Beyond the Sky and the Earth_ A Journey Into Bhutan - Jamie Zeppa [101]
I run into Tshewang again and again, and we fall into conversation easily. His parents are from Tashigang, he tells me, but he . grew up in southern Bhutan, the middle son of seven children. Like most Bhutanese, he is multilingual, speaking Sharchhop, Nepali, Dzongkha, English and Hindi fluently. His father is a gomchen and his mother a weaver who used to supplement the family income by brewing arra. As a child, he says, he walked five kilometers to school every day, returning home to toss his bag of schoolbooks into the trees before heading into the forest to look after the cows. In the evenings, he played by the riverside, listening for elephants, afraid of snakes. Every morning he would have to search for his school bag in the bushes while his parents scolded him for his carelessness. He did well in school, though, and qualified easily for college. What do you read, I ask, and he says everything. I believe him. He has an incredible store of knowledge, an excellent memory for details, names and dates and cultural trivia. “I was so desperate for books when I was a kid,” he says. “I remember picking up empty boxes and wrappers and things, just to read what was written on them. What did you like to read when you were a child, miss?”
I remember the day I got my own library card and checked out ten fat children’s classics. I tell him, discomfited at the gap between our worlds. He is not disconcerted at all, and plunges into the gap, and we end up debating the most fitting symbol of decadence. A TV in every room in the house, I say. Imelda Marcos’s shoe collection.
“Chocolate milk,” he says.
“Chocolate milk? How do you even know about chocolate milk?”
“From an ad in a magazine. When I saw that, I thought, it’s not enough to have milk? A whole bottle of milk is not enough? People have to add chocolate to it?”
This happens in many of our conversations: we start off in one direction and skid on a cultural difference, ending up in a new place altogether.
He loves to argue by illustration, piling metaphor onto metaphor until I cannot remember what we were talking about. “Okay, it’s like this: imagine a blind weaver,” he begins, and I cannot keep a straight face. I tell him that his arguments are elliptical and full of annoying contradictions ; he accuses me of manufacturing evidence. “Wait, let me guess—” he says whenever I start to prove a point, “they’ve done a study. ”
Harmless conversations, I tell myself. I look forward to them because he’s so intelligent and funny. I look forward to seeing lots of students, Nima, Arun, Chhoden ... no, I cannot convince myself that this is the same. Beneath our conversations, running through them, is an energy. I think he feels it as well. He stands or sits very close when we talk, looking directly into my eyes, and I sense that he is reading me as closely as I am reading him. While our behavior is not overtly inappropriate, I would not want Mr. Matthew’s disapproving eye observing us in conversation.
He is a show-off, I tell myself, a loud, attention-hogging, limelight-seeking blusterer, a trumpeter of synonyms. He’s actually very irritating. But this doesn’t work, either. Underneath the persona of the charming chatterbox, I sense a broad-minded, sympathetic person. Intellectually, he is a seeker, unafraid to cross over into another point of view, “to see how it looks from that side,” he says. Although he seems to be popular, he doesn’t really belong to any particular group or circle. He doesn’t quite fit in, and I wonder if he ever feels like an outsider among his classmates.
I ask him one afternoon. We are leaning against the balcony outside a classroom; classes have finished for the day, and below us on the grass, students are gathering for a volleyball game.
“Yes.