Beyond The Sky And The Earth Part 16

F-7.

Outside our room, there are changes. Two new Canadian lecturers arrive, part of a new project that links Sherubtse with a Canadian university. One is a warm sunny man whose house is instantly full of the students and lecturers he befriends effortlessly; the other is an odd, older man who manages to stand erect in spite of the heavy white man's burden he is carrying. He moves into the flat next to mine, and we take an instant dislike to each other. He has come, he announces gravely to Dini and me, to develop the college. He has the tools to do this because he has spent many, many years in undeveloped countries. I wince at the word but he doesn't notice. Dini laughs outright, but no, he is serious. She engages him in vitriolic arguments about development and imperialism, but he doesn't get it.

Southern students begin to leave. Some say their families are being pressured by the army and local authorities to get out. They could not find a land tax receipt from 1958 to prove they are citizens. Others say they are leaving because everyone else is. Others say the south is too dangerous, they are caught between the security forces and the armed groups that raid their houses. "If we wear this dress," Arun tells me, fingering his gho, "we will be caught by the anti-nationals. If we don't wear it, the government will think we support the anti-nationals." He has come to say goodbye; his family sent a message for him to come home. "But where will you go?" I ask. He says to a refugee camp in Nepal, where many others have already gone. He does not know if he will ever come back.

Once again it is news by I-hear-that. I hear that large numbers of southerners are leaving their homes in the south. I hear that they are selling their land back to the government and heading to camps in Nepal. I hear that they are being forced into leaving but that authorities capture the moment on videotape to doc.u.ment this "voluntary migration." I hear that the emigration is part of a careful plot by the anti-nationals, a propaganda ploy to win international sympathy. They intend to bring out as many people as possible, accusing the Bhutanese government of oppression and human rights abuses. Their plan is to bring down the Bhutanese government, and march back in to a new Nepali state which they will rule. I hear the army is dismantling houses, I hear that heads of families are taken out into fields at night, where they are beaten by soldiers and asked, "Now will you leave?" I hear that southerners who cannot prove they are citizens are being labeled F-7s. F-1 means both mother and father are Bhutanese. F-7 means non-national. What is in between, I ask. F-2 to F-6. No one knows. I hear this is being done to rid Bhutan of thousands of illegal immigrants. I hear this is affecting bona fide southern Bhutanese as well. I hear it is winding down, I hear it is just beginning.

I am distraught beyond tears when Arun leaves, and then a cold numbness sets in. I am disgusted by both sides. The worst are full of pa.s.sionate intensity, the best lack all conviction.

In a staff meeting, the princ.i.p.al makes reference to The Procession of Seventy-Five, and it takes me a few minutes to realize he is talking about the Durga Puja incident from two years ago, when about seventy-five southern students refused to wear national dress at the college gate. He makes reference to two southern staff members who have absconded. This is the new buzzword. Villagers voluntarily emigrate; government employees abscond. He makes reference to non-national staff members getting involved when they don't really understand the situation. I don't know if this is a reference to me for having been in The Procession of Seventy-Five, or for talking to the southern students about the situation, or if it refers to something else altogether. I pretend to be least bothered. It has nothing to do with me. I am an outsider, I have no stake in this, it means nothing to me at all.

Tashigang Tsechu

Tshew.a.n.g wakes me in the middle of the night. "Let's go to Tashigang tsechu," he says. The tsechu is a series of masked dances, performed annually at dzongs and temples across the country to convey Buddhist teachings and history. Each dzong and important temple has its own, and people from all over the district come to watch, dressed in their best, most colorful clothes.

"What, now?" I burrow back into the blanket.

"The thongdrel thongdrel is coming down today. We have to be there early." is coming down today. We have to be there early."

The thongdrel is a large religious scroll, usually of Guru Rimpoche, appliqued in bright silk. It is lowered on the last or second-last day of the tsechu in the early hours of the morning, and is rolled back up before direct sunlight touches it. Thongdrel means liberation upon sight; seeing one is enough to bring the faithful into an enlightened state.

"Come on," Tshew.a.n.g says, tying on his gho.

"How are we getting there?" I yawn, but I already know. "Don't forget the flashlight and batteries," I tell him, pulling a kira out of the closet.

He forgets the batteries, and the flashlight dies the minute we leave the road and embark on a long steep descent though thick scrub, "a shortcut," Tshew.a.n.g says, "we'll be in Tashigang in an hour," but without light, it takes forever to feel our way down the hill. Tshew.a.n.g has to hold my hand as we inch our way through the darkness. We stop to rest under a tree, lying on our backs, watching the stars through the leaves. It is the first time we have been together, just ourselves, outside. "It feels like the ends of the earth," Tshew.a.n.g says. "Listen." We strain our ears for a sound in the vastness of the night, but there is nothing, not one. By the time we reach the road again, the stars have withdrawn and the darkness is lifting. Tshew.a.n.g pulls me down into the gra.s.s at the side of the road, and we make love while the world grows gold and bright around us. No sooner have we finished than we hear the unmistakable whine of an approaching vehicle. We untangle ourselves and jump over the embankment, scattering clothes into the thorn bushes as the truck pa.s.ses. After, laughing hysterically, we search for our things, finding everything except Tshew.a.n.g's underwear.

Inside the dzong, the thongdrel is down, covering the entire wall of the temple; dozens of b.u.t.ter lamps flicker on the altar set up below it. The rippled cry of gyalings rises up, raising the hair on the back of my neck, and a drum beats like a heart as hundreds of people prostrate in the flagstone courtyard. We watch the masked dancers in wooden masks and skirts made out of bright yellow strips of silky cloth as they bend and sway and twirl slowly to the accompaniment of drums and cymbals. The dance ends, another begins with dancers wearing deer masks. A hunter appears with a crown of leaves and a bow, followed by a dancer in a long white dress and tall white hat. The white dancer admonishes the hunter, showing him the h.e.l.l that awaits him; the hunter is eventually converted and throws down his bow.

In between dances, the joker appears, a strange figure in rags and an ugly red mask, brandishing a huge wooden phallus. He chases young girls, old men, kids, a chicken, pointing and jabbing lewdly. His gait is exaggerated, loose and drunken, as he pitches himself forward and whirls around wildly, but when the next dance begins, he rests soberly on the temple steps.

Tshew.a.n.g sits beside me throughout, explaining the dances, making a point of calling me "miss." But I still forget and once I lay my hand on his arm. He nudges it off and frowns at me, and I am annoyed although I know he is right. I am sick of this. I want to go where we can sit together in public, come home and leave the curtains and windows open, answer the door, invite friends for dinner. The magic s.p.a.ce we create in our dark little room is precious and sacred, and it is not enough. I want a love that lives in the plain light of day.

We take the Comet back to Kanglung, sitting in separate seats. The bus stops to pick up someone a hundred meters from where we made love this morning, and Tshew.a.n.g hurries to the front of the bus and talks to the driver. The driver opens the door for him and he disappears. He reappears a few moments later, stuffing a ball of maroon cotton into his gho as he gets back onto the bus: he has found his underwear.

Jomolhari

An early-morning thunderstorm. We are crouched at the window, peering around the flap of the curtain, watching clouds move over Brangzung-la. The thunder fades, the clouds and rain remain. Every word you can use for cloth you can use for the monsoon: soft, heavy, swath, silk, cotton, wool, faded, splotched, woven, washed, rinsed, wrap, blanket, mantle, quilt, stuff, ruff, swaddle, m.u.f.fle, cover, layer, stratum, sheet, shroud. I will miss the monsoon when I leave. I squeeze my brain shut at the thought of leaving, blocking out the image of the plane lifting itself above the Paro valley, soaring out. I have six weeks left.

I have been in Bhutan for over three years, and my contract ends in June. I have decided not to extend it. Tshew.a.n.g and I cannot go on in our little room forever. People are starting to ask questions. During a meeting to discuss possible editors for the college's newsletter, the princ.i.p.al sent the peon to call Tshew.a.n.g from his hostel. I sat, frozen, in my seat. Tshew.a.n.g was not in his hostel. I had left him, naked and asleep, in my house. The peon returned, shaking his head. "Tshew.a.n.g is very hard to find," the student beside me said. "He just disappears!" I am certain that my Canadian neighbor knows about our relationship, and disapproves, and it will be just a matter of time before he mentions it casually to someone.

Moreover, I am pregnant. I know because every morning at ten o'clock, I must excuse myself from cla.s.s and rush to the staff toilet, where I am violently but briefly sick. (Once, I stay home from cla.s.s and hear Mrs. Chatterji being sick upstairs at the same time as me. Later, when I have gone to Canada, several students will write to tell me the happy news: after all these years, Mrs. Chatterji is pregnant.) My body has taken charge, it is engaged in this secret activity and will brook no interference from me. It refuses coffee, tea, alcohol, and for some reason, kidney beans. It demands sleep and fresh fruit and meat. I tell Tshew.a.n.g, and he walks to his family village, two hours north of Tashigang, and brings back strips of dried pork fat that he boils into an oily chili-flecked curry. I am revolted, but my body says eat it. Tshew.a.n.g watches me devour two plates with rice. In Bhutan, he says, people believe that eating lots of pork will cause the baby to have good, thick, black hair. He brings me tamarind and urges me to eat it raw. "Pregnant women are supposed to crave this," he tells me.

"No they're not, they're supposed to crave ice cream," I say, my face puckering up painfully as I chew one of the sticky pods. "I'm sure the baby would prefer ice cream."

"She," Tshew.a.n.g guesses, rubbing my stomach, which is beginning to thicken. "She wouldn't."

"He." I have dreamed of the baby already, a boy with curly brown hair in spite of the pork. "He would."

I will return to Canada to have the baby, due in December. Tshew.a.n.g will visit during his winter holidays, and return to Bhutan to finish his last semester at college. Then we will decide what to do. It will be a test, we tell each other, it will give us some perspective. We will use the time to think. We will wait and see. When we are together, I love the sound of these words, cool and una.s.sailably rational. But when we are apart, I am caught in the most terrible despair imaginable. I don't want to wait and see, I want to know now, for certain, whether we will be together, in Canada or Bhutan or anywhere, it doesn't matter where, whether we will be a family and have a future together. I want the unequivocal Answer to How Will It All Turn Out. I fill the water cups on my altar and sit in meditation, remembering my practice. I cannot eradicate my worries entirely but, with effort, manage to attain some measure of mental stillness.

In my last weeks in Bhutan, I decide to accompany a few other volunteer teachers on a trek to Jomolhari in northwestern Bhutan. We drive to the end of the road in Paro, to the ruins of Drukgyal Dzong, and then, hoisting up our rucksacks, we set off along the path I saw that first week in Bhutan, the centuries-old trading route. We walk through summer meadows filled with white b.u.t.terflies, past large comfortable farmhouses surrounded by prayer flags, following the river, a constant rush and surge of white and blue water over stone. A forest envelopes us, th.o.r.n.y oak, luminous larch, a dozen kinds of rhododendron, red, cream, pink, flame-shaped, bell-shaped, tiny white star-shaped. Across wooden bridges, up a path that used to be a river. A chorten marks the way to the old pa.s.s that leads down into the Chumbi Valley in Tibet, but we veer right, stay close to the river, leaving behind the fields and farmhouses. The ascent is slow, almost imperceptible. We turn a corner, and the soft round hills and oak forests of Paro close behind us. Ahead are sheer-sided mountains, black and bare, the peaks pinched and crimped by frozen snowy fingers. Above, the sky is the color of wind and cold whipped into froth. We walk deeper into the emptiest, cleanest landscape I have ever seen. Snow pigeons are wheeling in bright arcs, swooping up, free falling down and into a current that carries them over a ridge. We are already above the tree line, and three days from the nearest shop. Five houses are strung out along the valley, built of grey stone, a year's supply of deadwood piled up along the fences. Yaks watch us disinterestedly as we pa.s.s, picking our way through enormous boulders fingered and dropped by glaciers along the valley floor. Even here, chortens and faded prayer flags stuck into rock mark the path. We arrive as the sun disappears, leaving the valley in cold blue shadow, and sit, exhausted and breathless, on lichen-blistered rocks at the base of a ruined dzong, thin branches rising out of the broken stone walls like pencil marks. A wall of cloud hides the mountain from us.

At five the next morning, we wake to see it, huge and white, impossible, as if the moon had fallen to earth. We walk toward it, climbing over boulders and splashing through an icy river. Over a moraine, down into soft wet sand, shallow cloudy green river winding through. We climb another moraine and then we can see the base of the mountain, rock falls, snow and ice, pieces of the mountain smashed into gravel, gravel crushed into grey sand. We can see the remains of a glacial lake, bottle-green. Even this close to the mountain, there are yaks pulling up bits of gra.s.s. We climb up a slope until we can see another upthrust spire of mountain, Jichu Drake. In the brilliant light, I cannot tell the mountain from the cloud.

At first I think, this awful, awful place. An icy, windy desert. But then I realize it is not wasteland, land used up and useless, it is not the end of life, but the beginning of it. Here are the great mother mountains and the watersheds, the beginning of the river that grows the forests and rice in the fertile valleys downstream. This is primeval land, belonging to itself. It is not a landscape of many choices. It is immaculate, spare, spa.r.s.e, pa.r.s.ed into its primary elements. The grammar of mountains. Stone, ice, time. The wind sounds like the ocean. Nothing I have with me would help me here for very long. There is little here, and little to want. But there is s.p.a.ce and time to think.

Tshew.a.n.g and I have made separate, discreet inquiries; it is possible for us to marry and stay in Bhutan. It is possible for us to marry and leave Bhutan. These are the only options we have spoken of. I have not voiced the third, not to marry, to go our separate ways. Because I do not know if either of us is ready to make the sacrifices that the future will require. I don't know if I have brought Tshew.a.n.g further into this than he ever wanted to be. I worry that I am asking him for a commitment that he may not be ready for. He says he is, has said from the beginning that he only thought about this relationship in one way, heading toward one conclusion, marriage, a family, but I am not entirely convinced that at twenty-two, he is ready to make that kind of decision.

Sitting on a stone looking up at Jomolhari, I let myself think. I came to Bhutan to find out if the careful life I had planned, the life of waiting, watching, counting, planning, putting into place, was the life I really wanted. I can still go back to that life, even now, even after everything. Here I am, in another high place, the highest edge I have come to so far. I can still say goodbye to Tshew.a.n.g, go home, find an apartment, have the child, go back to school. In some ways, it is the least risky, most sensible option. I can turn these last three and a half years into a neatly packaged memory, pruned by caution, sealed by prudence. I can still turn back. But I will not. I will go over the edge and step into whatever is beyond.

Lotus Thunderbolt

Jesus Christ, Jamie Lynne!" my grandfather says when I tell him. If he were not so visibly, angrily, intensely upset, I might laugh. I had written to him about Tshew.a.n.g, and he had written back telling me not to be foolish, to think of my future. "It will all blow over," he wrote. "You'll forget each other the minute you're back here. Where you belong." He thought I was coming home to do my Ph.D. When I tell him I have come home to have a baby, he doesn't believe me.

"Grandpa," I say gently, "I wanted a baby. I want this baby. I love Tshew.a.n.g very much."

For a few weeks, he says nothing. He is thinking, turning it over and over in his mind, looking for something to salvage, a piece upon which he can build a future for me.

"All right," he begins one morning, stirring sugar into his coffee. "So you have the baby. Fine. Lots of people have babies when they're studying at that level. You can apply now, and start after the baby is born."

"I don't want to go back to school now, Grandpa. I'm going to wait for Tshew.a.n.g to finish school, and then we'll decide what to do."

"Forget him-"

"I can't forget forget him, Grandpa." him, Grandpa."

"Why make your life more complicated than you've already made it? You have to simplify it now."

"I agree. That's why I'm not making any decisions right now."

"You won't ever really belong in Bhutan, and he won't ever feel at home here."

"Well, I don't know about that, Grandpa. He's a pretty adaptable person, and I love Bhutan."

"You aren't even the same religion," he says. "How in h.e.l.l do you expect this to work?"

I mumble unhappily and get up to clear the dishes. I don't know how to tell him, he is already so upset. "Don't tell me you've gone and become a-a-"

"A Buddhist."

Now he is furious. "You were raised a Catholic! "

"Yes, but I've chosen to be something else, Grandpa. Anyway, you used to say that all religions are the same underneath."

"Then why can't you stay a Catholic? That's a cult, that's all that is. Buddhism! "

I enlist the help of my brother, father and mother. Please talk to him, I ask them. Tell him that you're not upset about it, you think it will all work out fine. The phone rings and rings, and I try not to listen to my grandfather explaining patiently why I never should have gone to Bhutan in the first place. "Everything will change after the baby is born," my mother tells me. "Your grandfather will come around. They always do."

I try talking through it with him, I try not talking about it at all, I try ignoring his comments, I try snapping back at him. I come home one day from a walk and find that the small altar I have set up in my room has been dismantled and packed away. "I don't want that nonsense in my house!" he shouts. When my father calls and offers me an alternative place to stay, I accept and move to Toronto.

I spend my time reading, swimming at the Y, seeing films, and writing to Tshew.a.n.g. I miss him hugely, and sometimes I fret about the future, but mostly I am calm. I take refuge in the Dharma community in Toronto, visiting a Tibetan Buddhist temple regularly, and attending a series of teachings given by a visiting Tibetan Rimpoche. The temple is in a downtown building; the downstairs lobby is all mirrors and polished bra.s.s, but several floors up, in a bright, airy room, there is an altar, b.u.t.ter lamps and water cups set before a statue of the Buddha, and every time I go in, it is a homecoming. I stay in touch with my Bhutan friends in Canada, visiting Tony and Margaret (who returned home, got married, and settled in Vancouver), Leon, who has begun a postgraduate degree in international affairs in Ottawa, and Lorna and her new family in Saskatchewan. Lorna does indeed have furniture, and seems very happy with it.

Friends working in Thimphu write to tell me that the political situation, or the "southern problem" as it is now called, continues along the same course it started out on, two sides, two stories, parallel lines. There is no resolution in sight.

The baby is born on the ninth day of the tenth month of the Water Monkey Year, December 3, 1992, a boy with curly brown hair, dark eyes, golden-brown skin, and a bluish mark at the base of his spine which the doctor calls a Mongolian Blue Spot. I have to wait for Tshew.a.n.g to get a name for the baby from a lama. He will phone me from Thimphu with the name, and then he will come to Canada for six weeks. In the meantime, I call the baby Dorji, and the baby does not complain. Tshew.a.n.g finally calls from Thimphu-he has been to Taktsang, he announces excitedly, the baby has a name, and it is Sangha Chhophel.

"Sangha?"

"Sangha," he corrects me.

"Sangha."

"No, not Sang-ha," he says. "Sang-ngha. Can you hear the difference?"

"Yes," I lie. "But listen, Tshew.a.n.g, maybe we should call him something easier for Canadians to p.r.o.nounce. Is that allowed?" I do not tell him that no one in my family can p.r.o.nounce "Tshew.a.n.g." My brother refers to him as Say-Wrong, and my mother's mother calls him Sam. I don't know what they'll do to Sangha.

"It's allowed, I think. How about Pema? Pema Khandu?"

I like Pema, but in Canada, Khandu would inevitably be p.r.o.nounced Candu. I explain the nuclear a.s.sociations, and suggest Dorji. Pema means lotus, a symbol of enlightenment because the white flowers bloom out of mire, the same way the mind blossoms out of samsara into enlightenment. Dorji means thunderbolt, a symbol of enduring truth.

My grandfather calls, wanting to know do I need any money, am I sure I don't need any, well okay then, he just wanted to make sure ... and how is the baby? And when is he going to arrive, the baby's father? "Soon, Grandpa," I say. "We'll be coming up to see you after Christmas."

"Well," my grandfather says, "have you done anything about winter clothes for him?"

"No." I haven't even thought about winter clothes for Tshew.a.n.g.

"Well, I don't suppose you saw-they had a special on boots at the Kmart," my grandfather says. "I picked him up a size eight."

Revenue Stamps

Tshew.a.n.g and I were married at the Thimphu District Court in September 1993. We wore matching clothes, a gho and kira cut from one piece of red-and-gold cloth woven by his mother. Pema Dorji, nine months old, wore a Blue Jays outfit. At the courthouse, we waited around for most of the morning before a clerk informed us that Bhutanese needed permission from the Home Ministry to marry foreigners. Across town we went to the Home Ministry, where we waited around a few more hours for our letter of permission. Back to the court with the letter. More waiting. The clerk emerged again from the judge's chamber and said, "You do have revenue stamps, don't you? For the marriage certificate?" We didn't bother asking what a revenue stamp was, or why we needed them to get married; we just went off to the revenue-stamp office to buy some. By the time we got back, it was almost five o'clock, and the clerk informed us that the judge was going home. One of our witnesses whispered something, and the clerk looked us up and down, nodded sympathetically and went back into the judge's chamber. "What did you tell him?" we asked our friend.

"I told him you were wearing borrowed clothes and had to return them tonight," he said. I began to straighten my kira in antic.i.p.ation of the actual event. How would the Bhutanese ceremony go? What would the judge say exactly? I checked my camera: film, flash, batteries. The clerk came out and said the judge had agreed to marry us. In fact, he had already already married us. "What do you mean?" I asked. married us. "What do you mean?" I asked.

"You're married," said the clerk. "You just have to sign the certificate."

"But we weren't even in the room!" I wailed.

The clerk shrugged. "Do you have the stamps?"

We signed the certificate, giggling, and stuck on the stamps. As wedding ceremonies go, it wasn't much, but with the mountains rising up to the violet sky outside and the river turning gold in the last drop of light, it was enough.

Postscript

Tshew.a.n.g and I lived in Thimphu for several years, and Pema's first words were an equal balance of English and Sharchhop. During our time in Thimphu, Tshew.a.n.g and I found some of the cultural differences between us to be even greater than we had expected, and had to make some difficult decisions about our future. Eventually, I decided to return to Canada, at least "for some time," as the Bhutanese say, and the future, well, we will see what it brings.

One of the questions I am most often asked about my life in Bhutan is "But does it feel like home to you?" In many ways, it does. I can stand on a ridge, looking at those mountains and forests and clouds forever, feeling wholly at ease, wholly at home. But I use the word "home" to refer to Canada as well. I go "home" to visit, "home" for a holiday. My grandfather phoned me often in Thimphu to see how I was, and always asked when I was coming "home." He meant for good, not for a holiday. It was hard for him to understand that home could be, for me, two radically different places and cultures, and it remained a source of sadness and difficulty between us. He was too old to make his own journey into Bhutan, which was unfortunate, because I knew that if he could see me there, he would know that I was already home. On a November afternoon in 1996, I was having lunch at my friend Dechen's house, and I had a sudden strong impression of my grandfather, as if he could somehow see me sitting cross-legged on the floor amongst friends, drinking warm salty b.u.t.ter tea and laughing as our children chased each other under the brilliant autumn sky outside. It was such a peculiar feeling that when my brother Jason phoned later to tell me that Grandpa had died that day in his sleep, I already knew.

Name same kadin chhe, Grandpa. Grandpa.

Beyond the sky and the earth, thank you.

About the Author.

Jamie Zeppa was born and raised in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, in 1964.

She lives in Toronto and Bhutan.