Beyond the Sky and the Earth_ A Journey Into Bhutan - Jamie Zeppa [48]
I am also appallingly wasteful. Last weekend, they came to visit while I was cleaning up, and watched anxiously as I piled garbage into a box until Karma Dorji finally burst out, “Miss! You is throwing? ” Yes, I said, looking down at the empty beer bottles and scrap paper. “Miss, we are taking, okay?” he asked. I said of course they could take it, and remembered the roomful of stuff left behind by the last Canadians. I had not yet figured out how to dispose of the bottles, plastic containers, and tin cans in there. It took me several weeks just to figure out how to take care of my own garbage, after realizing with a shock one morning that no one was going to come along with a truck to clear it away. I had to go through my overflowing bucket and separate what could be burned, what could be composted, what could not be thrown out after all. The more complex and developed a society becomes, I think, the less responsibility individuals have to take for their actions. As long as I could lug my garbage out to the curb two mornings a week in Toronto, what did I care what happened to it. But here, we are made to see the consequences of our consumption.
“Most of it’s rubbish,” I told the kids, leading them into the room off the kitchen. Except I could see right away it wasn’t. The bottles could be stopped with cloth plugs, the empty tins could be measuring cups and plant holders, the lengths of string and wire, the paper, the cardboard boxes, the torn plastic sheeting—all of it was useful, valuable. I felt ashamed, watching them pulling open the boxes excitedly, jubilantly waving a plastic jug with a broken handle, a squashed soccer ball, an empty shampoo bottle. They quarreled over a French-English board game with all its cards and pieces missing. “Miss, you is throwing?” they asked in disbelief. I nodded. What would they do with it? With the squashed soccer ball? They looked so pleased when they left, telling me over and over, “Miss, I am very happy to you,” that I wanted to cry.
It occurs to me now that in Sharchhop, the same word is used for both “thrown out” and “lost,” and there is no distinction between “to need” and “to desire.” If something is thrown out, it is lost to further use, and if you want something here, you probably also need it. When I study my Sharchhop book, I wonder who is richer, who poorer. English has so many words that do not exist in Sharchhop, but they are mostly nouns, mostly things: machine, airplane, wristwatch. Sharchhop, on the other hand, reveals a culture of material economy but abundant, intricate familial ties and social relations. People cannot afford to make a distinction between need and desire, but they have separate words for older brother, younger sister, father’s brother’s sons, mother’s sister’s daughters. And there are two sets of words: a common set for everyday use and an honorific one to show respect. There are three words for gift: a gift given to a person higher in rank, a gift to someone lower, and a gift between equals.
In the village, few written records are kept, but everyone knows who is related to whom, why that person left the village, what inauspicious signs shone down as they set out, what illnesses and misfortunes befell them after, what offerings were made, what consolation followed. Here the world is still small enough that knowledge is possible without surnames, records, certificates of birth and death. The world is that small, and yet it seems vaster to me, bigger and older and more complex than my world in Canada, where there is an official version of every life and death, and history is lopped and fitted and trimmed into chapters, and we read it once or twice and forget. It is written down; there is no need to remember. There is no need to remember, hence we forget. Whereas here history is told so that it can be remembered, it is remembered because it is told. The Sharchhop