Beyond the Sky and the Earth

by Jamie Zeppa

  Sharchhop has no script. We cannot hear the difference between b and bh, d and dh. I cannot pronounce tshe or nga. The grammar is incomprehensible, the verb must dangle its legs off the end of the sentence, and our progress is slow. After two weeks, I can count to eight, ask where are you going, and have two possible answers to are you a cowherd: no, I am a teacher; no, I am a nun.

  I am learning another language as well: lateral road, hi-lux, landcruiser; out-of-station, off-the-road, in-the-field; expat, consultant, volunteer; United Nations Development Program, Food and Agricultural Organization, World Food Program. Are you a consultant? No, I am a volunteer. Where are you going? I am going to the field. Are you taking the Vomit Comet? No, I have a ride in the FAO hi-lux.

  I have stopped eating meat. I don’t know if it was the trip to the market or the story of tapeworm cysts. In fact, I cannot eat much at all. I use bottled water to brush my teeth and wipe the droplets of unboiled, unfiltered water out of my glass before filling it. Sasha frowns. “I don’t think we have to be that careful,” she says.

  “You never know,” I shrug. Anything can happen. You can’t be too careful. Better safe than sorry. Prevention is better than a cure. I have turned into my grandfather. Jesus Christ, Jamie Lynne!

  Chuni tells us stories when we get tired of Sharchhop grammar. “This is a true story,” she begins, “this really happened,” and tells us of cloud fairies, wicked stepmothers, lamas who change into birds, prophetic dreams, a talking raven. A holy man throws his seven sons into the river to find out which ones are demons, and three turn into black dogs. “Be careful of poison villages,” she warns us. “Some villages are poison, especially in the east, Tashigang-side. You should never eat or drink anything there.” I want to get this straight, especially since we are all going “Tashigang-side,” but she has already begun the next story. Witches, a yeti, battles won by throwing hailstones back. All her stories have markers in the physical world. It happened there, at the rock by the river, she says. That is how the place got its name. You can still see the imprint his body left, the ruins of the castle, the burnt tree, it’s on the way to Paro, it’s near a rocky outcrop in Lhuntse, not even birds go there now.

  Gordon drives us back to the Paro valley one afternoon for a picnic of bread, cucumbers and tasteless tinned cheese, past the airport, at a sunny clearing near the river, where we stop beside a chorten, a monument made out of whitewashed stones with a square base, a globular middle, and pointed top. Chortens are complex Buddhist symbols representing the body of Buddha, Gordon tells us. Inside there are precious stones, written prayers, relics. In Nepal, most chortens have been desecrated and robbed, but, in Bhutan, this is extremely rare. The Bhutanese still believe in the sanctity of these monuments, and would expect divine retribution if they disturbed one.

  Across the river, hanging from a cliff is the monastery of Taktsang, the tiger’s nest, where Padmasambhava and his flying tigress landed. The flying tigress does not seem half as incredible as the monastery itself, which looks as if it has been glued to the cliff face. “Imagine,” Sasha says, “hauling up all the stones and wood, and then actually building it up there. A few people must have fallen to their deaths.” Gordon says the only death he knows of is recent: a tourist supposedly fell trying to get a good picture.

  Afterward, we drive to Drukgyal Dzong, built in 1647 to celebrate the victory of Bhutanese troops over invading Tibetans. In 1951, a fire started by a butter lamp consumed most of the fortress and now the dzong stands in ruins. The road loops around a stone marker and continues back to Thimphu. Lorna is singing some twangy country song about “the end of the road.” But the end of the road is the beginning of a wide footpath that disappears around the green bulk of a mountain. Beyond is a snow peak, the sacred mountain Jomolhari, home of the goddess Jomo, over seven thousand meters above sea level. Years ago, the Royal Government gave an international climbing team permission to ascend the mountain under the condition that they not disturb the goddess, and the team apparently kept their promise and did not set foot on the actual peak.

  A man passes us, leading three ponies laden with sacks and bamboo baskets, their bells singing softly as they step carefully off the tarmacked road, onto the other, older road. Watching the ponies pass, I feel for a moment that I am an illusion, standing in jeans and a sweatshirt outside a landcruiser, a camera dangling against my leg. What are you doing here, the landscape asks me. I don’t know yet.

  I begin to wonder what is happening beyond these mountains. I want the eleven o’clock news, The Globe and Mail, I want this program to be interrupted by a special bulletin. In Bhutan, news seems to be all word-of-mouth, what someone heard from someone else two days or two weeks ago, rumor and gossip and travelers’ tales. News of the road conditions, for example, fluctuates wildly. We are told that the passes are blocked with snow, we will not be going to our postings for a while. But someone heard that the passes are clear. No, two passes are cleared, we can get to Bumthang. The passes are partially clear, the road is open to light vehicles, someone came through last night from the east. The passes are clear but there is no petrol. There is petrol but no diesel. No, there is petrol and diesel but all passes are blocked, all roads are closed. We will leave tomorrow, we will leave next month.

  Lorna and Sasha and I are drinking Golden Eagle beer with Rita, a British teacher who has already been here for a year, and Wayne, an Australian engineer, in Benez, a little restaurant that draws a mixed crowd of foreign teachers and young Bhutanese in Western dress. Country music is leaking out of a speaker. Rita and Wayne are discussing various ways to walk from Tashi Yangtse in eastern Bhutan to Paro, a walk of more than thirty days. Lorna, Sasha and I have spent the day shopping for national dress and learning to put it on. The kira is actually a long rectangle of cloth wrapped around the body and belted, with an inner blouse and a jacket over top. The belt must be tight, or the whole ensemble begins to unravel. Lorna has been making us laugh all day with her down-home Saskatchewan expressions. She has one for every occasion. Coyote-ugly. It’s as hot in the city as it is in the summer. “Doncha just hate getting gowned up?” she’d asked when we were dressed and standing stiffly in our kiras, trying to breathe. Now she overfills her glass and beer bubbles up and runs off the table onto the floor. “Wherever you go, there you are,” she says, shaking her head.

  We are tired of discussing the roads, the snow, the passes, our possible date of departure, our postings and what is available there, our nearest Canadian neighbors. I will be able to visit them if I can get on a truck carrying gypsum from the mine at the bottom of the Pema Gatshel valley and then a ride from the Pema Gatshel junction up the road five hours to Tashigang. Sasha will have electricity, Lorna and I will not. Sasha will be on the main road, I on a feeder road, Lorna will be off-the-road and will have to walk three hours up a mountain to get to her new home. Rita, who is posted off-the-road in Mongar District, has to walk six hours. Next year, she says, she wants to go to an even more remote place, three days off the road, deep into central Bhutan. I privately think that Rita is displaying alarming symptoms of dementia.

  We order supper—thukpa, a noodle soup for me and Sasha, rice and chicken curry for Lorna, and for Rita, ema datsi, the national dish, a blistering stew of chilies and cheese. Wayne is drawing a map on the back of an envelope. The Eagles are singing “Hotel California.” We order more beer. And I think, sometimes it all makes sense: you are sitting in a restaurant with your companions. It could be a restaurant anywhere, it could be Sault Ste. Marie. Other times it makes no sense whatsoever. I don’t know how this relates to the rest of my life. There is no link between my life on the other side of the planet, all those dark miles and starry oceans away, and me sitting at this table, tearing my beer label off in strips, no connection at all. Except for myself: I myself must bridge the gap, I am the bridge—although I feel more like the gap. All the experiences and achievements that defined me at home are irrelevant and insignificant here. There is just me, here, now. Wh
erever you go, there you are.

  We are told to buy supplies in Thimphu, because “things” are not available outside the capital. I walk through the tiny shops. Things are not so available in the capital, either. We buy kerosene stoves, jerry cans, pressure cookers and hot-water flasks, noodles, cocoa powder, peanut butter. The shopkeepers wrap our purchases neatly in newspaper, and we carry them in our new jholas, handwoven cloth shoulder-bags. Sasha, an artist and a vegetarian, goes off in search of sketch paper and dried beans. We both buy large square tins with lids against the rats. I spend the last day in Thimphu packing and repacking my luggage, transferring my most precious supplies from home—chocolate bars, raisins, and a sample bottle of Cointreau—into the square tin. But in the morning, we are told the passes are blocked again (or still) with snow and we will be not be leaving “for some time.” We will have more orientation in Thimphu, we will visit the temples, the National Library.

  I do not want to have more orientation. I want to go home. I tell Sasha I am coming down with something, and lie in bed and wish for things: a Cosmopolitan magazine, a bagel and cream cheese, a grocery store, the Eaton Centre two days before Christmas.

  The Lateral Road—Bash on Regardless

  The passes are open and we are driving across the lateral road in a hi-lux, Lorna, Sasha, Rita, me, and Dorji, a driver from the Department of Education. After a three-week delay because of snow-blocked passes, we are finally on our way to our postings. “So what do you think so far?” Rita asks when we stop at Dochu La, a pass forty-five minutes out of Thimphu, from where we have an unobstructed view of the northern border: a row of impossible snow-peaks rising up from blue mountains. “Look, that tiny white speck is Gasa Dzong,” she says. “It’s a two- or three-day walk from here.” She knows the names of the peaks—Tsheringma, Table Mountain, Kula Kangri. “This must be one of the best views in the world,” she says. “I always feel so happy to be able to see so far.” Behind us, dozens of tattered prayer flags are flapping in a cold wind. I glance at Rita: she does look ridiculously happy to be here. It seems to be a consensus among all the other Western teachers we have met. They all love their villages, their schools, their kids, their particular hardships—rats or crazy headmasters or the landslides that close the road during the summer monsoon. Every expat teacher we met in Thimphu returning from holidays in Thailand or Nepal kept sighing and saying, it’s so good to be back, so good to be home.

  From Dochu La, we descend through mossy fir trees to a forest of shiny-leaved oak and rhododendron in bloom, some trees so crowded with scarlet flowers I almost laugh. Cartoon trees! Impossible trees! I like the magnolia better, the simple white flowers stark against black branches. “I read somewhere that the magnolia is one of the oldest flowers in the world,” Sasha says when we stop to take a photograph. This is something I would like to look up. In an encyclopedia, in a library. “Do any of the school libraries have encyclopedias?” I ask Rita.

  “The college in Kanglung has,” she says.

  “But not our schools?”

  “Where you guys are going, you’ll be lucky if there’s even a library.”

  There are a thousand new things from the orientation course I want to find out about: how reincarnate lamas are discovered, the characteristics of the Tibeto-Burman language group, who Francis Younghusband was. And all the things I’ve been meaning to look up for the past several years come back to me with renewed urgency: the meaning of “phylogenetic,” the origin of the Mafia, whirling dervishes. And then there are all the things I wish I could look up: why I have exiled myself to such a faraway place, and if I will forget everything I know in the valleys of eastern Bhutan, and who I will be when I come out.

  The road twists and writhes and burrows through forests. Rita says there are an average of seventeen curves per kilometer on the roads of Bhutan. Someone once counted. At an average speed of thirty kilometers per hour, it will take us three days to drive the 550-odd kilometers to Tashigang District. I eat crackers and Gravol to calm my stomach. The hi-lux grinds its way up to passes eerie with snow and silent white mist lying over the withered trees and the drip drip of water on black rocks, then descends into valleys, tangled green and warm. Monkeys scatter as we turn a corner. Grey langurs, someone says. We pass through tiny villages, hamlets of three or four houses. The country seems almost empty to me. So much unmarked, unmarred wilderness.

  The two- or three-story houses have ground-floor walls made out of whitewashed stone or mud, and upper levels of mud and wood. The narrow windows with their scalloped tops have sliding wooden slats to let in light and shut out the rain or the cold. The exterior walls are decorated with elaborate paintings, in faded blues and reds, of lotus flowers, deer, birds, and giant stylized phalluses (“to ward off evil spirits,” Rita says). Ladder steps lead to heavy wooden doors with irregular latches and locks. The roofs are covered with stone slates, or wooden shingles held down by large stones. Newer houses have roofs of corrugated iron sheeting. In the crawl space under the eaves, wooden barrels and boxes are stored, leathery items I cannot identify, earthen gourds and coils of frayed rope. Women weave at looms set up in the pale winter sunlight, and children, their cheeks dark red with cold, wave at us solemnly as we pass.

  The scenery changes almost every time we turn a corner. Shadowy pine, sunlit oak and beech, dry, hot groves of subtropical pine, called “chir pine” according to Rita, dense, moist jungly forests. Sometimes the mountains roar up, steep and black and haughty. Other times they are more gentle, sprawling, spreading, dissolving into haze. In these I can trace profiles, a smooth forehead, an aquiline nose, a stubborn chin. Whenever we stop and climb out of the vehicle, I am struck by the silence. It is particularly deep and strong higher up. At the passes, when the wind drops suddenly, the silence almost hums, and I can feel the weight of the earth beneath me, intensified by the emptiness between this solid piece of ground and the nearest ridge, a short flight away. It becomes a strange mental gravity. If I stand too long, I begin to feel rooted.

  We stop in the town of Tongsa, dominated by Tongsa Dzong, a massive, magnificent fortress. Rita takes us to a restaurant she knows, where the proprietor, a grave and beautiful Tibetan woman, leads us into the warm kitchen overlooking the dzong. We sip hot tea, studying the temple roofs and towers of the dzong, the ladder steps and turrets, the golden spires. Sasha makes a quick sketch. Once again, I have the feeling that I am an aberration in the face of something immense and very old. “The land that time forgot,” I say but Lorna makes a face. “The last Shangri-La. That’s starting to bug me,” she says.

  “But it does seem like that,” I say. “Like all those stories about stepping backwards in time.”

  She chews the inside of her lip. “I just think if I lived here, I’d hate to have a bunch of foreigners telling me this was Shangri-La. Especially if they came from a nice cushy life in a wealthy country.”

  In late afternoon, we come over a pass into the Bumthang valley in central Bhutan, wide and gentle, full of pale gold grass and surrounded by dark pine-covered slopes. The Swiss Guest House, which Rita has promised will have pine-paneled rooms, wood-burning stoves called bukharis, a hot shower, and toast for breakfast, is full, so we stay instead at a tourist hotel, where the cabins have bukharis but no wood to burn in them, and the taps in the bathroom remain disappointingly dry after much-promising gurgling.

  Rita corrects our pronunciation of Bumthang. “Bum—thang!” she drawls, laughing. “What is that, a disorder of the backside?” Bumthang, pronounced boom-tahng, is also called Jakar, which means place of the white bird. Jakar Dzong, looking stern and remote on a knoll above the town, started out as a monastery in the sixteenth century. Construction of the building had already begun at a different site when a white bird was seen circling the knoll. This was taken as an omen, and the monastery was moved. The valleys of Bumthang, Rita tells us at dinner, are considered very holy, full of monasteries and temples and pilgrimage places. No animals may be slaughtered in the valley, and sm
oking is banned. This is where Padmasambhava, also known as Guru Rimpoché, arrived in the eighth century to help a king who had fallen gravely ill after offending a local deity. Through meditation, Guru Rimpoché subdued the deity, turning it into a fierce protector of the Dharma, and the king was restored to health. The cave where Guru Rimpoché meditated still bears the imprint of his body. Rita says that Guru Rimpoché is worshiped in Tibet and Bhutan as the second Buddha. “The Buddha apparently predicted he would return to teach a more evolved form of Buddhism,” she says. “Guru Rimpoché is seen as that incarnation, and any place where he meditated is considered extremely sacred.”

  Bumthang is also the birthplace of the terton Pema Lingpa, who dove into a lake in the next valley with a burning lamp and emerged with religious treasures and the lamp still lit. I want to hear more about the hidden treasures, but this is all Rita knows: that terma, religious treasures—scriptures, scrolls, statues, ritual objects—were hidden by Guru Rimpoché, to be discovered centuries later by tertons, treasure-finders. Another thing on the List of Things to Look Up.

  We are woken in the early morning by the rusty call of crows. The sun has not yet risen over the ridge, and a cold mist hangs over the valley. The dzong of the white bird lies in shadow. It looks like the Bhutan of long, long ago, I think, remembering Rita’s history lessons. An older, colder, forbidding Bhutan. Our breath makes frosty clouds as we shiver and squirm into our clothes, which are stiff and cold. There is still no water, and we brush our teeth without it, outside under a stubby pine tree. We drive up to the Swiss Guest House for breakfast, and it does include toast and honey, just as Rita promised. “This is the last time you’ll eat toast in a while,” Rita says, “unless you can bake bread.” She begins an elaborate explanation of how to bake using some ridiculous pot-in-a-pot-on-a-kerosene-stove method. Lorna and Sasha write it all down. “It’s too complicated for me,” I say. “Anyway, maybe they sell bread in Pema Gatshel.” Rita lifts her eyebrows at this but says nothing. The sun has hoisted itself over the rim of the mountains and the mist in the valley turns gold as it breaks up and floats away, but we are reluctant to leave the warm, pine-scented room, and order more toast and coffee.