So Close to Heaven (40 page)

The monk in charge at Gantey, who was seized from time to time by a racking cough, didn’t want to talk very much about the origin and significance of the religious objects and symbolic decorations that filled one temple after another in the monastery, except to say that he thought some of the paintings were “about two thousand years old” and that restoring them was forbidden. He nonchalantly pointed out the urns holding the remains of reincarnates of an important early abbot. But he became animated when we came to a set of big old trunks, handworked with brass finishings. In those, he said, were Gantey’s temple festival costumes and the animal masks worn by the monks.

He said that children were taught to pay close attention to the animal dances so that they would be prepared for the variety of beings they might meet in succeeding lives. He drew us to a painting that illustrated the many intermediary deities of varying dispositions and powers a pilgrim encounters en route to heaven. In one corner of the mural were small white figures still awaiting a decision on their fate, poor writhing souls. He looked at them with pity.

It was spring when I first saw the Phobjika Valley—not with Vinod,
but on an earlier occasion, with a cheerful Bhutanese driver who plucked rhododendron blooms and tucked them under the windshield wipers to beautify the journey. This seems to be a seasonal custom, since to the Bhutanese rhododendrons are just another wildflower, with plenty to go around. The day was balmy, so we stopped for a picnic of boiled potatoes, eggs, bread, and cheese on a grassy slope with Gantey to one side and the Phobjika Valley in front of us. No sounds of modernity penetrated this place; it was a brief taste of life in Aum Rinzi’s era. At least until Michael Bloomen’s sputtering jeep came along.

Michael Bloomen is an artist. To be more specific, he is an art teacher in England who works hard to save for periodic trips to Bhutan, where, like his predecessors on British expeditions of old, he is systematically sketching and painting the country’s people and regions. Systematically is the hope, anyway. On this trip, the good-natured artist had seen just about everything go wrong, or at least not according to plan. A skilled trekker and climber, Bloomen had intended on this long-awaited visit to cross the roadless subalpine belt from Laya to Lunana, a grueling march at the best of times. The whole expedition collapsed when his porters and pack animals suddenly went home to do other work. That scotched not only the Lunana trek but the hope of walking down to Jakar, in Bumthang, along an old Tibetan trade route from the north. So he retraced his steps to Thimphu and set out along the Lateral Road for Bumthang to salvage what he could of his solo expedition. That’s when his four-wheel-drive vehicle developed coughs and wheezes.

He was philosophical. “But this is what we
expect
,” he said that night at dinner in Tongsa. “This is why we
come here!
” His reworked schedule had already proved serendipitous. He had holed up in towns unknown to foreigners, and had been rescued from one by a very high-ranking army officer, who told him fascinating tales of Bhutanese high life. In Gantey he had seen bright yellow rhododendron blooms for the first time, and was enthralled. He had made some fine sketches of chortens and other small landmarks along the way. Able to see something interesting wherever he became marooned on this unplanned expedition, he was content to stay in Tongsa while a search party tried to scrounge up a more reliable car or fix the one he had been assigned.

There were fewer than half a dozen foreigners sharing dinner in Tongsa’s small hotel that night, and we were all fascinated by Bloomen’s accounts of his earlier visits to Bhutan. The company was, as always,
pleasant, because this remote and rugged country has developed a small fraternity of devoted followers drawn back again and again despite the expense and the inevitable hardships. Almost never have I heard tourists complain in Bhutan, even at the end of very difficult days. Bhutan charms and entraps its guests with simple and honest hospitality.

Taking good care of travelers is a traditional priority, particularly if the guest is someone who commands special respect. On various trips, I stopped to admire the natural rest quarters villages had erected along the road for King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, his peripatetic uncle Prince Namgyal, or other important people. Typically, a dense fence is woven of sweet-smelling evergreen (sometimes arborvitae) supported by bamboo or wood poles to create an enclosure that becomes a private garden or a roofless room. There may be a short maze leading to a completely hidden latrine. Occasionally, there will be more than one chamber with evergreen walls, allowing a meal to be prepared and served away from the main rest area. When a ceremony or a sporting competition of some kind is due to take place in larger towns, the Bhutanese erect large white fairy-tale tents festooned with colorful drawings of dragons.

Tongsa is a memorable town for several reasons, not the least of which is its spectacular setting. A traveler from Thimphu approaches Tongsa through the Black Mountains and over the Pele La, a 10,800-foot pass where the vegetation is mostly grass and scrub. On my recent trip, Vinod, the protocol officer, and I had stopped on the Pele La for a picnic lunch on the first day of our Thimphu-Tashigang jaunt. Above the pass stood a satellite dish, part of Bhutan’s new hi-tech communications network. Near it, local people had staked prayer flags, perhaps to catch the breeze on the open slope as much as to preserve the sanctity of the spot. I happened to be looking in that direction when a yak herder materialized without a sound from over the crest of the hill behind us. Drawing his wooden bowl from his gho, he accepted some tea, showing interest in the Yu-Druk’s sandwiches too. Soon he had joined us for a meal, chatting to the protocol officer, Ugyen Wangchuck, namesake but no relation of the first king. The herder said he had been told that one of his yaks had got into a fight with an animal from another herd and had been killed. He had climbed up the mountain to take a look at the situation, which was not yet resolved; it wasn’t clear why.

Lunch over, he thanked us and resumed his task. We headed on to Tongsa over a notorious patch of road given to landslides and rock
showers. Paving occasionally collapses into abysses formed in sharp corners where waterfalls pound the shallow road surface and torrents land on small concrete bridges from on high. Repairs are made by Bhutanese citizens giving time to the state under a volunteer work system known as
wulah.
Each family is now required to contribute two weeks of labor, ideally that of the strongest member of the household. Only it doesn’t turn out that way. There are certain predictable exemptions; civil servants, for example, don’t break rocks. And families have taken to sending along women, some of them barely teenagers, to spare others for tasks on the farm. Workers, children included, are bivouacked like gypsies, covered in dust or the soot of fires under melting tar, as they huddle in lean-tos on the edges of chasms. My companion-interpreter always made sure that we gave any excess food we had to these workers.

Not long after the road from Pele La regains its composure on the descent to Tongsa, it passes the Chendebji Chorten, a landmark to travelers who know they have now entered eastern Bhutan. The eighteenth-century chorten, its bulk built in the rounded Nepali style with eyes looking in four directions from the square base of the stylized point near the top, was constructed to hold down a demon that had been bothering the people in this valley. All is peaceful here now, with the silence of the place broken only by the wind in the prayer flags and the gurgling of a stream running through a gorge. Less than twenty miles (but as much as an hour’s driving time) later, Tongsa Dzong bursts dramatically into view at a bend in the road—though it will take nearly another hour to reach its gates across the Mangde Valley. The dzong commands a ridge backed by higher mountains but overlooking the deep, wide valley at its feet. At the point that this classic dzong can be seen to best advantage, the roadbuilders have constructed one of the country’s few official lookout points, where it seems criminal not to stop for a photo.

Tongsa’s origins are relatively recent, so its history is refreshingly straightforward. In 1541, Lam Ngagi Wangchuck, a Drukpa monk of Tibetan royal lineage, came down from Ralung in eastern Tibet and stopped to meditate on the ridge above where the dzong now stands. He established a small temple, around which a village sprang up. In the next century, the Shabdrung Ngawang Namgyal ordered a fortress built here. It grew and grew into a huge complex several city blocks long, strung
along a spur overlooking the Mangde Chhu. Though its formal name is Chhokkor Rabtentse, everyone calls it Tongsa Dzong.

“The dzong was once astride the main road that came up here over a bridge down by the river,” Dasho Phub Dorji, the Tongsa dzongda, said as he greeted us at a massive wooden gate to the fortress. “There was then a western gate and an eastern gate, and everyone had to pass through the dzong until about 1960. These gates were for the security of the dzong, so just before dark somebody would close, and open again in the morning. Anyone who wanted to continue on the road had to be here before sunset, from west to east or east to west.” He added that the dzong might seem very large from outside “but inside it is very narrow.”

We walked from courtyard to courtyard and level to level of the old dzong. It was more than a workout. Bhutanese are accustomed to running up and down monastic ladder-stairs (and at high altitudes). After a while, even a foreigner catches on, though, and the climbs do not seem so vertiginous. We went from sanctuary to sanctuary in the monastic section of the fortress, away from the administrator’s offices. The dzongda pointed out the urns with the ashes of learned monks.

“We don’t know how old some of these are,” he said. “Unfortunately in our system so far no one has kept the records. One reason is that in olden days, they didn’t register and record anything. People did not feel the necessity to mark time.” The Dasho said there were three hundred monks in residence at Tongsa, including one hundred novices. There were also some nuns, but they did not stay in the dzong. By tradition, women never do. There are only a few hundred Buddhist nuns in all of Bhutan, and they play a peripheral role, as everywhere in the Himalayas, outnumbered as they are by thousands of monks in state monasteries or privately supported temples.

The dzongda was marveling at how the monks were able to master the sacred books by memory, without necessarily understanding all they read, as we entered a bare wooden hall where a group of about twenty novices were learning a lesson in self-discipline and silence. Most of the boys seemed to be about ten or twelve years old, and they were having a hard time being serious. With their scrubbed faces bathed in the sunlight that poured into the dark room through its only window, the boys looked angelic, but the sparkle in their eyes gave them away. Each time the elderly monk in charge turned his back, the boys—standing in rows,
palms clasped together—would fidget and giggle. One or two of them elbowed or tickled the boy next in line, setting off a round of muffled jostling and suppressed tittering. The dzongda laughed.

We moved on to another temple to the cawing of crows and the rising drone of a prayer. People from the nearby town had brought oil for lamps and some other offerings to mark a special occasion at that particular shrine. ‘According to our religion, we say, if you donate something to poor people, give help to the needy, and if you are good in this world, if your mind is clear, then when you are reborn you go up,” the dzongda remarked as we headed for his office for tea and cookies. “If you are bad, you go down to the animals.”

Dasho Phub Dorji said that as dzongda of Tongsa he played no part in the monastic activities of the dzong, which were directed by the chief monk, who in turn reported to the central monastic body. “But as a public administrator, I’m very much involved in development activities in this district: engineering projects, education, the agricultural extension centers, health, and so on,” he said. “At the village level, though, religion plays a greater part than administration, because the people have the faith that everything comes from religion. Therefore we have a program of integrating monks officially in development. If the monk knows something about health or other things, then in the village he may be of more help than a layman. If we say you have to wash your clothes every month or something like that, people may not listen. But if the monk says …”

When we met, Dasho Phub Dorji, who was educated entirely in Bhutan, had been giving thought to the problem of reintegrating into village life young Bhutanese who had been abroad and who would probably be initially unwilling to return to a rural existence thereafter. He was trying to convince the educated young that with a cash economy taking root, there would be opportunities in the countryside to help turn a subsistence economy based on barter into a lucrative one using market forces to create disposable incomes. “Somebody who is studying in U.S.A. or Australia, naturally he might not like to go back to the village, where there is no social life,” the dzongda said. “But gradually, he can know the situation. Today the farmer, if he keeps sheep, needs someone to look after the sheep. If he keeps cows, someone has to look after the cows. Somebody has to work in the fields.” Better farming, he said, would need better management. This would, in turn, create more jobs
in the countryside, especially in Bhutan, where the steep terrain makes mechanical farming impossible in most areas. “No matter how much money you make, you will always need manpower,” the dzongda said. “And in our villages, the whole life has changed. I was a student in the 1950s, when we had a subsistence life. Now villagers have some communications, health coverage, community schools. The lifestyle is very different.”

Not long after five the next morning, I went for a hike up the hill behind the Sherubling Tourist Lodge, the fourteen-room hotel where most foreigners stay. Because it was very early, I had a chance on my way out to snoop around the unattended reception desk near the door. I saw that Tongsa had thirty telephone lines, six of them to the dzongkhag administration offices, two to the thrimpon’s law court, one for monks, and most of the rest for branch offices of the central government. There was a phone book, too: it consisted of one mimeographed page of two-digit numbers.