Beyond the Sky and the Earth

by Jamie Zeppa

  Blessed Rainy Days

  Blessed Rainy Day, September 22, is supposed to be the official end of the monsoon. I sit under a blue-and-white canopy with the other lecturers, balancing a cup of oily suja and saffron-colored desi on my lap, watching an archery match. Only half the players are using traditional bamboo bows to hit the targets, short wooden planks set in the ground about 150 meters apart, and they are no match for the new compound fiberglass bows imported from abroad. I quickly grow tired of watching the actual game. Far more interesting are the players, the graceful dances they do when they hit the target, and the lewd gestures and songs they use to distract their opponents. The sky overhead is a fresh expanse of blue with a border of clean white cloud, except for a grey swelling in the south, which looks suspiciously like more rain.

  It is more rain. It begins just before dawn the next morning and continues for two weeks, days and nights of falling rain and drifting mist and water trickling in drains, until I am sick of the sound of it, and the tiresome wet and chill of it. The damp insinuates itself into my sheets and blankets, and none of my clothes will dry. A cold turns into an ear infection and I cannot hear, it is like walking underwater. The sky sinks lower and lower under its own weight until the clouds are among us, breaking apart and hurrying past us like distracted ghosts.

  After two weeks, I awake at dawn to the remarkable sound of nothing. Even without looking outside, I know: now the monsoon is over. The sky is clear every morning, and in the north one peak is bright with snow. The clarity is stunning. I feel dizzy, almost drunk on the amount of light. The hills all around are plush and green, and the trees are full of cicadas and flocks of birds that have migrated down from higher altitudes. The days are soft and warm and buttery; the sharpness in the early morning air melts away in the full sunlight. In my garden, the summer flowers are crowded out by rusty marigolds and orange and yellow nasturtiums. In the villages all around, sliced pumpkin and apples are set out to dry in flat baskets, and on farmhouse roofs green chilies turn a rich dark crimson in the sun. Long strips of bloody beef and chunks of pork fat are hung over clotheslines. When dry, they will be chopped into flaky pieces and served with chili sauce, or cooked for hours into a stew. The rice paddies turn gold around the edges, and the rice stalks droop under their own weight.

  I cannot write to Robert anymore. The writing comes out slowly, stiffly, it sounds like another language in my ears. When I try to write about my love for Bhutan, it feels like a betrayal of him, and I am not sure why. Perhaps because I feel I have fallen in love with the place, the way you fall in love with a person. I write letters addressed to no one and stick them in my journal.

  What I love most is how seamless everything is. You walk through a forest and come out in a village, and there’s no difference, no division. You aren’t in nature one minute and in civilization the next. The houses are made out of mud and stone and wood, drawn from the land around. Nothing stands out, nothing jars.

  Time has become a melding of minutes and months and the feeling of seasons. The colors are changing, the light that comes slanting over the rim of the mountain grows cooler. I have trouble remembering the date. I ask my students what day it is, but by the time I get to the next class, I have forgotten and must ask again. Yesterday, I started a letter home and wrote July and realized only when I looked outside and noticed the gold and brown creeping into the hills all around. Leon says it is the Bhutan Time Warp and I know what he means. Time does not hurl itself forward at breakneck speed here. Change happens very slowly. A grandmother and her granddaughter wear the same kind of clothes, they do the same work, they know the same songs. The granddaughter does not find her grandmother an embarrassing, boring relic. Her grandmother’s stories do not annoy her, and what she wants is no different from what her grandmother wanted at her age. In the village, there is little to keep up with. When change does come, everyone has time to get used to it. Glass windows, a corrugated iron roof, electric lights, immunization, a school. Everything that happens in the village will be remembered, because what happens affects everyone, it is everyone’s story. It is not something happening to strangers on the other side of a city, on the other side of the ocean, announced today, displaced tomorrow by newer news, the latest development, this just in. Just how fast development will change this is impossible to know. In school, the kids are taught a new order of things. There must be many students like Tobgay, no longer able to tell their parents what they are learning. When the outside world catches up, everything will accelerate, and grandparents will shake their heads and sigh over their grandchildren. The wholeness that I love will be lost, and yet I cannot say that development is bad and that people should go on living the way they have always lived, losing four out of eight children and dying at fifty. Development brings a whole new set of problems as it solves the old set. I must be careful not to fall into the good-old-days trap.

  For now, though, I am glad to be a part of the Time Warp. I feel exhausted when I remember my last year in Toronto, rushing to class, the grocery store, the bank, a movie, a meeting, always feeling that I had not caught up, fearing that I never would, because there was so much to do and see and buy and say you’ve done and seen and bought to be on the cutting edge, to be where it’s happening, not to be left behind. Now I have time in abundance. There is no one to catch up to, and I don’t have to be anywhere but here. I have no idea what is happening in the outside world, what wars or famines are being turned into ten-second news clips, what incredible new technologies are revolutionizing the way people die or dream or do their banking. I lost my watch in Tashigang and the digital face on my alarm clock faded out in the monsoon damp, but I am learning to tell time by the sun and the sounds outside, and I am hardly ever late.

  I have fallen into this world the way you fall into sleep, tumbling through layers of darkness into full dream. The way you fall in love.

  I am in love with the landscape, the way the green mountains turn into blue shadows in the late afternoon light, the quality of the light as the sun rises above the silver valley each morning, the unbearable clarity of everything after rain, the drop to the valley floor far below and the feeling of the great dark night all around, and knowing where I am, and being here. I am in love with the simplicity of my life, the plain rooms, the shelves empty of ornaments, the unadorned walls. I don’t want to go home at Christmas (I don’t want to go home, ever). They never warned us about this at the orientation.

  The field director in Thimphu sends a wireless message saying the flight to Toronto that I asked him to book several months ago has been confirmed.

  Durga Puja

  Shakuntala and I spend most of our time together. We are united against the knot of bickering staff members by our love for the place and our easy relationship with the students. Some of the lecturers begin to treat us with cool disdain; Shakuntala thinks they disapprove of two unmarried females being let loose upon the world. We make up bogus Latin names for the worst of them and cackle loudly in the library; we excuse ourselves from the dreary staff parties where the chairs are pushed back against the walls, funeral-parlor style, with the women demurely sipping orange squash on one side of the room and the men belting back Bhutan Mist on the other, while students scurry back and forth with platters of food. Instead, we invite the students to dinner and eat in a circle on the floor; afterward the students bring out guitars and sing, we play charades and word games and talk.

  The students visit frequently. They come to borrow books and tapes, they come to get their homework checked, they come to sit and drink coffee and talk. I have broken through some barrier, have even made peace with Smirk. He still makes wisecracks in class, but I have grown to like him. With his longish hair and his smart-ass comments he is asking questions about the accepted order of things. His full name is Dil Bahadur, which means Courageous Heart.

  Shakuntala was right: the students are very good company. The ones from wealthy families in Thimphu and Paro are more Westernized, at least on the sur
face. Their fathers are in key positions in the civil service and their families often have extensive land holdings. They are found most often in jeans and leather jackets under a haze of cigarette smoke at Pala’s. Their conversation is laced with a mix of slang from across decades and continents: chaps and chicks, cat and cool. Ten ngultrum is ten bucks, money is dough, drunk is boozed or boozed out. “But” is stuck on the end of a sentence (I don’t know but), and “damn” is merely a synonym for very. Every phrase is punctuated by the ubiquitous “ya.” I told her, ya, last time, ya, but she never listens, ya. No, ya. Shakuntala says that “ya” is not “yeah” but a corruption of “yaar,” Hindi for mate or man or friend. Many of these students have been educated in private boarding schools in Darjeeling and Kalimpong, and they refer to their less worldly classmates as “simple.” Simple in this instance means unacquainted with the world outside. Simple means the village, definitely not a cool place to be from. In less tactful moments, they use the word “rustic.”

  My favorite students are the “simple” ones. They are shyer and more difficult to draw out, but utterly sincere. The wealthier students seem more like teenagers, preoccupied with their clothes and hair and who has a date with who at Pala’s (ignoring the ridiculous new rule, set down by the principal, that bans “couples” in order to put an end to the “gossip and scandal”—i.e., pregnancy—that allegedly flourished under the Jesuits’ noses). The so-called simple ones have not had the opportunity of adolescence. They became adults at puberty. A surprising number of the men have wives and children back in their villages. (Female students who get married or pregnant, though, must drop out of school.) Unlike their private-school classmates, they have had limited exposure to Western culture. Their ideas of universal wealth and privilege are drawn directly from the few videotaped movies they have seen at the college, and they refuse to believe that there are people living on the streets, begging for coins in the cities of North America. They flip through my old magazines with the same absorption as class II C, looking up occasionally with the same puzzled expressions. “Ma’am, what is a UFO?” or “Miss, why it says here about a psychologist for cats?”

  The students learn that excessive formality makes me uncomfortable. They do not behave as casually as if I were a fellow student, but neither do they treat me with the same rigid protocol as the other lecturers. I am still “ma’am” and “madam” and sometimes “miss,” but they are warm and friendly and at ease, and I like them more each day, and I learn and learn and learn, far more than I teach.

  Because of their fluency, I can ask them things I could not ask class II C, and they answer many but not all of my questions about Buddhism. It is okay to appreciate the world and all that is beautiful in it, they tell me, only we must not become attached to it. “We have to remember that it is not permanent, and anyway, ma’am, isn’t that why it is so beautiful in the first place? If everything was the same forever, well, we can’t even imagine that,” one student says. I think of Keat’s Grecian Urn, frozen perfection, and agree. He is a slight young man, with a quiet, reflective face and a brush cut. His name is Nima, which means “sun,” and he has a smile that lights up a room. I ask him about the practices of tantric Buddhism, how they seem to contradict the Buddha’s teachings against superstition and empty ritual. He says that the lamas know the real meaning behind the rituals. “We know only the simple meaning. Like when we are filling the water cups on the altar, we must not spill one drop because we say it will draw the demons. But actually, miss, we aren’t supposed to spill one drop because we are supposed to be doing it carefully, and if we aren’t concentrating, then we aren’t doing it right. So maybe the people couldn’t understand this, and the lamas tried to think of a way they would remember, so they made up the story about the demons coming.”

  “So you don’t believe in demons,” I say.

  “No, miss, I am believing. We just can’t say about them, so it is better to believe, isn’t it?”

  There is a lot of this in the students, this preference for both/and over my insistence on either/or. Either the Buddha said there is no God and therefore Buddhism is not theistic, and therefore tantric Buddhism with its pantheon of deities is a contradiction of the original school of thought, or there are gods and therefore there is no contradiction. It is not so for the students. Yes, they say, the Buddha said he was not a god, and at the same time we worship him as a god, and there are many other gods as well, and there is no contradiction.

  “Anyway,” Nima says, “my father says it’s not what you believe or say you believe that matters, it’s what you do.” Nima’s father is a gomchen in a village three hours walk from Tashigang. He brings my questions to his father when he goes home and carries the answers carefully back to me. “Like for example, you must be knowing that in Buddhism we say all beings were our mothers in our past lives.”

  This is the rationale behind treating all beings with loving-kindness. It is why you should not kill any sentient being, even an insect. In our millions and billions of past lives, every being was at one time our mother. “Yes, I’ve read this,” I tell Nima. “But I don’t know if I believe it literally.”

  Nima says, “You see, miss, what matters is not what you believe but what you do. The important thing is whether you treat all beings the way you treat your mother. With that much love and respect. Of course, for we Bhutanese, it is best to believe and do. But if you believe and don’t do, then the belief is nothing.”

  Nima visits regularly, along with his roommates, Arun, a tall, emaciated southern Bhutanese who wants to be a doctor, and Wangdi, short and sturdy and almost irritatingly cheerful. I try to learn the subtle tonal differences between a “no-thank-you” that really means “no” and one that means “yes but I’m being polite.” Often I resort to asking, “Is that a Bhutanese no?” They are so tactful that I have to learn to read the most minute indicators. Nima winces slightly when I flip a spoonful of sugar into his cup backhandedly but says nothing. “What is it, Nima?” I ask.

  “Nothing, miss.”

  “Did I do something wrong?”

  “No, miss ...” He clears his throat and runs his hand across his shorn head. “Actually, miss, in Bhutan, we never pour anything in that backward way unless someone in the house has died. That is how we serve the dead.”

  During these visits, I learn not to whistle inside someone’s house (it may call in spirits) or step over religious books. I learn to flick a drop of tea from a full cup before I drink as an offering to hungry ghosts, whose excessive desire in previous lives has left them wandering in a realm of perpetual lack and longing; their stomachs are grotesquely swollen with hunger and thirst but their throats are knotted up. I learn to eat rice like the Bhutanese do, with my right hand, using my thumb to sweep the food neatly into my mouth. I learn to make butter tea, and eat chilies for breakfast.

  The students balance my view of rural Bhutan. Yes, they say, things in the village are peaceful ... on one level. “People are very jealous,” one young woman named Chhoden tells me. Her hair is cut in an asymmetrical bob, and her kiras are bright silky prints imported from Bangkok. Her immediate family lives in Thimphu, where her father is employed in the civil service, but she says they still visit their ancestral village in Mongar once a year. “You don’t see it, ma’am, because you are just seeing from the outside. There’s a lot of jealousy and backbiting. And people have very strict ideas about what is proper. When I go home to the village, I have to become a different person. Boys can roam about and do as they please but if girls do that, everyone will say oh that girl, she’s a bad character, always roaming here and there. If I try to argue, my parents say that I have been spoiled by school.”

  I talk a lot about language with the students, about English and Sharchhop and Dzongkha and Nepali. The Nepali-speaking students advise me to learn their native tongue; Nepali is more useful, they say, more people speak it and anyway it is easier to learn. The Dzongkha-speaking students frown at this. Madam, why you are learning N
epali? You should learn our national language.

  I want to learn both, I say. Isn’t that okay? Thinking to myself, it must be okay, you can all speak each other’s languages plus English and Hindi with a smattering of Bengali or Tibetan. But we are talking about something more than language here, I only wish I knew what. I want to learn both, I repeat, and neither group looks very pleased. As if, in choosing both, I had chosen neither.

  I learn that thank you very much in Dzongkha is namé samé kadin chhé. Namé means no sky, samé no earth. Namé samé kadin chhé means thanks beyond the sky and the earth. I learn that the script was developed in Tibet in order to translate the teachings of the Buddha, and it is therefore called Chhoeki; the language of religion. I learn to write the alphabet, which hangs from an invisible upper line, with the tails and heads of letters stacked together to create combined sounds. The spelling is murderous. “Why does joba have to start with an ‘m’, of all things?” I complain, exasperated, to Nima. “Why not a ‘q’ or a ‘p’ or heaven forbid a ‘j’?” He explains that because the language is monosyllabic, extra silent letters are used to distinguish one homonym from another. I almost give up, but the language looks so beautiful on the page, with birds flying above the words and lines ending in swords. The birds are o’s, the swords full stops.

  Another student gives me a list of “everyday phrases” in Nepali:

  what is your name, why are you laughing, wooden leg, heart’s disease,

  warm bed, mother’s blessing, permission, advice, dark night,