Beyond the Sky and the Earth

by Jamie Zeppa

  And in the Zoo, I can actually hear the students listening as we read Macbeth. There is a palpable tension in the room, and when the bell rings in the middle of Macbeth’s dagger soliloquy, Singye in the front row gasps. “He will not do it,” he says, aghast at the thought. There is no need to explain the significance of the crime Macbeth is about to commit, or the evil omens, the unruly night and strange wind, the wild behavior of Duncan’s horses, the appearance of Banquo’s ghost. These are not literary symbols to the students but the real and obvious results of a monstrous deed. It is impossible to gauge the distance between what I am supposed to be teaching them about the play and how they read it in the light of their own culture, but their insights are bringing the play to life for me, and it has never seemed more horrifying.

  One Saturday morning, two students bring a note to my door: there will be an evening cultural competition featuring song and dance in Dzongkha, Nepali and English. Mr. Bose and I are to judge the English items. “Will you be in the competition?” I ask the students, and they say yes, they have been released from SUPW in order to practice their song.

  “What’s SUPW?”

  “Socially Useful Productive Work,” one says.

  “Some Useful Period Wasted,” the other adds.

  I laugh, delighted, and from the garden next door, Mr. Matthew clears his throat loudly. I am not sure who this warning is meant for.

  Shakuntala and I go to the college store, a windowless room behind the student mess, to collect our weekly supply of vegetables. Baskets of chilies, tomatoes and beans are emptied out onto shelves, where they are pawed through and pinched. Everything is weighed on a rusty scale suspended from the ceiling. The man in charge, Mr. Dorji, shakes his head when I show him my handful of chilies. “Not even half kg,” he says. “Take for free.” My chili intake has increased steadily but I am still no match for the Bhutanese teachers who are loading up large jute sacks. My students tell me they cannot eat without chilies. When I prepare Western food for them, pasta or pizza, they tell me it is too sweet and go into the kitchen to make ézé, a condiment of chopped-up chilies, onions, tomatoes and cheese.

  Outside the store, we step over a butchered pig and collect bread from the bakery window. At home, I eat several pieces with Bumthang honey, then fall asleep on the divan.

  Canadian voices wake me up. “Hey, Medusa, open the door. We hear you have freshly sliced bread in there.” It is almost the entire Canadian contingent from eastern Bhutan, plus Mary, an Irish teacher posted in Samdrup Jongkhar.

  “It’s not sliced,” I say, throwing open the door, “and I’ve eaten half of it.”

  They traipse in, laying down jholas, bottles of Dragon Rum and lemon squash and Golden Eagle beer, a cassette player and tapes. “We were all in Tashigang and decided you needed a proper housewarming party,” Margaret from Radi says.

  “Look at this bathroom!” Lorna shrieks from the hall. “It’s TILED.”

  “Oh my god, two fireplaces! ”

  I tell them they are in time for the cultural competition in the evening, but they are disappointed.

  “Cultural competition! I could have that in Radi. I was promised sliced bread and a video,” Margaret complains.

  “Closets!” Lorna says. She looks well, her long golden-brown hair full of sunny highlights and her face tanned the color of honey. “She has two closets. I have to keep all my clothes in the food safe.”

  Leon and Tony look even thinner and blonder than the last time I saw them in Tashigang. Leon is handing out drinks made of Dragon Rum and lemon squash. Someone has plugged the cassette player in and the Traveling Wilburys are singing about last night. Margaret is in the kitchen making something out of sweetened condensed milk, cocoa, peanuts and dried “pig food.” Kevin and Tony are reading magazines, Lorna is dancing a jig with Leon, and Mary is knocking back Bhutan Mist and knitting. We are a motley crew, I think. What brings us together, aside from skin color and language? We would not all be such good buddies if we had met outside of eastern Bhutan. But I like being with them because I can slip back into my old Canadian self, I can speak a faster, sharper, more direct English. It is like going home to your family. Everyone understands the basic framework, you don’t have to explain yourself at every turn. It’s the same with these friends; no one asks me why I am not married yet or why my mother let me come all the way across the world to teach, was it because I couldn’t find a job in Canada? I don’t have to explain who Ed Grimly is, or why I am talking like him.

  But there is a negative side, too. The stress of being fully immersed in our villages, of trying to live mindfully in another culture, makes us overanxious to be purely ourselves when we are together. We drink too much and talk too loudly, we shriek with laughter and fall over in little bars in Tashigang, not caring what impression we are making. We want to forget where we are, and yet we keep calling ourselves phillingpa and making comparisons to Canada; we keep reminding ourselves that we are here, and isn’t it amazing.

  If many of these friendships are destined to fade after we leave Bhutan, we are bound now by the knowledge that we need each other here. Any mention in a letter of an ailment beyond the usual giardia will bring packets of instant soup in the mail or a visit, and in emergencies our nearest Canadian neighbor will become our next-of-kin.

  We walk to Pala’s for a dinner of shabalay, deep-fried turnovers stuffed with minced meat. Students drift in and out, glance over at us but pretend not to, and I am relieved that we are not quite the spectacle we would be in Pema Gatshel. A well-built young man in a long black trench coat and a beautiful woman in a denim skirt and cashmere sweater float past. Leon shakes his head. “I don’t know how you teach here,” he says. “The students are all absolutely gorgeous.”

  “It is a little unnerving,” I say.

  “What would happen if you had an affair with one of your students, though?” Margaret asks.

  “I don’t know, I haven’t really thought about it,” I lie. I find myself noticing over and over again how attractive this or that student is. The older male students have a very fine, courtly charm, and some of them are quite flirtatious.

  “Well, we’ll think about it on your behalf,” Lorna says, and the others agree enthusiastically.

  The cultural competition begins with a traditional Bhutanese dance. The men and women move slowly in a circle, raising and lowering their hands in front of them in simple, lulling gestures as they sing. The beauty is in the measured, synchronized movements; this is not a dance about performance but participation. There is no instrumental accompaniment, only the voices rising and falling in the melancholic, pentatonic scale, and lingering over microtones that no tempered instrument could ever match. The style is called zhungdra, the oldest form of music in Bhutan, and the melody climbs and climbs and then falls suddenly, rhythm changing unpredictably, evoking perhaps the soaring sinking Bhutanese landscape itself, mountaintops plunging into deep valleys and rising steeply again.

  A Nepali dance follows. Two women in gorgeous red-and-gold silk saris twirl and kick and throw up their arms to loud taped music overfull with instruments and competing melodies and rhythms. I am sitting between Leon and Margaret, a pen and clipboard on my lap, preparing to judge the English selections, the first of which is a “Break-Dance,” according to the MC. The lights go off, pulsating disco music starts and stops and starts again, and two lithe young men appear on stage in tight pants and tee shirts. The dance is a combination of some genuine break-dancing and a lot of straightforward calisthenics.

  “Where am I?” Leon mutters. I know exactly what he means. In spite of its closed-door policy and ban on TV, Bhutan is not hermetically sealed. Fashion trends and music cassettes find their way in, but it still seems utterly bizarre that I should be sitting in a concrete auditorium in the Himalayas watching Bhutanese students break-dance to American disco. The music ends and I have no idea how to judge the first English item. On what basis? In comparison to what? In the end, I give it a very mediocre mark.
The other English selections include CCR’s “Proud Mary” accompanied by an electric guitar and an amplifier that thinks it’s an instrument in its own right, and a remarkably good version of Elvis’s “Love Me Tender” by the well-built young man in the black trench coat. Elvis wins the English competition.

  There are more songs in Dzongkha, Nepali and Sharchhop, and dances from Tibet, Assam and the nomadic yak-herding communities along Bhutan’s northern border. The instruments are remarkable: the six-stringed, dragon-headed mandolin called a drumnyen; the many-stringed yangchen laid flat on a table and played with thin bamboo sticks; a gleaming new harmonium; a tabla played with deft fingers. Although the official government line might speak of one identity, there are many voices here, many dances and many songs, and perhaps it is my Canadian upbringing, being raised on the strengths of the multicultural mosaic over the American melting pot, but I am glad of the plenitude.

  Back at my house, we lay mattresses, mats, kiras and quilts in a row on the bedroom floor. There is much wriggling and giggling and negotiation for space, and when I finally fall asleep, I dream that I am dreaming of break-dancers. You’re just dreaming, I tell myself in the dream. There is no break-dancing in Bhutan.

  So Lucky to Be Here

  My dreams change and change again. Gone are the airport dreams and drugstore dreams and the dreams of in-between places, not really Canada, not really Bhutan, all dreams of longing for home. Now my dreams of Canada are grievous. I dream that I get on the Comet and it turns a corner and turns into a Greyhound bus with plush seats and a sign ordering passengers to not stand forward of the white line, and we are driving over a bridge, passing out of Bhutan onto a Canadian highway. It is the beginning or the end of winter, dirty crusts of snow, dull sky, a flat paved road leading into a sad, colorless city. I have made a terrible mistake; I do not want to go home at all. I get off the bus, but Bhutan is gone, and I do not know how to get back.

  I dream more often of Bhutan itself. I am walking through narrow green valleys with rivers rushing through them. The mountains rise up so steeply on all sides, I have to look up and up to find the sky above. I walk through forests at night to a ring of dark-fringed fir trees, to a rocky pool beneath a waterfall, to open spaces where I can see the stars thrown across the deep blue-black sky. In my dreams, clouds climb down from the sky, fill up ravines, melt into fields, darkening the green of the rice and the maize. I watch the mist and tell myself I am dreaming, the world cannot possibly be so beautiful, but I wake up and it is.

  We walk through the forests and fields around Kanglung, Shakuntala carrying a sketch pad or camera, I my journal. I am enraptured by the space, the size of the mountains, the stretch of the sky. I am always wondering what is beyond the next ridge. It is only about 150 kilometers as the crow flies from the Indian border in the south to the snowpeaks in the north, and yet it would take years to get to know the lay of the land by foot, to learn what is hidden in the folds of these mountains. I want to see what the crow sees.

  We turn off main trails, following narrower tracks into forests, through fields. I am no longer dismayed at the way a wide, worn trail can splinter into a dozen smaller paths, one of which winds down a slope and disappears at a log. We climb over the log, slosh across a stream and another path picks us up, carries us through rice paddies, to someone’s backdoor. A dog chases us around the kitchen garden into a forest, where a path brings us to the road. There are always large stones to sit and rest on, trees to sit and rest under, there is no restricted place, no lines and bars separating what clearly belongs to someone from what belongs to everyone.

  We pass through villages where the entire community is at work in one family’s fields, or where everyone has gathered to help build a house, plastering the woven bamboo walls with mud. Each village seems a world unto itself, a tightly knit, closely related, interdependent community, with an elected gup who as acts the headman, settling minor disputes and keeping whatever community records exist. A wealthier family may have paid for the grinding stones to extract oil from mustard seeds, or a manual threshing machine, but these are often used by everyone. Everyone knows what everyone else has—their belongings, their business, their plans, their problems. It is not possible here to close your doors to your neighbors, to live in tiny isolated units, nodding impersonally as you pass each other. In fact, the privacy that we so zealously guard in the West would be fatal here, where a mountain stands between one village and the next, between one village and the nearest hospital, wireless office, shop.

  We emerge from an oak forest one afternoon into the courtyard of a very old temple. The paintings in the vestibule have darkened with age, the reds and blues becoming deeper and richer instead of lighter. The door is padlocked, we cannot go inside, but we circumambulate the temple clockwise, turning the worn prayer wheels built into a bracket along the outer walls. The prayer wheels are inscribed with Om Mani Padme Hum, Hail Jewel in the Lotus, the mantra for the benefit of all sentient beings. You accumulate merit by turning the prayer wheels—if you do it mindfully. I spin the wheels but my mind usually spins off elsewhere.

  Scattered readings and occasional attempts to meditate will not make me mindful. I read the theory and I think yes, this makes sense, but my life—my mind—goes on as usual. While I am actually reading the texts, I think I understand. Nothing in the world is permanent, everything changes, breaks down, dies, and this is why attachment to things in this world causes suffering. The Eightfold Path is the way to nonattachment. Then I pick up an anthology of Romantic poetry, and I wonder what is wrong with attachment anyway, and what poetry could be born out of nonattachment. Why shouldn’t we throw ourselves into our lives and love the world deeply and break our hearts when it changes, fades and dies? I paddle back and forth between the Four Noble Truths and Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats. Contemplating the paintings of Buddha sitting in calm abiding, I have a thousand questions and no one to answer them, and wonder if this is a sign that I am on the wrong path. But then I remember Buddha’s last words to his disciples—work out your own salvation with diligence—and I am encouraged in my questioning.

  A packet of mail. My grandfather writes that I must really appreciate life in Canada now. You see now how lucky we are here. My mother writes about how proud she is of me, enduring all this hardship. They have it all wrong. There is no hardship any more, I write back. I love my life in Bhutan. I do see how lucky I am—to be here. A letter from the field office in Thimphu reminds me of the upcoming conference for Canadian teachers in Tashigang. No letter again, still, from Robert.

  Lorna appears at the door two days before the conference. “I just came to use your bathroom,” she says, bolting through the sitting room.

  “Haven’t they finished that new latrine yet?” I call out.

  “Yes,” she yells back, “but it doesn’t have tiles.”

  Over coffee on the front steps, Lorna tells me she is having an affair with a man in her village.

  “How did it begin?” I ask, thrilled.

  “In a maize field,” she confesses, and I have to spit out a mouthful of coffee so that I won’t choke. “Don’t laugh. We were coming back from a village party and he grabbed my arm and said, ‘Miss, I lob you.’ I couldn’t resist that.”

  “So he speaks English?”

  “No, I wouldn’t say that. He speaks a few words.” She is suddenly convulsed with laughter. “The first night, after we made love, we were lying there in my bed, trying to think of what to say to each other, and finally he turns to me and says sadly, ‘My little brother is dead.’ And I’m like, ‘Aww, that’s so sad, I’m so sorry.’ I thought that he was confiding some tragic childhood memory. Then I realized he was saying he couldn’t get it up again.”

  I laugh until my stomach hurts.

  “It’s true,” Lorna says. “I swear. But listen, don’t tell anyone. Not that I think anyone would care, really.”

  “Well, it’s all very romantic,” I say, surprised at the wistfulness in my voic
e.

  Lorna looks at me quickly. “How’s Robert?”

  “Who knows. I haven’t heard from him.” I am making it sound like Robert is the problem, but I know in my heart it is me. He hasn’t written very often, but when they do arrive, his letters sound just like him, affectionate and loyal and full of practical advice. It is me who is changing. My letters to him sound false and forced to me.

  The conference passes in a sleepy blur, under the swish of the ceiling fans in the Royal Guest House resplendent with blue-cloud painted walls and brocade hangings. In the afternoons, we trudge up a path behind the bazaar, following the river to where it widens into a pool. It is too shallow to swim, but we sit in the water and talk quietly. Children stare at us curiously, ten grown-up foreigners sitting in the river, doing nothing. They strip off their school uniforms and wash them in the river, passing around a sliver of soap as they scrub and pound their clothes on the rocks, and then hang them in the trees to dry.

  In the evenings, we eat at the Puen Soom. The three new teachers, fresh from Canada, pick at their food and send their plates back, asking for smaller portions of rice, half of this, no, a quarter. “How do you eat so much rice?” Marnie asks me. She is wearing a white blouse and peach-colored jeans, one of several perfectly coordinated outfits with matching accessories that she puts on each day; each morning in the guest house she curls her bangs with a propane-powered curling iron.

  I look down at my hill of rice and shrug. “You get used to it.”

  “I don’t know if I’ll get used to anything here,” she says doubtfully, looking around. “I hope my quarters are not like this.”

  I remember this feeling. You really will get used to it, I want to tell her again; your clothes will fade and fray, and you won’t have time between study duty and morning clinic to curl your hair, and the walls in your house will look exactly like this plus your roof will leak and you’ll have rats, but you won’t care because you’ll be in love with the place you have suddenly woken up in. You will feel so lucky to be here. But I know she won’t believe it until it happens.