Radio Shangri-La_ What I Learned in Bhutan, the Happiest Kingdom on Earth - Lisa Napoli [52]
This was also the time of day when the newscast got prepared. Since it was a Monday, a day when none of the newspapers published, Ngawang had to rely on the BBS as her sole source of information. This involved transcribing, by hand, what had made the news that evening; the margin for error here was high. I had tried to convince Sir Pema, Sir Tenzin’s deputy, that if all we were going to do was crib from other media, the way broadcasters back home plucked the majority of the stories they reported from newspapers, we should just halt the effort entirely. This was not a Western convention we should emulate, I said. But the fact that this was how it was done in the West made it all the more enticing. Sir Pema was dedicated to the idea that there needed to be at least the essence of news on Kuzoo. In his mind, it somehow offset the pop music and gave the station at least the illusion of seriousness. But he stopped short of pushing the Kuzooers to go out and report for themselves.
The items that Ngawang had transcribed from the BBS newscast at the top of the hour included: a forest fire; the naming of a panel of government officials to oversee next year’s elections; a hike in the price of Indian cars to twelve thousand ngultrums—about $250 each—and the revelation that the availability of low-interest auto loans had swelled the number of vehicles in the kingdom to thirty thousand. After Ngawang had transcribed and then reworded these stories, I helped her comb through the copy and do a practice read. Like anyone just starting out in radio, she was self-conscious on the air. Especially since everyone you know becomes your biggest critic when they listen in. One of her uncles had ranted about her recent past performances, saying that her English was poor, while a friend had complained she was sounding “too American.” I’d hoped that wasn’t a dig at her affection for me.
A public service message had been faxed in, too, from the Ministry of Home and Cultural Affairs. It tied into the car stories we had to report. We changed its dreary bureaucratic-speak into zippier language:
If you’re listening to Kuzoo in your car … hear this:
Starting next Tuesday, you might get stopped for a random emissions test. The police want to crack down on people who are not getting their cars tested for emissions. So they’re going to randomly stop drivers as of February 20. Air pollution is on the rise here in Thimphu. So we hope you’ll get your car tested for the sake of our air … and also to avoid having to pay hefty fines. This has been a public service announcement from Kuzoo FM 90.
A pretty sixteen-year-old volunteer named Lhaki piped up as she heard Ngawang rehearse.
“So glad about that,” she said. She was sitting on the floor with her legs crossed, holding a guitar, long hair hanging past her shoulders, bangs brushing into her almond eyes—a Bhutanese Joni Mitchell. “My parents both bribed the emissions inspector to lie about their cars so they could pass. So selfish.”
Disaffected teenage angst oozed from Lhaki’s every pore. The week before she’d shown off a few sketches in her tattered notebook, each as intricate and bizarre as one of the omnipresent religious scrolls—the sacred thangka paintings depicting various Buddhas that hung in virtually every room in Bhutan, not far from the requisite photo of the king. Each had a Hieronymus Bosch–like quality to it, complex and colorful, playful with a tinge of sinister. One of Lhaki’s drawings depicted her interpretation of Hell, accompanied by a simple declarative caption in cursive writing: Life sucks. On another page, in the same style, was a happy valley of love, filled with flowers and rainbows and suns, and dozens of tiny babies floating gaily around the landscape like cherubic angels floating in an Italian Renaissance painting. I wondered if she’d ever seen one or if she’d simply pulled the images from the recesses of her