by Jamie Zeppa
After thirty minutes on the winding road, a few people begin to vomit, out windows if they are near them, onto the floor if not. People cover their noses and mouths with their sleeves against the smell. A chicken escapes from somewhere and a child kicks my shins trying to catch it. Someone spits betel nut juice on my shoes. The ticket collector sways precariously from his perch and clutches at a woman’s head to prevent himself from falling into her lap when the bus brakes suddenly. People who want to get off at an unscheduled stop gesture to him, and he pounds loudly on the ceiling or the back wall: bangBANG, bangBANG, bangBANG. Disembarkation requires a contortionist’s skill and a great deal of determined uncivility. The open windy ride to Rangthangwoong seems like a luxury now. “Which would you rather have,” I ask Leon, “eggs Benedict with freshly squeezed orange juice or ...” I cannot finish.
“Valium and a Scotch,” he answers flatly.
We say goodbye to Tony in Khaling, and Leon gets off in Wamrong, wishing me luck getting a gypsum truck from Tshelingkhor. “If there’s no truck, and it’s getting dark,” he says, “stay in Tshelingkhor. Don’t walk in the dark. A kid fell off a cliff last year trying to take a shortcut somewhere along that road.”
“Yeah, okay, I’ll just book into the Holiday Inn for the night,” I say grumpily, thinking of the two miserable, bamboo shacks by the roadside.
“The Hilton has better room service,” he says. “Bye!”
There is already a large group of people waiting at Tshelingkhor when I scramble off the bus. It is dusk, and a heavy mist is creeping over the tree tops. Inside one of the huts, Tshering’s shop-cum-bar, I study the shelves behind the counter. I have a choice of Orange Cream Biscuits and tea, or Orange Cream Biscuits and several brands of Bhutanese whiskey: Dragon Rum, Triple XXX Rum, Black Mountain Whiskey, Bhutan Mist. I drink three cups of lukewarm tea and then switch to Bhutan Mist. Tiny knives scrape my throat on the way down but the final product settles warmly in my stomach. “Gari mala,” the old man beside me says glumly. He is drinking Triple XXX Rum. I ask him where the toilet is and he gestures to the door. Outside. I stand up but he waves me back down. “Ma di, ma di, ” he says, making a strange wriggling gesture with his fingers. “Pat-ba!” Finally, a young boy steps forward and translates shyly for me. “He is telling don’t go, miss. He is telling leeches.” If leeches can get up your nose, they can also get into other orifices. I sit back down. Just then, everyone in the room jumps up. I can hear it too, the distant rumble of a truck. Outside the mist has turned into a fine, cold rain. The truck stops, a flatbed already overloaded with sacks of rice, but the driver waits while we clamber on before turning onto the Pema Gatshel road.
I know we are driving along the edge of a very steep gully, but in the darkness I can see nothing except the occasional glimmer of the truck’s headlights on the clouds in the ravine beneath us. In my gut, though, I can feel the immense emptiness between the soft, deeply rutted road we are on and the bottom of the gulch somewhere down below. Beyond, across, I know there are mountains but I cannot see them. It is like driving on the edge of the world.
The truck turns a corner and we are splashed with mist from a waterfall. At the next corner, the truck flounders in mud, rocking back and forth. The Bhutanese begin to pray. I don’t know what I am more afraid of: the road giving way, the truck tottering and the whole lot of us tumbling over the edge, or my bladder full of tea bursting. The truck lurches forward, engine straining, then slides back. Everyone is scrambling to stay perched on top of the hard rounded sacks of rice, and I look desperately for something to hang on to. The old man from Tshelingkhor offers me a length of rope which is not secured to anything, a shovel handle, and his own cloth bag full of empty bottles. I shake my head to each. Finally, he grins lewdly and motions at his crotch. “Apa! Yallama!” I say, exasperated. Our fellow passengers, who have been watching this attempt to find me a handhold, burst into laughter. They laugh for the rest of the ride. Just when they begin to quiet down, someone shouts, “Apa! Yallama! ” and they explode again. I laugh, too, looking up at the sky of shifting clouds illuminated by the moon buried somewhere deep inside them.
Do Not Eat Your Spelling Tests
In the staff room during morning break, Maya is opening a stack of mail and skimming the letters. I pick up an envelope addressed to “Miss Dorji Wangmo, class VIII B, Pema Gatshel Junior High School” and ask Maya what she is doing. “Girls’ mail,” she says. “First the matron has to read.”
“But why?” I ask.
“Love letters,” she says, not looking up. I don’t know what to say to this. An inquiry into the privacy of mail is obviously pointless.
“See this one. The boy is writing ‘from your dear brother Tandin Wangchuk’ on the envelope, but look here, inside. ‘My dearest sweet Dechen, I am missing you a hell lot,’” she reads triumphantly, then crumples up the letter. She looks up and sees my expression. “We have to,” she says. “Otherwise these girls will spoil their studies.”
“But you don’t read the boys’ mail,” I say.
“No,” she says. “I am the girls’ matron.”
“But does anyone read the boys’ mail? The boys’ warden?”
“No,” she says.
I stand there, chewing on the end of my pen, remembering Mr. Om Nath’s strange tone when he talked about looking after the girls, thinking of how often the boys are singled out for responsibilities and recognition by the staff while the girls are pointedly ignored, how the number of female students decreases sharply in the upper classes. During the orientation, we were told that women in Bhutan enjoy much more freedom than women in other Asian countries. Women in Bhutan own shops and hotels and small businesses, they travel when and where they want, and schooling is free and open for both sexes. Unlike India, there is no dowry system and very few arranged marriages; daughters are as valued as sons, divorce is acceptable, widows remarry, and family property is usually passed down matrilineally. And yet, in the school, another set of values seems to be at work. In the lower classes, the girls are still bold and confident, but they become increasingly shyer as they move into the upper grades. They put their hands over their mouths and giggle when addressed; they defer to the male students and seem to shrink a little more each year. I wonder if sexism is somehow a by-product of Western-style development, or the number of Indian teachers in the school system, or if chauvinism is just as deeply embedded here as anywhere else. When I ask the older girls why so many of their friends have dropped out, they tell me they were needed at home, or they had gotten married, or their parents thought that education was irrelevant since their daughters were going to inherit the family house and land.
“One letter is there for you, in the headmaster’s room,” Maya says, and I slip across the hall. It is a letter from Robert. I have this idea that I will put it, unopened, into the top fold of my kira until lunch, that I will take it home and savor it slowly. I do not. I rip open the letter and read it right there, standing in the headmaster’s office. Robert writes that he misses me. He has received my postcard from Thimphu and my first long, long letter. He wishes he could call me. He writes about school, what’s gone wrong with his car this time, the weekend with his parents, the skiing is finished, it has been a mild spring. The letter is full of details of daily life, and I feel reconnected and homesick, close and far, at the same time. And then I get to the end, just before the love and x’s and o’s. He says he has read my letter over and over again, but he just can’t get a handle on where I am and what I am experiencing.
“Where are you?” he writes.
The bell rings for the next period but I stand in the office, the letter dangling from my hand. I don’t know how he can ask where I am, how he cannot understand. I wrote everything.
The monsoon has begun in earnest. The rain in March was just a little prelude. The mornings are often clear, and I get up early just to watch the sun float up over the dark hills behind the school. By early afternoon, the clouds have rolled in again, bloc
king up all views. It rains most heavily at night, and I like the sound of the falling water on the corrugated iron roof now, the steady reassuring pressure of it. I no longer worry about the road and what it might or might not bring—mail, visitors, supplies. I will not starve. I will be taken care of, I know that now.
If I get up early enough, I have an hour or two to myself before someone knocks at the door. I boil water for coffee on the new gas stove Trevor has brought me from Samdrup Jongkhar. It cost one month’s salary (which I had to borrow from the headmaster) but it is worth it. Back in bed with my coffee, I read, write in my journal, listen to the now-familiar sounds of chickens and roosters and cows and children. Once or twice, I have gone out for a walk at dawn, and have been surprised at the number of people already at work: tending cows, carrying water, collecting firewood. I think of the students who have already begun their three-hour walk to school, having risen and dressed and eaten a breakfast of cold rice in the dark.
The first knock at the door is usually one or two kids, bringing me vegetables. I pay for these things, even though the headmaster told me not to. “It is because you are the teacher,” he said. “They want to give something.” He said that respect for the teacher is a Bhutanese tradition, and the parents do not expect to be paid for vegetables. But I don’t know how I can suddenly stop paying them now that I have started, and it is such an inconsequential amount (for me)—not even a dollar for a week of fresh tomatoes or spinach. The news of this payment has spread, though, and now kids from other classes are bringing me vegetables as well. Dozens of kids, armfuls of spinach, baskets of onions and radish and beans. I cannot possibly eat all they bring, and yet, I do not know how to refuse it. I cannot take from some and not from others, cannot pay some and not others. I regret my misplaced generosity and then wonder if it is even generosity at all, or just guilt at having so much, and a desire to be liked, to be accepted by the village, to be thought well of. I have upset something, changed expectations, brought something foreign into the picture. I have created a transaction.
I wonder what other things I have unthinkingly done, if I will do more harm than good here. I do things without thinking, I forget where I am. This is harder than living without a refrigerator and hot running water, harder than being cut off from family and friends. This is, in fact, the hardest part: the same imperfect self immersed in a completely new and incompletely understood setting, the same desires and longings clouding judgment, the same old heedless mind, leaping from impulse to action.
No mindfulness, I think. Every Buddhist treatise I read stresses the importance of bringing the mind to focus on itself, developing the awareness necessary for right thought and speech and action. Mindfulness is both a means and an end, the way to enlightenment and the product of it. It has allowed me several times to pull myself out of a quagmire of homesickness and futile longing for material comforts, and bring myself back to the moment or task at hand, but I wish I had a stronger, less random sense of it. Perhaps I expected that I would automatically become wiser in a Buddhist culture, maybe through osmosis. But mindfulness will only come through effort. Meditation is one way to acquire it, but I am also beginning to wonder if all the Buddhist rituals I have witnessed so far—the turning of prayer wheels, recitation of mantras, circumambulation of prayer walls—are practiced in order to develop mental discipline.
I think about this through morning assembly, watching my kids’ heads bent in prayer. I love them, each and every one of them. They have already taught me far more than I can ever teach them. Jane was right: they make everything worthwhile. I bow my head and pray that I do not do more harm than good. I pray to remember where I am.
I push open the classroom door and they leap up. “Good morning, class II C,” I say. They are class II C, and I am Miss: Miss Jamie, also Miss Jigme, sometimes Miss Jammy, nurse and babysitter, cheerleader and referee, general assistant and, occasionally, teacher.
“Good morn-ing, miss! ” they shout back, beaming. And we begin.
Most days are still a travesty of pedagogy. Today, I hand back spelling tests and Sonam Tshering promptly stuffs his in his mouth and swallows it. For a moment, I am too surprised to speak. Karma Dorji says, “That boy is very hungry,” and everyone laughs, but I am not amused. Frowning, I fold my arms and say crossly, “Class II! Listen to me!” They sit up straight, serious, expectant. “Class II,” I say sternly, “do not eat your spelling tests.” And then I burst into laughter. My announcements and queries are growing more absurd daily. Tshewang Tshering, you cannot write your test with a cat in your gho. Sangay, put away those chilies. Well, eat them if you’re going to eat them, but don’t play with them during math. Class II C, who is bleeding all over the floor? Class II C, who is gassing? Class II C, why is there a bottle of pee in our room?
Moments of work and understanding and order arise briefly out of the uproar. In between accidents, emergencies, spontaneous expressions of affection, and moments of brilliant mischief, they learn the five senses, the months of the year, the rain cycle. Miss, they tell me, you is very good. Miss, you is coming my house, my mother is very happy to you. Miss, you is always teaching us English, today we is teaching you our language; you say long-sharang. I repeat it—long-sharang—and they fall over laughing. I have just learned the Sharchhop for dick-head.
After school, they come to take me roaming. There is so much to show me: a crumbling chorten, a flowering orange tree near a stream, a grove where ghosts are seen at night. They have so much to tell: the woman in their village who can talk to the dead, the time someone saw a demon and fell ill, the great hairy ferocious beast that lives in the mist on the tops of mountains and feeds on human flesh (one kid demonstrates by trying to bite another kid’s head). They tell me what they will be when they grow up: a dasho, a driver, a farmer. They tell me about their parents, who drinks arra and who does not, whose house has glass windows and whose does not, who died and when and why. They talk about God. God is Sangay, the Buddha, and God is also Guru Rimpoché. And Chenresig and Jambayang, they say, naming the Bodhisattvas of Compassion and Wisdom. Lha shama. Many gods. I ask if they believe in heaven. Yes, yes, they say. “Being very good, then going up to Guru Rimpoché’s place. Being bad, then going down.” I ask them what it means to be good. They say “good” means being kind, giving, not killing, not even a bird, not even a bug.
“But you eat meat, yes?” I ask. They nod. “So isn’t that also bad?” No, they say, they themselves do not kill the animal. “Only eating, not killing.” This reminds me of stories I have heard about pigs being tied near cliffs. The pig eventually falls off and then it can be said that the animal killed itself. I don’t really understand how this solves the prohibition on harming any sentient being, but they obviously do.
We walk back up the mountain in the cool evening shadows. At home, I write Robert another letter, reiterating, describing things again, in more and better detail. I am so lucky to be here, I write. Even when it is difficult and confusing. Maybe especially then. I am so glad I came. But I wonder if Robert will take this as a sign that I do not miss him, that I like Bhutan more than him. I rewrite the last page, saying I can’t wait to see him at Christmas. Christmas. The word looks foreign and unreliable on the page.
Beating Nicely
It is the language that confuses me at first. “Our sir is beating nicely,” a class IV student informs me. Beating means hitting, with a strip of willow or a thin stick, across the palm or the backs of the legs. But beating nicely? Perhaps it means a beating without force, a mild or apologetic beating: this hurts me more than it hurts you. But nicely is used in Bhutan to mean well-done. So this is a thorough beating, a terrible beating. The sir in question is Mr. Iyya, but almost every teacher in the school has a stick and they are all beating nicely. An ugly narrow piece of bamboo, brought whistling down onto a trembling hand, a vicious crack, an indrawn breath, silent tears. I do not often understand what the beating is being given for. One morning during assembly, several of the smalle
st students receive a stick across the back of the legs. Mrs. Joy tells me it is for coming to school without shoes. “But what if their parents can’t afford to give them shoes?” I ask, horrified. She shrugs. “They have to wear shoes. Headmaster has been telling and telling,” she says.
In the classroom, students are hit when they come late, when they talk out of turn, when they have forgotten their books, when they don’t understand, when they can’t remember, when they dare ask a question, when they give the wrong answer and, occasionally, especially in Mr. Iyya’s class, when they give the right answer. Teachers come to school with a notebook, a pen, and a stick. When the stick gets lost or broken, they send a student outside to find another. I should have expected this the first time I heard the Alphabet Song sung with a sinister twist: “Oh my madam don’t beat me, now I know my ABCs.”
I remind myself that this is not my country, not my education system. I remember fragments from our orientation session, a lecture about the monastic system, harsh punishments meted out by the guru to the student as a way to achieve total submission. The goal in the monastery is not submission for its own sake but the breaking of the ego, liberation from a false sense of self, leading to enlightenment. But it is very hard to see how this applies to class III students who do not understand multiplication. The final goal in school is knowledge, understanding, and a stick will not help. Another part of me argues: it is part of a bigger cultural system, it involves different values. You can only judge it from your perspective, from your own cultural background and upbringing, and even if you are right, what can you do about it? Back and forth I argue, right-wrong, east-west, judgment is possible-impossible. It reminds me of arguments in a first-year university philosophy class, the impossibility of ever saying anything, one way or another.
