Beyond the Sky and the Earth_ A Journey Into Bhutan - Jamie Zeppa [86]
The students balance my view of rural Bhutan. Yes, they say, things in the village are peaceful ... on one level. “People are very jealous,” one young woman named Chhoden tells me. Her hair is cut in an asymmetrical bob, and her kiras are bright silky prints imported from Bangkok. Her immediate family lives in Thimphu, where her father is employed in the civil service, but she says they still visit their ancestral village in Mongar once a year. “You don’t see it, ma’am, because you are just seeing from the outside. There’s a lot of jealousy and backbiting. And people have very strict ideas about what is proper. When I go home to the village, I have to become a different person. Boys can roam about and do as they please but if girls do that, everyone will say oh that girl, she’s a bad character, always roaming here and there. If I try to argue, my parents say that I have been spoiled by school.”
I talk a lot about language with the students, about English and Sharchhop and Dzongkha and Nepali. The Nepali-speaking students advise me to learn their native tongue; Nepali is more useful, they say, more people speak it and anyway it is easier to learn. The Dzongkha-speaking students frown at this. Madam, why you are learning Nepali? You should learn our national language.
I want to learn both, I say. Isn’t that okay? Thinking to myself, it must be okay, you can all speak each other’s languages plus English and Hindi with a smattering of Bengali or Tibetan. But we are talking about something more than language here, I only wish I knew what. I want to learn both, I repeat, and neither group looks very pleased. As if, in choosing both, I had chosen neither.
I learn that thank you very much in Dzongkha is namé samé kadin chhé. Namé means no sky, samé no earth. Namé samé kadin chhé means thanks beyond the sky and the earth. I learn that the script was developed in Tibet in order to translate the teachings of the Buddha, and it is therefore called Chhoeki; the language of religion. I learn to write the alphabet, which hangs from an invisible upper line, with the tails and heads of letters stacked together to create combined sounds. The spelling is murderous. “Why does joba have to start with an ‘m’, of all things?” I complain, exasperated, to Nima. “Why not a ‘q’ or a ‘p’ or heaven forbid a ‘j’?” He explains that because the language is monosyllabic, extra silent letters are used to distinguish one homonym from another. I almost give up, but the language looks so beautiful on the page, with birds flying above the words and lines ending in swords. The birds are o’s, the swords full stops.
Another student gives me a list of “everyday phrases” in Nepali:
what is your name, why are you laughing, wooden leg, heart’s disease,
warm bed, mother’s blessing, permission, advice, dark night,
song of the river
truth, love story, remember, again, voice, enemy, friend, forget
setback, lack, lake, fire, water, mountain, sun, rain
king, minister, rich, poor, apple, pear
good morning, good evening, good bye
A very small announcement on the notice board invites all staff and students to attend the Hindu celebration of Durga Puja in the auditorium. Shakuntala tells me the story behind it, from the Hindu epic Ramayana: Ravanna, the demon king of Lanka, abducts Sita, the wife of the god Ramchandra. Ramchandra worships the goddess Durga for nine days, and on the tenth day is empowered to defeat Ravanna and bring his wife home. Durga is also Kali, the goddess of destruction, smashing the old to make way for the new in an endless cycle of change.
On the auditorium stage, an altar has been set up with a fierce statue of Durga garlanded with marigolds and silver tinsel. Incense hangs in delicate streamers in the air. There is an offering of milk and honey to the goddess, and then we are given tikka, a smear of red powder on our foreheads. Dil Bahadur is looking unusually somber as he assists with the ceremony on stage. His longish hair