Belief
A
t Pala’s one morning for breakfast, I watch Amala throw buckets of water at the pack of snarling dogs that has made its home outside her kitchen. “What to do with them,” she says. “Always fighting and all night barking.”
Dogs are a problem all over Bhutan, especially in towns, wherever there are institutions with kitchens—schools and hospitals and army camps. The packs belong to no one and to everyone. It would be a sin in Buddhism to round them all up and kill them, since all sentient beings are considered sacred, even these horrid, diseased, deformed dogs.
“Now I will do something,” Amala says grimly.
Three days later, I look up from my lunch to see her talking earnestly to a truck driver. He nods and begins rounding up the dogs, using jute sacks to pick them up and toss them, yelping and howling, into the back of his truck. When all the dogs are in, Amala hands him two hundred ngultrum, and he drives off.
“Where’s he taking them?” I ask.
“Wamrong,” she says.
“Why Wamrong?”
“Too far for them to walk back.” She smiles into her tea.
But the next day, the truck returns. The driver leaps out and unlatches the back door. The dogs pour out, still yelping and howling, and settle themselves in front of Amala’s kitchen. The driver is smiling broadly; he can hardly believe his luck. The good merchants of Wamrong gave him another two hundred rupees to take all the dogs back.
I am spending more time with Amala, who is a fountain of stories and local histories. She tells me about
pows,
people who can go visit your relatives in the afterlife, and oracles who speak through a chosen person. Amala tells me about her sister, Sonam, who returned home after many years in the West, bringing with her an anthropologist who wanted to see an oracle in action. They went to the family temple in Sakteng, where the man who could summon the oracle was called. He slumped to the floor in a trance and rose as the oracle took possession, speaking in a stern and unearthly voice. The oracle would not answer the anthropologist’s questions because she was of a different faith, but had a few things to say to Sonam, accusing her of staying away from home too long and neglecting her father’s temple. The oracle picked up a sword and swung it around wildly, and Sonam was terrified. Finally, it told her to throw a ceremonial white scarf around the central statue at the altar. The way the scarf fell would determine her fate. Sonam threw the scarf, which landed properly, and the oracle was placated.
Amala is surprised that I believe in the oracle. “Foreign peoples is only believing if they see with their own eyes,” she says. “Not seeing, then not believing.”
“But Amala, lots of people in the West believe in things they can’t see,” I say. “People believe in god, and ghosts, and theories that no one can prove.”
“But not in Bhutanese things,” she says. “They are only believing in their own things they can’t see.”
I think of the European woman I met having lunch here some time ago. She had been in Bhutan for three months with an international aid agency. “The Bhutanese are so superstitious, don’t you find?” she had asked me. “Everything happens because of ghosts or demons.”
“But Christianity has the Holy Ghost,” I argued. “And the Devil.”
“That’s different,” she said. She didn’t explain how. “I really feel sorry for them. So much of their faith is based on fear.”
“At least in Buddhism, hell is not forever,” I countered. “I can’t think of anything more frightening than the idea of eternal hell after only one lifetime.” The woman ended the conversation by paying for her lunch and leaving. I hadn’t meant to insult her faith. I wanted only to point out what Amala has just put so succinctly. Being in Bhutan has shown me how strong this tendency is, to think that what we believe is real and valid and what everyone else believes is fearful nonsense and superstition.
I have finished most of the Buddhist books from the library, moving from basic texts to esoteric writings such as
The Tibetan Book of Great Liberation
and back again. The first sermon of the Buddha still stuns me with its clarity; I read it and feel the world grow still and quiet around me. I read teachings on meditation and wisdom, keeping in mind Nima’s summation that belief without practice is useless. Buddhist practice offers systematic tools for anyone to work out their own salvation. Here, the Buddha said, you’ve got your mind, the source of all your problems, but also the source of your liberation. Use it. Look at your life. Figure it out.
The teachings on compassion are particularly important to daily practice. Compassion grows out of the recognition that all sentient beings—friends, enemies, complete strangers—want the same thing. We all want to be happy, and yet again and again, we act in ways which bring suffering to ourselves, and to others, and through others back to ourselves. Seeing through the superficial differences to this core of sameness is the great equalizer, stripping away the mask of unique personal identity and revealing us one and all as simple, wanting, fearful, hopeful, bewildered beings. It is an enormous daily mental challenge to see Mr. Matthew not as my enemy but simply as my neighbor, wanting exactly what I want, and being mistaken, just like me, about how to get it.
According to Buddhism, if someone insults or hurts you, you should see their behavior as an opportunity to learn about the nature of your pride and attachment. Buddhism demands that you not only love your enemy, but see him or her as your greatest teacher. Instead of despising Mr. Matthew, I could be using each encounter with him to examine my ego and break down my own arrogance.
Buddhism requires that I take on the terrifying responsibility for myself; I am the author of my own suffering, and my own deliverance. And yet it also requires very little—only that I open my eyes right here, where I am standing, that I simply pay attention.
I ask Amala how one becomes a Buddhist, is there a ceremony, what are the requirements. She tells me to go to a lama. I feel almost ready.
Tshewang returns
One Hundred Years of Solitude
through a friend, with “thanks” scribbled on a scrap of paper inside. We have not spoken since the dance. I think this is his way of telling me he realizes that we have to stop. The unadorned note strengthens my resolve to break the spell between us. I debate the idea of discussing it with him, I write letters to him in my head.
Dear Tshewang, I am writing so
that we can close what we have opened by mistake between us, and I want you to know how sorry I am that ...
that what? That I did not kiss you the night of the dance? That I said we can’t when actually I meant we can? That’s what I’m really sorry about. No, it is better to leave it entirely alone. We need a complete cessation.
But I miss our disorderly discussions and wild debates, I miss that sexual charge between us, I miss the way his eyes curl up when he laughs. Without these encounters to hope for, my days are steadier and more productive, and entirely without joy.
Enter Macduff
W
e have finished reading
Macbeth
in the Zoo, and the students want to perform it. They have divided themselves up into groups and assigned themselves scenes, and in the evenings, I watch them rehearse on stage. They start off earnestly, standing stiffly and declaiming, but by the end they are doubled over in laughter. They are at ease with one another, shouting encouragement and insults and advice, and I think that if there are times when they forget who is north and who south, this is one of them. After rehearsal, we sometimes sit outside the auditorium, talking quietly before the bell at eight o’clock calls them back to their hostels. Night falls softly, and it is easier to talk in the dark. They remember their best and worst teachers, summer and winter holidays; they remember the first time they saw a vehicle, the first time they saw a video, the first time they met each other at boarding schools in Samtse or Khaling or Thimphu; they remember who could make even the strictest teacher laugh aloud, remember that time we got caught stealing maize from the lopen’s garden, and I cannot imagine then that they actually dislike and mistrust each other. They have grown up together, and can speak each other’s languages and sing each other’s songs. They have a shared personal history, and perhaps this will in the end count for more than the historical divisions and facts and allegations.
On the political front, there has been no news for several weeks. Nothing in the
Kuensel,
which doesn’t mean anything, but also nothing from the students. I start to believe that the crisis is over. Perhaps there is dialogue now, perhaps there will be accommodation and understanding on both sides.
The students are ready for their final performances. They have gone to great effort with costumes and makeup and special effects, and it is a travesty. “Is this a dagger which I see before me?” Macbeth asks the plank of wood hanging from the stage curtains, and the alarm from a digital watch is set off to give the impression of urgency, but the persistent beepbeep flusters Macbeth who tries to wrest the watch away from the special effects team and there is a scuffle with Lady Macbeth who owns the watch; Great Birnam Wood misses its cue and there are leaves and branches everywhere; enter Macduff with Macbeth’s head, a wig of black yak hair, and I laugh until I cry.
In the library the next morning, a crowd of students is pressed up against the front desk, trying to read a single copy of the
Kuensel.
I ask what’s going on, and the
Kuensel
is passed silently over to me. On June 2, the anniversary of the King’s coronation, in the industrial town of Gomtu in southern Bhutan, a jute sack was found near a petrol pump, containing the severed heads of two southern Bhutanese men. A letter in the sack accused the men of cooperating with the Royal Government and betraying their own people.
Ranjana, a class XII student, is led out of the library in tears. “One of them was her uncle,” someone tells me.
I pass the newspaper back and leave the library. I feel sick. I stand on the balcony outside the staff room. In the fields below the college, women are weeding the rice paddies. I try to think about this labor that will feed the family, these works and days of hands, the feeling of mud between the toes, water up to the ankles, the sun on the back of the neck—it is useless, the image will not allow me entrance, and I am sent back to the mental picture of two heads in a jute sack. It seems impossible, something I have read somewhere else (“enter Macduff with Macbeth’s head”), it cannot be happening here.
I force myself to read the rest of the
Kuensel
article. For the first time, the arrests of last year are mentioned. Between October and December 1989, forty-two people were arrested for anti-national activities. Thirty-nine were later released, and a general amnesty of two months was announced to enable those who had fled the country to return. A group calling itself the People’s Forum for Human Rights announced that it wants to divide southern Bhutan into a separate political entity.
A northern student tells me he is leaving school to join the militia. “To fight the aunties,” he says.
“The aunties?” I repeat, bewildered, and then realize he is talking about the anti-nationals. “These southerners,” he explains.
“Not all southerners are anti-nationals,” I say quietly.
“You don’t know, miss. You don’t know what they are.”
Two schools in southern Bhutan are attacked and set aflame. A group of armed men attack a truck and force the driver to take off his gho. Previously, southern Bhutanese found out of national dress were fined by the Dzongkhag authorities. Now, southern Bhutanese found wearing national dress are stripped by “anti-nationals.”
The time for talking and listening has disappeared, the opportunity growing smaller and smaller until it snapped shut altogether. There will only be rhetoric now, posturing and lying and violence. I want to step out sideways. I do not want to be a witness to the inevitable.
I am cleaning the bookshelf one evening in an attempt to avoid the pile of marking that awaits me. I open
One Hundred Years of Solitude
and Tshewang’s thank-you note flutters out. On the other side is written LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA. I see the word “love” and I think: maybe this was the message I was supposed to respond to. Maybe this termination has been all my doing. The hand that has been holding my heart unclenches, and I can breathe deeply and it doesn’t hurt. Then I crush the paper up. It is a title, not a message. What next? I wonder. Messages through a frequency device implanted in my head? I will put this desire into a stone. I will seal it up. I will make the right effort.
I make the right effort and it makes me miserable. It rains every night, and every morning the sun breaks hot and relentless through the dissipating mist. “Good for the farmers,” Mr. Fantome tells me when I visit him in his garden, “good for all green growing things.” Everything swells wildly, and the forests glow eerily with gigantic ferns and luminous underbrush.
In the midst of the rainy season,
I write in my journal,
I have driven myself into this dry scorched flat place. Desire has led me to this place where there is nothing to drink or
eat.
I do not know how to lead myself out. I have never been so unhappy.
Zurung
L
eon invites me to his new posting in Yurung, a village in the Pema Gatshel valley. I stop at Pema Gatshel Junior High School on the way, but the kids have all gone home for the summer break. I leave a packet of letters and crayons for my former students and walk down to Gypsum, where I cross the river twice, thrice and begin to ascend to Yurung, except somehow, in the hot sun at the bottom of the valley, I have got turned around and I am actually walking back up the mountain to Pema Gatshel. A farmer sets me straight. Yurung, when I finally reach it, is the prettiest village I have seen yet. The houses are clustered close together, separated by low stone walls and bramble fences and kitchen gardens, and willow and cypress line the stream that rushes through the middle. I am relieved to be in a village again, I am relieved to be away from my articulate and unreasonable students. I am relieved to be away from the possibility of meeting Tshewang and the necessity of avoiding him, the laborious battle against my heart’s desire, but I cannot bring myself to tell this to Leon. I suspect that I do not want to be talked out of it for good. Somewhere in me, hope is hiding. “I don’t want to think about the Situation,” I say. “I just want to sit here on your front steps and watch the cows and chickens and the children. Don’t ask me anything, I don’t want to talk about it.”