A Baby in a Backpack to Bhutan: An Australian Family in the Land of the Thunder Dragon

by Bunty Avieson

  Mal leads us through the gate to a spot where we can watch what’s going on. Five hundred pairs of eyes swing around to look at us. The faces break into huge grins. Mal and I never caused this sort of reaction on our own. It’s that glow-in-thedark baby again.

  We watch mesmerised for a few minutes then a mighty ear-splitting burst of thunder heralds that a storm is imminent. It is a feature of the topography and proximity to the mountains that as monsoon season approaches, every few days we are treated to massive, sudden storms. They are awe-inspiring.

  Dark clouds gather at the top of the mountains and either blow off in another direction or sweep on down the valley, bringing a wild angry electrical storm. Then it passes and the sky clears ready for another fabulous sunset.

  There is only one drawback to life in Bir – the telephones. The lines, when they are working, are fine for a chat but not good enough for the transmission of data, which means we can’t send or receive emails. To do that we have to go to the nearby town of Chauntra. It’s only four kilometres away but, like everywhere in India, the roads are so bad it takes about twenty minutes by rickshaw or taxi.

  It’s not much fun for Kathryn – bouncing in and out of potholes the size of small swimming pools – so every few days Mal takes both our computers and disappears for a few hours. And thank God he does. Otherwise we wouldn’t realise how close we are to certain death – by nuclear bomb, launched by Pakistan. Due any minute.

  It takes hysterical emails from Australia to alert us to this fact.

  ‘Alexander Downer said on tonight’s news that you have to come home now or he won’t be responsible for you!’ says one, making us wonder if the Foreign Minister had indeed gone on national television to personally warn Bunty, Mal and Kathryn.

  ‘We hear that there is a mass exodus out of India and no-one can get flights. How awful for you to be so trapped,’ said another.

  Trapped? Is she joking? I never want to leave this idyll.

  The Indian Express, our only window to the world outside Bir, has been keeping us up to date on the rising tensions in Kashmir, 100 kilometres up the road from here. But they reflect nothing of the hysteria that appears to have gripped the Australian newspapers. I gather they are running maps showing how much of the fallout from a nuclear bomb will reach different parts of Australia. My girlfriend in Adelaide sends me emails saying that she is beside herself with worry. We try to reconcile that image with what we are seeing around us.

  When we came to Bir two weeks ago we caught the overnight train from Delhi to Pathankot, the train station near the border of Pakistan. Soldiers are always milling about there on their way to and from the military camps. This trip through Pathankot was no different and security was about as lax as always. As we drove past the officers’ camp they were spending the morning enjoying a leisurely game of golf. If war was about to break out, they seemed remarkably sanguine. And the closer we got to the supposed ‘front’, the more peaceful it seemed to be.

  As for the people in Bir, they are delightfully unfussed. The biggest deal here is whether the electricity will hold out long enough to see the next World Cup match, when the monsoons will arrive, and how cheap the mangoes are as India is enjoying an unexpected glut. We may be close to Kashmir and Pakistan geographically, but we’re a thousand miles away in every other possible way.

  I decide that if the fallout maps are right and Australia would be so badly affected by a nuclear bomb detonated here, then what the hell. Why go home? We may as well stay here and enjoy the mangoes. I maintain this nonchalant attitude until a western doctor friend studying in Dharamsala comes for a visit one pleasant Tuesday afternoon.

  She tells us, over tea and biscuits in our office, that the war will start on Thursday. The way she says it, with such certainty, makes it sound like India and Pakistan have made a booking. Some friends in Dharamsala told her, she says. They have friends in the Pakistani military. It seems surreal, but she is adamant. First thing Thursday morning a cell from the Pakistan army will crawl over the border, deliberately provoking the Indian military into unleashing its nuclear bomb on Pakistan, who will send one straight back into India. It’s too late for us to leave. We’re all going to die. She smiles and takes another biscuit.

  After she leaves I express some misgivings to Mal, who rolls his eyes.

  ‘How is it that a western doctor knows the top-secret plans of the Pakistani military?’ he asks.

  Mmm.

  Thursday comes and goes and there is no tell-tale mushroom cloud over the monastery roofs to the west. It’s the same serene blue, going on forever. But I think I won’t really believe it until I read Friday’s newspaper, reporting on Thursday’s news, which we will get on Saturday. I scan it anxiously over my morning cup of tea. Not a mention. No-one nuked us on Thursday. I breathe a huge sigh of relief.

  Being here in Bir we see the different international reactions. The west claims the threat of war is very real and start pulling out non-essential staff from embassies and closing some of the international schools. The Indians are furious, saying it is an overreaction and undiplomatic. One Indian Government minister is highly indignant, claiming western minds just don’t understand the reality of the situation.

  ‘Don’t they realise it’s just bluster?’ he is quoted as saying.

  Thank you for the clarification.

  Meanwhile, for us, life goes on. A pair of Indian salesmen drive half a day from Chandigargh to come and talk solar panels with Mal. He wants to install them on the roof of Dzongsar Institute to power the hot water used in the new kitchen.

  They come for a meeting in our office. I hear them arrive and see across the door how formally they behave with Mal, bowing a lot, shaking his hand and handing him business cards. They are so businesslike and professional in their suits, despite the heat. Mal hasn’t shaved, but at least his T-shirt is clean. I take them tea and, in recognition of the important meeting, keep my head demurely bowed, just like a good Indian wife.

  They ask for sugar. Of course. Indians love their tea sweet – so achingly sweet it gives me lockjaw. Neither Mal nor I take sugar so I apologise profusely and race out to buy some, tucking Kathryn into her rocker beside them before I disappear down the hallway. There is a little Tibetan grocery shop a few doors up. The man pours a small pile of sugar – probably a couple of dessertspoons – from a large container onto a newspaper, then deftly wraps it. He waves away my money. We are regulars here, buying cold drinks and water each day, and he thinks this amount is too small to mention. He’s a good businessman. Competition must be keen as the shops on either side of him look identical and sell the same products.

  India’s emerging consumer class is a huge untapped market and is starting to be bombarded with products by all the multinational grocery companies. Most of the big-name brands available in Sydney can be found on the shelves of these small shops that are the size and shape of a single car garage. Fizzy drinks, shampoo and conditioner, baby formula, tinned sardines and tuna, washing powder, even jars of olives.

  I rejoin the men for their meeting, placing the sugar in a little jar in front of them. They use it all.

  Often I’ve gone along with Mal to source different building products and the Indian men have ignored me, refusing to make eye contact with me or even acknowledge I’m in the room. Such is the status of women. But these men, two brothers, are utterly charming. And they know their solar panels. They produce a photo album of successful projects they have completed, proudly showing us their pièce de résistance, the solar heating they installed for a swimming pool at an exclusive Indian girls school.

  They make the best ‘collectors’ in India, they say. That’s the black box that traps the sun’s heat, possibly the most crucial component of a good solar system. They are so passionate about their business that I can’t help but be enthralled. By the end of the meeting I’m agreeing that certain types of hoses are indeed ‘elegant’ and theirs are undoubtedly the best-looking ‘widgets’ I’ve ever seen.

>   The brothers and their handsome widgets live in a little factory on an industrial estate in the city of Chandigargh, 240 kilometres north of Delhi, where Mal and I stayed once when instead of catching the train from Delhi, we decided to drive overland to Bir. Chandigargh, designed in the 1950s by French architect and town planner Le Corbusier, is home to one of the wonders of the modern world, and I am excited to discover that these men are from that extraordinary city. They are equally as delighted to meet a fan.

  In the midst of the vast barren dust bowl that is India, Chandigargh contains a public park that almost defies belief. It is a garbage dump that has been turned into a surreal sculptural garden.

  While the new city was being built, amid much fanfare and excitement, a roads inspector quietly and systematically collected all the building refuse – broken tiles and glass, ceramic toilet bowls, bottles, rags, electrical fixtures, bits of crockery, car parts, plastic bangles and terracotta pots. On the back of his bicycle he carried what he had found and hid it in a disused wasteland on the outskirts of town. Unauthorised development of any kind was strictly illegal in the fancy new city, so secretly each night, by the light of burning tyres, he worked, recycling the garbage. He turned it into exotic creative sculptures.

  In 1972 a government party stumbled across the illegal development hidden in the forest. By then it was a fantasy garden of twenty-three acres or more, featuring almost 2000 sculptures ranging from small to life size and bigger – animals, people and deities, entire miniature villages, all set into the natural rocky labyrinth of the wasteland.

  Word spread and soon people were visiting from all over India and the world. Nek Chand, the uneducated and unassuming roads inspector, became a world-celebrated artist. He has had exhibitions in Paris, London, Berlin and Madrid, and donated over a hundred sculptures to the Capital Children’s Museum in Washington. He spent six months installing them and running workshops, sharing his vision for urban recycling. Nek Chand still lives at the site and is working on completing new, ever more ambitious sculptures.

  The day we visited, in March 2001, was so hot it felt like there wasn’t enough air to breathe, but we persevered, inspecting every inch of the fantasy world he had created from garbage. It seems to encapsulate my experience of India. Just when I am convinced I hate it and can stand no more poverty, dirt or sleazy advances, something wonderfully magic and unexpected will just bowl me over.

  It’s payday at the new labrang worksite and Mal strolls around with Kathryn on his chest and an umbrella over them both while I walk behind handing out sweets. I feel like a complete ponce, recreating some old black-and-white movie of the days of the Raj.

  The Indian workers crowd around to touch Kathryn and congratulate Mal. This group of a dozen or so women have worked on various projects for him over the past ten years, and their obvious delight at meeting his baby is lovely. There are lots of smiles and hands held in prayer, touching their forehead in blessing to us both.

  The women, the same ones we hear walking down the main street at 7 am on their way to the site, are covered neck to foot in beautiful vivid saris. They toss the dupatta (shawl) over their shoulder and out of their way to get down to work. And backbreaking work it is. Some carry piles of gravel on trays on their heads. Others work in pairs, one wielding a shovel of gravel and the other helping take its weight by an attached rope. They bring their lunch in tiffin boxes, small stainless-steel food containers stacked on top of each other.

  They work seven days a week and the end of each month is payday, when they finish early, cook a chicken or two and Mal provides alcohol for a party. They are paid about A$2.50 a day, which is the upper level for unskilled labour. Most of the women are married and their husbands work on their farms, or as skilled workers elsewhere.

  The most exciting day is when they pour the concrete, and Kathryn and I wander down to watch all the fun. After weeks of preparation (formwork, placing steel and laying plastic conduit for electrical cables), workers come from all over the valley to help. It is a bit like the scene in Witness when all the Amish men work together to build a barn. There is a real sense of camaraderie and co-operation here, as well as urgency. Once water is added to the cement powder, sand and gravel, and ground through the hand mixer, it doesn’t take long to set, particularly in this warm, dry weather.

  The Indians – men of all ages, dressed in shorts, some with impossibly skinny, bowed legs – twist their scarves into a cushion on their head and form a queue. They wait patiently, jostling each other and grinning. As soon as the first batch of concrete is ready they are off, holding out big tin cans or metal trays for the cement mixer to pile on sloppy, wet concrete. They hoist these onto their heads and, balancing them with one hand, make their way quickly and expertly up a series of bamboo ladders, along exposed beams to where it is needed. They dump it for the women to smooth into place, and file back, passing each other on the ladders. There must be fifty or sixty of them, pouring a few cubic metres of concrete.

  The women bring thermoses of sweet chai (tea) and share them out during a break, offering cups to Kathryn and me. At the end of the day, everyone is exhausted but the sense of satisfaction is contagious. What started out as a skeleton is beginning to look like the three-storey accommodation building that it will eventually become.

  While building progresses around her, and I finish off my book, Kathryn has been achieving her own significant milestones. She has discovered she can fit both feet into her mouth, hold her head up on her own and vocalise a string of sounds that could be anything. Possibly Swahili, maybe Tibetan – though the monks have no more idea what she is saying than we do, which makes that unlikely. It’s just baby babble, but all the same, we are ridiculously proud.

  Our time in Bir is up and we take her back to Sydney – happy to show off all her new tricks.

  4

  Men of Magic

  SEPTEMBER 2002

  Would Kathryn and I like to spend three months in Bhutan sleeping on the floor with twenty strangers whose names I can’t pronounce, while he disappears up a yak trail six hours away, not even accessible by carrier pigeon?

  Of course, Mal doesn’t put it quite like that. Not at first. He says Rinpoche is making a new movie, bigger and more sophisticated than The Cup and this time set in Bhutan. Mal and Raymond Steiner are again co-producers, which means Mal will have to spend three months there. He thinks he might be able to organise for Kathryn and I to stay with a lovely local family throughout the shoot. What do I think?

  Over a glass of chilled chardonnay on a balmy night in Sydney, with Kathryn clean, fed and asleep in her cot, it sounds impossibly exotic. We three survived India in a heatwave. Compared to that, surely, Bhutan will be a breeze.

  Mal adds a few more touches. While he works and lives in makeshift camps, knee deep in mud and filmset dramas, Kathryn and I would be comfortably ensconced with this family of six sisters, two of whom have married brothers, and all their extended offspring. There’ll be children for Kathryn to play with, people to help me look after her while I write, and Mal would visit every few days. All of this in one of the most mysterious countries of the world, Bhutan. Land of the Thunder Dragon.

  I know little of the country and yet something is ringing a faint bell. Wasn’t it the fabled Shangri-la of James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon? For some unknown reason my sixth-grade teacher gave that to me to read when I was just twelve years old. I’d been enthralled by the mysticism and magic. We could go there for three months? To that secretive little kingdom, bordered by India and Tibet, nestled among the clouds on the roof of the world, where time has stood still . . . when do we leave? I’m beside myself with excitement at the adventure of it all.

  Friends say how brave they think I am, in a tone that reveals they think no such thing. Clearly I’m suffering some sort of postnatal lunacy. One woman in my new mothercare group is outraged on Kathryn’s behalf. Fancy taking a little baby to one of the coldest regions of the world and, worse still, away from western
medicine. What if . . . ? Yes, indeed. What if all sorts of things happen, none of them good? Like, I’m not already waking in the middle of the night drenched in sweat at all the possibilities. But I figure this is part of the parenthood deal and while I know I’m new at it, I think it has little to do with geography.

  Our Kathryn is fit and healthy, with the sweetest disposition you could hope for, and, at just three months, she survived the rough and tumble of travelling in India. She is sooo much bigger now – seven months and thriving. I think it’s better for us to be together with her dad, under any conditions, than away from him. Travelling is part of Mal’s job and how we live our life. Spending three months in Bhutan sounds like a glorious opportunity. I think I would be crazy to say no.

  So it’s settled. We are going. Mal flies on ahead and we prepare to follow him in five weeks. Daddy-on-a-stick comes out of the drawer, Kathryn has more shots and I start searching for thermal babywear in Sydney in spring.

  u

  I don’t even make it onto the plane before Kathryn and I get into trouble, trapped in the huge revolving doors of Sydney Airport. It is a pivotal moment as, with a crashing thud, I realise that my old solo life has gone forever. Jetting around the world with a baby on my hip was never meant to be like this.

  I stand mute and helpless, Kathryn crying loudly, while I try to juggle her in her state-of-the-art travelling pram along with a trolley carrying a travel cot, the biggest suitcase I have ever owned (full of nappies, baby food, a Bamix and her thermal clothing), as well as an outrageous amount of hand luggage – a laptop computer plus her supplies for the next thirty-six hours. Inside the revolving doors all noise is muffled. It’s like being in a huge fish bowl. Everyone can see me but no-one comes to help. I feel waves of disapproval. Babies aren’t welcome here. It’s an airport, don’t you know?