Beyond the Sky and the Earth (29 page)

What about our traditions and culture, the southern students ask. What about our rights? They are imposing their culture, their driglam namzha, on us.

It’s our country, after all. We’ve been here since time immemorial. They came here from Nepal only when Bhutan started to develop. They came here because they had nothing in Nepal, a northern student tells me.

My family has been here for a hundred years. I have just as much right to be here as they do.

If they don’t want to abide by the law of the land, they should leave. If they want to be Nepali, they should go back to Nepal. They’ve never been loyal to Bhutan. In their houses, they put up pictures of the king of Nepal instead of our His Majesty.

They never wanted us here. When our people first came, it was because they needed us to work. They gave us land in the south where the jungles were full of malaria. And our ancestors cleared the land and planted oranges and cardamom and we became prosperous. That’s what they don’t like.

They’ve been bringing their people in illegally, the border with India is open. If we don’t take care of this problem, we’ll be swamped. We’ll be a minority in our own country.

We’ve never been treated equally. Just look at all the ministers—there’s only one southern Bhutanese. Our people can only go so far. There’s always been discrimination.

There has never been any discrimination against them. They get free schooling and health care just like the rest of us.

You can’t trust them. They appear very simple on the outside, but inside you don’t know what they are thinking.

You can’t trust them. They want a “greater Nepal” and that would include part of Bhutan. They want to take over, like they did in Sikkim.

The voices grow shriller. I try to present each side with the other side’s arguments. There are angry denials. Don’t listen to them, that’s all propaganda. You can’t trust them it’s all their fault they want to destroy us our culture our rights those people this is what they’re like.

Ordinary words swell with heat into rhetoric, and no real discussion is possible, only the same script, recited again and again.
Il n’y a rien en dehors du texte
—this comes back to me from a poststructuralist seminar, with a distressingly different meaning, and I wish I were back in a Canadian university, engaged in discussions about language that would make no difference to the world outside; how easy it was to talk about hegemony and discourse from the margins in a well-lit classroom where no one had to whisper and keep watch out the window and students did not disappear at night.

This is not about democracy or rights, I think. At the most basic level, it is about tribes. Loyalty to one’s race, and fear of the other. Each half thinks it makes a whole story on its own, and neither side will acknowledge that there is another side. I have not heard one person speak of mediation or negotiation or even the listening that is necessary for understanding. There is no recognition of any overlap, any common ground. Already it is a case of two solitudes.

One morning, I fall asleep during a meeting, and wake up to find I have been appointed to the “exam committee” which will meet “today itself only” after lunch. I arrive ten minutes early to find my colleagues already engaged in a blistering debate over a title for the head of the committee. Convenor? Controller? Supervisor? Excuse me, my dear sir! I beg your pardon! If you will kindly listen! They go on and on until I think I am going to scream.

“But let us ask our Canadian colleague,” Mr. Ahmed says, and five heads swivel toward me.

“Convenor, controller, head honcho,” I answer. “This is a complete waste of time.”

There is a slight pause and the discussion resumes. Mr. Gupta is finally elected controller, Mr. Ahmed coordinator, and they decide that they will decide between them who will go to Delhi to pick up the exams. They exchange smug smiles, and I realize the whole debate has been about this, an all-expenses-paid trip to Delhi. Shakuntala and I used to laugh at the wheeling-dealing schemes of the more mercenary lecturers; today I am infuriated. I walk out. Silence follows me to the door and down the hall.

I flee to Pala’s where I sit at a table outside, churning with anger. I don’t care if I make outright enemies among the rest of the staff now. There are too many facades to maintain. Nothing is going on, nothing is wrong, no students were arrested, no students were beaten up, no students ran away. No students are talking about joining a movement, no students are talking about joining the militia to fix up the students who join the movement. No students are talking because there is nothing to talk about. I am a foreigner, I do not know what is going on (nothing is going on), I am not involved. I have no opinion on anything. I am here to teach Shakespeare and the present perfect continuous and if the country falls apart around me, it’s none of my business. My business is with the staff members, all competent, dedicated professionals who get along famously.

Inside the restaurant someone is tuning a drumnyen, and voices try out a melody, stop and start and dissolve in laughter. At the next table, a student is poring over a tattered copy of
Rolling Stone,
another is engrossed in a biography of Bob Dylan. They are eating
zow,
rice crisps, which they throw by the handful into their mouths. I have seen the Bob Dylan fan in the library and on stage a number of times. He has a handsome face: high cheekbones, a luscious mouth, and a long fringe of jet black hair falling into his eyes. He looks over and smiles, and the result is dazzling. “Good meeting, miss?” ,

“How do you know I was in a meeting?”

“I was in the classroom next door.” His eyes are bright with laughter.

“You weren’t eavesdropping on your lecturers, were you?”

His answer is long and ridiculous, full of words like “sanctimonious,” “plethora,” “scalar,” ending with “sound and fury, signifying nothing. ”

I burst into amazed laughter. “So you
were
eavesdropping!”

His friend gets up to go, but he stays and talks. He speaks English faster and more fluently than any Bhutanese person I have met, darting from topic to topic, the British in India, Indian immigrants in Britain, Sufi mystics, Bhutanese methods of dream interpretation, international intelligence agencies, the Booker Prize. I can barely keep up. I cannot figure him out. He is worldly and obviously extremely well-read, but instead of the cool, breezy nonchalance that I have come to associate with the private-school set, there is an intensity about him that I find very attractive. Or maybe it’s just that he is unsettlingly good-looking. At any rate, I am sorry when he says he has to get to class. “Economics,” he says, “which I detest and despise.”

“Abhor.”

“Revile. Loathe.”

“Your nickname should be Roget,” I say. I wish he was in my class. I wish I could talk to him every day. He shoves his book into the front flap of his gho, and makes a funny little bow. “Good afternoon, miss.” He has a quicksilver smile and very mischievous eyes. His name is Tshewang, I remember. I find myself smiling long after he has gone.

All around us spring unfurls. Peach and plum trees explode into blossom, the sky loses its hard winter glare, and the days begin to stretch out, afternoon light lingering on the mountaintops. A new English teacher arrives, a brilliant young woman from southern India with a sharp tongue and a head full of Marxist feminist literary theory. Her name is Dini, and she deconstructs the English syllabus one morning over coffee on my front step. “I’m not teaching that,” she says, stroking off a selection of essays, “or this poetry, and oh god, Shakespeare is so overrated.”

“You have to teach it,” I say, laughing. “It’s in the syllabus.”

“Syllabus shyllabus, I am not teaching it.”

We spend hours playing Scrabble and cooking vindaloo dishes that smoke with twenty-five different spices. She is a Christian, and her boyfriend is from a strict Brahmin family. They want to get married but his family will not allow it. She tells me stories of life in an Indian village, untouchables beaten for allowing their shadow to fall on an upper-caste man, or killed for drinking from the upper-caste well. She explains the four major castes and the thousands of subcastes, the concept of untouchability. She talks about recent Indian history, the situation in Jammu-Kashmir, the problems in the northeast, the Naxalite movement. For Dini, the recent political developments in Bhutan are similar to a dozen other demographic conflicts in the subcontinent. “This is nothing new,” she says. “It may be new to Bhutan, of course, but not to the rest of the region.” I listen carefully as I slice tomatoes and long red chilies, peel garlic, learn to use a pestle and mortar to grind seeds and spices into a paste.

Dini thinks I should deconstruct my love for the landscapes of Bhutan. “You’re projecting things onto the place,” she says, “all the things you feel your own culture is missing. The pre-industrialized world, communion with nature, all that Shangri-La-Di-Da business.”

“But the people are safe and content here, Dini.”

“And poor.”

“Well, yes, there is material poverty,” I agree, “but not misery.”

“What’s the difference?” she asks.

I say that lives in the villages might be hard and short, but the people seem genuinely content with what they have, and this is a function of their faith, which recognizes that desire for material wealth and personal gain leads to suffering. Dini says they are content with what they have because what they have is all they know. How deep do you think those values go? she asks. Their lifestyle is not a matter of choice but a function of the environment. If they could have cars and refrigerators and VCRs, they would. Let the global market in here with all its shiny offerings, she says, and see how fast everything changes.

I remember the video shops, the air freshener and plastic coasters shaped like fish for sale in Thimphu.

Dini doesn’t see why the Bhutanese should not choose for themselves. “If they want fish-shaped coasters, why shouldn’t they have them? You want Bhutan to ban consumer goods just because they ruin your quaint notion of an untouched magical little world. It reminds me of all those environmentalists coming to India and telling us we have to cut down on CO
₂
emissions, what do we think, every Indian can have a car or what? Every American has a car, but oh, that’s different.”

I can say nothing to this.

“Look,” she says. “In your mind, Bhutan can be whatever you want it to be. But only the Bhutanese know what it really is.”

The next time I stop to watch a family transplanting rice into flooded paddies, I feel how Dini’s adamantine edge has cut away some of my sentimental attachment. The family stands in muddy water, backs bent as they stab the rice shoots into the wet earth, their hands fast and unerring. At the edge of the field, a girl of about three carries a baby wrapped on her back with a broad handwoven cloth. The baby gnaws a fist and frets as the terraces fill slowly up with green. Standing there with an armful of rhododendrons I have picked in the forest, I am aware of two possible versions: I can see either the postcard (Lost World Series, Rural Landscape No.5), or I can see a family bent over the earth in aching, backbreaking labor, the ghosts of two children dead of some easily preventable disease, and not enough money for all of the surviving children to buy the shoes and uniforms required for school. It is too easy to romanticize Bhutan. The landscape cannot answer back, cannot say, no you are wrong, life here is different but if you add everything up, it is not any better. You can love this landscape because your life does not depend on it. It is a merely a scenic backdrop for the other life you will always be able to return to, a life in which you will not be a farmer scraping a living out of difficult terrain.

I love the view, but I would not want the life.

In the twilight, the percussion of frogs and crickets and cicadas rises up from the marsh below the staff quarters, and I meditate, legs folded under me, eyes closed. At first, I itch and squirm and shift, but gradually a stillness settles over me. My goal is mindfulness: I want to be able to hold the stillness inside, to move through the day aware of my thoughts and words and actions. The full concentration I achieve when I am sitting begins to dissolve minutes after I stand up, but a trace of it remains, a small piece of quiet in my head that I carry with me throughout the next day.

 

 

 

I run into Tshewang again and again, and we fall into conversation easily. His parents are from Tashigang, he tells me, but he . grew up in southern Bhutan, the middle son of seven children. Like most Bhutanese, he is multilingual, speaking Sharchhop, Nepali, Dzongkha, English and Hindi fluently. His father is a gomchen and his mother a weaver who used to supplement the family income by brewing arra. As a child, he says, he walked five kilometers to school every day, returning home to toss his bag of schoolbooks into the trees before heading into the forest to look after the cows. In the evenings, he played by the riverside, listening for elephants, afraid of snakes. Every morning he would have to search for his school bag in the bushes while his parents scolded him for his carelessness. He did well in school, though, and qualified easily for college. What do you read, I ask, and he says everything. I believe him. He has an incredible store of knowledge, an excellent memory for details, names and dates and cultural trivia. “I was so desperate for books when I was a kid,” he says. “I remember picking up empty boxes and wrappers and things, just to read what was written on them. What did you like to read when you were a child, miss?”

I remember the day I got my own library card and checked out ten fat children’s classics. I tell him, discomfited at the gap between our worlds. He is not disconcerted at all, and plunges into the gap, and we end up debating the most fitting symbol of decadence. A TV in every room in the house, I say. Imelda Marcos’s shoe collection.