Beyond the Sky and the Earth (19 page)

the fan and talk about our kids. Lorna tells me how she tried to describe a vacuum cleaner and washing machine to them. “God knows what they’ve constructed in their minds,” she says. “Just imagine how it must sound to them: a big pipe that sucks up dirt and a box that washes your clothes.”

I tell Lorna about class II C’s dismal science exam answers. “I’m really feeling my lack of teacher training,” I say. “I don’t know if I’m doing much more than babysitting.”

We talk about beating. Lorna says that she is a strict teacher and hopes to show that you can be strict without hitting. “But shouldn’t we try to do something about it?” I ask.

Lorna shrugs. “It’s not our place to do anything,” she says. “And anyway, what would we do?”

The electricity suddenly fails, and we lie on the beds in the damp heat, listening to the crickets and one hysterical dog. I am almost asleep when Lorna’s voice comes out of the darkness. “I just remembered something. You can’t wear that new kira.”

“Why not?”

“Only monks and nuns can wear that color.”

I had completely forgotten. “Well, I can always make curtains out of it.”

“Or become a nun,” Lorna snickers.

In the morning, we decide to flee the heat and go to Bidung. The owner of a white hi-lux parked outside the hotel, a tall, boyish-looking Australian man, agrees to give us a ride to Tashigang. His name is Will, and he is a consultant, he tells us, making Seventy-Five Thousand American Dollars a Year,
Plus
Living Allowance and All Travel Expenses, and he cannot understand why we have come here for anything less. “You teachers make what, a hundred and fifty dollars a month?” he snorts.

“It’s enough to live on,” I say.

“It’s what all the other teachers live on here,” Lorna adds.

Will just shakes his head. “One hundred and fifty dollars a month. You couldn’t get me to do it, no way.”

“No one asked you to do it,” Lorna mutters.

Will talks all the way to Tashigang. This place, these people, can’t get a damn thing done, no work ethic, no idea of how to build a proper bridge, equipment thrown here and there, two new drills broken to pieces in a week.

“So why do you stay?” Lorna asks. “If it’s that bad.”

“I told you,” he says. “Seventy-Five Thousand Dollars a Year.”

In Tashigang, we scramble out of the vehicle and don’t even thank him for the ride. It is late afternoon; we will have just enough time to get to Bidung before dark. We walk up through cool pine forests in the falling evening, to the ridges where the winds stay, stopping to rest under trees, at the base of a chorten, beside a cluster of prayer flags. We arrive in Bidung at nightfall. Lorna’s quarters, at the end of a dilapidated row, consist of a bed-sitting room and a dank, spidery kitchen with a mudstove. I rummage in my bag for my new flashlight to take to the latrine. “It’s true to its name,
pit latrine,
” Lorna warns me. “They’re building a new one. This one is so disgusting, I don’t use it.”

“What do you use then?”

“The maize fields,” she says. “The maize is just high enough.”

“Oh, Lorna!”

But she is right, the latrine is exceedingly disgusting. Where the floorboards have not rotted away, they are covered in excrement, and I hope for Lorna’s sake they finish the new latrine before all the maize is harvested in the fall. When I come back, Lorna says we have just been invited to dinner by her “headless master.” “A nice man,” she says as we walk to his quarters, “but a hopeless headmaster. And he drinks too much, but then, there’s not a lot else to do out here, is there?”

Sitting on straight-backed chairs in a room identical to Lorna’s, we sip large cups of arra. “Dinner will take some time,” the headmaster tells us, pouring more arra. “Please have.” Two bottles of arra later, I am sitting with an empty plate in my lap, although I cannot remember having eaten. We stand up to go, and Lorna has to hold onto my arm.

On the way back, she says, “How did you eat that awful meat?”

“There was meat?”

“Yes, you idiot. It was putrid. I don’t know how you ate so much of it.”

I don’t know either. I awake hung-over. Lorna is getting ready for class. She has no classroom and teaches on the school verandah. Five small faces appear at her window. “Miss
niktsing,
” they whisper excitedly.
Two
misses. On her way out, Lorna throws a packet of chicken noodle soup at me, part of a recent package from Canada, and asks me to make lunch. “Use wood instead of the kerosene stove, okay?” she says. “I have to haul the kerosene up from Tashigang. There’s plenty of kindling in the bucket in the kitchen.” I nod and go straight back to sleep.

Hours later, I carefully layer pieces of kindling and scrap paper in the bottom of the stove, sprinkle everything with kerosene and throw a lit match. The fire blazes up and I am pleased. Ten minutes later, the soup is still cold: the fire has gone out. I use more kindling, more paper, more kerosene. I poke, I blow, I curse. How is it that whole houses have been known to burn to the ground with one electrical spark, and yet I cannot warm a pot of soup with a bucket of highly flammable substances? I hear the door open and Lorna calls out cheerfully, “Hi honey, I’m home.” She is decidedly less cheerful when she sees that I’ve used all her wood and paper, and almost all the kerosene, and the soup is still cold. She fiddles with the charred remains in the stove, and the fire leaps to life.

We sip the hot soup and eat cream crackers, and discuss various romantic developments among the expatriate teachers. Lorna has already ruled out the possibility of romance with any of the Canadians. “They’re good buddies,” she says. “But nothing more.” I ask her if she has seen anything like the night-hunting we heard about during our orientation, where young men court women by climbing through their windows at night.

She says yes, and this is why the girls at school are locked in.

“What do you mean, locked in?”

“Locked in the hostel. At night. From the outside.”

My mouth drops open. “They’re locked in from the outside? What if there’s a fire or something?” I say. “Why can’t the girls lock themselves in from the inside?”

“I don’t know,” Lorna says. “They don’t trust them?”

“But who are they locked in against? The boys?”

“I guess so.”

“So why don’t they lock the boys in, then?”

“I don’t know,” Lorna says.

“But isn’t it weird? Even the word ‘night-hunting.’ And if everyone is so relaxed about sex, and if women are so free, why are they locking the girls in? It’s just not acceptable.”

“It’s not acceptable in our culture,” Lorna says.

Outside, a hard heavy rain begins. There is something ominous in the force of it. I cannot see farther than the edge of the playing field. At 3:30, I begin to worry about the road back to Pema Gatshel. “If this keeps up, I’ll be stranded in Tashigang,” I say. “I’d better get back.” Lorna lends me a rain cape, and I set off. The path is now a mudslide, and at several places I have to sit and slither down. My pants are slick with clay, and rain runs down my neck.

The road south is already closed by the time I reach Tashigang, and I have to stay for several days, waiting for the landslides to be cleared and then for some form of transport. Each morning I sit at the Puen Soom, praying for a landcruiser, a hi-lux, a truck, a scooter, a donkey. One morning on the way down to the bazaar I even pray for the dreaded Vomit Comet and my prayers are instantly answered. There it is, revving up in a swirl of blue fumes.

T
he rains have turned Pema Gatshel a thousand shades of green: lime, olive, pea, apple, grass, pine, moss, malachite, emerald. The trees are full of singing insects, flowers, birds, hard green oranges, children. I walk along a stone wall, feeling my foot connect with every step to the earth, listening to the whirring humming world around. I stop to watch a woman weeding her garden. Her children are playing a game with stones in the shade of a flowering shrub, while three plump chickens scratch in the dirt. A little further on, I rest on a mossy boulder beside a waterfall, cooling my face and hands in the mist. A class II student and his father stop to offer me a handful of plums, and I refuse politely. Offer-decline, offer-decline, offer-accept. The plums are firm and faintly sweet. Above, the cleanest whitest clouds I have ever seen are banked up against the sky. It’s hard to believe now that I once thought this a landscape of lack, that I was afraid I wouldn’t have enough, wouldn’t fare well, wouldn’t be happy.

Yesterday, the kids brought me seven tiny, withered apples, obviously the last of last year’s harvest. Under the darkened, spotted skin, the yellow heart was almost unbearably sweet. In Canada, I would have thrown them out and gone to the grocery store to choose new, perfectly shaped, unblemished apples, the taste genetically engineered out of them.

Everything is more meaningful here because there is less of everything. Every brown farm egg is precious. I make yogurt out of sour milk, and turn overripe fruit into jammy desserts. A plastic bag is a rare and immensely useful thing. The first few did not last long, but now I am careful. I wash and dry and fold them away. I clean out jars and tins and plastic containers and save the tinfoil liners from cartons of milk powder. I stand in my kitchen, satisfied with the meaning of every item, thinking that my grandfather would be pleased. I am beginning to think that his cautious saving and counting and putting away have more to do with this measure of meaning than fear of future lack.

I like knowing where things come from. The cheese in my curry comes from the cow belonging to the family in the first house behind the hospital with the banana trees out front. I buy the cheese, fresh, still warm, wrapped in a banana leaf and tied with a piece of dried vine. The new flip-flops I am wearing are a present from Sangay Chhoden’s mother for the antibiotic ear drops I gave her for Sangay Chhoden’s baby brother’s infected ear. The cloth bag of peas in the kitchen came from Sonam Tshering, whose family lives in a bamboo hut at the end of the road and who cannot afford to be giving away peas or anything else. I forget the peas until they begin to rot, and am about to throw the whole lot out when I think of the hut and the meager vegetable garden behind it. I force myself to pick through pods, separating the edible peas from the slime, keeping in mind a Tantric Buddhist teaching about overcoming squeamishness, facing the inevitability of death and decay by immersing oneself in all forms of unpleasantness.

Everything is more meaningful because it is connected to the earth. There are no signs to read, no billboards or neon messages; instead I read the hills and the fields and the farmhouses and the sky. The houses, made of mud and stone and wood, are not hermetically sealed. The wind blows in through the cracks, the night seeps in through the rough wooden window slats. The line between inside and outside is not so clear.

Everything is more meaningful because understanding requires struggle. I have to hold on to all the half-explained, half-translated, half-imaginable things, hoping that I will meet someone someday who will be able to explain. One evening I am called to the boys’ hostel to see a sick class VIII boy. He is sitting slumped in his bunk, eyes unseeing. When I touch his arm lightly, he shudders. The other boys explain: he has these fits, no not epilepsy, they know epilepsy, it is not that. It is like possession, they say. Last year a lama gave him a protective amulet and he was fine until he lost the amulet washing in the river last week and now, just see, miss, he is sick again. I don’t know what to say. They didn’t cover possession in the health course. Keep him warm, I say, but not too warm. Let him be but stay close by. Later, when I tell the other teachers, they nod. Yes, this happens. They don’t know how to say it in English. There are things here too old to be translated into this new language.

The headmaster asks me to teach class VIII English in the afternoons while class II C is learning Dzongkha. I stay up late the night before my first class, reviewing the lesson, hoping that I will be able to handle the senior students, many of whom are at least eighteen. I do not have to worry: they are well-behaved and meticulously polite. They are eager to answer questions with definite answers: What is the past participle of eat? What happens to the main character of the story? Other questions, though, produce a strained, confused silence. Perhaps they are shy, I think, perhaps they will express themselves more freely in their written assignments. But I am disappointed and puzzled by the sameness of their writing. Every piece begins with a cliché or a mangled proverb.
As they say, student life is golden life, and it is true also. As saying goes, the cleanliness is next to the godliness and I agree to it.
Every piece concludes with some hackneyed piece of advice or fawning praise
(so let us ever thank our kind teachers who make so many sacrifices for the poor and undeserving students).
I cannot get them to write in their own voices, and wonder if it is because individual expression is not valued here as it would be in the West. Originality seems to count for very little; the community is more important, conformity and accordance and compliance.

But there must be some dissent, I think. I listen more carefully outside the classroom, and begin to hear different stories. Some senior girls tell me they were forced to cut their hair at school. They are ethnically Nepali, from the southern districts of Bhutan. (According to government policy, students above class VI are sent to schools outside their home districts. Southern students are sent north, eastern students west, western students south, to promote greater integration.) The Nepali girls tell me that it is their custom to keep their hair long. “We wept like anything,” they say, “but what to do? Short hair is driglam namzha.”

I casually ask the headmaster why the female students must all have short hair. “Lice,” he says matter-of-factly. The hostels are alive with fleas, lice and bedbugs, this is true, and given the school’s erratic water supply, short hair makes sense. But this driglam namzha is appearing more and more. There is the new dress law: all Bhutanese citizens have to wear national dress in public or face fines and possible imprisonment. In the staff room, I leaf through back issues of the
Kuensel,
Bhutan’s weekly newspaper, which I rarely bother to read when it arrives, a week or two late. An article explains that the national dress rule is part of efforts to preserve and promote Bhutan’s national identity. A larger country can afford a diversity of customs and traditions which enrich and add color to the national image, but “for a small country like Bhutan, maintaining and strengthening a distinct national identity will always be a most important and vital factor for its continued well-being and security.” These messages seem particularly aimed at the southern Bhutanese of Nepali origin. According to the
Kuensel,
the southern people have expressed full support for strengthening Bhutan’s unique cultural identity by wearing national dress, speaking the national language, and following the ethics and practice of driglam namzha. The government announces that it will import machine-woven cloth to make ghos and kiras that can be sold at cost price to the people of southern Bhutan. The people of southern Bhutan express their gratitude.