So Close to Heaven (37 page)

Bhutanese cooking, never advertised as a notable cuisine, was a nice surprise on my first trip to Bhutan. Nothing in Thimphu’s Motithang Hotel gave my husband and me much reason to believe that dinner would be the highlight of the day we checked in, after what seemed like a very long trip from Kathmandu. Our room was miserably cold and
damp, though it was May. The hall carpet outside our door was soggy; there had been some kind of a pipe rupture somewhere along the line, and puddles had been left in the corridors, apparently on the theory that they would sooner or later dry of their own accord. No one was sure exactly when dinner would be ready. A fair amount of time passed after we took our seats in a cavernous dining room—the Motithang had been an official guest lodge of the royal government, and the dining room was still commandeered now and then for government functions. Then the headwaiter and his assistants began to shuffle out of the kitchen to place hot pots of food into the warmers on the buffet table. The evening picked up.

In dress and bearing, our headwaiter was a character drawn from one of those turn-of-the-century photos of the royal court and its retainers taken by leaders of British Himalayan expeditions. He was a great bear of a man in a stained and faded gho, worn knee socks, and shoes that had seen many miles of mountain hiking. His rough hands seemed unaccustomed to handling the glassware and china, which he put down and lifted with great deliberation, grunting and wheezing at every exertion. He said nothing extraneous, but was attentiveness personified. He brought us cans of Druk fruit juice, the pride of a nascent Bhutanese agro-industry, and bottled water from India. When the moment was upon us, he welcomed us to the buffet with genuine hospitality. As well he might. On the table were heaped mounds of red rice, a tasty Bhutanese variety not found in many other places. On these we piled slender fresh asparagus, lightly sautéed, and a choice of simple but well-seasoned stews and curries. This was long before I knew that some of the finest vegetables, fruits, and grains in Asia were the staples of Thimphu’s produce market. The statistics about Bhutan—life expectancy, infant mortality, prevalence of infections, or whatever—never prepare you for the discovery of how well many people can live on the harvests of this underpopulated land.

Because Bhutan spans several climatic bands, all sorts of good things flow into Thimphu: oranges, apples, apricots, many varieties of rice and onions, buckwheat, bushels of roasted grains for steeping alcoholic drinks or mixing into yak-butter tea, homemade soft and dry cheeses, wonderful new potatoes, yams, mushrooms, fiddlehead ferns, young bamboo, cauliflower, cabbages, lettuces, eggplants, squashes, dried river
weed, nuts, spices, herbs, root crops I couldn’t identify, and, always, lots of chilis. Meat and dried fish, as I learned from cooks, usually come from India.

Eating hot green or red chili peppers straight is a test of growing up in Bhutan. A mother told me little children are proud when they can tuck into a bowl of them without ill effects; the feat is a rite of passage. The unofficial Bhutanese national dish is
ema-datsee
, a stew of chilis and homemade cheese. I knew this the first time I ordered it, but then carelessly let my mind wander and forgot the green things weren’t string beans, but only for a blinding, throat-clearing second. The best antidote for this mistake is rice in large mouthfuls. Cooked chili dishes, salads with raw chilis, and chili-laced stews grow on most people after a while, but in small portions. In places where the cooking isn’t very good (the Olathang Hotel in Paro springs immediately to mind), chilis can liven up a boring dish.

The source of all good things in Thimphu is the weekend market, now sheltered under open-sided, tin-roofed concrete pavilions near the bus station below the main part of town. It is very close to Changlimithang, the park for sports and festivals. Changlimithang has an auspicious history. On this field in 1885, a climactic battle—a brief but bloody swordfight—ended Bhutan’s last civil war and removed the last challenger to Ugyen Wangchuck, the penlop of Tongsa, who twenty-two years later would be crowned king. His enemy, the Thimphu dzongpon, Alu Dorji, was forced to flee to Tibet after the humiliation.

At the crowded market, where produce spills out of baskets and country sacks, there are also real handicrafts (nothing mass-produced) for sale: bamboo ware, blankets, burled-wood bowls from the east, rough-carved spoons and ladles, and woven bags of all kinds. Bushy yak tails, good for dusting and swatting flies, are there, along with Tibetan-style jewelry, amulets, seals, pictures of the Dalai Lama, and the occasional human thighbone for use as a ceremonial trumpet. The market is a social gathering too, as monks, householders, craftspeople, herbal medicine vendors, and farmers from outlying regions get together to gossip and exchange opinions.

Thimphu, its market, its shops and restaurants, its business houses and hotels, is the new Bhutan. The town did not really exist until King Jigme Dorji Wangchuck, third ruler of the Wangchuck dynasty, decided to rebuild the dzong in the 1960s and establish a permanent new town in its
shadow. Until then, Bhutan had been governed from dzongs alone, where the two traditional institutions of Himalayan Buddhist nations, the monastic orders and the royal government, coexisted.

Secular town life is something Aum Rinzi has watched develop, and she is skeptical. She sees self-reliance dwindling with the growth of service industries, and she takes refuge on her productive farmland in the hills near the road to Punakha, the old capital, where the dzong is still the center of life. The location of her Mendegong farm, somewhere between modern and medieval Bhutan, is coincidentally symbolic.

With urban growth and tourism has come a hotel boom in Thimphu, and visitors can be choosier about where they want to stay. After one experience with the Motithang Hotel, which is too isolated for anyone who wants to get a sense of daily life in Thimphu, I moved downtown next time to the Druk Hotel, a commercial establishment right on Thimphu’s main square and within walking distance of nearly everything a visitor wants to do. Then the Druk’s owners started to renovate the place. When the door handle of my newly refurbished room popped off, leaving me locked inside, it seemed time to move on from there also. The Druk, with a Bhutanese owner but Indian management, had some other drawbacks. For one thing, the dining room was cleaned by an Indian sweeper of indescribable scruffiness, grotesquely out of place in Bhutan, where institutionalized indignity is extremely rare. Wearing an undershirt and a
lungi
layered with filth, he would appear not before breakfast was served, but during the meal. With a short broom in one hand and a greasy gray rag in the other, he would proceed around the dining room, brushing up clouds of dust as he moved his pile of rubbish across the grimy carpet.

One morning, when my stomach wasn’t quite up to his performance, I sat by a window to look out over the street below. But between the hotel and the opposite side of the road, there was another disturbing sight. A group of scavengers, also probably outcaste Indians, were huddled around a trash fire sharing with a stray dog bits of food they had found somewhere. It is ironic that those Bhutanese who never travel outside their country and know of India only as the regional superpower and the lord of a viceroy-sized embassy in Thimphu should see Indian citizens reduced to living on the streets of this minuscule mountain capital, eating scraps. Sometimes Indian scavengers, women with young children, could also be seen combing through open sewers for usable
trash. That practice will end, however, if Thimphu’s administration follows through on its plan to clean up the town (with the help of European sanitation engineers and solid-waste managers) and keep it free of the plastic bags and the other detritus of a burgeoning consumer society that have ruined the streetscapes and public squares of Kathmandu.

In the early 1990s, when privately owned hotels began to proliferate, I eventually settled on the Yu-Druk, a spacious hillside lodge overlooking Thimphu from the west. It was a longish walk into town, though downhill, and a fairly energetic climb back. But from my breezy room at the front of the hotel, with its wide rooftop porch over the floor below, Thimphu displayed a hidden beauty, especially during a misty dawn or a full-moon night, when the landmark spire of the Memorial Chorten stood out on the horizon as the town slumbered under golden streetlights among the black hills. The Yu-Druk, an amalgam of two large houses with a private temple on the upper floor of one, has a gang of eager young men and women on its staff who are always around and cheerful, making the place feel like a well-run home. The young men were on the lookout for reading material; my Indian magazines, bought in Kathmandu, and the novels I would normally have discarded after long flights from Europe or the United States were snapped up for reading during long afternoons when guests were out and there was only the telephone to attend to. Often, they played tapes of Bhutanese folk music on their modest boom box behind the bar, which was stocked mostly with bottled water and a few odd liquor bottles down to dregs. The only guest I ever saw try to order drinks at the bar was an Australian. All over the house we could hear the bottles in the adjacent cupboard clanking as a frantic young man tried to find something his guest, in an honest-to-God bush hat, would accept.

Most of the buildings in Thimphu, a town cupped in a deep valley between steeply rising slopes, are not very attractive. Although the facades of shops and most homes hew faithfully to the national architectural style of half-timbering and Buddhist folk-art trim around compound windows, there is a Potemkin quality to a lot of it. The really appealing, though poorer and simpler, towns are far away from Thimphu. There, designs painted on houses and shops are richer and express the true devotional, moral, or even superstitious purposes they were intended to fulfill.

Despite its growth as a commercial center, Thimphu’s main attraction
is Tashichodzong, the seat of royal government. Its five massive red pagoda-roofed, gold-topped towers—one in each corner of the rectangular white fortress and one rising above them in the central courtyard—are a majestic sight when seen from higher up the Thimphu Valley on the way toward a royal palace at Dechencholing, or from a hill on the road to Motithang. Tashichodzong, housing the king’s court, the ministries of royal government, and, for half the year, the office of the head abbot, the je khenpo, is many times older than Thimphu town. Bhutanese historians say that the dzong was built on the site of a monastery erected in the thirteenth century. Certainly a fortress stood here along the Wang Chhu (often called the Thimphu Chhu) in one form or another since the seventeenth century. In succeeding centuries it was rebuilt or restored from time to time after fires, wars, and natural disasters. The last renovation took place in the 1960s when the dzong became the national capital.

In recent years, the gracefully proportioned dzong resting in meadows and groves of lacy trees along the narrow stream has lost some of its once-sweeping pastoral views. Government offices, the golf course, a new High Court, and a conference hall have moved into the neighborhood. But within the precincts of the dzong, an older order still reigns, as government officials and supplicants in formal scarves of rank or office move briskly around the inner courtyards and climb the steep monastic wooden stairs to offices above.

A few especially vivid impressions remain of life in the dzong. One is of a tailor seated among ceremonial brocades on the floor of the former National Assembly hall; he had moved his sewing to a window to catch the afternoon sun, which lent a glow to his needle and the colorful hangings being repaired in his old man’s hands. Another abiding picture is of young clerks and office assistants rushing to the calls of ministers, pulling aside the heavy cloth panels that serve as doors and scurrying, heads lowered, into the presence of superiors. An order received, junior officers back away respectfully, with a great deal of head-nodding, to execute requests. In summer, the climate of a thick-walled fortress is mercifully cool. In winter, Bhutanese rugs and woven blankets may warm the chairs and sofas, but electric fires and hot tea are needed by the humans unaccustomed to the rigors of monastic life who work and visit there.

As Thimphu town has grown, it has added some unusual royal institutions
that offer primers on traditional Buddhist arts and are increasingly providing the authentic craftspeople sought by other Himalayan communities where culture has been diluted or lost. Next to the Handicraft Emporium there is a studio-school for creating classic thangkas of painted panels mounted on brocade. Hanging in Buddhist temples and homes everywhere in the Himalayas, thangkas bear the likenesses of familiar saints, among them the Guru Rinpoche, and manifestations of Lord Buddha and of demigods or representations of the Wheel of Life. Farther afield, there is the National Library, with its silk-bound books, and near it the National Art School, where children from primary level upward are taught painting, sculpture, carving, and manuscript calligraphy, along with English.

After a couple of visits to this school, I came to understand how disciplined and restrictive the Buddhist canon can be in the arts, where all workmanship is sacred. Our vaunted free expression or artistic license would not be encouraged or even tolerated by Bhutanese masters. At the art school, little boys sat in rows on the floor of spartan rooms modeling identical images of the Buddha, or copying the same scripts or mandalas from finger-worn old models. A public school teacher later told me that children in secular schools, where the rules are different, are often reluctant to improvise, so stylized is their visual art world. Rewards do not come from taking liberties with the images of saints or the Lord Buddha in his many forms.

At the National Art School, I also noticed that all the pupils seemed to be poorly dressed, and I asked if they came from disadvantaged families. The faculty member showing me around looked embarrassed at the question, and seemed to evade it. When we stepped outside, my translator said that yes, the boys were poor, but the teachers didn’t want to say so in front of them. Most had been brought from distant villages, where they had shown an aptitude for artisanship, and to which they would return to glorify the local architecture. They were being taught to take pride in themselves and their heritage, I was told. No one wanted to make them feel inferior because of their relatively lowly birth. In Thimphu there were temptations enough to lure boys away from traditional crafts and into what they might imagine to be more exciting, lucrative trades and pastimes. The school was trying to hold the line.