Beyond The Sky And The Earth Part 9

Lorna writes: Cheer up, simple is a compliment here. It means good-natured. My kids told me I was d.a.m.n fat and homely and later I found out that homely means easygoing. Homely people make you feel at home. Get it? There's absolutely no consolation I can offer on d.a.m.n fat, though, and you'll just have to put up with the sliced bread. Cheer up, simple is a compliment here. It means good-natured. My kids told me I was d.a.m.n fat and homely and later I found out that homely means easygoing. Homely people make you feel at home. Get it? There's absolutely no consolation I can offer on d.a.m.n fat, though, and you'll just have to put up with the sliced bread.

Cultural Compet.i.tion

I walk to the bend in the road before breakfast, the wind soft and warm against my face and bare arms, carrying the smells of green things and earth. Kanglung is drier than Pema Gatshel: apart from a few afternoon showers, the days are mostly warm and bright. In the new light I see a peak in the north that I have not noticed before, a black stone spire much higher than the ridges and crests around it. Yesterday, some students told me that G.o.ds and other spirits reside in naturally sacred sites called walk to the bend in the road before breakfast, the wind soft and warm against my face and bare arms, carrying the smells of green things and earth. Kanglung is drier than Pema Gatshel: apart from a few afternoon showers, the days are mostly warm and bright. In the new light I see a peak in the north that I have not noticed before, a black stone spire much higher than the ridges and crests around it. Yesterday, some students told me that G.o.ds and other spirits reside in naturally sacred sites called nheys. nheys. Peaks, rocky outcrops, a circle of cypress trees, a waterfall, all can be nheys, and if you disturb one, you will fall sick, or some other misfortune will overtake you. Everyone knows this, they said. If you damage the natural world, you must suffer the consequences. Peaks, rocky outcrops, a circle of cypress trees, a waterfall, all can be nheys, and if you disturb one, you will fall sick, or some other misfortune will overtake you. Everyone knows this, they said. If you damage the natural world, you must suffer the consequences.

All around me are constant reminders of Buddhism: rough prayer walls along the path, a prayer wheel turned by a stream, prayer flags soaring above the ridge. If I close my eyes, I can conjure the Toronto skyline, giant hypodermic needle jabbing the sky, gla.s.s facades of office towers, all cold perfection. Here, things grow and fade and die, and no one pretends otherwise. The older walls of a house remain mudbrown and rutted beside the smooth white walls of the newly built addition. The old and the new grow out of each other and there is no attempt to make everything perfect and perpetually modern. There would be no point, when everything is changing, is fading away.

In cla.s.s, I battle against cliches, cant, and bad grammar. "I want to hear what you have to say," I tell the students. "Write me something different, something you haven't already written a hundred times before." I spend hours marking their homework, drawing arrows from subjects to verbs, restructuring convoluted sentences, and writing notes of encouragement beside any signs of original expression. Mr. Bose tells me I am wasting my time.

In a shop outside the college gate, I stop to buy laundry soap. The shopkeeper hands me my package and I recognize my own handwriting. "... careful with subject-verb agreement," I read. "Don't use cliches." The soap is wrapped in one of the compositions I corrected this morning. "Where did you get this?" I ask.

The shopkeeper shows me a stack of papers. "The students are giving," he says. "I tell them not to throw, I will use in my shop. Instead of plastic. Plastic is too expensive."

Shakuntala shows me past exams set by the University of New Delhi. Write a composition on one of the following: Time and tide wait for no man. A book is the best of friends. Write a composition on one of the following: Time and tide wait for no man. A book is the best of friends.

It occurs to me that Mr. Bose may be right.

But there are also signs of hope. A student named Tobgay writes about how education has changed his family life. When he was first admitted to Sherubtse, his parents were thrilled, especially his father who was illiterate. During his first-term break, at a family gathering, his father proudly asked him what he was learning at the college, and Tobgay told him. I told that we saw the picture of the first man walking on the moon and everyone laughed at that. I told it was true, the people had gone up to the moon even and then my father became angry with red face and bulging eyes. Don't tell lies, he told. It is not a lie, I told. After my cousins went, he told that he felt shame by me telling such things and, now that I am in college I think I am a high shot to tell such things like this or what. How people can go to the moon, he told. So now when I go home for holidays I am never telling what I learned at college and when I am at home all the things we learn at college seem impossible, like people walking on the moon. I told that we saw the picture of the first man walking on the moon and everyone laughed at that. I told it was true, the people had gone up to the moon even and then my father became angry with red face and bulging eyes. Don't tell lies, he told. It is not a lie, I told. After my cousins went, he told that he felt shame by me telling such things and, now that I am in college I think I am a high shot to tell such things like this or what. How people can go to the moon, he told. So now when I go home for holidays I am never telling what I learned at college and when I am at home all the things we learn at college seem impossible, like people walking on the moon.

And in the Zoo, I can actually hear the students listening as we read Macbeth. Macbeth. There is a palpable tension in the room, and when the bell rings in the middle of Macbeth's dagger soliloquy, Singye in the front row gasps. "He will not do it," he says, aghast at the thought. There is no need to explain the significance of the crime Macbeth is about to commit, or the evil omens, the unruly night and strange wind, the wild behavior of Duncan's horses, the appearance of Banquo's ghost. These are not literary symbols to the students but the real and obvious results of a monstrous deed. It is impossible to gauge the distance between what I am supposed to be teaching them about the play and how they read it in the light of their own culture, but their insights are bringing the play to life for me, and it has never seemed more horrifying. There is a palpable tension in the room, and when the bell rings in the middle of Macbeth's dagger soliloquy, Singye in the front row gasps. "He will not do it," he says, aghast at the thought. There is no need to explain the significance of the crime Macbeth is about to commit, or the evil omens, the unruly night and strange wind, the wild behavior of Duncan's horses, the appearance of Banquo's ghost. These are not literary symbols to the students but the real and obvious results of a monstrous deed. It is impossible to gauge the distance between what I am supposed to be teaching them about the play and how they read it in the light of their own culture, but their insights are bringing the play to life for me, and it has never seemed more horrifying.

One Sat.u.r.day morning, two students bring a note to my door: there will be an evening cultural compet.i.tion featuring song and dance in Dzongkha, Nepali and English. Mr. Bose and I are to judge the English items. "Will you be in the compet.i.tion?" I ask the students, and they say yes, they have been released from SUPW in order to practice their song.

"What's SUPW?"

"Socially Useful Productive Work," one says.

"Some Useful Period Wasted," the other adds.

I laugh, delighted, and from the garden next door, Mr. Matthew clears his throat loudly. I am not sure who this warning is meant for.

Shakuntala and I go to the college store, a windowless room behind the student mess, to collect our weekly supply of vegetables. Baskets of chilies, tomatoes and beans are emptied out onto shelves, where they are pawed through and pinched. Everything is weighed on a rusty scale suspended from the ceiling. The man in charge, Mr. Dorji, shakes his head when I show him my handful of chilies. "Not even half kg," he says. "Take for free." My chili intake has increased steadily but I am still no match for the Bhutanese teachers who are loading up large jute sacks. My students tell me they cannot eat without chilies. When I prepare Western food for them, pasta or pizza, they tell me it is too sweet and go into the kitchen to make eze eze, a condiment of chopped-up chilies, onions, tomatoes and cheese.

Outside the store, we step over a butchered pig and collect bread from the bakery window. At home, I eat several pieces with b.u.mthang honey, then fall asleep on the divan.

Canadian voices wake me up. "Hey, Medusa, open the door. We hear you have freshly sliced bread in there." It is almost the entire Canadian contingent from eastern Bhutan, plus Mary, an Irish teacher posted in Samdrup Jongkhar.

"It's not sliced," I say, throwing open the door, "and I've eaten half of it."

They traipse in, laying down jholas, bottles of Dragon Rum and lemon squash and Golden Eagle beer, a ca.s.sette player and tapes. "We were all in Tas.h.i.+gang and decided you needed a proper housewarming party," Margaret from Radi says.

"Look at this bathroom!" Lorna shrieks from the hall. "It's TILED."

"Oh my G.o.d, two fireplaces! "

I tell them they are in time for the cultural compet.i.tion in the evening, but they are disappointed.

"Cultural compet.i.tion! I could have that in Radi. I was promised sliced bread and a video," Margaret complains.

"Closets!" Lorna says. She looks well, her long golden-brown hair full of sunny highlights and her face tanned the color of honey. "She has two closets closets. I have to keep all my clothes in the food safe."

Leon and Tony look even thinner and blonder than the last time I saw them in Tas.h.i.+gang. Leon is handing out drinks made of Dragon Rum and lemon squash. Someone has plugged the ca.s.sette player in and the Traveling Wilburys are singing about last night. Margaret is in the kitchen making something out of sweetened condensed milk, cocoa, peanuts and dried "pig food." Kevin and Tony are reading magazines, Lorna is dancing a jig with Leon, and Mary is knocking back Bhutan Mist and knitting. knitting. We are a motley crew, I think. What brings us together, aside from skin color and language? We would not all be such good buddies if we had met outside of eastern Bhutan. But I like being with them because I can slip back into my old Canadian self, I can speak a faster, sharper, more direct English. It is like going home to your family. Everyone understands the basic framework, you don't have to explain yourself at every turn. It's the same with these friends; no one asks me why I am not married yet or why my mother let me come all the way across the world to teach, was it because I couldn't find a job in Canada? I don't have to explain who Ed Grimly is, or why I am talking like him. We are a motley crew, I think. What brings us together, aside from skin color and language? We would not all be such good buddies if we had met outside of eastern Bhutan. But I like being with them because I can slip back into my old Canadian self, I can speak a faster, sharper, more direct English. It is like going home to your family. Everyone understands the basic framework, you don't have to explain yourself at every turn. It's the same with these friends; no one asks me why I am not married yet or why my mother let me come all the way across the world to teach, was it because I couldn't find a job in Canada? I don't have to explain who Ed Grimly is, or why I am talking like him.

But there is a negative side, too. The stress of being fully immersed in our villages, of trying to live mindfully in another culture, makes us overanxious to be purely ourselves when we are together. We drink too much and talk too loudly, we shriek with laughter and fall over in little bars in Tas.h.i.+gang, not caring what impression we are making. We want to forget where we are, and yet we keep calling ourselves phillingpa and making comparisons to Canada; we keep reminding ourselves that we are here, and isn't it amazing.

If many of these friends.h.i.+ps are destined to fade after we leave Bhutan, we are bound now by the knowledge that we need each other here. Any mention in a letter of an ailment beyond the usual giardia will bring packets of instant soup in the mail or a visit, and in emergencies our nearest Canadian neighbor will become our next-of-kin.

We walk to Pala's for a dinner of shabalay, shabalay, deep-fried turnovers stuffed with minced meat. Students drift in and out, glance over at us but pretend not to, and I am relieved that we are not quite the spectacle we would be in Pema Gatshel. A well-built young man in a long black trench coat and a beautiful woman in a denim skirt and cashmere sweater float past. Leon shakes his head. "I don't know how you teach here," he says. "The students are all absolutely gorgeous." deep-fried turnovers stuffed with minced meat. Students drift in and out, glance over at us but pretend not to, and I am relieved that we are not quite the spectacle we would be in Pema Gatshel. A well-built young man in a long black trench coat and a beautiful woman in a denim skirt and cashmere sweater float past. Leon shakes his head. "I don't know how you teach here," he says. "The students are all absolutely gorgeous."

"It is a little unnerving," I say.

"What would happen if you had an affair with one of your students, though?" Margaret asks.

"I don't know, I haven't really thought about it," I lie. I find myself noticing over and over again how attractive this or that student is. The older male students have a very fine, courtly charm, and some of them are quite flirtatious.

"Well, we'll think about it on your behalf," Lorna says, and the others agree enthusiastically.

The cultural compet.i.tion begins with a traditional Bhutanese dance. The men and women move slowly in a circle, raising and lowering their hands in front of them in simple, lulling gestures as they sing. The beauty is in the measured, synchronized movements; this is not a dance about performance but partic.i.p.ation. There is no instrumental accompaniment, only the voices rising and falling in the melancholic, pentatonic scale, and lingering over microtones that no tempered instrument could ever match. The style is called zhungdra, zhungdra, the oldest form of music in Bhutan, and the melody climbs and climbs and then falls suddenly, rhythm changing unpredictably, evoking perhaps the soaring sinking Bhutanese landscape itself, mountaintops plunging into deep valleys and rising steeply again. the oldest form of music in Bhutan, and the melody climbs and climbs and then falls suddenly, rhythm changing unpredictably, evoking perhaps the soaring sinking Bhutanese landscape itself, mountaintops plunging into deep valleys and rising steeply again.

A Nepali dance follows. Two women in gorgeous red-and-gold silk saris twirl and kick and throw up their arms to loud taped music overfull with instruments and competing melodies and rhythms. I am sitting between Leon and Margaret, a pen and clipboard on my lap, preparing to judge the English selections, the first of which is a "Break-Dance," according to the MC. The lights go off, pulsating disco music starts and stops and starts again, and two lithe young men appear on stage in tight pants and tee s.h.i.+rts. The dance is a combination of some genuine break-dancing and a lot of straightforward calisthenics.

"Where am am I?" Leon mutters. I know exactly what he means. In spite of its closed-door policy and ban on TV, Bhutan is not hermetically sealed. Fas.h.i.+on trends and music ca.s.settes find their way in, but it still seems utterly bizarre that I should be sitting in a concrete auditorium in the Himalayas watching Bhutanese students break-dance to American disco. The music ends and I have no idea how to judge the first English item. On what basis? In comparison to I?" Leon mutters. I know exactly what he means. In spite of its closed-door policy and ban on TV, Bhutan is not hermetically sealed. Fas.h.i.+on trends and music ca.s.settes find their way in, but it still seems utterly bizarre that I should be sitting in a concrete auditorium in the Himalayas watching Bhutanese students break-dance to American disco. The music ends and I have no idea how to judge the first English item. On what basis? In comparison to what? what? In the end, I give it a very mediocre mark. The other English selections include CCR's "Proud Mary" accompanied by an electric guitar and an amplifier that thinks it's an instrument in its own right, and a remarkably good version of Elvis's "Love Me Tender" by the well-built young man in the black trench coat. Elvis wins the English compet.i.tion. In the end, I give it a very mediocre mark. The other English selections include CCR's "Proud Mary" accompanied by an electric guitar and an amplifier that thinks it's an instrument in its own right, and a remarkably good version of Elvis's "Love Me Tender" by the well-built young man in the black trench coat. Elvis wins the English compet.i.tion.

There are more songs in Dzongkha, Nepali and Sharchhop, and dances from Tibet, a.s.sam and the nomadic yak-herding communities along Bhutan's northern border. The instruments are remarkable: the six-stringed, dragon-headed mandolin called a drumnyen; drumnyen; the many-stringed the many-stringed yangchen yangchen laid flat on a table and played with thin bamboo sticks; a gleaming new harmonium; a tabla played with deft fingers. Although the official government line might speak of one ident.i.ty, there are many voices here, many dances and many songs, and perhaps it is my Canadian upbringing, being raised on the strengths of the multicultural mosaic over the American melting pot, but I am glad of the plenitude. laid flat on a table and played with thin bamboo sticks; a gleaming new harmonium; a tabla played with deft fingers. Although the official government line might speak of one ident.i.ty, there are many voices here, many dances and many songs, and perhaps it is my Canadian upbringing, being raised on the strengths of the multicultural mosaic over the American melting pot, but I am glad of the plenitude.

Back at my house, we lay mattresses, mats, kiras and quilts in a row on the bedroom floor. There is much wriggling and giggling and negotiation for s.p.a.ce, and when I finally fall asleep, I dream that I am dreaming of break-dancers. You're just dreaming, I tell myself in the dream. There is no break-dancing in Bhutan.

So Lucky to Be Here

My dreams change and change again. Gone are the airport dreams and drugstore dreams and the dreams of in-between places, not really Canada, not really Bhutan, all dreams of longing for home. Now my dreams of Canada are grievous. I dream that I get on the Comet and it turns a corner and turns into a Greyhound bus with plush seats and a sign ordering pa.s.sengers to not stand forward of the white line, and we are driving over a bridge, pa.s.sing out of Bhutan onto a Canadian highway. It is the beginning or the end of winter, dirty crusts of snow, dull sky, a flat paved road leading into a sad, colorless city. I have made a terrible mistake; I do not want to go home at all. I get off the bus, but Bhutan is gone, and I do not know how to get back.

I dream more often of Bhutan itself. I am walking through narrow green valleys with rivers rus.h.i.+ng through them. The mountains rise up so steeply on all sides, I have to look up and up to find the sky above. I walk through forests at night to a ring of dark-fringed fir trees, to a rocky pool beneath a waterfall, to open s.p.a.ces where I can see the stars thrown across the deep blue-black sky. In my dreams, clouds climb down from the sky, fill up ravines, melt into fields, darkening the green of the rice and the maize. I watch the mist and tell myself I am dreaming, the world cannot possibly be so beautiful, but I wake up and it is.

We walk through the forests and fields around Kanglung, Shakuntala carrying a sketch pad or camera, I my journal. I am enraptured by the s.p.a.ce, the size of the mountains, the stretch of the sky. I am always wondering what is beyond the next ridge. It is only about 150 kilometers as the crow flies from the Indian border in the south to the snowpeaks in the north, and yet it would take years to get to know the lay of the land by foot, to learn what is hidden in the folds of these mountains. I want to see what the crow sees.

We turn off main trails, following narrower tracks into forests, through fields. I am no longer dismayed at the way a wide, worn trail can splinter into a dozen smaller paths, one of which winds down a slope and disappears at a log. We climb over the log, slosh across a stream and another path picks us up, carries us through rice paddies, to someone's backdoor. A dog chases us around the kitchen garden into a forest, where a path brings us to the road. There are always large stones to sit and rest on, trees to sit and rest under, there is no restricted place, no lines and bars separating what clearly belongs to someone from what belongs to everyone.

We pa.s.s through villages where the entire community is at work in one family's fields, or where everyone has gathered to help build a house, plastering the woven bamboo walls with mud. Each village seems a world unto itself, a tightly knit, closely related, interdependent community, with an elected gup gup who as acts the headman, settling minor disputes and keeping whatever community records exist. A wealthier family may have paid for the grinding stones to extract oil from mustard seeds, or a manual thres.h.i.+ng machine, but these are often used by everyone. Everyone knows what everyone else has-their belongings, their business, their plans, their problems. It is not possible here to close your doors to your neighbors, to live in tiny isolated units, nodding impersonally as you pa.s.s each other. In fact, the privacy that we so zealously guard in the West would be fatal here, where a mountain stands between one village and the next, between one village and the nearest hospital, wireless office, shop. who as acts the headman, settling minor disputes and keeping whatever community records exist. A wealthier family may have paid for the grinding stones to extract oil from mustard seeds, or a manual thres.h.i.+ng machine, but these are often used by everyone. Everyone knows what everyone else has-their belongings, their business, their plans, their problems. It is not possible here to close your doors to your neighbors, to live in tiny isolated units, nodding impersonally as you pa.s.s each other. In fact, the privacy that we so zealously guard in the West would be fatal here, where a mountain stands between one village and the next, between one village and the nearest hospital, wireless office, shop.

We emerge from an oak forest one afternoon into the courtyard of a very old temple. The paintings in the vestibule have darkened with age, the reds and blues becoming deeper and richer instead of lighter. The door is padlocked, we cannot go inside, but we circ.u.mambulate the temple clockwise, turning the worn prayer wheels built into a bracket along the outer walls. The prayer wheels are inscribed with Om Mani Padme Hum, Om Mani Padme Hum, Hail Jewel in the Lotus, the mantra for the benefit of all sentient beings. You acc.u.mulate merit by turning the prayer wheels-if you do it mindfully. I spin the wheels but my mind usually spins off elsewhere. Hail Jewel in the Lotus, the mantra for the benefit of all sentient beings. You acc.u.mulate merit by turning the prayer wheels-if you do it mindfully. I spin the wheels but my mind usually spins off elsewhere.

Scattered readings and occasional attempts to meditate will not make me mindful. I read the theory and I think yes, this makes sense, but my life-my mind-goes on as usual. While I am actually reading the texts, I think I understand. Nothing in the world is permanent, everything changes, breaks down, dies, and this is why attachment to things in this world causes suffering. The Eightfold Path is the way to nonattachment. Then I pick up an anthology of Romantic poetry, and I wonder what is wrong with attachment anyway, and what poetry could be born out of nonattachment. Why shouldn't we throw ourselves into our lives and love the world deeply and break our hearts when it changes, fades and dies? I paddle back and forth between the Four n.o.ble Truths and Wordsworth, Coleridge, Sh.e.l.ley and Keats. Contemplating the paintings of Buddha sitting in calm abiding, I have a thousand questions and no one to answer them, and wonder if this is a sign that I am on the wrong path. But then I remember Buddha's last words to his disciples-work out your own salvation with diligence-and I am encouraged in my questioning.

A packet of mail. My grandfather writes that I must really appreciate life in Canada now. You see now how lucky we are here. You see now how lucky we are here. My mother writes about how proud she is of me, enduring all this hards.h.i.+p. They have it all wrong. There is no hards.h.i.+p any more, I write back. I love my life in Bhutan. I do see how lucky I am-to be here. A letter from the field office in Thimphu reminds me of the upcoming conference for Canadian teachers in Tas.h.i.+gang. No letter again, still, from Robert. My mother writes about how proud she is of me, enduring all this hards.h.i.+p. They have it all wrong. There is no hards.h.i.+p any more, I write back. I love my life in Bhutan. I do see how lucky I am-to be here. A letter from the field office in Thimphu reminds me of the upcoming conference for Canadian teachers in Tas.h.i.+gang. No letter again, still, from Robert.

Lorna appears at the door two days before the conference. "I just came to use your bathroom," she says, bolting through the sitting room.

"Haven't they finished that new latrine yet?" I call out.

"Yes," she yells back, "but it doesn't have tiles." tiles."

Over coffee on the front steps, Lorna tells me she is having an affair with a man in her village.

"How did it begin?" I ask, thrilled.

"In a maize field," she confesses, and I have to spit out a mouthful of coffee so that I won't choke. "Don't laugh. We were coming back from a village party and he grabbed my arm and said, 'Miss, I lob you.' I couldn't resist that."

"So he speaks English?"

"No, I wouldn't say that. He speaks a few words." She is suddenly convulsed with laughter. "The first night, after we made love, we were lying there in my bed, trying to think of what to say to each other, and finally he turns to me and says sadly, 'My little brother is dead.' And I'm like, 'Aww, that's so sad, I'm so sorry.' I thought that he was confiding some tragic childhood memory. Then I realized he was saying he couldn't get it up again."

I laugh until my stomach hurts.

"It's true," Lorna says. "I swear. But listen, don't tell anyone. Not that I think anyone would care, really."

"Well, it's all very romantic," I say, surprised at the wistfulness in my voice.

Lorna looks at me quickly. "How's Robert?"

"Who knows. I haven't heard from him." I am making it sound like Robert is the problem, but I know in my heart it is me. He hasn't written very often, but when they do arrive, his letters sound just like him, affectionate and loyal and full of practical advice. It is me who is changing. My letters to him sound false and forced to me.

The conference pa.s.ses in a sleepy blur, under the swish of the ceiling fans in the Royal Guest House resplendent with blue-cloud painted walls and brocade hangings. In the afternoons, we trudge up a path behind the bazaar, following the river to where it widens into a pool. It is too shallow to swim, but we sit in the water and talk quietly. Children stare at us curiously, ten grown-up foreigners sitting in the river, doing nothing. They strip off their school uniforms and wash them in the river, pa.s.sing around a sliver of soap as they scrub and pound their clothes on the rocks, and then hang them in the trees to dry.

In the evenings, we eat at the Puen Soom. The three new teachers, fresh from Canada, pick at their food and send their plates back, asking for smaller portions of rice, half of this, no, a quarter. "How do you eat so much rice?" Marnie asks me. She is wearing a white blouse and peach-colored jeans, one of several perfectly coordinated outfits with matching accessories that she puts on each day; each morning in the guest house she curls her bangs with a propane-powered curling iron.

I look down at my hill of rice and shrug. "You get used to it."

"I don't know if I'll get used to anything here," she says doubtfully, looking around. "I hope my quarters are not like this."

I remember this feeling. You really will get used to it, I want to tell her again; your clothes will fade and fray, and you won't have time between study duty and morning clinic to curl your hair, and the walls in your house will look exactly like this plus your roof will leak and you'll have rats, but you won't care because you'll be in love with the place you have suddenly woken up in. You will feel so lucky to be here. But I know she won't believe it until it happens.

Blessed Rainy Days

Blessed Rainy Day, September 22, is supposed to be the official end of the monsoon. I sit under a blue-and-white canopy with the other lecturers, balancing a cup of oily suja and saffron-colored desi on my lap, watching an archery match. Only half the players are using traditional bamboo bows to hit the targets, short wooden planks set in the ground about 150 meters apart, and they are no match for the new compound fibergla.s.s bows imported from abroad. I quickly grow tired of watching the actual game. Far more interesting are the players, the graceful dances they do when they hit the target, and the lewd gestures and songs they use to distract their opponents. The sky overhead is a fresh expanse of blue with a border of clean white cloud, except for a grey swelling in the south, which looks suspiciously like more rain.

It is more rain. It begins just before dawn the next morning and continues for two weeks, days and nights of falling rain and drifting mist and water trickling in drains, until I am sick of the sound of it, and the tiresome wet and chill of it. The damp insinuates itself into my sheets and blankets, and none of my clothes will dry. A cold turns into an ear infection and I cannot hear, it is like walking underwater. The sky sinks lower and lower under its own weight until the clouds are among us, breaking apart and hurrying past us like distracted ghosts.

After two weeks, I awake at dawn to the remarkable sound of nothing. Even without looking outside, I know: now now the monsoon is over. The sky is clear every morning, and in the north one peak is bright with snow. The clarity is stunning. I feel dizzy, almost drunk on the amount of light. The hills all around are plush and green, and the trees are full of cicadas and flocks of birds that have migrated down from higher alt.i.tudes. The days are soft and warm and b.u.t.tery; the sharpness in the early morning air melts away in the full sunlight. In my garden, the summer flowers are crowded out by rusty marigolds and orange and yellow nasturtiums. In the villages all around, sliced pumpkin and apples are set out to dry in flat baskets, and on farmhouse roofs green chilies turn a rich dark crimson in the sun. Long strips of b.l.o.o.d.y beef and chunks of pork fat are hung over clotheslines. When dry, they will be chopped into flaky pieces and served with chili sauce, or cooked for hours into a stew. The rice paddies turn gold around the edges, and the rice stalks droop under their own weight. the monsoon is over. The sky is clear every morning, and in the north one peak is bright with snow. The clarity is stunning. I feel dizzy, almost drunk on the amount of light. The hills all around are plush and green, and the trees are full of cicadas and flocks of birds that have migrated down from higher alt.i.tudes. The days are soft and warm and b.u.t.tery; the sharpness in the early morning air melts away in the full sunlight. In my garden, the summer flowers are crowded out by rusty marigolds and orange and yellow nasturtiums. In the villages all around, sliced pumpkin and apples are set out to dry in flat baskets, and on farmhouse roofs green chilies turn a rich dark crimson in the sun. Long strips of b.l.o.o.d.y beef and chunks of pork fat are hung over clotheslines. When dry, they will be chopped into flaky pieces and served with chili sauce, or cooked for hours into a stew. The rice paddies turn gold around the edges, and the rice stalks droop under their own weight.

I cannot write to Robert anymore. The writing comes out slowly, stiffly, it sounds like another language in my ears. When I try to write about my love for Bhutan, it feels like a betrayal of him, and I am not sure why. Perhaps because I feel I have fallen in love with the place, the way you fall in love with a person. I write letters addressed to no one and stick them in my journal.

What I love most is how seamless everything is. You walk through a forest and come out in a village, and there's no difference, no division. You aren't in nature one minute and in civilization the next. The houses are made out of mud and stone and wood, drawn from the land around. Nothing stands out, nothing jars.

Time has become a melding of minutes and months and the feeling of seasons. The colors are changing, the light that comes slanting over the rim of the mountain grows cooler. I have trouble remembering the date. I ask my students what day it is, but by the time I get to the next cla.s.s, I have forgotten and must ask again. Yesterday, I started a letter home and wrote July and realized only when I looked outside and noticed the gold and brown creeping into the hills all around. Leon says it is the Bhutan Time Warp and I know what he means. Time does not hurl itself forward at breakneck speed here. Change happens very slowly. A grandmother and her granddaughter wear the same kind of clothes, they do the same work, they know the same songs. The granddaughter does not find her grandmother an embarra.s.sing, boring relic. Her grandmother's stories do not annoy her, and what she wants is no different from what her grandmother wanted at her age. In the village, there is little to keep up with. When change does come, everyone has time to get used to it. Gla.s.s windows, a corrugated iron roof, electric lights, immunization, a school. Everything that happens in the village will be remembered, because what happens affects everyone, it is everyone's story. It is not something happening to strangers on the other side of a city, on the other side of the ocean, announced today, displaced tomorrow by newer news, the latest development, this just in. Just how fast development will change this is impossible to know. In school, the kids are taught a new order of things. There must be many students like Tobgay, no longer able to tell their parents what they are learning. When the outside world catches up, everything will accelerate, and grandparents will shake their heads and sigh over their grandchildren. The wholeness that I love will be lost, and yet I cannot say that development is bad and that people should go on living the way they have always lived, losing four out of eight children and dying at fifty. Development brings a whole new set of problems as it solves the old set. I must be careful not to fall into the good-old-days trap.

For now, though, I am glad to be a part of the Time Warp. I feel exhausted when I remember my last year in Toronto, rus.h.i.+ng to cla.s.s, the grocery store, the bank, a movie, a meeting, always feeling that I had not caught up, fearing that I never would, because there was so much to do and see and buy and say you've done and seen and bought to be on the cutting edge, to be where it's happening, not to be left behind. Now I have time in abundance. There is no one to catch up to, and I don't have to be anywhere but here. I have no idea what is happening in the outside world, what wars or famines are being turned into ten-second news clips, what incredible new technologies are revolutionizing the way people die or dream or do their banking. I lost my watch in Tas.h.i.+gang and the digital face on my alarm clock faded out in the monsoon damp, but I am learning to tell time by the sun and the sounds outside, and I am hardly ever late.

I have fallen into this world the way you fall into sleep, tumbling through layers of darkness into full dream. The way you fall in love.

I am in love with the landscape, the way the green mountains turn into blue shadows in the late afternoon light, the quality of the light as the sun rises above the silver valley each morning, the unbearable clarity of everything after rain, the drop to the valley floor far below and the feeling of the great dark night all around, and knowing where I am, and being here. I am in love with the simplicity of my life, the plain rooms, the shelves empty of ornaments, the unadorned walls. I don't want to go home at Christmas (I don't want to go home, ever). They never warned us about this at the orientation.

The field director in Thimphu sends a wireless message saying the flight to Toronto that I asked him to book several months ago has been confirmed.

Durga Puja

Shakuntala and I spend most of our time together. We are united against the knot of bickering staff members by our love for the place and our easy relations.h.i.+p with the students. Some of the lecturers begin to treat us with cool disdain; Shakuntala thinks they disapprove of two unmarried females being let loose upon the world. We make up bogus Latin names for the worst of them and cackle loudly in the library; we excuse ourselves from the dreary staff parties where the chairs are pushed back against the walls, funeral-parlor style, with the women demurely sipping orange squash on one side of the room and the men belting back Bhutan Mist on the other, while students scurry back and forth with platters of food. Instead, we invite the students to dinner and eat in a circle on the floor; afterward the students bring out guitars and sing, we play charades and word games and talk.

The students visit frequently. They come to borrow books and tapes, they come to get their homework checked, they come to sit and drink coffee and talk. I have broken through some barrier, have even made peace with Smirk. He still makes wisecracks in cla.s.s, but I have grown to like him. With his longish hair and his smart-a.s.s comments he is asking questions about the accepted order of things. His full name is Dil Bahadur, which means Courageous Heart.

Shakuntala was right: the students are very good company. The ones from wealthy families in Thimphu and Paro are more Westernized, at least on the surface. Their fathers are in key positions in the civil service and their families often have extensive land holdings. They are found most often in jeans and leather jackets under a haze of cigarette smoke at Pala's. Their conversation is laced with a mix of slang from across decades and continents: chaps and chicks, cat and cool. Ten ngultrum is ten bucks, money is dough, drunk is boozed or boozed out. "But" is stuck on the end of a sentence (I don't know but), (I don't know but), and "d.a.m.n" is merely a synonym for very. Every phrase is punctuated by the ubiquitous "ya." and "d.a.m.n" is merely a synonym for very. Every phrase is punctuated by the ubiquitous "ya." I told her, ya, last time, ya, but she never listens, ya. No, ya. I told her, ya, last time, ya, but she never listens, ya. No, ya. Shakuntala says that "ya" is not "yeah" but a corruption of "yaar," Hindi for mate or man or friend. Many of these students have been educated in private boarding schools in Darjeeling and Kalimpong, and they refer to their less worldly cla.s.smates as "simple." Simple in this instance means unacquainted with the world outside. Simple means the village, definitely not a cool place to be from. In less tactful moments, they use the word "rustic." Shakuntala says that "ya" is not "yeah" but a corruption of "yaar," Hindi for mate or man or friend. Many of these students have been educated in private boarding schools in Darjeeling and Kalimpong, and they refer to their less worldly cla.s.smates as "simple." Simple in this instance means unacquainted with the world outside. Simple means the village, definitely not a cool place to be from. In less tactful moments, they use the word "rustic."

My favorite students are the "simple" ones. They are shyer and more difficult to draw out, but utterly sincere. The wealthier students seem more like teenagers, preoccupied with their clothes and hair and who has a date with who at Pala's (ignoring the ridiculous new rule, set down by the princ.i.p.al, that bans "couples" in order to put an end to the "gossip and scandal"-i.e., pregnancy-that allegedly flourished under the Jesuits' noses). The so-called simple ones have not had the opportunity of adolescence. They became adults at p.u.b.erty. A surprising number of the men have wives and children back in their villages. (Female students who get married or pregnant, though, must drop out of school.) Unlike their private-school cla.s.smates, they have had limited exposure to Western culture. Their ideas of universal wealth and privilege are drawn directly from the few videotaped movies they have seen at the college, and they refuse to believe that there are people living on the streets, begging for coins in the cities of North America. They flip through my old magazines with the same absorption as cla.s.s II C, looking up occasionally with the same puzzled expressions. "Ma'am, what is a UFO?" or "Miss, why it says here about a psychologist for cats?"

The students learn that excessive formality makes me uncomfortable. They do not behave as casually as if I were a fellow student, but neither do they treat me with the same rigid protocol as the other lecturers. I am still "ma'am" and "madam" and sometimes "miss," but they are warm and friendly and at ease, and I like them more each day, and I learn and learn and learn, far more than I teach.

Because of their fluency, I can ask them things I could not ask cla.s.s II C, and they answer many but not all of my questions about Buddhism. It is okay to appreciate the world and all that is beautiful in it, they tell me, only we must not become attached to it. "We have to remember that it is not permanent, and anyway, ma'am, isn't that why it is so beautiful in the first place? If everything was the same forever, well, we can't even imagine that," one student says. I think of Keat's Grecian Urn, frozen perfection, and agree. He is a slight young man, with a quiet, reflective face and a brush cut. His name is Nima, which means "sun," and he has a smile that lights up a room. I ask him about the practices of tantric Buddhism, how they seem to contradict the Buddha's teachings against superst.i.tion and empty ritual. He says that the lamas know the real meaning behind the rituals. "We know only the simple meaning. Like when we are filling the water cups on the altar, we must not spill one drop because we say it will draw the demons. But actually, miss, we aren't supposed to spill one drop because we are supposed to be doing it carefully, and if we aren't concentrating, then we aren't doing it right. So maybe the people couldn't understand this, and the lamas tried to think of a way they would remember, so they made up the story about the demons coming."

"So you don't believe in demons," I say.

"No, miss, I am believing. We just can't say about them, so it is better to believe, isn't it?"

There is a lot of this in the students, this preference for both/and over my insistence on either/or. Either the Buddha said there is no G.o.d and therefore Buddhism is not theistic, and therefore tantric Buddhism with its pantheon of deities is a contradiction of the original school of thought, or there are G.o.ds and therefore there is no contradiction. It is not so for the students. Yes, they say, the Buddha said he was not a G.o.d, and at the same time we wors.h.i.+p him as a G.o.d, and there are many other G.o.ds as well, and there is no contradiction.

"Anyway," Nima says, "my father says it's not what you believe or say you believe that matters, it's what you do." Nima's father is a gomchen in a village three hours walk from Tas.h.i.+gang. He brings my questions to his father when he goes home and carries the answers carefully back to me. "Like for example, you must be knowing that in Buddhism we say all beings were our mothers in our past lives."

This is the rationale behind treating all beings with loving-kindness. It is why you should not kill any sentient being, even an insect. In our millions and billions of past lives, every being was at one time our mother. "Yes, I've read this," I tell Nima. "But I don't know if I believe it literally."

Nima says, "You see, miss, what matters is not what you believe but what you do. The important thing is whether you treat all beings the way you treat your mother. With that much love and respect. Of course, for we Bhutanese, it is best to believe and do. But if you believe and don't do, then the belief is nothing."