Beyond the Sky and the Earth_ A Journey Into Bhutan - Jamie Zeppa [108]
“This time no one was lost,” one of them adds. “But next time will be very bad, the lama was telling like that.”
I return to Kanglung, determined to end this thing with Tshewang. The more I think about it, the more disturbed I am. I realize I am actually angry, and on the long, sweaty walk uphill to the college, I try to figure out why. He took me by surprise, for one thing, speaking my secret thoughts when I had just decided he hadn’t a clue what they were. I am angry at myself for misjudging him, for thinking him naive. I am also afraid. He has brought the thing between us into the open, moving it from the realm of hopeful fantasy into the real world of decisions and consequences. All along I have been longing to know his feelings and now, when he has made them perfectly clear, I want to grab him and shake him and tell him, “It is not up to me!” I do not want it to be up to me. Yes: there is a powerful attraction and an understanding between us. But: he is a student, I am a lecturer. Real lecturers do not etc., etc. I have already made one mistake, although it seems insignificant in comparison to this. With the anonymous encounter at the beginning of the year, I put my reputation at risk, but my heart was not even remotely involved. With this relationship, I have no idea where my heart would take me.
Belief
At Pala’s one morning for breakfast, I watch Amala throw buckets of water at the pack of snarling dogs that has made its home outside her kitchen. “What to do with them,” she says. “Always fighting and all night barking.”
Dogs are a problem all over Bhutan, especially in towns, wherever there are institutions with kitchens—schools and hospitals and army camps. The packs belong to no one and to everyone. It would be a sin in Buddhism to round them all up and kill them, since all sentient beings are considered sacred, even these horrid, diseased, deformed dogs.
“Now I will do something,” Amala says grimly.
Three days later, I look up from my lunch to see her talking earnestly to a truck driver. He nods and begins rounding up the dogs, using jute sacks to pick them up and toss them, yelping and howling, into the back of his truck. When all the dogs are in, Amala hands him two hundred ngultrum, and he drives off.
“Where’s he taking them?” I ask.
“Wamrong,” she says.
“Why Wamrong?”
“Too far for them to walk back.” She smiles into her tea.
But the next day, the truck returns. The driver leaps out and unlatches the back door. The dogs pour out, still yelping and howling, and settle themselves in front of Amala’s kitchen. The driver is smiling broadly; he can hardly believe his luck. The good merchants of Wamrong gave him another two hundred rupees to take all the dogs back.
I am spending more time with Amala, who is a fountain of stories and local histories. She tells me about pows, people who can go visit your relatives in the afterlife, and oracles who speak through a chosen person. Amala tells me about her sister, Sonam, who returned home after many years in the West, bringing with her an anthropologist who wanted to see an oracle in action. They went to the family temple in Sakteng, where the man who could summon the oracle was called. He slumped to the floor in a trance and rose as the oracle took possession, speaking in a stern and unearthly voice. The oracle would not answer the anthropologist’s questions because she was of a different faith, but had a few things to say to Sonam, accusing her of staying away from home too long and neglecting her father’s temple. The oracle picked up a sword