Beyond the Sky and the Earth_ A Journey Into Bhutan - Jamie Zeppa [23]
The classroom is furnished with long, narrow tables and benches. The teacher’s desk is at the front of the room, its plain wooden top ink-stained, its two drawers empty. The blackboard is extremely small, but it doesn’t matter because the stubs of soft chalk I found make no impression on it whatsoever.
In the staff room today, I meet several teachers who have just arrived from India. Everyone is very friendly, shaking my hand, asking me my “good name,” welcoming me to the school on behalf of their colleagues and on their own behalf. Everyone asks me if I have “settled myself up” yet, and when did I come, and did I come across the top road, and am I knowing the Canadians who were here before me, Sir Dave and Mrs. Barb, except Mrs. Joy, from southern India, who asks if I am Christian. I am taken aback by this and stammer something about being raised a Christian but no longer, uh, something or other. The lines on her face deepen and she shakes her greying head; this is obviously the wrong answer.
Every second sentence is punctuated with the phrase “isn’t it.” Mr. Sharma asks me if I have met Mr. Iyya yet. I say no. “Oh, you will be having much in common with Mr. Iyya, isn’t it,” he informs me. “Mr. Iyya is always reading English novels and writing poetries. Mr. Iyya is a tip-top poet.” He asks what my qualifications are, and before I can answer, tells me his: B.A., M.A., M.Ed., M.Sc. Actually, he confides, he is overqualified for this place, isn’t it, but what to do.
Mrs. Joy asks me why I am wearing “that dress.” I look down at my kira. “You don’t have to wear their dress,” she says grimly. She is wearing a brown synthetic sari and a grey sweater.
“But I want to,” I say.
“It doesn’t look nice on you,” she tells me and I begin to ponder the . irony of her name. The bell rings for lunch, and I excuse myself.
The school is a cold, concrete edifice, its cement walls discolored, crumbling in places, waterstained. Behind are the girls’ and boys’ hostels, off to one side is the dining hall. The front yard, a large, bald, dusty rectangle, is also the “playing field,” where I send class II C each day after attendance to play until the bell rings for lunch. The whole compound is surrounded by a barbed wire fence. Across the road is a long, low ramshackle row of staff quarters, and a somewhat less dilapidated, two-story concrete apartment building, where I live. I mount the steep ladder steps to my flat on the second floor and let myself in, not wanting to be in any of the five dank rooms but not knowing where else to go. The cement walls are dark with smoke and grease and hand-prints, and I remind myself to find out who the landlord is. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad place with a couple of coats of paint, a carpet of some sort, some real chairs instead of those punitive wooden benches. There is an abundance of wildlife, mice or rats, black beetles with pincers from the tool department of a hardware store, moths and ants and fleas, and today, an enormous hairy spider. Are there tarantulas in Bhutan? I beat it with a broom and sweep it out the door; it resurrects itself on the step and scuttles off.
I turn on all the taps, but there is still no water. I really must speak to the landlord. I have not unpacked. I cannot unpack until I clean, but I don’t know how to begin to tackle the thick layer of damp and dust and decay that lays over everything. I have not had a bath since I left Thimphu, because there is rarely water in the taps, and when there is, it is numbingly cold and I am too afraid of the kerosene stove to try heating it. The stove, which has to be pumped before it is lit, hisses and splutters alarmingly, and I am sure that I will die in a massive kerosene explosion. I am almost out of crackers. The teachers downstairs, Mr. and Mrs. Sharma, from Orissa in eastern India, have invited me for supper twice. “Please, it is no problem for