Beyond the Sky and the Earth_ A Journey Into Bhutan - Jamie Zeppa [119]
I close my eyes and think of the journey ahead, from Paro to Delhi to London to Toronto. I am vaguely afraid to leave Bhutan, afraid that the magic doors will snap shut and I will be on the wrong side. I am afraid that I will not find my way back. It is irrational, I know: I have extended my contract for another year, I have a return ticket, I have a visa for Bhutan in my passport, but still.
Lorna has also extended her contract. I ask her if she ever worries that something will happen and she might not get back. She tells me I am crazy.
“I can’t imagine going home,” I say. “I mean finishing here, and leaving for good.”
“But you’ll have to go home someday,” Lorna says. “You can’t live here forever.”
I don’t see why not.
When we get to Thimphu, we find that something has indeed happened: WUSC has declared bankruptcy and the program in Bhutan will begin to close down. We can all come back and finish our contract extensions, but no new teachers will be recruited under the program.
At home, everything is glossy and polished and unreal: glassfronted shops, tinsel-bedecked displays, people’s faces, all gleaming facades. In people’s houses, I am overwhelmed by the number of things. I miss out large parts of the conversation because I am lost in looking at ornaments jostling for room on shelves, walls covered with hundreds of pictures, posters, calendars, clocks, decorative plates. Everywhere I look there is some thing to look at. My eyes are constantly dragged away.
“Sorry, what?” I say. “Pardon?”
Television is incomprehensible. The images fly out of the screen too fast, faces phrases whole lives flash and pass and I let them; ten minutes of television exhausts me for hours. In my aunt’s house, the television is always on, and it is unbearable. Come for dinner, they say, and I do, and we sit with our plates in our laps in front of the TV, my uncle clicking from channel to channel, nothing on he says but he does not turn it off.
Outside, I am shaken by the traffic, the rush, the speed at which people walk, excuse me, pardon me, are you getting on that escalator or are you just going to stand there blocking my way? An interminable line of cars on the highway, all going in the same direction, all carrying one person. I think of the gasoline consumed, the carbon monoxide produced, the money spent, the utter waste of it, one car for one person. When I suggest to my cousin that we take the bus downtown, she raises her eyebrows at me. “I don’t take the bus,” she says.
The number of stores is overwhelming, the number of things being bought and sold, things that people don’t need and don’t even seem to want all that much but for some reason have to have. I have never taken an economics course in my life, but after Bhutan, it is clear that this economy is not sustainable or sane. It is completely out of control, and the political prattle that links the family and democracy and small-town values to the anonymous forces of the Almighty Market is utterly absurd.
I do not do any of the things I thought I would do, go to an art gallery, the theater, a dozen movies. I meet Robert for a beer; not unexpectedly, we find we have very little to say to each other, and are both relieved when our glasses are empty and we can murmur polite wishes for a happy Christmas/life. I do the obligatory round of family visits: father in Toronto, mother and grandfather in Sault Ste. Marie, various relatives in between. I wake up tired and wander around the house, unable to breathe properly with hot stale air blasting out of the vents and all the windows sealed against the winter outside. My family’s questions about Bhutan are impossible to answer. Bet you’re glad to be back, aren’t you? They have toilet paper