Beyond the Sky and the Earth (25 page)

The field director in Thimphu sends a wireless message saying the flight to Toronto that I asked him to book several months ago has been confirmed.

S
hakuntala and I spend most of our time together. We are united against the knot of bickering staff members by our love for the place and our easy relationship with the students. Some of the lecturers begin to treat us with cool disdain; Shakuntala thinks they disapprove of two unmarried females being let loose upon the world. We make up bogus Latin names for the worst of them and cackle loudly in the library; we excuse ourselves from the dreary staff parties where the chairs are pushed back against the walls, funeral-parlor style, with the women demurely sipping orange squash on one side of the room and the men belting back Bhutan Mist on the other, while students scurry back and forth with platters of food. Instead, we invite the students to dinner and eat in a circle on the floor; afterward the students bring out guitars and sing, we play charades and word games and talk.

The students visit frequently. They come to borrow books and tapes, they come to get their homework checked, they come to sit and drink coffee and talk. I have broken through some barrier, have even made peace with Smirk. He still makes wisecracks in class, but I have grown to like him. With his longish hair and his smart-ass comments he is asking questions about the accepted order of things. His full name is Dil Bahadur, which means Courageous Heart.

Shakuntala was right: the students are very good company. The ones from wealthy families in Thimphu and Paro are more Westernized, at least on the surface. Their fathers are in key positions in the civil service and their families often have extensive land holdings. They are found most often in jeans and leather jackets under a haze of cigarette smoke at Pala’s. Their conversation is laced with a mix of slang from across decades and continents: chaps and chicks, cat and cool. Ten ngultrum is ten bucks, money is dough, drunk is boozed or boozed out. “But” is stuck on the end of a sentence
(I don’t know but),
and “damn” is merely a synonym for very. Every phrase is punctuated by the ubiquitous “ya.”
I told her, ya, last time, ya, but she never listens, ya. No, ya.
Shakuntala says that “ya” is not “yeah” but a corruption of “yaar,” Hindi for mate or man or friend. Many of these students have been educated in private boarding schools in Darjeeling and Kalimpong, and they refer to their less worldly classmates as “simple.” Simple in this instance means unacquainted with the world outside. Simple means the village, definitely not a cool place to be from. In less tactful moments, they use the word “rustic.”

My favorite students are the “simple” ones. They are shyer and more difficult to draw out, but utterly sincere. The wealthier students seem more like teenagers, preoccupied with their clothes and hair and who has a date with who at Pala’s (ignoring the ridiculous new rule, set down by the principal, that bans “couples” in order to put an end to the “gossip and scandal”—i.e., pregnancy—that allegedly flourished under the Jesuits’ noses). The so-called simple ones have not had the opportunity of adolescence. They became adults at puberty. A surprising number of the men have wives and children back in their villages. (Female students who get married or pregnant, though, must drop out of school.) Unlike their private-school classmates, they have had limited exposure to Western culture. Their ideas of universal wealth and privilege are drawn directly from the few videotaped movies they have seen at the college, and they refuse to believe that there are people living on the streets, begging for coins in the cities of North America. They flip through my old magazines with the same absorption as class II C, looking up occasionally with the same puzzled expressions. “Ma’am, what is a UFO?” or “Miss, why it says here about a psychologist for cats?”

The students learn that excessive formality makes me uncomfortable. They do not behave as casually as if I were a fellow student, but neither do they treat me with the same rigid protocol as the other lecturers. I am still “ma’am” and “madam” and sometimes “miss,” but they are warm and friendly and at ease, and I like them more each day, and I learn and learn and learn, far more than I teach.

Because of their fluency, I can ask them things I could not ask class II C, and they answer many but not all of my questions about Buddhism. It is okay to appreciate the world and all that is beautiful in it, they tell me, only we must not become attached to it. “We have to remember that it is not permanent, and anyway, ma’am, isn’t that why it is so beautiful in the first place? If everything was the same forever, well, we can’t even imagine that,” one student says. I think of Keat’s Grecian Urn, frozen perfection, and agree. He is a slight young man, with a quiet, reflective face and a brush cut. His name is Nima, which means “sun,” and he has a smile that lights up a room. I ask him about the practices of tantric Buddhism, how they seem to contradict the Buddha’s teachings against superstition and empty ritual. He says that the lamas know the real meaning behind the rituals. “We know only the simple meaning. Like when we are filling the water cups on the altar, we must not spill one drop because we say it will draw the demons. But actually, miss, we aren’t supposed to spill one drop because we are supposed to be doing it carefully, and if we aren’t concentrating, then we aren’t doing it right. So maybe the people couldn’t understand this, and the lamas tried to think of a way they would remember, so they made up the story about the demons coming.”

“So you don’t believe in demons,” I say.

“No, miss, I am believing. We just can’t say about them, so it is better to believe, isn’t it?”

There is a lot of this in the students, this preference for both/and over my insistence on either/or. Either the Buddha said there is no God and therefore Buddhism is not theistic, and therefore tantric Buddhism with its pantheon of deities is a contradiction of the original school of thought, or there are gods and therefore there is no contradiction. It is not so for the students. Yes, they say, the Buddha said he was not a god, and at the same time we worship him as a god, and there are many other gods as well, and there is no contradiction.

“Anyway,” Nima says, “my father says it’s not what you believe or say you believe that matters, it’s what you do.” Nima’s father is a gomchen in a village three hours walk from Tashigang. He brings my questions to his father when he goes home and carries the answers carefully back to me. “Like for example, you must be knowing that in Buddhism we say all beings were our mothers in our past lives.”

This is the rationale behind treating all beings with loving-kindness. It is why you should not kill any sentient being, even an insect. In our millions and billions of past lives, every being was at one time our mother. “Yes, I’ve read this,” I tell Nima. “But I don’t know if I believe it literally.”

Nima says, “You see, miss, what matters is not what you believe but what you do. The important thing is whether you treat all beings the way you treat your mother. With that much love and respect. Of course, for we Bhutanese, it is best to believe and do. But if you believe and don’t do, then the belief is nothing.”

Nima visits regularly, along with his roommates, Arun, a tall, emaciated southern Bhutanese who wants to be a doctor, and Wangdi, short and sturdy and almost irritatingly cheerful. I try to learn the subtle tonal differences between a “no-thank-you” that really means “no” and one that means “yes but I’m being polite.” Often I resort to asking, “Is that a Bhutanese no?” They are so tactful that I have to learn to read the most minute indicators. Nima winces slightly when I flip a spoonful of sugar into his cup backhandedly but says nothing. “What is it, Nima?” I ask.

“Nothing, miss.”

“Did I do something wrong?”

“No, miss ...” He clears his throat and runs his hand across his shorn head. “Actually, miss, in Bhutan, we never pour anything in that backward way unless someone in the house has died. That is how we serve the dead.”

During these visits, I learn not to whistle inside someone’s house (it may call in spirits) or step over religious books. I learn to flick a drop of tea from a full cup before I drink as an offering to hungry ghosts, whose excessive desire in previous lives has left them wandering in a realm of perpetual lack and longing; their stomachs are grotesquely swollen with hunger and thirst but their throats are knotted up. I learn to eat rice like the Bhutanese do, with my right hand, using my thumb to sweep the food neatly into my mouth. I learn to make butter tea, and eat chilies for breakfast.

The students balance my view of rural Bhutan. Yes, they say, things in the village are peaceful ... on one level. “People are very jealous,” one young woman named Chhoden tells me. Her hair is cut in an asymmetrical bob, and her kiras are bright silky prints imported from Bangkok. Her immediate family lives in Thimphu, where her father is employed in the civil service, but she says they still visit their ancestral village in Mongar once a year. “You don’t see it, ma’am, because you are just seeing from the outside. There’s a lot of jealousy and backbiting. And people have very strict ideas about what is proper. When I go home to the village, I have to become a different person. Boys can roam about and do as they please but if girls do that, everyone will say oh that girl, she’s a bad character, always roaming here and there. If I try to argue, my parents say that I have been spoiled by school.”

I talk a lot about language with the students, about English and Sharchhop and Dzongkha and Nepali. The Nepali-speaking students advise me to learn their native tongue; Nepali is more useful, they say, more people speak it and anyway it is easier to learn. The Dzongkha-speaking students frown at this. Madam, why you are learning Nepali? You should learn our national language.

I want to learn both, I say. Isn’t that okay? Thinking to myself, it must be okay, you can all speak each other’s languages plus English and Hindi with a smattering of Bengali or Tibetan. But we are talking about something more than language here, I only wish I knew what. I want to learn both, I repeat, and neither group looks very pleased. As if, in choosing both, I had chosen neither.

I learn that thank you very much in Dzongkha is
namé samé kadin chhé. Namé
means no sky,
samé
no earth.
Namé samé kadin chhé
means thanks beyond the sky and the earth. I learn that the script was developed in Tibet in order to translate the teachings of the Buddha, and it is therefore called
Chhoeki;
the language of religion. I learn to write the alphabet, which hangs from an invisible upper line, with the tails and heads of letters stacked together to create combined sounds. The spelling is murderous. “Why does
joba
have to start with an ‘m’, of all things?” I complain, exasperated, to Nima. “Why not a ‘q’ or a ‘p’ or heaven forbid a ‘j’?” He explains that because the language is monosyllabic, extra silent letters are used to distinguish one homonym from another. I almost give up, but the language looks so beautiful on the page, with birds flying above the words and lines ending in swords. The birds are o’s, the swords full stops.

Another student gives me a list of “everyday phrases” in Nepali:

A very small announcement on the notice board invites all staff and students to attend the Hindu celebration of Durga Puja in the auditorium. Shakuntala tells me the story behind it, from the Hindu epic
Ramayana:
Ravanna, the demon king of Lanka, abducts Sita, the wife of the god Ramchandra. Ramchandra worships the goddess Durga for nine days, and on the tenth day is empowered to defeat Ravanna and bring his wife home. Durga is also Kali, the goddess of destruction, smashing the old to make way for the new in an endless cycle of change.

On the auditorium stage, an altar has been set up with a fierce statue of Durga garlanded with marigolds and silver tinsel. Incense hangs in delicate streamers in the air. There is an offering of milk and honey to the goddess, and then we are given
tikka,
a smear of red powder on our foreheads. Dil Bahadur is looking unusually somber as he assists with the ceremony on stage. His longish hair has been cut, and he is wearing loose white pants and a white shirt. He ties a piece of colored thread to my wrist, and another student gives me a handful of sweets: these are
prasad,
the offerings made to the goddess and given back to the worshipers. Tomorrow they will go to the river to immerse the statue, a female student named Gayatri says, and invites me to come along and see. I sit for a while in the auditorium after the other lecturers have left, listening to the songs flowing one into the next without pause, with a tabla and bells as accompaniment.

Scholars claim that Buddhism developed as a reaction to negative elements of Hinduism, in particular the rigid caste system and the excessive, empty ritualism that had built up over the centuries in India. Hinduism and Buddhism are not wholly separable, however. Most of the Hindu deities turn up in the Buddhist pantheon, and the two systems share many concepts, including reincarnation and karma. Moreover, by the time Buddhism came to the Himalayas, it had picked up many of the practices of Indian Tantrism. Although Durga Puja is more flamboyant than the Buddhist rituals I have seen, its colors more gaudy and its music less somber, the two do not seem fundamentally different.

Offstage, something is wrong. There is much running off and returning and urgent whispering. Beside me, Gayatri is twisting her handkerchief into knots. “Is something going on?” I ask her. “No, ma’am,” she says, but her face is strained and unhappy.