Beyond the Sky and the Earth_ A Journey Into Bhutan - Jamie Zeppa [111]
I force myself to read the rest of the Kuensel article. For the first time, the arrests of last year are mentioned. Between October and December 1989, forty-two people were arrested for anti-national activities. Thirty-nine were later released, and a general amnesty of two months was announced to enable those who had fled the country to return. A group calling itself the People’s Forum for Human Rights announced that it wants to divide southern Bhutan into a separate political entity.
A northern student tells me he is leaving school to join the militia. “To fight the aunties,” he says.
“The aunties?” I repeat, bewildered, and then realize he is talking about the anti-nationals. “These southerners,” he explains.
“Not all southerners are anti-nationals,” I say quietly.
“You don’t know, miss. You don’t know what they are.”
Two schools in southern Bhutan are attacked and set aflame. A group of armed men attack a truck and force the driver to take off his gho. Previously, southern Bhutanese found out of national dress were fined by the Dzongkhag authorities. Now, southern Bhutanese found wearing national dress are stripped by “anti-nationals.”
The time for talking and listening has disappeared, the opportunity growing smaller and smaller until it snapped shut altogether. There will only be rhetoric now, posturing and lying and violence. I want to step out sideways. I do not want to be a witness to the inevitable.
I am cleaning the bookshelf one evening in an attempt to avoid the pile of marking that awaits me. I open One Hundred Years of Solitude and Tshewang’s thank-you note flutters out. On the other side is written LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA. I see the word “love” and I think: maybe this was the message I was supposed to respond to. Maybe this termination has been all my doing. The hand that has been holding my heart unclenches, and I can breathe deeply and it doesn’t hurt. Then I crush the paper up. It is a title, not a message. What next? I wonder. Messages through a frequency device implanted in my head? I will put this desire into a stone. I will seal it up. I will make the right effort.
I make the right effort and it makes me miserable. It rains every night, and every morning the sun breaks hot and relentless through the dissipating mist. “Good for the farmers,” Mr. Fantome tells me when I visit him in his garden, “good for all green growing things.” Everything swells wildly, and the forests glow eerily with gigantic ferns and luminous underbrush. In the midst of the rainy season, I write in my journal, I have driven myself into this dry scorched flat place. Desire has led me to this place where there is nothing to drink or eat. I do not know how to lead myself out. I have never been so unhappy.
Zurung
Leon invites me to his new posting in Yurung, a village in the Pema Gatshel valley. I stop at Pema Gatshel Junior High School on the way, but the kids have all gone home for the summer break. I leave a packet of letters and crayons for my former students and walk down to Gypsum, where I cross the river twice, thrice and begin to ascend to Yurung, except somehow, in the hot sun at the bottom of the valley, I have got turned around and I am actually walking back up the mountain to Pema Gatshel. A farmer sets me straight. Yurung, when I finally reach it, is the prettiest village I have seen yet. The houses are clustered close together, separated by low stone walls and bramble fences and kitchen gardens, and willow and cypress line the stream that rushes through the middle. I am relieved to be in a village again, I am relieved to be away from my articulate and unreasonable students. I am relieved to be away from the possibility of meeting Tshewang and the necessity of avoiding him, the laborious