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

by Bunty Avieson

  Mal and I move all his producer stuff into a spare bedroom and sit side by side on the mattress on the floor. Kathryn sits opposite us playing with her vast range of toys: an empty plastic container, thermos lid and spoons.

  All morning, sisters and maids rush past giggling, fussing around the verandah and lounge room and calling out to each other. Karma Yangki is wearing make-up (which is rare) and has a pretty pink shawl draped around her shoulders. Wesel Wangmo has donned a western-style dress I’ve not seen before, but the other sisters tease her so much she changes back into her everyday kira.

  Mal and I are served lunch early, just after 11, and the dishes are quickly cleared away. Outside we can see the maids and sisters gathered in the driveway, ready to greet the star, or the ‘hero’ as they call him. The Bhutanese video industry is small and relatively new. This actor stars in almost every production.

  Kicking myself that I have to leave in the middle of such showbiz excitement, Mal and I drive into town with Kathryn to buy new nappies. If it wasn’t that Kathryn is actually wearing the very last one of the 120 nappies I brought with me, there is no way we would be going anywhere. But this is about as close to an emergency as it gets so Mal, Kathryn and I take off in Phuntsho Wangmo’s little Maruti.

  Driving in Bhutan is fun. Beautiful scenery, lots of sweeping bends and a leisurely pace. And not so many rules. Kathryn doesn’t have to sit on her own, strapped into a baby seat in the back. There are no such things as baby seats or capsules here. Instead she sits up front on my knee watching the world go by. It’s a little nerve-wracking at first and I wrap my arms tightly around her in case we round a corner and meet a stray cow, but it is also much more entertaining. Whenever Mal changes gears she leans forward and copies him.

  At one point we’re forced to stop for a herd of cows in the middle of the road and groups of schoolchildren come up to the window to stare at Kathryn.

  When we reach the supermarket, I am delighted to find it’s well stocked. We buy enough supplies to fill the Maruti’s boot, including bottled mountain water, which we go through very quickly in this dry mountain air, and disposable nappies from Japan and Thailand.

  In the supermarket we bump into the only westerner I know in Thimphu – a kind New Zealand woman called Clare who was on my flight. She is the nearest thing to a guardian angel, having taken pity on me during the interminable delay in Kolkata Airport by buying me a cold beer and being gracious enough not to wince at the smell of vomit that surrounded me. She was travelling to Thimphu to meet her husband, who is on a project here with the Education Department.

  I probably spoke to her for just two hours at the airport, but am wildly excited to see her and hear how she is getting on. While the shopkeeper packs our purchases into cardboard boxes – no plastic bags here – we chat and laugh like long-lost friends.

  She is frustrated that after spending an hour typing an email at the local cybercafe, it all disappeared when she tried to send it. Apart from that little hiccup, she is having a lovely time. She and her husband have moved into a comfortable apartment in Thimphu, and while he has been away on brief trips out of town, Clare has been immersing herself in Thimphu life. We chatter away like excited schoolgirls, then go our separate ways, each happy to have found someone to marvel with about this amazing little country.

  I realise my excitement is partly because I’ve hardly seen another westerner since arriving here. The tourists who come to Bhutan tend to come in trekking season – autum or spring – and then spend little time in the capital. The few westerners I have seen have been wearing suits and either lunching with Bhutanese businessmen or walking with them in the street, looking purposeful.

  An extraordinary number of countries have business interests here. Japan sponsors road and agricultural projects. Germany is financing the restoration of an important dzong. Switzerland is helping train farmers in modern techniques. Denmark and Norway are involved in environmental schemes. Australia is involved in education, poultry, animal husbandry and study of the fruit fly. And so on. For a country with no significant global presence, it seems that a lot of countries are quietly volunteering their expertise to help in whatever way they can.

  We head back and find that the ‘hero’ and ‘heroine’ still haven’t arrived. There are some Jeeps outside the house and a couple of people with remote telephone handsets wandering around looking concerned. A woman sits on the verandah with a shoebox containing an eyelash curler, eye-shadow palette, brush and mirror. I guess she’s the make-up department.

  But the Taba household has given up waiting and gone back inside.

  Finally at 5 pm, after hours of pacing and anxious phone calls, the crew call it a day. They tell us the weather wasn’t good enough to film outside on the verandah. The real reason, the sisters tell us after they have gone, is that the heroine threw a wobbly – a star tantrum worthy of Hollywood. She didn’t ‘feel’ up to filming today, so while everyone else waited around, she declined to appear. The video-makers are too embarrassed to admit that to us foreigners, in case we think badly of the Bhutanese.

  In the evening the family go to the movies. There is a new Bhutanese video showing at Thimphu’s Lugor Cinema and it stars the heroine who didn’t turn up today. She is Bhutan’s hottest actress, starring in most Bhutanese videos. She auditioned for the lead female role in Rinpoche’s movie, but was passed over for Deki Yangzom, a beautiful but unknown, and completely inexperienced, young woman who works for the Royal Monetary Authority.

  The sisters ask us if we would like to have dinner served in Karma Yangki’s bedroom, where we can watch the TV. Another chance to watch the BBS news? You bet.

  So Mal, Kathryn and I take up the most popular position in the house – on the mat by the bed. The maids bring dinner, followed by sweet tea.

  After the BBS news, something is broadcast in Dzongkha. We don’t understand a word but enjoy the strip advertisements in English that run across the bottom of the screen in one long, endless stream: apartment to rent in Bumthang . . . regrettable warning about an interruption to the power supply in some remote regional areas ... job vacancies at the Royal Monetary Authority ... Punakha Dzongkhag announces vacancies for ‘a caretaker, sweeper, tractor driver and a ward boy’ . . .

  When the family returns, they give us their verdict on the movie. Thumbs down. It was about a monk who gets a girl pregnant. It was a mistake, yet he leaves the monkhood to marry her. But they aren’t in love. Then he gets drunk and sells her and the child. Silly story, says Phuntsho Wangmo. But the heroine was good.

  Hopefully the heroine will be in a more amenable mood tomorrow and the crew will be able to shoot her scenes at Taba. They don’t reappear the next day, or the one after, and by the end of the week, as life moves on and Mal heads back up the yak trail, we’ve just about forgotten them.

  The Taba house becomes the venue for a historic weekend in the middle of the month. It starts quietly enough, with the delivery on Friday morning of an enormous cardboard box. It’s carried into the house by the driver of the delivery truck, the two younger sisters, a visiting male cousin and the two maids.

  Whatever is in the box is heavy and the six of them struggle with it down the driveway to the front door. By the time I get up from the table and down the stairs to help, it is safely inside, standing on one end in the entrance foyer, and everyone has disappeared.

  A few hours later, after lunch, sisters Karma Chokyi and Wesel Wangmo appear upstairs and start rearranging the furniture in the formal lounge room, opening the padlocked door of the shrine room and carrying things through. Young men arrive and place squares of carpet on some of the couches.

  Karma Chokyi tells me that some people will be meeting here over the weekend, and they are getting ready for it. The way she says it, it doesn’t sound like such a big deal but I take my laptop to bed and try to keep out of their way.

  As the afternoon progresses, the tempo picks up, and by early evening the upstairs area is bustling. Half-a-dozen people are
hard at work. A young man nails to the walls Buddhist paintings of various deities. Carpets from the lounge room are placed around the edges of the shrine room. The dining table is covered with a red tablecloth and then, lined up on it, a dozen enormous beaten copper pots with individual burners. The dining area is being transformed into an elegant banquet hall.

  On the long table outside my bedroom a man sets up glasses and bottles of whisky, red wine and water, alongside Kathryn’s baby formula. I whisk it away, then retrieve her pram from beside the front door. This is starting to look very big.

  Phuntsho Wangmo and Tenzin Wangdi arrive after work, followed by Karma Yangki. They walk around the top floor inspecting everything, then disappear downstairs, deep in discussion. The maids place saucers with betel nut and lime leaves on low tables in front of each seat. Twelve places are set.

  Karma Chokyi tells me the meeting is expected to start at around 9 the following morning and will probably go on till 5 pm. They will be in the lounge room but Karma Yangki doesn’t want me to feel at all uncomfortable. I really should feel completely at home and come and go as I please, she insists.

  On Saturday morning breakfast is early and the two maids are clearly preoccupied. They bring me a plate of toasted carrot, cabbage and tuna sandwiches, then rush off, gossiping to each other and giggling. Their excitement is contagious.

  Determined not to be in the way, I eat quickly, have my bucket bath, forgo my warm fleecy trousers for a skirt and dig out the lipstick I know I packed, but haven’t used since I got here. I do one last check that nothing of Kathryn’s is on show anywhere and I’m back in my room by 8.30. There is a curtain across the bedroom door (as there is across every doorway in the house), which means I can leave the door open to hear everything, but stay discreetly tucked away.

  Nine o’clock comes and goes and there is no sign of anyone. While sounds of activity float up from below, all around the top floor is a reverberating, expectant silence. After half an hour I can’t stand it any more and venture downstairs.

  It is bedlam. Happy, noisy, bedlam. And yet everyone seems quite relaxed.

  The cardboard box that stood in the foyer yesterday has been moved into the living room and ripped apart. Emerging from its debris is one tall, freestanding tan-coloured two-door refrigerator – the finest one I have ever seen. The doors are still covered in their plastic wrapping, and Karma Yangki, Mani Dorji, Tenzin Wangdi and another man are putting an enormous trout in the vegetable crisper, then taking it out again, amid deep discussion.

  Karma Yangki wishes me a cheery good morning as I pass. I ask if the men are expected soon and she just shrugs.

  In the kitchen two new men, the sleeves of their ghos pushed up their muscular forearms, are working away beside the maids, who are giggling so much it’s a wonder they can stand. Wesel Wangmo introduces a third man, the chief cook for the day. He is one of Thimphu’s finest chefs, renowned for his haute cuisine, and has been hired for the weekend. He is gregarious and animated. In proud and near-perfect English he tells me the two maids are his helpers. They don’t understand what he is saying but continue to buzz around him, clearly in awe of this accomplished man and willing to slice and dice and anything else he might require.

  Pinned to the wall is the menu for the day. White rice, red rice, riverweed soup, pork fat with potato, emmadatshi (chilli with cheese), fried fish, beans, cauliflower, chilli beef, stewed yak, chicken, and more.

  I head back to my room and sit up in bed with my laptop.

  At 10.15 there is still no sign of the men. Karma Chokyi brings me a cup of tea and says, when I ask, that they will be here at about 11.

  I realise I’m the only one doing any clock watching. Time is one of those notions we treat so differently. None of the sisters wears a watch and they don’t refer to times in conversation, unless asked. Instead they leave such things vague and open-ended. Yet they manage to be on time when they need to be – for a movie or to catch an aeroplane. It’s a mystery to me.

  Karma Yangki drops by my room a quarter of an hour later and, in the same conversation, tells me two different times

  – 11.30 and 12.30. She doesn’t seem to notice. Phuntsho Wangmo comes by and says definitely 12.15. Karma Chokyi still thinks 11.

  At around midday I hear Karma Yangki and Phuntsho Wangmo laughing together at the top of the stairs, about the cook. Apparently he’s complaining that the Bhutanese are always very late. With great indignation, he is telling anyone who will listen that foreigners are sooo much better to cook for because they always arrive exactly on time. These men are on Bhutanese time, the sisters tell me, laughing again. They are clearly not the least bit fussed.

  Finally, between 1 and 1.30 pm, they arrive – twelve of Bhutan’s most eminent and learned scholars, comprising the royally appointed Dzongkha Committee. It turns out that this weekend’s ‘meeting’ is a conference, the culmination of years of work developing the national language.

  The committee includes a judge, the head of the Royal Advisory Council, the Director of Education, a doctor of traditional medicine and host, Mani Dorji. As owner of the largest private printing press in the country, he will be the dictionary’s publisher. What they decide in the course of today and tomorrow will become fact and linguistic law for the whole kingdom.

  In this country of less than a million people there are three official languages (English, Dzongkha and Nepalese) plus dozens of dialects, none of which have a written form. Many villages are so isolated and their dialects so diverse that much of the country doesn’t understand each other. The language my adopted family speaks, Sharchop, is spoken in villages in the east. The Sharchop people are recognised as the original inhabitants of Bhutan and many have moved west to Thimphu.

  As part of his vision to unify his kingdom, the previous king decided that a national language was needed. He chose Dzongkha, spoken by about a quarter of the population. The language had no written form so the first step was to create an alphabet and a style. Taking the Tibetan script that is used in Bhutanese monasteries, the Dzongkha script was developed. Some say it is the same as Tibetan, others insist it is more elegant. The official dictionary, to be finalised this weekend, is another step in the language process. It will provide the definitive guide to everything Dzongkha.

  The men look wonderfully dignified and important, each one dresssed in the traditional gho. But as this is a gathering in Mani Dorji’s home rather than an official state occasion, they aren’t wearing the kabney, a three-metre long, ninety-centimetre-wide scarf draped over one shoulder and tied, just so. And because it isn’t winter yet – that starts officially sometime in December, when the monks move to lower ground

  – the men all sport bare legs and long socks. Once the monks make their annual migration to Punakha (a village three hours’ drive away and a lot warmer), the men of Thimphu can cover their legs, wearing tights or thermal long johns, much like I have on under my long woollen skirt, along with my thick woollen socks. I wonder how cold all those bare knees must be.

  On the low tables in front of each man is the saucer of lime and betel nut, a china mug with sweet tea and a lid, and a thick red A4 folder full of words elegantly drawn in script, ready for their deliberations.

  Karma Yangki tells me again that I am welcome to join the men at any time. Much as I would love to be a fly on the wall, I can’t imagine I would be much help with a Dzongkha dictionary. (I’m not sure I would be much help on an English one, for that matter.)

  Phuntsho Wangmo tells me that it’s a shame they aren’t talking in English because I would find it very interesting. I insist I’m not feeling at all left out, that I understand that if they are doing a dictionary of Dzongkha, it makes sense for them to conduct their discussions in Dzongkha.

  She then asks if I would take photos of the occasion. I’m no photographer but would feel rather impolite admitting that right now, so instead I check my lipstick, make sure my thermal-covered ankles aren’t visible, grab my camera and timidly venture in. M
eetings in boardrooms with people called Packer had nothing on this. I feel I am witnessing something akin to our forefathers writing the constitution. I just hope I can stop trembling enough to focus the camera.

  Fortunately I’m greeted by a kind-faced man I recognise, who immediately puts me at ease. He is Lungtaen Gyatsho, one of those charismatic men who appeared in the magic-school scene of Rinpoche’s movie. He played the teacher, and ensuring his availability was crucial in the scheduling of the film.

  When Mal worked out the shooting schedule he had to work around three fixed dates: the rice harvest in Paro Valley, the school exams of a fifteen-year-old student who plays one of the leads, and the diary of this very important man. As well as chairing the Dzongkha Committee, Lungtaen Gyatsho is involved in drafting the kingdom’s first constitution. Dressed in robes, he is bald and portly, with a square face, tinted wire-rimmed glasses and a goatee.

  While I wait, camera at the ready, he makes a short speech. I understand a few words – writer, Australia, husband, Rinpoche, photo, which pretty much explains why I am standing in their midst – and I nod every time I recognise a word.

  I write novels in Australia. My ‘husband’ is producer of Rinpoche’s new film. And I am about to take their photo.

  The men respond with huge smiles and nods. I suspect that has more to do with their respect for Rinpoche and the huge interest in his film than me, my job or nationality – given that they don’t have fiction writers and little from Australia makes the 7 o’clock BBS news.

  As I happily record this slice of Bhutanese history, moving around the room photographing each man, the reactions range from stern-faced and proud to grinning down the lens. One man says he has to show his teeth then flashes a huge smile. I tell him he has great teeth and he laughs with delight. Snap. Another gentleman strikes a pose of grave dignity, holding it so rigidly, not even a hair would dare to move. Snap.

  Photos taken, I shuffle my way out the door, part-bowing, part-genuflecting, back to my bedroom, leaving them to get on with the important stuff. I’m sure this isn’t how the Oxford Dictionary was written, but there you go. The Bhutanese do everything in their own delightful way.