It was winter break from school when Namgay and I started thinking of marriage. We continued the Dzongkha and English lessons, and there were lots of sidelong looks and grazing of hands as we both reached for the same book. It was really Victorian, intriguing, wonderful, heart-racing stuff. I wasn’t sure what might ultimately happen, but my life had taken a turn since I’d moved to Bhutan. I was used to being in unexplored territory. Namgay was not only a teacher but also a great cook, and he could chop wood and lift three times his weight. He could sew, plant a garden, and herd animals. He could rewire a house and repair a broken lock. He was dependable, protective, polished, handsome, hardworking, and religious. He was highly evolved spiritually. He could perform a variety of rituals to appease numerous deities. While not the attributes I was accustomed to in American men, all these things matter a great deal in Bhutan. Namgay was a catch.
His education had been quite different from mine.
He liked to draw. When he was a child, he lived with his Uncle Lama, and paper and pencils were hard to come by so he drew in the dirt with a stick. Because Namgay exhibited some early promise as an artist, instead of becoming a monk he was sent to the National Art School in Thimphu to study thanka painting. After 8 years at the school and a 15-year apprenticeship painting temples all over Bhutan, he went to work at the school, teaching students to paint thankas.
Since much of Bhutanese society is matrilineal, the man usually moves in with the woman and her family when they marry. In the villages, some marriages might be arranged, but mostly they are love matches. A marriage is often simply an agreement, but there can be a wedding puja or a celebration if the couple has a little money.
When we decided to marry, I said I wanted to move to Namgay’s house. I had no property or family; my house was rented. He thought it was a bad idea, that it would be too difficult, since my house had a large water heater, among other amenities, and his house had no hot water.
I believed that since I was in Bhutan, marrying a Bhutanese, I should make an effort to live like a Bhutanese. I was already used to adapting to their way of life—or so I thought. And I knew if we lived on the other side of town in my little cottage, Namgay’s family would feel awkward and might not readily visit us. Anyway, I reasoned, if it didn’t work out we could always move. I suppose I was lulled into a false sense of security. The truth is, all Bhutanese go out of their way to be kind to foreigners. It’s just part of who they are.
So what it boiled down to was that for about two and a half years, the time I spent living in Bhutan before I married Namgay, the whole country had basically been babysitting me. Once, years before, when I was moving from my rented house in Semtokha to the cottage I lived in when I met Namgay, I hired a taxi to move me and my stuff, which was several suitcases, numerous baskets of books, and a few pots and pans. The taxi driver was kind; he made several trips back and forth carting my things, and he even helped me move the stuff out of my old house into the new one. My only sadness was that, somewhere between the two houses, I lost one of my shoes.
A month went by; and one day as I came out of a shop, clutching shopping bags filled with rice and vegetables, someone shouted, “Oh, Cinderella! Miss Cinderella!” It was the taxi driver who had helped me move, grinning big, driving slowly down the street, steering the taxi with one hand and waving my missing shoe out the window with the other.
Namgay eventually agreed to let me give up the cottage and join him in his apartment in his sister’s house.
We spent weeks talking in broken English and Dzongkha with dictionaries spread before us and a fire blazing in the stove, learning each other’s language and deciding our future. He said I had to stop smoking because it hurt Guru Rinpoche’s eyes. And every time I lit a cigarette, according to Namgay, a Dakini, a female manifestation of enlightened energy in Vajrayana Buddhism, fell from the sky. Addiction aside, I couldn’t be responsible for that; so, with great effort, I quit. After several weeks, Namgay invited me to his house to meet his family.
The day I was supposed to go, a wave of anxiety hit me, and my knees actually started to wobble. In my life I have hardly ever had wobbly knees. I’m not a wobbly-knee kind of person. But this was bigger than anything I had ever done—a giant leap into a life so radically different that I could hardly imagine it. I knew I was intruding in an enormous way on Namgay’s family’s life. Once I visited them, I felt there would be no turning back. It would mean that for all practical purposes we were married, since this is how village people in Bhutan view marriage.
Of course it was a huge gamble for me, but I still marvel at the chance they took. They were, and are, a very traditional Buddhist family. Namgay, his two sisters, and their families all lived near each other in Kawajangsa and took care of their mother, who split her time equally between her daughters’ households. The eldest sister, Choki, was married to a wood-carver named Dhendup. Karma, the second sister, had a husband, Pema, who was a thanka painter who taught at the National Art School with Namgay and me.
They could have been voted Bhutanese family least likely to have anything to do with a foreigner; and they were some of the shyest, most unassuming people I have ever met. They were not well-to-do; they were polite, hardworking, and religious. They lived their faith and never missed an opportunity to be kind. It’s not that they had anything against foreigners. It’s just that they would never have had a chance to meet one, since so few foreigners live in Bhutan. I might as well have been from outer space. But they were about to have me full force among them. This is what made my knees shake. Buddhists say: if you can’t help, at least don’t hurt. I so didn’t want to hurt. And knowing that we were from such dissimilar universes made me worry that we wouldn’t be able to meet somewhere in the middle. I felt like an invader.
That Saturday morning in January, the sun was bright and the birds danced and screeched in the garden as I dressed myself in a nice kira. Then I changed it and put on another, then another, until all of the kiras I owned were strewn about the house. Nothing looked right or felt right, and my house looked like it had been looted. I fled to my neighbor Chuni’s house, and she said I looked fine in what I was wearing. “Don’t worry,” she said. “They’re nice people.”
“That’s what I’m worried about,” I said. Namgay and I had decided to make it work. They didn’t have a choice. Whatever happened, they had to come along for the ride.
I’d bought an enormous tin of Danish butter cookies and a big sack of walnuts to give to Namgay’s mother. I walked down to the road and got a taxi.
When I walked up the stairs to the front door, Namgay’s nephew came to greet me. It turned out that Namgay wasn’t home. He had gone to the vegetable market to shop for the week’s produce. His nephew, who looked to be in high school, said that Namgay would be right back. I heard myself say in a whisper, “Oh, well, okay, I’ll come back …” I turned to leave.
“Wait,” he called. “Come in and have a cup of tea.”
I drank sitting cross-legged on a pillow on the floor in Namgay’s temple room. Most houses in Bhutan have a temple room, or choshom, which means “altar.” They might not have indoor plumbing, but there is usually a room with an elaborately carved and brightly painted wooden altar covering one wall. On the glass-enclosed shelves of the altar are the gilded statues of household deities. Families in Bhutan, depending on their proclivities, almost always have images of Guru Rinpoche, or his wrathful manifestation Dorji Drolo; Shabdrung Ngawang Namgyal; Chana Dorji, a powerful protector; Chenrezig, the manifestation of compassion; or one of the Taras—White Tara for long-term wishes and desires and good marriage and good health, or Green Tara for more short-term needs like money and safe journeys.
The people of Bhutan put much of their wealth into these rooms. If the family has a little money, the statues are big, elaborate, and numerous; and there are thankas, framed in silk, hanging on the walls. In front of the statues on the altar, there is a symbolic offering of seven bowls of water. Offerings to the deities shouldn’t be a measure of wealth, and water is a leveler: anyone can offer it, so it is offered every morning. I noticed in Namgay’s temple room there were no thankas, only posters of deities and pictures of thankas. Although Namgay paints some of the most beautiful thankas I have ever seen, he keeps none of them. They are all for other people.
There were red and blue flowers on the altar in a great jumble of antique brass and silver vases, and the smell of sandalwood incense wafted across the room. It mingled with the smell of dust and the mildew of the ancient prayer books, wrapped in yellow silk in a glass case in the corner. Great, intricate butter sculptures, called torma, in rows behind the water bowls added to the overwrought appearance of the shrine. White obelisks with red, blue, green, and yellow flowers on the tops reflected light from several rows of butter lamps—oil in silver chalices with cotton wicks—that give off perceptible heat along with light. The butter lamps, so called because in olden times they were actually fueled by butter, were full of melted vegetable oil; and everything, especially the golden statues, glistened in the candlelight. A red silk canopy rimmed in yellow silk covered most of the ceiling, making the room tentlike and cozy, and everything had a sepia tint from years of candle smoke. There were so many bits of silk, wooden crosses with pieces of string threaded through them to form diamond shapes, things that might catch on fire—but never did. It was a beautiful external expression of the family’s faith.
In the corner, against the wall, there was a canvas sewn to a wooden frame—a thanka that someone, perhaps the nephew, had left off painting. There were small bowls of bright paint and some brushes on the floor around it. The thanka was a little forest scene with an elephant, a monkey, a rabbit, and a bird standing next to a beautiful tree. The monkey was sitting on the elephant’s back, the rabbit was on the monkey’s back, and the bird, who sat on the monkey’s head, was reaching for one of the tree’s bright red berries. You see this image all over Bhutan, painted on the walls of houses and temples; it illustrates the parable of the Four Faithful Friends, who embody the spirit of cooperation and friendship. The friends help each other and ensure their own survival. Namgay’s nephew, named Dorji, was in class 11, and he said Namgay was teaching him to paint thankas during the school holiday.
Once, out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw an old woman dart past the open temple-room door. It must have been Namgay’s mother, Lhamo. If I had been new to Bhutan, I would have thought this odd—that she was trying to avoid me. But I knew it was because she was just too bashful to have me see her. Already the family was jittery. Namgay’s American friend had come.
I remembered what my neighbor Chuni had said to me once: sometimes she hears a voice or just has a feeling in her body that tells her she needs to stay put and not move. “When in doubt, do nothing.” It’s a fundamental of Daoism, wu wei, the innate knowledge of when to act and when not to act, sometimes described as “acting without acting.” That made enormous sense to me. So I burrowed in and absorbed the calming ambiance of the beautiful temple room.
Then from the window, I saw Namgay walking up the street. He was wearing a beautiful woven gho and carrying a recycled rice sack full of vegetables in one hand and a cardboard tray of eggs tied with string in the other. I heard his footsteps on the stairs, and my heart pounded. There was a flutter of voices in the hallway as his relatives told him in hushed, urgent tones that I was in the temple room. I heard Namgay giving orders in Dzongkha. He was making arrangements to feed me, as I was an honored guest.
He came in and greeted me with exaggerated enthusiasm. “HellOOOOO!” he said like Steve Martin’s wild and crazy guy—without the irony. An American woman had never come to see him and his family, but he was trying to make it seem like it happened every day. His awkwardness made me ache. The friendly, relaxed feeling we’d had on those long visits to my house was gone. I was in his territory now. We would need time to adjust.
Our conversation was stilted; then he disappeared. He came back after a few minutes with another cup of tea and some biscuits and once again evaporated. To Americans this is very strange behavior, but any Bhutanese would do the same thing. Bhutanese must give the visitor the best, most comfortable place in the house to sit, and then they must feed the guest the best food they have. Conversation is optional—food is not. Namgay and his family were in his kitchen cooking me a big lunch, as would any respectable Bhutanese family. So I waited alone, as was the custom.
With Namgay home, my nervousness gave way to a sense of adventure, if not quite optimism. Now I was enjoying this visit tremendously. There was a nice breeze blowing through the open window. The house was on a hill just above the Painting School. The view from the window was Thimphu proper surrounded by green mountains and, above them, clouds. It was a scene of stunning beauty. It felt like the right place to be.
After an hour or so, Namgay appeared again with an enormous bowl of red rice and some phak sha pha, or dried, aged pork fat, considered a delicacy in Bhutan. He sat the food in front of me on the floor, smiled, and then left the room again. I waited for several minutes to see if he would return with food for himself. It is typical for guests to eat alone in a traditional Bhutanese household, but Namgay and I, when he came to my house, ate together American-style. He didn’t come back.
I stood up, smoothed my kira, picked up the bowls of rice and pork, and walked into Namgay’s kitchen. There they all were: Namgay, his mother, and his nephew, sitting on cow hides on the kitchen floor enjoying their meal. I stood in the doorway. They jumped up, looking alarmed as if something terrible had happened, or as if they had been caught doing something illegal. Namgay rushed over to take the bowls of food from my hands.
I laughed and said in Dzongkha, “Please sit down. I want to eat with you. I’m lonely in the temple room!”
Everyone looked at me, surprised. This was highly irregular. Then they laughed, too. “Toup!” Namgay said. “Okay!”
He set my bowls of food on the floor between his and his mother’s. I sat down on a bearskin rug between them, and we all had a nice meal together. Our first of many.
It was getting late, and Namgay’s mother said I should sleep in the temple room. I hadn’t planned to spend the night. I hadn’t planned anything, really.
They made me a comfortable bed from rugs and blankets, and I took off my belt and koma, the two gold and silver brooches that fasten the kira at the shoulder, and crawled into the little nest. Almost everybody in Bhutan sleeps this way—no mattress, just whatever is available to put on the floor and cover up with. In the mornings, the bedding is stored away or hung on clotheslines to air out. When I talk with visitors to Bhutan, the universal complaint is the uncomfortable mattresses in the hotels. If only they knew the hotel mattresses were actually the best Bhutan has to offer.
As the family slept, I lay awake in the dark, too excited and amazed to even close my eyes. It was true. I was marrying Namgay. All of us, Namgay, his family, and I, were starting a life together. What would it be like? I had no idea. The unknowable quality of what was about to happen didn’t make me feel anxious. I felt wonderful, as if a big, grand adventure was about to unfold. All I had to do was show up. I was in some kind of suspended state of euphoria—the place you go just before something really monumental happens. I felt invincible, because I knew that whatever did happen, I was in a wonderful place with these lovely, remarkable people.
Once, years later, Namgay asked me why I loved him and I said because he had a good heart, he was handsome, and his work was close to God. Lying in the temple room, I realized that now, because I was marrying Namgay, I would also be married to Bhutan. When you marry a foreigner, you also marry the country. I had never been so happy.
We had several weddings. The first was traditional Buddhist, because it’s important to appease the deities. A sip, or Bhutanese astrologer, chose March 10, 2000, saying it was auspicious. It was a glorious, cloudless day, as most March days are in Bhutan, with a cool, crisp wind as a reminder of winter. We were glad for the chill in the air after several hours in the small temple room with hundreds of butter lamps generating substantial heat. Five red-robed monks and one lama crowded into the temple room with Namgay and me. They blew eight-foot horns, beat ceremonial drums, and chanted prayers for our well-being and happiness. Namgay looked handsome in a red-and-yellow silk gho that had been woven by his sister Karma many years before in anticipation of his marriage; I had an elaborate woven silk wedding kira, as is the custom, made of many different shades of red and pink. Only his family and a few of our friends— maybe 40 people—attended. They came into the temple room one by one and presented us with katas.
Since my family couldn’t come, a Bhutanese friend stood in and performed their duties. All day and into the evening, Namgay and I sat together on pillows in the temple room of his family’s house. After the ceremony there was food and drink, followed by dancing.
I moved to his house with two suitcases of clothes, a car, a refrigerator, a few dishes and pots, a small CD player and some CDs, and a new mattress—my worldly possessions. There are no dowries in Buddhist Bhutan.
Since I was a foreigner, the Royal Government required that we have a civil ceremony in the province where the groom was born. So, a couple of months later, we made the six-hour drive to Trongsa Dzong. We arrived the night before and stayed at a little inn in the small town of Trongsa.
At the morning ceremony in the judge’s chamber, I wore a kira and a rachu, an embroidered ceremonial scarf, traditionally long and red, worn over the left shoulder, that women have to wear when they enter a government building. Namgay wore a gho and a kabney, a shawl-like scarf of raw silk that is draped around the body and then over one shoulder. All Bhutanese men must wear them in the dzongs. The judge, sitting behind his large desk, performed the ritual, reading out the equivalent of a civil ceremony as we stood before him. I had no idea what he was saying, but Namgay prompted me to say the Dzongkha equivalent of “I do.”
It was a solemn affair until the end. The thrimpon, or judge, said that if either one of us had a problem with the other, we must report back to him immediately. We laughed and left his office for his assistant’s office next door, where we sat in front of his big, messy desk and signed endless, enormous ledgers that attendants kept producing, a remnant of the old British-Indian system, where everything we signed had to be accompanied by beautiful, elaborate stamps. Of course, an office peon appeared with a big tray of tea. A large group of villagers, in the dzong to visit the court or conduct government business, stood outside the office, peeking in. In Trongsa, a foreign woman marrying a Bhutanese man was unusual, if not unprecedented.
We had to produce witnesses to cosign our marriage certificate. My witness, or my “bridesmaid,” was the lovely Tibetan woman Aum Rinzy, who owned the hotel in Trongsa. As a tourist, over the years, I had stayed at her place many times and eaten in her wonderful kitchen with the big window from which I could see almost the whole of Trongsa valley, narrow and snaking and covered in virgin forest. She was delighted and amused that I was marrying a man from her village. She had four husbands of her own, all brothers.
We were having a lunch at her hotel afterward, so as soon as she gave the marriage certificate her thumbprint signature, she hurried back to organize the cooking. The simple, quick lunch we had ordered became elaborate and very festive, as it stretched into the evening with impromptu music and dance and, of course, ara. Nearly the whole town showed up at her little inn to wish us, the American woman and the “local boy,”
tashi delek—good luck.
It was moving to celebrate our wedding in Trongsa, and to know I’d married into an old, religious, very traditional family whose ancestral home was Chendebji, a well-known village in Trongsa District, about 25 miles west. The village sits on the side of a big hill, on the edge of the Black Mountains, which are as daunting and mysterious-looking as their name implies. Chendebji means “the place where a big cypress tree grows,” but now the legendary tree is gone. That’s too bad, because according to ancient texts, eight people could sleep in the hollows made between its trunk and its massive roots.
In ancient times, the people of Chendebji were gatekeepers, responsible for controlling traffic from both eastern and western Bhutan to the palace of Kuenga Rabten on the other side of the district, and so the covered Maleyzam Bridge below the village would be removed during periods of conflict, especially during the time of the second king, Jigme Wangchuck, or if the king was indisposed and didn’t want visitors.
Since many people would come to call on the king, the village chipon, a position that was rotated among the households of Chendebji, would be responsible for either allowing prospective visitors to pass or turning them away, depending upon the pleasure of the king. The visitors would usually be compelled to give a little endowment to the chipon, so the people of the village must have been well off.
A local deity named Gyelp Dungley Karpo safeguards Chendebji. At one time, the village was large, with over 100 households, but now there are only 22. Every household has a name and a ranking, decreed by the king, and Namgay’s family household name was Togto. Its ranking was number two. The family had status in the village, because nine lamas have come, consecutively, from the household; and each of them has served as the Lama of Wangdue Goempa, a large temple and monk school in Wangdue Phodrang. Namgay’s ancestral home seemed like it was out of Middle Earth.
The only things missing were hobbits.
Besides his immediate family, Namgay has many aunts, uncles, and cousins. His father, now deceased, was an astrologer. After we married, Namgay told me that his father had prophesied our marriage. I would come from very far away, from a place that no one knew. He told Namgay to wait for me. He said we had been together before, married in the 17th century, at the confluence of the Mo Chu and the Po Chu, the mother and father rivers, in Punakha. When I first heard the story, I admit I viewed it with some skepticism. Now, I am skeptical about almost nothing. That’s what comes from living an unconventional life.
I don’t know how we got through the first six months of marriage. For me it was like India, a place I find simultaneously wonderful and horrible, and I’m sure Namgay felt the same. No amount of laying groundwork or talking prepared either of us. I remember the time in a vague, detached way, like scenes from an odd, but fantastic movie. It felt as though it was happening to someone else.
Namgay says now that he felt like he was living with a stranger. Evidently, he found my behavior somewhat erratic. Okay, I was a little bit moody, and I came completely unglued one night when he chased a rat with a broom. I heard him banging around in the kitchen for several minutes, got out of bed, and went in just in time to see a rat the size of a Chihuahua hop onto the sill and leap out the open window into the black night. I cried for hours and couldn’t seem to stop, even with lavish amounts of consoling by Namgay. The next morning, our sweet neighbors sent over food, and I felt ashamed. They must have heard me crying.
We were poles apart on so many things, so we gradually had to come together. We had to change or adapt almost everything we did. Instead of flushing the toilet, I had to learn to pour a bucket of water into it. Instead of a solipsistic existence living alone, I lived with Namgay, and we lived in a house that was surrounded by many neighbors. Everyone knew our business, and everyone seemed interested in my every movement. No foreigners lived in Kawajangsa, so, walking down the street, I drew stares. Little children ran after me, so I had to get used to traveling with an entourage. We welcomed visits to our house by Namgay’s extended family. Namgay was much loved, and of course they wanted to meet me. I wanted them to think I was worthy of him.
Having lived my entire adult life alone, I have to say, I had developed some pretty revolting eating habits. My general philosophy of meals was: if it’s messy, eat it over the sink. In fact, messy or not, there’s really nothing you can’t eat while standing in the kitchen.
Namgay was appalled. He carefully cleaned and prepared the food, cooked it slowly, then sat and ate in the kitchen. He relished each meal and enjoyed the process. He easily spent four hours each day preparing, eating, and cleaning up from meals. Eating out of cooking pots is very bad form in Bhutan.
I was too impatient to enjoy cooking and food. When I did prepare a meal, it was hastily put together. I had never really gotten the hang of cooking in Bhutan. Everything had to be started from scratch.
Alone, I ate crackers, lovely cheese from Bumthang valley, fruits, cookies, and tea, with the occasional carrot thrown in if I could manage to peel it. If I wanted a nice, hearty meal, I went to a restaurant. He, on the other hand, needed to expand his repertoire. His diet could be summed up in one word: rice. Every meal, whether it was breakfast, lunch, or dinner, was begun by washing several cups full of rice in clean, cold water and putting them in the rice cooker. Rice is the staple food of Bhutan, as it is throughout Asia. I never cooked rice. I didn’t even know how.
I liked it, and I ate it in restaurants and in other people’s houses, but the eating of rice is relentless in a Bhutanese home. Even with the limited selection of food in the markets of Thimphu, I was accustomed to more variety in my meals. After a month or so of rice for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and puffed rice for snacks with tea, I’d look at a bowl of rice and imagine myself screaming a primordial scream, hurling it through an open window, then grabbing my head and running away. But I kept my feelings in and tried to introduce pasta. It was too early in the marriage to have a full-on nervous breakdown.
Along with rice, hot chilies are the preferred food of the Bhutanese. In fact, if you took all their other food away and just gave them rice and chilies, they’d be perfectly happy. Even as young children, they learn to love hot food, and babies get the taste of hot chilies taking their mother’s breast milk. Chilies are the national addiction. If I never again in my life eat chilies, I will be perfectly happy.
There is usually a curry or two to go with the rice the Bhutanese eat with every meal. The word curry means anything you put on rice. Ema datse, which is chilies cooked in melted cheese, is the national dish of Bhutan. Bhutanese are also fond of meat, and dried meat—either yak, pork fat, or beef—is popular.
I learned to cut and clean vegetables and cook them in one of our three somewhat temperamental pressure cookers. Namgay used to call them the baby, mother, and father cookers. The midsized mother cooker had a rubber gasket on its lid that wouldn’t stay put. The larger father had a piece of its handle missing. But the baby was nearly perfect. I did learn to cook rice using an electric rice cooker, first washing the rice three times in cold water and stirring it around with my hand, looking for odd bits of stone and chaff, before turning the cooker on. Most important, I learned to wash my hands after I cut chilies. You only have to chop chilies and then rub your eyes once to understand that.
The minutiae of daily life, growing accustomed to each other and adapting our ways to the ways of the other, were formidable. I can remember sweeping the sitting room one day after school. Namgay just stood in the doorway watching me with a shocked look on his face.
“What is it?”
“Is that the way you sweep?”
“Apparently. What’s wrong?” I asked, defensively. Then he showed me. He took the broom and swept the room while I looked on. I saw immediately the difference between my sweeping and his sweeping. It was stunning. I was scrambled egg; he was eggs Benedict. It was the difference between someone who had swept only occasionally and someone who had swept many times a day, every day of his life—who knew the business end of a broom. He angled the broom deftly and corralled all the little dust particles with real panache. He was the Fred Astaire of sweeping.
Living several years alone in Bhutan without a washing machine, I’d perfected a “soaking method” for washing clothes. I was thinking of patenting it. I would separate the lights from the darks and put them each in a bucket of soapy water for a day or two. I’d swish them around in the water a bit, rinse, and then hang them to dry. Voilà! Namgay was appalled. He rubbed each piece of clothing vigorously with a bar of pink laundry soap and then, when it was completely infused with soap, scrubbed it with a brush—first one side and then the other—on the concrete floor of the bathroom. I found this too labor-intensive. Also, try doing it to a cashmere sweater or silk scarf. He thought I didn’t get the clothes clean enough; I thought he was unnecessarily abusive to our garments. A couple of years into the marriage, we got an impartial, disinterested washing machine; and I believe this is the reason we are still married.
Those early months I remember like snapshots, such as the time I pulled a pair of black tights out of my cupboard to wear one morning. The tights, I knew, had a hole in them. But when I put them on, I saw, to my utter amazement, that Namgay had mended it. I was stunned: had I married a man who mended tights? Evidently. I tried to imagine other men I knew mending tights. I couldn’t. He had been raised in a culture where many men learned to embroider and sew. I found that wonderful. Besides the level of caring and skill, the attention to detail amazed me. And it made me sad that in the U.S. we don’t mend things anymore. Mending and fixing broken things is deeply satisfying.
More than a decade has passed since Namgay and I married. I believe our marriage is a testament to tolerance; it is a measure of just how much people can change. Old dogs can learn new tricks.
People were moving to the town every day from the villages. Although water is abundant in Bhutan, the city’s waterworks couldn’t keep up with the demand. The waterworks often conserved water by simply turning it off for a while. So parts of the town, like the crowded suburb of Kawajangsa where we lived, often had water shortages.
When I moved to Namgay’s house, I asked him if they had a water problem. By that I meant, was there a water shortage?
He said, “No. No water problem.” Silly me. Looking back, I realize it was a question of semantics, as are so many things. A water problem to him would be no water in the house—and no possibility of water in the house. A dry well. Period. End of story. Access to water three days out of seven was no problem. For me, a water problem meant there wasn’t water 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
But by the time I figured all of this out, I was firmly ensconced in his house in Kawajangsa, about five minutes’ walk from the Painting School, where we both continued to work. I had already given up my little bungalow on the other side of town with the enormous water heater and the abundant water supply.
Otherwise, we lived in a nice apartment. There were eight small rooms: kitchen, temple room, sitting room, storeroom, toilet, and three bedrooms. In the traditional Bhutanese style, the house was whitewashed adobe, solidly built of mud, which is an excellent insulator, with wood-plank floors and windows with shutters but no glass. Our furnishings were little benches covered with Tibetan rugs and large painted chests; the bedroom had a mattress and two cupboards. I loved the spareness. The lack of clutter in the small rooms, and then the explosion of clutter in the over-the-top temple room, pleased me no end. The kitchen and bathroom were rudimentary and functional, and the house was spotlessly clean.
Like water, electricity was a challenge. There was enough power to run the rice cooker, a small space heater, and the fluorescent bulb on the ceiling of each room. But if I wanted to blow-dry my hair, I’d have to turn everything else off. Again, for Namgay this constituted no electrical problem. We just had different expectations.
Although I had lived in Bhutan for several years, I had never fully understood how ecologically and frugally most Bhutanese live. One evening after a difficult day, at the end of a long week at school, I walked up the dusty road just as the sun was going down below the mountains. I wanted desperately to take a bath. Usually we filled buckets with water, used a heating element to warm it, and washed in the bathroom, standing over the buckets. We used small plastic pitchers to scoop up water and rinse with it. Tonight, though, I wanted a real bath, and I had been thinking of it all day.
As soon as I arrived home, I got a towel, a change of clothing, and shampoo, and then turned on the bathroom tap. Nothing came out. I ran to the kitchen. We had a ten-gallon plastic bucket in the corner of the kitchen that we kept filled with water for just such situations. The bucket was empty, and there was no water coming from the kitchen tap either.
At that point, I sat down on the kitchen floor and started to cry. I cried because I was dirty and I wanted to take a bath after a hard day; I cried because I was exhausted and I felt like I wasn’t tough enough; and I cried because I dearly loved Namgay and couldn’t imagine living without him, but I was worried we wouldn’t make it—we wouldn’t beat the odds, the difficulties and stresses of an intercultural marriage, the language issues, the lack of water, all of which were stacking against us. I had come such a long way in my life. But I needed to go so much further. I had enjoyed so much privilege and comfort. I had never lived with so little luxury—or so much scarcity and change.
By the time Namgay came home about 30 minutes later, it was dark. I was still sitting on the kitchen floor, crying, with the lights off. He turned on the lights and saw me, and then he turned around and left without saying a word. He abandoned me.
That made me cry even more, until I heard his heavy footsteps on the stairs outside and the sloshing of water. He had come back lugging two enormous buckets of water from the tap in a neighbor’s yard down the hill. As the water heated, he made me a cup of tea. Then he picked me up off the floor where I was still sniveling in a heap, carried me in his arms to the bathroom, undressed me, and gave me a gentle bath, like I was a temperamental but treasured child.
Then he took a bath, and by the time we had dinner and got in bed, we were happy, laughing, and very clean.