employ an underage worker. They would be admitting to a crime.

  What if they said she merely lived with their family?

  ‘It is a crime to have an illegal immigrant live with you.’ She says Dolma’s only hope is a marriage certificate.

  I explain the marriage has broken down irretrievably. The caseworker sighs deeply, as if Dolma has done this deliberately to irritate her, then says she will need to seek further advice.

  And so begins months of advice and counter-advice, all of it bewildering. Dr Chophel, the head of the NCWC, is kindly and goes out of his way to help. Dolma has tears in her eyes when she recounts how well he treated her when she visited him in his office. I feel humbled that it is such a novelty for her to be shown respect from an important person.

  But for every person on Dolma’s side, there is another who treats her like a criminal. She travels for days across the country to visit a gup who might be able to give her a piece of paper that would confirm she exists, only to have him refuse to see her.

  Seeing the w
orld through Dolma’s eyes changes something irrevocably. I am shocked by her precarious identity, her disempowerment because she cannot read, her lack of rights as a woman in an underclass in a third-world country.

  Suddenly the stories in Bhutan Observer affect me more. It is not just the plight of the women, desperate though that often is. It is rural poverty. Families going without food in winter; parents sending their five-year-olds to walk through snow for two hours to get to school; nuns as young as seven going to the toilet in the forest at night, terrified by the wild animals; boy monks who die from malnutrition; children working in fields or as maids in rich homes; and Layap girls being married off at 12.

  They are all Dolma and Dolma is me, and somehow it is all more real and heartbreaking than it was a month ago. The stories in the newspaper hurt in a way they didn’t before. I feel raw and angry and humbled and wretched. It is too much. I want to go home. And yet I cannot imagine ever going home, to real-estate prices and culture wars and reality TV.

  These feelings arise in all the foreigners who stay here beyond a two-week trek. They see what the tourists don’t and inevitably it comes as a shock. A punch in the guts.

  The narrative of Bhutan is Shangri-La and Gross National Happiness. It is mystical, utopian and an antidote to the errors of the modern world. It is what the Bhutanese want their country to be and it is what I want it to be. When the myth is shattered, it hurts.

  Fiona tells me the tragic story of two young teenage girls at RENEW who are pregnant as a result of incest. Their mothers have disowned them and they cannot return to their villages. They are just schoolgirls.

  She describes a woman beaten by her husband so severely she is now brain-damaged. Like Dolma, she did not have citizenship and he thought she could not complain. Lieutenant Karma set him straight. Men are not allowed to beat anyone, citizen or non-citizen.

  A nurse tells of a young woman who died a slow agonising death in the men’s ward after an overdose of paracetamol tablets. Her husband had taken a second wife. When the hospital telephoned the husband, the new wife told them to go away.

  The stories go on. This is not Shangri-La. It is as flawed as any other country. And, as foreigners, we are not supposed to see these things or interfere. We are supposed to admire the country for its ideal of Gross National Happiness, then we are supposed to go home, back to our bloated first-world lives.

  18

  Two Remarkable Women

  The role of women in Bhutan is complicated and contradictory. Inheritance law means that daughters generally inherit the family farm, while sons are left to fend for themselves. But in positions of authority, women are poorly represented. There are no women in the 11-member government cabinet, and just six in the 25-member National Council. The ones who do make it to positions of authority, such as Lieutenant Karma Rigzin, are highly respected.

  Other powerful women in Bhutan include the pilot Ugyen Dema, the judge Namgay Peldon, and Bhutan Broadcasting Service’s managing director, Pema Choden. She is an ex-diplomat, married to a former monk who gave up his vows and robes to be with her. He now takes tourists on treks while she runs BBS, managing the staff and budgets. She has launched an online radio station and speaks knowledgeably at communications forums around the globe.

  But the most important woman in the whole country is the legendary Neten Zangmo. The Fourth King appointed Neten Zangmo to the toughest job in Bhutan – the head of the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC). Part of her job is to re-educate the public about what constitutes corruption now that their country is a democracy. She regularly runs newspaper advertising campaigns that explain different forms of corruption. Certain cultural traditions, such as nepotism, ignoring illegal acts to save face and giving gifts to officials, are no longer acceptable. In fact, they are against the law.

  Neten Zangmo and her team publish the ACC Quarterly News Update, a two-page newsletter inserted in the newspapers. It includes a column by an eminent spiritual master explaining how karma works on the corrupt.

  Like everything else to do with democracy, the new rules of business and civic responsibility require some getting used to. According to Bhutanese friends, practices that Neten Zangmo says are no longer allowed are so entrenched in the society that people won’t know how to do business without them. Others will disregard the laws, believing themselves to be above them, which is probably understandable because until democracy, people of high status often were above the law. Not anymore. Such practices now have a name – corruption. But in this rigidly hierarchical society, not everyone thinks corruption is a big deal. It is the way things have always been done. An ACC survey on how the people feel about corruption shows that while it is prevalent – particularly bribes and nepotism among government employees – the Bhutanese do not think it is so bad. While the Fourth King, the Fifth King, the government and Neten Zangmo take it very seriously, the community shows remarkable tolerance. Bhutan Observer reports that corruption ‘does not carry a heavy social stigma in Bhutan, according to an Anti-Corruption Commission survey. To be known as a corrupt person in Bhutan is not generally viewed as a great or lasting shame.’

  This tolerance comes partly from a culture of unquestioning respect for superiors and partly from Buddhist beliefs. Everyone will reap their own karma. An old Dzongkha saying is, ‘There is no person without faults; there is no tree without knots.’ Buddhism doesn’t carry notions of revenge or punishment. Instead, it encourages compassion for those human afflictions, such as greed and ignorance, which we all have. When leaders are caught out, many Bhutanese prefer to leave them be, not shame them further.

  But Neten Zangmo has declared war on corruption and she is fearless. This petite, bespectacled woman faces off against business leaders, bureaucrats and government ministers. She has taken some of Bhutan’s most high-profile people to court and made powerful enemies.

  It is a lonely job. Every day she faces abuse and threats from people she is investigating. But she has even more powerful supporters. After Bhutan Times publishes a particularly bruising round of criticism from some powerful businessmen, the Fifth King steps in. He doesn’t say anything directly or interfere in any way: rather, he bestows on her the red scarf, publicly applauding her tenacity and integrity. It is the equivalent of a knighthood and comes with a medal and the title of Dasho. She is the country’s first female Dasho.

  The Fifth King’s support is sublimely effective. Newspapers immediately run long profile pieces celebrating the achievements of this remarkable woman. Readers write in with their Neten Zangmo stories. Bhutan Times calls her the ‘Heart Daughter of Bhutan’. And the businessmen quietly shut up.

  Neten Zangmo is like a friend to Bhutan Observer, having been a member of the initial conclave to determine the newspaper’s direction. She is part of the ongoing discussion with the proprietors about how the newspaper can best exemplify Gross National Happiness. In news conferences the editors speak of her reverentially.

  Neten Zangmo has been a legend in our home for years. Mal has admired her over his two decades of visiting Bhutan with Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche. When Mal first met her she was the principal of a technical college. He thought she was gutsy and fun then. Mal introduced me to her at a party in 2002 during the making of Travellers & Magicians. She sat on the floor, explaining the country’s constitution, which she was helping to draft. She was formidably intelligent, but also cheeky and cheerful. After the Fifth King awarded her the red scarf, Kuensel wrote, ‘She is seltzer with a lifetime fizz … She is the antithesis of the packaged leader – irrepressible, candid, spontaneous, funny, feisty, independent, unfashionable and strangely charismatic – a woman oddly at peace with herself in one of the country’s most sensitive institutions. She is, clearly, an original.’

  Befitting her esteemed position as a Dasho and the head of the ACC, Neten Zangmo has a toilet attached to her office. But in keeping with her own principles, she insists on cleaning it herself. She
often features in Bhutan Observer’s political cartoons, usually depicted wearing a kira and Nikes, chasing some corrupt person down the street.

  Another Bhutanese woman who makes her way into the pages of Bhutan Observer exists at the other end of the social scale. Rita lives with her husband and four children in a toilet block opposite the newspaper’s office. I watch them from my window. When I find out the small white-washed building I pass every day is both their home and a public toilet, I am shocked, but also fascinated by the family.

  The mother is voluptuous in vivid Indian saris, and has a jolly sense of humour. She washes the children in a bucket of cold water on the footpath while they wail and scream. She hangs wet laundry on the street fence as her children play in the gutter.

  One daughter, who is about the same age as Kathryn, greets me every morning. She is a chatterbox, but not in English. Even though I understand little of what she is saying, I look forward to seeing her. Her smile lights up the street.

  I start bringing her small gifts – colouring pencils and, as it gets colder, some of Kathryn’s winter clothes. I feel ridiculously pleased when I see her wearing the mittens and boots, striding up and down the street pretending to be a soldier. I think that means she likes them.

  Needrup announces in our news conference that he wants profiles about real people to balance all the coverage of ‘important’ people, and I suggest the family in the toilet. Everyone in the room immediately knows who I mean. We all pass them every morning. Needrup likes the idea and appoints Metho Dema, a sweet, dreamy 21-year-old reporter, to do the story. She lets me tag along.

  We go after lunch and discover that the family is having a siesta. Rita, the mother, doesn’t mind our intrusion. This is a public toilet and they have visitors all day.