by Jamie Zeppa
At five the next morning, we wake to see it, huge and white, impossible, as if the moon had fallen to earth. We walk toward it, climbing over boulders and splashing through an icy river. Over a moraine, down into soft wet sand, shallow cloudy green river winding through. We climb another moraine and then we can see the base of the mountain, rock falls, snow and ice, pieces of the mountain smashed into gravel, gravel crushed into grey sand. We can see the remains of a glacial lake, bottle-green. Even this close to the mountain, there are yaks pulling up bits of grass. We climb up a slope until we can see another upthrust spire of mountain, Jichu Drake. In the brilliant light, I cannot tell the mountain from the cloud.
At first I think, this awful, awful place. An icy, windy desert. But then I realize it is not wasteland, land used up and useless, it is not the end of life, but the beginning of it. Here are the great mother mountains and the watersheds, the beginning of the river that grows the forests and rice in the fertile valleys downstream. This is primeval land, belonging to itself. It is not a landscape of many choices. It is immaculate, spare, sparse, parsed into its primary elements. The grammar of mountains. Stone, ice, time. The wind sounds like the ocean. Nothing I have with me would help me here for very long. There is little here, and little to want. But there is space and time to think.
Tshewang and I have made separate, discreet inquiries; it is possible for us to marry and stay in Bhutan. It is possible for us to marry and leave Bhutan. These are the only options we have spoken of. I have not voiced the third, not to marry, to go our separate ways. Because I do not know if either of us is ready to make the sacrifices that the future will require. I don’t know if I have brought Tshewang further into this than he ever wanted to be. I worry that I am asking him for a commitment that he may not be ready for. He says he is, has said from the beginning that he only thought about this relationship in one way, heading toward one conclusion, marriage, a family, but I am not entirely convinced that at twenty-two, he is ready to make that kind of decision.
Sitting on a stone looking up at Jomolhari, I let myself think. I came to Bhutan to find out if the careful life I had planned, the life of waiting, watching, counting, planning, putting into place, was the life I really wanted. I can still go back to that life, even now, even after everything. Here I am, in another high place, the highest edge I have come to so far. I can still say goodbye to Tshewang, go home, find an apartment, have the child, go back to school. In some ways, it is the least risky, most sensible option. I can turn these last three and a half years into a neatly packaged memory, pruned by caution, sealed by prudence. I can still turn back. But I will not. I will go over the edge and step into whatever is beyond.
Lotus Thunderbolt
Jesus Christ, Jamie Lynne!” my grandfather says when I tell him. If he were not so visibly, angrily, intensely upset, I might laugh. I had written to him about Tshewang, and he had written back telling me not to be foolish, to think of my future. “It will all blow over,” he wrote. “You’ll forget each other the minute you’re back here. Where you belong.” He thought I was coming home to do my Ph.D. When I tell him I have come home to have a baby, he doesn’t believe me.
“Grandpa,” I say gently, “I wanted a baby. I want this baby. I love Tshewang very much.”
For a few weeks, he says nothing. He is thinking, turning it over and over in his mind, looking for something to salvage, a piece upon which he can build a future for me.
“All right,” he begins one morning, stirring sugar into his coffee. “So you have the baby. Fine. Lots of people have babies when they’re studying at that level. You can apply now, and start after the baby is born.”
“I don’t want to go back to school now, Grandpa. I’m going to wait for Tshewang to finish school, and then we’ll decide what to do.”
“Forget him—”
“I can’t forget him, Grandpa.”
“Why make your life more complicated than you’ve already made it? You have to simplify it now.”
“I agree. That’s why I’m not making any decisions right now.”
“You won’t ever really belong in Bhutan, and he won’t ever feel at home here.”
“Well, I don’t know about that, Grandpa. He’s a pretty adaptable person, and I love Bhutan.”
“You aren’t even the same religion,” he says. “How in hell do you expect this to work?”
I mumble unhappily and get up to clear the dishes. I don’t know how to tell him, he is already so upset. “Don’t tell me you’ve gone and become a—a—”
“A Buddhist.”
Now he is furious. “You were raised a Catholic! ”
“Yes, but I’ve chosen to be something else, Grandpa. Anyway, you used to say that all religions are the same underneath.”
“Then why can’t you stay a Catholic? That’s a cult, that’s all that is. Buddhism! ”
I enlist the help of my brother, father and mother. Please talk to him, I ask them. Tell him that you’re not upset about it, you think it will all
work out fine. The phone rings and rings, and I try not to listen to my grandfather explaining patiently why I never should have gone to Bhutan in the first place. “Everything will change after the baby is born,” my mother tells me. “Your grandfather will come around. They always do.”
I try talking through it with him, I try not talking about it at all, I try ignoring his comments, I try snapping back at him. I come home one day from a walk and find that the small altar I have set up in my room has been dismantled and packed away. “I don’t want that nonsense in my house!” he shouts. When my father calls and offers me an alternative place to stay, I accept and move to Toronto.
I spend my time reading, swimming at the Y, seeing films, and writing to Tshewang. I miss him hugely, and sometimes I fret about the future, but mostly I am calm. I take refuge in the Dharma community in Toronto, visiting a Tibetan Buddhist temple regularly, and attending a series of teachings given by a visiting Tibetan Rimpoche. The temple is in a downtown building; the downstairs lobby is all mirrors and polished brass, but several floors up, in a bright, airy room, there is an altar, butter lamps and water cups set before a statue of the Buddha, and every time I go in, it is a homecoming. I stay in touch with my Bhutan friends in Canada, visiting Tony and Margaret (who returned home, got married, and settled in Vancouver), Leon, who has begun a postgraduate degree in international affairs in Ottawa, and Lorna and her new family in Saskatchewan. Lorna does indeed have furniture, and seems very happy with it.
Friends working in Thimphu write to tell me that the political situation, or the “southern problem” as it is now called, continues along the same course it started out on, two sides, two stories, parallel lines. There is no resolution in sight.
The baby is born on the ninth day of the tenth month of the Water Monkey Year, December 3, 1992, a boy with curly brown hair, dark eyes, golden-brown skin, and a bluish mark at the base of his spine which the doctor calls a Mongolian Blue Spot. I have to wait for Tshewang to get a name for the baby from a lama. He will phone me from Thimphu with the name, and then he will come to Canada for six weeks. In the meantime, I call the baby Dorji, and the baby does not complain. Tshewang finally calls from Thimphu—he has been to Taktsang, he announces excitedly, the baby has a name, and it is Sangha Chhophel.
“Sangha?”
“Sangha,” he corrects me.
“Sangha.”
“No, not Sang-ha,” he says. “Sang-ngha. Can you hear the difference?”
“Yes,” I lie. “But listen, Tshewang, maybe we should call him something easier for Canadians to pronounce. Is that allowed?” I do not tell him that no one in my family can pronounce “Tshewang.” My brother refers to him as Say-Wrong, and my mother’s mother calls him Sam. I don’t know what they’ll do to Sangha.
“It’s allowed, I think. How about Pema? Pema Khandu?”
I like Pema, but in Canada, Khandu would inevitably be pronounced Candu. I explain the nuclear associations, and sugges
t Dorji. Pema means lotus, a symbol of enlightenment because the white flowers bloom out of mire, the same way the mind blossoms out of samsara into enlightenment. Dorji means thunderbolt, a symbol of enduring truth.
My grandfather calls, wanting to know do I need any money, am I sure I don’t need any, well okay then, he just wanted to make sure ... and how is the baby? And when is he going to arrive, the baby’s father? “Soon, Grandpa,” I say. “We’ll be coming up to see you after Christmas.”
“Well,” my grandfather says, “have you done anything about winter clothes for him?”
“No.” I haven’t even thought about winter clothes for Tshewang.
“Well, I don’t suppose you saw—they had a special on boots at the Kmart,” my grandfather says. “I picked him up a size eight.”
Revenue Stamps
Tshewang and I were married at the Thimphu District Court in September 1993. We wore matching clothes, a gho and kira cut from one piece of red-and-gold cloth woven by his mother. Pema Dorji, nine months old, wore a Blue Jays outfit. At the courthouse, we waited around for most of the morning before a clerk informed us that Bhutanese needed permission from the Home Ministry to marry foreigners. Across town we went to the Home Ministry, where we waited around a few more hours for our letter of permission. Back to the court with the letter. More waiting. The clerk emerged again from the judge’s chamber and said, “You do have revenue stamps, don’t you? For the marriage certificate?” We didn’t bother asking what a revenue stamp was, or why we needed them to get married; we just went off to the revenue-stamp office to buy some. By the time we got back, it was almost five o’clock, and the clerk informed us that the judge was going home. One of our witnesses whispered something, and the clerk looked us up and down, nodded sympathetically and went back into the judge’s chamber. “What did you tell him?” we asked our friend.
“I told him you were wearing borrowed clothes and had to return them tonight,” he said. I began to straighten my kira in anticipation of the actual event. How would the Bhutanese ceremony go? What would the judge say exactly? I checked my camera: film, flash, batteries. The clerk came out and said the judge had agreed to marry us. In fact, he had already married us. “What do you mean?” I asked.
“You’re married,” said the clerk. “You just have to sign the certificate.”
“But we weren’t even in the room!” I wailed.
The clerk shrugged. “Do you have the stamps?”
We signed the certificate, giggling, and stuck on the stamps. As wedding ceremonies go, it wasn’t much, but with the mountains rising up to the violet sky outside and the river turning gold in the last drop of light, it was enough.
Postscript
Tshewang and I lived in Thimphu for several years, and Pema’s first words were an equal balance of English and Sharchhop. During our time in Thimphu, Tshewang and I found some of the cultural differences between us to be even greater than we had expected, and had to make some difficult decisions about our future. Eventually, I decided to return to Canada, at least “for some time,” as the Bhutanese say, and the future, well, we will see what it brings.
One of the questions I am most often asked about my life in Bhutan is “But does it feel like home to you?” In many ways, it does. I can stand on a ridge, looking at those mountains and forests and clouds forever, feeling wholly at ease, wholly at home. But I use the word “home” to refer to Canada as well. I go “home” to visit, “home” for a holiday. My grandfather phoned me often in Thimphu to see how I was, and always asked when I was coming “home.” He meant for good, not for a holiday. It was hard for him to understand that home could be, for me, two radically different places and cultures, and it remained a source of sadness and difficulty between us. He was too old to make his own journey into Bhutan, which was unfortunate, because I knew that if he could see me there, he would know that I was already home. On a November afternoon in 1996, I was having lunch at my friend Dechen’s house, and I had a sudden strong impression of my grandfather, as if he could somehow see me sitting cross-legged on the floor amongst friends, drinking warm salty butter tea and laughing as our children chased each other under the brilliant autumn sky outside. It was such a peculiar feeling that when my brother Jason phoned later to tell me that Grandpa had died that day in his sleep, I already knew.
Namé samé kadin chhé, Grandpa.
Beyond the sky and the earth, thank you.
About the Author
Jamie Zeppa was born and raised in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, in 1964.
She lives in Toronto and Bhutan.
