by Jamie Zeppa
We sip the hot soup and eat cream crackers, and discuss various romantic developments among the expatriate teachers. Lorna has already ruled out the possibility of romance with any of the Canadians. “They’re good buddies,” she says. “But nothing more.” I ask her if she has seen anything like the night-hunting we heard about during our orientation, where young men court women by climbing through their windows at night.
She says yes, and this is why the girls at school are locked in.
“What do you mean, locked in?”
“Locked in the hostel. At night. From the outside.”
My mouth drops open. “They’re locked in from the outside? What if there’s a fire or something?” I say. “Why can’t the girls lock themselves in from the inside?”
“I don’t know,” Lorna says. “They don’t trust them?”
“But who are they locked in against? The boys?”
“I guess so.”
“So why don’t they lock the boys in, then?”
“I don’t know,” Lorna says.
“But isn’t it weird? Even the word ‘night-hunting.’ And if everyone is so relaxed about sex, and if women are so free, why are they locking the girls in? It’s just not acceptable.”
“It’s not acceptable in our culture,” Lorna says.
Outside, a hard heavy rain begins. There is something ominous in the force of it. I cannot see farther than the edge of the playing field. At 3:30, I begin to worry about the road back to Pema Gatshel. “If this keeps up, I’ll be stranded in Tashigang,” I say. “I’d better get back.” Lorna lends me a rain cape, and I set off. The path is now a mudslide, and at several places I have to sit and slither down. My pants are slick with clay, and rain runs down my neck.
The road south is already closed by the time I reach Tashigang, and I have to stay for several days, waiting for the landslides to be cleared and then for some form of transport. Each morning I sit at the Puen Soom, praying for a landcruiser, a hi-lux, a truck, a scooter, a donkey. One morning on the way down to the bazaar I even pray for the dreaded Vomit Comet and my prayers are instantly answered. There it is, revving up in a swirl of blue fumes.
The Question Why
The rains have turned Pema Gatshel a thousand shades of green: lime, olive, pea, apple, grass, pine, moss, malachite, emerald. The trees are full of singing insects, flowers, birds, hard green oranges, children. I walk along a stone wall, feeling my foot connect with every step to the earth, listening to the whirring humming world around. I stop to watch a woman weeding her garden. Her children are playing a game with stones in the shade of a flowering shrub, while three plump chickens scratch in the dirt. A little further on, I rest on a mossy boulder beside a waterfall, cooling my face and hands in the mist. A class II student and his father stop to offer me a handful of plums, and I refuse politely. Offer-decline, offer-decline, offer-accept. The plums are firm and faintly sweet. Above, the cleanest whitest clouds I have ever seen are banked up against the sky. It’s hard to believe now that I once thought this a landscape of lack, that I was afraid I wouldn’t have enough, wouldn’t fare well, wouldn’t be happy.
Yesterday, the kids brought me seven tiny, withered apples, obviously the last of last year’s harvest. Under the darkened, spotted skin, the yellow heart was almost unbearably sweet. In Canada, I would have thrown them out and gone to the grocery store to choose new, perfectly shaped, unblemished apples, the taste genetically engineered out of them.
Everything is more meaningful here because there is less of everything. Every brown farm egg is precious. I make yogurt out of sour milk, and turn overripe fruit into jammy desserts. A plastic bag is a rare and immensely useful thing. The first few did not last long, but now I am careful. I wash and dry and fold them away. I clean out jars and tins and plastic containers and save the tinfoil liners from cartons of milk powder. I stand in my kitchen, satisfied with the meaning of every item, thinking that my grandfather would be pleased. I am beginning to think that his cautious saving and counting and putting away have more to do with this measure of meaning than fear of future lack.
I like knowing where things come from. The cheese in my curry comes from the cow belonging to the family in the first house behind the hospital with the banana trees out front. I buy the cheese, fresh, still warm, wrapped in a banana leaf and tied with a piece of dried vine. The new flip-flops I am wearing are a present from Sangay Chhoden’s mother for the antibiotic ear drops I gave her for Sangay Chhoden’s baby brother’s infected ear. The cloth bag of peas in the kitchen came from Sonam Tshering, whose family lives in a bamboo hut at the end of the road and who cannot afford to be giving away peas or anything else. I forget the peas until they begin to rot, and am about to throw the whole lot out when I think of the hut and the meager vegetable garden behind it. I force myself to pick through pods, separating the edible peas from the slime, keeping in mind a Tantric Buddhist teaching about overcoming squeamishness, facing the inevitability of death and decay by immersing oneself in all forms of unpleasantness.
Everything is more meaningful because it is connected to the earth. There are no signs to read, no billboards or neon messages; instead I read the hills and the fields and the farmhouses and the sky. The houses, made of mud and stone and wood, are not hermetically sealed. The wind blows in through the cracks, the night seeps in through the rough wooden window slats. The line between inside and outside is not so clear.
Everything is more meaningful because understanding requires struggle. I have to hold on to all the half-explained, half-translated, half-imaginable things, hoping that I will meet someone someday who will be able to explain. One evening I am called to the boys’ hostel to see a sick class VIII boy. He is sitting slumped in his bunk, eyes unseeing. When I touch his arm lightly, he shudders. The other boys explain: he has these fits, no not epilepsy, they know epilepsy, it is not that. It is like possession, they say. Last year a lama gave him a protective amulet and he was fine until he lost the amulet washing in the river last week and now, just see, miss, he is sick again. I don’t know what to say. They didn’t cover possession in the health course. Keep him warm, I say, but not too warm. Let him be but stay close by. Later, when I tell the other teachers, they nod. Yes, this happens. They don’t know how to say it in English. There are things here too old to be translated into this new language.
The headmaster asks me to teach class VIII English in the afternoons while class II C is learning Dzongkha. I stay up late the night before my first class, reviewing the lesson, hoping that I will be able to handle the senior students, many of whom are at least eighteen. I do not have to worry: they are well-behaved and meticulously polite. They are eager to answer questions with definite answers: What is the past participle of eat? What happens to the main character of the story? Other questions, though, produce a strained, confused silence. Perhaps they are shy, I think, perhaps they will express themselves more freely in their written assignments. But I am disappointed and puzzled by the sameness of their writing. Every piece begins with a cliché or a mangled proverb. As they say, student life is golden life, and it is true also. As saying goes, the cleanliness is next to the godliness and I agree to it. Every piece concludes with some hackneyed piece of advice or fawning praise (so let us ever thank our kind teachers who make so many sacrifices for the poor and undeserving students). I cannot get them to write in their own voices, and wonder if it is because individual expression is not valued here as it would be in the West. Originality seems to count for very little; the community is more important, conformity and accordance and compliance.
But there must be some dissent, I think. I listen more carefully outside the classroom, and begin to hear different stories. Some senior girls tell me they were forced to cut their hair at school. They are ethnically Nepali, from the southern districts of Bhutan. (According to government policy, students above class VI are sent to schools outside their home districts. Southern students are sent north, eastern students west, western students south, t
o promote greater integration.) The Nepali girls tell me that it is their custom to keep their hair long. “We wept like anything,” they say, “but what to do? Short hair is driglam namzha.”
I casually ask the headmaster why the female students must all have short hair. “Lice,” he says matter-of-factly. The hostels are alive with fleas, lice and bedbugs, this is true, and given the school’s erratic water supply, short hair makes sense. But this driglam namzha is appearing more and more. There is the new dress law: all Bhutanese citizens have to wear national dress in public or face fines and possible imprisonment. In the staff room, I leaf through back issues of the Kuensel, Bhutan’s weekly newspaper, which I rarely bother to read when it arrives, a week or two late. An article explains that the national dress rule is part of efforts to preserve and promote Bhutan’s national identity. A larger country can afford a diversity of customs and traditions which enrich and add color to the national image, but “for a small country like Bhutan, maintaining and strengthening a distinct national identity will always be a most important and vital factor for its continued well-being and security.” These messages seem particularly aimed at the southern Bhutanese of Nepali origin. According to the Kuensel, the southern people have expressed full support for strengthening Bhutan’s unique cultural identity by wearing national dress, speaking the national language, and following the ethics and practice of driglam namzha. The government announces that it will import machine-woven cloth to make ghos and kiras that can be sold at cost price to the people of southern Bhutan. The people of southern Bhutan express their gratitude.
This is the reason I have not read much of the Kuensel. Everyone is always expressing support and gratitude, no one ever seems to have a contradictory point of view. It seems strange, for instance, that the people of southern Bhutan would be so keen to wear the northern dress in the hot tropical plains, and that not a single person of Nepali origin expressed concern for preserving their own culture and language. Perhaps with time, an identity can be replaced, but it is hard to overwrite the names people call themselves. Either dissenting views were felt but not expressed, or expressed but not reported, but there must have been some people who were not happy with this idea.
I ask a class VIII student to explain the dress law to me. He says, “Our national dress is part of our culture.” I ask why it must be legislated then. He isn’t sure, but says that the Dzongda recently told his class the question why should not be allowed in Bhutan.
“Why ever not?” I ask, incredulous.
“Asking why is not driglam namzha,” he says. I stare, openmouthed, but in the end I say nothing. I am afraid to contradict the district administrator. Maybe it is not even true. Maybe it is a misinterpretation. Maybe I do not understand. Most definitely I do not understand. The question why should not be allowed? A completely different system of values is at work here, based on another history. Obedience to authority, respect for elders and preservation of the status quo form the bedrock of Bhutanese values. I tell myself to see the Dzongda’s statement objectively, as a part of a cultural context ... but I wonder if this is ever truly possible: what does “objectively” mean anyway?
Movement Order
Miss, your friend is here!” Sangay Chhoden comes to the library after school to tell me. I lock up and follow Sangay down the stairs to see who has come to visit. “Well, hello Medusa,” Leon says, looking at my hair which has been made particularly unruly by the July humidity. “I’m starving. What do you have to eat? Let’s make pizza.” We set off, skirting the playing field, but the soccer game comes to a complete stop anyway so that everyone can watch us walk away. “Does this happen to you in Wamrong?” I ask Leon.
“Oh, all the time. I can’t buy tomatoes in the market without the entire town talking about it. What’s the phillingpa doing, he’s buying tomatoes, how much is he paying, where did he buy them last time, how much did he pay then. It’s part of being here, I know, but it still gets on my nerves sometimes. We have such a strong concept of privacy and it just doesn’t exist here.”
I know exactly what he means. I sometimes long for anonymity, to walk down a crowded city street unnoticed, unremarked upon, to be surrounded by strangers who couldn’t care less where I am going when I step out of my door on a Saturday morning. Everyone in the village will know by this evening that my friend has come to visit. It doesn’t really matter, but still, I wish my private life could be ... well, private.
We stop between my building and the bank and furtively cut a few stalks of “pig food.” I have noticed that many of the foreign teachers, even those that would not normally smoke it, take advantage of the wild marijuana that grows so luxuriantly everywhere. I dry the leaves in a frying pan while Leon chums together onions and Druk tomato sauce for the pizza. We stay up late drinking warm Golden Eagle beer and smoking the marijuana. Leon is certain that he will extend his contract and is already thinking of where he would like to be posted next. “Somewhere off the road,” he says. “I know it’s too early, but do you think you might extend?”
“I can’t,” I say. “There’s Robert, for one thing ...”
I am worried about my relationship with Robert. I miss him, but our letters only seem to emphasize the distance between us. They have become monologues, except for a few lines tacked on at the beginning or the end: I hope you got over your stomach trouble, I hope you did well on that last essay, be careful with the water there, your new car sounds lovely. I do not write that a car now sounds like a terrible indulgence in a city with buses, trains, trams and a subway system, or that the condominium Robert raved about sounds like an expensive prison. And I have a feeling he does not write how inexplicable he finds the stories in my letters. “It’s like we’re on two different planets,” I say.
“Well, in a way, you are,” Leon says.
I stare glumly at my bottle of beer. “I’m supposed to go home at Christmas,” I say. “Maybe he can come back with me for a visit after.” There’s that odd word again, Christmas. Home has a strange ring to it now, too.
Too many bottles of beer later, I sweep the rest of the “pig food” into a Ziploc bag. “Leave the mess,” I tell Leon, who is stacking up plates and pineapple rinds, and go crashing off to bed.
Someone knocks loudly at the door a few hours later. I lie in bed in the grey morning light, fully resolved to ignore the knocking. Go away, go away, I think, it’s too early to be bringing me vegetables or a bleeding limb. I’m not getting up, go away. The knocking grows thunderous. I march to the door in my nightshirt and yank furiously at the bolts.
“What?” I say. “What!”
The headmaster steps back, looking disconcerted. “Uh, Miss Jamie, this is the new principal of Sherubtse College,” he says, gesturing to the heavyset man beside him. He has a broad, genial face, and is wearing a richly embroidered orange-and-yellow gho. “He would like to talk to you....”
I apologize profusely for keeping them waiting, for my rudeness, for my nightshirt, for everything in general, and lead them into the sitting room, where Leon is sitting up in his sleeping bag, blinking. He leaps to his feet as I dash off to put on a kira. When I come back, the headmaster and the Sherubtse principal are sitting at the table while Leon clears away the empty beer bottles and dirty plates. He goes off to the kitchen to make tea, and the college principal explains that he has just been appointed to replace Father Larue. One of the English lecturers is leaving this month, he says, and he has heard from someone that I have a master’s degree in English. Would I be interested in the job?
“Father Larue thought that I was too young,” I say lamely.
“I know,” he says, shaking his head. “I say, if someone has the right qualifications, what does age matter? It’s like saying that someone is too short for the job. No, no, we aren’t worried about your age.”
Leon brings in the tea, and we notice at the same time the Ziploc bag in the middle of the table. He has thoughtfully cleared away the pizza remains and pineapple rinds for this impromptu
job interview, but has forgotten the bag of pot. Our eyes meet and I can see that he is on the verge of an explosion. He bites his lip and looks away, his shoulders shaking with laughter.
We drink our tea while the principal tells me more about the college. A forty-minute drive south of Tashigang, surrounded by the village of Kanglung, the college is Bhutan’s highest institute of education. About five hundred students are enrolled in undergraduate degrees in arts, commerce and science. The English curriculum is set by Delhi University, there’s some poetry, some Shakespeare, a few novels. The library has thirteen thousand books. The other lecturers are mostly from Delhi, they all live on campus, the staff quarters are very nice, and he is sure I will be very happy there....
I don’t know what to say. The college sounds like a dream (thirteen thousand books!) but it is all so sudden, and it’s unclear whether or not I have a choice in this matter. The principal stands. “So, I’ll send a message to the Education Department for your movement order,” he says. “And we’ll send the hi-lux for you next week.”
When they are gone, Leon dangles the plastic bag of pot in front of me. “I can’t wait to see that movement order,” he says. “It’s going to say TRANSFERRED BACK TO TORONTO.”
“Do you think I can refuse to go, Leon?” I ask.
He says I could probably ask to stay in Pema Gatshel, but thinks I should accept the transfer. “I think you’ll get a whole different perspective on Bhutan at the college,” he says. “The students are from all over the country, and from every type of background. It’s a great opportunity. ”
