Beyond the Sky and the Earth_ A Journey Into Bhutan - Jamie Zeppa [117]
I do not believe in separate hell realms, I tell Nima. There are enough horrors right here on earth. “But what about these gods and demigods?” I ask. “They look very happy.”
Nima nods. “They are happy for now, miss. Their world is very beautiful and pleasant, but they have not escaped cyclic existence, and sooner or later, they will use up their good karma and will be reborn in one of the lower realms. ”
I notice a black door off to the side painted with white skulls, and ask Nima if we can go in there. He says he can but I cannot. The room houses the temple’s guardian deity, and women are not allowed to go in. The gomchen asks if we would like our fortunes told. Nima takes a pair of dice from a brass tray and holds them against his forehead briefly before throwing them down. The lama looks up the answer in a book and reads it aloud. Nima seems pleased. Now it is my turn, and I take the dice and look at Nima for help. “You have to think of a wish or a question,” he says. I touch the dice to my forehead and drop them onto the tray. The lama reads out the answer.
“What you want will be very difficult,” Nima translates. “Things will work out, but not in the way you expect.”
On the way back down the hill, Nima tells me he asked about his spiritual training in India. “The answer was very positive. And miss, I know what you wished for. You wished to stay in Bhutan, isn’t it?”
“Sort of,” I say. Out of the starry cluster of wishes and questions that filled my head when I picked up the dice, only Tshewang’s face remains clear now.
The students bring news of planned demonstrations in southern Bhutan. Arun comes to ask if I think he should go ... down ... to join the others, the demonstrators.
I say no. I don’t want him to be hurt, trampled, run over, arrested, kidnapped, beaten up, shot, his head cut off and left in a sack. I don’t want him to disappear. I don’t want to lose any of them. I want them to stay here. All of them, north and south, the combination and the contradiction. I want them all to stay right here and make a final effort to talk to each other, to fight the real enemy, which is mutual mistrust and rhetoric, to find what they still hold in common beneath the cant.
I remember a verse from the Buddhist canon: Not at any time are enmities appeased through enmity but they are appeased through non-enmity. This is the eternal law.
The Kuensel reports that armed anti-nationals swept through the southern villages, rounding up people and forcing women and children to walk in front. The demonstrators grew violent, the paper reports, but the Bhutanese security forces were under orders not to fire. The crowds converged on district headquarters, stripping people of their national dress and burning office records. The militants ordered letters of their demands be carried to the central government. The contents of these letters are not reprinted.
Arun has not gone to join the demonstrators. “It could have been solved without this,” he says. “If the government would only listen to what we are saying. If only they didn’t make it a crime to say that we want something else. Personally, ma’am, I don’t want a separate country for the southern Bhutanese, and none of my friends do, either. That’s a ridiculous idea. But we don’t want things to go on as they are, either. We’re educated, we want our rights. We want to be able to say what we really want. And to be who we are. We are also part of Bhutan, isn’t it. But they make it so that we can only be Bhutanese if we turn into them and even then we aren’t real Bhutanese. It was okay before, when we only had to wear national dress in school and at office. Some