Beyond the Sky and the Earth

by Jamie Zeppa

  Furniture

  I am boiling water for the filter and cleaning the kitchen when I hear Lorna walk through the front door. She is singing, “Why, why, why, Delila.” We meet in the back hallway. “Hi,” she says. “I’m pregnant. What’s up with you?”

  “Tshewang and I are in love.”

  We collapse on the floor, laughing. She tells me about Darren in Canada. “I had no idea when I left that I was pregnant,” she said. “Poor Darren. I sent him a letter. The kid’ll be in high school by the time he gets it.”

  “Are you going to have the baby here?”

  “No, I’ll finish up early and go home. Home! You know what this means, don’t you?”

  “No, what?”

  “Furniture! ” Lorna equates furniture with settling down. Her voice is grumpy but the happiness comes off her in waves. She makes me promise not to tell anyone, especially the field director. “He’ll pack me off home, and I want to stay as long as I possibly can.”

  “I won’t tell if you won’t,” I say.

  “I knew this would happen,” she says. “I mean you and Tshewang. I knew that day we saw him at Pala’s. Well, are you happy now?”

  “I don’t know, Lorna. I’m happy, all right. I’m ecstatic, except when I think of the future. We want to get married, but we don’t know if it’s even allowed. Tshewang has already told his parents about us, and says they are fully supportive, but of course there are a thousand other things to consider.” I go through the List of Unresolved Issues and Unanswerable Questions, and she throws in a few of her own. Cultural differences, conflicting expectations about marriage (she has observed that marital fidelity does not seem to be considered a great virtue in Bhutan), power imbalances caused by money, education, experience. “I don’t think Bhutan allows dual citizenship,” she says. “If he emigrates to Canada, he’ll have to give up his Bhutanese passport. And would you really be content to stay in Bhutan for the rest of your life?”

  I can’t say for certain about the rest of my life in any one place. After all, I only know two places, Canada and Bhutan. “I love Bhutan,” I tell her.

  “Yes, I know. I love Bhutan, too, but I know I couldn’t live here forever.”

  “Anyone can live anywhere,” I say.

  “For a time, sure. But I think part of the reason we love Bhutan so much is that it’s not permanent. We know we have a limited time here, that’s what makes it so precious. And it’s a difficult place to get to. Remember how you felt going home this winter, how you were so worried you wouldn’t get back? It’s one of those impossible places that everyone dreams about. The forbidden kingdom.”

  “That’s all true, Lorna, but it doesn’t really have anything to do with Tshewang. ”

  “I’m not questioning your feelings for Tshewang, but these things form the background of your relationship and you should think about them. ”

  I do think about all these things. They go around and around in my head in a whirlwind of fear and hope. I write lists, For the Future and Against, For the Relationship and Against, I have arguments in my head as different people, Ann Landers debates P. B. Shelley, my grandfather contends with Florentino Ariza. I thought Bhutan was all I would want, I tell Lorna. Just more time in Bhutan, enough time, until I was full up with it, saturated, satiated. I thought that would be the end of it, but it seems there is no end to wanting. Now there is a whole new desire. Now I want Tshewang.

  “Well, you have him,” Lorna says.

  “I have him now, yes, but I want him tomorrow and next year and the next. We want to have a future together. We want to have furniture.”

  “Why can’t you just be happy with what you have now and say goodbye when it’s time to leave?”

  Because I cannot bear the thought of that. Because the thought of never seeing him again paralyzes me with grief. It’s not that kind of love, and I’m not that kind of person, and it’s too late for that now, anyway “I want what I want,” I say. “And I don’t want to come to the end of my time here and say to Tshewang, ‘Well, sweetie, that was nice. Have a happy life.’ ”

  “Well, given the circumstances,” Lorna says, “and I don’t mean to discourage you, but given the circumstances, I think you should at least think about it.”

  I say that I will but I know that I won’t. I haven’t told her the other thing I want: a baby.

  I think of all the relationships and circumstances in which children can be conceived, and I think of Tshewang and me in our little room, the pure flame of our love and our time together, and I want a child to come out of it. There will never be another time like this.

  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 document 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 passionate intensity, the best lack all conviction.

  In a staff meeting, the principal 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 fo
r 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

  Tshewang 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 is coming down today. We have to be there early.”

  The thongdrel is a large religious scroll, usually of Guru Rimpoché, appliquéd 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,” Tshewang 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,” Tshewang says, “we’ll be in Tashigang in an hour,” but without light, it takes forever to feel our way down the hill. Tshewang 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,” Tshewang 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. Tshewang pulls me down into the grass 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 passes. After, laughing hysterically, we search for our things, finding everything except Tshewang’s underwear.

  Inside the dzong, the thongdrel is down, covering the entire wall of the temple; dozens of butter 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 hell 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.

  Tshewang 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 space 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 Tshewang 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, muffle, 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. Tshewang 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 principal sent the peon to call Tshewang from his hostel. I sat, frozen, in my seat. Tshewang was not in his hostel. I had left him, naked and asleep, in my house. The peon returned, shaking his head. “Tshewang 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 class and rush to the staff toilet, where I am violently but briefly sick. (Once, I stay home from class 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 Tshewang, 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. Tshewang 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,” Tshewang 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. Tshewang 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 unassailably 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 butterflies, 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, thorny 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 pass 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 pass, 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.