Beyond the Sky and the Earth (10 page)

We turn off the main path and hobble down a slope to the creek, where Jane immerses her clothes in the shallow water, and I sit on a rock in the shade. She tells me about Jangchuk and Pema, how they took care of her in the beginning, bringing her dinner every night until she could manage for herself. Jangchuk is a
gomchen,
Jane says, a lay priest and the caretaker of the temple. Gomchens usually belong to the Nyingma sect of Tibetan Buddhism (slightly different from the Drukpa Kargyue sect, which is the official religion of Bhutan); they are allowed to marry; they do not wear the robes of a fully ordained monk, but their ghos are longer, worn calf-length instead of knee-length, and they often keep their hair long. People go to them for all sorts of religious ceremonies, for blessings, horoscopes, births, deaths, illness.

“Don’t people go to the hospital in Pema Gatshel?” I ask.

“Mmm, they’d almost always go to a lama first, because illness is usually seen as having a spiritual cause. If the lama is unable to do anything they might go to the hospital, but by then it’s often too late, and if the person dies in the hospital, people blame the foreign medicine.”

“Is traditional Bhutanese medicine herbal?”

“Some of it is,” Jane says. “But most of the treatment here consists of particular prayers and pujas. They also do a couple of other things, like blood-letting. Tiny incisions are made at a certain place on the body. The worst thing I’ve ever seen was the searing. I didn’t actually see it, only the scars on Pema. They burn the skin with a heated metal rod.” She draws thick rectangles on her arm with her thumb and forefinger to show me.

She tells me about another treatment which Pema underwent for her chronic stomach pain. After some prayers, she said, Jangchuk had taken a cow’s horn with a hole in the tip and applied the base to Pema’s stomach. He sucked on the tip and then lifted the horn—there on Pema’s stomach was a black clot, which Jangchuk hastily threw out. Jane said he hadn’t made an incision; she had been watching carefully, and there was no sign of bleeding. “What was it, do you think?” I ask. Jane shrugs. “I don’t know. Jangchuk said it was the thing that was making her sick, and sure enough, she got better shortly afterward.”

I do not answer. I am thinking about magician’s techniques, sleight-of-hand, a false-bottomed horn. “Do you think it could have been a trick?” I ask Jane.

She says she considered this, but why would he trick his own wife?

“Maybe it was psychological,” I said. “A placebo.”

But Jane shakes her head. “No,” she says. “Jangchuk believes in his medicine. You know, in the beginning, people would tell me so-and-so was sick because he’d seen a ghost or a black snake, or he hadn’t made an offering to his guardian deity, and I’d just shake my head. But now, I’m not so sure.”

“But do you believe that people really get sick because they’ve seen a ghost?” I ask.

“I can’t say anymore. So many things happen here that you just can’t explain, and I don’t know enough of the language to understand the whole picture. I ask the older students but I think a lot gets lost in the translation. They say ‘ghost’ or ‘black magic’ but who knows exactly what that means? We’re seeing just the tip of a whole belief system. Faith makes things real.”

“But only psychologically,” I say. “Not physically real, right?”

“With ghosts and black magic, what’s the difference?”

I watch her soap and pound her clothes on the rock, wring them out and drop them into her bucket. Laughter floats down from the groups of other women washing their clothes upstream. We climb back up to the main path. Jane goes home to hang up her clothes, and I go to the temple, where Jane says there will be a puja, a religious ceremony, held regularly in honor of Guru Rimpoché.

The temple is surrounded by a stone wall. In the flagstone courtyard, prayer flags hang limply in the warm air. The whitewashed walls of the main building taper slightly as they rise to the gently pitched roof. Around the top, under the eaves, is the broad band of dark red paint that indicates a religious structure. Inside, under the window where the light falls in, men wearing maroon scarves over their ghos sit in a row, their musical instruments in front of them: bronze and silver horns, some very long, a drum held upright on a carved wooden handle, cymbals, a bell. Prayer books, consisting of long narrow sheets of unbound paper between thin wooden covers, lie open in front of them. I remember to take off my shoes and stand hesitantly in the doorway until Jangchuk sees me and gestures for me to come in. Sitting cross-legged on the polished wooden floor, I study the frescos on the walls, the carved pillars, and the elaborate altar, which is laden with butter lamps, bowls of water, offerings of rice, fruit, flowers, incense, packages of biscuits. The paintings on the walls show dozens of Buddhas and other figures I do not recognize; the paint has faded, and the walls are smoke-blackened, but the faces of the Buddhas are serene and gentle, smiling down. Behind the altar is an enormous Buddha, gold painted, with black eyes and dark blue hair and the same kind smile.

The prayers begin softly, rhythmically, partly chanted partly sung. I close my eyes and try to think about nothing, but I cannot keep my mind empty, or even quiet. Thoughts roll in, pulling me along. Suddenly the horns are blown and I am so startled I nearly leap to my feet. The sound is long, clear, trilling, mournful, something between music and a cry. From the longer horns, low notes blurt out. A drum begins to beat. I can feel the music at the base of my spine, in my stomach, my throat. The chanting begins again and the bell stitches bright silver notes into the droning voices. A sudden, short silence, followed by a prayer sung in a minor key, and I struggle to keep the melody in my head, but it is driven out by the cries of the horns and the renewed beating of the drum. I cannot think because my head is full of the sound. It is beautiful, it is not beautiful, it is discordant and stark, it is frightening, yes but it is also somehow comforting, it is music for great unroofed spaces, it is, what is it? It is convincing, I think finally. It is the closest word I can find. I close my eyes and now it is easy to think of nothing.

When I open my eyes again, I am not sure where I’ve been. Jangchuk and the others are standing up and filing out into the courtyard, and they motion for me to follow. Outside, we are served plates of rice, vegetable curry, dahl and ema datsi with bowls of arra, and I am exhorted to eat more, drink more. When I finally stand up to go, I feel lightheaded. Also strangely light.

At Jane’s house, I fall into a warm and dreamless sleep. When I wake up, it is dark outside, and Jane is picking through a basket of rice by candlelight. Tomorrow I will walk back to Pema Gatshel. The thought does not make me as unhappy as I expected. Anyone can live anywhere. We will see.... I search for my flashlight to take to the latrine and then remember that it is broken. I take a candle instead, which I somehow manage to drop into the hole. I remind myself to ask Jane why she just doesn’t eat that chicken.

I
am in a drugstore. The aisles seem unusually long, it is some kind of superstore, and everything gleams under the overhead lights. I push my cart slowly, studying the shelves carefully. What do I need? Look, here’s this bath gel new and improved with a flip-top lid. The drugstore leads into a grocery store. I stand in the cereal section, considering deeply: Shreddies or Fruit Loops? The store will close soon, I have to hurry. “Shoppers,” a glad voice says, “visit our ladies’ department for unbelievable savings.” I wake up, blinking: I am in Pema Gatshel. I must push back against the dark disorientation this realization causes if I am to get out of bed, and it seems I must get out of bed: someone is knocking on the door.

On the doorstep are two of my students. Karma Dorji, who rescued me on the way to Tsebar, is short and sturdy, with a round, cherubic face, nut-brown skin, and a distinctive cowlick. Norbu is taller, with a crooked little grin and a perpetually runny nose. Their ghos are faded, and on their feet they wear rubber sandals. Silently they offer their presents: a bundle of spinach, a cloth bag of potatoes, a handful of spring onions. Karma Dorji reaches inside his gho and removes a small brown egg. “Thank you!” I say. “Thank you very much!” They look embarrassed at my effusive thanks.

“My mother is giving,” Norbu says.

“Please tell your mother thank you,” I say, wondering if I should be paying for these things.

“Yes, miss.” They leap down the ladder-like stairs and bound across the playing field.

Back inside, I hear water sputtering from a tap. This means I must fill every bucket, basin, pot, pan, bottle, kettle, jug, mug and cup right now, before the water disappears. In the kitchen, I pump up the kerosene stove until it is hissing steadily, throw a lit match at it and run into the bedroom, waiting for the explosion. When none comes, I creep back to the kitchen and put a pot of water on the blue flame. It immediately dies, and I have to repeat the process.

In the bathroom, the water has stopped. I have one full bucket. I can either bathe or wash my clothes. The drain is partially blocked, and although I have stuck a variety of implements down there—thick branches, thin willow wands, a piece of barbed wire—there is always a swamp in the middle of the bathroom. Gritting my teeth, I squat next to the bucket, and begin to pour the cold water over myself with a plastic jug. By the time I have finished, I am shivering violently and have to climb back into bed for several minutes before I can begin my daily kira ritual, a series of physical and mental contortions as I swathe and pin and belt the length of cloth around me. Sometimes, I stop, exasperated, holding some unexplained end, trying to figure out how it got free and where I should put it, and I wonder if I shouldn’t just give up and wear a skirt and sweater. No, I will not give Mrs. Joy the satisfaction. Yesterday in the bazaar, an old woman stopped me and began to tuck in various parts of my kira, pulling the skirt down as she yanked the top up. Stepping back, she studied her adjustments critically.
“Dikpé?”
I asked. Okay? She shook her head and waved me on: it was still wrong, but it was the best she could do with me.

With the egg Norbu has brought me, I make a pancake, which I eat with Bhutan’s own Mixed Fruit Jam, and then I leave for school, descending the steep staircase slowly, backwards, clutching the rails.

At school, I sit in the staff room with the other teachers, watching the students in the playing field. Many of them did not start school until they were eight or nine, which means that most of the class VIII kids are in their late teens. They all wear the school uniform, grey-blue ghos and kiras. Some of the smaller kids wear hand-me-downs, faded and splotched and miles too big for them. Pema Gatshel has both boarders and day students, and many of the day students walk for one or two or three hours to school each morning and evening. When it rains, they arrive at school soaked, and sit in their wet uniforms the whole day.

When the bell rings, we stand on the steps for morning assembly. The students stand in front of us at the edge of the playing field, in lines according to gender and class. The number of female students decreases steadily from preprimary to class VIII. The school captain, a class VIII boy named Tshering, leads the morning prayer and national anthem. From where I am standing, I can see the tip of a snow peak shining above a row of dark blue mountains in the northwest. I like to think that I am facing home, and wonder what Robert is doing right now, half the world away. It is yesterday evening there, and I picture him, with perfect clarity, in his apartment, reading the paper in his armchair, playing his guitar, cooking dinner. I wonder if he is thinking of me at the exact moment I am thinking about him. There is no way to find out. I am a million billion trillion miles away. Sometimes during morning assembly, my throat closes up and it hurts to breathe. Sometimes, though, I remember my book of Buddhist readings: feelings, desires, sorrows are all created by the mind. Everything in fact is “mind.” If I remember this, I simply turn my attention back to the slow and stately singing, and the sadness drains away.

After the national anthem, a senior student gives a short speech in English or Dzongkha on an assigned topic: punctuality, honesty, respect for dear parents and teachers. Every English speech ends with the same breathless rush: “... and so my dear friends, I sincerely hope you all will be punctual/honest/respectful to your dear parents and teachers.” The headmaster then makes a speech in Dzongkha; I know only the first word,
dari,
which means “today.”

Dari, after the assembly, the headmaster informs me that I have been assigned to morning clinic, and will have to attend the first-aid course at the hospital starting on Monday. I have also been assigned to the library, he says, and gives me the key. I have already been to the library, a poorly lit room with a few very tattered picture books, abridged editions of
The Red Badge of Courage and Heidi,
and a great many Canadian readers published in the mid-1970s. How these came to be here, no one seems to know.

I like the headmaster and his wife, who has just given birth to twins. At first, I think he is very young to be a headmaster, but I change my mind when I see him with the students. He is sternly and completely in control. It is not so much his character as the Bhutanese way of being in authority, I think, remembering the officials we met in Thimphu, the Dzongda in Tashigang. Whatever it is, it elicits a fearful, unquestioning obedience from the students. With the staff, he is more relaxed, but I sense an undercurrent of tension between him and the Indian staff. The Indian teachers freely admit they are here because they could not find jobs in India, and they almost seem to resent the fact that they have to take orders from the Bhutanese. Last week, in the staff room, Mr. Sharma commented loudly on the uselessness of attending morning assembly if it’s going to be in a language he doesn’t understand. “Half the staff doesn’t understand Dzongkha,” he said.