A Baby in a Backpack to Bhutan: An Australian Family in the Land of the Thunder Dragon

by Bunty Avieson

  Finally, Karma Yangki was buying groceries in a shop in Thimphu when a handsome young man with spiky hair and an innocent expression wandered past the window. She hitched up her kira and chased him down the street, calling out the character’s name, ‘Tashi, Tashi!’

  When the film is finished, that bewildered young man, Lhakpa Dorji, will be the hottest thing in Bhutan.

  Even the extras on the film have special qualities. One morning in Paro, Mal, Kathryn and I arrive at breakfast to find the dining hall full of the most amazing-looking men I have ever seen. They seem massive, though I’m not sure that it’s their physical size as much as their imposing presence and wild appearance. They are all stout and dressed in robes, with long greying hair, not unlike North American Indian chiefs. Kathryn squeals with delight at the sight of them while I do my best not to stare. They are incredibly charismatic, which has something to do with the way they hold themselves – relaxed but with great dignity and a kind of contained power. But they are not frightening or intimidating, rather they seem quite jolly.

  I think I’m playing it cool, not embarrassing anyone by gawking, when I see Mal is grinning at me. ‘It’s okay to be impressed,’ he whispers. ‘They’re the gomchen here for today’s shoot.’

  Today’s shoot is in a ‘magic school’ and these men will play the teacher and his students. In real life they are gomchen, serious Buddhist practitioners who have spent their lives meditating and studying. But not as monks, rather as lay-people, having their own families and staying within the non-religious world. These half-a-dozen or so men are highly respected for both their learning and their practice. Some are on secondment to the royal family, conducting pujas for them.

  They are a jovial bunch and enjoy their day of filming, sitting cross-legged on the wooden floor of the centuries-old temple while incense billows about them and the crew runs around adjusting lighting and finetuning camera angles.

  Every few days the exposed film is sent by DHL courier to Bangkok. There it is processed, matched with sound and made into two tapes. While the original negative stays in Bangkok, stored in a huge refrigerator, one tape is sent to Bhutan to be viewed by the director and crew, the other goes on to Sydney, where the film editors are already at work.

  It’s John Scott and Lisa-Anne Morris again. Even though it is two months until shooting finishes, the sooner they can immerse themselves in the world of the story, the better. They don’t speak Dzongkha (only about 200 000 people in the world do) so each batch of film rushes arrives with a numerical log and notes. They also have a script and it’s up to them to figure out what is going on. To me it sounds like an impossible task but Mal assures me they are well up to it. The Cup was in Tibetan. Not understanding what the actors are saying is a mere technicality.

  The first rushes are brilliant, John tells Mal by telephone, and the crew breathe a collective sigh of relief. It doesn’t last. The next telephone call is to say the rushes have gone astray, somewhere between Bangkok and Thimphu, which causes Mal, as producer, some major headaches and frustrates the director and crew, who want to see for themselves how everything looks.

  John’s next call reveals a much bigger problem: the second batch of rushes show damage to the negative, a scratch running through every frame. It can be digitally corrected in postproduction and no-one would be the wiser, but that is time-consuming and expensive – not to mention bloody annoying. The crew needs to locate the problem and fix it. Pronto. And they must do it while they are filming, which to me sounds bizarre, but they can’t afford to stop production. It must be done on the run.

  Meanwhile the big Tata truck due for some forthcoming scenes hasn’t turned up, the horse required for a long vigorous galloping scene is off its food and the sound recordist is unable to get out of bed because of a debilitating stomach bug that looks like it may sweep through the crew.

  Mal is up to his neck in crises with more looming. He warned me he would be busy but I had no idea. This is my first experience up close with movie-making and it looks seriously stressful. It’s a bit like deadline day on a weekly magazine when every minute you are late to the presses costs money. The only difference is Mal faces that pressure every minute of every day. I feel almost guilty that Kathryn and I are having such a lovely, relaxed time. Almost . . .

  All the problems must be fixed soon because the Paro section of filming is scheduled to finish and the new location at Chendebji – eight hours’ drive away – is nearly built and ready for them to arrive. While the cast and crew are enjoying the warmth and luxury of Kichu resort, the accommodation department is breaking camp and moving it, a mammoth job requiring six huge Tata trucks.

  Everything from the camp has to go – beds, bedding, carpets, generators, two whole kitchens, freezers, even the electricity and wiring is stripped out of each room and moved. At the other end a complete camp for more than a hundred people is being painstakingly reassembled.

  The cast and crew are reluctant to leave Kichu with its hot showers and soft beds, and I’m starting to wonder about my eagerness to spend the next few months in Thimphu with a family of people I don’t know, two of whom, it turns out, are the casting sisters Karma Yangki and Phuntsho Wangmo. After being reunited with Mal, reintroducing him to his daughter and meeting all these interesting people, I am to be dropped off in the middle of the night to live with this extended family of twenty while Mal disappears down some yak trail.

  What was I thinking?

  ‘I’ve known the family for years,’ Mal assures me. ‘They’re lovely people.’

  Then you stay with them. How can you leave me and our baby with a bunch of people I’ve never met?

  ‘I’ll be back every seven days or so.’

  Seven days? Seven days! You said three or four ...

  ‘You’re welcome to come to the next location but it’s going to be basic. We’re camping, and it’ll be cold and wet and pretty miserable. It’s not really suitable for a baby.’

  So Kathryn and I go to Thimphu.

  5

  The House of Many Mothers

  EARLY NOVEMBER 2002

  It’s been a bad night. Kathryn woke six times and, at 4 am, exhausted and in tears, I decide it is time to try the Bhutanese solution for babies who won’t sleep. It’s off to the temple with her.

  Over breakfast I ask Karma Yangki (pronounced Karma Young-key), my beautiful, elegant host and newly adopted big sister, if she will take us. ‘I need help,’ I tell her. ‘I’m ready to do it the Bhutanese way.’

  She beams a smile full of maternal sympathy and understanding. Aged about thirty-five (she is not sure of her birth date), she is some years younger than me, but as the mother of four children, way ahead in experience.

  Over the past few weeks Kathryn and I have been absorbed into Karma Yangki’s family in their traditional-style house on the outskirts of the capital city, Thimphu.

  Mal has known the family for ten years and stayed in their home a few months ago. Taking snippets from his stories, a dollop from Lost Horizon and my own fanciful imaginings, I was expecting a two-storey house with animals – probably cows and sheep – living on the ground floor, with all of us upstairs in one huge room, sleeping sardine-style, by the dying embers of an open fire, which would also be where all the meals were cooked. I imagined I would probably need to use sign language to communicate and everyone would retire early, ready for the next gruelling day of ... something backbreaking and earthy.

  My expectations are wrong in every way.

  For one, I don’t have to bunk down on the floor with the whole family. That may be the Bhutanese style on farms and in poorer parts of the country, but this family shares a very comfortable home in the nice leafy suburb of Taba, and I have a room all to myself. In fact, it’s twice the size of my bedroom in Sydney. The only animals are two playful little terriers and two new kittens. All the members of the family are well educated and speak English, to varying degrees, certainly enough that sign language isn’t necessary.

  O
ur host (and husband of Karma Yangki) is Mani Dorji – pronounced Marnee Dawjee. He and his brother Tenzin Wangdi turn out to be the emerging Murdochs of Bhutan. They own the largest private press in the country, printing all the school textbooks as well as monastic texts, calendars and business brochures. They own a couple of shops and plan soon to launch the first non-government newspaper. This family’s connections reach far and wide throughout the little Himalayan kingdom and it is an extraordinary privilege to be staying with them, and right at the centre of most of what is going on.

  The country, a kingdom whose King is also the head of government, is at a most crucial stage in its history as it inches cautiously towards becoming a democracy. Living here I get to meet people involved in drafting the first constitution. The country’s most learned men will meet at this home, right where I eat my lunch each day, to write the country’s first official dictionary.

  For all that, the family lives quite simply, mostly sleeping on mattresses on the floor, in a warren of rooms downstairs, with their belongings hanging on hooks on the walls. A husband and wife, two of the wife’s sisters, a three-year-old and two maids live here, while other sisters, children, cousins, mothersin-law and more distantly related family come and go. There

  is another sister in Thimphu, Phuntsho Wangmo, who stays here often, another who lives in east Bhutan, one who studies astrology in Bir, and a brother in Delhi. Keeping track of them all is virtually impossible. Any night of the week the family will pull out another mattress, find some doonas and someone else will become part of the household for a night, a week or longer.

  The Bhutanese love a good time and seldom retire before midnight. In the morning I can bump into all sorts of different people who might have slept over. Most baffling of all, sometimes they sleep with the light on.

  Kathryn and I rattle around upstairs. On our floor, there is a shrine room, filled with statues of Buddha and thangkas (religious paintings), our bedroom, two single bedrooms, a bathroom, a formal lounge room, an open dining area and a large marble verandah with steps down to the driveway. Kathryn has her travel cot set up in one corner of our bedroom, while Mal (when he is here) and I have the double bed and a view across the picturesque rural valley to the snow-capped Himalayas.

  The Taba house is a work-in-progress. When Mal stayed here a few months ago during auditions, there was no formal lounge room upstairs or an outside verandah. Karma Yangki got the builders in, told them what she wanted and without plans or any kind of council approval, they did it.

  The walls are made of thin pine with no insulation and many gaps, so that there is just one incomplete layer separating us from the sub-zero temperatures outside. The afternoon sun that pours through the glass window warms the room. But the minute it sets, the bitter cold starts seeping through the gaps. By early morning it is so cold that any skin left bare stings.

  We wear thermals and hats to bed and sleep under three doonas and two blankets. Kathryn, who would kick off the lightest sheet at home in Australia, wears a zip-up hooded jumpsuit so thickly padded that she can’t move her arms and looks like a mini Michelin man. We think she looks cute. She hates it. For a baby who likes to be nude, this clothes-wearing thing is a little tiresome. For once she is overruled.

  For me, getting out from under that pile of doonas to face a bucket bath is the hardest part of every day. Washing my hair is even less appealing and drops to once or, at most, twice a week.

  Each morning at 8 am Wesel Wangmo (Yoo-sell Wong-mo), who at around twenty is the youngest of the family’s six sisters, comes and takes Kathryn off for breakfast downstairs. I’ve brought instant oats and a Bamix to purée vegetables. At nine months she is well into solids and I am religiously following the book on what she should eat. For the first few weeks Wesel Wangmo makes her porridge for breakfast, but once we all start to relax, she has whatever the maids are making for the rest of the family – pumpkin, spinach, even fish soup, with the eyes floating in it, a big favourite with the other children. Kathryn loves it all.

  While she is eating breakfast downstairs, the two maids serve me mine in the upstairs dining area. There are usually two or three hot dishes – soup, eggs, vegetables – with pancakes and either sweet Indian tea or salty yak-butter tea. There is enough here for a family of four and if I don’t eat plenty, they worry that I don’t like their cooking. I try to explain that the feast, laid out before me in a row of beaten copper serving bowls, is somewhat grander than I am used to – two pieces of toast with a smear of Vegemite – but wonderfully appreciated all the same. It is just one of many such conversations we have over the next two months as we dance around each other’s cultural differences.

  After breakfast I have the top floor virtually to myself while the sisters entertain Kathryn. I can work on my book at the dining table looking out to the road, where the students file past on their way to the nearby school. Or in the formal lounge room. Or sitting up in bed. As golden autumn gives way to frigid winter, I usually opt for working in bed.

  I always know exactly where Kathryn is and which sister is playing with her. The thin walls and floor mean her coos of delight and their responses float up to where I am. Sometimes I hear them joining in a chorus of ‘Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star’ and find myself singing along as I type. When she needs a feed or a nap they bring her back. Otherwise I’m alone with absolutely no excuse not to work.

  Kathryn is thriving in this house of many mothers. She sits wherever they put her and plays happily, thrilled to have so much constant attention. She is captivated by Karma Yangki’s three-year-old daughter Madonna, who is half-terrified of her. Madonna has never seen such a pale-skinned, redheaded person. It doesn’t imbue her with confidence that Kathryn squeals and flaps her arms wildly whenever she walks in the door. It takes a few days but finally Madonna realises how limited Kathryn is – she can’t chase her – and becomes intrigued with her odd-looking new playmate.

  The family is wonderful and each evening a different sister joins me for dinner. It could be Karma Yangki, the eldest, who as well as being an earth mother has an outrageously rude sense of humour; Karma Chokyi (Karma Chockie), aged about twenty-six, who is being courted by her first boy and keeps me up to date with every glorious step of their fledgling romance; Wesel Wangmo, the youngest, who adores Kathryn and is adored back in equal measure; or Phuntsho Wangmo (Poontso Wong-mo), who runs Mal’s production office in Thimphu. She is in constant contact with the set and knows all the gossip, like who among the cast and crew might be having a hot affair. It’s the sort of stuff that Mal, being a man, never thinks is relevant, and I, of course, find endlessly fascinating.

  A conversation with Phuntsho Wangmo is usually juicy and often ends up with me clutching my sides and falling about with hysterics. ‘Nooooo! They didn’t.’ ‘Oh yes, they did... bumped the woman in the next room clean out of her bed ...’

  Dinner could be with any one of the sisters or a combination. I never know who I’m going to get, but whoever it is, I know the conversation is going to be interesting.

  Life in the bosom of this remarkable family should be idyllic, and really it is. Except for the nights.

  Kathryn just will not sleep and no matter how entertaining the sisters are and breathtaking the views, it makes little difference to my appreciation of life. I am a walking zombie.

  In Sydney she slept. In India she slept. On aeroplanes, rammed under a flickering movie screen, she slept. Strapped to my chest or perched in the backpack she slept. But not here, surrounded by endless beauty and bliss. She wakes every few hours, screaming.

  It could be a dozen different things. The cold nights. The dry mountain air causing her to wake up thirsty. The change in food. The change in taste of my breastmilk. The fact the sky is blue or that the day of the week has a ‘d’ in it. I email friends in Australia for advice but nothing helpful comes back. The drugs they secretly recommend (‘I only did this once but, gee, it was good,’ two mothers confide) aren’t available here.

  Kathr
yn is healthy, eating huge meals and happy during the day but at night we’ve become locked into a pattern that I need to break. I decide to try a bout of control crying, just like my handbook recommends. It suggests leaving the baby to cry for five minutes before going in and comforting her, then seven or eight minutes and so on, building up the gaps between. It means having nerves of steel and a heart of ice but nevertheless it worked for us in Sydney.

  Trying it in Bhutan, where we are sharing a room, means burying my head under the three doonas, two blankets and a pillow, watching the hands move slowly on my luminous watch.

  I am just ten minutes into it, while Kathryn is letting loose with both lungs and all the indignance of a healthy, feisty nine-month-old, when I realise someone is pounding on our door.

  It is Wesel Wangmo, eyes wide with concern. ‘Is Kathryn all right?’ she asks, peering anxiously into the room. Karma Yangki, and the other sisters, are worried. It is only 9 pm and, of course, the whole family is still up. I have visions of them all clustered at the foot of the stairs whispering among themselves about what I might be doing to that cute little baby who does nothing but smile at them all day.

  The Bhutanese shower their babies with love and attention. When they cry, they pick them up and cuddle them. They can’t understand why on earth I would leave her crying. Put it like that and quite frankly, neither can I.

  Control crying is not going to work in this household. I give up and take Kathryn into bed with me but I know that is just delaying the problem. Mal will be back in a few days and he takes up most of the double bed. There is hardly room for me, let alone Kathryn. I have to get her to sleep through the night, in her own little bed in her corner of the room.