Beyond the Sky and the Earth

by Jamie Zeppa

  I can say nothing to this.

  “Look,” she says. “In your mind, Bhutan can be whatever you want it to be. But only the Bhutanese know what it really is.”

  The next time I stop to watch a family transplanting rice into flooded paddies, I feel how Dini’s adamantine edge has cut away some of my sentimental attachment. The family stands in muddy water, backs bent as they stab the rice shoots into the wet earth, their hands fast and unerring. At the edge of the field, a girl of about three carries a baby wrapped on her back with a broad handwoven cloth. The baby gnaws a fist and frets as the terraces fill slowly up with green. Standing there with an armful of rhododendrons I have picked in the forest, I am aware of two possible versions: I can see either the postcard (Lost World Series, Rural Landscape No.5), or I can see a family bent over the earth in aching, backbreaking labor, the ghosts of two children dead of some easily preventable disease, and not enough money for all of the surviving children to buy the shoes and uniforms required for school. It is too easy to romanticize Bhutan. The landscape cannot answer back, cannot say, no you are wrong, life here is different but if you add everything up, it is not any better. You can love this landscape because your life does not depend on it. It is a merely a scenic backdrop for the other life you will always be able to return to, a life in which you will not be a farmer scraping a living out of difficult terrain.

  I love the view, but I would not want the life.

  In the twilight, the percussion of frogs and crickets and cicadas rises up from the marsh below the staff quarters, and I meditate, legs folded under me, eyes closed. At first, I itch and squirm and shift, but gradually a stillness settles over me. My goal is mindfulness: I want to be able to hold the stillness inside, to move through the day aware of my thoughts and words and actions. The full concentration I achieve when I am sitting begins to dissolve minutes after I stand up, but a trace of it remains, a small piece of quiet in my head that I carry with me throughout the next day.

  I run into Tshewang again and again, and we fall into conversation easily. His parents are from Tashigang, he tells me, but he . grew up in southern Bhutan, the middle son of seven children. Like most Bhutanese, he is multilingual, speaking Sharchhop, Nepali, Dzongkha, English and Hindi fluently. His father is a gomchen and his mother a weaver who used to supplement the family income by brewing arra. As a child, he says, he walked five kilometers to school every day, returning home to toss his bag of schoolbooks into the trees before heading into the forest to look after the cows. In the evenings, he played by the riverside, listening for elephants, afraid of snakes. Every morning he would have to search for his school bag in the bushes while his parents scolded him for his carelessness. He did well in school, though, and qualified easily for college. What do you read, I ask, and he says everything. I believe him. He has an incredible store of knowledge, an excellent memory for details, names and dates and cultural trivia. “I was so desperate for books when I was a kid,” he says. “I remember picking up empty boxes and wrappers and things, just to read what was written on them. What did you like to read when you were a child, miss?”

  I remember the day I got my own library card and checked out ten fat children’s classics. I tell him, discomfited at the gap between our worlds. He is not disconcerted at all, and plunges into the gap, and we end up debating the most fitting symbol of decadence. A TV in every room in the house, I say. Imelda Marcos’s shoe collection.

  “Chocolate milk,” he says.

  “Chocolate milk? How do you even know about chocolate milk?”

  “From an ad in a magazine. When I saw that, I thought, it’s not enough to have milk? A whole bottle of milk is not enough? People have to add chocolate to it?”

  This happens in many of our conversations: we start off in one direction and skid on a cultural difference, ending up in a new place altogether.

  He loves to argue by illustration, piling metaphor onto metaphor until I cannot remember what we were talking about. “Okay, it’s like this: imagine a blind weaver,” he begins, and I cannot keep a straight face. I tell him that his arguments are elliptical and full of annoying contradictions ; he accuses me of manufacturing evidence. “Wait, let me guess—” he says whenever I start to prove a point, “they’ve done a study. ”

  Harmless conversations, I tell myself. I look forward to them because he’s so intelligent and funny. I look forward to seeing lots of students, Nima, Arun, Chhoden ... no, I cannot convince myself that this is the same. Beneath our conversations, running through them, is an energy. I think he feels it as well. He stands or sits very close when we talk, looking directly into my eyes, and I sense that he is reading me as closely as I am reading him. While our behavior is not overtly inappropriate, I would not want Mr. Matthew’s disapproving eye observing us in conversation.

  He is a show-off, I tell myself, a loud, attention-hogging, limelight-seeking blusterer, a trumpeter of synonyms. He’s actually very irritating. But this doesn’t work, either. Underneath the persona of the charming chatterbox, I sense a broad-minded, sympathetic person. Intellectually, he is a seeker, unafraid to cross over into another point of view, “to see how it looks from that side,” he says. Although he seems to be popular, he doesn’t really belong to any particular group or circle. He doesn’t quite fit in, and I wonder if he ever feels like an outsider among his classmates.

  I ask him one afternoon. We are leaning against the balcony outside a classroom; classes have finished for the day, and below us on the grass, students are gathering for a volleyball game.

  “Yes. No. Sometimes.” He chews the inside of his lip and touches the back of my hand lightly. “But it’s lonely, isn’t it, miss, not to think the way everyone else thinks.” He smiles that peculiar smile that always makes me want to move closer, stay longer, know more.

  I find myself wanting to talk with him about bigger things, Mr. Iyya and the question of beating, history, politics, religion. He listens, agrees, disagrees, tells me flat-out sometimes, “Miss, you are wrong there,” and I realize I can say anything to him because he will argue back. It is an immense relief to talk in my own voice.

  He remembers everything I tell him, and I am touched and flattered when he asks how my brother, Jason, is, or collects bits of Canadian news from magazines for me. He materializes in odd places, under the eaves of a shop, on the football ground at twilight. I begin to wonder if it is more than coincidence when I find him sitting at my favorite bend in the road. “What are you doing here, Tshewang?” I ask.

  “Waiting for you,” he says.

  “No, really.”

  He smiles and I cannot tell one way or the other.

  I begin to wonder every morning if today I will see him, and I am disappointed at nightfall if I haven’t. I, too, have memorized small details: he likes to read late at night, he hates the cold, he doesn’t know his real birth date, he has long, spatulate fingers but short, stubby thumbs.

  It’s a crush, I tell myself. A silly, passing infatuation. Get over it.

  The days pass quickly, the rice growing higher in the paddies, the clouds thickening with the monsoon. I walk at dawn, when Kanglung is sunk in mist, the world softened and still in the slow listless rain. One morning, I meet him running with two of his friends. He is wearing a red bandanna to keep his hair out of his eyes on the ten-kilometer run uphill, and his shorts and tee shirt reveal a compact body with well-defined shoulders and arms, and a lot of smooth copper-colored skin wet with rain. We wave as we pass each other, and when he is out of sight, I stop in the middle of the road, put a cold, wet hand against my flushed cheek. I am shocked at the force, the physical density of my desire.

  Mr. Chatterji helps me plant chilies among the roses and gladioli and weeds in my garden. He won’t take the seedlings directly from my hand because they are a “hot” food and handing them to someone directly will result in an argument. I lay the plants on the ground, and he picks them up from there, popping them into the soil and sprinkling them with water. I put t
welve chilies in my curry now, and eat ema datshi every day. “Just like a Bhutanese,” Lopen Norbu says when I go to his house for dinner. “Now you need a Bhutanese husband.” I shake my head vehemently, as if the thought had never crossed my mind.

  Tshewang visits unexpectedly one Sunday morning. He sits uneasily at the edge of the divan, refusing my offers of coffee and tea. Everything about him is in motion. He chews his nails, taps his feet, fiddles with his pen, and his eyes fly around the room. Our conversation is full of polite abdications, sorry go ahead, no what were you saying? Outside, in full view of the world, we talk effortlessly and endlessly. Inside, alone, we are unable to finish a single sentence. Well, this is a disaster, I think unhappily. Why is it all wrong? I feel thirteen again. He plucks up a magazine and then he is gone, completely absorbed in what he is reading. I lift a notebook from the pile I’ve been marking, but I cannot read a word with him sitting there. I consider his face and his hands, remembering his legs and the curve of his shoulders from the morning in the rain, wondering what would he do if I went over there right now and kissed him, wondering what kind of lover he would be.

  He puts down the magazine and says, “Miss, can I borrow a book?”

  I reach over and pull One Hundred Years of Solitude from the bookshelf and hold it out to him. “Okay, great,” he says, shoving the book into his gho. “Well, I should get going.”

  “Okay.” I want desperately, dangerously for him to stay, and I cannot wait for him to be gone.

  At the door he stops, studying a class II C picture. I want to ask him what he is thinking, does he feel this powerful pull or not. Does he think of me the way I think of him. Say something, I think. Please. “Thanks, miss,” he says and closes the door behind him.

  Miss. Madam. Ma’am., I burst into tears.

  Foreigners Can’t Understand

  Dini and I are asked to judge a debate about the role of women in Bhutanese society. The debate is not taken seriously, and the conclusion is that there is no gender problem in Bhutan. “What about the fact that there are five hundred male students and eighty female students at the college?” Dini asks. “How many women ministers are there? How many women dashos? How many women are elected to the national assembly?”

  “And what about how the women on campus are treated?” I add. They are often hissed at and harassed when they get on stage to make a speech.

  “There is no discrimination against women in Bhutan,” a male debater reaffirms. “If women want to become ministers, they can. If they want to be elected to the national assembly, they can be. They just don’t want to be.”

  “Why don’t they want to be?”

  He pauses to think. “Because they’re busy with their families. Anyway, if they have any ideas they want raised, their husbands can do it. And when we hiss at the girls, we’re only teasing them. They know that.”

  Dini leaves the auditorium in disgust.

  I try to discuss this in one of the senior classes. “Let’s define gender problem,” I begin one morning.

  “Is this in the syllabus?” someone asks from the back of the room.

  “No, it’s not in the syllabus,” I answer, unruffled. “But I’m just curious about what constitutes a gender problem to you.”

  The answers are similar. The way women are treated in India. Widows made to throw themselves on their husband’s funeral pyre. Girl babies aborted, or left to die. Institutional barriers. Discrimination embedded in law. But none of this happens in Bhutan, they say. Therefore, there is no discrimination.

  But there are other forms, more subtle but still very powerful, I begin.

  A student interrupts. “The government says there is no discrimination against women in Bhutan. And the government must be knowing whether there is or isn’t.”

  I stand silenced at the front of the class. If I persist, I will be contradicting the government. If I stay silent, I will implode. “Write me an essay on it,” I say finally, knowing that I will not be able to read them.

  I am just beginning to see how large the gap is between what I try to teach and the Bhutanese way of thinking and learning. I give what I think will be an inspiring lecture on Shelley’s “Song to the Men of England” to my senior poetry class and the students object to the poem.

  “We are not believing like this,” one says. “We believe if you are born poor, that is your karma. It means you must have been very greedy in your last life.”

  “But the rich people in this poem, what about their karma? Are you saying they have a right to exploit the peasants?”

  “No,” another explains. “If they do all these things like in this poem, they will be reborn poor next time and will have to suffer. So there is no need for uprisings because karma will take care of everything.”

  “But what about helping to alleviate the suffering of others? As Mahayana Buddhists, aren’t you supposed to be acting compassionately?”

  Yes, they say, compassion is important, but they cannot see the link between compassion and working to change institutionalized injustices. Anyway, in Bhutan, the social system is handed down to us from our forefathers, one says finally. It is part of our traditional culture. We must preserve our traditions and culture.

  And that is the end of that debate.

  Like class II C, they want to memorize everything. They are uncomfortable with ambiguity and keep asking, “But what’s the real answer? ”

  “Why can’t there be more than one answer?” I counter.

  They shake their heads. For the exams, they say, there is only one right answer.

  “But not for literature,” I say. “Everything we read is open to interpretation.”

  “Please, madam,” someone says. “If we don’t pass English, we won’t be promoted.”

  Mr. Bose, I have noticed, sits at the front of his class and reads from his yellowed notes while the students write frantically. There is no discussion, no room for other interpretations. I remember the kids in Pema Gatshel being hit for asking questions: questions insulted the teacher, the thinking went, because they implied the teacher had not done his or her job properly.

  “I won’t be insulted if you ask questions,” I tell the students. “In fact, I’m insulted when you don’t ask.”

  In private, they sometimes share their critical observations with me, but in public, they wear the smooth, untroubled face of conformity. I ask why they never express their doubts and criticisms openly, and they tell me this is not how things are done in Bhutan. Questions about how things work might be read as dissent. My own questions about the political situation are drawing more hostile answers from both sides. “I’m only asking,” I say uneasily, knowing that I am both asking and telling, that my asking holds value judgments. One student tells me with uncharacteristic bluntness, “Foreigners can’t understand. This is not their country. They should not get involved.”

  I turn it over and over in my mind one evening at Pala’s, at the little table in the back corner, underneath bougainvillea and orchids. I am exhausted by the constant debate with myself. It is like walking a tightrope—I climb up and manage to balance for a short time, arms out, feet splayed, muscles tightened against the pull of gravity—yes, from here I can see how all values are culturally constructed. From an intellectual point of view, it’s a fascinating place to be: here there are no universal standards or ethics, only endless constructions and points of view. But now that I am up here, I realize, there is no place to go, except back down, to my own side and point of view.

  Amala brings out a mug of changke, a thick tangy drink made out of fermented rice. “Taste,” she says. “Just now I am making.”

  “Thanks, Amala.”

  “No problem,” she sings out as she goes back inside. It is her favorite phrase, acquired from the students. She complains that her English is “all broken” but I love the way she talks.

  Tshewang sticks his head around the corner. “Hello, miss,” he says softly.

  I wave at him and pick up my pen. Go awa
y, I think. I am too demoralized to talk, and after last Sunday’s awkwardness, he is the last person I want to see.

  “What’s wrong, miss?”

  “Nothing. I’m writing some letters.”

  “Can I sit here?” He pulls out a chair across from me.

  “Isn’t it time for your night study, Tshewang?”

  He sits down anyway and waits, his eyes trained on me. “What is it, miss?”

  I cannot resist the kindness in his voice and eyes. I tell him about my frustration in class over the students’ reluctance to debate issues. “I just want them to talk,” I say. “What’s wrong with really debating the issue of gender in Bhutan?”

  He considers this. “There’s a time and a place for everything, miss. What good is it to say something if no one is ready to hear it?”

  “Because silence feels like complicity and cowardice to me.”

  He pulls a purple blossom off the bougainvillea that runs along the railing beside the table and holds it in his palm as if he were weighing it. His face is very serious. “Miss, I think you should know.... The students like you, you’re a good teacher and all, but some of your comments ... about political things ... might not always be appreciated.”

  It is tactfully put, but the frown lines between his eyes convey the real message. The bells for night study reach us dimly. “Yes,” I sigh. “I know. But it’s hard to stay quiet when you feel strongly about something. ”

  He pushes back his chair but does not get up. “You know, miss, a person can be completely right about something ...”

  “But?”

  “A person can be completely right about something but still not have the right to say it,” he says.

  “So in your wonderfully diplomatic Bhutanese way, you’re saying you also think I should shut up and mind my own business?” It will hurt to hear it from him. I put it harshly, hoping he will say no.