by Jamie Zeppa
Lesley has been in Bhutan for three years. Her first posting was a village in the high, cold, subalpine district of Bumthang, where she lived for two years in a room in the temple and learned to speak Bumthap, the language of central Bhutan. She extended her contract for another year, and her next posting was one thousand meters lower, in the warm, wet jungles of Kheng, where she learned to speak Khengkha. She walked from one posting to the other, a journey of three days.
It is immediately apparent that Lesley has an encyclopedic knowledge of Bhutan. I cannot let her complete a sentence without interrupting with another question, and later, when we settle down to write letters, I take out my journal and make notes:
Reincarnations of lamas. Usually, the dying lama will leave instructions, indicating a time or place or some other clue. His followers begin to look for him about two years after his death, using the clues and sometimes in consultation with an oracle. They may hear about a child who is acting rather strangely-saying that he wants to go to his real home, perhaps describing his former monastery. For the first two or three years of life, the child retains some knowledge of his former life, but it usually fades after that. The dead lama’s disciples bring his belongings, mixed up with other similar items, to the child, and ask the child to identify his former things as proof of his identity. The belief is that a high lama has learned to control his mind even afterdeath and therefore can direct his mind into its next rebirth.
Ghost-catchers. Elaborate sculptures made of dough, thin sticks and colored thread, called lue. Used in certain pujas to draw away any negative influences, spirits, bad luck, and yes, ghosts as well.
Hidden valleys, called beyul. Secluded places that have been blessed and sealed by Guru Rimpoché for followers of Buddhism in times of difficulty. There is some disagreement as to whether these are actual valleys hidden away in the mountains, or mythical places, or places in some other dimension that you can only get to through spiritual practice. Only people with the right karma can enter them. “Lost Horizon” is supposedly based on Shambhala, the most famous hidden valley. There are supposed to be several such valleys in Bhutan, in Gasa and Lhuntse, here they’re real places with physical coordinates as well as being spiritual places in some non-physical dimension. The one in Lhuntse is sealed to outsiders from the time of rice planting to the time of harvesting. Not even Bhutanese from outside the valley can enter during this time.
I don’t know if my List of Things to Look Up is now shorter or longer.
Lesley suggests tea and momos in the bazaar. I tell her that Pema Gatshel has no restaurant.
“There must be at least one tea stall,” she says. “Let’s go look.” The sun has disappeared behind glossy green mountains, and a thin banner of pink-and-gold cloud stretches across the darkening sky. In the market, Lesley turns into a rather shaky-looking hut. Behind the counter, a young mother is playing with her baby. Behind her on the wall is a curling poster of Phoebe Cates, and I wonder where it came from.
“Momo cha?” Lesley asks the woman.
She nods and goes into a back room. We sit at one of the wooden tables. “So you speak Sharchhop too?” I ask Lesley. She says, “About five words.” The woman comes out with two plates of steamed dumplings garnished with chili sauce and two glasses of tea. I open one of the dumplings and study the minced meat and onions inside, feeling the old familiar fear rise up. Lesley looks up suddenly. “These are certainly well cooked,” she says intuitively. “They’re like rubber. The only thing we’ll get from these is indigestion.” I eat the momos, while Lesley and the woman behind the counter have a conversation in Sharchhop, English, and sign language about our respective ages, marital status, number of children, brothers, sisters.
We walk back home in the dark, using Lesley’s flashlight. I am still not used to nightfall in Bhutan, the way it really does fall, suddenly and completely, and am always unconsciously waiting for the lights to come back on. Lesley makes a bed on the floor of the sitting room. In my own room, I sit at the table. I have not managed to make my place as charming as Jane’s, but in the candlelight, with a few jars of wildflowers around me, I am not displeased with my home.
I have an idea that I will write in my journal, but I do not. I sit, listening. The night is full of crickets. I am thinking about how Lesley was not afraid to walk into an unknown hut in an unfamiliar town and order dinner, how she is not afraid to talk to people even if she knows five words of their language. I would have never thought to look into that place on my own, let alone go inside and order a meal. I would have never started a conversation with the woman behind the counter. I remember that first breaking of fear when I ate with Karma Dorji’s family on the way to Tsebar, the feeling of relief and freedom, a bodily lightness. I have done nothing but worry since I arrived in Bhutan, two and a half months ago. Will the road be open, will the strike really last one hundred days, will I run out of food, will I get sick, will my mail get through, will there be water in the taps, will those dumplings give me amoebic dysentery. Large parts of me have been shut down: inside whole rooms are in darkness, doors closed, curtains drawn, sheets thrown over the furniture. I live in a tiny cramped room of what-if. I must stop being afraid, I think as I get into bed.
An hour later, the rumble of thunder wakes me up. From the bed I can see the storm approaching in one window, lightning illuminating swollen storm clouds. From the other window the sky is still starry and clear. I fall asleep when both windows are full of rain, and I dream that Lesley and I find a hidden valley in Pema Gatshel. Between the school and the hospital, we follow a barely perceptible path and emerge from a grove of trees into a grassy, steep-sided ravine with a silver stream singing through it. “It was here all along,” I say happily, and awake to see that both windows are filled again with stars.
Lesley leaves the next morning for Tsebar, and I hurry off to school to find the students and monks carrying items up and down the stairs—buckets of water, trays, bowls of rice, flowers, freshly cut pine branches, books, religious instruments, folding chairs. The Bhutanese teachers are shouting orders. Today there will be a puja, the students tell me, to chase away the ghosts. The headmaster laughs at this. Not exactly ghosts, he says. Pujas are held regularly in temples, but they are also held elsewhere for hundreds of other reasons—for the birth of a child, a wedding, promotion, or cremation, to ensure the success of a new project or a journey, to protect a household from harm. This puja, he explains, is being held to clear away any bad karma, obstacles, or harmful thoughts left over from last year that might hamper the success of this school year.
After morning assembly, the teachers are called upstairs to a classroom which has been cleared out. Red-robed monks sit in rows, chanting prayers. The Bhutanese teachers prostrate in front of an altar laden with offerings of food and water, butter lamps and incense. The Indian teachers bow, some deeply, some stiffly. Mrs. Joy merely nods her head. The headmaster tells me that I can do whatever I wish, it is up to me. I prostrate in front of the altar, because it is holy and beautiful, and then linger, listening to the prayers and the music, the same horns and bells and drums I heard in Tsebar. Back outside, we are served salty butter tea called suja and rice crisps. Someone pinches my arm, hard, and I almost drop my cup. It is Mrs. Joy. “Why did you bow down up there?” she hisses. “It is worshiping idols.”
I try to explain that an altar is an altar, a god is a god. “It’s all pretty much the same to me,” I tell her.
She shakes her head angrily. “You broke the First Commandment! ”
I cannot remember what the First Commandment is. I consider telling her to mind her own goddamn business, but then I think of Mr. Joy, leaning on the railing in a cloud of cigarette smoke, smiling nastily, and I say nothing. “May all sentient beings have happiness and the causes of happiness,” I think wearily. It is the only Buddhist prayer I know so far.
At lunch, I mail a hastily scrawled note to Lorna. My kids think I’m an idiot, one of the teachers addresses me as “your ladyshi
p,” I have fifty-three flea bites, and my blackboard doesn’t work. How are you?
A week later, Lorna writes back: Ha! I have fifty flea bites on one leg alone! Your kids are right. What is a blackboard?
Royal Visit
Mr. Iyya rushes into the staff room during morning clinic. “Have you heard the Good News?” he asks, wringing his hands.
For a moment, I think Mrs. Joy has got to him, but no—the good news is that the King is coming to Pema Gatshel! He will be here today! This very afternoon!
“Really?” I ask, painting Yeshey Dorji’s infected chin with gentian violet. “Will he come to the school? Will we get to meet him?”
Mr. Iyya assures me that he will, and we will. He has met the King before, he says. The King is knowing Mr. Iyya very well, yes very well. He stops abruptly, looking stricken. “What is it, Mr. Iyya?” I ask. He says he must write a poem for the visit of His Majesty to our humble valley. “An epic poem!” he exclaims. “In the style of Homer!”
He’d better get moving, I think to myself, if he’s going to finish it by this afternoon.
The headmaster comes in. Yes, he says, the King is on tour and will come to Pema Gatshel, no one knows for sure when, but classes are canceled in order to prepare.
From the class VIII history book, which I have been reading during library duty, I know that the King, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, assumed the throne upon the death of his father in 1972. He was seventeen, the youngest ruling monarch in the world. Throughout his reign, he has made frequent tours of the country to explain government policy and discuss development plans, and is by all accounts a well-loved ruler.
The history of Bhutan before the monarchy is extremely difficult to follow. Before the 1600s, there was no central authority in Bhutan. Each valley was ruled by its own king or clan leader. In 1616, Ngawang Namgyel, a Tibetan abbot, was engaged in a serious clerical dispute in ,his monastery when the protective deity of Bhutan appeared to him in a dream in the form of a raven flying south. The abbot left Tibet and crossed the high Himalayan passes into northwestern Bhutan, where he quickly established himself as an extraordinary leader. After defeating various invading Tibetan armies and unifying the valleys of Bhutan under one central administration, Ngawang Namgyel became the supreme ruler of the country, and assumed the title of Shabdrung, which means “at whose feet one submits.” His legacy is evident everywhere in Bhutan today, from the country’s legal code to its many dzongs, fortress-monasteries which represented a combination of political and religious power.
Before his death, the Shabdrung devised a dual system of government to look after both secular and spiritual affairs. The country’s monastic body was governed by an elected leader called the Jé Khenpo, and administrative and political affairs were managed by a temporal ruler, known as the Desi, with a number of local governors, called penlops, working under him. The Shabdrung’s reincarnations were supposed to be the supreme head of both systems.
Over the years, however, this system floundered. The penlops became all-powerful, appointing and dismissing Desis and Jé Khenpos as they wished, and political rivalries led to great internal instability. The history book lists a series of conflicts, ranging from court intrigue (one of the most interesting cases involved a smallpox-infested silk gho sent as a present to a political rival), dzong-burnings and kidnappings (especially of wives), to multiple assassinations and outright civil war. Then, at the end of the nineteenth century, one person, Ugyen Wangchuck, the Tongsa Penlop, emerged out of this turmoil as a powerful figure, bringing the penlops under his increasingly centralized authority. In 1907, penlops, lamas, and people’s representatives gathered at Punakha and voted to establish a hereditary monarchy, electing Ugyen Wangchuck “Druk Gyalpo,” the Precious King of the Dragon People.
Strangely, the Shabdrung’s reincarnations disappear from the history text shortly after this without a word of explanation. When I asked Mr. Dorji, the history teacher, about this several weeks ago, he looked uncomfortable for a moment, and then said that the Shabdrung’s current incarnation lives in India. “Was he born there?” I asked. Mr. Dorji shook his head. “He was born here, but now ... he lives there.” It was clear that I was not going to get any more out of him.
Preparations for the royal visit are exhaustive. I am asked to help Mr. Sharma supervise the cleaning of the yard. Mr. Sharma walks back and forth with a stick, shouting incoherently as the kids converge on the playing field, picking up paper, twigs, leaves, bits of cloth. He comes rushing over to me. “No. NO!” he says, gesturing for me to drop the litter I have picked up. “They will do it! ”
“I’ll help them,” I tell him. “Then it will get done faster.”
This does not go over well with Mr. Sharma. “It sets a bad example,” he says.
“Really? I think it demonstrates the dignity of labor.”
This offends Mr. Sharma, who says that he is a Brahmin, and this is not his work.
Elsewhere, the straggly flower garden in front of the school is being weeded and lined with stones and the stones themselves are being whitewashed. Some teachers are putting together a wall magazine of students’ essays and drawings. Classrooms and hostels are swept out, water is poured over steps, branches are lopped off trees. The tip-top poet is nowhere to be seen.
Jane appears with a group of selected teachers and students from the other villages of the district for the royal visit. We go to the tea stall for momos and sit there all evening, talking quietly in the candlelight. Jane explains protocol to me: the entire village will line up along the road, and when the royal convoy passes, everyone will bow. The Bhutanese are not supposed to look directly at the King, and will keep their eyes lowered in deference. “Can we look at him?” I ask. I have seen pictures: every shop and house has one, draped with a white scarf. He is a handsome man. Jane thinks it is okay to sneak in a few looks.
We order a “peg” each of Bhutanese whiskey and orange squash, a sickeningly sweet syrup, and the combination turns out to be so awful that we have to dilute it with water from the plastic jug on the table.
“Let’s just hope the whiskey will kill whatever else is in the water,” Jane says. I stare down at my cup: for once, I hadn’t thought about germs.
Several drinks later, we hear thunder rumble in the next valley. Jane tells me that Bhutan is called Land of the Thunder Dragon after the Drukpa Kargyue branch of Buddhism practiced here. When the religion was established in the twelfth century, the founder heard the thunder dragon roar, and named his school Druk—dragon. We listen to the dragon approach. It climbs a ridge in the south, the thunder becoming sharper as it gets closer. Suddenly the storm is above us, breaking open, pouring down. Neither of us has an umbrella or a flashlight. “Let’s wait it out,” I suggest. “The storms here are always over so quickly.” We wait and wait and wait, but the dragon stays right here, thunder cracking over our heads, rain roaring on the tin roof. Karma, the woman behind the counter, is falling asleep. We decide to go. Outside, we are soaked instantly. Jane says she is just waiting to step off the mountain and go sliding down to Gypsum. I say I am just waiting for lightning to strike us both dead. We slip in the mud and cling to each other, laughing hysterically. Jane says she is just waiting to see me open that Canadian combination lock in the dark. Somehow I do and we fall into the apartment, shivering, hiccuping, laughing still, and drink hot, weak tea. My skin feels cool and clean when I crawl into bed, and I fall asleep listening to the storm fade into the next valley.
I wake up with nausea and a bloated stomach. A hangover, I think, but when I sit up, I belch and taste rotten eggs. “Jane, are you sick?” I call out.
“What, you mean a hangover?” she calls back.
“No...”
She opens the bedroom door. “You look awful. Does it taste like eggs gone bad?”
“Yes.”
“Then it’s giardia. Do you feel well enough to get up?”
I do not, but I am not going to miss the King’s visit.
I wear a
kira purchased from a woman who came to my door last week, a series of brilliantly colored stripes worked in wool on a cotton background. Jane reminds me to bring my raichu, the narrow, red ceremonial scarf that women wear over their left shoulders when meeting a high-ranking official. Men wear a kabney, a broad scarf of cream-colored raw silk, draped diagonally across the body. At the school, the students are gathered on the playing field, ghos and kiras neat, hair sleeked back with water, faces shining. The class VIII girls come to adjust our kiras and help us fold our raichus properly. They show us how to bow when the King passes. The higher the rank, they explain, the lower the bow. For a Dzongda, you would touch your knee with the fringed end of your raichu or kabney “For our His Majesty, you must touch the ground,” they say. This is very important. This is called driglam namzha. They bow gracefully. Jane and I need more practice. I hope I do not fall on my face in front of the King.
An hour later, we are still standing around outside. Preparations are still not complete, and the headmaster looks grim as he checks the school compound. Then the Dzongda shows up and the activity intensifies. He asks the headmaster why there is no gate. The headmaster says he was told not to make a gate. The Dzongda says of course they have to make a gate! Now! Class VIII boys! Hurry! Bamboo poles are brought from somewhere and tied together, and slowly the skeleton of a gate materializes at the entrance of the school. The students bring armloads of pine branches to drape over the frame. The rest of the school is lined up, practicing driglam namzha. I ask Jane what this term means exactly, and she says she doesn’t think it can be directly translated. “Some people say etiquette, some people say rules and regulations, or discipline, or law. From what I understand, it’s a collection of rules governing behavior and social interaction. How to serve tea to your superiors, how to sit or stand in the presence of royalty, the proper way to wear national dress, that kind of thing.” I sit on the school steps, exhausted already, listening to my insides rumbling and heaving; I put my head down on my knees and fall into a thin, unhappy sleep.
