Beyond the Sky and the Earth (35 page)

At home, everything is glossy and polished and unreal: glassfronted shops, tinsel-bedecked displays, people’s faces, all gleaming facades. In people’s houses, I am overwhelmed by the number of
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
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 pass 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
,” 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 glasses 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 hell 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 ship 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 Saturday 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
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, sparse 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 shingled 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 wishing 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 Tshewang’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 identities, 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.