by Jamie Zeppa
“But how do you know who is related without last names?” I ask.
“Just like that only,” he shrugs.
Day Two with Class Two. I practice saying their names, and they practice saying, “Yes, miss.” No matter what I ask them, they smile and say, “Yes, miss.” Do you understand? Yes, miss. Am I saying your name right? Yes, miss. Where are you going? Yes, miss.
Maybe I am talking too fast. “Do you have, any, books?” I ask very slowly, and am elated when they say, “No, miss.” We smile at each other for some time. This gives me courage to try to fill in the complicated form the headmaster gave me this morning—student’s name, father’s name, mother’s name, village, gewog, student’s date of birth. We try it orally first, but I cannot even begin to spell their parents’ names, and what is a gewog? I give them each a piece of paper. “Write down,” I say slowly, “your name. Are you all writing your names?”
“Yes, miss.”
“Good. Is everyone finished? Okay. Now, write down your birthday. Okay? Your birthday? Under your name.”
They are still looking up at me. “Your birthday. Date of birth. When you were born,” I repeat.
There is a prolonged silence, and then a conference begins in Sharchhop with Tshewang Tshering, the tallest, explaining, and Ugyen Tshering Dorji, the smallest, disagreeing. “You go first,” I tell Tshewang. “When is your birthday? ” He picks up his pencil and writes very carefully while the others watch. Over his shoulder I read, “It is rice and pork.”
“Never mind,” I say weakly. “We’ll do it another time. You can go out now and play.” They tumble out of their seats and burst out of the classroom, shrieking, as if it were the last day of school.
The classroom is furnished with long, narrow tables and benches. The teacher’s desk is at the front of the room, its plain wooden top ink-stained, its two drawers empty. The blackboard is extremely small, but it doesn’t matter because the stubs of soft chalk I found make no impression on it whatsoever.
In the staff room today, I meet several teachers who have just arrived from India. Everyone is very friendly, shaking my hand, asking me my “good name,” welcoming me to the school on behalf of their colleagues and on their own behalf. Everyone asks me if I have “settled myself up” yet, and when did I come, and did I come across the top road, and am I knowing the Canadians who were here before me, Sir Dave and Mrs. Barb, except Mrs. Joy, from southern India, who asks if I am Christian. I am taken aback by this and stammer something about being raised a Christian but no longer, uh, something or other. The lines on her face deepen and she shakes her greying head; this is obviously the wrong answer.
Every second sentence is punctuated with the phrase “isn’t it.” Mr. Sharma asks me if I have met Mr. Iyya yet. I say no. “Oh, you will be having much in common with Mr. Iyya, isn’t it,” he informs me. “Mr. Iyya is always reading English novels and writing poetries. Mr. Iyya is a tip-top poet.” He asks what my qualifications are, and before I can answer, tells me his: B.A., M.A., M.Ed., M.Sc. Actually, he confides, he is overqualified for this place, isn’t it, but what to do.
Mrs. Joy asks me why I am wearing “that dress.” I look down at my kira. “You don’t have to wear their dress,” she says grimly. She is wearing a brown synthetic sari and a grey sweater.
“But I want to,” I say.
“It doesn’t look nice on you,” she tells me and I begin to ponder the . irony of her name. The bell rings for lunch, and I excuse myself.
The school is a cold, concrete edifice, its cement walls discolored, crumbling in places, waterstained. Behind are the girls’ and boys’ hostels, off to one side is the dining hall. The front yard, a large, bald, dusty rectangle, is also the “playing field,” where I send class II C each day after attendance to play until the bell rings for lunch. The whole compound is surrounded by a barbed wire fence. Across the road is a long, low ramshackle row of staff quarters, and a somewhat less dilapidated, two-story concrete apartment building, where I live. I mount the steep ladder steps to my flat on the second floor and let myself in, not wanting to be in any of the five dank rooms but not knowing where else to go. The cement walls are dark with smoke and grease and hand-prints, and I remind myself to find out who the landlord is. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad place with a couple of coats of paint, a carpet of some sort, some real chairs instead of those punitive wooden benches. There is an abundance of wildlife, mice or rats, black beetles with pincers from the tool department of a hardware store, moths and ants and fleas, and today, an enormous hairy spider. Are there tarantulas in Bhutan? I beat it with a broom and sweep it out the door; it resurrects itself on the step and scuttles off.
I turn on all the taps, but there is still no water. I really must speak to the landlord. I have not unpacked. I cannot unpack until I clean, but I don’t know how to begin to tackle the thick layer of damp and dust and decay that lays over everything. I have not had a bath since I left Thimphu, because there is rarely water in the taps, and when there is, it is numbingly cold and I am too afraid of the kerosene stove to try heating it. The stove, which has to be pumped before it is lit, hisses and splutters alarmingly, and I am sure that I will die in a massive kerosene explosion. I am almost out of crackers. The teachers downstairs, Mr. and Mrs. Sharma, from Orissa in eastern India, have invited me for supper twice. “Please, it is no problem for us,” they said. “We have to cook for ourselves anyway, isn’t it.” But I cannot find the energy to go, to sit stiffly with strangers, nodding and smiling, trying to find things to talk about. Standing at the bedroom window, I look out over the verdant confusion of the Pema Gatshel valley. It makes my head hurt, looking down the green steepness, looking up into the empty sky. There are long moments when I cannot remember where I am. I feel completely unfamiliar to myself, almost unreal, as if parts of me have dissolved, are dissolving. The Buddhist view that there is no real self seems completely accurate. I have crossed a threshold of exhaustion and strangeness and am suspended in a new inner place.
It is dark by 6:30 in the evening, an absolute unbroken darkness, and crushingly silent. I light the kerosene lamps, fiddling with the wicks to stop them from smoking, and finally blow them out and light candles. I flip through my Sharchhop language notebook to the heading “School”—sit down! stand up! don’t shout! go outside! the teacher is angry! do you understand?—but find nothing to help me communicate better with class II C. I try to write letters home even though the headmaster says that another landslide has blocked the lateral road and there is a bandh, a strike, in Assam. It will take a week or three to clear the road, and no one knows for sure about the strike, the last one went on for one hundred days. Writing will put things in order, or in sentences at least. I begin but cannot get beyond the first lines. After that, I fall into an abyss, sit blankly, blinking, staring.
A thick white mist moves into the valley one afternoon, bringing a cold, solemn rain. It rains all night, and at dawn the roof begins to leak, directly above my bed, directly, in fact, on my head. I get up and push the bed to the far wall. The sound of rain on the metal roof is the saddest thing I have ever heard. Outside, mist lies in deep drifts over everything. All around, the mountains sleep, blankets of cloud drawn up to their shoulders, over their heads. The teachers in the flats below have set buckets under the eaves and have strung up a clothesline in the stair-well. Mr. Sharma whistles as he hauls his buckets of rainwater in. I resolve to stop feeling sorry for myself. I, too, will set out buckets to collect water; I will snap out of this sorry state.
I walk to the bazaar, skirting the deep puddles along the road, stepping gingerly over cow dung. Children come out of the shops to stare at me. “English, English,” they call shyly, and when I wave at them, they giggle and hide. Shopkeepers emerge from their shops to watch me pass. I feel a spectacle, and turn hastily into the nearest doorway. Inside, I point to what I want, a box of milk powder, two boxes of biscuits—no, not Orange Cream—okay, okay, Orange Cream, a jar of instant coffee. I am smiling painf
ully and nodding at the shopkeeper’s questions. I don’t know what he is asking. “Gila,” I say, which means “yes, it is.” He looks at me quizzically. It is not the right answer. What was the question? I cannot live here if I don’t speak the language.
Back out on the road, I contemplate visiting a few more shops, just to see what is available. Out of the corner of my eye, I see a blur. A dog growls, and there is a sharp pain in my ankle. I look down and see a tiny puncture, a spot of blood. But why did it bite me, I whine to myself, and then I realize. Oh god, oh god, I’ve been bitten by a rabid dog. I’ve come all the way across the world to die of rabies. I have to identify the dog. Yes, yes, the health lecture is coming back to me: confine the dog immediately and watch it for ten days for signs of rabies. But which of the twenty dogs milling around was it? I rush back into the shop.
“Khu, ” I say breathlessly. Khu is dog. “Khu—” and I make a biting motion with my hand and show my ankle. The shopkeeper clucks sympathetically, but shows no alarm.
I have to ask if he knows the dog, if he thinks the dog is rabid. How do you say rabid in Sharchhop? I am thinking frantically. Mad. I could ask, is the dog mad? But I don’t even know the word for “mad.” I use the closest thing. “Rotsigpa?” I ask. Was the dog angry? The shopkeeper stares at me. He thinks I’m crazy. I can just hear him telling people, “What could I say? I guess it was angry. It bit her, didn’t it?”
I flee to the hospital, where the tiny puncture wound is washed with hot water and antiseptic soap. The Norwegian doctor there listens to my story and goes up to the bazaar. He and his family have been in eastern Bhutan for several years, and speak fluent Sharchhop. While he is gone, I eat marzipan cake and drink black coffee brought by Liv, the Norwegian nurse. How is this cake possible, I want to know. And will I get more of it before my throat closes up and I have to be tied to a stake like Old Yeller? When the doctor returns, he tells me he doesn’t think the dog is rabid. “There is a brown dog in the bazaar who is always biting people,” he says. “Was it a brown dog that bit you?”
“Yes,” I say. “No. I don’t know. Maybe I should go to Thimphu for rabies injections.” Or Canada.
The doctor reassures me. “No, no,” he says. “I am sure that is not necessary. We’ve had no reports of rabies in Pema Gatshel recently.”
“I guess you’re right.” I certainly hope he’s right.
“You’re staying in the building across from the school?” the doctor asks. “Where the other Canadians used to stay?”
“Yes. I need to see the landlord, actually,” I say. “The roof leaks, there’s hardly ever any water, and the whole place needs to be painted. ”
“Oh, I think the landlord lives in Thimphu,” he says. “Water is very much a problem here, especially in the monsoon: too much outside, not enough inside. But what to do?”
What to do, what to do. I’m beginning to see that “what to do” means “absolutely nothing at all can be done.” Back in my flat, I begin to unpack, swallowing hard periodically, checking my throat for pain or other signs of hydrophobia. The apartment has no cupboards or closets, so I lay things out on tables and windowsills, all my medicine and tools and batteries, I line my shoes neatly up beside the door and drape a few shirts over a clothesline the former tenants have strung across the bedroom. I leave my portable keyboard in its case on a bench, and stack my books on the little bedside table. There doesn’t seem to be much else. How have I come with so little? I have left everything behind.
The Way to Tsebar
The mist is at war with the mountains, and winning. It creeps like a disease, withering green trees, eroding ridges, diminishing the massive bulk of the mountains, turning solid rock to shadow. Everything looks long-deserted, haunted, like the last day of time. At night, it rains heavily. I have never seen so much rain. It’s only March, not even the monsoon yet. I imagine the massive landslide on the lateral road, the rest of the mountain being washed away. It will take months, maybe years to fix. I feel besieged.
I walk around the school compound after class, watching the clouds moving over the mountains. Sometimes they fall from the sky in great swaths into the valley below, or are torn in strips that trail behind the main cloud body, dragged through forests and over ridges. My attempt at free-lance phonics was an astounding failure in class II C today, as was spelling dictation. Some of the kids can write passably well, others can barely hold a pencil. We spent the rest of the day drawing pictures. Later, in the staff room, talking with the other teachers, I felt acutely the edges and corners of myself which do not fit in here. I am too casual, too blunt, no one laughs at my jokes. I find myself speaking more slowly and formally, answering in complete sentences, standing almost at attention. I am afraid of making a mistake, saying the wrong thing, giving offense. I don’t know why it is so difficult and there is no one I can talk to about it in my own language, my own inflections.
I give myself a good talking to: you said you wanted to come for the experience. Well, here it is, the experience. It’s culture shock, it will pass. There’s a whole page on it in the Briefing Kit, with a chart. Anyway, you only have to stay a year, you can go home at Christmas and not come back. You can always go home now, if things don’t get better, if you hate it.
I hate it.
But I don’t have the courage to ask to be sent back. I want divine intervention, I want to be absolved of blame and responsibility. I wish for an urgent message from home, an ultimatum from Robert, come home right now or it’s all over between us, a serious but not too terrible illness, easily treated with tablets and bedrest at the Toronto General Hospital.
I sit at the table until it is dark, fiddling with my shortwave radio, which seems to have direct access to Radio Beijing. Everything else is noise—fading orchestras, electronic bleeps and blips and squelches. I turn it off. Outside, the dogs begin to bark. Hark, hark, I say aloud, and eat a cracker, an Orange Cream Biscuit, another cracker. I wish for cappuccino, I wish for baked potatoes, I wish for raspberry cheesecake. I wish to go to sleep and wake up in Canada. My legs are covered in flea bites which calamine lotion does absolutely nothing to help, and I scratch them until they bleed. I can’t believe I volunteered for this. Am I going to cry? Then I remember the tin. The tin, the tin, how have I forgotten the square tin with the round lid, the rat-proof tin, the treasure box, the Christmas chest, the store of all goodness. I pry open the top, reach in and pull out a cellophane package of dried beans. Lentils. Split peas. A package of origami paper. It is Sasha’s box. I have Sasha’s split peas and origami paper and she has my chocolate. Life is suffering! Now I am going to cry. I sit on the floor and cry and cry, and when I have finished, I have decided: I will go home in the morning. I have made a mistake, a terrible terrible mistake, but it can be rectified. I will send a wireless message to Thimphu. I will say I am sick. I will lie, I will cry, I will beg. I will throw myself on the floor and scream. They cannot make me stay here! They cannot make me stay!
But the next day, the mist is gone and the sky is a clean, clear, dazzling blue. I can see every curve and contour of the mountains all around, edges and lines are hard and bright in the sharp morning light. At school, there is a letter for me. It has come from Tsebar, a village across the valley and up the next mountain, from Jane, a British teacher. I heard you were there, she writes. Why don’t you come and visit this weekend? I’d walk across but I hurt my ankle washing clothes in the creek. She has drawn a map. It’s only a three- or four-hour walk. Only!
I decide to go. I cannot go back home until the roadblock is cleared anyway. I will go to visit this Jane across the valley, and on my way back, I will go home. I will pass this house and the fields and the school, I will pass the gate, the crooked shops, the little white temple, I will keep going, straight home. At home, I will go to the library, I will reread The History of Literary Criticism. I will make notes, a reading list, a study schedule. I will not make this mistake again.
I take my sleeping bag, my high-tech flashlight, a bo
ttle of water, a mini medical kit and my copy of Where There Is No Doctor. Down the valley path I go, stumbling under the hot afternoon sun against rocks and the roots and bones of trees. In some places, the path descends so steeply that I must clutch wildly at overhanging branches and nearby shrubs to hold myself upright. The path finally levels out, and I find myself in front of three shops. I can see the gypsum mine further downhill. Funded by the Government of India, Bhutan’s principal aid partner, the mine is an immense, ugly white scar in the lush greenery. Parked on the roadside, loaded with chunks of gypsum, is a huge orange truck, its front and sides garishly painted with eyes and elephants, its windshield garlanded with tinsel and plastic flowers.
I continue on to the river, which zigzags wildly across the valley floor. I have to cross it six times, over sodden logs laid across large flat rocks. The sun is even hotter down here, and I am soaked with sweat by the time the path enters the forest and begins to ascend. Too bad I’m not staying, I think: I’d really be in good shape after two years of this.
I stop, panting, at a stream. How much farther up is it? Shouldn’t I be there by now? Is this the right way? Why is my backpack so heavy?
You shouldn’t have brought Where There Is No Doctor.
What if something happens out here? I’ll need it.
The only thing that’s going to happen is you’re going to collapse under the weight of it.
You can’t be too careful.
Yes, you can. You can be careful unto craziness.
Caution is not crazy. Singing a song about tapeworm cysts in the cerebellum is crazy. Carrying a medical book into the jungle is not crazy. Coming here in the first place was crazy. Look at this narrow little path. This path is crazy. What if I get lost?
You won’t get lost, you have a map.
No, I don’t, I left it on the table with Sasha’s kidney beans.
