Radio Shangri-La_ What I Learned in Bhutan, the Happiest Kingdom on Earth - Lisa Napoli [34]
“We can be like King Larry,” Sir Tenzin said brightly.
Or rather, Pema could be. Because she was so diligent and productive and interested in being all over the airwaves, I’d taken to calling her Oprah, even though she couldn’t have been more physically opposite than the superstar. Pema stood no more than five feet tall and weighed perhaps ninety pounds. Her cheeks were freckled like a midwestern farm girl’s, and her long hair hung down past her shoulders with a slight wave. She frequently fiddled it all into a bun as she stared at the computer. Maven of popular culture that she was, she didn’t have to ask who I was referring to. Early yesterday morning, I’d caught her surfing the Neiman Marcus Web site for Burberry pocketbooks. Even the tiniest cost triple her monthly salary.
“Where did you learn about Burberry, much less Neiman Marcus?”
Pema turned in her chair and looked at me as if I were a clueless idiot.
“Sex and the City,” she said. “A friend brought the DVD from India.” She didn’t believe I’d seen the show only once; she seemed to assume that on the series’ native soil, each home would be blessed with a continuous feed of episodes.
In a country where many preferred to be treated with the holistic and spiritual tradition of Bhutanese medicine, psychiatry was an alien concept. Bhutan was still a place where people actually talked to their families and friends about the trials and tribulations of daily life, and trusted that whatever haunted them would somehow work itself out. Saddled by worries or problems, they’d deploy the monks and Rinpoches. Radio was the perfect medium for the psychiatrist to make his services known—to explain how therapy worked and what kinds of issues it addressed. As was the case with all health care in Bhutan, traditional and Western, visits to doctors were free.
“Let’s see,” said Pema, orderly and matter-of-fact. She’d already chosen the theme music for the show, Michael Jackson’s “Heal the World.” (Presumably for the title, and not because she saw the pop singer as a paragon of mental health.) Now she was plundering the Web for background information to explain the first topic Dr. Chencho wanted to address: anxiety.
“This says there are five main types of anxiety disorders.” She was reading from the Web site of the National Institute of Mental Health, the first thing to come up on her Google search. “Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Panic Disorder, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and Social Phobia.”
None of these seemed to be an affliction with which Pema could have been personally familiar. She was magnificently confident, the type of confidence that could edge into bossiness.
“Do you know what any of that means?” I asked.
“Yes, it spells it out right here,” snipped Pema, who I feared would read on the air the whole list and their descriptions word for word.
Across the room, Pink sat absorbed in a musical otherworld, headphones pressing down on her long wavy hair, scanning tunes for her next show. This didn’t keep her from hearing her cell phone chirping, a special ringtone I’d not heard it play before. She answered, then walked over to me.
“It’s for you,” she said, as if I got calls on her number all the time. I took the phone, surprised.
“Hello?” I said.
“Let’s have dinner tonight.” The gravelly, accented English of Rinpoche was commanding. “Pink will bring you to my hotel.”
The prospect of a private audience with this monk intrigued me. Maybe he’d had a vision he wanted to share that could shape my future. I wasn’t sure I even believed in the idea of a vision, or even of healing prayer. I had no idea what I would ask or say or expect. But