Beyond the Sky and the Earth (16 page)

An old man with a large goiter on his neck stops to offer us betel nut smeared with lime paste and wrapped in a green leaf. Leon accepts, saying he has been meaning to try it. We watch as he stuffs the whole thing into his mouth and chews. “How is it?” we ask.

“God-awful,” he says, but keeps chewing. “It’s supposed to give you a mild high.”

After several minutes, he spits it out. “Are you high?” I ask.

“No, I’m nauseous. Are my teeth red?”

“Yes.”

The sunlight has turned a warm, liquid gold. We look up and down the length of the river valley, watching the mountain ranges in the south opening one after the other like gates to a secret kingdom. I love how the landscape gives the impression of vast space and intimacy at the same time: the thin brown line of a path wandering up an immense green mountainside, a plush hanging valley tucked between two steep hillsides, a village of three houses surrounded by dark forest, paddy fields flowing around an outcrop of rock, a white temple gleaming on a shadowy ridge. The human habitations nestle into the landscape; nothing is cut or cleared beyond what is required. Nothing is bigger than necessary. Every sign of human settlement repeats the mantra of contentment: “This is just enough.”

We walk back to Catherine’s place and cook rice, vegetable curry and dahl, talking about where to go for the first-term break. I had not thought of going anywhere. “Oh, you have to go somewhere,” Leon tells me. There are a hundred possible destinations and combinations, other postings to visit, different routes to try out, all the old trading paths that people took before the lateral road was built. There are very old, holy temples to see, Tony wants to go to Dremitse on its own little hilltop, Catherine to Rangchikhar to meet a levitating lama. Two years suddenly seems a very short time. “What about the three-month winter break?” Tony says. “We could all walk from Lhuntse to Bumthang and spend Christmas at the Swiss Guest House.”

“What a good idea!” I exclaim, thinking of bukharis and the smell of pine.

“I thought you were going home for Christmas,” Leon says to me.

Yes, so I am. I had forgotten.

The lama who lives next door invites us to his room at dusk. The only light comes from the butter lamp on his altar. The lama is absorbed in his evening prayers, and we sit on the floor beside him and drink zim-chang, the good-night arra he has offered us. I am glad there is no need to speak. I want to absorb this moment in this room, the steady flame of the butter lamp, the composed faces of the Buddhas behind the altar, the contented silence of my friends, the great peaceful night settling all around us outside. I feel I could sit here forever. Back in Catherine’s room, wrapped in a borrowed blanket, I lay under the window, cold and tired and happy. I study the stars sprayed across the sky and listen to the lama praying softly next door. I remember my arrival in Bhutan and how miserable I was, and all the other teachers who seemed inexplicably content. They were right all along, I think. This is the most remarkable place, after all.

T
here is no transport from Rangthangwoong to Tashigang; we have to walk back. After a breakfast of fried rice and leftover curry, we set off down the mountainside to the main road which runs along the river valley. Leon and Tony go galloping off, surefooted through fields and rice paddies. I must fly along after them to keep up. As long as I don’t think about where to put my foot next, I do not stumble. We are hot and sweaty by the time we reach the row of shops at Duksam, where there is hot tea, warm beer or unfiltered water to drink. We opt for the warm beer, which makes me sleepy, and then continue to trudge along the road. It is sixteen kilometers back to the bridge below Tashigang. There is no shade, and the sun is merciless. Below us, the river is a deliciously cool turquoise surge. Tony says the color indicates its origin: the turquoise comes from suspended particles of stone crushed by the grinding of a glacier. I long to climb down the bank and immerse myself in its blue-green chill.

The flat road is aerobically easy but endlessly tedious. We stop to talk to everyone we pass.
Where are you going, where are you coming from. Gari mala
—
notruck.
Leon and I become engaged in an inane conversation about soap operas, restaurants, and bad songs from the seventies to help pass the time. We pass the temple of Gomkhora, beside an enormous black rock near the river. “That’s the rock Guru Rimpoché used to pin down a demon,” Leon says. “He chased the demon all the way from Tibet. There’s a really narrow tunnel down there in the rock that people squirm through. If they make it, it means their sins are cleared away.” We stand for a moment, looking down toward the river. There is something completely satisfying about the whole spot. The temple is old but well kept, surrounded by neatly parceled rice paddies and shaded by large, fragrant eucalyptus trees. In the noontime light, everything shimmers but nothing moves except the river. There is no sign of any human activity and that feeling comes over me again, the feeling of being too recent and flimsy for the landscape I am in. I try to imagine who I would be if I had lived all my life here at this temple by the river. I wonder what I would want if I had grown up without ads telling me my heart’s desires: to be thinner, richer, sexier, look better, smell better, be all that I can be, have a faster car, a brighter smile, lighter hair, whiter whites, hurry now, don’t miss out, take advantage of this special offer. If instead I had spent twenty-four years absorbing the silent weight of the mountains, the constant pull of the river, the sound of hot white light burning into black rocks.

A bird sings out, a two-note song, and I come back to myself. “Let’s just stay here,” I say, because the road ahead bends and quivers in the heat, and we still have twelve kilometers to go, and standing here is like drinking spring water. Even the river hesitates at this spot, curling around the large rocks and murmuring against the banks before the current tugs it away.

The last two hours of the journey take forever. We turn a comer and see Tashigang dzong, perched on a cliff in the distance, but that’s where it remains, in the distance, a mirage, and I limp along, feet burning, stomach empty, with the refrain of “Run Joey Run” on permanent playback in my head. “I wish the Vomit Comet would come along,” I say.

“No you don’t,” Leon and Tony say in unison.

“Which would you rather have right now,” Leon says suddenly, “a sandwich with Black Forest ham on thinly sliced rye bread with Dijon mustard and a cold beer or—”

“Oh no,” Tony groans. “Not the Food Game.”

“OR, a pizza with extra thin crust, sun-dried tomatoes, onions, black olives, cheese and—”

“It’s his favorite game on long walks and bus rides,” Tony explains. “It’s torture.”

“AND a bottle of your favorite red wine,” Leon finishes.

“The sandwich,” I say. “You?”

“The pizza. Okay, now, which would you rather have for dessert, Häagen-Dazs chocolate chocolate-chip ice cream or ...”

Time speeds up. We cross Chazam discussing the merits of seafood over falafel above the loud flap and flutter of tattered prayer flags tied to the bridge railings, and take a short cut to Tashigang dzong, a forty-five-minute ascent up the steepest slope ever to bear a path. I am dizzy and painfully out of breath when we reach the cluster of prayer flags at the top, but now I understand why the dzong was built here, on this unassailable spur overlooking the river.

At the Norkhil bar, we are joined by a class VIII student Tony knows. He begins to tell us about Tashigang, how a local deity had to be subdued before Buddhism could flourish there; a small dwelling halfway down the mountain is said to hold the deity now. The dzong was built in 1688, continuing the Shabdrung’s campaign to bring the whole country under one rule. “Hey,” I interrupt, “what happened to the Shabdrung anyway?”

“What do you mean, miss?”

“In the class VIII history book, the Shabdrung’s reincarnations suddenly disappear.”

The student glances over one shoulder, then another, and begins to tell us a story. Sometime in the 1920s or 1930s, he is not sure when, the then-Shabdrung began to cause trouble with the monarchy and soon after died mysteriously “in his sleep,” but everyone knows he was assassinated, suffocated with a white silk scarf, and everyone knows the family of the man who killed him was cursed with illness, madness, loss and ruin. The next reincarnation was found somewhere in the eastern districts, but this Shabdrung also disappeared. Some people say he was pushed out of a window in Tashigang dzong.

The student pauses and looks around again. “As he was falling, a bird tried to save him, and caught him with its wings, but the men in the dzong threw stones and he fell again. The river itself didn’t want to take him, and sent him back to shore, but the men came again and pushed him back in and so finally he had to die.”

He tells us that the next reincarnation was taken out of Bhutan by the Indian army during the Indo-China war, and now lives in New Delhi.

We sit quietly, digesting this, and I remember the Pema Gatshel history teacher’s reluctance to talk about the current Shabdrung. After the student leaves, we look at each other. “How much of that do you think is grounded in fact?” I ask.

“Who knows?” Leon says, shrugging.

I think about all the half-complete stories I have heard since I got here, how their incompleteness makes them resonant and powerful. History here seems a combination of official, unofficial, and forbidden stories. This tale of the Shabdrung, for instance: I don’t know where to look it up or who to ask for more information. There’s no way to know for sure. It could have happened, it might have happened, I heard it happened ... It is the impossibility of knowing for sure that makes everything possible. I am dying to know (no, I don’t want to know) the rest of the story, the whole story, the real story.

We drink several cold beers in silence. “Now where’s my ham sandwich with Dijon mustard, that’s what I want to know,” I say. But what I really want is rice and dahl and potato curry at the Puen Soom, which is fortunate, because that’s all there is.

On Tuesday morning, we search the bazaar in vain for a private vehicle going south. “It’s the Vomit Comet for sure,” Tony says.

“It’s full. We’ll never get on,” I say, watching as a woman with a jerry can of kerosene, a baby, and a bundle of frayed, faded cloth tries to press her way up the bus steps.

Leon walks around the bus, peering into the windows. “That’s not full,” he reports back scornfully. “Full means the ticket collector has to walk on the backs of the seats. Let’s go.”

We squeeze ourselves onto the bus, which reeks of mildew, vomit, kerosene, and betel nut, struggling over legs, bags, boxes, sacks, jerry cans, children and bedrolls. It is like being pushed through a sieve. Still more people pile on, until we are jammed in too tightly to move, and the ticket collector has to walk on the backs of the seats. The engine rumbles to life and Hindi film music comes screeching out of a speaker. “Oh misery,” Leon groans, “we’ve got the one with the sound system.”

After thirty minutes on the winding road, a few people begin to vomit, out windows if they are near them, onto the floor if not. People cover their noses and mouths with their sleeves against the smell. A chicken escapes from somewhere and a child kicks my shins trying to catch it. Someone spits betel nut juice on my shoes. The ticket collector sways precariously from his perch and clutches at a woman’s head to prevent himself from falling into her lap when the bus brakes suddenly. People who want to get off at an unscheduled stop gesture to him, and he pounds loudly on the ceiling or the back wall: bangBANG, bangBANG, bangBANG. Disembarkation requires a contortionist’s skill and a great deal of determined uncivility. The open windy ride to Rangthangwoong seems like a luxury now. “Which would you rather have,” I ask Leon, “eggs Benedict with freshly squeezed orange juice or ...” I cannot finish.

“Valium and a Scotch,” he answers flatly.

We say goodbye to Tony in Khaling, and Leon gets off in Wamrong, wishing me luck getting a gypsum truck from Tshelingkhor. “If there’s no truck, and it’s getting dark,” he says, “stay in Tshelingkhor. Don’t walk in the dark. A kid fell off a cliff last year trying to take a shortcut somewhere along that road.”

“Yeah, okay, I’ll just book into the Holiday Inn for the night,” I say grumpily, thinking of the two miserable, bamboo shacks by the roadside.

“The Hilton has better room service,” he says. “Bye!”

There is already a large group of people waiting at Tshelingkhor when I scramble off the bus. It is dusk, and a heavy mist is creeping over the tree tops. Inside one of the huts, Tshering’s shop-cum-bar, I study the shelves behind the counter. I have a choice of Orange Cream Biscuits and tea, or Orange Cream Biscuits and several brands of Bhutanese whiskey: Dragon Rum, Triple XXX Rum, Black Mountain Whiskey, Bhutan Mist. I drink three cups of lukewarm tea and then switch to Bhutan Mist. Tiny knives scrape my throat on the way down but the final product settles warmly in my stomach.
“Gari mala,”
the old man beside me says glumly. He is drinking Triple XXX Rum. I ask him where the toilet is and he gestures to the door. Outside. I stand up but he waves me back down.
“Ma di, ma di,
” he says, making a strange wriggling gesture with his fingers.
“Pat-ba!”
Finally, a young boy steps forward and translates shyly for me. “He is telling don’t go, miss. He is telling leeches.” If leeches can get up your nose, they can also get into other orifices. I sit back down. Just then, everyone in the room jumps up. I can hear it too, the distant rumble of a truck. Outside the mist has turned into a fine, cold rain. The truck stops, a flatbed already overloaded with sacks of rice, but the driver waits while we clamber on before turning onto the Pema Gatshel road.

I know we are driving along the edge of a very steep gully, but in the darkness I can see nothing except the occasional glimmer of the truck’s headlights on the clouds in the ravine beneath us. In my gut, though, I can feel the immense emptiness between the soft, deeply rutted road we are on and the bottom of the gulch somewhere down below. Beyond, across, I know there are mountains but I cannot see them. It is like driving on the edge of the world.