Back in the U.S., my life took on a new focus. Everything I did was calculated to get me back to Bhutan. I told everyone I met about my desire to live and work there.
I made two long visits to the country in 1995 and 1996. I spent months traveling to every corner of the country, learning everything I could about the people and how they lived. The Bhutanese were nice about it. Some of them asked me why I loved the place so much. “Here I can be kind,” I replied. And I meant it. Bhutan was teaching me things I had lost track of in the West. There was plenty of time for introspection.
“Maybe you were Bhutanese in a previous life,” more than a few of them remarked, laughing. I like to think of myself as having been Bhutanese at one point. It’s the only reason I can think of for my absolute passion. Many people I’ve met over the years who have visited are taken with the place; some return for visits or to work here for a while. Some want to return, but their lives take a different turn; their loved ones, jobs, and commitments eventually take precedence, or they get other obsessions. From the first time I visited Bhutan until now, that has never happened to me. I remember thinking, Are you going to be 60 years old and still trying to get to Bhutan? And I’d answer, Yes, I’ll never stop. The desire took over everything. It was as unavoidable as hunger. I left everyone I’d ever loved, everything I knew, my home, and everything I owned. I left my job as a freelance writer and several lucrative contracts I’d had for years. Needless to say, my family, friends, and business associates were surprised. I spent my savings and eventually sold everything I had to stay in Bhutan.
In 1997, I moved to Bhutan to teach English for no pay at a cultural school outside of Thimphu. Two years later, still as a volunteer, I was transferred to an art school in a suburb of Thimphu. I had found the center of the universe.
The other teachers at the National Art School, known locally as the Painting School, were Bhutanese thanka artists—makers of Buddhist scroll paintings— and wood-carvers, slate carvers, weavers, and embroiderers, who made highly refined and esoteric Buddhist art. The students were charming, earnest, and intensely focused. They devoted most of their time to drawing, painting, and praying; and they spent about two hours a day with me, learning English. They desperately wanted to converse with the few Westerners, mostly tourists, who occasionally visited the school to admire their art, so they were hungry to learn the language.
Any American who has ever taught outside the U.S. understands that when you teach in another country, there is also a lot to learn. Cultures, traditions, manners, languages—there are so many minefields, so many opportunities to make an ass of yourself. I have to say, I took every available opportunity to excel in that area. I was overwhelmed. I quickly forgot about the pink goats.
My students, who ranged in age from 8 to 23, had varying degrees of English competency. They learned a little English from me; but I learned enormous, useful, extraordinary things from them: how to drink from a water bottle without touching the lip; how to open a soft-drink bottle without an opener; how to cook a tasty meal with only a radish, an onion, and a little rice; how to keep your shoes and the hem of your kira (the Bhutanese women’s traditional dress, an ankle-length piece of fabric wrapped around the body) clean when walking through mud; how to be gracious and generous when you have nothing; how to wash your entire body with half a bucket of water; how to clean the stones out of lentils; how to go to the toilet without toilet paper—or a toilet; how to stay warm on a cold night when there aren’t enough blankets; how to get rid of a stye; how to stop a colicky baby from crying. And that was just in the first month.
The most valuable thing they taught me was that there are many ways to look at almost everything. At the school, we had no English books, very little paper, and no teaching aids, so we had to improvise. One of the activities the students loved was sitting on the floor in a circle and telling stories. I would start by introducing the characters. The next person in the circle would advance the plot, the next would add his or her twist, and so on until everyone in the circle had an opportunity to tell part of the story. There were about 20 to 30 students in my classes; and by the time the story got halfway around the circle, invariably one or more of the characters would have been killed off.
I might begin a story this way: “Karma is a poor village man who loves Sonam, the daughter of the village headman.” The student next to me might say, “Sonam’s father wants her to marry Leki, a rich man in the village.” The next person might add, “Leki is rich, but he is a bad man, and he doesn’t like Karma because he knows Sonam loves him.” The story would go on until someone said, “Then Sonam and Karma walked across a bridge, fell off, and drowned in the river.”
In any other culture, the story would end with the death of the main characters, but not in Bhutan. Without skipping a beat, the next student would say, “Then they are reincarnated.” And the next student would say, “Sonam becomes a beautiful bird, and Karma is a horse. And this horse and this bird love each other.”
My mind reeled; it is marvelous to think that death doesn’t end things.
Old stuff was ripped out of my head and replaced with a different and more expansive view of the world.
I doubt the students learned as much from me. Case in point: I didn’t notice any enormous change in their grasp of the English language. However, my command of Dzongkha was coming along nicely. In those first years, I stumbled a lot. I wasn’t a trained teacher, although I’d taught a little in the U.S. Evidently I was a better student. What I lacked in training, I like to think I made up for with enthusiasm. It was the greatest adventure of my life.
As I walked up the hill toward the school each morning, the strong smells of juniper and cedar, burned as an offering outside the house of a prosperous resident on the hill above the school, filled the air. The fragrant smoke curled up to the sky. I’d say hello or stop and chat with Aum Tshering or Aum Tseten. Aum Tshering was a sharp-witted old crone, probably not as old as she looked owing to the lack of moisturizer and sunscreen in Bhutan, and she liked to tease. She’d invite me to come and sit for a while in her shop. If I was early for school, I would.
There were usually three or four of her friends, old men and women, a baby or two, a young girl, all participating in the national pastime: drinking tea. I was always a nice diversion for them, an American with an appalling command of Dzongkha, a modern-day Mrs. Malaprop, saying things like, “I have only been in this country for a short distance.” For several months I inexplicably confused the word uzen, or principal, with dopchu, bracelet, and called our headmaster “Bracelet Jigme.” He’d look at me quizzically when I spoke to him, but he never corrected me—probably because he was too polite. Maybe he figured, “What’s the use?”
If the people in Aum Tshering’s shop spoke any English, they didn’t let on. Aum Tshering asked me questions I had learned to answer, things like, “Where are you from?” and “Do you like Bhutan?”
To that question I said, “Na me sa me,” which means “so much,” or “infinitely,” or, translated literally, “between the earth and the sky.” If I was feeling a bit more poetic, I’d say, “Nege sim Bhutan lu en, la”—“My heart is in Bhutan.” This would make them roar with laughter. I was like a trained monkey, enjoying my work, aware that I was entertaining people and not getting paid for it, but not really understanding why everyone was laughing so hard.
“Do you have a husband?” Aum Tshering always asked with a sly tone, knowing full well that I didn’t. Her friends grinned, waiting to laugh at my reply. She had the universal tendency to talk loudly to people who aren’t proficient in a language, as if the added volume would help me understand.
“Map me!” I’d say, looking surprised. “No husband!” I’d shake my head vigorously, eyes wide, as if I’d recently lost 50 IQ points.
“Well, if your heart is in Bhutan, why don’t you marry a nice Bhutanese man?” she’d ask, being my straight man, the voice of reason. This was my cue to look earnest and hopeful. I’d say, “You arrange a marriage for me,” or “I leave the latch to my house off every night, but nobody comes.”
I always had the same audience and the same material, but I still made them howl with laughter every time.
Once when I was drinking tea in Aum Tshering’s shop, I noticed a bucket filled with doma, or betel nut, on the counter, among the one-rupee sweets. Indian rupees and Bhutanese ngultrum are interchangeable in Bhutan, and currency is often just referred to as “rupees.” The Bhutanese love to chew doma, a mild stimulant. They wrap it in a leaf smeared with lime and pop the whole thing in their mouths and chew it. It’s a vile habit and an acquired taste—very bitter—but it does give a slight adrenalin buzz. The combination of leaf and lime makes a red juice that stains wherever it is spat, as well as the teeth and lips and sometimes the chin, so heavy users look like they’re wearing red lipstick—or like good-natured vampires. Some of my co-workers at school chewed doma and would occasionally offer it to me. I had no desire to try it until the weather got very cold. My classroom had no glass in the windows, and one day the wind was whipping in. Chewing the doma made me warm for about 15 minutes, but the taste was awful and the texture even worse. It was like chewing sawdust. I’d go to the open window and spit the red juice out onto the pavement below. I couldn’t stand the thought of swallowing it. The next morning during assembly the principal asked that the person spitting doma on the sidewalk beside the school please stop. He would have been shocked to know it was the newly arrived American English teacher.
Doma is normally sold in a little four-inch-tall paper cone with five pieces for five rupees. One day, little cones of doma appeared to be made from pages of The New Yorker. I recognized the distinctive logo, the sans-serif headline typeface, and the high-gloss paper immediately. It’s not as if there are newsstands with magazines from the U.S. on every corner. In fact, there aren’t any newsstands. There are very few magazines here, and the ones that make it into the country are the Indian movie magazines and a handful of out-of-date news magazines. You might be able to find bookstores or shops in New Delhi, Calcutta, or Bangkok with American or European magazines, but the expense of trucking or flying them into Bhutan would be huge. And there are hundreds of other things (food, clothing, shelter) of more use to the Bhutanese than magazines.
People here are not traditionally big readers. Until the 1960s, when the secular school system began, only the clergy and ruling class were educated. The handful of tiny bookstores in the capital sells Buddhist dharma books, children’s books, and pulp fiction, as well as classics by Dickens and Dostoyevsky that are printed in India.
However, because there were no English books at the Painting School, someone working at the UN donated a bunch of New Yorkers. After I read them from cover to cover, I gave them to the students. They didn’t read them, but they did cut out the pictures. We made stories using the cover illustrations, cartoons, ads, and photographs. My adolescent male students were fascinated with the full-page car ads. I’d see some of these pictures pasted above the beds in their hostel. They were destined for lives of making religious art, but they all had the universal testosterone-fueled fascination with expensive toys.
I can’t imagine anyone getting more use out of those New Yorkers. After the students finished with them, I’d put the remaining pages in a box next to the trash bin outside the school. Some rag picker sold the scraps to Aum Tshering, who used them to wrap the doma. Nothing is wasted in Bhutan.
Before we got cell phones in Bhutan, communication was rudimentary. Everyone had heavy-as-a-bowling-ball Raj-era black telephones or the ’60s Princess Phones with perpetually knotted cords, designed to leap off anything they’re sitting on if you attempt to dial them. Making a phone call from school was the most exhausting and mind-numbing task I have ever attempted.
I rarely made phone calls, anyway, because in Bhutan, face-to-face conversation was the preferred way to get things done. If you did call someone at his or her office, it wasn’t likely you would get through. He would be in a meeting or down the hall; she would be on the line and the phone would be busy; or the phone would be out of order, the cord not plugged in, or the bill unpaid. There were no sophisticated trunk lines so that somebody could be put on hold and another line could be answered. If a group of people were having a conversation and the phone rang, no one would get up to answer it. Everyone would just keep talking. There were no answering machines then, and even now I don’t know of anyone who has one. No wonder there’s less stress in Bhutan.
It’s difficult to articulate how little the Bhutanese are slaves to their communication equipment. In the U.S., we let the phone ring three or four times, and then we expect someone to pick it up or the answering machine to kick in. In Bhutan, it’s not uncommon to call someone and let the phone ring 20 or 30 times. You finish what you’re doing and take your time; then, if you want, you can answer the phone.
Taking messages is often outside the habit of office workers. Nobody is that keen to write anything down and then try to follow up on it. It’s a different mind-set. Asking someone to take a message is like asking him to let you drive your car over his foot. It is met with veiled hostility or incredulity. Even if he is willing, he is unlikely to have a pencil or pen and a piece of paper at his disposal. I’ve thought a lot about why this might be the case, and here’s what I’ve come up with: The rest of the world isn’t as obsessed with paper and documentation as Americans are.
At the Painting School, there was only one telephone, and it sat inside a locked wooden box. The locked wooden box sat on a stool, which was inside a small closet next to the principal’s office, as if it had done something terribly wrong and would be punished for a very long time. The closet door had a big, black, Indian iron padlock on it and a small slit at eye level so you could see and hear the phone. You just couldn’t answer it, I often thought plaintively. The peon—I liked to call him the phone wallah—whose sole job was to answer and clean the telephone, take messages, unlock the closet and the box so we could make calls, and otherwise tend to the phone was rarely, if ever, around. I felt it lent an existential quality to life at the school, as if we were all acting in a Beckett play, our own little theater of the absurd.
One day I needed to make telephone calls to two separate offices about a pending order of books. I had heard from the main education office that the books were down in Phuentsholing in a warehouse. I needed to call someone at the local education office in Thimphu to confirm this, then I needed to call someone else to get the books delivered. I asked several of the teachers if they’d seen the phone wallah.
You would have thought I had asked for a private audience with His Majesty the King. “He’s not here!” one lopen (teacher) said, his voice registering surprise. “He’s at lunch,” said another, eyeing me warily. “Ca che be?” Why?
“I want to use the phone!” I said, exasperated. Why in heaven’s name else would I want the phone wallah?
Finally, after a couple of hours, a miracle occurred. As if he had divined my pressing need, as if I had invoked him like a deity, the phone wallah appeared. A man of about 60, he was dressed in an old school uniform, a gho that was too short for him; it fell above his knees. It was obviously a castoff from a student, a small one at that. He wore rubber flip-flops—the flip-flop, or chappel, is a ubiquitous style of footwear in Bhutan. He smelled like he had been drinking his lunch. When I told him I needed to use the telephone, he looked surprised. I produced a cone of doma from my pocket and gave it to him. That cheered him up.
He took the doma, dug his hand into the front of his grimy gho, and fished in his pocket for the keys. I stood there waiting, a piece of paper with two telephone numbers on it clutched like a ticket in my hand. I was resolved to wait as long as it took him to open the closet door, unlock the phone, and let me make my calls. I would see this thing to the bitter end. I really wanted the books.
The phone wallah brought out a key ring on a chain with an enormous number of keys, but he knew immediately which key unlocked the closet. He opened the door quickly, as if he did it every day, which I happened to know that he didn’t.
I watched with renewed hope as he unlocked the wooden box. Maybe this would be easier than I thought. A group of students and teachers had crowded the hallway. Someone was using the phone! I held out my hand for the receiver, but he shook his head and pantomimed dialing: there were obviously rules, a protocol for phone use. It was also his job to dial.
I was more than happy to oblige. I would let him do what he was meant to do. It was a heady moment.
I thrust the piece of paper with the numbers on it under his nose. I pointed in an exaggerated way to the first number: “Two … two … two … one … five,” I said. The phone wallah looked at me in distress, then shyly looked at the ground.
“Madam, he doesn’t speak English,” one of the students offered.
I repeated the phone number in Dzongkha: “Ne … ne … ne … che … nga.”
But no. I had said it too fast! The phone wallah hovered over the ancient black handset; one finger poised over the rotary dial seemed to hang there.
“Ne,” I said. Miracle! He dialed the two.
“Ne,” I said again. He dialed another two.
“Ne,” I said again. He hesitated, slammed the receiver down. He had choked. We had to start over.
“Ne.” He did it.
“Ne.” He did it again.
“Ne.” He choked.
He just couldn’t coordinate his hand and his brain to dial three nes in succession. Drunk? Maybe. Frustratingly inept? Absolutely.
I was the unconditional manifestation of patience, and he finally was able to finish the sequence of five numbers. I heard the familiar click, click, click of the phone ringing. We appeared to be on the way to victory.
But no, not quite.
He slammed the phone down hard this time. “Engaged!” he called out. He did know some English after all. Then he whipped out his massive key ring and started to lock the phone back in the box.
“Wait, wait!” I cried. “Can you try again?” A student translated. He nodded. Of course he could try again. This time I distinctly heard the phone ringing, but he slammed it down again and said, “Engaged!”
Was he deaf, too? Undaunted, I persevered. The third time was the charm. He actually let the phone ring through to the party I was trying to reach. I heard a hello at the other end, a light at the end of this crazy tunnel. He passed the receiver to me. I was euphoric. In a few seconds I got the information I needed and thanked the person at the other end profusely, then handed the receiver back to the phone wallah. He took it from me and placed it gingerly back in its cradle, as if he didn’t want to tax it further. Then he pulled a grimy rag out of his gho pocket and polished the back of the receiver.
Everyone in the hallway was beaming with pleasure. He closed the phone box and was locking it when I called out, “Wait, I need to make another call.”
The student translated again. The phone wallah looked at me as if to say, “Haven’t we suffered enough already?”
I kept thinking of that old joke: How many phone wallahs does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
I finally made the second call.
A few weeks later the books arrived, but I never got to use them. The “In-Charge” of the supplies, Lopen Chimi, locked them in a closet because, he said, if he didn’t, the students would take them and wouldn’t bring them back.
Luckily, someone from the UN sent over a new batch of New Yorkers.
The second year I taught, I met another teacher, Phurba Namgay, a thanka painter. The intricate process of painting scroll-like thankas, depicting images of a Buddha or other deities, hasn’t changed in Bhutan in about 400 years. This painter was talented, shy, and enormously kind. He had high cheekbones that made his eyes disappear when he laughed and an innate elegance. Although I found him wildly exotic and inscrutable, there was something familiar about him. We didn’t speak for many months, only nodded and smiled at each other on the stairs. But then we got to know each other, and we became good friends. Then we did the unthinkable: we got married.
Men and women in Bhutan wear traditional dress to work. For men it’s the handsome knee-length robe, the gho, which crosses over itself in front and ties at the side. Excess fabric is pulled up and tucked in to form a giant pleat in back, and everything is held together with a tight, wide belt.
I wore a kira, the floor-length woven dress of Bhutanese women, cinched at the waist with a tight belt and pinned with a brooch at each shoulder. Under it I wore a silk shirt, or wanju, and an unstructured short jacket called a tdego topped it all off. If wrapped correctly, the kira forms a pleat on your right side so that walking is easier. And because the belt is very tight, the fabric makes a small pouch, called a hemchu, above your waist to keep your keys, pens, and other essentials.
A kira requires frequent, yet discreet, adjustment. Eventually I learned to incorporate the necessaries into my personal mythology: I’d stand up, smooth the skirt of my kira, and tuck my hand into the front to straighten the fold of the pleat and show that I was ready to get going. It’s a no-nonsense gesture, like rolling up your sleeves. It means “I’m ready,” or “I’ve had enough.” It’s a great gesture for teachers.
Smooth the collar of your wanju, or curl it under with your hand as you talk, and this says you are charming, coy, and girlish. You can soften what you are saying by doing this. Its equivalent in Western dress would be playing with your earring.
When you walk up the stairs, you hike your kira ever so slightly so you don’t trip over it. This gesture feels quite antiquated. If you do it right, it’s elegant and sexy. If you do it incorrectly, you look prim and stuffy, or, in my case, like a Western woman who’s not used to wearing a long dress. The very tight, wide belts, called kera, which hold everything together in the gho and kira truss it all up and make you stand and sit straighter. Because the clothes are so elaborate, they call attention to the body. I often felt like I was in a production of The Mikado.
For Namgay and me, the language of kira and gho was our mating dance. I swooned in the mornings during assembly when he would arch his back, look over his shoulder, and feel the hem of his gho to see if his pleat was straight. When I tucked my hands into the sleeves of my tdego as we chatted, he knew I was flirting.
My husband is a Buddhist. He believes our karma brought us together, as it has before in other samsaras— the cycles of birth, death, and rebirth in Buddhist belief— and it will countless times again as we are born and reborn. Maybe in the next life I’ll be his mother; after that, maybe he’ll be my dog. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that we’ll find each other. He doesn’t doubt this. As he often says, we both had opportunities to marry before we met each other, but we didn’t take them. We waited. And I came from such a long distance, over nearly insurmountable odds. His conviction is persuasive. Now I also believe. I believe in a lot of things that seem to defy reason. In Bhutan, that’s just the way it is.