“Well, half the staff does,” the headmaster replied levelly. “Dzongkha is our national language. Mrs. Joy tried to give me a whispered account of “the problem with these people,” meaning the Bhutanese, but I pulled away. I do not want to be a part of whatever factionalism is developing here.
Outside the door of my classroom, I pause briefly, listening to the clatter and chatter inside. It stops abruptly as I swing open the door. This is my favorite part of the day. “Good morning, Class Two C,” I say. The entire class leaps up and sings out, “Good morn-ing, miss!” Twenty-three faces are smiling at me. Sometimes they shout it with so much conviction that I laugh.
I have a syllabus now, and the students have textbooks and thick notebooks, and pencils which they sharpen with razor blades. I haven’t mastered this skill yet, and have to ask one of the kids to sharpen my pencils for me. Sharpening miss’s pencil has become a somewhat prestigious task, but they were puzzled the first time, watching me almost slice off my fingers, and there was much whispered consultation in Sharchhop. “Where did they find this one?” I imagined them saying. “She can’t even sharpen a pencil.”
I teach English, math and science in the mornings, and in the afternoon, the Dzongkha lopen comes in to teach the national language. From the other classrooms I can hear the drone of students spelling or reading and reciting in unison: “h-o-u-s-e, house, c-a-r-r-y, carry, g-o-i-n-g, going.” In the other classrooms, the teacher says something and the students say it back, over and over and over. I cannot think what good this rote learning is doing anyone. I ask the students to read out loud individually and they look at me as if I have lost my mind.
Often, attendance is the only thing we manage to accomplish in class II C. There are a thousand interruptions. A woman knocks at the window and holds up a cloth bag. The entire class rushes over. “Class Two C,” I say, “sit down. There’s no need for all of you to be at that window.” Actually, there’s no need for any of them to be at that window. “Who is it?” I ask.
“It is Sangay Jamtsho’s mother,” they answer.
“What does she want?”
“Sangay Jamtsho forgot his jhola.”
“Sangay Jamtsho, go and get your jhola,” I say. The entire class rolls toward the door, like ball bearings, but I am there first. “I said Sangay Jamtsho. Sit back down, the rest of you.”
Sangay Chhoden comes up to my desk. Beneath her thick thatch of hair, her delicate features are screwed up in concentration. “Miss,” she says so softly I can barely hear. “House going.”
“What do you mean, Sangay?”
“Yes, miss.”
I start again. “House going?”
“Yes, miss.”
“Your house?”
“Yes, miss, my house going! ”
“Now?”
“Yes, miss. House going now, miss.”
“But why, Sangay? Why house going now? Now is school. Are you sick?”
“No, miss. House going now.”
I sigh, exasperated. “Are you coming back?”
“Yes, miss. Coming.”
“Okay, go.”
Dorji Wangdi, the office assistant, tea-maker, and general all-round helper whose official title is “peon,” knocks at the door. “Chit from Headmaster, Sir,” he says, handing me a notice. It has been noticed that some teachers are “biasedly motivated” and all staff are kindly requested to follow the rules and regulations of the school and to attend to each and every duty including morning assembly without prejudice to their utmost ability for the smooth functioning of the school. This notice is for our “kind information and necessary action, please.”
Sangay Dorji puts up his hand. His “stomach is paining,” can he go to the toilet? Norbu’s hand shoots up. His stomach is also paining. So is Sonam‘s! So is Phuntsho’s! I tell them to wait until Sangay Dorji comes back, but Sangay Dorji does not come back. I am so intent on explaining the difference between long ‘a’ and short ‘a’ that I do not notice until another student calls out, “Miss! Sangay Dorji is playing outside! ” I look out the window, and yes indeed, there is Sangay Dorji, playing outside.
I send Karma Dorji to get Sangay, and we get all the way to long ‘o’ before I look out the window to see Sangay
and
Karma playing outside.
Mr. Iyya, Pema Gatshel’s self-proclaimed bard, knocks at my classroom door. Originally from Madras, Mr. Iyya has been at the school for more than ten years. His curly black hair is slicked back with hair-oil, and he sometimes wears a spotted cravat. His everyday speech is a garbled mess of malapropisms, misquotations, and flights of fancy, and his poetry, which he pastes on the school bulletin board, is even worse. He is in charge of all English extracurricular activities—the school magazine, debates and plays. Underneath the genteel-poet guise, though, he has a terrible temper. Yesterday, I was horrified to see him break a stick on a class III boy’s hand.
“Yes, Mr. Iyya?” I ask.
He bows deeply and says he would like to apologize to my ladyship for this untimeless interruption but he would like to most humbly request me to borrow him my cane as he has the gravest misfortune of a broken one.
“My what?” I ask.
“Your ladyship’s cane.”
I stare at him. Mr. Iyya is definitely unhinged. I turn to class II C. “He wants one stick for beating, miss,” one of them informs me.
“I do not use a cane in my classroom,” I tell Mr. Iyya coldly, and close the door with a bang.
Dorji Wangdi knocks at the door. Another chit for my kind information and necessary action. There will be a puja at the school in a few weeks for the benefit of all sentient beings. All teachers are invited to attend.
Mr. Tandin, the class VIII history teacher and Store-In-Charge, comes to tell me that the School Store will be open for one half-hour. I go up to the Store and bring back twenty-three boxes of crayons. Class II C falls silent at the sight of them, and then erupts in a cheer. “Miss, I am very happy to you!” Sonam Phuntsho crows jubilantly. The crayons are magic. Class II C is very quiet as I explain that these are their own crayons, and they have to look after them, as it is highly unlikely that I will be able to persuade Mr. Tandin to release twenty-three boxes of crayons from his paltry store ever again. I tell them I will read them a story and then they will draw me a picture of the part they liked most. “Once a long time ago there was a mouse,” I begin, but there is another knock at the door.
After school, I go up to the library and fling open the window. Everything is covered with a fine white dust. I begin to pull books off the shelves in an attempt to impose some sort of classification system, but there is hardly enough material to classify. I ponder various systems, but the most appropriate one seems to be: unreadably tattered, moderately tattered, and untouched (all the Canadian readers fall into this category). I lock the door and go home to find three students sitting at the top of my stairs, their ghos splotched with mud from an after-school soccer game. Karma Dorji and Norbu are back, and they have brought Tshewang Tshering, whose standing-up hair has recently been shaved off. “Are you waiting for me?” I ask stupidly. Of course they are. My Australian neighbor on the other side of the building, some sort of sheep or cow or horse insemination expert, has been out-of-station since I arrived. “May-I-come-in-miss?” they chorus as I open the door. Once inside, they stand uneasily. I usher them into the sitting room. They sit in a row on a bench, looking around, smiling at each other, dangling their bare, dirty feet above the floor. Finally, Tshewang Tshering asks me, “Miss, you have snaps?”
“Snaps?”
“Yes, miss. We looking snaps.”
Snaps? I feel my face creasing up into a hundred lines of bewilderment as I try to guess what “snaps” could possibly mean. I have an insane idea that they want ginger snaps.
“Miss,” Tshewang Tshering says. “Snaps. Mother, father, sister, brother.”
“Oh, you want to see pictures! Snapshots!”
“Yes, miss!” They are nodding vigorously.
Oh hurray! I understand! I hurry off to the bedroom and pull out a Ziploc bag of photographs.
“This is my mother,” I say, handing out the pictures which they seize eagerly. “My father. My father’s house.”
“This your sister?” Karma Dorji asks, holding up a picture of my brother, Jason.
“No, that’s my brother.”
“Your brother, miss?”
“Yes, Karma.”
“He is lama!
“A lama? No ...”
“Why—why he is having long hairs?”
“Oh, because—because, hmmm,” I search for an answer. “Just like that only,” I finally say, and they nod.
Tshewang Tshering is looking at a postcard of the Toronto skyline. “Miss, this your house?”
“No, that’s a bank.”
“This your house?”
“No, that’s an office. All offices.”
“This one your house?”
“No, no! That’s the CN tower.”
Another postcard, of Yonge Street. “This your village, miss?”
“Yes. Toronto.”
“Who is this?” Tshewang Tshering asks, pointing to some tourists on the postcard.
“I don’t know,” I say, bewildered by the question. “Just some people.” And then I understand. I explain that there are two million people in Toronto, more people in this city than in all of Bhutan.
“Yallama
!” they say softly, the Bhutanese expression for surprise or disbelief.
Karma Dorji is flipping through a stack of magazines and music books. “Miss, this your mother?”
I get up to look and almost fall down laughing. “No, that is not my mother!” It is Johann Sebastian Bach.
Finally, I ask them if they would like some tea. “No, miss,” they say. But I know this is a Bhutanese no, so I go into the kitchen. They follow. Karma Dorji takes the pot from me. “We is making tea for miss,” he says.
“Oh no, that’s okay,” I say. “I’ll make it.” I try to prize the pot away from Karma Dorji, but he won’t let go. “You’re too young to be making tea by yourself,” I explain. “My kerosene stove is very dangerous.” They are reluctant to go, and stand in the kitchen doorway, watching as I pump up the stove. “Back, back,” I tell them, gesturing wildly as I throw a match at the stove and push them out of the kitchen. They think this is hilarious. They have to hold each other up, they are laughing so hard.
“Not funny,” I say crossly. “Dangerous. You boys wait in the other room.”
“Miss, I am doing now,” Karma Dorji tells me when he manages to stop laughing. “I am knowing this one. My house is having same-same stove.” And before I can stop him, he is pumping up the stove. When it begins to hiss, he lights a match and deftly applies the flame to the stove. A strong blue light appears. I stand openmouthed as Tshewang Tshering fills a pot with water. Norbu is rummaging through the kitchen, pulling out packages of tea, milk powder and sugar. Karma Dorji shakes the cuff of his gho out and wraps the length of it around the pot handle. He pours the steaming tea into the mugs. I follow them into the sitting room with a packet of biscuits. Karma tells me that he does the cooking at home when his parents and older sisters are working outside.
“What do you know how to cook?” I ask.
“I am cooking food, miss.”
“What kind of food?”
“Food, miss,” he says again. “Miss is not eating food?”
“Of course I eat food,” I say. “What do you think I eat?”
“Miss is only eating biscuits, my father is telling.”
“How does your father know?”
“My auntie is having one shop. She is telling miss is not buying food, only biscuits.”
“Aren’t biscuits food?” I ask, a little miffed that my eating habits have become news.
“No, miss. Food is rice.”
“Ah,” I say. “Rice. Well, in my village, in Canada, we do not eat very much rice, so I don’t know how to cook it.”
They obviously find this hard to believe. “What people is eating then in your village?”
“Oh, potatoes, bread, noodles.”
“Miss,” Karma Dorji says, his mouth full of biscuit, “I am teaching you how to cook rice. Just now, miss. You have rice?”
“Yes, but—”
All three of them are back in the kitchen. Tshewang Tshering is washing out the teacups. Karma Dorji has found the rice, which he pours onto a tin plate and picks through. I watch helplessly. Within minutes, the rice has been cleaned, rinsed and put into a pressure cooker on the stove.
“Miss.” Karma Dorji is looking around the kitchen critically.
“Yes, Karma?”
“You is having onion and chili? I am making
momshaba.”
“Now wait a minute, Karma. The rice is enough.”
Karma Dorji begins to chop up onions and chilies. Norbu is separating the spinach leaves he brought this morning and washing them in the sink. The pressure cooker whistles suddenly, sending me scurrying out of the kitchen. “What does that mean?” I ask from the doorway.
“Not finished,” Karma Dorji says. “Three times then finished.”
After the third whistle, they remove the pressure cooker and Karma Dorji fries the onions and chilies, and then adds the spinach leaves and some tomato slices. Tshewang Tshering pulls the little weighted knob off the pressure cooker lid and steam shoots out to the ceiling. I flutter around the kitchen, issuing unnecessary warnings—be careful, that’s sharp, watch out, you’ll get a steam burn. When everything is ready, I tell them that they must stay and eat. They protest, but I insist until finally they pull their tin lunch plates from inside their ghos. I am always amazed at what the upper portions of these ghos can hold: books, plates, cloth bags, a bottle of arra for me, rice crisps, dried apples, a cucumber, a handful of chilies to eat in class. Karma Dorji serves the food and we eat in silence. I cannot believe how good everything is, the rice sweet and unsticky, the spinach perfectly cooked, although extremely hot. I ask how many chilies are in this dish. Karma says ten.
“Ten!
Yallama,”
I say, wiping my eyes and nose. “How old are you, Karma?”