So Close to Heaven (43 page)

“I put up a notice that says, ‘No Men,”’ he said. “And I came down here and told the girls if you see any man apart from the instructor on the site, you can catch him, beat him up, tie him down, and bring him to me for punishment. I’ll put him in jail.

“But on the other hand,” he added, “if you go to the Sunday market and see a boy you like, and your minds click and your bodies click and you become pregnant—well, that’s your problem.”

That crisp and sunny Sunday in Bumthang had begun with meditation for the Americans. Gathered in the Wangdicholing Guesthouse’s largest suite, its curtains drawn and a warming fire in a rather more substantial bukhari (the fire courtesy of Sam), the Americans, with eyes closed and legs akimbo, were at work trying to see inside their souls from outside themselves. Members of the heterogeneous group—a psychologist, writers, a retired businessman, and at least one Wall Street financier among them—had more or less auditioned by essay for an expensive trip that promised to immerse and instruct them while trundling them across more than three hundred miles of Bhutanese wilderness. Like many Americans encountered in the Himalayas and India, at least a few of these travelers seemed to be looking for themselves as much as for that elusive, superior Eastern sense of priorities we seem to think leads to contentment and fulfillment. Indeed, part of the tour was devoted to seminar sessions in which they were asked to tell their life stories with brutal honesty and candor—“their hungry hells as well as better times,”
explained Brent Olson of Inner Asia Expeditions of San Francisco, who organized the esoteric trip and came along to direct the logistics. Brent, who had been making several visits a year to Bhutan for nearly a decade, was obviously the arbiter and soother of ruffled feelings among his high-sensitivity charges. But then, almost anyone could have trouble coping all at once with high-altitude mountain terrain, intense introspection, and mind-draining meditation, punctuated by cold nights and hot chilis.

Some of the Americans had brought a supply of dried soup in packets to guard against intestinal tragedies while traversing the unknown culinary landscape. The instant-food packet is now widely recognized in Asia as the universal hallmark mostly of Japanese tourists, who are capable of traversing whole countries without having to order anything more in local restaurants than giant thermoses of boiling water. Newly affluent and often devout Japanese are coming to Bhutan, as they are now visiting Nepal, Burma, Sri Lanka, and India, on pilgrimages to Buddhism’s holiest and earliest landmarks. An unknown number of them apparently move around these less developed nations (relatively luxurious Sri Lanka excepted) sleeping on nothing other than their own peripatetic sheets and quilts, which they hang out to air in the morning sun. In Burma several years ago, a group of nervous Japanese sat down to dinner at a table near mine in the Strand Hotel’s pre-renovation dining room and ordered only bowls and cups with their hot water. They produced from their airline carry-on bags many envelopes of dried noodles, broths, crackers, seasonings, cookies, and tea bags. But then, unlike the smug among us, they probably didn’t have to spend a night on some cold bathroom floor after eating sliced mangoes apparently laced with invisible tap water.

The Americans in Bumthang that Sunday had sped away from Thimphu a few days earlier in their tourist vans to follow the roller-coaster Lateral Road, the country’s only east-west highway, across Bhutan to Tashigang for an important monastery festival. Bumthang was as far as they got. Carsickness had felled nearly half their number; others seemed to be in justifiable shock from the toilets at Gantey, the first overnight stop. The majority, not wanting to spend all their time on this serpentine road, had no trouble deciding to vote for mercy and succumb to the embrace of this valley of pastures, gentle slopes, evergreen forests, and a rushing stream. Temples, monasteries, and natural sites of intense holiness promised real-time seminars. Cloaked in the approval of Her Majesty
the Queen Mother, who supported Sam Keen’s plan to film the trip (and Bhutan) for American television, they could enter forbidden recesses of Bhutanese worship. There was no better place to crash than Bumthang.

Bumthang can comfortably draw outsiders in small numbers into its remarkable daily life—market town, destination of pilgrims, center of agricultural experimentation—without making a single major concession to foreign guests that would alter the quality of the place. The word is getting around, however, that Bumthang offers almost everything a visitor comes to Bhutan to experience and enjoy, including gentle terrain for treks that are more like walks through a medieval landscape of hamlets and monasteries. Just arriving in Bumthang is a pleasure.

When the road from Tongsa descends from the Yutong La and drifts into the Chumey Valley—one of four usually wide (for Bhutan) open spaces that together form the district of Bumthang—the soft beauty of the landscape is enhanced by the traveler’s relief that tortuous roads and dark mountain gorges have been left behind and that the way ahead is enveloped in broad, sunny fields of buckwheat and potatoes. Twig fences that line the road sprout shoots; wildflowers of gold and white color fallow land where animals graze on thick green grass. Small farming settlements of only six or seven houses shelter sturdy temples and monasteries. Zugney village, a town of weavers, claims a seventh-century Tibetan temple. At Domkhar, an old palace is being transformed into a Buddhist center. This is all only a preview of what is to come in the heart of Bumthang, just beyond another (but not too difficult) mountain pass, the 9,515-foot Kiki La. There lies the Chokhor Valley and Jakar, the district’s largest commercial center and base for exploring the region. The last two Bumthang valleys, Tang and Ura, both wilder and steeper, home more to yaks than cows, are farther to the east.

Jakar itself is doomed. The town—one street and a roundish empty space that everyone treats as a traffic circle, steering carefully around its circumference—is no more than a collection of a few dozen wooden shacks and more substantial two-story buildings that house general-merchandise shops, a branch bank, a struggling handicrafts store, and numerous teashops or “hotels,” which are really restaurants of sorts serving the cross-country travelers for whom Bumthang is an important stop. Off to one side, a jump across a narrow brook, is a Sunday marketplace, where traders lay out for sale dried fish from Assam, tropical produce from
southern Bhutan, parkas from China, and Indian-made running shoes. The flaw is that all the activity in Jakar is concentrated between two bridges—one over a tributary brook, the other spanning the river—that define a flood plain along the tumbling, swift stream of the Bumthang Chhu. Dasho Pem Dorji, the dzongda of Bumthang, plans to tear it all down and rebuild on higher ground.

The dasho always means what he says. For several years he has been on a sanitation crusade in Bumthang, and he enforces it with a reign of terror. He stalks the byways of Jakar and the villages of the surrounding hills and valleys, paying unannounced visits to hidden corners of backyards in search of stashed trash. Children flee noiselessly but speedily at his approach. Grabbing whatever stick is at hand, he attacks discarded tires, paper scraps, and plastic bags, ordering grown men into the street to pick up the mess publicly. Fines are liberally awarded on the spot.

“The fear is there, and they have to do it,” he said as we bounced along in his Land Cruiser one day. “Once they learn, I remove all the punishments. One and a half years back I was disliked,” he acknowledged, leaving the rest of us to wonder how he judged his popularity at this point. “Of course, I went maybe a bit too far, beating up about four people. But later they realized that having a clean environment around their own households was for their own good. Most of the villagers, you know, walk barefoot. That worm that enters through the foot could be wiped out, so the cleanup is a preventive measure. Second thing, if they have a clean stove, eye problems will be solved. If you have clean drinking water, then all the diseases like diarrhea, dysentery, cholera can be prevented. Similarly, if you have a healthy body, then for so much development and field work you want to do, there can be good participation.

“You see a lot of smokes coming up from the villages?” he asked, sweeping his arm triumphandy over the surrounding mountains. “They’re burning up their dirt!”

The dasho, an agriculture expert of some standing, says he became an apostle of sanitation in a Christian boarding school in the Indian hill station of Kalimpong, where Scottish missionaries made all the boys clean their own rooms and bathrooms. The relationship between cleanliness and progress (if not godliness) was seared into his soul by those austere Presbyterians of Dr. Graham’s Homes, the school where many Bhutanese boys have been educated over the past three-quarters of a
century. The legacy of J. A. Graham, who had been a tutor of Bhutan’s second king and was founder of the school, is imprinted across the Himalayas in small pockets of order. Graduates now in their thirties and forties also account for a significant part of the Himalayan intellectual and literary elite.

Dasho Pem Dorji says he was impressed by the equality and sense of responsibility he learned in Kalimpong, a town that more than a century ago was Bhutanese. When he heard recently that the more affluent shopkeepers of Jakar were thinking of hiring Indian outcaste “sweepers” to do their cleaning for them, as Thimphu property owners do, he forbade the practice before it began in Bumthang. Instead, he placed green bins labeled “Use Me” around shops and in settlements, and ordered that the townspeople start learning to pick up their own rubbish. A blizzard of edicts flowed from his feudal sword.

“You want to sell sweets?” he asked rhetorically. “If the people who come to your shop throw sweet papers, it is your duty to pick them up and tell them, put rubbish in the Use Me box. Every week, I’ve asked the district engineer to dig eight-by-eight-foot temporary pits where they will throw the rubbish from the Use Me bins, and they will burn it. Every Sunday I will inspect. If they don’t clean up, the first punishment is a one-hundred-ngultrum [about four dollars] fine. The second punishment is one week of sweeping the town. The third punishment is carrying three weeks of stone to the dzong without payment. This has to be done to teach people, you dirty, you clean. If your dzongda can clean his own bathroom, you can clean your own rubbish. So this is the thing I am trying to teach. I hope to succeed in a year.”

Later in the safety of a cluttered shop, the proprietor, who had been sitting on a stool watching the dasho cut a swath through someone’s shed, allowed that the dzongda had made a difference to the quality of life—or anyway, the cleanliness of gutters and the narrow earthen streets he had ordered paved with stone for drainage. “The people are all scared of him,” she said. “But after he goes? They’ll go back to the old ways.” She shrugged and grinned. But she wiped the counter and tidied up some sacks just in case. Her small daughter streaked past with a surprised puppy about to be thrown out the door.

This Sunday in Bumthang, it was the turn of the dzongda’s deputy, the
dzongrab
, Khandu Tshering, to make the weekly inspection tour. We dropped in on the Sunday market. Stallholders rushed forward to
present their best
domas
, betel chews, to the dzongrab, an elegant older gentleman in a spotless black gho and silken knee socks whose air of reserve and deliberation served as a perfect foil to the manic style of the dzongda. The dzongrab may have commanded more respect than fear, but a lot of subtle, even furtive, tidying up was going on all around him nonetheless. On the way back to Wangdicholing, with the dzongrab at the wheel, we inadvertently hit a dog headed toward the dzong but did it no evident harm.

Dzongrab Khandu Tshering cares a lot about sanitation, too, he said as he sat for a while in the Wangdicholing Guesthouse garden answering questions from me and from Kate Wyatt, a psychologist in the American seminar group, who was eager to know whether life in Buddhist Bhutan had its built-in buffers against psychological strain and mental illness. The dzongrab did not disappoint her. He said that stress and psychological problems were not a major concern among the Bhutanese, who often turn to a lama for help in the kind of personal crisis that would send an urbanized Westerner to a psychiatrist or analyst. In Thimphu, I had heard of a young man educated in Australia who on his return was unable to reconcile himself to Bhutanese family life and worship. He had gone to a lama for advice. Together, he and the lama were negotiating their way through Buddhism to help the young man understand what his ancestors’ faith could still offer a science graduate who had ceased to believe in the myths and rituals on which he was raised.

“In many ways, maybe a lama can help head off mental problems,” the dzongrab said. But he had reservations about jumping to the conclusion that Buddhism can unfailingly provide balm for troubled minds. “It is entirely dependent on the individual who is mentally in trouble. When he goes to lama, lama will from different angles try to make him understand by telling all the good things about religion. Some can change their minds and outlook after listening to the holy lamas. Some will not. We are not all the same.”

Dzongrab Khandu Tshering—a tall man with a strong, high-cheek-boned, tanned and weathered face that would become an ancient warrior—was introduced to me as a former “royal compounder” and a repository of information on the history of medicine in Bhutan. He began his career in the 1950s as a master of traditional remedies before Bhutan had Western-style doctors or any significant interchange with the outside world. He had been witness to a medical revolution.

“A compounder is just like a pharmacist,” he explained in his quiet, methodical manner. “He made some diagnoses and gave medicine, because at that time there was not a qualified doctor in the country. A few Bhutanese were beginning to be trained abroad as doctors, but in the meantime, the government established dispensaries in all the districts to look after the ill people. Three of us were taught first locally in Bhutan and India. After three years, we three were sent for further training in a mission hospital in Kalimpong. We were there for two and a half more years. Local diagnosis and treatment we learned from there. After finishing the course, we came back, and I joined in Tongsa district in 1957 as district in charge. I was in Tongsa as dispensary in charge for twelve years. After that I was posted to the old Thimphu General Hospital, just near the dzong, where I was training officer and head compounder. In 1972, during the coronation time, the new general hospital in Thimphu was opened, and again I was appointed as administrative officer.” A few years later, he was moved out of health and into general administration, reaching the highest levels of royal government service.