A Baby in a Backpack to Bhutan

by Bunty Avieson

  It is here that Mal brings me to continue our conversation and courtship. The man’s got class. It is a divine idyll of unsurpassed beauty and simplicity. He buys two bottles of Coke from a shop along the way and points out a grassy patch, where we sit down to enjoy the passing parade.

  For the Indian women in the fields, this is the busiest part of their day and they are bent double carrying huge cane baskets on their back as they pick the young tea shoots, the best part of the bush. Dressed in their colourful saris they smile and chat as they work, sometimes stopping to stare at Mal and me, curious but friendly. In another field a young man manoeuvres a bull and wooden plough over the dirt, which is full of hard clumps of clay. It looks exhausting.

  When darkness falls everyone makes their way back to their homes for dinner. As Mal and I walk back to the labrang, alongside the high brick walls of Dzongsar Institute, the air erupts with the ferocious noise of hundreds of men yelling and screaming. It sounds to me like all 350 monks are involved in the most aggressive and bloody of footy matches. Mal finds that idea highly amusing. He takes my hand and leads me through the dark to an unlocked back gate. I’m a little shocked that we’re going in there – inside the monastery. Mal obviously knows his way around, which I find only partly reassuring.

  ‘Is this okay?’ I ask. ‘Me being a woman, I mean?’

  He finds this even funnier and assures me the monks won’t all go gaga at the sight of my unbridled womanliness.

  We walk down some stairs, up a path, around a bend and out onto a grassed courtyard overlooking a huge floodlit quadrangle. The sight almost beggars belief and it takes me ages to make sense of what I’m seeing. The area is crowded with hundreds of monks yelling and berating each other, their faces fierce and animated, hands waving about wildly, even threateningly, while others stand by listening, frowning or sometimes laughing and cheering. It is bedlam, a cacophony of noise. I’m stupefied. What on earth is going on?

  Conversation is impossible in the midst of so much sound, but gradually I realise there is some sort of order to what is happening. The monks are sitting or crouching in circles of up to ten men, with occasional pairs. In the centre of each circle are two men, one standing and yelling at the other, clapping his hands as he stands over his crouching opponent. The clapping isn’t applause. It’s aggressive and intimidatory as the monk slaps one hand over the other, making the palms connect loudly. In some of the circles the opponent is physically cowering. It’s an arresting sight that reminds me of gladiator movies where groups of bare-chested men stand around cheering and egging the fighters on as they wrestle each other to the ground.

  I find out later that the monks were debating, testing themselves against each other and honing their skills of philosophical thought and analysis. This institute is renowned throughout the subcontinent for the erudition and sharp intellect of its students. With its nine-year degree course for a masters of philosophy, Dzongsar produces some of the most skilled debaters of Buddhist philosophy.

  The debates are conducted with one monk expounding his theory. Every time he makes a point, he swipes his hand across his palm, the physical equivalent of ‘so be it’. The opponent listens respectfully, then when it’s his turn, he leaps to his feet and pursues those lines of thought, while onlookers indicate their approval or disapproval. The monks love this form of word play and dance of ideas. Even Tibetan laypeople, while speaking the language, cannot necessarily follow the abstract issues being discussed.

  Debating competitions are held throughout the year at various monasteries across India where the very best pit their wits against each other. Noise and energy are features of Tibetan education at all levels. In the schools the children learn by memorisation and recitation – the more voice they give, the more they please their teacher.

  Walking past monasteries we hear the young boys, some whose voices have not yet broken, yelling the Tibetan prayers, playfully competing with each other to be loudest. We don’t understand a word but their enthusiasm is evident and I find myself smiling along.

  The next morning Mal takes me into the kitchen of Dzongsar Institute where meals are prepared for the 350 monks. It is about the size of my own small kitchen back in Sydney, and not nearly as well equipped.

  Mal is designing a new kitchen for the institute and updates the monk, who is the head chef and speaks good English, on when the fittings will arrive and what to expect. The monk can hardly believe his ears. What Mal describes is utter luxury.

  He has ordered six enormous 250-litre steel pots that will be connected to a huge steam generator in the basement. Each pot has a side lever so that one monk can effortlessly pour the contents – rice, dhal, tea and whatever meat or vegetable dish is being prepared that day – into smaller steel pots, which come with a trolley to deliver them to the table. The trolleys will perfectly match the height of three gas burners.

  The monk’s eyes grow larger and larger.

  To top it all off there’ll be an oven big enough to steam hundreds of momos at a time. These are the traditional dough dumplings filled with meat or vegetables, a bit like dim sims only much tastier.

  All of this is being made by a company in Bangalore, south India, a five-day drive away by truck. When it is finished the monk and his four helpers will move from a gas ring in a lean-to with no running water, to a custom-designed industrial kitchen. Their delight is infectious and we leave with their laughter ringing in our ears.

  In every possible way Bir is a world away from my life. Lovely to visit but all too soon the two weeks are up and it’s time to go home. Back to my job at New Idea and circulation figures, celebrity dramas and battles for stories. And time to say goodbye to Mal.

  A few weeks after returning home Mal suddenly appears on my doorstep in Sydney. Just wanted to say hi, he says. Can only stay five days. We both know it’s serious. We don’t even think about the complications our lives might offer.

  A month later we both have business in Europe. It seems the universe is being helpful and we make the most of it, managing to combine our trips. Mal meets me in London for my appointments, then I travel with him to Motovun, a tiny medieval town in Croatia, where he is presenting The Cup at a four-day film festival.

  Friends are more than a little alarmed that suddenly not only am I out of the office – enough of a shock in itself – but I’m wandering the world, going to obscure places with a man they just can’t get a handle on. One friend emails me because she’s heard that I’m going out with an Indian refrigerator repairman. Another tells me she too wants to go to India and give out kitchens to the poor. They don’t understand anything about this enigmatic man who has stolen my heart.

  ‘Yes, but what does he do?’ they ask.

  ‘He works for a Bhutanese lama.’

  ‘You’ve gone mad.’

  Maybe.

  At the same time that my personal life is taking such an unexpected and happy turn, in the most glorious piece of synchronicity, a wonderful opportunity opens up professionally.

  I come home from Motovun to news from literary agent Selwa Anthony that the half-finished manuscript for a novel, which I had slipped into her handbag at a work lunch one day, has been picked up by a major publishing house. They don’t just like it, they are offering an advance to finish it and write a second one.

  The world really has gone mad. Suddenly I’m being offered a career beyond magazines, one I have dreamed of since I was a child, one that I can do while travelling the world with a certain six-foot-two man with no fixed address but a very fancy Italian coffee machine. I tell my boss I quit. I’m off to write books. He gives me a sideways look, and says he’ll give me six months’ paid leave, enough time to get this madness out of my system.

  Even better – I’m being offered a safety net. I’m not so blinded by love that I don’t realise I’m throwing away a perfectly good, well-paying career for the vagaries of life as a writer on the road, and with a man I have known just four months. I’m not even sure I can finish the bo
ok. Writing it at home for fun is one thing, but turning it into a book for publication, to be read by other people ... oh lordy.

  But how will I ever know if I don’t give it a try, I tell myself. Publishing houses don’t just hand out book contracts every day, and such an opportunity may never come again.

  Three weeks later, while the rest of the world is flying into Sydney for the Olympic Games, I catch one of the empty aeroplanes out, to join Mal in Canada where he’s wearing his architect’s cap and working just outside Vancouver. A more dramatic contrast to the world of magazines I can’t imagine.

  The Sea to Sky Retreat Center comprises a number of timber cabins set on forty acres of wild, pristine Canadian wilderness. The centre is built around the vast mirror-like Daisy Lake. In the distance loom the snow-covered mountains of Whistler and Blackcomb.

  There are no telephones, TV, radio or newspapers, not even a whole lot of conversation as the few other people that are here are on silent retreat.

  While they study and do their meditations in their quarters and Mal plays lumberjack outside, I sit in a cosy cabin, my mind back in my Sydney apartment where my book is set. We all meet up for a quiet lunch then go our separate ways again until dinnertime.

  It is the perfect way to disengage from magazines and throw myself into writing.

  After a few months Mal has to be back in Bir to oversee the installation of the new kitchen so we return to India. It is January and bitterly cold. And quiet. Most of the Tibetans are away selling their hand-knitted woolly jumpers and the monks are on holiday. There’s just a handful of people left behind, the stray dogs and us.

  The truck with the kitchen fittings doesn’t arrive and each day brings a new, more outrageous story. It’s lost somewhere in the middle of India, says the company manager by telephone from Bangalore. ‘We found the vehicle but the driver got drunk and wandered off’ is the next excuse. And: ‘The truck hit a pothole and has lost half its undercarriage, but your kitchen is okay.’

  Finally the delivery truck limps into Bir and the gleaming steel pots are unloaded, along with trolleys, huge gas burners and the momo oven. The handful of monks left at the institute turn out to watch and cheer. Mal walks through the huge empty room that will house the new kitchen, listening to the head chef explain where he wants it all to go. He has had plenty of time to think about it and has some very definite ideas.

  While Mal talks kitchens I finish the final chapter of my book, a month ahead of its deadline. Soon we’ll be heading back to Sydney so I can hand it in to the publishers and resign properly from New Idea. I’m not looking forward to it. Giving me paid leave was a pretty supportive gesture, and I’m hoping my bosses won’t be too annoyed at my decision.

  Six months is a long time in magazines. I’ve missed Tom and Nicole’s split, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas’s wedding, and who knows how many lovers for Fergie and Andrew. I discover also that my boss (the General Manager) and his boss (the Managing Director) have both left the company and I can’t find anyone to resign to. There’s a new Editor hot to trot in the wings and no-one seems at all fussed that Iwon’t be back. I’m not sure they even remember me. I’m off the hook.

  Before we have unpacked, a Sunday gossip column runs a small piece claiming that I’m dating the godson of the Dalai Lama, which comes as news to Mal. A few days later a columnist phones a girlfriend of mine to ask if it’s true that I’ve shaved my head, cut all the legs off my furniture and will only wear orange. She laughs so hard she falls off her chair. When finally she picks herself up and composes herself she thanks him for the best laugh she has had in a long time. She tells him I don’t have the cheekbones to go bald, orange makes me look dead and just the night before, she enjoyed way too many wines sitting on my couch and the only things legless were her and me.

  After years of being way too interested in other people’s private lives, it seems kind of fair that mine should come out looking so bizarre. That would be that karma thing.

  2

  Two Becomes Three

  JUNE 2001

  I’m perched on the edge of the bed looking at Mal with a mixture of fear, anticipation and excitement. The little purple ball in a glass vial, the size of my little finger, is doing its thing in the bathroom. It’s 1.50 pm. We have ten minutes to see if it turns pink.

  It is suddenly quiet in our bedroom overlooking the main street in Bir. The labrang we stayed in last year is full so these are our temporary quarters – two rooms on top of the telephone shop run by the deaf-mute Indian man. There is a momentary lull in the endless barrage of noise – no tractor trolleys thundering past on their way to collect the day’s pickings from the tea plantations, no barking dogs, and even the rhythmic chanting of hundreds of monks from the surrounding monasteries is momentarily absent. It is as if, like us, everything is temporarily suspended in the sultry heat of a summer afternoon.

  I’m aware of the intense worry on Mal’s face and my own frantically beating heart. We are a bit stunned at the idea and have just ten minutes to prepare ourselves. We’d talked about this possibility, but only as an abstract concept.

  Something’s going on. I can feel it in my breasts. They hurt. And I’m out of breath. Just walking up the slight hill to lunch at the Khyentse labrang is exhausting. After doing it happily for weeks, now I have to stop for a little rest en route. And I feel kind of hungover, which is really odd because I haven’t had a drink since a week ago. That was when we treated ourselves to a weekend at a hotel in Dharamsala – three hours’ drive west – and overindulged in room service, beer and TV. Our life in the little monastery village of Bir doesn’t feature such luxuries, so to be able to sit up in bed with a curry and a chilled beer watching Robert Redford in Three Days of the Condor on cable was our idea of a party.

  The colour of that little ball in the glass test tube could mean some major changes. I can’t begin to imagine what those changes might be, but there’s a gnawing in the pit of my stomach that suggests they will be enormous and ongoing. I keep thinking of that RSPCA advertisement: ‘A puppy isn’t just for Christmas’. Oh my God, what have we done? It seems a surreal paradox that, while my doctor thinks that at age thirty-nine I’m getting too old to have a baby, I don’t actually feel old enough.

  In the past twelve months my life has already changed radically. I’ve swapped my Sydney harbourside apartment, frantic weekly deadlines and regular paypackets to write novels and be with Mal, whose idea of home is wherever he’s parked his coffee machine. Its current address is his room in New Delhi in a shared household of westerners and monks, all working for Rinpoche’s organisation, Siddhartha’s Intent. I’ve been happily writing wherever Mal’s work happens to take us. We’ve fashioned a wonderfully carefree life together, spending roughly half our time in Sydney and the rest of it hopping on and off planes. I’ve been able to keep in touch with my agent and publisher via the web, sending chapters and seeing cover designs by email, sometimes crouched in tiny Indian phone booths, other times juggling a laptop and mobile phone in an airport lounge. It’s a long way from a slick city office with a personal assistant and all the trappings, but I’ve been having the time of my life. My first book was well received and I’m well into writing my second, with half-formed ideas for a third, fourth, fifth and so on into old age. The future was looking good for two footloose people with only themselves to worry about, and no responsibilities or commitments. If that little ball turns pink, the changes are unimaginable.

  The big hand hits the 12 and our ten minutes are up. We race each other into the bathroom and stare.

  It’s pink. We’re pregnant. Mal is in shock. I’m in shock. We take the little test tube back into the bedroom, carefully lean it against a pile of books and look at it in wonderment for the rest of the afternoon. The next few days we wander around grinning at each other like we have a delicious secret. And I cry, daily.

  ‘Happy tears?’ Mal asks anxiously.

  ‘Oh yes,’ I say, feeling excited, scared and like an
army of hormones is marching through my bloodstream.

  We queue at the telephone shop downstairs so that I can ring my best friend in Adelaide and tell her. After writing the phone number down on a piece of paper and passing it to the deafmute Indian man, I take my place in the queue of monks.

  In the past year the phone man has married, and he signals in sign language across the room to his blushing bride. Like him, she is in her twenties, deaf and mute. She is also breathtakingly beautiful in a red sari with a veil that covers her from head to her tiny bejewelled toes. Their newlywed excitement is palpable and they keep erupting in giggles at some private joke. They make no sound but both their bodies convulse and their faces beam. It is impossible not to join in.

  Finally it’s my turn, and after shouting my announcement over the dodgy phoneline, all I can do is sob into the receiver.

  My friend in Adelaide laughs, the monks laugh and the deaf couple, oblivious to what is going on, are still laughing anyway.

  It will be another four months, three continents and vats of hormonal tears before I see the reassuring face of my own doctor in Sydney.

  Mal and I find ourselves celebrating the various milestones of pregnancy in a number of different parts of the world. In a hospital in New Delhi I have a series of tests, including an internal ultrasound. Out of respect for my modesty, Mal is not allowed in the room. But every female worker traipses past, interested to know if ‘whitey’ is the same as them underneath it all. It’s like a passing parade by my feet. No-one seems too shocked by what they see, which is something of a relief – although it’s a bit hard to tell as no-one gives me eye contact.

  I email all the test results to my doctor; he emails back that I’m anaemic and should start iron tablets. I stop sucking in my belly when I’m naked and Mal, with that male candour that is so adorable, expresses surprise that I look pregnant so soon. I tell him that it’s a known medical fact that within days of conception a substantial layer of fat is deposited across the mother’s belly to keep the embryo warm. Bless him, he believes me.