Beyond the Sky and the Earth_ A Journey Into Bhutan - Jamie Zeppa [76]
In my other degree class, I am to teach “language,” but the only set topic in the syllabus is precis writing. “What am I supposed to teach them for the rest of the year?” I ask Mr. Bose. He advises me to take attendance and then release them. “No, seriously,” I laugh, “what should I do with them?”
“I have told you seriously,” he replies.
In the evening, I sit at my desk under the glare of a bare bulb and write letters. I write to class II C, telling them that I have put up their pictures and that I think about them every day.
I write to Lorna: We have a VCR and a grand piano and a bread slicer. The students are all very cool and sophisticated. Some of them have informed me that I am damn fat and simple. I think I hate it here.
I try to write to Robert. I want to tell him how everything has changed for me, how I marvel at the distance I have come. I want to tell him how difficult it is to imagine going home at Christmas, but I cannot. My mind seizes up. I reread the letters I have received from him, but I cannot reconnect myself. I can still close my eyes and see him in the armchair in his apartment, but the picture gets smaller each time I call it up.
Class II C writes back. The letters are addressed to “The Miss Jeymey,” and the envelopes bear instructions: “Fly my letter very quick” and “Open with smile face.” Sangay Chhoden writes: Dear Miss, I am very happy to write without no reason. How are you that side. Here I am fine with my kind teachers and friends.
Karma Dorji writes: Dear Miss, I am very unhappy at pema gatshel, why means you is went.
Norbu writes that they have a new sir and he is beating them nicely. I put my head down and cry.
Lorna writes: Cheer up, simple is a compliment here. It means good-natured. My kids told me I was damn fat and homely and later I found out that homely means easygoing. Homely people make you feel at home. Get it? There’s absolutely no consolation I can offer on damn fat, though, and you’ll just have to put up with the sliced bread.
Cultural Competition
I walk to the bend in the road before breakfast, the wind soft and warm against my face and bare arms, carrying the smells of green things and earth. Kanglung is drier than Pema Gatshel: apart from a few afternoon showers, the days are mostly warm and bright. In the new light I see a peak in the north that I have not noticed before, a black stone spire much higher than the ridges and crests around it. Yesterday, some students told me that gods and other spirits reside in naturally sacred sites called nheys. Peaks, rocky outcrops, a circle of cypress trees, a waterfall, all can be nheys, and if you disturb one, you will fall sick, or some other misfortune will overtake you. Everyone knows this, they said. If you damage the natural world, you must suffer the consequences.
All around me are constant reminders of Buddhism: rough prayer walls along the path, a prayer wheel turned by a stream, prayer flags soaring above the ridge. If I close my eyes, I can conjure the Toronto skyline, giant hypodermic needle jabbing the sky, glass facades of office towers, all cold perfection. Here, things grow and fade and die, and no one pretends otherwise. The older walls of a house remain mudbrown and rutted beside the smooth white walls of the newly built addition. The old and the new grow out of each other and there is no attempt to make everything perfect and perpetually modern. There would be no point, when everything is changing, is fading away.
In class, I battle against clichés, cant, and bad grammar. “I want to hear what you have to say,” I tell the students. “Write me something different, something you haven’t already written a hundred