Beyond the Sky and the Earth (28 page)

Leon, Tony, Lorna and several others go to Thailand for the winter, and they urge me to come along. I want to see Nepal, though, and fly to Kathmandu with Jane from Tsebar. From there, we travel overland to Delhi. Northern India is exhausting. Along the way we are stared at, glared at, honked at, swerved around, groped, grabbed, pinched, poked, fondled, bullied, propositioned, lied to, proposed to, and sang to. It is a relief when we finally reach Shakuntala’s book-lined flat in Delhi. Jane returns to England, and I continue on alone to Kovalum Beach in Kerala, where I spend my days swimming and reading and walking from one end of the beach to the other, eating yogurt, fish, pineapples and coconut. The three-day train journey back to northern India is warm and intimate. We pass through cool morning forests, hot midday plains and hills turning purple in evening shadows, and the Indian families in the compartment share their food with me, aloo dum and paratha and an assortment of homemade pickles, sweet basmati rice and chickpeas in tangy sauce. I have nothing to offer in return, but buy fruit drinks and ice cream for the kids, and we make stars and boats and flowers out of the back pages of my journal.

By the time I reach Calcutta, I am longing to see the mountains again. All winter, my thoughts have never been far from Bhutan. The bus from Calcutta to Phuntsholing barrels over a deeply gouged and rutted highway. The air becomes suddenly cooler, and I look up: ahead, without a prologue of knolls or hills, the mountains rise straight up. I feel a familiar surge of happiness. I am back home.

—
Buddhist Scriptures

T
he college is awash in mid-morning sunlight when I step off the Comet from Tashigang. I unlock my house and fling open all the windows. Mrs. Chatterji calls down to me, asking about my trip to India. She is very beautiful, with large brown eyes and pale skin and a fall of straight dark hair. Over her flowery sari, she wears two thick handknit sweaters against the cold, but when I suggest that she comes out into the sun, she shakes her head. “Bad for the complexion,” she says, and points to the broom in my hand. “So today you are doing spring cleaning?” Actually, I was only going to sweep off the front step so that I could sit on it, but I nod. After living below her for six months, I know that housework is her entire day. She begins as soon as her husband leaves for class in the morning—sweep the floors, beat the rugs, tend the garden, do the laundry, cook the meals, wash the dishes. “She needs a child,” Mrs. Matthew once whispered to me.

“Or a job,” I whispered back. Mrs. Chatterji has a master’s degree, but when I asked Mr. Chatterji why she didn’t teach, he laughed. “My wife does not have to work. She is happy at home.” But I do not believe it. In the late afternoon, waiting for her husband to return, she descends the stairs and paces back and forth along one wall of the house. I have never seen her go farther than this by herself, and I cannot imagine how long that stretch of time is between the last thing cleaned and folded and put away and the sound of her husband’s footsteps on the stairs.

On the other side, Mr. Matthew is working in his garden. He offers to lend me his gardening tools. “Your garden has become like jungle,” he says in his musical Keralan lilt. I tell him that I like the undomesticated look, but he frowns.

I change the subject. “It’s so quiet without the students, isn’t it?”

“Quiet is good,” Mr. Matthew says. “You know, we were talking about you just before our winter holidays.”

“Who was?”

“We, the lecturers. You are becoming too familiar with the students. This is not good. They will be taking advantage.”

“I haven’t had any—”

“You must not lower yourself to their level. You are a lecturer, not one of them, isn’t it. Lecturers cannot be friendly with the students.”

“It’s all right, really—”

“No,” he says. “It is not all right. I hope you will improve yourself this year.”

I sit in the sun on my front step all afternoon, reading and drinking in the view, and in the evening go out to the tap in the backyard to wash my journey-stained clothes. Mrs. Matthew stops on her way upstairs. “Washing your clothes at night?” She is aghast.

“It was too nice a day to do laundry,” I say.

“In the dark?” She goes clucking loudly up the stairs to her apartment, where she and Mr. Matthew will discuss the errors of my ways, and they will be legion.

This is the other side of small, which Chhoden had warned me about last year when she spoke of the constricting uniformity of village life. After six weeks in total anonymity, I had forgotten this, the smallness and narrowness of the community here. I had forgotten all the implied criticisms of my teaching methods and general behavior, the falsely cheerful questions in the staff room.
What for you are bringing this tape player to class? Playing music—in class? What were your students doing sitting outside today? Writing poems is in the syllabus? Why you are having so many students visiting you, Miss Jamie? Are you giving extra tuition in English?
Not really asking. Really telling. Telling me this is not the way we do things here. Real lecturers do not behave like this. Real lecturers call the students boys and girls; they take attendance religiously and do not play Dire Straits songs in class to illustrate satire. Real lecturers do not sit on their steps drinking coffee with the students, and they do not hang out their clothes to dry at night. If it weren’t for Shakuntala, I would be very alone here.

At the post office, there is a parcel from Canada that has taken nine months to reach me, a few Christmas cards, and a letter from Robert. I carry it to the bend in the road and read it hastily under the prayer flags. Robert is hurt and angry and bewildered. He doesn’t understand how I could have turned away from so much in such a short time. I am unable to look fully at the pain that I have caused, and I fold the letter away into my pocket, wishing I could fold away my remorse and guilt as easily.

We have been back only for a few days when Shakuntala receives a message from home. Her father is seriously ill, and she may have to return to Delhi. She waits for news, hardly daring to leave her house. “Maybe he’ll be okay,” I say, and she nods but her eyes tell of an immense grief to come.

That same weekend, a student shows up at my window late at night, and we have a whispered conversation through the shutter—you can’t come in, but why not, you
know
why not. He begs, pleads, promises to tell no one, he swears to Buddha he would never tell, and what harm can come of it, just this once, if you only knew how much courage it took for me to come here, you would not send me away. I do not recognize him—he is not in any of my classes, and in my mind, this somehow justifies letting him in. I am hungry for physical contact, and in a quick, unthinking moment have convinced myself that this is night-hunting, part of the experience of Bhutan. I open the door.

Almost immediately, though, I regret it. Physically, it is a rushed, blurry, wholly dissatisfying encounter, but the real problem is how his demeanor changes. The sweet, pleading routine is replaced by a smugness that turns my stomach. I hurry him out of the house after, cursing myself for not having had more sense. I doubt that he will keep his word about telling no one, and I dread the thought of seeing him in daylight. My only consolation is that he mentioned his final-year exams. This means that in a few weeks, he will be gone.

By the next morning, I have worked myself into a blind panic over the encounter, and the possibility of it becoming public. I am not sure if I could be fired in Bhutan for this, but certainly my reputation among the students would be irreparably damaged, perhaps to the point of making teaching impossible. I don’t know how I could have been so reckless. Next door, Shakuntala is packing to return to Delhi, but I am so caught up in my own predicament that I barely notice her distress. I pace her bedroom while she folds clothes into a suitcase, half-listening to her describe her father’s latest symptoms. He is going to tell someone, is all I can think, and what then. Shakuntala stops talking, and after a long strained moment, I realize she has asked me a question, the only word of which I heard was “remission.” I rush into the silence, telling her what I have done, appalled at the way I turn it into a light-hearted, light-headed encounter. “I don’t know,” I conclude. “Do you think he’ll tell?”

“I—I don’t know,” she says blankly.

“Maybe no one would believe him,” I say. “Do you think?”

“Jamie,” she says. “My father is
dying.”
She is weeping.

For the next few days, I live in a state of pure neurosis. I see him on campus, and we look carefully past each other, and slowly the worry about what
might
happen
if
he tells begins to dissipate. The worry, but not the regret.

Then I realize that Shakuntala is gone. She writes briefly to say that her father has died, and that she must stay in Delhi with her mother. The thought of my callous behavior on the day of her departure shakes me out of sleep at night, thrusts itself into everything I do, look here, it clamors, look at this. I try meditating to empty my mind of all cognitive thought, but I am unable to get away from myself. After a few minutes, I leap up, looking for some book or task to throw myself into. There is no quick confess-and-forgive formula in Buddhist practice. Buddhism requires a constant, relentless internal honesty, and I know I will be unable to proceed until I face my own behavior, my utter thoughtlessness in sleeping with the student, and my failure to be a true friend to Shakuntala. The only way out of this is straight through it. And while you are there, a voice adds, you might take a real look at the grief you have caused Robert.

 

 

 

Without Shakuntala, I am alone, neither part of the staff nor of the student body. I resolve to try to make amends with the staff members, but the thought of becoming one of “we the lecturers” makes me feel cold and cross, a hundred years old. It rains for several days, and I stay in bed, preparing lessons, eating peanuts, wrapped in sweaters and a heavy woolen kira against the cold damp. When the rain subsides, I put on my shoes and walk to the shops to get something more substantial than peanuts. The tops of the mountains are all engrossed in cloud, and the wind comes down from the dark peaks in the north, sharpened by its passage through brambles and thorns, carrying icy droplets of rain. While the shopkeeper packs my groceries in newspaper, I read the astrologers’ calendar on the wall, printed in Chhoeki and English. It is the Year of the Iron Horse, and the predictions are ominous, full of conflict and rain and the movement of peoples.

Four of the five who were arrested last year are back. They are subdued, associating with neither north nor south, nor with each other; they are years older, eyes shadowed and faces haggard. As for the one who is still missing, all I can find out is that he was “involved” and is now in jail. Dil has not returned. The southern students say the Situation deteriorated over the winter: there were curfews and travel restrictions, the government is canceling Nepali instruction in the southern schools, and families have to produce a land-tax receipt from 1958 in order to be counted as Bhutanese citizens. The northern students say that thousands of illegal immigrants have been found in the southern belt, and what country in the world wouldn’t take action against this.

In the newspaper, treason is still the key word, along with
ngolops,
traitors. The government was “deeply saddened to learn that some southern Bhutanese teachers, trainees, students and civil servants had taken part in activities aimed at harming the Tsawa Sum.” It is a matter of “great regret and disappointment that these people had become involved in anti-national activities against the government that had fed, clothed and educated them since their childhood.” The government says that clemency has been shown to all except the ringleaders, and the people’s representatives express disappointment at the government’s lenient stand. I have serious doubts about this expressed disappointment; the entire discussion sounds stilted, as if it had been scripted.

I begin asking direct questions. I get two sides of a story, two halves that do not make a whole.

See ma’am, it’s about democracy and human rights, the southern students tell me. We have a right to wear our own dress and speak our own language.

But the northern students say it is about their survival as a nation. Bhutan is a small country stuck between two giant neighbors, threatened by demographic pressures. We have to protect and preserve our traditions and culture.