by Jamie Zeppa
Tashigang has grown somehow in two months, I think, as we pull into the center of town between a bus that is disgorging an endless stream of stiff-limbed, dazed passengers and a truck loaded with crates. It seemed so small and medieval when we drove through in March. I took no account then of the tarmacked roads, the electricity wires, the number of buildings—bank, hospital, telephone exchange, barber, tailor, post office, hydropower cell, wireless station, school, police headquarters, petrol station, bars, bars-cum-hotels. I didn’t notice the hand-drawn AIDS poster on a shop wall. I didn’t notice you could buy shoes in Tashigang. And shoe polish, playing cards, colored markers, curtain rings and hair dye. I didn’t notice you could buy so many things you didn’t actually need.
Two Westerners are sitting on a bench outside the Puen Soom, and although it has been months since I met them in Thimphu, I recognize them instantly. Leon, posted in Wamrong, and Tony from Khaling, are in the second year of their contracts. They are both tall and blond and very thin, but in their faded cotton clothes and rubber flip-flops, with colorful jholas at their feet, they do not seem out of place. They are reading and sipping glasses of murky liquid. Mud puppies, they inform me, sweet tea with a shot of Dragon Rum. Tomorrow they are going to visit Catherine, the Canadian teacher in Rangthangwoong, and they invite me to come along. I hesitate. I don’t want to miss my ride back to Pema Gatshel with Trevor tomorrow, but when will I get another chance to go to what-was-it-called again? I decide to go.
Leon and Tony are staying with Kevin, another Canadian teacher posted in Tashigang. “Is there room for me, or should I stay in a hotel?” I ask.
“Which hotel would that be?” Leon asks, gesturing grandly at the bazaar. “Bedbug Inn? The Flea Seasons?”
“This is eastern Bhutan,” Tony says. “Where there’s a floor, there’s room.”
On the way up to Kevin’s house, we stop at a bakery to buy soft, flat rounds of Tibetan bread. On one wall are somber black-and-white photographs of the four kings of Bhutan and a religious calendar from last year, the Year of the Earth Dragon. On the wall opposite is a poster of a scarlet-lipped, dagger-nailed Joan Collins. No one seems to mind the incongruity.
Kevin lives in a concrete block of a house furnished with the usual wooden benches and stiff chairs. We sit in the kitchen, drinking beer, peeling vegetables for dinner and sharing reports on the lateral road, the mail situation, and the state of everyone’s health—who got what from where and what they did about it. I laugh until my throat hurts. A leech up the nose wouldn’t have seemed so funny three months ago.
Outside, shadows collect under the eucalyptus trees and the air is filled with birdsong and the whistling of pressure cookers as neighbors prepare their evening meals. Inside, I find the electric lights harsh and strangely wasteful. I am used to having a circle of warm light only where I need it; I feel out of sync with the growing twilight outside and keep checking my watch. Leon and Tony have brought sleeping bags; I borrow a blanket from Kevin and lay some cushions down on the floor. It is nine o’clock and Tashigang is still awake: Bhutanese folk music drifts up from the bazaar, a vehicle honks impatiently, trucks lumber up the road, a woman yells repeatedly for Sonam to come home. Eventually, the sounds begin to fade away, Sonam finally comes home and even the thriving metropolis of Tashigang goes to sleep.
The bus to Rangthangwoong turns out to be a truck. We squeeze ourselves into the open back and wait for the driver. People keep climbing in, and soon I must balance awkwardly on one foot until my other foot finds a tentative resting place on a sack of rice. The engine grunts and wheezes to life and the truck lurches off down to the river, over the bridge called Chazam, and onto a rough, dusty road. The landscape is dry and sun-bleached, with chir pine trees dotting the dry, rocky slopes, a complete contrast to the wet, dense green of the enclosed Pema Gatshel valley. I turn my face into the hot wind and the girl next to me smiles and admires my silver earrings. She looks about fifteen, and has a pretty, heart-shaped face. Her earrings are thick, hand-fashioned hoops of gold. “Yours are nicer,” I tell her in Sharchhop. She shakes her head shyly. A group of students in their school ghos and kiras begins to sing. A man in a blue-striped gho, smelling strongly of arra, lurches against us when the truck turns a sharp corner and stops. We are at Duksam, two rows of crooked wooden shops along a narrow tarmacked road; several passengers leap out, several more leap on.
When the bus starts up again, I notice the man in blue has pushed himself between me and the girl. He is singing loudly as he clamps his hand over the girl’s breast. She looks away but there is no place for her to move. I cannot read her expression. I don’t know what to do, if I should do anything. Part of me is thinking, this is not your culture. You’ve been here for a few short weeks, you don’t even speak the language. You don’t know what’s going on here, who are you to interfere? The other part of me is thinking, it is perfectly clear what is going on here. It is not a matter of cultural differences. But it cannot be perfectly clear, except to a Bhutanese, and I am profoundly unsure, paralyzed by this inner argument. Finally, I work my way between the man and the girl. When he tries to reach around me, I elbow away his hand, and he looks into my face, puzzled. I look straight back. The singing around us has stopped. The man grins and shrugs and turns away. I try to look at the girl, but she is looking straight ahead and will not meet my eye. I can only hope I have done the right thing.
Rangthangwoong is halfway up a mountain, a village scattered around three large houses with ground-floor shops. Catherine is dressed in a grey kira, but her bright auburn hair sets her apart in the crowd waiting for the bus. Her quarters, located above one of the shops, consist of a bed-sitting room and, across a communal hallway, a bathroom and kitchen. She has been here for two years already, and she is very excited because the landlord has just installed a tap in her kitchen. We go to admire it, turning it on and off, laughing at ourselves. Someone has brought her a bottle of fresh buttermilk, and she pours us each a cup and then we walk up to the ruins of a ninth-century castle. Sitting below, on a grassy knoll, Catherine points to a mountain at the end of the valley. “That’s India,” she says. “The town is Tawang, in Arunachal Pradesh. At night, we can see the lights. My headmaster says you could walk there in one day.” This, of course, is illegal, she adds. You would run into the army at the border. This is where the Indo-China war spilled over into Bhutan in 1962. After the Chinese invasion of Tibet, India began to station troops along the northern frontier, including along Bhutan’s northern borders. The brief war was the result of growing tension along the northeastern Indian border, with both China and India claiming the area as their own. The older people still talk about it, Catherine says, the sudden appearance of helicopters in the sky over a village that had never even seen a vehicle. They thought it was the end of the world.
An old man with a large goiter on his neck stops to offer us betel nut smeared with lime paste and wrapped in a green leaf. Leon accepts, saying he has been meaning to try it. We watch as he stuffs the whole thing into his mouth and chews. “How is it?” we ask.
“God-awful,” he says, but keeps chewing. “It’s supposed to give you a mild high.”
After several minutes, he spits it out. “Are you high?” I ask.
“No, I’m nauseous. Are my teeth red?”
“Yes.”
The sunlight has turned a warm, liquid gold. We look up and down the length of the river valley, watching the mountain ranges in the south opening one after the other like gates to a secret kingdom. I love how the landscape gives the impression of vast space and intimacy at the same time: the thin brown line of a path wandering up an immense green mountainside, a plush hanging valley tucked between two steep hillsides, a village of three houses surrounded by dark forest, paddy fields flowing around an outcrop of rock, a white temple gleaming on a shadowy ridge. The human habitations nestle into the landscape; nothing is cut or cleared beyond what is required. Nothing is bigger than necessary. Every sign of human settlement repeats
the mantra of contentment: “This is just enough.”
We walk back to Catherine’s place and cook rice, vegetable curry and dahl, talking about where to go for the first-term break. I had not thought of going anywhere. “Oh, you have to go somewhere,” Leon tells me. There are a hundred possible destinations and combinations, other postings to visit, different routes to try out, all the old trading paths that people took before the lateral road was built. There are very old, holy temples to see, Tony wants to go to Dremitse on its own little hilltop, Catherine to Rangchikhar to meet a levitating lama. Two years suddenly seems a very short time. “What about the three-month winter break?” Tony says. “We could all walk from Lhuntse to Bumthang and spend Christmas at the Swiss Guest House.”
“What a good idea!” I exclaim, thinking of bukharis and the smell of pine.
“I thought you were going home for Christmas,” Leon says to me.
Yes, so I am. I had forgotten.
The lama who lives next door invites us to his room at dusk. The only light comes from the butter lamp on his altar. The lama is absorbed in his evening prayers, and we sit on the floor beside him and drink zim-chang, the good-night arra he has offered us. I am glad there is no need to speak. I want to absorb this moment in this room, the steady flame of the butter lamp, the composed faces of the Buddhas behind the altar, the contented silence of my friends, the great peaceful night settling all around us outside. I feel I could sit here forever. Back in Catherine’s room, wrapped in a borrowed blanket, I lay under the window, cold and tired and happy. I study the stars sprayed across the sky and listen to the lama praying softly next door. I remember my arrival in Bhutan and how miserable I was, and all the other teachers who seemed inexplicably content. They were right all along, I think. This is the most remarkable place, after all.
The Vomit Comet
There is no transport from Rangthangwoong to Tashigang; we have to walk back. After a breakfast of fried rice and leftover curry, we set off down the mountainside to the main road which runs along the river valley. Leon and Tony go galloping off, surefooted through fields and rice paddies. I must fly along after them to keep up. As long as I don’t think about where to put my foot next, I do not stumble. We are hot and sweaty by the time we reach the row of shops at Duksam, where there is hot tea, warm beer or unfiltered water to drink. We opt for the warm beer, which makes me sleepy, and then continue to trudge along the road. It is sixteen kilometers back to the bridge below Tashigang. There is no shade, and the sun is merciless. Below us, the river is a deliciously cool turquoise surge. Tony says the color indicates its origin: the turquoise comes from suspended particles of stone crushed by the grinding of a glacier. I long to climb down the bank and immerse myself in its blue-green chill.
The flat road is aerobically easy but endlessly tedious. We stop to talk to everyone we pass. Where are you going, where are you coming from. Gari mala—notruck. Leon and I become engaged in an inane conversation about soap operas, restaurants, and bad songs from the seventies to help pass the time. We pass the temple of Gomkhora, beside an enormous black rock near the river. “That’s the rock Guru Rimpoché used to pin down a demon,” Leon says. “He chased the demon all the way from Tibet. There’s a really narrow tunnel down there in the rock that people squirm through. If they make it, it means their sins are cleared away.” We stand for a moment, looking down toward the river. There is something completely satisfying about the whole spot. The temple is old but well kept, surrounded by neatly parceled rice paddies and shaded by large, fragrant eucalyptus trees. In the noontime light, everything shimmers but nothing moves except the river. There is no sign of any human activity and that feeling comes over me again, the feeling of being too recent and flimsy for the landscape I am in. I try to imagine who I would be if I had lived all my life here at this temple by the river. I wonder what I would want if I had grown up without ads telling me my heart’s desires: to be thinner, richer, sexier, look better, smell better, be all that I can be, have a faster car, a brighter smile, lighter hair, whiter whites, hurry now, don’t miss out, take advantage of this special offer. If instead I had spent twenty-four years absorbing the silent weight of the mountains, the constant pull of the river, the sound of hot white light burning into black rocks.
A bird sings out, a two-note song, and I come back to myself. “Let’s just stay here,” I say, because the road ahead bends and quivers in the heat, and we still have twelve kilometers to go, and standing here is like drinking spring water. Even the river hesitates at this spot, curling around the large rocks and murmuring against the banks before the current tugs it away.
The last two hours of the journey take forever. We turn a comer and see Tashigang dzong, perched on a cliff in the distance, but that’s where it remains, in the distance, a mirage, and I limp along, feet burning, stomach empty, with the refrain of “Run Joey Run” on permanent playback in my head. “I wish the Vomit Comet would come along,” I say.
“No you don’t,” Leon and Tony say in unison.
“Which would you rather have right now,” Leon says suddenly, “a sandwich with Black Forest ham on thinly sliced rye bread with Dijon mustard and a cold beer or—”
“Oh no,” Tony groans. “Not the Food Game.”
“OR, a pizza with extra thin crust, sun-dried tomatoes, onions, black olives, cheese and—”
“It’s his favorite game on long walks and bus rides,” Tony explains. “It’s torture.”
“AND a bottle of your favorite red wine,” Leon finishes.
“The sandwich,” I say. “You?”
“The pizza. Okay, now, which would you rather have for dessert, Häagen-Dazs chocolate chocolate-chip ice cream or ...”
Time speeds up. We cross Chazam discussing the merits of seafood over falafel above the loud flap and flutter of tattered prayer flags tied to the bridge railings, and take a short cut to Tashigang dzong, a forty-five-minute ascent up the steepest slope ever to bear a path. I am dizzy and painfully out of breath when we reach the cluster of prayer flags at the top, but now I understand why the dzong was built here, on this unassailable spur overlooking the river.
At the Norkhil bar, we are joined by a class VIII student Tony knows. He begins to tell us about Tashigang, how a local deity had to be subdued before Buddhism could flourish there; a small dwelling halfway down the mountain is said to hold the deity now. The dzong was built in 1688, continuing the Shabdrung’s campaign to bring the whole country under one rule. “Hey,” I interrupt, “what happened to the Shabdrung anyway?”
“What do you mean, miss?”
“In the class VIII history book, the Shabdrung’s reincarnations suddenly disappear.”
The student glances over one shoulder, then another, and begins to tell us a story. Sometime in the 1920s or 1930s, he is not sure when, the then-Shabdrung began to cause trouble with the monarchy and soon after died mysteriously “in his sleep,” but everyone knows he was assassinated, suffocated with a white silk scarf, and everyone knows the family of the man who killed him was cursed with illness, madness, loss and ruin. The next reincarnation was found somewhere in the eastern districts, but this Shabdrung also disappeared. Some people say he was pushed out of a window in Tashigang dzong.
The student pauses and looks around again. “As he was falling, a bird tried to save him, and caught him with its wings, but the men in the dzong threw stones and he fell again. The river itself didn’t want to take him, and sent him back to shore, but the men came again and pushed him back in and so finally he had to die.”
He tells us that the next reincarnation was taken out of Bhutan by the Indian army during the Indo-China war, and now lives in New Delhi.
We sit quietly, digesting this, and I remember the Pema Gatshel history teacher’s reluctance to talk about the current Shabdrung. After the student leaves, we look at each other. “How much of that do you think is grounded in fact?” I ask.
“Who knows?” Leon says, shrugging.
I think about
all the half-complete stories I have heard since I got here, how their incompleteness makes them resonant and powerful. History here seems a combination of official, unofficial, and forbidden stories. This tale of the Shabdrung, for instance: I don’t know where to look it up or who to ask for more information. There’s no way to know for sure. It could have happened, it might have happened, I heard it happened ... It is the impossibility of knowing for sure that makes everything possible. I am dying to know (no, I don’t want to know) the rest of the story, the whole story, the real story.
We drink several cold beers in silence. “Now where’s my ham sandwich with Dijon mustard, that’s what I want to know,” I say. But what I really want is rice and dahl and potato curry at the Puen Soom, which is fortunate, because that’s all there is.
On Tuesday morning, we search the bazaar in vain for a private vehicle going south. “It’s the Vomit Comet for sure,” Tony says.
“It’s full. We’ll never get on,” I say, watching as a woman with a jerry can of kerosene, a baby, and a bundle of frayed, faded cloth tries to press her way up the bus steps.
Leon walks around the bus, peering into the windows. “That’s not full,” he reports back scornfully. “Full means the ticket collector has to walk on the backs of the seats. Let’s go.”
We squeeze ourselves onto the bus, which reeks of mildew, vomit, kerosene, and betel nut, struggling over legs, bags, boxes, sacks, jerry cans, children and bedrolls. It is like being pushed through a sieve. Still more people pile on, until we are jammed in too tightly to move, and the ticket collector has to walk on the backs of the seats. The engine rumbles to life and Hindi film music comes screeching out of a speaker. “Oh misery,” Leon groans, “we’ve got the one with the sound system.”
