by Jamie Zeppa
He hesitates. “Yes, miss,” he says gently.
It hurts all the more for the compassion in his face. “Well, thanks for saying it, Tshewang.”
“Good night, miss,” he says, and places the purple flower in my hand.
When he is gone, I lay my head on my arms and send silent questions out into the night. Where did you come from. How did you get to be the way you are. Do you know that I have never met anyone like you in my life.
Lorna comes to visit for a weekend. Over supper at Pala’s she tells me the latest crisis at her school, a science teacher who is convinced that other people are listening to his thoughts through some kind of “frequency device” implanted in his head. “We sent him to the Basic Health Unit,” she says, “and they gave him aspirin and sent him home. His wife is really scared.”
Tshewang winks as he passes and flashes my copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude. The sight of him makes me flush.
“Who is that?” Lorna asks.
“No one,” I say, putting my head on the table. “Oh, Lorna, I think I should go home.”
“He’s cute,” she says.
“And smart. He reads. He’s funny. He’s—”
“Your student.”
“Well, technically he’s not my student.”
“Don’t you ‘technical’ me,” Lorna says. “Didn’t you learn your lesson the last time?”
“Yes,” I say miserably. I have told her about the student I slept with after the winter holidays. “But this is different.”
“Does he feel the same way about you?”
“I have no idea, Lorna, and it’s a good thing because it’s the only thing that makes me behave myself. I am this close to falling in love with him.”
“Well, stop,” Lorna says, without much conviction.
The Map
On an all-day walk through villages and rice paddies around Kanglung, I pick my way around the spur of a mountain, through a forest of oak and rhododendron, and emerge in a glen with a brook curling through it. The mountain wall rises up behind, and all around are trees; it is a completely sheltered and sheltering place. The sun lies thickly, like honey, over the long green grass, and I feel warm and sleepy and inexplicably content. I sit and take out my journal to describe the place, but the pen in my hand feels heavy, and I stretch out in the grass in the warm yellow light instead and sink into an intensely calm and pleasurable state, a kind of golden dreamplace, although I am not asleep, and I don’t know how much time passes before I sit up, blinking. I have no idea what I’ve been thinking. I leave reluctantly, telling myself I can return tomorrow.
But the next day, I cannot find the glen. I walk for hours until I realize I am lost. It didn’t seem possible to get lost; there are only two directions, down and up. But I do not recognize the houses or chortens I pass, and the path falls into shadow as the sun lowers itself into the western valleys. I keep walking up, certain that I will eventually hit the road. A wind rouses itself and bits of mist float past. The mist thickens as I ascend until I am walking through a soft, cold, dense fog. Finally I hit tarmac, except this is not the road. It is a runway. I know where I am now: I have heard about this out-of-service airstrip at the army camp in Yongphula, above Kanglung. It has not been used since the Indo-Chinese border skirmishes in 1962, because planes had a tendency to crash into the side of the mountain at the far end of it. In the twilight, swathed in mist, it is a strange and desolate place. Two dark figures emerge from the fog; as they approach, I see that they are Bhutanese soldiers. Behind them they are pulling a dog, its jaws muzzled with a heavy rope. Its back legs look crippled, and its eyes have a yellow glare. The soldiers make biting motions with their hands, and I understand that the dog is rabid. I hurry back down the path until I come to the road.
I try again and again, counting the landmarks from the first visit. There was a waterfall, yes, and I passed a house just like this one, and then I went up but here the path goes down....
I begin a map of the area, drawing the college buildings, the clock tower, the pine trees, the bridge. The villages around, connected by paths. Lopen Norbu’s house. The old lhakhang and the village above. I draw in streams and the river where the students immersed the statue of Durga last year, boulders, a tree full of brown monkeys near the prayer wall above Kanglung. The prayer flags at the bend in the road. The place where I saw a red panda, sunning itself above a tangled bamboo thicket. And places which have revealed themselves, a small cave high up in a rock wall, uncovered when a cloud moved and the light shifted, a waterfall appearing as the mist drifted away. I think that if I finish the map, I will find the glen again. There’s only so much physical space here, it’s simply a matter of tracing out the paths and filling in the landmarks.
I remember things from my childhood, a love of secret places, places inside of places. I remember searching for a secret passageway in my grandparents’ house, tapping on walls, squeezing past boxes and empty suitcases to explore the back of closets. “There are no secret passageways in this house,” my grandmother said firmly. But I was certain there was a way to go through the mirror into a different world, or to fall through an invisible doorway into another time. Here, the folds and pleats of the mountains give me that same feeling, the places that have been forgotten in forests and the far corners of valleys. There are ruins of houses, abandoned villages, skeletons of terraces overgrown with green, and I long to know why the people left, and how long ago, and what conflict or disease sent them away. There are stories everywhere.
The map becomes its own place. I have started too small, I cannot fit everything in, and I must draw bubbles along the borders with miniature maps and symbols inside, connected to the main map with curly lines but one curly line becomes a Bhutanese cloud and another becomes a mountain, and then I give in and color in a lake that does not exist, and a river flowing out of the mouth of Tashigang Dzong, and stars wherever there is room. I look up from my map, out over the valley, north to the sharp peaks, south to the blue-shadowed ridges, up to the darkening sky with its watermelon-wedge moon and a handful of stars. My map has become a conflagration of space and memory and desire, charting the exact space where place and the experience of the place meet.
Jam Session
Dini and I are invited to a dance by the students in our third-year class, a “jam session,” it is called, held in the dining hall on a Saturday night. “We don’t have to be chaperones, do we?” Dini asks, and the students laugh. “No, ma’am,” they say. “Just come and dance.” We promise we will.
I put on my least teacherly clothes, a straight denim skirt and white tee shirt, and walk over to Dini’s. She offers me a shot of Dragon Rum—“protection against an evening of Milli Vanilli,” she says. “We’re still going to feel like chaperones, you know.”
“Dini, do you ever feel attracted to any of the students?”
“Only twenty or thirty of them,” she says, and I laugh.
In the dining hall, the tables and chairs have been pushed against the wall, and crepe-paper streamers and balloons are taped to the ceiling and pillars. The students, in jeans, miniskirts and leather jackets, dance in pairs and large circles to unidentifiable dance music pounding out of a row of mismatched speakers. Two entrepreneurs sell boxes of mango juice and plates of chips by the door. Tshewang, dressed all in black, slides off his chair beside the DJ. “Miss,” he says, bowing formally, “would you care to dance?”
We thread our way across the floor, sticking to the outer edges because he dances as he talks, tirelessly, with frequent leaps and bounds. He keeps closing up the distance I try to leave between us.
“Sorry, miss,” he says, laughing, when we have danced ourselves into a corner. “Would you like to sit down? Shall I get you a drink?” I slide onto a chair against the wall, grateful for the sharp breeze from the window behind. Tshewang returns with a box of warm mango juice and angles his chair closer to mine. All along the left side of my body I feel the warmth of him, and I think I should move my chai
r a few inches away for the sake of decorum but I cannot bring myself to move at all. A slow number comes on, and the floor clears except for three or four brave couples. Tshewang explains that they are officially “paired up,” a fact which they must try to keep from the principal. “When he finds out, he’ll call them to his office and make them promise to break up.” His hand slides lightly down my forearm, pulling my hand out of my lap, and he holds my fingers in the tiny dark space between us. All I can think is: yes. I want only this moment, and nothing beyond matters. My body is a cold, dark shell except for my hand. Life begins at my wrist, my palm pulses gently, my fingertips glow like embers.
A strip of orange crepe paper unravels to the floor in front of us, bringing me out of my trance. I have no idea what Tshewang is thinking, if this is merely a flirtatious diversion for him or if his desires go farther, but I feel sure he would be shocked at the extent of mine. I am too old to be perched here with streamers coming down around me, listening to some sappy Air Supply number, aching to make love with someone who isn’t even allowed to date and who keeps calling me “miss.” I pull my hand back into my lap. “How old are you, Tshewang?” I blurt out. I had not planned to ask it aloud, but I hope he says seventeen. That’ll teach me.
“I’m twenty, miss.”
“Oh yes. I—I remember when I was twenty,” I say, putting a squint in my voice to make it sound like an event lost in the mists. “Well, I should find Dini. Thanks for the dance, Tshewang.”
He looks at me carefully, and then he leans very close and puts his mouth to my ear. “It’s up to you, miss,” he says, and his fingers brush my hair away from my earlobe, burning my skin.
It is me who is shocked. I stare at him, unable to think. “We can’t,” I say, panicking.
“I know,” he says automatically.
He is still close enough to kiss, and for a second, I think we will. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice a couple watching us curiously. “Tshewang, people are looking at us.”
“I don’t care.”
“Then you have no more sense than a—a goose,” I say helplessly.
He laughs. I don’t know if I am thrilled or alarmed by his audacity.
“Let’s go find Dini,” I say, standing up. He walks with me across the floor to where Dini is sitting on a crate, trying to convince the DJ to change the music. “Thanks, Tshewang,” I say again. I dare not look at him.
“No, thank you, miss.”
The next day, I walk the nineteen kilometers into Tashigang, praying fervently that Lorna or Leon will be in for the weekend. I have to talk to them about this. It has gone too far, I know that, and yet my strongest regret is that I didn’t let it go farther. Tashigang is humid, and the sky is clotted with heavy grey cloud; the guest house smells of damp and insecticide, and there is no water. I have to haul buckets from the tap across the street for a bath and then I drink beer in the Puen Soom. Karma, the proprietor, stands at the door, watching the rain fall. “Today your friends not coming,” he says. “Too much rain maybe.”
The next morning I shoot out of bed, woken by a sound that I quickly identify as screaming. Leaping to the window, I see a wall of water and mud come roaring down the mountain, swallowing the bridge, uprooting trees, washing away latrines along the riverbank. Shopkeepers are fleeing up the hillside with their children and wooden cash boxes under their arms. I rush out, but the flood is already subsiding into a thick brown torrent. On the steps of a shop overlooking the river, a tearful mother is alternately scolding and kissing her drenched children. It is still raining, and I walk through mud and debris to the riverbank to watch the water churning mud and roots and leaves. Four students from the junior high school join me, pointing out the place where the barbershop used to be, now a wet muddy patch.
“Lucky the barber was out having tea,” one says. They tell me that this is the second of three floods predicted by a lama. The first flood happened before they were born, in the 1950s, and wiped out the lower bazaar. After that, a different lama came and performed a puja to protect the town. “See, miss, that picture?” They point to the eaves of a shop roof, under which a painting of Guru Rimpoché has been placed so that it faces the river. “The lama was putting that picture and there was no flood. But last year that lama died, and now just see, the flood again has come.”
“This time no one was lost,” one of them adds. “But next time will be very bad, the lama was telling like that.”
I return to Kanglung, determined to end this thing with Tshewang. The more I think about it, the more disturbed I am. I realize I am actually angry, and on the long, sweaty walk uphill to the college, I try to figure out why. He took me by surprise, for one thing, speaking my secret thoughts when I had just decided he hadn’t a clue what they were. I am angry at myself for misjudging him, for thinking him naive. I am also afraid. He has brought the thing between us into the open, moving it from the realm of hopeful fantasy into the real world of decisions and consequences. All along I have been longing to know his feelings and now, when he has made them perfectly clear, I want to grab him and shake him and tell him, “It is not up to me!” I do not want it to be up to me. Yes: there is a powerful attraction and an understanding between us. But: he is a student, I am a lecturer. Real lecturers do not etc., etc. I have already made one mistake, although it seems insignificant in comparison to this. With the anonymous encounter at the beginning of the year, I put my reputation at risk, but my heart was not even remotely involved. With this relationship, I have no idea where my heart would take me.
Belief
At Pala’s one morning for breakfast, I watch Amala throw buckets of water at the pack of snarling dogs that has made its home outside her kitchen. “What to do with them,” she says. “Always fighting and all night barking.”
Dogs are a problem all over Bhutan, especially in towns, wherever there are institutions with kitchens—schools and hospitals and army camps. The packs belong to no one and to everyone. It would be a sin in Buddhism to round them all up and kill them, since all sentient beings are considered sacred, even these horrid, diseased, deformed dogs.
“Now I will do something,” Amala says grimly.
Three days later, I look up from my lunch to see her talking earnestly to a truck driver. He nods and begins rounding up the dogs, using jute sacks to pick them up and toss them, yelping and howling, into the back of his truck. When all the dogs are in, Amala hands him two hundred ngultrum, and he drives off.
“Where’s he taking them?” I ask.
“Wamrong,” she says.
“Why Wamrong?”
“Too far for them to walk back.” She smiles into her tea.
But the next day, the truck returns. The driver leaps out and unlatches the back door. The dogs pour out, still yelping and howling, and settle themselves in front of Amala’s kitchen. The driver is smiling broadly; he can hardly believe his luck. The good merchants of Wamrong gave him another two hundred rupees to take all the dogs back.
I am spending more time with Amala, who is a fountain of stories and local histories. She tells me about pows, people who can go visit your relatives in the afterlife, and oracles who speak through a chosen person. Amala tells me about her sister, Sonam, who returned home after many years in the West, bringing with her an anthropologist who wanted to see an oracle in action. They went to the family temple in Sakteng, where the man who could summon the oracle was called. He slumped to the floor in a trance and rose as the oracle took possession, speaking in a stern and unearthly voice. The oracle would not answer the anthropologist’s questions because she was of a different faith, but had a few things to say to Sonam, accusing her of staying away from home too long and neglecting her father’s temple. The oracle picked up a sword and swung it around wildly, and Sonam was terrified. Finally, it told her to throw a ceremonial white scarf around the central statue at the altar. The way the scarf fell would determine her fate. Sonam threw the scarf, which landed properly, and the oracle was placated.
Amala is surprised that I believe in the oracle. “Foreign peoples is only believing if they see with their own eyes,” she says. “Not seeing, then not believing.”
“But Amala, lots of people in the West believe in things they can’t see,” I say. “People believe in god, and ghosts, and theories that no one can prove.”
“But not in Bhutanese things,” she says. “They are only believing in their own things they can’t see.”
I think of the European woman I met having lunch here some time ago. She had been in Bhutan for three months with an international aid agency. “The Bhutanese are so superstitious, don’t you find?” she had asked me. “Everything happens because of ghosts or demons.”
“But Christianity has the Holy Ghost,” I argued. “And the Devil.”
“That’s different,” she said. She didn’t explain how. “I really feel sorry for them. So much of their faith is based on fear.”
“At least in Buddhism, hell is not forever,” I countered. “I can’t think of anything more frightening than the idea of eternal hell after only one lifetime.” The woman ended the conversation by paying for her lunch and leaving. I hadn’t meant to insult her faith. I wanted only to point out what Amala has just put so succinctly. Being in Bhutan has shown me how strong this tendency is, to think that what we believe is real and valid and what everyone else believes is fearful nonsense and superstition.
I have finished most of the Buddhist books from the library, moving from basic texts to esoteric writings such as The Tibetan Book of Great Liberation and back again. The first sermon of the Buddha still stuns me with its clarity; I read it and feel the world grow still and quiet around me. I read teachings on meditation and wisdom, keeping in mind Nima’s summation that belief without practice is useless. Buddhist practice offers systematic tools for anyone to work out their own salvation. Here, the Buddha said, you’ve got your mind, the source of all your problems, but also the source of your liberation. Use it. Look at your life. Figure it out.