As I write, I can hear Namgay painting in the room above me. Painting is usually a semi-silent endeavor, but not where we live. While he paints, he chants soft prayers to the deity whose image he’s creating. He says this helps him paint better and gives the thanka power.
Namgay’s sprayers waft through the open window of the little sunporch where I work and make the hair on the back of my neck stand up as I write. I feel I am getting some residual good karma. Anyway, let’s hope.
Namgay has a few gray hairs now, but he still looks young. He is still shy, but not with me. His work is slow, meticulous, and deliberate, and it can take months to complete one of his intricate paintings.
He paints with ancient Bhutanese methods, starting with simple cotton cloth that he stretches and sews with twine onto a wooden frame to make a canvas. He covers the cloth with a layer of gum and calcium chalk, then rubs it hard, first on one side, then on the other, with a river rock to make it smooth. He paints and rubs the canvas three or four times until it is perfect and will absorb the paint evenly without cracking. The word thanka means “rolled art,” and so these paintings of Buddhist deities and other images are rolled and unrolled for hundreds of years. Most are kept rolled up and stored until holy days or ceremonies. Then they’re unrolled and hung on the walls of temples. It is art that will live for many generations.
After preparing the canvas, Namgay draws an elaborate figure, a Buddhist god or goddess, in the Bhutanese style, with sky and earth in the background, and then begins to paint it with pigments he has made from crushed stones—lapis, malachite, vermilion—or minerals and plants, mixed with gum and water. Every thanka is painted in the same sequence: he paints the sky and earth, then the clouds, then the body of the deity, then finally the face. He’ll only paint the face of a deity first thing in the morning, because then his hand is very steady and his mind less cluttered. It is important for the mind of the painter to be as pure as possible. The last elements to be painted are the eyes; and when the eyes are painted, the thanka is “awake.”
Namgay’s thankas are known for their precision and for the beautiful, serene faces of the deities. The figures he paints are prescribed by a tradition that goes back hundreds of years. My favorites are the Neten Chudru, or Sixteen Arhats, the students of the Buddha who took the dharma to the four corners of the earth. I like the Dakini he paints: beautiful enlightened women, attendants to the deities, ornamentally perched in clouds like angels, pouring oil and holy water down out of the sky. I also have a special feeling for Dorji Drolo, the wrathful manifestation of Padmasambhava, or Guru Rinpoche. He reminds me to fight for what I love and try to subdue my anger and ignorance.
Namgay can draw the figures perfectly, with just the right proportions. He learned the thousands of different positions of the Buddha, Green Tara, the God of Compassion, White Tara, and Dorje Sempa in school. For him, painting is a meditation, an act of piety.
The final step of painting a thanka is to highlight the flowers and leaves and the brocade and jewels of the figures with pure gold dust mixed, again, with gum and water. The gold is polished with a special stone, a long, thin agate, to make it shine. I love to watch this. The surface shimmers as Namgay’s patient hand makes infinitesimal, deft strokes with the stone, and the gold comes alive. Rub too soft and the gold won’t polish; rub too hard and the canvas will crease or tear.
The painting is a living jewel, every detail perfect. If he doesn’t make the thanka perfect, he says, then the person who has commissioned the painting won’t have a good reincarnation, and neither will he, the painter.
Namgay makes his own brushes from the summer hair inside cows’ ears. This is particularly fine hair for the intricate designs and tiny, almost invisible lines: hair of the gods, tiny, perfect pink lotus hands, lines that capture breath and prayers. Our cat, who dines on canned sardines from India to make her fur oily and fine, supplies a slightly heavier grade of hair for brushes. Lately, I notice Namgay is branching out: several cats in our neighborhood have small chunks of hair snipped with scissors from their backs. He jokes that they are accruing merit, giving their hair to help make religious art.
Unlike Namgay, who is even and understated, I go up and down, and I talk a lot. I grew up far from anything or anybody Buddhist. Nevertheless, Namgay adores me. Now I understand that people come together sometimes for unexplainable reasons. Acceptance is so much a part of being in love, and love can make a person exceptional.
I came to Bhutan for the first time when I was 39. “A nice diversion” was how the travel agent put it. It was. Bhutan, the great distraction, has reshaped me until my life has become unrecognizable. I’ve lost 30 pounds, gained a Bhutanese family, quit smoking, started meditating, and learned to walk everywhere, and almost imperceptibly my ideas and attitudes have changed. I don’t think it’s wrong to work less, have less stuff, or go on more picnics. There’s no moral here. It is possible that I’ve gone completely insane, but as the Bhutanese say when confronted with paradox, “What to do, la?” If I am going quietly crazy, I couldn’t think of a nicer place to do it than Bhutan.
Of course, I’m probably not crazy, but after all these years, my sensibilities have been stretched and remolded; and I have come around to the Bhutanese way of doing things in many respects—eating, dressing, thinking, celebrating, praying, talking, laughing, having a casual attitude toward time. If I don’t get it done in this life, then perhaps I will in the next.
I have found a voice and a home and a wonderful life among the people and mountains of Bhutan. I have learned to slow down, to pay attention, and to laugh. But sometimes I still need a wake-up call.
One day, about two years after we married, Namgay and I were sitting in our little garden behind our house beside the river. It was early morning and we had our tea, and we were enjoying the crisp June morning and talking about the flowers that were beginning to bud. I remembered I had some seeds in the storeroom that I wanted to plant, and I asked him if they would do better under the peach tree in the shade or beside the brick wall where they would get full sun. The conversation drifted. I can’t recall the exact words, but it’s what all married couples do—play remember when. Remember those flowers at the hotel in Lobesa? Remember when we ate at that restaurant? Remember when we went to Hawaii? Remember that man we met in Bumthang who we bought the sugar bowls from? Then Namgay said, “Remember that day I gave you a lift?”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “What lift?”
“On my motorcycle.”
“You don’t have a motorcycle.”
“Before. That day you hurt your ankle.”
“What?”
“In Punakha.”
“What?! How did you know I sprained my ankle?”
“Because,” he said sweetly and matter-of-factly, “I gave you a lift.”
“No! That was you?” I jumped out of my chair.
“THAT was you on the motorcycle?”
After so many years, the picture of the man on the bike was still vivid, that day when he rescued me on the road. The helmet visor obscured his features, except the lips. But I have certainly seen those lips since. Of course.
Talk about having the feeling you’re on the right track, or feeling like there’s magic afoot. Why didn’t he mention it before? I’m not sure. I ask him all the time. At different times, he says he forgot about it, or he just assumed I knew it was him—that I was in silent collusion. But now I know that’s just the way he is. His equanimity and understatement are why I love him and why I love Bhutan, because to me they are inseparable.
I’ve learned not to question so much.
I understand that life is full of these happy, lifealtering coincidences. They probably happen much more than we think or know, especially when we are traveling, loosed from our moorings, if you will. They happen quite often in Bhutan. And I know that if a day comes when you’re in a place that seems absolutely magical, when you feel like anything can happen, you just have to go with it: go ahead and let yourself get carried away.