Beyond the Sky and the Earth_ A Journey Into Bhutan - Jamie Zeppa [61]
I have one kerosene stove (used only for boiling water), a plastic jerry can, and a shining new gas stove with cylinder. A few tin plates, mugs and tumblers. Three spoons. A flour sifter, a tea strainer. One sharp knife. Two woven bamboo baskets, an assortment of empty cans with plastic lids. A frying pan, a pressure cooker, two pots. A beer bottle with the label washed off (the rolling pin), two shoulder pads (the oven mitts), one plastic bag full of plastic bags and one water filter. Overall it is still the ugliest, coldest, dirtiest, bleakest, barest, least comfortable kitchen I have known, but I have everything I need.
First-term exams have finished, and I have just started marking class II C’s science papers. Even the preprimary students wrote exams. All week, students wandered around the school yard memorizing their textbooks. Class II C wanted to join them. “We have to by-heart it,” they said.
“No, you don’t have to by-heart it,” I argued. “You have to understand it. Do you understand it?”
“Yes, miss.”
I pour boiling water into the tin mug, stir in coffee powder and carry it to my desk, where the papers are stacked up. What is a shrub? A shrub is a shrub. Shrub is mugspit. I am not a shrub. The shrub’s name is Miss Jammy. Shrub is I don’t kanow Miss. Most of them fail science. Maybe I should have let them by-heart it. I press my head against the window. I don’t kanow Miss.
Outside, the wind picks up, sounding strange and ominous, and a flock of crows settles on the edge of the playing field. From a neighbor’s house the sounds of a puja, horns and drums and a chanted prayer, rise up over the crying of a baby. The puja is for the baby who is thinner and more yellow each time I see her. I swat at the flies that buzz angrily around my head. I cannot grade any more papers. I have to get out. I open the door to find Lorna climbing the staircase. “Howdy,” she says. “Wanna go shopping with me tomorrow in Samdrup Jongkhar?”
Samdrup Jongkhar, on the Indo-Bhutan border, is three hours away from Pema Gatshel by truck. At the orientation in Thimphu, it was referred to as sort of a shopper’s paradise for eastern Bhutan, where Indian goods of every kind were readily available. “Are you kidding?” I say. “Let’s go right now! ”
We get a ride in the back of a gypsum truck, sitting on a pile of stones as the truck roars out of the valley and onto the main road. The sky is clear, a brilliant, heartbreaking blue. “This is so much better than the Vomit Comet,” Lorna says. I tell her about a teacher who claimed the woman behind him on the Comet gave birth and no one even knew about it until the ride was over and the happy woman and her husband got off the bus with their new baby. Lorna says a very young monk peed on her foot on her first bus ride and a Bhutanese man proposed to her.
“Really? What did he say exactly?”
“He didn’t speak English, so he got his friend to ask,” she says. “His friend said, ‘Bhutanese man wants marriage you.’ ”
“And what did you say?”
“I said I’d think about it. There wasn’t anything in our contracts about remaining celibate, was there?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Good,” she says, laughing. “The old libido is starting to rage.”
“Yeah,” I sigh. “I’ve got the same problem, and Robert is seven thousand miles away.”
“How long before you see him again?”
“Seven months.”
Lorna whistles. “Good luck to you, girl.”
The truck turns a corner and we gasp: the mountains have dwindled into soft emerald hills which in turn subside into the scorched and impossibly flat plains of India. The heat grows as we descend through lusher, more exaggerated tropical vegetation—flowering bushes with star-like leaves, groves of banana trees, umbrella trees with flame-colored blossoms. We see grey langurs, scarlet birds, black butterflies the size of my hand with electric blue markings, a large hornbill, waterfalls. Then we pull into