Ithaca (6 page)

“Surely you cannot legislate happiness,” he says. “People are the same everywhere; they don’t give a damn about inner happiness until they have satisfied their craving for material things.”

“I think you’re oversimplifying,” Das says quietly. “What we’re trying to do as a society, what the king, and his father with whom the concept originated, are trying to direct us towards is to attain a balance between material prosperity and the things that give us inner happiness. We have problems, just as everyone has problems, but I think the point of GNH is to set different objectives for ourselves as individuals and as a country, objectives that redefine notions of prosperity and wealth, objectives that try to steer us away from rampant consumerism. If we get even partway there we will be better off than we were before.”

“And you can do this by turning your back on the modern world, becoming a sort of primitive Utopia?”

Das and Sonam laugh together. “No, that is the way the media depicts us,” Sonam says. “Today you can go to a disco in Thimphu, we are connected to the Internet, we have forty satellite channels –”

Das carries the thought forward, “The point is we do not want to be swept away by all these things, we need to remain connected to our culture, achieve the right balance. An extraordinarily high percentage of Bhutanese who leave the country return, so we must be doing something right.”

Zach is not entirely persuaded, but he doesn’t really want to carry the argument further. If this is the way this country and its people want to lead their lives, who is he to disagree – he can’t even manage his own life. He compliments Sonam on the food, and her face suffuses with pleasure. Das says, “Sonam makes a great meen moily; she learned how to make South Indian food like a native when we lived there. And when you visit next we’ll give you the best ema datse in town.”

After dinner Sonam vanishes upstairs, leaving the two men alone. Das pours them another whisky. They make small talk, and then, all at once and in a way that seems perfectly natural, Zach unburdens himself about what has brought him to Thimphu. As he does so, he thinks that it is his years in London that have made him so uptight, so unwilling to talk freely of the things that he really wants to talk about. In this part of the world they do things differently. He is glad, fiercely glad that it is so, as he tells Das about the lonely death of his mother, his troubles with Julia, his fears about his job.
His host does not interrupt once. When he is finished, Das freshens his whisky, and then says there is something he would like to show him.

He takes Zach to the back of the house, and leads him into a sparsely furnished room – a desk, a chair, and a shelf of books. In the corner something glows in the dim light of the overhead bulb. Das walks him over, switches on a spotlight, and a tremendous bird rockets out at them – an outrageously coloured creature, plumed in howling reds, blues, and yellows.

“What is it?” he asks his host.

“A male satyr tragopan, one of our migratory birds. Its plumage is actually even more stunning than this, I don’t think I have done it justice.”

“It’s extraordinary,” Zach says. “But why is it painted on the floor?”

Das doesn’t reply directly but says that Sonam and he decided to settle in Thimphu after their first-born, a boy, died in an accident when they were living in Trivandrum. But the change of scene did nothing to calm his mind, he found it hard to concentrate on anything, he was short with Sonam, unable to focus on his work. One day, a group of Tibetan monks from Dharamshala visited Bhutan and demonstrated the art of sand-painting, using small metal funnels called chakpur and coloured sands to create beautiful and detailed mandalas. They spent several days creating a luminous work of art, and then, when it was finished, they swept it up, destroyed it, to demonstrate the impermanence of everything, to show graphically the Buddhist concept of non-attachment.

“It made a powerful impression,” Das says, “and I was determined to learn the art of sand-painting, it seemed to show me a way to come to terms with the death of my boy.”

They look at the flaring beauty of the bird on the floor; in a short time it will be as if it never existed.

“At first I found it difficult to destroy the paintings I created or even to make good paintings for that matter. I was not trained like the monks, my paintings were not based on religious themes or anything like that, and for me sand-painting was simply a way to work out my grief and my frustration. It didn’t help that I wasn’t a particularly good artist or that the material I was using was difficult to manage. But I kept at it. The first successful painting I made was of Sonam’s parents’ house; it had taken so much effort that I couldn’t bring myself to erase it, I had to have Sonam do it for me. And then slowly I began to get the point.”

“How long did this one take you?”

“About three months.”

“And when will you destroy it?”

“Tomorrow. I have just a few details of the crest to complete and I’ll be done.”

“Thank you,” Zach says simply, “for sharing this with me.”

Back in his hotel he thinks for a long time about Das’s method of dealing with sorrow and loss. Although he can’t see himself spending months creating paintings of coloured sand in his apartment, the principle makes a lot of sense to
him. He thinks that, without really planning it, his life has been built on a platform of detachment. It is the only way he could have survived and learned to thrive in places far from home. The years he’s had with Julia, the years he has been sheltered by Litmus and by Seppi, these have eroded his watchful and self-reliant nature. It’s why he has been feeling so unsettled, he will need to start rebuilding his defences – here and now would be a good place to start.

Novelists rarely agree about anything to do with their craft, but the one thing on which the views of a large number, from Gabriel García Márquez to R.K. Narayan to Graham Greene, seem to coincide is that what fills the well of their imagination is their childhood and early youth. As he lies on his bed in his Thimphu hotel room thinking about his life he gets what they mean – within the noise and chaos of the present, it is only the significant events of his childhood that rise up clear and untarnished.

Zach’s ability to fend for himself was formed early on. His father worked for a coffee company high in the Shevaroy Hills; their nearest neighbours were three miles away and Zach, an only child, was pretty much left to his own devices with only a succession of ayahs for company. When he was ten he was sent to boarding school. It was a tough school, and he was the outsider; the student body was largely blue-collar and resented his family’s wealth and his life of apparent privilege; he had to fight and fight often just to be left alone.

One incident stood out. Home for the holidays, he had just celebrated his thirteenth birthday, which fell on December 15. His father had taught him to shoot the previous year, and his parents had given him an air gun for his birthday. Although he had been prohibited from indiscriminately slaughtering the bird life that abounded in the vicinity of the house, he tried to do just that when he was unsupervised, which was most of the time. The help weren’t able to curb his bloodthirsty instincts (formed from reading too many books on shikar) because they were only permitted to caution him, or threaten to tell his parents, they were not allowed to command. Fortunately his aim was wayward and apart from an unfortunate bulbul that he dropped while it perched on a telephone wire, the birds around the house were terrorized but unharmed. But although Zach had delighted in his air gun what he was really looking forward to was the opportunity to use his father’s Purdey shotgun, a beautiful weapon with twin barrels of blue steel and a stock as black as night. Ever since he could remember, Zach had gone out with his father on hunting expeditions; Nirmal was a fair shot and had bagged duck, quail, and jungle fowl, and on one memorable occasion a wild boar. He had promised to let Zach use the shotgun when he turned sixteen.

Two days after his birthday his father was called away to a meeting at the company’s headquarters in the plains. He expected to be away for four days. On the second day of his trip, his mother received a call from her neighbour saying the police had informed her about a convict who had broken out of prison in a town approximately three hours away and was
last seen heading in their general direction. There was nothing to worry about, the police had said, but they would keep in regular touch until the convict, who had been serving a life sentence for chopping his neighbour to death with an aruval over a land dispute, was captured. The police were telling everybody to stay close to their bungalows, the neighbour said, and to get in touch if they spotted anyone who looked suspicious. The police phoned the house soon after with the same message. Zach’s mother told him to stop going out with his air gun until the murderer was caught. He dragged himself around the house that day, trying not to get in the way of his mother or the help. By the evening of the next day he was thoroughly bored.

At around five-thirty, after Thangavel, the butler, had cleared away the tea things in the living room, Zach went to his bedroom to listen to music. His bedroom gave on to a verandah, beyond which there was almost half an acre of beautifully maintained lawn bordered by a hibiscus hedge that stood about six feet high. On the lawn was a swing on which Zach had spent many happy hours as a little boy urging his father or his ayah or one of the gardeners to push him higher, higher. As he lay on his bed listening to an old Jefferson Airplane song on the stereo, he thought he saw a silhouette by the hibiscus hedge. In the winter, night came early in the hills, and the gardeners were normally gone by five, but maybe one of them had stayed on late; then he’d remembered that the gardeners had a half-day on Fridays. Today was Friday. His heart beating a little faster, Zach had stealthily slid off the bed, and crawled along the floor to the
window; crouching down, he had peered over the sill into the dusk. Was he imagining things or was that something that looked like a human figure wrapped in a lungi? He dropped to the floor, crawled across the room, pushed open the door, crawled out into the passage that separated his room from his parents’ room, closed the door to his room, and ran to the cupboard containing his father’s shotgun. His mother was having a bath, and the servants were in the kitchen preparing supper, as the neighbours were coming over that night.

Breaking open the shotgun as he had seen his father do, he had loaded it with two cartridges, shoved a couple more into the pocket of his shorts, snapped the barrels back into position, run back into his room, dropped to the floor, and crawled along to the window where he peered over the sill as he had done a few minutes earlier. There was nothing to be seen by the hedge in what little light remained. Not once did it occur to him to call the butler or his assistant.

Although he was terrified he had quietly unlocked the door to the verandah. Then, as smoothly as he could, he had pushed open the door, before rushing out, the gun held chest high, and screaming, “Who is there? Come out at once or I will shoot!” There wasn’t a breath of wind. The emptiness of the lawn mocked his terror. There was no one by the hedge. He heard a slight creaking sound. He turned towards it; in the dim light the swing swayed up and down.

Within minutes, the verandah light had come on, and the butler, who had heard him shouting, was there, a poker in his hand. Zach explained what had just happened. His mother joined them and got very angry with him for having taken
his father’s shotgun, and for having put himself needlessly at risk. She phoned the police and a police jeep arrived half an hour later and stayed the night. When Zach’s father returned he had been as cross as his mother had been; he said if Zach ever touched the shotgun again before his sixteenth birthday he would rescind his promise to allow him to use the weapon. When the murderer was caught four days later in the coolie lines a few miles away, where he had been given shelter by a relative, he admitted to the police that during his days of freedom he had spent some time one evening watching Nirmal aiyah’s son in his room. Remembering the incident still alarms him, but he thinks that was the day he had truly begun to learn how to fend for himself.