Radio Shangri-La_ What I Learned in Bhutan, the Happiest Kingdom on Earth - Lisa Napoli [72]
When she finishes, she asks to see my photos. I warn her: My Bhutan is very different from your Bhutan. Yes, please, she says eagerly: I want to see. She has Bhutan fever, that mesmerized glow. She also possesses the breezy self-confidence of a person who has lived a privileged life and who is not used to being told no.
Taking pictures has never really been my thing. But I had to take photographs during my time in Bhutan—how often would I travel across the world? Though I carried my little camera with me every day, I had to constantly remind myself to remove it from my purse and use it. Once, while I was in college in western Massachusetts, a friend and I stopped to admire a gorgeous sunset, an enormous orange circle descending across the valley. At age seventeen, having hardly been out of New York City, I’d never seen anything like it. I wished out loud that we could preserve it on film for future enjoyment. My friend admonished me. “Just enjoy this moment, the light. Don’t feel like you have to take it home with you. You can’t.” From then on, anytime I saw something beautiful, I resisted the urge to look at it through a lens, challenged myself to just enjoy it. Let the camera in my brain make a record, if need be, and enjoy the feeling what I was seeing evoked.
Fighting back the fatigue of my sleepless night, I decide to indulge my travel companion’s request. I lean over the aisle, cradling my laptop, so she can get a good look at my impromptu slide show. Every once in a while, Pink’s sister the flight attendant—days away from leaving for her new job on Emirates—interrupts us to make her way up and down the aisle.
This is the first time I’ve looked at my snapshots. Here is the Kuzoo studio, I narrate, perhaps the only radio station in the world that broadcasts from an old kitchen. Here is my apartment, and under that chair in the living room is where I saw the rat I suspected all along was sharing my space. He was this big, so huge, like a cat.
Here are the kids at the golf course, I say. I explain to my seat mate that, no, you wouldn’t necessarily associate golf with a poor Buddhist kingdom, but an Indian military officer convinced the third king to build the course behind the Thimphu dzong, and a generation of players was born. Only nine holes, though, and the canteen at the course serves up pretty good Chinese-style fried rice.
Here’s Pema and Ngawang of Kuzoo recording sound with a minidisc player. They were taping Ed’s demonstration of a game he made up called gol-chery, which fuses golf with archery. Clever, no? The kids loved it.
This is Pema getting her hair curled and Pink getting her eyebrows threaded at a beauty “saloon” before a night on the town. That flight attendant who keeps passing us? She’s the sister of this girl in the picture.
This is our boss at Kuzoo, Sir Tenzin, up by the BBS broadcast tower. This is Sir Pema, the second in command at Kuzoo. What he really wants is to be a philosopher. That’s the Kuzoo van. And Kesang, he’s the driver.
Here’s a group shot from our trek up to Takshang, Tiger’s Nest. It was right before a naked young Rinpoche ran down the trail. Yes, it’s magical there, isn’t it?
The collective effect of my little slide show is like seeing this latest chapter of my life flash before my eyes. My heart is swelling. Had I really been living in this place that these people spent thousands of dollars to see? Me?
NO MATTER HOW dear you are to them, there are two things your friends are unlikely to do for you in Los Angeles. Helping you move is far and away number one. But an easy number two is picking you up at the airport. Which is why the various offers to drop me at LAX when I left, and to fetch me on the evening of my return, surprised and flattered me. They also made me feel a bit ashamed. I hadn’t missed a thing about