Beyond the Sky and the Earth (34 page)

P
erhaps enough time has passed. Perhaps it is safe now to talk. By some mutual unspoken agreement, we approach each other again, cautiously at first, shyly, exchanging neutral greetings, but within a few weeks we are back to our old rushing conversations, and with the conversations, the same old desire rises. We never mention the night of the jam session, but nothing has changed between us. I see him outside the office, waiting for the mail, or with his big blue mug and a book, on his way to the student mess for tea. “Miss, have you read that Marquez story about the sea of lost time?” he calls out, or “Miss, what’s the oldest language in the world?” And I say yes, or I don’t know, and we stand there, in the hall or on the lawn, and I feel the college buildings shrink around us, bells and voices echoing dimly. I always tell him more than I mean to, whole passages of my life come spilling out. He listens and then from inside his gho, he pulls out small presents: a feather, a picture of white Tara, a mango, definitions copied neatly onto pieces of paper:
aleatory
—
dependingon random choice; a lumen is a unit of flux of light; infrangible
—
unbreakable.

There is no privacy, no place or time to talk alone. I do not invite him to my house and he does not come on his own. We rely on these meetings in open corridors, trying to finish one last thought before the bell rings. They are not always happy or satisfying conversations. On the subject of the Situation, for example, we end up talking in circles, which Tshewang says proves his point, his point being that there is no point in talking about it.

“Anyway,” he tells me, “I hate talking about politics with you. I haven’t read what you’ve read. I haven’t been where you’ve been. You always argue me into a wall, and I can never be right.”

“That’s not true,” I say, hurt. But I fear it is. We bring too much with us into these conversations, it seems impossible to make a statement that is free of our separate pasts and upbringings and political cultures. My arguments arise from a culture that has named its own values as the highest aspirations of humanity. The fact that governments and corporations and individuals pay lip service to these values, the fact that there are grave inequalities and injustices and abuses of every sort in Western society, does not stop us—me—from pontificating in other places.

No, they are not always easy conversations, but each one adds to the ground we stand on together. In the evenings, I fall into dark fits of despair, asking myself where this can possibly go. It can’t go anywhere, I tell myself.
Scalar
—
having magnitude but not direction.
Then I wonder if I just shouldn’t give in and let it happen. Perhaps one night would quench this awful desire and then we could be free of it ... no, no, no. One night would not be enough, and it is not one night that I want. Throw out those little scraps of paper, I tell myself. What you want is impossible.

 

 

 

Nima has decided to leave secular school after class XII and go to a Buddhist college in southern India, where he will become a monk. His mother, he says, is disappointed, but he has his father’s blessing. “You know, miss, in Buddhism, we say that life is like housekeeping in a dream. We may get a lot done, but in the end we wake up and what does it come to, all that effort? I want to study what is really important.”

“Are you sure about this, Nima?” I ask, thinking of the rigorous monastic discipline, the long periods of isolation from his family and friends.

He pulls out a book from his gho,
A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life,
and reads me a quote:

“It’s the same, isn’t it, miss? One hundred years or just one moment. It’s still a dream.”

I can do nothing but nod. He is many lifetimes ahead of me in wisdom and maturity, and in my heart, I bow to him as my teacher.

We go to the temple one afternoon, bringing offerings of incense and vegetable oil for the butter lamps. A long-haired gomchen opens the door and we leave our shoes outside and enter the main room. The floor is cold beneath us as we prostrate in front of the altar on which a single butter lamp burns before a statue of Guru Rimpoché. We pause to look at the paintings on the wall, and Nima points out the six realms of existence in the wheel of life. The realms form the continuum of cyclical life, and rebirth in the worlds of gods, demi-gods, humans, animals, hungry ghosts, or hell, occurs in accordance with one’s karma. Buddhist hell is remarkably similar to the Christian one, with its hot and cold tortures, except that it is not forever. Beings reborn in the hell realm remain until they have exhausted their negative karma. The hungry ghosts have stick arms and legs, stomachs grotesquely swollen with hunger, and twisted, knotted necks that do not permit them to swallow. They remind me of dieters in the West.

I do not believe in separate hell realms, I tell Nima. There are enough horrors right here on earth. “But what about these gods and demigods?” I ask. “They look very happy.”

Nima nods. “They are happy for now, miss. Their world is very beautiful and pleasant, but they have not escaped cyclic existence, and sooner or later, they will use up their good karma and will be reborn in one of the lower realms. ”

I notice a black door off to the side painted with white skulls, and ask Nima if we can go in there. He says he can but I cannot. The room houses the temple’s guardian deity, and women are not allowed to go in. The gomchen asks if we would like our fortunes told. Nima takes a pair of dice from a brass tray and holds them against his forehead briefly before throwing them down. The lama looks up the answer in a book and reads it aloud. Nima seems pleased. Now it is my turn, and I take the dice and look at Nima for help. “You have to think of a wish or a question,” he says. I touch the dice to my forehead and drop them onto the tray. The lama reads out the answer.

“What you want will be very difficult,” Nima translates. “Things will work out, but not in the way you expect.”

On the way back down the hill, Nima tells me he asked about his spiritual training in India. “The answer was very positive. And miss, I know what you wished for. You wished to stay in Bhutan, isn’t it?”

“Sort of,” I say. Out of the starry cluster of wishes and questions that filled my head when I picked up the dice, only Tshewang’s face remains clear now.

The students bring news of planned demonstrations in southern Bhutan. Arun comes to ask if I think he should go ... down ... to join the others, the demonstrators.

I say no. I don’t want him to be hurt, trampled, run over, arrested, kidnapped, beaten up, shot, his head cut off and left in a sack. I don’t want him to disappear. I don’t want to lose any of them. I want them to stay here. All of them, north and south, the combination and the contradiction. I want them all to stay right here and make a final effort to talk to each other, to fight the real enemy, which is mutual mistrust and rhetoric, to find what they still hold in common beneath the cant.

I remember a verse from the Buddhist canon:
Not at any time are
enmities appeased through enmity but they are appeased through non-enmity. This is the eternal law.

The
Kuensel
reports that armed anti-nationals swept through the southern villages, rounding up people and forcing women and children to walk in front. The demonstrators grew violent, the paper reports, but the Bhutanese security forces were under orders not to fire. The crowds converged on district headquarters, stripping people of their national dress and burning office records. The militants ordered letters of their demands be carried to the central government. The contents of these letters are not reprinted.

Arun has not gone to join the demonstrators. “It could have been solved without this,” he says. “If the government would only listen to what we are saying. If only they didn’t make it a crime to say that we want something else. Personally, ma’am, I don’t want a separate country for the southern Bhutanese, and none of my friends do, either. That’s a ridiculous idea. But we don’t want things to go on as they are, either. We’re educated, we want our rights. We want to be able to say what we really want. And to be who we are. We are also part of Bhutan, isn’t it. But they make it so that we can only be Bhutanese if we turn into them and even then we aren’t real Bhutanese. It was okay before, when we only had to wear national dress in school and at office. Some of my friends say no, we shouldn’t have to wear it at all, but I didn’t mind. Then they made it the law and now I hate wearing it. Now just see how it has turned. After this, they will be completely right and we will all be criminals.”

“I think it can still be solved, Arun.”

“No, madam.” His voice is hard and certain and very bitter. “This problem will never be solved.”

After he leaves, I pull on shoes and run out of the house, up the driveway behind the staff quarters to the main road. The sky is dark and swollen. Lightning splits open a cloud and I am drenched in rain and sorrow. I am afraid that Arun’s prediction will come true. I stand under the eaves of a shop, wiping water and tears from my face.

 

 

 

At a jam session to celebrate the end of the school term, Tshewang and I dance together once, and then sit outside on a bench behind the student mess. Whenever the music inside stops, we can hear the winter wind roaming wildly in the valley below us.

“What will you do in Canada?” he asks.

“See my family and friends. Go to bookstores, see movies, eat.”

“You won’t want to come back, maybe.”

“No, I’ll want to come back.”

“I’ll miss you,” he says, looking elsewhere. In the weak yellow light of the overhead bulb, I study his profile, thinking how much I like him, his quick energy and wit and the thoughtfulness underneath. I know if I said, come back to my house with me, he would come. The burden of keeping silent is killing me. It is the only thing keeping me safe. I lean over and kiss his cheek. “Goodbye, Tshewang.” He turns and we kiss again, a brief, shy, utterly delightful kiss. “Goodbye, miss.”

I walk home alone, the sky full of stars, the night full of the smallest sounds, my whole self full of longing and sorrow that run clean and clear, a dark, quiet river over broken stone.

A
hi-lux has been sent to Tashigang to take the Canadian teachers to Thimphu at the start of the winter break. After we load our luggage into the back, we go to the Puen Soom for a last cup of tea with Karma. “Today not good for travel,” he tells us. “Today is the Meeting of Nine Evils. Better you stay and go tomorrow.”

“My students told me the same thing,” I say. So did Kevin’s; so did everyone’s. Many years ago, the story goes, a man and a woman met at a crossroads. Unaware that they were actually a brother and sister who had been separated in infancy, they fell in love, and when they consummated their relationship, the nine evils descended upon them. No one could tell me exactly what the nine evils were, but everypne had warned me to stay at home in order to avoid them. We look at each other, wondering, and then Kevin says no, we have to go today, let’s not be silly about this. “Maybe the Nine Evils won’t bother phillingpa,” Kevin tells Karma as we climb into the truck. Karma looks doubtful.

The truck roars out of town and breaks down just outside of Tashigang. The driver climbs out, cranks open the hood and bangs something, and the engine grumbles to life. This happens more times than I care to count, and we spend much of the first day sitting at the roadside, while the driver hammers away under the engine hood and curses. Finally, between Mongar and Bumthang, hours away from either, the truck chokes to a halt and the driver opens the hood, peers in, and closes it. “No chance,” he says. “Engine is gone now.” We are stranded. A passing flatbed stops and we pile our luggage and ourselves onto the back. There is something wrong with the flatbed’s engine as well, and it cannot go faster than fifteen kilometers an hour. The low-lux, we call it. It chokes and wheezes the endless way up to Trumseng-La, desolate with mist and snow and black ice. We huddle together, hungry and weary, wrapped in sleeping bags that feel like cellophane against the gnawing cold, and a quarrel breaks out over the use of the word “fuck” and whether freezing in the back of a fucking flatbed at four thousand meters above fucking sea level with at least six hours more in the company of a bunch of fucking uptight teachers is justification for using it in every fucking sentence, and then a jerry can of kerosene breaks open and seeps into the luggage, and someone cries out, “My silk weavings!” and someone else says, “My down sleeping bag! ” and someone else says it is the Nine Evils, and everyone else says don’t be ridiculous, but it is what we are all thinking. We were warned, why didn’t we listen.

I close my eyes and think of the journey ahead, from Paro to Delhi to London to Toronto. I am vaguely afraid to leave Bhutan, afraid that the magic doors will snap shut and I will be on the wrong side. I am afraid that I will not find my way back. It is irrational, I know: I have extended my contract for another year, I have a return ticket, I have a visa for Bhutan in my passport, but still.

Lorna has also extended her contract. I ask her if she ever worries that something will happen and she might not get back. She tells me I am crazy.

“I can’t imagine going home,” I say. “I mean finishing here, and leaving for good.”

“But you’ll have to go home someday,” Lorna says. “You can’t live here forever.”

I don’t see why not.

When we get to Thimphu, we find that something has indeed happened: WUSC has declared bankruptcy and the program in Bhutan will begin to close down. We can all come back and finish our contract extensions, but no new teachers will be recruited under the program.