Beyond the Sky and the Earth_ A Journey Into Bhutan - Jamie Zeppa [110]
But I miss our disorderly discussions and wild debates, I miss that sexual charge between us, I miss the way his eyes curl up when he laughs. Without these encounters to hope for, my days are steadier and more productive, and entirely without joy.
Enter Macduff
We have finished reading Macbeth in the Zoo, and the students want to perform it. They have divided themselves up into groups and assigned themselves scenes, and in the evenings, I watch them rehearse on stage. They start off earnestly, standing stiffly and declaiming, but by the end they are doubled over in laughter. They are at ease with one another, shouting encouragement and insults and advice, and I think that if there are times when they forget who is north and who south, this is one of them. After rehearsal, we sometimes sit outside the auditorium, talking quietly before the bell at eight o’clock calls them back to their hostels. Night falls softly, and it is easier to talk in the dark. They remember their best and worst teachers, summer and winter holidays; they remember the first time they saw a vehicle, the first time they saw a video, the first time they met each other at boarding schools in Samtse or Khaling or Thimphu; they remember who could make even the strictest teacher laugh aloud, remember that time we got caught stealing maize from the lopen’s garden, and I cannot imagine then that they actually dislike and mistrust each other. They have grown up together, and can speak each other’s languages and sing each other’s songs. They have a shared personal history, and perhaps this will in the end count for more than the historical divisions and facts and allegations.
On the political front, there has been no news for several weeks. Nothing in the Kuensel, which doesn’t mean anything, but also nothing from the students. I start to believe that the crisis is over. Perhaps there is dialogue now, perhaps there will be accommodation and understanding on both sides.
The students are ready for their final performances. They have gone to great effort with costumes and makeup and special effects, and it is a travesty. “Is this a dagger which I see before me?” Macbeth asks the plank of wood hanging from the stage curtains, and the alarm from a digital watch is set off to give the impression of urgency, but the persistent beepbeep flusters Macbeth who tries to wrest the watch away from the special effects team and there is a scuffle with Lady Macbeth who owns the watch; Great Birnam Wood misses its cue and there are leaves and branches everywhere; enter Macduff with Macbeth’s head, a wig of black yak hair, and I laugh until I cry.
In the library the next morning, a crowd of students is pressed up against the front desk, trying to read a single copy of the Kuensel. I ask what’s going on, and the Kuensel is passed silently over to me. On June 2, the anniversary of the King’s coronation, in the industrial town of Gomtu in southern Bhutan, a jute sack was found near a petrol pump, containing the severed heads of two southern Bhutanese men. A letter in the sack accused the men of cooperating with the Royal Government and betraying their own people.
Ranjana, a class XII student, is led out of the library in tears. “One of them was her uncle,” someone tells me.
I pass the newspaper back and leave the library. I feel sick. I stand on the balcony outside the staff room. In the fields below the college, women are weeding the rice paddies. I try to think about this labor that will feed the family, these works and days of hands, the feeling of mud between