by Jamie Zeppa
The teachings on compassion are particularly important to daily practice. Compassion grows out of the recognition that all sentient beings—friends, enemies, complete strangers—want the same thing. We all want to be happy, and yet again and again, we act in ways which bring suffering to ourselves, and to others, and through others back to ourselves. Seeing through the superficial differences to this core of sameness is the great equalizer, stripping away the mask of unique personal identity and revealing us one and all as simple, wanting, fearful, hopeful, bewildered beings. It is an enormous daily mental challenge to see Mr. Matthew not as my enemy but simply as my neighbor, wanting exactly what I want, and being mistaken, just like me, about how to get it.
According to Buddhism, if someone insults or hurts you, you should see their behavior as an opportunity to learn about the nature of your pride and attachment. Buddhism demands that you not only love your enemy, but see him or her as your greatest teacher. Instead of despising Mr. Matthew, I could be using each encounter with him to examine my ego and break down my own arrogance.
Buddhism requires that I take on the terrifying responsibility for myself; I am the author of my own suffering, and my own deliverance. And yet it also requires very little—only that I open my eyes right here, where I am standing, that I simply pay attention.
I ask Amala how one becomes a Buddhist, is there a ceremony, what are the requirements. She tells me to go to a lama. I feel almost ready.
Tshewang returns One Hundred Years of Solitude through a friend, with “thanks” scribbled on a scrap of paper inside. We have not spoken since the dance. I think this is his way of telling me he realizes that we have to stop. The unadorned note strengthens my resolve to break the spell between us. I debate the idea of discussing it with him, I write letters to him in my head. Dear Tshewang, I am writing so that we can close what we have opened by mistake between us, and I want you to know how sorry I am that ... that what? That I did not kiss you the night of the dance? That I said we can’t when actually I meant we can? That’s what I’m really sorry about. No, it is better to leave it entirely alone. We need a complete cessation.
But I miss our disorderly discussions and wild debates, I miss that sexual charge between us, I miss the way his eyes curl up when he laughs. Without these encounters to hope for, my days are steadier and more productive, and entirely without joy.
Enter Macduff
We have finished reading Macbeth in the Zoo, and the students want to perform it. They have divided themselves up into groups and assigned themselves scenes, and in the evenings, I watch them rehearse on stage. They start off earnestly, standing stiffly and declaiming, but by the end they are doubled over in laughter. They are at ease with one another, shouting encouragement and insults and advice, and I think that if there are times when they forget who is north and who south, this is one of them. After rehearsal, we sometimes sit outside the auditorium, talking quietly before the bell at eight o’clock calls them back to their hostels. Night falls softly, and it is easier to talk in the dark. They remember their best and worst teachers, summer and winter holidays; they remember the first time they saw a vehicle, the first time they saw a video, the first time they met each other at boarding schools in Samtse or Khaling or Thimphu; they remember who could make even the strictest teacher laugh aloud, remember that time we got caught stealing maize from the lopen’s garden, and I cannot imagine then that they actually dislike and mistrust each other. They have grown up together, and can speak each other’s languages and sing each other’s songs. They have a shared personal history, and perhaps this will in the end count for more than the historical divisions and facts and allegations.
On the political front, there has been no news for several weeks. Nothing in the Kuensel, which doesn’t mean anything, but also nothing from the students. I start to believe that the crisis is over. Perhaps there is dialogue now, perhaps there will be accommodation and understanding on both sides.
The students are ready for their final performances. They have gone to great effort with costumes and makeup and special effects, and it is a travesty. “Is this a dagger which I see before me?” Macbeth asks the plank of wood hanging from the stage curtains, and the alarm from a digital watch is set off to give the impression of urgency, but the persistent beepbeep flusters Macbeth who tries to wrest the watch away from the special effects team and there is a scuffle with Lady Macbeth who owns the watch; Great Birnam Wood misses its cue and there are leaves and branches everywhere; enter Macduff with Macbeth’s head, a wig of black yak hair, and I laugh until I cry.
In the library the next morning, a crowd of students is pressed up against the front desk, trying to read a single copy of the Kuensel. I ask what’s going on, and the Kuensel is passed silently over to me. On June 2, the anniversary of the King’s coronation, in the industrial town of Gomtu in southern Bhutan, a jute sack was found near a petrol pump, containing the severed heads of two southern Bhutanese men. A letter in the sack accused the men of cooperating with the Royal Government and betraying their own people.
Ranjana, a class XII student, is led out of the library in tears. “One of them was her uncle,” someone tells me.
I pass the newspaper back and leave the library. I feel sick. I stand on the balcony outside the staff room. In the fields below the college, women are weeding the rice paddies. I try to think about this labor that will feed the family, these works and days of hands, the feeling of mud between the toes, water up to the ankles, the sun on the back of the neck—it is useless, the image will not allow me entrance, and I am sent back to the mental picture of two heads in a jute sack. It seems impossible, something I have read somewhere else (“enter Macduff with Macbeth’s head”), it cannot be happening here.
I force myself to read the rest of the Kuensel article. For the first time, the arrests of last year are mentioned. Between October and December 1989, forty-two people were arrested for anti-national activities. Thirty-nine were later released, and a general amnesty of two months was announced to enable those who had fled the country to return. A group calling itself the People’s Forum for Human Rights announced that it wants to divide southern Bhutan into a separate political entity.
A northern student tells me he is leaving school to join the militia. “To fight the aunties,” he says.
“The aunties?” I repeat, bewildered, and then realize he is talking about the anti-nationals. “These southerners,” he explains.
“Not all southerners are anti-nationals,” I say quietly.
“You don’t know, miss. You don’t know what they are.”
Two schools in southern Bhutan are attacked and set aflame. A group of armed men attack a truck and force the driver to take off his gho. Previously, southern Bhutanese found out of national dress were fined by the Dzongkhag authorities. Now, southern Bhutanese found wearing national dress are stripped by “anti-nationals.”
The time for talking and listening has disappeared, the opportunity growing smaller and smaller until it snapped shut altogether. There will only be rhetoric now, posturing and lying and violence. I want to step out sideways. I do not want to be a witness to the inevitable.
I am cleaning the bookshelf one evening in an attempt to avoid the pile of marking that awaits me. I open One Hundred Years of Solitude and Tshewang’s thank-you note flutters out. On the other side is written LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA. I see the word “love” and I think: maybe this was the message I was supposed to respond to. Maybe this termination has been all my doing. The hand that has been holding my heart unclenches, and I can breathe deeply and it doesn’t hurt. Then I crush the paper up. It is a title, not a message. What next? I wonder. Messages through a frequency device implanted in my head? I will put this desire into a stone. I will seal it up. I will make the right effort.
I make the right effort and it makes me miserable. It rains every night, and every morning the sun breaks hot and relentless through the dissipating mist. “Good for the farmers,” Mr. Fantome t
ells me when I visit him in his garden, “good for all green growing things.” Everything swells wildly, and the forests glow eerily with gigantic ferns and luminous underbrush. In the midst of the rainy season, I write in my journal, I have driven myself into this dry scorched flat place. Desire has led me to this place where there is nothing to drink or eat. I do not know how to lead myself out. I have never been so unhappy.
Zurung
Leon invites me to his new posting in Yurung, a village in the Pema Gatshel valley. I stop at Pema Gatshel Junior High School on the way, but the kids have all gone home for the summer break. I leave a packet of letters and crayons for my former students and walk down to Gypsum, where I cross the river twice, thrice and begin to ascend to Yurung, except somehow, in the hot sun at the bottom of the valley, I have got turned around and I am actually walking back up the mountain to Pema Gatshel. A farmer sets me straight. Yurung, when I finally reach it, is the prettiest village I have seen yet. The houses are clustered close together, separated by low stone walls and bramble fences and kitchen gardens, and willow and cypress line the stream that rushes through the middle. I am relieved to be in a village again, I am relieved to be away from my articulate and unreasonable students. I am relieved to be away from the possibility of meeting Tshewang and the necessity of avoiding him, the laborious battle against my heart’s desire, but I cannot bring myself to tell this to Leon. I suspect that I do not want to be talked out of it for good. Somewhere in me, hope is hiding. “I don’t want to think about the Situation,” I say. “I just want to sit here on your front steps and watch the cows and chickens and the children. Don’t ask me anything, I don’t want to talk about it.”
The neighborhood women show up the next morning with bottles of arra to welcome me. The arra has been cooked with butter and fried eggs, which does little to make it more palatable. We sit on the kitchen floor, drinking, but I have forgotten too much Sharchhop to participate in the conversation. After several mornings and evenings with them, however, the language returns, and they attribute my increasing fluency to the potency of their brew.
I spend a good part of each day wandering through the village, up to the temple, down to the school, across to a ridge where I sit under the prayer flags, drinking in the green of the valley below, the flowing clean spaces around me, and I thank whatever force or god or karmic link has brought me here. Namé samé kadin chhé, thanks beyond the sky and the earth. This is the Bhutan that I love. It seems impossible here that heads can be cut off and left in jute sacks. And yet, I know it is wrong, dishonest to separate the two things, the splendor of rural Bhutan and the political situation. Bhutan is a real place, with a real history, in which real conflicts lead to real upheaval, the real suffering of real people. As much as I would like it to be, it is not a hidden valley.
I meet the teachers at Leon’s school, a mix of southern, eastern and northern Bhutanese, and Leon invites them back to his house for “Canadian drinks” one evening. In the flickering light of one candle stub, we mix up glasses of lemon squash and rum and hand them out. The teachers sip their drinks reluctantly, and adamantly refuse our offer of seconds. I think they are being polite until Leon lights more candles, and we see that we’ve given them mustard oil instead of rum.
We walk over to Tsebar, up to the ridge and along a mountaintop in the warm sunlight and down along a wooded slope. A thick mist squeezes its way through the trees, and the forest becomes eerie, all silent fog and shadow and hanging tangled dripping green. We are in Leech Forest. At first we stop to pull them off, but they drop from the trees and somersault off rocks, and for every one we remove, three more find their way on board, and finally we just run, clawing at branches and vines and gasping, until we are out again in a sunny meadow, where we sit and pluck them off and mop up blood with handkerchiefs. “They’re clever little buggers,” Leon says. “They release an anesthetic and an anti-coagulant when they latch on. You don’t even know they’re there.” In Tsebar, we have arra and bangchang with Jangchuk and Pema, and I try to imagine Jane waking up somewhere in England, knowing that Bhutan is impossibly far away. I try to imagine myself waking up in Canada, knowing that Bhutan is closed, finished, over, and the dark line of the mountains against the dawn, the million billion trillion stars in the bowl of the sky, the faces of my students, now a memory and a grief. Leaving will be like waking from a dream, I think, the most intense and wonderful dream, knowing you’ll never be able to dream it again.
The only way to avoid waking is to avoid leaving. I will not leave here until I have lived here thoroughly, until it seeps into me, into blood, bone, cell, until I am full of it and changed by it, and maybe not even then.
I tell this to Leon. He has just finished Kiss of the Spider Woman, and now he reads me the last line. “This dream is short but this dream is happy.”
But I want it to be more.
Boils
I am marking homework in the staff room one morning when Mr. Bose sits down beside me, clears his throat, and informs me that one of my trial-exam questions is “wrong.”
“What do you mean ‘wrong’?”
“That business about write the letter Lady Macbeth writes in the sleepwalking scene.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“What’s wrong with it!” He looks dangerously close to a stroke. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it! It’s not the kind of question they’ll get asked on their final exam! You are not preparing them for their final exam!”
“But the questions they get on their final exams are ridiculous. ‘Summarize Act I of the play.’ I don’t care if they can recite Act I from memory, I want them to have their own thoughts about the play.”
“Never mind their own thoughts about the play! Can they answer the final exam questions? That’s what you should be concerned about,” Mr. Bose says, wagging a finger. “I’m going to have to monitor your work.”
“Mr. Bose,” I say furiously, “never tell me how to teach my class again.” In a second, my anger destroys all the calm I have built up through a week of progressive meditation exercises. It breaks over me, and I indulge in it, can you believe the nerve of him, who does he think he is, etc., etc., until I feel thoroughly poisoned by it.
The sky weeps and wipes its face on the mountains. My legs break out in blisters and boils. The students tell me boils are caused by “impure blood,” and if you get one, you will get nine. I have had three so far. One of my students, Kumar, develops a strange skin condition and is hospitalized in Tashigang. His bed is in an open ward, and two of his classmates stay with him, sleeping on the floor beside the bed at night, bringing his meals and arguing with the doctor over his treatment. “These college students,” the doctor tells me wearily. “They think they know everything.”
Kumar’s face is thin and peaked. The rash makes his skin look like sandpaper. He says the hospital is not so bad, “except at night, miss, it is impossible to sleep. Everyone is groaning and praying.”
On the way out, I pass by a man sitting on the stairs. A large chunk of his leg is missing, and I can see the glimmer of bone at the base of the wound. He sits quietly, waiting for someone to come and tend to him. I had meant to ask a doctor about my boils, but they seem silly now.
Everyone has them. Another student, Tashi, holds a clean handkerchief over the large angry boil on his cheek throughout class. When I pass him in the hallway the next day, I do not recognize him. “It’s me, miss,” he says. “Tashi.” His face is swollen beyond recognition, and he has trouble speaking.
Early the next morning, the college peon knocks on my door with a notice. One of the students has died in the night, and all classes are canceled. I see a group of his classmates climbing up the embankment toward my house, and I know it was Tashi. They tell me the infection went to his brain; they took him to the hospital in Tashigang but it was too late. They wait while I put on a kira, and I follow them to the temple where Tashi’s body, covered in white scarves, is laid out beneath a white canvas canopy. The Dz
ongkha lopens are leading the prayers, a recitation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and two students sit by Tashi’s side. A plate of food has been placed beside him. His classmates will take turns sitting with him until his family arrives for the cremation. I sit with the students, the prayers rising and falling around me, and try to pray but I cry instead. “You should try not cry, ma’am,” Chhoden tells me, squeezing my hand. “We say that it makes it harder for the spirit to leave, if people cry.”
It takes Tashi’s family three days to make the journey from their village. For three days, his classmates continue their vigil in shifts, never leaving the body alone. Two of Tashi’s friends have to prepare the body for the cremation. This includes washing the body and breaking the bones to force it into a fetal position. The body is laid upon the pyre and covered with scarves and Tashi’s best gho. After a long prayer and many offerings to the corpse, the wood is lit. But the body does not burn properly, and the lama heading the ceremony says it is because of the spirit’s attachment to this world. Tashi’s classmates bring his flute and his paints from his room and cast them onto the fire, admonishing his spirit. “You’re dead now. See, all your things are gone. We don’t want you here. Go now.”
“How awful,” I say to Chhoden.
She shakes her head. “No, madam. We have to tell like that. If we show how much we loved him, his spirit won’t want to leave and then it will be stuck here. It has to know it’s dead.” She says some people know immediately that they are dead, but others just wander around, sitting down with their family to eat, wondering why no one will speak to them. “That’s why we leave food out near the body, so that the person will not feel so bad.”