Beyond The Sky And The Earth Part 14

A week later, at a puja at the old lhakhang above the college, I stand in line behind mothers who have come to ask a visiting lama for blessings and names for their babies. The lama is a young man with a spiky haircut and John Lennon gla.s.ses, but the women in the line a.s.sure me that he is a very important Rimpoche. And he knows English, they tell me, so I am very lucky. I watch as he touches the forehead of each child, pausing to think of a name. When it is my turn, I prostrate and explain what I want. The lama says that to become a Buddhist, I must take refuge vows. "You take refuge in the Three Jewels," he says, "the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha-the Buddha, his teachings, and the religious community." He explains that taking refuge is the first step to Buddhist practice; you acknowledge that refuge cannot be found in worldly things, all of which are impermanent and incapable of leading to true liberation, and that Buddhism is your true spiritual home. It does not mean you give up living in the world and go into a monastery, the lama explains. That is the path for some people, yes, but every person has their own path. When you take the refuge vows, you commit yourself to following the Buddhist path in your daily life. You endeavor to practice nonharming in body, speech and mind, you endeavor to follow the n.o.ble Eightfold Path.

From his briefcase, he takes a little booklet which explains the vows and the refuge prayer, and on the cover he prints a Buddhist name: Kunzang Drolma. Kunzang Kunzang means "all good," and means "all good," and Drolma Drolma is the Bhutanese name for Tara, the G.o.ddess of compa.s.sion. is the Bhutanese name for Tara, the G.o.ddess of compa.s.sion.

Later that afternoon, Nima helps me set up an altar on the mantle in my sitting room. In front of pictures of the Buddha and Guru Rimpoche, he puts seven small silver bowls, which he fills with water.

"We offer water because even the poorest farmer can afford to offer it," he explains. "But in our minds, we imagine that we are offering food, water for drinking and water for was.h.i.+ng, flowers, incense, light, and perfumed oils." I must fill the water cups every morning and empty them before nightfall, he says, as an offering to the G.o.ds and to all sentient beings. Then he shows me how to twist cotton batten into a wick for the b.u.t.ter lamp. When he is gone, I sit cross-legged in front of the altar and watch the flame burning steady and strong above the little lamp until my mind feels quiet. I am grateful that I could take the refuge vows outside such an old and sacred temple with a Bhutanese lama who could speak English. It is apt and beautiful and undoubtedly auspicious, but the small ceremony was only a reinforcement of the powerful experience I had in meditation. In the same way that marriage vows are not the marriage, the refuge ceremony is not the practice. The practice is the practice, I think. For the rest of my life. On a small card on the altar, I have copied a verse from the Buddhist canon: "Mindfulness is the abode of eternal life, thoughtlessness the abode of death. Those who are mindful do not die. The thoughtless are as if dead already."

A Flux of Light

Perhaps enough time has pa.s.sed. Perhaps it is safe now to talk. By some mutual unspoken agreement, we approach each other again, cautiously at first, shyly, exchanging neutral greetings, but within a few weeks we are back to our old rus.h.i.+ng conversations, and with the conversations, the same old desire rises. We never mention the night of the jam session, but nothing has changed between us. I see him outside the office, waiting for the mail, or with his big blue mug and a book, on his way to the student mess for tea. "Miss, have you read that Marquez story about the sea of lost time?" he calls out, or "Miss, what's the oldest language in the world?" And I say yes, or I don't know, and we stand there, in the hall or on the lawn, and I feel the college buildings shrink around us, bells and voices echoing dimly. I always tell him more than I mean to, whole pa.s.sages of my life come spilling out. He listens and then from inside his gho, he pulls out small presents: a feather, a picture of white Tara, a mango, definitions copied neatly onto pieces of paper: aleatory aleatory-dependingon random choice; a lumen is a unit of flux of light; infrangible-unbreakable.

There is no privacy, no place or time to talk alone. I do not invite him to my house and he does not come on his own. We rely on these meetings in open corridors, trying to finish one last thought before the bell rings. They are not always happy or satisfying conversations. On the subject of the Situation, for example, we end up talking in circles, which Tshew.a.n.g says proves his point, his point being that there is no point in talking about it.

"Anyway," he tells me, "I hate talking about politics with you. I haven't read what you've read. I haven't been where you've been. You always argue me into a wall, and I can never be right."

"That's not true," I say, hurt. But I fear it is. We bring too much with us into these conversations, it seems impossible to make a statement that is free of our separate pasts and upbringings and political cultures. My arguments arise from a culture that has named its own values as the highest aspirations of humanity. The fact that governments and corporations and individuals pay lip service to these values, the fact that there are grave inequalities and injustices and abuses of every sort in Western society, does not stop us-me-from pontificating in other places.

No, they are not always easy conversations, but each one adds to the ground we stand on together. In the evenings, I fall into dark fits of despair, asking myself where this can possibly go. It can't go anywhere, I tell myself. Scalar Scalar-having magnitude but not direction. Then I wonder if I just shouldn't give in and let it happen. Perhaps one night would quench this awful desire and then we could be free of it ... no, no, no. One night would not be enough, and it is not one night that I want. Throw out those little sc.r.a.ps of paper, I tell myself. What you want is impossible. Then I wonder if I just shouldn't give in and let it happen. Perhaps one night would quench this awful desire and then we could be free of it ... no, no, no. One night would not be enough, and it is not one night that I want. Throw out those little sc.r.a.ps of paper, I tell myself. What you want is impossible.

Nima has decided to leave secular school after cla.s.s XII and go to a Buddhist college in southern India, where he will become a monk. His mother, he says, is disappointed, but he has his father's blessing. "You know, miss, in Buddhism, we say that life is like housekeeping in a dream. We may get a lot done, but in the end we wake up and what does it come to, all that effort? I want to study what is really important."

"Are you sure about this, Nima?" I ask, thinking of the rigorous monastic discipline, the long periods of isolation from his family and friends.

He pulls out a book from his gho, A Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life, A Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life, and reads me a quote: and reads me a quote: Suppose someone should wake from a dream In which he experienced one hundred years of happiness, And suppose another should waken from a dream In which he experienced just one moment of happiness....

"It's the same, isn't it, miss? One hundred years or just one moment. It's still a dream."

I can do nothing but nod. He is many lifetimes ahead of me in wisdom and maturity, and in my heart, I bow to him as my teacher.

We go to the temple one afternoon, bringing offerings of incense and vegetable oil for the b.u.t.ter lamps. A long-haired gomchen opens the door and we leave our shoes outside and enter the main room. The floor is cold beneath us as we prostrate in front of the altar on which a single b.u.t.ter lamp burns before a statue of Guru Rimpoche. We pause to look at the paintings on the wall, and Nima points out the six realms of existence in the wheel of life. The realms form the continuum of cyclical life, and rebirth in the worlds of G.o.ds, demi-G.o.ds, humans, animals, hungry ghosts, or h.e.l.l, occurs in accordance with one's karma. Buddhist h.e.l.l is remarkably similar to the Christian one, with its hot and cold tortures, except that it is not forever. Beings reborn in the h.e.l.l realm remain until they have exhausted their negative karma. The hungry ghosts have stick arms and legs, stomachs grotesquely swollen with hunger, and twisted, knotted necks that do not permit them to swallow. They remind me of dieters in the West.

I do not believe in separate h.e.l.l realms, I tell Nima. There are enough horrors right here on earth. "But what about these G.o.ds and demiG.o.ds?" I ask. "They look very happy."

Nima nods. "They are happy for now, miss. Their world is very beautiful and pleasant, but they have not escaped cyclic existence, and sooner or later, they will use up their good karma and will be reborn in one of the lower realms. "

I notice a black door off to the side painted with white skulls, and ask Nima if we can go in there. He says he can but I cannot. The room houses the temple's guardian deity, and women are not allowed to go in. The gomchen asks if we would like our fortunes told. Nima takes a pair of dice from a bra.s.s tray and holds them against his forehead briefly before throwing them down. The lama looks up the answer in a book and reads it aloud. Nima seems pleased. Now it is my turn, and I take the dice and look at Nima for help. "You have to think of a wish or a question," he says. I touch the dice to my forehead and drop them onto the tray. The lama reads out the answer.

"What you want will be very difficult," Nima translates. "Things will work out, but not in the way you expect."

On the way back down the hill, Nima tells me he asked about his spiritual training in India. "The answer was very positive. And miss, I know what you wished for. You wished to stay in Bhutan, isn't it?"

"Sort of," I say. Out of the starry cl.u.s.ter of wishes and questions that filled my head when I picked up the dice, only Tshew.a.n.g's face remains clear now.

The students bring news of planned demonstrations in southern Bhutan. Arun comes to ask if I think he should go ... down ... to join the others, the demonstrators.

I say no. I don't want him to be hurt, trampled, run over, arrested, kidnapped, beaten up, shot, his head cut off and left in a sack. I don't want him to disappear. I don't want to lose any of them. I want them to stay here. All of them, north and south, the combination and the contradiction. I want them all to stay right here and make a final effort to talk to each other, to fight the real enemy, which is mutual mistrust and rhetoric, to find what they still hold in common beneath the cant.

I remember a verse from the Buddhist canon: Not at any time are Not at any time are enmities appeased through enmity but they are appeased through non-enmity. This is the eternal law. enmities appeased through enmity but they are appeased through non-enmity. This is the eternal law.

The Kuensel Kuensel reports that armed anti-nationals swept through the southern villages, rounding up people and forcing women and children to walk in front. The demonstrators grew violent, the paper reports, but the Bhutanese security forces were under orders not to fire. The crowds converged on district headquarters, stripping people of their national dress and burning office records. The militants ordered letters of their demands be carried to the central government. The contents of these letters are not reprinted. reports that armed anti-nationals swept through the southern villages, rounding up people and forcing women and children to walk in front. The demonstrators grew violent, the paper reports, but the Bhutanese security forces were under orders not to fire. The crowds converged on district headquarters, stripping people of their national dress and burning office records. The militants ordered letters of their demands be carried to the central government. The contents of these letters are not reprinted.

Arun has not gone to join the demonstrators. "It could have been solved without this," he says. "If the government would only listen to what we are saying. If only they didn't make it a crime to say that we want something else. Personally, ma'am, I don't want a separate country for the southern Bhutanese, and none of my friends do, either. That's a ridiculous idea. But we don't want things to go on as they are, either. We're educated, we want our rights. We want to be able to say what we really want. And to be who we are. We are also part of Bhutan, isn't it. But they make it so that we can only be Bhutanese if we turn into them and even then we aren't real Bhutanese. It was okay before, when we only had to wear national dress in school and at office. Some of my friends say no, we shouldn't have to wear it at all, but I didn't mind. Then they made it the law and now I hate wearing it. Now just see how it has turned. After this, they will be completely right and we will all be criminals."

"I think it can still be solved, Arun."

"No, madam." His voice is hard and certain and very bitter. "This problem will never be solved."

After he leaves, I pull on shoes and run out of the house, up the driveway behind the staff quarters to the main road. The sky is dark and swollen. Lightning splits open a cloud and I am drenched in rain and sorrow. I am afraid that Arun's prediction will come true. I stand under the eaves of a shop, wiping water and tears from my face.

At a jam session to celebrate the end of the school term, Tshew.a.n.g and I dance together once, and then sit outside on a bench behind the student mess. Whenever the music inside stops, we can hear the winter wind roaming wildly in the valley below us.

"What will you do in Canada?" he asks.

"See my family and friends. Go to bookstores, see movies, eat."

"You won't want to come back, maybe."

"No, I'll want to come back."

"I'll miss you," he says, looking elsewhere. In the weak yellow light of the overhead bulb, I study his profile, thinking how much I like him, his quick energy and wit and the thoughtfulness underneath. I know if I said, come back to my house with me, he would come. The burden of keeping silent is killing me. It is the only thing keeping me safe. I lean over and kiss his cheek. "Goodbye, Tshew.a.n.g." He turns and we kiss again, a brief, shy, utterly delightful kiss. "Goodbye, miss."

I walk home alone, the sky full of stars, the night full of the smallest sounds, my whole self full of longing and sorrow that run clean and clear, a dark, quiet river over broken stone.

Return

Ahi-lux has been sent to Tas.h.i.+gang to take the Canadian teachers to Thimphu at the start of the winter break. After we load our luggage into the back, we go to the Puen Soom for a last cup of tea with Karma. "Today not good for travel," he tells us. "Today is the Meeting of Nine Evils. Better you stay and go tomorrow."

"My students told me the same thing," I say. So did Kevin's; so did everyone's. Many years ago, the story goes, a man and a woman met at a crossroads. Unaware that they were actually a brother and sister who had been separated in infancy, they fell in love, and when they consummated their relations.h.i.+p, the nine evils descended upon them. No one could tell me exactly what the nine evils were, but everypne had warned me to stay at home in order to avoid them. We look at each other, wondering, and then Kevin says no, we have to go today, let's not be silly about this. "Maybe the Nine Evils won't bother phillingpa," Kevin tells Karma as we climb into the truck. Karma looks doubtful.

The truck roars out of town and breaks down just outside of Tas.h.i.+gang. The driver climbs out, cranks open the hood and bangs something, and the engine grumbles to life. This happens more times than I care to count, and we spend much of the first day sitting at the roadside, while the driver hammers away under the engine hood and curses. Finally, between Mongar and b.u.mthang, hours away from either, the truck chokes to a halt and the driver opens the hood, peers in, and closes it. "No chance," he says. "Engine is gone now." We are stranded. A pa.s.sing flatbed stops and we pile our luggage and ourselves onto the back. There is something wrong with the flatbed's engine as well, and it cannot go faster than fifteen kilometers an hour. The low-lux, we call it. It chokes and wheezes the endless way up to Trumseng-La, desolate with mist and snow and black ice. We huddle together, hungry and weary, wrapped in sleeping bags that feel like cellophane against the gnawing cold, and a quarrel breaks out over the use of the word "f.u.c.k" and whether freezing in the back of a f.u.c.king flatbed at four thousand meters above f.u.c.king sea level with at least six hours more in the company of a bunch of f.u.c.king uptight teachers is justification for using it in every f.u.c.king sentence, and then a jerry can of kerosene breaks open and seeps into the luggage, and someone cries out, "My silk weavings!" and someone else says, "My down sleeping bag! " and someone else says it is the Nine Evils, and everyone else says don't be ridiculous, but it is what we are all thinking. We were warned, why didn't we listen.

I close my eyes and think of the journey ahead, from Paro to Delhi to London to Toronto. I am vaguely afraid to leave Bhutan, afraid that the magic doors will snap shut and I will be on the wrong side. I am afraid that I will not find my way back. It is irrational, I know: I have extended my contract for another year, I have a return ticket, I have a visa for Bhutan in my pa.s.sport, but still.

Lorna has also extended her contract. I ask her if she ever worries that something will happen and she might not get back. She tells me I am crazy.

"I can't imagine going home," I say. "I mean finis.h.i.+ng here, and leaving for good."

"But you'll have to go home someday," Lorna says. "You can't live here forever."

I don't see why not.

When we get to Thimphu, we find that something has indeed happened: WUSC has declared bankruptcy and the program in Bhutan will begin to close down. We can all come back and finish our contract extensions, but no new teachers will be recruited under the program.

At home, everything is glossy and polished and unreal: gla.s.sfronted shops, tinsel-bedecked displays, people's faces, all gleaming facades. In people's houses, I am overwhelmed by the number of things things. I miss out large parts of the conversation because I am lost in looking at ornaments jostling for room on shelves, walls covered with hundreds of pictures, posters, calendars, clocks, decorative plates. Everywhere I look there is some thing thing to look at. My eyes are constantly dragged away. to look at. My eyes are constantly dragged away.

"Sorry, what?" I say. "Pardon?"

Television is incomprehensible. The images fly out of the screen too fast, faces phrases whole lives flash and pa.s.s and I let them; ten minutes of television exhausts me for hours. In my aunt's house, the television is always on, and it is unbearable. Come for dinner, they say, and I do, and we sit with our plates in our laps in front of the TV, my uncle clicking from channel to channel, nothing on he says but he does not turn it off.

Outside, I am shaken by the traffic, the rush, the speed at which people walk, excuse me, pardon me, are you getting on that escalator or are you just going to stand there blocking my way? An interminable line of cars on the highway, all going in the same direction, all carrying one person. I think of the gasoline consumed, the carbon monoxide produced, the money spent, the utter waste of it, one car for one person. When I suggest to my cousin that we take the bus downtown, she raises her eyebrows at me. "I don't take the bus bus," she says.

The number of stores is overwhelming, the number of things being bought and sold, things that people don't need and don't even seem to want all that much but for some reason have to have. I have never taken an economics course in my life, but after Bhutan, it is clear that this economy is not sustainable or sane. It is completely out of control, and the political prattle that links the family and democracy and small-town values to the anonymous forces of the Almighty Market is utterly absurd.

I do not do any of the things I thought I would do, go to an art gallery, the theater, a dozen movies. I meet Robert for a beer; not unexpectedly, we find we have very little to say to each other, and are both relieved when our gla.s.ses are empty and we can murmur polite wishes for a happy Christmas/life. I do the obligatory round of family visits: father in Toronto, mother and grandfather in Sault Ste. Marie, various relatives in between. I wake up tired and wander around the house, unable to breathe properly with hot stale air blasting out of the vents and all the windows sealed against the winter outside. My family's questions about Bhutan are impossible to answer. Bet you're glad to be back, aren't you? They have toilet paper in the Third World? What the h.e.l.l do they use, then? Did you see our new car/electric can opener/waterbed/porcelain Dalmatian wine rack? Can you get anything like that over there? What do you do for entertainment? Thanks for the pictures you sent, geez the people sure are poor over there, aren't they? Sure makes you glad you were born here, doesn't it? Really makes you appreciate what you have, doesn't it?

I feel that I have changed and changed and changed, like Ulysses's s.h.i.+p changed one part at a time until every part had been replaced. It seems strange that after two years, everyone here is still talking about the same things, this aunt still not talking to that niece, that niece still saving up for a Corvette, cousin Bill and his wife are thinking about going to this new beach they opened up in Florida, someplace different, we went out to that new mall they got in Edmonton, the world's biggest mall, they got everything under the sun in there, hotels, swimming pools, skating rink, you name it they got it, Mary got married and you shoulda seen her dress, cost her somewhere up around four thousand dollars, the whole wedding must have set them back fifteen, twenty thousand but what the hey, his old man's loaded.

I tell people that I have become a Buddhist, and the responses are mixed. A few friends express concern, wondering if I am not taking this Bhutan thing a little too far; my brother is interested, and borrows my Dharma books; my parents are accepting, although my mother looks a little sad. My grandfather, however, is hostile to the idea. "You better not become a Buddhist," he says whenever the topic of religion comes up.

"It's more a philosophy than a religion," I tell him. "It has the same ethical rules as Christianity. It's not as foreign as you might think."

He says he doesn't want to hear about it.

People complain endlessly. The government this and the government that, the cost of everything, inflation, unemployment, taxes. Five minutes ago, they were telling me how lucky we are to have been born here, we have so much, we should be grateful, but they are not. What would it take to make you happy, I want to ask, but I think they do not know. A small dose of Buddhism would go a long way here.

A friend tells me how awful his mother is, she just doesn't understand him, she doesn't try to communicate with him. She always wants something from him that he just can't give. She never hugs him. "But your mother is seventy," I say. "She's from a whole other generation. They didn't hug back then."

No, that's not it, he says. It's not that she doesn't love him, it's not that she abused him or mistreated him, it's not that she was an alcoholic or anything like that. Then what is it? I ask. I am seeing it from the Bhutanese point of view: your mother raises you, she does her best, she's not perfect but it's hard to raise a child, and her mistakes arise out of the same ignorance that yours do. But this sounds hopelessly archaic and wrong when I say it, and my friend looks at me oddly and changes the subject.

I am shocked at the sheer number of claims and trivial objections and why-should-I's. Why should I give up a whole Sat.u.r.day afternoon to help her move when she can hire movers. Why should I look after his cat. Why should I give her half of the furniture. In Bhutan, I often felt frustrated by the absence of questioning, and constrained by the strong social mores. In Bhutan, you should because everyone else does. You should because that's the way it has always been done. You should because if you don't, you will be criticized, perhaps ostracized, and ostracism is dangerous in a village. Here, I feel equally frustrated by the whining and the self-absorption. I can see the advantages of the mind-set in Bhutan, the cohesiveness it generates, the social security net, and the disadvantages as well, the fear of critical questioning, the rigidity that stifles creativity.

It is the same with privacy. It is a relief in some ways to walk down Yonge Street thinking, "Not a single person here knows who I am and no one will ask me where I am going and why and when I will come back." But it is also frightening. If something happened, if I were attacked, or if I suddenly blacked out right here in front of this shoe store, would people continue to walk past, eyes frozen on some unattainable point in the distance? In Bhutan, the lack of privacy could infuriate me, but I always felt safe. Bhutan does not cultivate serial killers: people live too closely together, their lives are too interconnected for such atrocities to grow unnoticed and unchecked.

It seems to me that the two worlds represent extremes in many ways. Extreme individualism and extreme social conformity. Extreme privacy and extreme communalism. On one hand, a society of too many freedoms; on the other, too many constraints. My Canadian friend complaining vaguely that his mother doesn't understand him, and one of my students sobbing as she left college and her quiet, artistic boyfriend to marry a rough, domineering man twenty years her senior, because her parents said she had to and she dared not contradict them. I wonder where in the world it would be possible to have the ideal, a middle way, a balance between individuality and responsibility to the larger community. Easily named, of course, but I cannot begin to imagine where to achieve it.

What appeals to me most strongly about Bhutan is that daily life still makes sense. It runs on a comprehensible scale. A small farm with a few cows, a few chickens, a kitchen garden, a few cash crops, and the family has a place to live, food to eat. The mountains still have their forests intact, which means few floods, little soil erosion and enough fuelwood and timber for the small population. Small things still make a difference: a pipe to bring clean water down to a village, a basic health unit offering vaccinations and prenatal care.

Sometimes, when I am describing a typical Bhutanese village, people sigh and say oh how lovely. They want to believe in the Bhutan I used to believe in, a lost world in the mists of time, the fairy-tale place I first imagined two years ago, looking at black-and-white pictures in the library. But fairy tales don't have villages without a clean water supply, or four-year-olds dying of dysentery or tuberculosis. People don't want to hear this. Nor do they want to hear my criticisms of life in Canada. Everyone wants a cleaner, simpler, safer, saner world but no one wants to give up anything. No one wants to take the bus.

My grandfather is upset that I am going back. "You can't tell me that life is better over there," he says. "I saw those pictures you sent."

"But it is better in some some ways," I say. It is safer, it is smaller, it is more real. ways," I say. It is safer, it is smaller, it is more real.

"They don't have anything," he says.

"They have what they need."

He shakes his head. "I just don't understand why you're going back," he says. "After all, it's not like you're not getting anything out of it."

Even with friends, it is difficult. They talk about their work, their plans, academic conferences, the split in the department. I sit politely at the edge of the conversation, and when it is my turn to talk, about Bhutan, my work, my students, I tell too much or not enough, and it is impossible to explain my love for the place, and how it has changed me utterly. Everyone seems sharp, impatient, aggressive, cynical, all raised eyebrows and ironic smiles.

I feel slow. I think slowly, I talk slowly, I react slowly. In the blur and rush of everything around me, I am more mindful. The mindfulness has grown quietly and surely, perhaps more a result of my slow, spa.r.s.e environment in Kanglung than my own efforts. I can see how it would evaporate here without a consistent daily practice.

I scan the horizon from every window: grey city, frozen sky, smoke stacks belching yellow smog. I close my eyes and I can see the mountains from my window in Kanglung, the first pale light entering the valley, a raven circling a chorten. I count the days until I can go home, and there are too many so I call the airline and change the date of my return.

The world seems smaller on the return trip, through transit lounges and security checks from Toronto to India, and then into the deep, forested valleys of Bhutan. Here are the mountains in their bleached winter raiment still rising to meet the sky, the calm streets of Thimphu, the quiet fields and forests, the prayer flags adrift in the air that smells of pine trees in sunlight, the strings of dried red chilies hanging from the eaves of mud and wood houses, here are the roofs s.h.i.+ngled with wooden slats held down with white stones from the river, here are the haystacks and cowherds and the calling of crows, here I am, home again, home.

I unpack my luggage in the Thimphu guest house, shop for supplies to take to Kanglung, drink thick bitter coffee at the Swiss Bakery and write in my journal. The sky turns milky white one morning and heavy clotted snow flakes begin to fall. By early evening, the town is ghostly white, and a hard, lean moon hangs in the pale wintry sky. I return to the guest house and am startled to find an American woman in the kitchen, boiling water for tea. Her name is Julie, and she is visiting her cousin, an engineer working in Thimphu. We sit in front of the electric heater, watching steam curl out of our mugs, and I tell her about my trip to Canada.

"I can see how you would feel displaced after here," she says. "It's so beautiful and so quiet. It must have been a shock to the system after two years."

It takes a long time to find the true words, to put them in order, to tell the whole story. It is not just this or that, the mountains the people, it is me and the way I can be here, the freedom to walk unafraid into the great dark night. It is a hundred thousand things and I could never trace or tell all the connections and reflections, the shadows and echoes and secret relations between them.

The snow melts the next day, water dripping everywhere in the brilliant light. Julie asks if I will come with her to visit a monastery at the north end of the Thimphu valley. We ride out in a taxi, past the dzong and the walled palace of Dechencholing, around a mountain to the end of the road where we sit on a rock by the river beneath Cheri monastery. The sun warms our cold stiff fingers, and a raven in an oak tree calls to its mate. There is something magical about the place, Julie says, it reminds her of a wis.h.i.+ng place she knew as a child. We try to figure out what makes it so: the end of the road, the bluegreen river, the narrow path that leads north through forested valleys to the snowpeaks, the temple built into the face of the mountain, the deep and complete silence of the rocks, the earth, the trees. I pick up a small blue stone and examine it, smiling to myself. "I wish to stay in Bhutan," I say, and I see Tshew.a.n.g's face exactly.

"Really?" Julie says. "Do you think that will happen? I mean ..." She takes a big breath. "Look, Jamie, I hope you won't mind if I say this, but I don't think that's a very wise thing to wish for. For one thing, you'll never really belong here. Even if you got married to a Bhutanese, even if you stay here for years and years. It won't ever be your place, if you know what I mean."

I don't. "It's home to me now," I say.

"Well, yes, it might feel like that, and I know I've only been here a few weeks, and you've been here for two years, but it seems to me that this might be a hard place to belong to, I mean really belong to. I think you would have to change profoundly in order to live here."

"People emigrate all the time," I say. "They leave their homes, their ident.i.ties, they pack up and start new lives in countries far away. People do it every day. They leave their homes, go forth from their countries, the sons of the Buddhas all practice this way," I quote from a Buddhist prayer.

"No," she says. "People don't emigrate here. At least not that I know of. The way you feel now-well, I can understand the way you feel now, because it's so beautiful and it's so different from where you came from, but that feeling won't last, and then-"

"Why shouldn't it last?"

"How can it?" she says. "Someday, you will wake up and ask yourself, what am I doing here? Don't wish to stay here forever. If what you've been telling me about Buddhism is right, you shouldn't want to hold on to it, right? You should enjoy it and then let it go. I know you didn't ask me for advice, but I feel this so strongly I just have to tell you."

And she has a point, I can see that, from some other part of myself, perhaps from some distant future place, looking back, I can hear that she is offering very sound advice. Unfortunately or fortunately, I do not know right now, I cannot take it. I close my eyes and throw my stone and make my wish.

[image]

Love Un paysage quelconque est un etat de l'ame. l'ame.

-H.F. Amiel, Journal Intime

Love Is a Big Reason

Behind the frosted gla.s.s sky, the sun is a blurry orb of weak light. A tenuous blue-tinged mist like woodsmoke lies over Kanglung. The bare branches of trees tremble in the cold; the ground is rusted and blighted by frost. Inside my house, my bags are scattered over the sitting room floor, half-unpacked. Presents for various people are piled up on the altar, magazines and books for students, chocolate and newspapers for the Canadians who didn't go home. I arrived in Kanglung a week ago, heart singing to be home. Now I am weeping into a cup of black tea. I don't know why I have come back. I don't know where I belong. I don't know what to do.