Beyond the Sky and the Earth

by Jamie Zeppa

  This is the other side of small, which Chhoden had warned me about last year when she spoke of the constricting uniformity of village life. After six weeks in total anonymity, I had forgotten this, the smallness and narrowness of the community here. I had forgotten all the implied criticisms of my teaching methods and general behavior, the falsely cheerful questions in the staff room. What for you are bringing this tape player to class? Playing music—in class? What were your students doing sitting outside today? Writing poems is in the syllabus? Why you are having so many students visiting you, Miss Jamie? Are you giving extra tuition in English? Not really asking. Really telling. Telling me this is not the way we do things here. Real lecturers do not behave like this. Real lecturers call the students boys and girls; they take attendance religiously and do not play Dire Straits songs in class to illustrate satire. Real lecturers do not sit on their steps drinking coffee with the students, and they do not hang out their clothes to dry at night. If it weren’t for Shakuntala, I would be very alone here.

  At the post office, there is a parcel from Canada that has taken nine months to reach me, a few Christmas cards, and a letter from Robert. I carry it to the bend in the road and read it hastily under the prayer flags. Robert is hurt and angry and bewildered. He doesn’t understand how I could have turned away from so much in such a short time. I am unable to look fully at the pain that I have caused, and I fold the letter away into my pocket, wishing I could fold away my remorse and guilt as easily.

  We have been back only for a few days when Shakuntala receives a message from home. Her father is seriously ill, and she may have to return to Delhi. She waits for news, hardly daring to leave her house. “Maybe he’ll be okay,” I say, and she nods but her eyes tell of an immense grief to come.

  That same weekend, a student shows up at my window late at night, and we have a whispered conversation through the shutter—you can’t come in, but why not, you know why not. He begs, pleads, promises to tell no one, he swears to Buddha he would never tell, and what harm can come of it, just this once, if you only knew how much courage it took for me to come here, you would not send me away. I do not recognize him—he is not in any of my classes, and in my mind, this somehow justifies letting him in. I am hungry for physical contact, and in a quick, unthinking moment have convinced myself that this is night-hunting, part of the experience of Bhutan. I open the door.

  Almost immediately, though, I regret it. Physically, it is a rushed, blurry, wholly dissatisfying encounter, but the real problem is how his demeanor changes. The sweet, pleading routine is replaced by a smugness that turns my stomach. I hurry him out of the house after, cursing myself for not having had more sense. I doubt that he will keep his word about telling no one, and I dread the thought of seeing him in daylight. My only consolation is that he mentioned his final-year exams. This means that in a few weeks, he will be gone.

  By the next morning, I have worked myself into a blind panic over the encounter, and the possibility of it becoming public. I am not sure if I could be fired in Bhutan for this, but certainly my reputation among the students would be irreparably damaged, perhaps to the point of making teaching impossible. I don’t know how I could have been so reckless. Next door, Shakuntala is packing to return to Delhi, but I am so caught up in my own predicament that I barely notice her distress. I pace her bedroom while she folds clothes into a suitcase, half-listening to her describe her father’s latest symptoms. He is going to tell someone, is all I can think, and what then. Shakuntala stops talking, and after a long strained moment, I realize she has asked me a question, the only word of which I heard was “remission.” I rush into the silence, telling her what I have done, appalled at the way I turn it into a light-hearted, light-headed encounter. “I don’t know,” I conclude. “Do you think he’ll tell?”

  “I—I don’t know,” she says blankly.

  “Maybe no one would believe him,” I say. “Do you think?”

  “Jamie,” she says. “My father is dying.” She is weeping.

  For the next few days, I live in a state of pure neurosis. I see him on campus, and we look carefully past each other, and slowly the worry about what might happen if he tells begins to dissipate. The worry, but not the regret.

  Then I realize that Shakuntala is gone. She writes briefly to say that her father has died, and that she must stay in Delhi with her mother. The thought of my callous behavior on the day of her departure shakes me out of sleep at night, thrusts itself into everything I do, look here, it clamors, look at this. I try meditating to empty my mind of all cognitive thought, but I am unable to get away from myself. After a few minutes, I leap up, looking for some book or task to throw myself into. There is no quick confess-and-forgive formula in Buddhist practice. Buddhism requires a constant, relentless internal honesty, and I know I will be unable to proceed until I face my own behavior, my utter thoughtlessness in sleeping with the student, and my failure to be a true friend to Shakuntala. The only way out of this is straight through it. And while you are there, a voice adds, you might take a real look at the grief you have caused Robert.

  Without Shakuntala, I am alone, neither part of the staff nor of the student body. I resolve to try to make amends with the staff members, but the thought of becoming one of “we the lecturers” makes me feel cold and cross, a hundred years old. It rains for several days, and I stay in bed, preparing lessons, eating peanuts, wrapped in sweaters and a heavy woolen kira against the cold damp. When the rain subsides, I put on my shoes and walk to the shops to get something more substantial than peanuts. The tops of the mountains are all engrossed in cloud, and the wind comes down from the dark peaks in the north, sharpened by its passage through brambles and thorns, carrying icy droplets of rain. While the shopkeeper packs my groceries in newspaper, I read the astrologers’ calendar on the wall, printed in Chhoeki and English. It is the Year of the Iron Horse, and the predictions are ominous, full of conflict and rain and the movement of peoples.

  Four of the five who were arrested last year are back. They are subdued, associating with neither north nor south, nor with each other; they are years older, eyes shadowed and faces haggard. As for the one who is still missing, all I can find out is that he was “involved” and is now in jail. Dil has not returned. The southern students say the Situation deteriorated over the winter: there were curfews and travel restrictions, the government is canceling Nepali instruction in the southern schools, and families have to produce a land-tax receipt from 1958 in order to be counted as Bhutanese citizens. The northern students say that thousands of illegal immigrants have been found in the southern belt, and what country in the world wouldn’t take action against this.

  In the newspaper, treason is still the key word, along with ngolops, traitors. The government was “deeply saddened to learn that some southern Bhutanese teachers, trainees, students and civil servants had taken part in activities aimed at harming the Tsawa Sum.” It is a matter of “great regret and disappointment that these people had become involved in anti-national activities against the government that had fed, clothed and educated them since their childhood.” The government says that clemency has been shown to all except the ringleaders, and the people’s representatives express disappointment at the government’s lenient stand. I have serious doubts about this expressed disappointment; the entire discussion sounds stilted, as if it had been scripted.

  I begin asking direct questions. I get two sides of a story, two halves that do not make a whole.

  See ma’am, it’s about democracy and human rights, the southern students tell me. We have a right to wear our own dress and speak our own language.

  But the northern students say it is about their survival as a nation. Bhutan is a small country stuck between two giant neighbors, threatened by demographic pressures. We have to protect and preserve our traditions and culture.

  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.

  A Silly Passing Infatuation

  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 untouchab
ility. 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 CO2 emissions, what do we think, every Indian can have a car or what? Every American has a car, but oh, that’s different.”