Beyond the Sky and the Earth (23 page)

I
walk to the bend in the road before breakfast, the wind soft and warm against my face and bare arms, carrying the smells of green things and earth. Kanglung is drier than Pema Gatshel: apart from a few afternoon showers, the days are mostly warm and bright. In the new light I see a peak in the north that I have not noticed before, a black stone spire much higher than the ridges and crests around it. Yesterday, some students told me that gods and other spirits reside in naturally sacred sites called
nheys.
Peaks, rocky outcrops, a circle of cypress trees, a waterfall, all can be nheys, and if you disturb one, you will fall sick, or some other misfortune will overtake you. Everyone knows this, they said. If you damage the natural world, you must suffer the consequences.

All around me are constant reminders of Buddhism: rough prayer walls along the path, a prayer wheel turned by a stream, prayer flags soaring above the ridge. If I close my eyes, I can conjure the Toronto skyline, giant hypodermic needle jabbing the sky, glass facades of office towers, all cold perfection. Here, things grow and fade and die, and no one pretends otherwise. The older walls of a house remain mudbrown and rutted beside the smooth white walls of the newly built addition. The old and the new grow out of each other and there is no attempt to make everything perfect and perpetually modern. There would be no point, when everything is changing, is fading away.

 

 

 

In class, I battle against clichés, cant, and bad grammar. “I want to hear what you have to say,” I tell the students. “Write me something different, something you haven’t already written a hundred times before.” I spend hours marking their homework, drawing arrows from subjects to verbs, restructuring convoluted sentences, and writing notes of encouragement beside any signs of original expression. Mr. Bose tells me I am wasting my time.

In a shop outside the college gate, I stop to buy laundry soap. The shopkeeper hands me my package and I recognize my own handwriting. “... careful with subject-verb agreement,” I read. “Don’t use clichés.” The soap is wrapped in one of the compositions I corrected this morning. “Where did you get this?” I ask.

The shopkeeper shows me a stack of papers. “The students are giving,” he says. “I tell them not to throw, I will use in my shop. Instead of plastic. Plastic is too expensive.”

Shakuntala shows me past exams set by the University of New Delhi.
Write a composition on one of the following: Time and tide wait for no man. A book is the best of friends.

It occurs to me that Mr. Bose may be right.

But there are also signs of hope. A student named Tobgay writes about how education has changed his family life. When he was first admitted to Sherubtse, his parents were thrilled, especially his father who was illiterate. During his first-term break, at a family gathering, his father proudly asked him what he was learning at the college, and Tobgay told him.
I told that we saw the picture of the first man walking on the moon and everyone laughed at that. I told it was true, the people had gone up to the moon even and then my father became angry with red face and bulging eyes. Don’t tell lies, he told. It is not a lie, I told. After my cousins went, he told that he felt shame by me telling such things and, now that I am in college I think I am a high shot to tell such things like this or what. How people can go to the moon, he told. So now when I go home for holidays I am never telling what I learned at college and when I am at home all the things we learn at college seem impossible, like people walking on the moon.

And in the Zoo, I can actually hear the students listening as we read
Macbeth.
There is a palpable tension in the room, and when the bell rings in the middle of Macbeth’s dagger soliloquy, Singye in the front row gasps. “He will not do it,” he says, aghast at the thought. There is no need to explain the significance of the crime Macbeth is about to commit, or the evil omens, the unruly night and strange wind, the wild behavior of Duncan’s horses, the appearance of Banquo’s ghost. These are not literary symbols to the students but the real and obvious results of a monstrous deed. It is impossible to gauge the distance between what I am supposed to be teaching them about the play and how they read it in the light of their own culture, but their insights are bringing the play to life for me, and it has never seemed more horrifying.

 

 

 

One Saturday morning, two students bring a note to my door: there will be an evening cultural competition featuring song and dance in Dzongkha, Nepali and English. Mr. Bose and I are to judge the English items. “Will you be in the competition?” I ask the students, and they say yes, they have been released from SUPW in order to practice their song.

“What’s SUPW?”

“Socially Useful Productive Work,” one says.

“Some Useful Period Wasted,” the other adds.

I laugh, delighted, and from the garden next door, Mr. Matthew clears his throat loudly. I am not sure who this warning is meant for.

Shakuntala and I go to the college store, a windowless room behind the student mess, to collect our weekly supply of vegetables. Baskets of chilies, tomatoes and beans are emptied out onto shelves, where they are pawed through and pinched. Everything is weighed on a rusty scale suspended from the ceiling. The man in charge, Mr. Dorji, shakes his head when I show him my handful of chilies. “Not even half kg,” he says. “Take for free.” My chili intake has increased steadily but I am still no match for the Bhutanese teachers who are loading up large jute sacks. My students tell me they cannot eat without chilies. When I prepare Western food for them, pasta or pizza, they tell me it is too sweet and go into the kitchen to make
ézé
, a condiment of chopped-up chilies, onions, tomatoes and cheese.

Outside the store, we step over a butchered pig and collect bread from the bakery window. At home, I eat several pieces with Bumthang honey, then fall asleep on the divan.

Canadian voices wake me up. “Hey, Medusa, open the door. We hear you have freshly sliced bread in there.” It is almost the entire Canadian contingent from eastern Bhutan, plus Mary, an Irish teacher posted in Samdrup Jongkhar.

“It’s not sliced,” I say, throwing open the door, “and I’ve eaten half of it.”

They traipse in, laying down jholas, bottles of Dragon Rum and lemon squash and Golden Eagle beer, a cassette player and tapes. “We were all in Tashigang and decided you needed a proper housewarming party,” Margaret from Radi says.

“Look at this bathroom!” Lorna shrieks from the hall. “It’s TILED.”

“Oh my god, two fireplaces! ”

I tell them they are in time for the cultural competition in the evening, but they are disappointed.

“Cultural competition! I could have that in Radi. I was promised sliced bread and a video,” Margaret complains.

“Closets!” Lorna says. She looks well, her long golden-brown hair full of sunny highlights and her face tanned the color of honey. “She has two
closets
. I have to keep all my clothes in the food safe.”

Leon and Tony look even thinner and blonder than the last time I saw them in Tashigang. Leon is handing out drinks made of Dragon Rum and lemon squash. Someone has plugged the cassette player in and the Traveling Wilburys are singing about last night. Margaret is in the kitchen making something out of sweetened condensed milk, cocoa, peanuts and dried “pig food.” Kevin and Tony are reading magazines, Lorna is dancing a jig with Leon, and Mary is knocking back Bhutan Mist and
knitting.
We are a motley crew, I think. What brings us together, aside from skin color and language? We would not all be such good buddies if we had met outside of eastern Bhutan. But I like being with them because I can slip back into my old Canadian self, I can speak a faster, sharper, more direct English. It is like going home to your family. Everyone understands the basic framework, you don’t have to explain yourself at every turn. It’s the same with these friends; no one asks me why I am not married yet or why my mother let me come all the way across the world to teach, was it because I couldn’t find a job in Canada? I don’t have to explain who Ed Grimly is, or why I am talking like him.

But there is a negative side, too. The stress of being fully immersed in our villages, of trying to live mindfully in another culture, makes us overanxious to be purely ourselves when we are together. We drink too much and talk too loudly, we shriek with laughter and fall over in little bars in Tashigang, not caring what impression we are making. We want to forget where we are, and yet we keep calling ourselves phillingpa and making comparisons to Canada; we keep reminding ourselves that we are here, and isn’t it amazing.

If many of these friendships are destined to fade after we leave Bhutan, we are bound now by the knowledge that we need each other here. Any mention in a letter of an ailment beyond the usual giardia will bring packets of instant soup in the mail or a visit, and in emergencies our nearest Canadian neighbor will become our next-of-kin.

We walk to Pala’s for a dinner of
shabalay,
deep-fried turnovers stuffed with minced meat. Students drift in and out, glance over at us but pretend not to, and I am relieved that we are not quite the spectacle we would be in Pema Gatshel. A well-built young man in a long black trench coat and a beautiful woman in a denim skirt and cashmere sweater float past. Leon shakes his head. “I don’t know how you teach here,” he says. “The students are all absolutely gorgeous.”

“It is a little unnerving,” I say.

“What would happen if you had an affair with one of your students, though?” Margaret asks.

“I don’t know, I haven’t really thought about it,” I lie. I find myself noticing over and over again how attractive this or that student is. The older male students have a very fine, courtly charm, and some of them are quite flirtatious.

“Well, we’ll think about it on your behalf,” Lorna says, and the others agree enthusiastically.

The cultural competition begins with a traditional Bhutanese dance. The men and women move slowly in a circle, raising and lowering their hands in front of them in simple, lulling gestures as they sing. The beauty is in the measured, synchronized movements; this is not a dance about performance but participation. There is no instrumental accompaniment, only the voices rising and falling in the melancholic, pentatonic scale, and lingering over microtones that no tempered instrument could ever match. The style is called
zhungdra,
the oldest form of music in Bhutan, and the melody climbs and climbs and then falls suddenly, rhythm changing unpredictably, evoking perhaps the soaring sinking Bhutanese landscape itself, mountaintops plunging into deep valleys and rising steeply again.

A Nepali dance follows. Two women in gorgeous red-and-gold silk saris twirl and kick and throw up their arms to loud taped music overfull with instruments and competing melodies and rhythms. I am sitting between Leon and Margaret, a pen and clipboard on my lap, preparing to judge the English selections, the first of which is a “Break-Dance,” according to the MC. The lights go off, pulsating disco music starts and stops and starts again, and two lithe young men appear on stage in tight pants and tee shirts. The dance is a combination of some genuine break-dancing and a lot of straightforward calisthenics.

“Where
am
I?” Leon mutters. I know exactly what he means. In spite of its closed-door policy and ban on TV, Bhutan is not hermetically sealed. Fashion trends and music cassettes find their way in, but it still seems utterly bizarre that I should be sitting in a concrete auditorium in the Himalayas watching Bhutanese students break-dance to American disco. The music ends and I have no idea how to judge the first English item. On what basis? In comparison to
what?
In the end, I give it a very mediocre mark. The other English selections include CCR’s “Proud Mary” accompanied by an electric guitar and an amplifier that thinks it’s an instrument in its own right, and a remarkably good version of Elvis’s “Love Me Tender” by the well-built young man in the black trench coat. Elvis wins the English competition.

There are more songs in Dzongkha, Nepali and Sharchhop, and dances from Tibet, Assam and the nomadic yak-herding communities along Bhutan’s northern border. The instruments are remarkable: the six-stringed, dragon-headed mandolin called a
drumnyen;
the many-stringed
yangchen
laid flat on a table and played with thin bamboo sticks; a gleaming new harmonium; a tabla played with deft fingers. Although the official government line might speak of one identity, there are many voices here, many dances and many songs, and perhaps it is my Canadian upbringing, being raised on the strengths of the multicultural mosaic over the American melting pot, but I am glad of the plenitude.

Back at my house, we lay mattresses, mats, kiras and quilts in a row on the bedroom floor. There is much wriggling and giggling and negotiation for space, and when I finally fall asleep, I dream that I am dreaming of break-dancers. You’re just dreaming, I tell myself in the dream. There is no break-dancing in Bhutan.

M
y dreams change and change again. Gone are the airport dreams and drugstore dreams and the dreams of in-between places, not really Canada, not really Bhutan, all dreams of longing for home. Now my dreams of Canada are grievous. I dream that I get on the Comet and it turns a corner and turns into a Greyhound bus with plush seats and a sign ordering passengers to not stand forward of the white line, and we are driving over a bridge, passing out of Bhutan onto a Canadian highway. It is the beginning or the end of winter, dirty crusts of snow, dull sky, a flat paved road leading into a sad, colorless city. I have made a terrible mistake; I do not want to go home at all. I get off the bus, but Bhutan is gone, and I do not know how to get back.