Beyond the Sky and the Earth_ A Journey Into Bhutan - Jamie Zeppa [133]
Lotus Thunderbolt
Jesus Christ, Jamie Lynne!” my grandfather says when I tell him. If he were not so visibly, angrily, intensely upset, I might laugh. I had written to him about Tshewang, and he had written back telling me not to be foolish, to think of my future. “It will all blow over,” he wrote. “You’ll forget each other the minute you’re back here. Where you belong.” He thought I was coming home to do my Ph.D. When I tell him I have come home to have a baby, he doesn’t believe me.
“Grandpa,” I say gently, “I wanted a baby. I want this baby. I love Tshewang very much.”
For a few weeks, he says nothing. He is thinking, turning it over and over in his mind, looking for something to salvage, a piece upon which he can build a future for me.
“All right,” he begins one morning, stirring sugar into his coffee. “So you have the baby. Fine. Lots of people have babies when they’re studying at that level. You can apply now, and start after the baby is born.”
“I don’t want to go back to school now, Grandpa. I’m going to wait for Tshewang to finish school, and then we’ll decide what to do.”
“Forget him—”
“I can’t forget him, Grandpa.”
“Why make your life more complicated than you’ve already made it? You have to simplify it now.”
“I agree. That’s why I’m not making any decisions right now.”
“You won’t ever really belong in Bhutan, and he won’t ever feel at home here.”
“Well, I don’t know about that, Grandpa. He’s a pretty adaptable person, and I love Bhutan.”
“You aren’t even the same religion,” he says. “How in hell do you expect this to work?”
I mumble unhappily and get up to clear the dishes. I don’t know how to tell him, he is already so upset. “Don’t tell me you’ve gone and become a—a—”
“A Buddhist.”
Now he is furious. “You were raised a Catholic! ”
“Yes, but I’ve chosen to be something else, Grandpa. Anyway, you used to say that all religions are the same underneath.”
“Then why can’t you stay a Catholic? That’s a cult, that’s all that is. Buddhism! ”
I enlist the help of my brother, father and mother. Please talk to him, I ask them. Tell him that you’re not upset about it, you think it will all
work out fine. The phone rings and rings, and I try not to listen to my grandfather explaining patiently why I never should have gone to Bhutan in the first place. “Everything will change after the baby is born,” my mother tells me. “Your grandfather will come around. They always do.”
I try talking through it with him, I try not talking about it at all, I try ignoring his comments, I try snapping back at him. I come home one day from a walk and find that the small altar I have set up in my room has been dismantled and packed away. “I don’t want that nonsense in my house!” he shouts. When my father calls and offers me an alternative place to stay, I accept and move to Toronto.
I spend my time reading, swimming at the Y, seeing films, and writing to Tshewang. I miss him hugely, and sometimes I fret about the future, but mostly I am calm. I take refuge in the Dharma community in Toronto, visiting a Tibetan Buddhist temple regularly, and attending a series of teachings given by a visiting Tibetan Rimpoche. The temple is in a downtown building; the downstairs lobby is all mirrors and polished brass, but several floors up, in a bright, airy room, there is an altar, butter lamps and water cups set before a statue of the Buddha, and every time I go in, it is a homecoming. I stay in touch with my Bhutan friends in Canada, visiting Tony and Margaret (who returned home, got married, and settled in Vancouver), Leon, who has begun a postgraduate degree in international affairs in Ottawa, and Lorna and her