by Jamie Zeppa
One afternoon, from across the playing field, I watch Mr. Rinzin slap Karma Dorji across the face and I go running across the grass, heart swollen with rage, how dare he, how dare he? “What seems to be the problem?” I ask Mr. Rinzin. My voice is shaking but he does not seem to notice. “Nothing, nothing. There’s no problem,” he says, smiling, and walks away.
“What happened, Karma?” I ask.
“He is calling me to come, but I am coming there too slowly.” He shrugs and plods off to join his friends, and I burst into tears.
I go to talk to the headmaster. He listens sympathetically as I explain. I say that hitting a child for disobedience is one thing, maybe, but children are being hit all the time, for everything, even for things they have no control over. They are hit when they don’t understand and become afraid to ask questions. How can they learn if they cannot ask questions? Learning and fear are not compatible, and, as for discipline, there are other methods. The headmaster nods. He has heard this before. He says that he agrees in principle with me, but that students in Bhutan are used to the stick, and perhaps they will not behave without it. He says that if he stopped using the stick, the students might think he had no authority over them. “But all the students are so well behaved,” I say.
“Yes,” he agrees, “they are, but why? Because they’ve been brought up so strictly, isn’t it?” I feel my throat tighten, and I command myself not to cry. The headmaster does not speak for a while, and then he says that I can use whatever method I choose in my own classroom, and that maybe I will be an example to the others. I nod because I still cannot speak. He asks me if I have heard of NAPE, the New Approach to Primary Education, which the government is introducing. Under the NAPE system, he says, there will be no hitting. But it will take some time for people to get used to the new ways, he says.
These things take time, it is true, I want to say, but what about Mr. Iyya? Time is not going to help Mr. Iyya. There is a big difference between Mr. Iyya’s beatings and everyone else’s. A few days ago, I stopped outside class I B, my heart in my throat at the sound of weeping. Inside, the entire class was lined up in front of the Dzongkha lopen who was seated at the front of the room with a bucket of water and a handful of stinging nettles. He dipped the nettles into the water and struck each student across the palm. He did not look angry or happy or not happy to be punishing the students for whatever infraction they had jointly committed or their simple failure to learn. He just looked tired. But Mr. Iyya is different. I have heard him shout himself gleefully into a black twisted rage over a misspelled word. The senior girls tell me that he slaps them in class and says nasty things to them. “What kind of nasty things?” I ask, but they are too shy to tell me. His methodology for teaching English to class IV is to make them copy out and memorize pages from the dictionary.
That afternoon, as we walk out of town, I ask Karma Dorji if his parents hit him. “My mother is not beating,” he says.
“But what about when you are very naughty?” I ask.
“Then shouting,” he says. “My father is shouting and then sometimes beating. But Phuntsho Wangmo, you know Phuntsho Wangmo, miss? Our class Phuntsho? Her mother is beating. Her mother is very kakter.” Kakter means hard, difficult, rough.
“And the teachers at school, they are beating, yes?” I ask. They all nod, and Norbu says, “Only miss is not beating. Why not beating, miss? ”
“Because class II C is very good,” I say, and they laugh. “Not good, miss. We is very naughty.”
Then I tell them, slowly so that they will understand, “In my village, in Canada, if I beat my students, their parents would get very angry. They would call the police and I would have to go to jail.” But even as I say it, I hear the falseness in it. I try to calculate how many years ago corporal punishment was used in schools. I remember the strap in my elementary school. I cannot explain to them the complexity of the issue, the debate over physical punishment, the legal aspects, parents suing teachers, children suing parents. I cannot explain the state of things in North American schools, where teachers do not hit the students but students sometimes hit the teachers, the slow poisoning of the relationship between teacher and student, breaches of trust and abuse of authority, the hopeless lack of self-control that no one seems to know how to address. Things are different in North America, but in the final analysis, not any easier or any better, and I am sorry now that I have given that impression. Here again is the mind, leaping from emotion to speech without reflection. I have learned nothing.
Three days after this conversation, tea break in the staff room is interrupted by a disturbance outside the headmaster’s office. A man with a stick is speaking quietly, angrily in rapid-fire Sharchhop. Maya tells me that Mr. Iyya split open a girl’s knuckles in class and her father has come looking for him. The door to the office closes and we can hear nothing more. We sit in the staff room, watching the mist settle over the school yard, listening to the start of the rain on the roof, waiting for the end of the story. The office door opens, and the man leaves the school. The headmaster looks exhausted. The father was furious, he says, and he was hard-pressed to stop him from taking that stick to Mr. Iyya. He has promised to keep Mr. Iyya under control. The father in turn has promised not to beat Mr. Iyya on school property, but warned that Mr. Iyya now comes to the bazaar at his own risk.
I walk slowly across the playing field, letting the cold rain soak me. The hem of my kira is wet and heavy against my ankles, and my flip-flops sink into the mud. I feel like I am struggling through deep water. You do nothing, you keep quiet, and a teacher breaks open a girl’s hand. But at least something has been done. Perhaps it was right to stay out of it and let the parents come forth on their own. But if the girl had been a boarder, if she had had a different, less confident father, perhaps no one would have come forth. The girl would have been sent to the hospital for stitches, and Mr. Iyya would continue to hit and degrade the students. I want to know whose responsibility it is to do something. Just because I am a foreigner, an outsider, just because this is not my home, does that mean I should stay silent while children are beaten by a crazed, vicious adult? It’s a slippery slope on all sides, and I do not know where to draw the line between cultural sensitivity and plain old cowardice.
The Shrub’s Name Is Miss Jammy
I am perched on a counter in the kitchen, waiting for a pot of water to boil, remembering how in the beginning, I hated to come in here. The discolored walls and cracked concrete sink made me think longingly of warm and well-lit kitchens with shelves full of pretty things. Porcelain cups and saucers, ceramic canisters, quilted pot holders and matching oven mitts. Table cloths, place mats. A bread box, a butter dish, salt and pepper shakers. Junk and clutter, I think now. Clutter and junk.
I have one kerosene stove (used only for boiling water), a plastic jerry can, and a shining new gas stove with cylinder. A few tin plates, mugs and tumblers. Three spoons. A flour sifter, a tea strainer. One sharp knife. Two woven bamboo baskets, an assortment of empty cans with plastic lids. A frying pan, a pressure cooker, two pots. A beer bottle with the label washed off (the rolling pin), two shoulder pads (the oven mitts), one plastic bag full of plastic bags and one water filter. Overall it is still the ugliest, coldest, dirtiest, bleakest, barest, least comfortable kitchen I have known, but I have everything I need.
First-term exams have finished, and I have just started marking class II C’s science papers. Even the preprimary students wrote exams. All week, students wandered around the school yard memorizing their textbooks. Class II C wanted to join them. “We have to by-heart it,” they said.
“No, you don’t have to by-heart it,” I argued. “You have to understand it. Do you understand it?”
“Yes, miss.”
I pour boiling water into the tin mug, stir in coffee powder and carry it to my desk, where the papers are stacked up. What is a shrub? A shrub is a shrub. Shrub is mugspit. I am not a shrub. The shrub’s name is Miss Jammy. Shrub is I don’t kanow Miss. Most
of them fail science. Maybe I should have let them by-heart it. I press my head against the window. I don’t kanow Miss.
Outside, the wind picks up, sounding strange and ominous, and a flock of crows settles on the edge of the playing field. From a neighbor’s house the sounds of a puja, horns and drums and a chanted prayer, rise up over the crying of a baby. The puja is for the baby who is thinner and more yellow each time I see her. I swat at the flies that buzz angrily around my head. I cannot grade any more papers. I have to get out. I open the door to find Lorna climbing the staircase. “Howdy,” she says. “Wanna go shopping with me tomorrow in Samdrup Jongkhar?”
Samdrup Jongkhar, on the Indo-Bhutan border, is three hours away from Pema Gatshel by truck. At the orientation in Thimphu, it was referred to as sort of a shopper’s paradise for eastern Bhutan, where Indian goods of every kind were readily available. “Are you kidding?” I say. “Let’s go right now! ”
We get a ride in the back of a gypsum truck, sitting on a pile of stones as the truck roars out of the valley and onto the main road. The sky is clear, a brilliant, heartbreaking blue. “This is so much better than the Vomit Comet,” Lorna says. I tell her about a teacher who claimed the woman behind him on the Comet gave birth and no one even knew about it until the ride was over and the happy woman and her husband got off the bus with their new baby. Lorna says a very young monk peed on her foot on her first bus ride and a Bhutanese man proposed to her.
“Really? What did he say exactly?”
“He didn’t speak English, so he got his friend to ask,” she says. “His friend said, ‘Bhutanese man wants marriage you.’ ”
“And what did you say?”
“I said I’d think about it. There wasn’t anything in our contracts about remaining celibate, was there?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Good,” she says, laughing. “The old libido is starting to rage.”
“Yeah,” I sigh. “I’ve got the same problem, and Robert is seven thousand miles away.”
“How long before you see him again?”
“Seven months.”
Lorna whistles. “Good luck to you, girl.”
The truck turns a corner and we gasp: the mountains have dwindled into soft emerald hills which in turn subside into the scorched and impossibly flat plains of India. The heat grows as we descend through lusher, more exaggerated tropical vegetation—flowering bushes with star-like leaves, groves of banana trees, umbrella trees with flame-colored blossoms. We see grey langurs, scarlet birds, black butterflies the size of my hand with electric blue markings, a large hornbill, waterfalls. Then we pull into Samdrup Jongkhar, and the wet heat rushes over and wraps itself around us. We thank the truck driver and leap down onto the tarmac—I can feel the heat burning through the soles of my shoes—and stagger down the road to the Shambhala Hotel.
Inside, under a whirring fan, we gorge on french fries and chicken and chocolate and wait for the sun to drop. It is a little cooler without the unrelenting sun beating down on our heads but still very humid, and my lungs feel full of slush. We walk to the Indo-Bhutan border, which is half a brick wall painted with slogans: ULFA! ANTI-ULFA BE CAREFUL! BODOLAND! I know from the Indian newspapers the school receives that ULFA is the United Liberation Front of Assam, fighting for separation from India, and that the Bodos are a tribal people who want a separate state carved out of Assam. On the other side of the wall, the roads and shops and teastalls continue, but the buildings look more run-down, and there are piles of bricks and sand and garbage in the streets. We walk back along the main road past shops selling everything. Jeans, umbrellas, pineapples, refrigerators, cassette players, canned vegetables, spices, hand cream, flashlights, car parts, bolts of cloth in hundreds of patterns and colors. I buy a new and hopefully chicken-proof flashlight (50 ngultrum, about $4), and we decide to get new kiras with matching blouses and jackets. Lorna studies the shelves of cloth for about thirty seconds before choosing a stripy green print, but I spend ages comparing swatches of cloth, much to her annoyance.
“What do you think of this?” I ask, holding up a plain dark-grey fabric.
“Yeah, it’s nice.”
“Or this one? I like the checks better than the plain.”
“After a month of washing it in Surf, you’re not going to be able to tell the difference.” This is true: the washing powder we use sucks the color out of our clothes and gnaws little holes in everything.
“Oh, here’s a nice one. What do you think of this maroon?”
“It’s FINE. Come on, Cinderella, you’ll be late for the ball.”
I buy the maroon. Back in our room at the Shambhala, we sit under
the fan and talk about our kids. Lorna tells me how she tried to describe a vacuum cleaner and washing machine to them. “God knows what they’ve constructed in their minds,” she says. “Just imagine how it must sound to them: a big pipe that sucks up dirt and a box that washes your clothes.”
I tell Lorna about class II C’s dismal science exam answers. “I’m really feeling my lack of teacher training,” I say. “I don’t know if I’m doing much more than babysitting.”
We talk about beating. Lorna says that she is a strict teacher and hopes to show that you can be strict without hitting. “But shouldn’t we try to do something about it?” I ask.
Lorna shrugs. “It’s not our place to do anything,” she says. “And anyway, what would we do?”
The electricity suddenly fails, and we lie on the beds in the damp heat, listening to the crickets and one hysterical dog. I am almost asleep when Lorna’s voice comes out of the darkness. “I just remembered something. You can’t wear that new kira.”
“Why not?”
“Only monks and nuns can wear that color.”
I had completely forgotten. “Well, I can always make curtains out of it.”
“Or become a nun,” Lorna snickers.
In the morning, we decide to flee the heat and go to Bidung. The owner of a white hi-lux parked outside the hotel, a tall, boyish-looking Australian man, agrees to give us a ride to Tashigang. His name is Will, and he is a consultant, he tells us, making Seventy-Five Thousand American Dollars a Year, Plus Living Allowance and All Travel Expenses, and he cannot understand why we have come here for anything less. “You teachers make what, a hundred and fifty dollars a month?” he snorts.
“It’s enough to live on,” I say.
“It’s what all the other teachers live on here,” Lorna adds.
Will just shakes his head. “One hundred and fifty dollars a month. You couldn’t get me to do it, no way.”
“No one asked you to do it,” Lorna mutters.
Will talks all the way to Tashigang. This place, these people, can’t get a damn thing done, no work ethic, no idea of how to build a proper bridge, equipment thrown here and there, two new drills broken to pieces in a week.
“So why do you stay?” Lorna asks. “If it’s that bad.”
“I told you,” he says. “Seventy-Five Thousand Dollars a Year.”
In Tashigang, we scramble out of the vehicle and don’t even thank him for the ride. It is late afternoon; we will have just enough time to get to Bidung before dark. We walk up through cool pine forests in the falling evening, to the ridges where the winds stay, stopping to rest under trees, at the base of a chorten, beside a cluster of prayer flags. We arrive in Bidung at nightfall. Lorna’s quarters, at the end of a dilapidated row, consist of a bed-sitting room and a dank, spidery kitchen with a mudstove. I rummage in my bag for my new flashlight to take to the latrine. “It’s true to its name, pit latrine, ” Lorna warns me. “They’re building a new one. This one is so disgusting, I don’t use it.”
“What do you use then?”
“The maize fields,” she says. “The maize is just high enough.”
“Oh, Lorna!”
But she is right, the latrine is exceedingly disgusting. Where the floorboards have not rotted away, they are covered in excrement, and I hope for Lorna’s sake
they finish the new latrine before all the maize is harvested in the fall. When I come back, Lorna says we have just been invited to dinner by her “headless master.” “A nice man,” she says as we walk to his quarters, “but a hopeless headmaster. And he drinks too much, but then, there’s not a lot else to do out here, is there?”
Sitting on straight-backed chairs in a room identical to Lorna’s, we sip large cups of arra. “Dinner will take some time,” the headmaster tells us, pouring more arra. “Please have.” Two bottles of arra later, I am sitting with an empty plate in my lap, although I cannot remember having eaten. We stand up to go, and Lorna has to hold onto my arm.
On the way back, she says, “How did you eat that awful meat?”
“There was meat?”
“Yes, you idiot. It was putrid. I don’t know how you ate so much of it.”
I don’t know either. I awake hung-over. Lorna is getting ready for class. She has no classroom and teaches on the school verandah. Five small faces appear at her window. “Miss niktsing, ” they whisper excitedly. Two misses. On her way out, Lorna throws a packet of chicken noodle soup at me, part of a recent package from Canada, and asks me to make lunch. “Use wood instead of the kerosene stove, okay?” she says. “I have to haul the kerosene up from Tashigang. There’s plenty of kindling in the bucket in the kitchen.” I nod and go straight back to sleep.
Hours later, I carefully layer pieces of kindling and scrap paper in the bottom of the stove, sprinkle everything with kerosene and throw a lit match. The fire blazes up and I am pleased. Ten minutes later, the soup is still cold: the fire has gone out. I use more kindling, more paper, more kerosene. I poke, I blow, I curse. How is it that whole houses have been known to burn to the ground with one electrical spark, and yet I cannot warm a pot of soup with a bucket of highly flammable substances? I hear the door open and Lorna calls out cheerfully, “Hi honey, I’m home.” She is decidedly less cheerful when she sees that I’ve used all her wood and paper, and almost all the kerosene, and the soup is still cold. She fiddles with the charred remains in the stove, and the fire leaps to life.
