Beyond the Sky and the Earth_ A Journey Into Bhutan - Jamie Zeppa [37]
“What do you know how to cook?” I ask.
“I am cooking food, miss.”
“What kind of food?”
“Food, miss,” he says again. “Miss is not eating food?”
“Of course I eat food,” I say. “What do you think I eat?”
“Miss is only eating biscuits, my father is telling.”
“How does your father know?”
“My auntie is having one shop. She is telling miss is not buying food, only biscuits.”
“Aren’t biscuits food?” I ask, a little miffed that my eating habits have become news.
“No, miss. Food is rice.”
“Ah,” I say. “Rice. Well, in my village, in Canada, we do not eat very much rice, so I don’t know how to cook it.”
They obviously find this hard to believe. “What people is eating then in your village?”
“Oh, potatoes, bread, noodles.”
“Miss,” Karma Dorji says, his mouth full of biscuit, “I am teaching you how to cook rice. Just now, miss. You have rice?”
“Yes, but—”
All three of them are back in the kitchen. Tshewang Tshering is washing out the teacups. Karma Dorji has found the rice, which he pours onto a tin plate and picks through. I watch helplessly. Within minutes, the rice has been cleaned, rinsed and put into a pressure cooker on the stove.
“Miss.” Karma Dorji is looking around the kitchen critically.
“Yes, Karma?”
“You is having onion and chili? I am making momshaba.”
“Now wait a minute, Karma. The rice is enough.”
Karma Dorji begins to chop up onions and chilies. Norbu is separating the spinach leaves he brought this morning and washing them in the sink. The pressure cooker whistles suddenly, sending me scurrying out of the kitchen. “What does that mean?” I ask from the doorway.
“Not finished,” Karma Dorji says. “Three times then finished.”
After the third whistle, they remove the pressure cooker and Karma Dorji fries the onions and chilies, and then adds the spinach leaves and some tomato slices. Tshewang Tshering pulls the little weighted knob off the pressure cooker lid and steam shoots out to the ceiling. I flutter around the kitchen, issuing unnecessary warnings—be careful, that’s sharp, watch out, you’ll get a steam burn. When everything is ready, I tell them that they must stay and eat. They protest, but I insist until finally they pull their tin lunch plates from inside their ghos. I am always amazed at what the upper portions of these ghos can hold: books, plates, cloth bags, a bottle of arra for me, rice crisps, dried apples, a cucumber, a handful of chilies to eat in class. Karma Dorji serves the food and we eat in silence. I cannot believe how good everything is, the rice sweet and unsticky, the spinach perfectly cooked, although extremely hot. I ask how many chilies are in this dish. Karma says ten.
“Ten! Yallama,” I say, wiping my eyes and nose. “How old are you, Karma?”
“Eight,” he says and plops another serving of rice onto my plate. “Now miss is knowing,” he says. “Now miss is eating food.”
When they have gone, I write in my journal: “Anyone can live anywhere, even you. This is for your kind information and necessary action, please.”
Morning Clinic Day Duty.Evening walk
Jane arrives for the health course with presents for me from Jangchuk and Pema: a basket of plums, a bottle of arra, a ball of raw cheese and a lump of fresh butter wrapped in a banana leaf. She stays with me, and for a week we sit with teachers from all over the district in an airless hospital classroom, taking notes. The course is taught by the Norwegian medical staff. We learn first about traditional beliefs regarding common illnesses: diarrhea is believed to be the result of too much water in the system; an inflammation anywhere on the body may have been caused by invisible arrows fired by certain forest spirits; mixing Western medicine