Beyond the Sky and the Earth_ A Journey Into Bhutan - Jamie Zeppa [84]
The students visit frequently. They come to borrow books and tapes, they come to get their homework checked, they come to sit and drink coffee and talk. I have broken through some barrier, have even made peace with Smirk. He still makes wisecracks in class, but I have grown to like him. With his longish hair and his smart-ass comments he is asking questions about the accepted order of things. His full name is Dil Bahadur, which means Courageous Heart.
Shakuntala was right: the students are very good company. The ones from wealthy families in Thimphu and Paro are more Westernized, at least on the surface. Their fathers are in key positions in the civil service and their families often have extensive land holdings. They are found most often in jeans and leather jackets under a haze of cigarette smoke at Pala’s. Their conversation is laced with a mix of slang from across decades and continents: chaps and chicks, cat and cool. Ten ngultrum is ten bucks, money is dough, drunk is boozed or boozed out. “But” is stuck on the end of a sentence (I don’t know but), and “damn” is merely a synonym for very. Every phrase is punctuated by the ubiquitous “ya.” I told her, ya, last time, ya, but she never listens, ya. No, ya. Shakuntala says that “ya” is not “yeah” but a corruption of “yaar,” Hindi for mate or man or friend. Many of these students have been educated in private boarding schools in Darjeeling and Kalimpong, and they refer to their less worldly classmates as “simple.” Simple in this instance means unacquainted with the world outside. Simple means the village, definitely not a cool place to be from. In less tactful moments, they use the word “rustic.”
My favorite students are the “simple” ones. They are shyer and more difficult to draw out, but utterly sincere. The wealthier students seem more like teenagers, preoccupied with their clothes and hair and who has a date with who at Pala’s (ignoring the ridiculous new rule, set down by the principal, that bans “couples” in order to put an end to the “gossip and scandal”—i.e., pregnancy—that allegedly flourished under the Jesuits’ noses). The so-called simple ones have not had the opportunity of adolescence. They became adults at puberty. A surprising number of the men have wives and children back in their villages. (Female students who get married or pregnant, though, must drop out of school.) Unlike their private-school classmates, they have had limited exposure to Western culture. Their ideas of universal wealth and privilege are drawn directly from the few videotaped movies they have seen at the college, and they refuse to believe that there are people living on the streets, begging for coins in the cities of North America. They flip through my old magazines with the same absorption as class II C, looking up occasionally with the same puzzled expressions. “Ma’am, what is a UFO?” or “Miss, why it says here about a psychologist for cats?”
The students learn that excessive formality makes me uncomfortable. They do not behave as casually as if I were a fellow student, but neither do they treat me with the same rigid protocol as the other lecturers. I am still “ma’am” and “madam” and sometimes “miss,” but they are warm and friendly and at ease, and I like them more each day, and I learn and learn and learn, far more than I teach.
Because of their fluency, I can ask them things I could not ask class II C, and they answer many but not all of my questions about Buddhism. It is okay to appreciate the world and all that is beautiful in it, they tell me, only we must not become attached to it. “We have to remember that it is not permanent, and anyway,