Beyond the Sky and the Earth_ A Journey Into Bhutan - Jamie Zeppa [113]
“What’s wrong with it?”
“What’s wrong with it!” He looks dangerously close to a stroke. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it! It’s not the kind of question they’ll get asked on their final exam! You are not preparing them for their final exam!”
“But the questions they get on their final exams are ridiculous. ‘Summarize Act I of the play.’ I don’t care if they can recite Act I from memory, I want them to have their own thoughts about the play.”
“Never mind their own thoughts about the play! Can they answer the final exam questions? That’s what you should be concerned about,” Mr. Bose says, wagging a finger. “I’m going to have to monitor your work.”
“Mr. Bose,” I say furiously, “never tell me how to teach my class again.” In a second, my anger destroys all the calm I have built up through a week of progressive meditation exercises. It breaks over me, and I indulge in it, can you believe the nerve of him, who does he think he is, etc., etc., until I feel thoroughly poisoned by it.
The sky weeps and wipes its face on the mountains. My legs break out in blisters and boils. The students tell me boils are caused by “impure blood,” and if you get one, you will get nine. I have had three so far. One of my students, Kumar, develops a strange skin condition and is hospitalized in Tashigang. His bed is in an open ward, and two of his classmates stay with him, sleeping on the floor beside the bed at night, bringing his meals and arguing with the doctor over his treatment. “These college students,” the doctor tells me wearily. “They think they know everything.”
Kumar’s face is thin and peaked. The rash makes his skin look like sandpaper. He says the hospital is not so bad, “except at night, miss, it is impossible to sleep. Everyone is groaning and praying.”
On the way out, I pass by a man sitting on the stairs. A large chunk of his leg is missing, and I can see the glimmer of bone at the base of the wound. He sits quietly, waiting for someone to come and tend to him. I had meant to ask a doctor about my boils, but they seem silly now.
Everyone has them. Another student, Tashi, holds a clean handkerchief over the large angry boil on his cheek throughout class. When I pass him in the hallway the next day, I do not recognize him. “It’s me, miss,” he says. “Tashi.” His face is swollen beyond recognition, and he has trouble speaking.
Early the next morning, the college peon knocks on my door with a notice. One of the students has died in the night, and all classes are canceled. I see a group of his classmates climbing up the embankment toward my house, and I know it was Tashi. They tell me the infection went to his brain; they took him to the hospital in Tashigang but it was too late. They wait while I put on a kira, and I follow them to the temple where Tashi’s body, covered in white scarves, is laid out beneath a white canvas canopy. The Dzongkha lopens are leading the prayers, a recitation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and two students sit by Tashi’s side. A plate of food has been placed beside him. His classmates will take turns sitting with him until his family arrives for the cremation. I sit with the students, the prayers rising and falling around me, and try to pray but I cry instead. “You should try not cry, ma’am,” Chhoden tells me, squeezing my hand. “We say that it makes it harder for the spirit to leave, if people cry.”
It takes Tashi’s family three days to make the journey from their village. For three days, his classmates continue their vigil in shifts, never leaving the body alone. Two of Tashi’s friends have to prepare the body for the cremation. This includes washing the body and breaking the bones to force it into a fetal position. The body is laid upon the pyre and covered with scarves and Tashi’s best gho. After a long prayer and many offerings to the corpse, the wood is lit. But the body does not burn properly, and the lama heading the ceremony says it is because of the spirit’s attachment to this world. Tashi’s classmates bring his flute and his paints from his room and cast them onto the fire, admonishing