Beyond the Sky and the Earth (24 page)

I dream more often of Bhutan itself. I am walking through narrow green valleys with rivers rushing 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 spaces 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 space, 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 pass 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
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 threshing 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 pass 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 circumambulate 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,
Hail Jewel in the Lotus, the mantra for the benefit of all sentient beings. You accumulate 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 Noble Truths and Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley 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.
My mother writes about how proud she is of me, enduring all this hardship. They have it all wrong. There is no hardship 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 Tashigang. 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.”

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 passes 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, passing 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.

B
lessed 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 fiberglass 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
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 altitudes. The days are soft and warm and buttery; 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 bloody 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.