So Close to Heaven (36 page)

I hadn’t given the downside of roads much thought until I met Aum Rinzi at her farmstead near Mendegong, only a few hours’ drive from Thimphu at the top of a rocky dirt track not really meant for cars. Although her family had a home in Thimphu, she said she was happiest in the country, where her heart and head overflowed with memories. Her lively mind ranged over past and present, sifting and analyzing and balancing the limits of the feudal society into which she was born against the excesses of the life she saw evolving around her. She was not judgmental, but she was very wise. Her life was a reminder that in this extraordinary country there are people whose experiences span eras, not just generations.

Aum Rinzi had lived through epochal change. But she had always chosen to hold on to that which she saw no reason to discard in haste. She had enjoyed a privileged life, and owned the substantial house and farmland she shared with her late husband’s second wife. She slept on a simple pallet bed and worshipped at the small temple she had built adjoining her home; it was probably her largest extravagance, and she showed it off with great pride. As we stood there by her family altar, a bird flew in from the garden and began to flap around in panic, banging into walls and unfamiliar panes of glass. When I opened a narrow window on the temple’s outer porch and helped the bird escape, Aum Rinzi turned to me with a smile somewhere between amused and beatific and said, “You will gain merit for that.”

Aum Rinzi—
aum
means grandmother—speaks thoughtfully but not without passion at what has been lost as well as gained by three decades of rapid development. As a young woman not yet out of her teens, she became a companion and lady-in-waiting to a Bhutanese queen and later the wife of a government minister.

But privilege in Bhutan was a relative thing in the days of Aum Rinzi’s youth. That was a time of greater equality among Bhutanese, says King Jigme Singye Wangchuck. “I remember my father saying when I was a small boy that in the old days—although there was a lot of hardship and suffering that we faced due to the policy of complete isolation—one of the main reasons Bhutanese were united, were happy,
were contented, although we were poor, was because all of us were equally poor,” he said. “I think that is very true.”

Aum Rinzi’s reminiscences of travel are full of happy times on the road, when no one was in a hurry, there were no noxious cars and buses, and everyone, farmer or lord, moved from home to home or temple to temple or palace to palace at a human pace, sharing the foot tracks and horse trails that wound through the mountains and valleys. “First of all, in those days it was inconceivable that people would go back and forth as much as they do now,” Aum Rinzi said, as her granddaughter, Doma Tshering, a foreign service officer educated at Macalester College, did the translating. “Just to travel around one’s home meant a journey on horseback. So for the most part, people tended to remain around the house, tending to the work. Of course, we didn’t have vehicles of any kind. We didn’t even think of that in those days. We had no reason to go out much. We used to have a lot of land, so we were pretty much self-sufficient. We didn’t have to buy any commodities. We didn’t even have to buy butter for the butter tea and lamps, because we kept cows. To a certain extent it is the same now for me in Mendegong. We grow all our own vegetables and rice. So in that way, life hasn’t changed so much for many of us.

“But nowadays, wherever you go, people are always in a rush,” she said. “They hop in their car, and off they go. They hop out, and it’s over. In the old days, you started off with people loading luggage on horses. Then the children were loaded. Finally we all rode off. As we went, we looked for a nice field whenever we wanted to stop. Wherever we chose, the servants would start a fire and we would break for tea. Then we would move along again, gradually. In the evenings, when we got to a nice rest spot, someone would put up tents for the night. The servants and the women would start singing songs and dancing, and we would all sit there and enjoy the evening.”

One serendipitous evening in Bumthang, I was invited to such an entertainment, and was able to glimpse the world Aum Rinzi described. The dzongda, Pem Dorji, had summoned all his district officials to a conference, and the day ended around a huge bonfire built against the chill of a dark mountain night. Huge vats of food were prepared: curried stews, dumplings, red rice, and salads. Beer flowed. All the while, young people danced story-dances, some mischievous or even a little wicked in
theme. Not infrequently, the tale was of men being outwitted by women—or at least that’s what they told me. We all sat in a semicircle around the fire and watched. The atmosphere was warm and convivial, sometimes uproarious, but never too loud to disturb the little children dozing at the edges of the gathering. Aum Rinzi was right: there is nothing to equal this spontaneous celebration among generous people.

In 1934, when Aum Rinzi was barely twenty, she made the journey of a lifetime, to Calcutta, as part of the entourage of King Jigme Wangchuck and his queen, Ashi Phumtsho Choegron. King Jigme, the grandfather of the present ruler and the second hereditary monarch of Bhutan—he reigned from 1926 until 1952—had been invited as the official guest of the British colonial government in India. It is fascinating to hear Aum Rinzi talk about that trip, and then read a description of the same visit written by Margaret Williamson, the wife of Frederick Williamson, the British political agent for Bhutan and the official responsible for arranging the visit.

“This was the first trip I made anywhere,” Aum Rinzi said, preparing a betel chew from ingredients she kept in a plastic container. “We all went to see the foreigner, the Lord Sahib. From Bumthang, where we were staying, we went to the Indian border by horse. There someone had sent us automobiles to take us to a train for Calcutta. I was astounded. We were all afraid to step into the cars. We had about twelve people in His Majesty’s entourage, and there were five more with the Royal Grandmother, who also had her cook and servants.” Aum Rinzi calls the former queen “Royal Grandmother” because that is her present title in the Bhutanese court.

“I was very shocked when I first got to Calcutta,” Aum Rinzi went on, her eyes twinkling as she paused to spit betel juice into something she had stashed in the fold of her kira. “It was as if I were in a dream. I could never imagine that such things existed, that so many people could be there. Calcutta was very clean and orderly. Wherever we went there were all foreigners. Even the shopkeepers were British. We didn’t go out very much. It was all too overwhelming. We stayed twenty-five days in Calcutta, and then went to Nepal, where we were for a very long time.”

Mrs. Williamson, who recorded her memories of the same event in a 1987 book,
Memoirs of a Political Officer’s Wife in Tibet, Sikkim and Bhutan
, could not have known of the Bhutanese apprehensions when she
and her husband, whom she called Derrick, set out to receive the royal visitors. With their extraordinary innate aplomb, the Bhutanese hid their fears.

“Derrick and I went down to Jalpaiguri, where the narrow gauge joins the main railway line, to meet the train bringing the royal party from Hashimara,” Mrs. Williamson wrote. “And what a spendid sight they were when they arrived! Their Highnesses wore colorful Bhutanese costume, as did the more than 200 retainers who accompanied them, each of whom was armed with a bow and arrow and had a shield slung over his shoulder.”

Mrs. Williamson recalls wondering whether the Bhutanese would be nonplussed by the “hooting, speeding traffic, by the milling crowds kept in constant motion by the remorseless drives that activate the modern commercial world, by the sheer profusion of buildings, among the great administrative, business, religious and public edifices.” To her delight, the royal visitors “took it all in their stride.” As for the armed retainers, they decided to set up an archery competition on the Maidan, Calcutta’s Central Park, and had to be dissuaded by their hosts, who feared certain disaster if Bhutanese arrows started flying from warriors’ bows. “Graciously, they took down their targets and withdrew,” Mrs. Williamson wrote.

As for Aum Rinzi, “I was happy to come home, but also thrilled to have been in India and Nepal,” she said. “I was able to come back and say, oh, I’ve been to these places. It was very exciting for me. In those days, no one really ventured outside Bhutan, even to India.” Aum Rinzi later traveled to Tibet, to Sikkim, and even to Delhi, but by then, these jaunts were becoming part of life, if not exactly routine. Nothing lived up to the wonder of the trek to Calcutta. “That trip of mine,” she says now, still relishing the memory, “was quite a feat.”

I
THIMPHU

T
HE
PLANE
from Kathmandu was late, and darkness is creeping up the steep valleys along the road from the Paro airport to Thimphu. It is winter and the hills are brown, with russet pompoms of barbary or gorse. The last glow of the sunset illuminates a white chorten, but the houses I recall from other seasons have vanished into black shadows. There is no electricity in these gorges. “Unless there are nine, ten houses, only then the government gives,” the driver explains.

We have a flat tire within a few miles of Simtokha Dzong, which heralds the approach of the Thimphu Valley. We pull over by a roadside shop/bar, where a monk is reciting prayers in front of boxes of soap powder, candy in cellophane bags, and strings of homemade cheese cubes. The owner’s wife is on the floor of an adjacent room in front of a supply of beer and whiskey bottles, nursing a plump infant. A small metal stove for burning wood gives off some heat. Outside the shop, the owner and a mate are banging back into shape the bumper of a truck that has been seriously sideswiped. In the pitch darkness, though under a brilliant display of stars in the sky, a high school student hiking home to a roadless village in the nearby hills stops to lend us his flashlight. The taxi driver is struggling to change the tire he can’t really see with a jack that doesn’t seem to be lifting the heavy Land Cruiser off the dust.

The student, Passang Dorji, is garrulous, though ill. He has been sent home from a boarding school for superior students in Punakha, a few hours away by bus, to have a lung infection treated. “After school sports
day, I fell sick,” he explains. His flashlight (he calls it a “torch,” the British term) saves the night. He won’t take new batteries from me, though the sale might have been a windfall for the shopkeeper, whose stock of Indian batteries lack date stamps. The prudent purchaser buys more than needed, since a fair number of Indian batteries are recycled—that is, taken back from the trash and repackaged for sale as new. I learned this from friends in Delhi who stomped on dead batteries to foil recyclers.

Passang Dorji does want pen friends, however. He writes his address—C.O. Kinlay (GupDup), P.O. Wangehutaba, Thimphu, Bhutan, Asia—in my notebook. Speaking almost colloquial English, he tells me that he has been learning the language since the equivalent of junior high school. Now in his late teens, he says he wants to “serve the country” when he finishes school. “The country has given so much to me,” he says without artifice, still holding his flashlight on the jack and the driver. “I have my schooling, and the hostel to live in is free. When it is over, I think I want to go to the army.” Bhutan has a small army, trained by Indian officers and therefore serving as an adjunct of India’s border defenses against China. No nation threatens Bhutan militarily, least of all China, now that many border issues have been resolved. But military officers, even in a Buddhist nation, can enjoy assured status and ceremony. In Thailand they get rich and periodically stage coups.

In the dark of the night, the bobbing and weaving of other flashlight beams etch bright lines into the horizon, identifying the trails of people going home to villages where hours of walking—to a job, to fetch water, to work in the fields—are a daily routine. Along the road, the car’s headlights shine on thin men bent over as they struggle under bundles of straw or bags of grain. When they reach home, their evening meal is likely to be much like that of the shopkeeper on whose bit of land we changed the tire: a heap of rice, served in a colorful basket or pottery bowl, to be formed into a small ball in the fingers and dipped into a thin stew garnished with hot peppers.