So Close to Heaven (42 page)

Tshering, taking charge, scorned the toothbrush idea, too. She took immediately to the bracelet. “My granny grandmama left me one like,” she said, splashing lye-laced soapsuds around the bathroom sink and walls as she attacked the hapless jewelry with a scrubbing brush meant for the floor. “I know how to clean. Leave to me.” When she finished, one large red stone had been unmasked as a finely cut piece of bicycle reflector and one of the smaller turquoises looked suspiciously like a fragment of aquamarine bathroom tile. Another, apparently real, turquoise was imbedded in unidentifiable goo, and there was a space where there should have been a coral. But the silver had begun to shine, and she was pleased.

Tshering looked after the rooms at the guesthouse, a collection of about a dozen cottages built in what was once the front garden of a royal residence, the Wangdicholing Palace. Bumthang, the seat of at least half a dozen important temples and the birthplace of the saint Pema Lingpa, whom the Bhutanese regard as an ancestor of the royal family, was also where Bhutan’s first king, Ugyen Wangchuck, was born. Thus the royal family (and therefore the civil service) has always had close ties to Bumthang, which has duly benefited. In this valley, the spirit and the state come together.

The old royal lodge, a deteriorating masterpiece of traditional architecture
that was the scene of many courtly spectacles, still stands behind the tourist lodge, but is rarely used. When King Jigme Singye Wangchuck conies to Bumthang these days, he stays at a modest newer bungalow in a secluded grove about a mile upstream on the same bank of the Bumthang Chhu. The king clearly prefers rustic settings and natural building materials—he had cement steps removed from the front veranda of the new residence and replaced with timber. In the bungalow, his bedroom is spartan but spacious, dominated by a large woodstove and, naturally, a king-size carved wooden bed, imported from India. The king’s four stunning queens sleep almost summer-camp-style in a much smaller room all but filled by their four simple single beds. A caretaker accompanying the dzongda of Bumthang on an inspection tour of the bungalow smiled affectionately as he ran his hand lightly over the tiny pitmarks in the bare wooden floor made by Their Majesties’ stiletto-heeled shoes. If you’re a wellborn Bhutanese woman, wearing high heels with a kira has become essential, it seems, no matter how rustic the setting, rocky the terrain, or precipitous the temple stairs.

Wangdicholing Guesthouse, where many foreign visitors to Bhutan stay, is separated from the old royal palace by a stone wall where noisy crows perch to scream at nothing in particular. Lazy dogs indifferent to the persistent cawing snooze in the sun on ledges around a caretaker’s cottage, preparing for the night’s howling sessions and dogfights. But on the bright Sunday morning that my bracelets were getting the lye treatment, about the only sound outdoors was the guttural sputtering of a hot-water heater boiling over on the back wall of my cabin, trying to keep up with Tshering Hamo.

To describe Tshering as merely the chambermaid of this establishment would be selling her short. Round-faced, beautifully rosy-cheeked, and solidly built, like most of the women of rural Bhutan, she was also the guesthouse porter, shouldering huge loads of camping gear and suitcases that would crush a pony. British political agents who first penetrated Bhutan several centuries ago, while recording in their diaries radically different judgments on the women’s comeliness or lack of it, were on the whole impressed by the physical strength of the Bhutanese of both sexes. These mountain women with their uniformly cropped thick black hair framing their weathered faces are strong, tireless, and shrewd. A British military engineer in Ladakh came to the same conclusion there, recalling in 1846 how the women carried his tent over the
mountains after whimpering male coolies had complained about its weight.

Tshering could sometimes be found winging stones at stray hounds, washing dishes in the hotel kitchen, bartending, delivering room-service orders around the compound, or waiting on tables in the paneled lodge with a huge woodstove that serves as restaurant and social center. (Formal entertainment was limited, however, mostly to old Bhutan tourism videos, with jumpy pictures and scratchy sounds played on a television set whose veil-like cover was lifted only in the evening hours.) No one ever saw the guesthouse manager work as hard as Tshering, when he worked at all.

Tshering could also build a mean fire. It was firewood that first brought us into friendly small talk. She professed to be pleased that I knew good kindling when I saw it and that I was conversant about flues and drafts after years of experience with an ornery woodstove in Pennsylvania. After a while, she was bringing me choice logs dry enough to ignite, compact enough to push through the small round opening of the stove in my room, but fat enough to smolder all night—the difference at Wangdicholing between reasonable comfort and subquilt hibernation in the winter months.

The heater used here and elsewhere in Bhutan is called a
bukhari
, a reminder of its Central Asian origins. In essence, a bukhari is a large tin can on spindly feet with a hole in the top, over which there is a cover that fits only when the two whimsically handcrafted circumferences on the stove and its lid can be made to coincide. Sometimes they never do, and the whole contraption becomes a riot of uncontrollable drafts. At Wangdicholing, a hot bukhari on its small slab of concrete is the only source of warmth in a wood-floored, wood-paneled room devoid of fire extinguishers, unless you count the bathroom bucket. But then, much of forested Bhutan and its half-timbered architecture classify as firetraps. It is a rare monastery or dzong that has not burned to the ground at least once or twice in its history. The monks will point proudly to the distinction of having escaped the inferno when they can make that claim.

Tshering was not very impressed with my cautious paper-and-sticks method of starting a fire in the stove. She had a lot of bukharis to light at Wangdicholing, morning and evening, and she didn’t want to waste time on niceties. With compact movements of her broad, capable hands, their skin chapped crimson and cracked from work and exposure, she
would stuff the little stove to its capacity with wood, then lace the pile lavishly with kerosene from a Druk Marmalade jar. To that volatile combination she quickly applied a wad of flaming toilet paper. Even before the roar had subsided, she would sweep out into the evening darkness to thaw the next freezing foreigner.

After a few years of dealing with tourists, most of them paying more than two hundred dollars a day for the privilege of staying in what was akin to an unheated motel room whose economically cut curtains didn’t always extend to the full width of the drafty windows, Tshering had begun to take the measure of the outside world from her Bumthang vantage point. Other young Bhutanese of her generation were being sent abroad for training in tourism; she learned on the job, toting trays and receiving complaints. She got accustomed to (but never could explain) the harrumphs of guests who returned to find their door keys not in the guesthouse reception office, which was usually locked anyway, but sticking smartly out of the padlocks on their room doors. Until very recently, Bhutanese never locked their houses, even in towns; why should guests? The mealtime whims of tourists didn’t make sense, either. “I bring six-o’clock breakfast; he says I want seven,” she groused one day after apologizing when I got tea instead of coffee for the third consecutive morning. “At night he says eight o’clock next day; next morning at six forty-five he says where is toast, tea. Fire is out.”

The occasion for this outburst was the impending arrival of a German tour group, whose list of demands and special orders had preceded them across the Black Mountains. Wangdicholing was being cleaned from one end to the other with Teutonic thoroughness by a staff that had worked out what each nationality expected of a hotel. Malingering guests had been evicted or forced to double up so that the staff would be spared having to tell the arriving Germans they were staying somewhere else. Somewhere else in Bumthang can be a bleak experience best symbolized by outdoor latrines and cold-water washes, if not tents hastily pitched in meadows to the astonishment of cows. This Sunday, the grounds had been scoured for minute bits of trash, and a general stoning of stray dogs had cleared the yard of animal life.

Nonetheless, by midday the situation had started to deteriorate. The guesthouse was out of bottled water, a sad-faced waiter announced, noting that “Americans drank it all.” It was just as well he didn’t catch the brief return of the most despised of all the outcast dogs—a pretty, long-haired,
reddish mongrel whose appearance among the pack of regular kitchen-door beggars inexplicably provoked the staff into a special frenzy of shooing. Dogs everywhere in Bhutan recognize an insistent “Ssh! Ssh! Ssh!” not as an order to be quiet but as an invitation to get lost. This pariah dog, in the ultimate get-even gesture, sniffed its way to the benches arranged in a small square under a warm noonday sun on the lawn outside the dining room and chose a strategic spot, just easy enough to miss but certain to be stepped on, in which to deposit a generous pile of feces.

The water-guzzling Americans being evicted from rooms in the face of a German advance that Sunday were the kind of tourists Bhutanese consider most fascinating. There were twelve of them in this group, and they had come to study Bhutanese Buddhism. It was their great good fortune that Robert Thurman, the Tibetan scholar and head of Columbia University’s religion department, had joined the trip as mentor. A Buddhist, he was also on a journey of discovery, making his first trip to Bhutan after a lifetime of studying Tibet and Tantric Buddhism. A few others in the group considered themselves Buddhists but had never experienced life in a Buddhist environment as pervasive as this, particularly in rural settings where religion is marked by unexamined ritualism and unself-conscious practice.

The theological core of Buddhism was embellished here long ago with the enthusiastic worship of unorthodox spirits and legendary local saints, a bewildering prospect for the Western intellectual whose understanding of the religion is more spiritual or cerebral. Predictably, some of the Americans had brought their metaphorical hair shirts to don when bemoaning the lack of spiritualism in the materialistic West—only to run into uncomprehending young Bhutanese who had had enough of material renunciation and wanted nothing more than the chance to wallow in consumerism. As if to illustrate the point, one of them stole an American pilgrim’s Walkman.

Older Bhutanese, even when critical of the corrupting influence of foreign guests, are often the most appreciative of outsiders who come to learn and share. Aum Rinzi told me that she is cheered by even the half-understood or intrinsically therapeutic Buddhism of mainstream America and Europe. “I don’t think our religion will ever fade; that is impossible,” she said. “It can only grow and prosper, because nowadays you’ll find followers in Western countries. I am very interested to see
that wherever in the Buddhist world there is a sermon being preached by a famous lama, Westerners go there and listen. Some have taken religious robes. They know that only ignorant people—fools—will ignore our beliefs.”

From Tshering Hamo’s point of view, the Americans at Wangdicholing that weekend were distinguished in more practical ways. At dawn, the California writer Sam Keen, one of the leaders of the group, would go out and select and chop his own firewood. He had some tips for the hotel on how to better utilize the woodstoves. In fact, he recommended that they should be replaced with more efficient and environmentally sound American models. Tshering had not known that some Americans heated their homes this way. Sam—author of the best-seller
Fire in the Belly
and a recognized founder of a post-feminist male self-esteem movement, who had been described all around town as rich and famous—seemed an unlikely candidate for a bukhari. He soon told us that he heated a thirty-two-foot West Coast living room with wood. In talking about this, Tshering and I didn’t get into the question of the size or price of Sam’s bukhari—or of the necessity of chimneys in places like northern California. Most rural Bhutanese houses don’t have them. The smoke just collects in rooms, stinging eyes and polluting lungs, until it can find its way out a window or through the roof of an upper story, blackening the whitewashed outside wall as it goes.

Coincidentally, that same week Bumthang (in its role-model role) had been playing host to a group of women from around the country who were being taught to build and operate smokeless cooking stoves. Camped out in a fallow field a mile or so from town, the women, from unmarried teenagers to middle-aged householders, were digging clay from the earth, packing and pounding it into molds made of boards, and scooping out tunnels for air to circulate and exit cleanly through an exhaust system made of tin sheeting.

Wood burns slowly in these clay stoves, saving fuel while radiating heat from earthen constructions that can be built (or replaced) at a very low cost almost anywhere in the country. The women, a couple dozen of them who were expected to pass on their knowledge of this economical and health-enhancing technology to their neighbors after returning home, lived together as students in dormitory-style tents, attended study sessions in another tent heated by a homemade barrel stove filled with
smoldering sawdust, bathed in a pool warmed by hot stones, and ate in the sun near a mess tent where tea always bubbled and rice steamed.

Chatting with visitors as they worked beside rows of finished stoves that would be broken up and recycled into the earth when the course ended, the women said they had not met resistance from husbands or fathers when they were chosen for training that would take them far from home for several weeks. But the presence of so many attractive women camped out in a meadow in his bailiwick gave the dzongda of Bumthang, Pem Dorji, some cause for concern. So he let it be known around town that the campsite was off limits to curious and predatory local men. Bhutanese are not puritanical about sexual relations, and physical relationships are easily formed and broken, with or without marriage. The dzongda had devised a policy that balanced his responsibilities with the realities of youth.