by Jamie Zeppa
On the way out of the valley, we stop at a shop to buy cheese and apple juice, produced in local factories started by the Swiss twenty years ago. The air smells of woodsmoke. Dorji returns from the petrol pump looking grim. There is no diesel in Bumthang, he reports.
“Do we have enough to get to Mongar?” Rita asks.
“Mongar also no diesel,” he says. “Maybe Tashigang.”
Even I know we don’t have enough to get all the way to Tashigang, almost two hundred kilometers away. I am about to suggest that we return to the Swiss Guest House to see if there are any rooms available, instead of getting back into the vehicle, why is everyone getting back into a vehicle that doesn’t have enough fuel to get us to the next petrol pump which is at any rate empty, do people want to be stranded on the top of some godforsaken mountain in the snow and mist where we would freeze or die of starvation before anyone would even think to look for us? It is too late. Everyone is back in the hi-lux already, and they are waiting for me. I don’t understand, I want to wail. But I climb in.
This morning we are on our way up to Trumseng La, the highest pass we will have to cross, almost four thousand meters above sea level. Patches of old snow begin to appear along the road, becoming fresher and deeper as we ascend until we are toiling through winter. Dorji slows the hi-lux down to ten, fifteen kilometers per hour, honking at every corner. We stop when we reach the top, climb out, shivering in the cold and ghostly mist under wind-blasted trees, to read the sign erected by the Public Works Department: “You have reached Trumseng La, Bhutan’s highest road pass. Check Your Brakes. Bash On Regardless. Thank you.”
On the other side of the pass, we are surprised by an enormous truck parked close to the mountain wall. The driver has lit a fire under the fuel tank. “The diesel freezes,” Rita explains. I ask her why this method of thawing the fuel doesn’t blow the entire truck off the side of the mountain, but she says she doesn’t know.
Shortly after Trumseng La, Dorji slows down again and points ahead. The whole mountainside collapsed there last year, Rita informs us, the cliff falling away suddenly, killing 247 road workers who were camped at the site. It looks as if someone has taken a very large, very sharp knife and sliced off the side of the mountain, leaving only a narrow ledge, like decorative trim, on the rock face. Surely we aren’t going to drive across that, I think. There’s no road. The whole thing will fall away under the weight of the truck and we will end up dead at the bottom of the ravine. This is just plain foolishness! This is for the birds! But no, we are to bash on regardless. We cross it very, very slowly. This gives us ample time to study the details of the catastrophe, the deep cracks in the raw, naked rock above, the slide of stone and mud and tree roots straight down a thousand, thousand meters into the ravine below.
I feel worse, somehow, when we are over it. Now there is that between me and Thimphu. Why didn’t I ask to be posted in Thimphu? At least you can’t fall off the road there, at least it has hotels, hot running water, the bakery. Why can’t I live in a hotel in Thimphu for two years? Thimphu is only an hour and a half away from the airport. From Thimphu, I could get to Calcutta, to international airline offices. From Thimphu, I could get home. But every kilometer takes me farther away. Farther and further, I sing myself to sleep, farther and further on a nearly empty tank.
I wake when my sweater slips to the floor and I bang my head on the window. We have stopped outside a collection of windowless bamboo huts. Dorji disappears inside. “He’s asking for diesel,” Rita tells me. Oh yes, of course, I think sourly. They’ll obviously have some in there. Rita is clapping. “He got some!” Everyone is clapping, and Dorji grins as he holds up a jerry can. I clap too, especially loudly.
We stop at a shack made of planks, woven bamboo mats, tin sheets and plastic. FOODINGS AND LODGINGS the sign says. We climb out, stretch and yawn. Inside, from blackened pots on a mud stove, a women serves plates of steaming rice and tiny bowls of bones in broth. “Aren’t you going to eat?” the others ask. I shake my head and sip bottled water. They exchange glances. I know what they are thinking. They are thinking I won’t make it. I won’t last two months, let alone two years. Later, when I have gone home, they will tell stories about me. Remember that girl from Sault Ste. Marie, what was her name, she’d never been anywhere in her life? She was afraid of everything, remember? Is that the one who only ate crackers? What was she thinking when she decided to come?
We spend the second night in Mongar at the Hospital Guest House, which belongs to the Norwegian Leprosy Mission. It is a treacherous walk down from the narrow bazaar in the dark, after a dinner of instant Maggi noodles in the Karma Hotel with syrupy tea for dessert and a shot of Dragon Rum “brewed and bottled,” the label claims, “by the Army Welfare Project, Samdrup Jongkhar.” Not a very glamorous name for a brewery, but the rum is quite good. The crowing of roosters wakes me from a warm and happy dream in which I am walking from the university library to meet Robert for coffee and croissants. My breakfast in Mongar is water and crackers. We say goodbye to Rita, who will now begin her six-hour walk to her school, and get back into the hi-lux for the three-hour drive to Tashigang.
Sasha is the first to be dropped off, at a village between Mongar and Tashigang. We help her unload her luggage, two suitcases, one large, one small, her tin box and hot-water flask. A young man appears, introduces himself as the headmaster, and leads us to his house, where we sit stiffly on hard benches. A small boy brings a wooden bowl of rice crisps and three cups of tepid tea. “Do you think the water was boiled properly for this?” I whisper to Sasha. She downs her tea in one long swallow in answer. Then we are taken to her quarters, a two-room cottage, its rough mud walls streaked with fresh whitewash. Inside there is a wooden bed frame, a desk, a chair. We stand at the doorway, peering in. Even Sasha looks unsettled. It is so starkly empty and far from home. A rooster crows outside, and I have to fight hard not to weep, overwhelmed at the thought of leaving Sasha here by herself, in this shack that is to be her home. I can’t imagine how she will survive, how any of us will. “What a great view,” Lorna says from the window, and my voice returns, false and bright and strained. “We’ll all visit each other,” I say. “We’ll only be a few hours apart when you think about it.” When I think about it, I realize I have a whole new meaning for “the middle of nowhere.”
We get back into the hi-lux and I turn to wave goodbye, but Sasha has gone inside and the door is firmly closed.
Subtropical, warm even now in early March, Tashigang is wedged into the crook of a mountain. Bougainvillea erupts over doorways and races along the top of stone walls, and tall, elegant eucalyptus sway over the stream that runs down from the mountain and through the middle of town. Tashigang reminds me of a medieval town, pictures from a high-school history book, the narrow crooked streets and three-storied, Tudor-style buildings with tiny balconies tacked on. The “lower market” is a row of shops along the road to the dzong; the “upper market” is a circle of shops around an enormous prayer wheel. Prayer wheels are cylinders inscribed with mantras, ranging from hand-held to room-sized. Spun around in a clockwise motion by the devout, they operate on the same principle as prayer flags: when set in motion, the printed mantras multiply the prayers being sent out for the benefit of all sentient beings. We sit on a bench outside a shop in the upper market and watch the traffic—horses carrying sacks of rice, two old women chatting beside the prayer wheel, children chasing a dog with a string of red chilies around its neck. Parked outside a shop, beside a blue UNDP jeep, is a battered bus with telltale streaks marring the Bhutan Government Transport Service sign painted across its side. “That must be the Vomit Comet,” Lorna says. “And look over there, that must be the fire station.” She points to four red, dented metal buckets hanging from a pole.
A white woman in a kira emerges from a shop. “Well, hello,” she says. “You must be the new Canadians. I’m Nancy. I expected you here three weeks ago but then the roads closed. What to do.” She shepherds us into the Puen Soom Hotel,
a tiny restaurant in the corner of the market, and orders tea. There is a poster of the Canadian Rockies on the wall, and a miniature Canadian flag propped up among the bottles of whiskey behind the bar—signs of other Canadians in eastern Bhutan who use Tashigang as a meeting place. Nancy has a hangover, from a farewell party the night before. She is on her way out, her contract has finished, and she is returning to Canada. She has to be in Ottawa in three weeks, for an interview, for a job teaching in the Arctic, she tells us.
It must be something in the water, I think: no one here is content with a moderately difficult life. They all want to be four days off the road, and then, when they have served their time and can go back home to a nice warm apartment with a bus stop around the corner, they go teach in the Arctic!
“Is there diesel in Tashigang?” Lorna asks.
Nancy looks up, surprised. “You mean you were sent out here without any spare diesel?”
“The driver managed to find some along the way, but there’s none in Bumthang or Mongar.”
“Well, there’s none here either,” Nancy says, sighing. “We’ll have to go ask Dasho Dzongda for help this afternoon.” The Dzongda is the district administrator, and Dasho is a title, like Sir, conferred by the King.
Lorna sighs, too. “I guess we have to get gowned up, then,” she says.
We finish the tea, and Lorna and I walk up the ridge behind the town and sit under some prayer flags, looking out across the narrow river valley. The hillsides nearby are brown and dry and detailed with shrubs and rocky outcrops and zigzagging paths, but in the distance, the mountains become insubstantial in the haze. Tashigang Dzong is on a lower spur to our right, above the turquoise river. Across the river and up behind the ridges is Bidung, Lorna’s new home. Somewhere south is Pema Gatshel. Somewhere west is Thimphu. And beyond Thimphu—but no, I am too tired to retrace the journey mentally. I want to just click my heels three times and be home.
After more tea at the Puen Soom, we struggle into our kiras and walk through the lower market with Nancy to the dzong. A policeman stands at the gate, beside a jumble of worn rubber flip-flops and plastic sandals. “You have to wear shoes and socks into a dzong,” Nancy explains, “or else go in barefoot.” We step into the cool inner courtyard. Directly across from us is the massive stone wall of the dzong’s three-storied temple. On either side of the courtyard are offices with thick wooden doors. Handlettered signs pasted on the lintels announce the DISTRICT EDUCATION OFFICER, DISTRICT ANIMAL HUSBANDRY OFFICER, DISTRICT AGRICULTURE OFFICER. Very young, freshly shorn monks peer down at us from the wooden balconies above, and giggle when we wave to them. We are led into the Dzongda’s chamber, where we sit on a bench under the window and are served tea and more Orange Cream Biscuits. I remember not to cross my legs and to wait for the Dzongda to begin drinking his tea before I touch mine. “Please have,” he says, gesturing to our teacups. “Thank you, Dasho,” Nancy says, and then explains who we are and where we are trying to go without diesel and why in very respectful tones. The Dzongda listens, nodding, and then rings a bell. A clerk appears, bent forward in a bow, and the Dzongda barks a long order in Dzongkha. The clerk murmurs over and over the honorific word for “all right.” “Lasso la, lass, lass, lass.” The Dzongda has ordered a release of diesel from an emergency store. He says that the District Education Officer will arrange for horses and porters to transport Lorna’s things to Bidung, I can leave tomorrow in the hi-lux, which will drop me off in Pema Gatshel and return to Tashigang to take Nancy to Thimphu. It is all settled.
Out in the courtyard, we pass a regal-looking monk with a cat-o’-nine-tails. The small monks scatter at his approach. “The Kudung,” Nancy says, “the Disciplinarian.”
“They sure take authority seriously here,” Lorna remarks.
We spend the night in a guest house, a stark, unwelcoming wooden cabin above the town. I lay awake for hours, listening to the dogs barking hysterically in the alley below. I can find nothing to throw at them except the batteries from my walkman: I fling them out into the night, and the barking continues uninterrupted.
The next morning, it is just Dorji and me on the winding road from Tashigang to the Pema Gatshel junction. Thirty minutes outside of Tashigang, we pass a cluster of immaculate white buildings spread over a green plateau. “Kanglung College,” Dorji reports. I look longingly at the neat lawns and gardens, the basketball court, the wooden clock tower that declares the wrong time in four directions. This could have been my posting, I think sadly, noticing the tidy cottages, the electricity wires, a tall young man with the most beautiful face I have ever seen, reading a book under a flowering tree.
Just outside of Kanglung, a coy road sign informs us IF YOU LIKE MY CURVES, I HAVE MANY. Another admonishes BE GENTLE ON MY CURVES. An hour later, the driver announces, “Khaling,” as we drive through a heavily misted town. An hour after that, we stop in Wamrong for lunch. I have seen no hint of the Canadian teachers already posted here and in Khaling, Leon and Tony, whom I met briefly in Thimphu. I sit on a retaining wall and nibble biscuits, looking out over the cloud-filled valley below. Two young boys stop throwing stones at a grotesquely deformed dog, to stare at me, pointing and whispering “phillingpa”—foreigner. “Kuzu zangpo, ” I greet them. They bump into each other, laughing, embarrassed, trying to scramble away.
When we reach the Pema Gatshel junction, the late-afternoon sun is already slanting over the hills. “Where is Tshelingkhor?” I ask Dorji. In Thimphu, someone said there was a village at the junction. Dorji points to two bamboo shacks at the roadside. “Shop-cum-bar,” I read. “Tshelingkhor.”
The hi-lux turns off the main road.
“Can a village be two houses?” I ask Dorji.
“Village can be one house also,” he says.
We bounce along the deeply gouged road, through a dense forest of gnarled oak, passing waterfalls and landslides. Suddenly, the forest opens and Pema Gatshel is below us, a deep, green, leafy salad bowl of a valley. Dorji points out the roof of the hospital, the dzong, a temple high on a hilltop. We drive through the bazaar, a straggling row of unpromising-looking shops. “Pema Gatshel Junior High School is there,” Dorji says, gesturing ahead. I see a metal roof, a barbed-wire fence, cement walls.
“My new home,” I think, but I do not believe it.
What to Do?
It is the third day of school, and I am standing in front of class II C. There is a blackboard but no chalk. There are no books, no crayons, no syllabus. There are, however, five students. The rest are “coming, miss.” They have been coming, miss, for three days. The headmaster, a young man with a wispy mustache and a brilliant smile, says it will take a week for all the teachers and students to arrive. It is always like this at the beginning of the new school year each spring, he says.
“And the books?” I ask.
“After some time,” he says, smiling. “We ordered them, but ... what to do.”
I certainly don’t know. I have five students who spring to their feet each morning and shout, “Good morning, miss.” I don’t know what to begin teaching, whether to begin teaching or wait until the others come, how to keep them occupied until the others come. I don’t even know their names yet.
This is how it has gone so far. First day: I am given a register and list of names and am told to take attendance. “My name is Jamie,” I tell the members of class II C, three boys and two girls who could be any age between four and eleven. “The first thing I would like to do is learn all of your names, so I’d like you to all stand up one by one and introduce yourselves.” This cheery speech is met by an exchange of bewildered glances but when the faces turn back to me, they are still smiling. “Does everyone understand?” I ask.
“Yes, miss,” they chorus.
“Okay, you first,” I say, pointing to a boy in the first row with standing-up hair. He looks like the oldest of the five.
“Yes, miss,” he says, rising to his feet. I wait. He waits. I smile. He smiles back.
“Yes?” I sa
y gently.
“Yes, miss?” he repeats politely.
“Go ahead,” I say.
“Yes, miss.” He sits back down.
“What is your name! ” I finally exclaim, exasperated. He leaps to his feet again and shouts back, “My name is Song Sing!”
“Song Sing?” I repeat incredulously. He looks doubtful but says, “Yes, miss.” I run through the list of names. There is no Song Sing among them. “Can you come and show me your name?” I ask. “Come and show me where your name is here.”
He points to one. “This my name. My name is Tshewang Tshering.”
“Tsay-wong Tse-ring,” I repeat slowly. He looks relieved.
It takes most of the morning to get through the rest of the names. Phuntsho Wangmo. Sangay Chhoden. Karma Ngawang Dorji. Ugyen Tshering Dorji.
“Are you two brothers?” I ask the last two. “Brothers? Brothers?” They shake their heads shyly, giggling. Later, when I ask the headmaster, he looks equally confused. “Brothers? I don’t think so.”
“They have the same last name,” I say.
“Oh! We don’t have last names here,” he says. “Just two names, which a lama gives. It can be Dorji Wangchuk, Wangchuk Dorji. Karma Dorji, Dorji Wangmo. Only the Royal Family has one last name. And the southern Bhutanese, they are Nepali, they have last names. Sharma, Bhattarai, Thapa.”
