So Close to Heaven (33 page)

Animals portrayed by dancers wearing huge lifelike masks are important components of religious festivals or, increasingly, classical dance performances. In the Stag Dance, which can be performed by monks or laymen or a combination of both, a hunter is brought before the Lord of Death to argue for the best afterlife possible based on his worldly deeds. Unfortunately, his life has included a lot of animal killing, and in the end he is doomed because the fruits of his vocation outweigh his many acts of Buddhist merit. The Lord of Death sentences him to be reincarnated as each of the animals whose life he has taken, and then to experience five hundred deaths in each of those beastly incarnations. In the dance that tells the story, performers wearing heavy stag heads leap and spin with extraordinary strength and vigor. Occasionally, a dancer seems close to collapse as he exits the “stage”—often an open field or courtyard—to be helped by attendants who quickly remove the top-heavy animal mask and relieve the pressure on his head.

Animals and birds also play prominent roles in many moral tales, including the beloved fable of the Four Friends. In the Bhutanese version of this story, a bird, a rabbit, a monkey, and an elephant combine their talents to provide themselves a perennial supply of delicious fruit. The bird found and planted a seed, which was watered by the rabbit, fertilized
by the monkey, and guarded by the elephant. When the tree grew and blossomed, the four again worked as a team to pick the fruit that soon appeared. The elephant stood by the trunk, and the rabbit, monkey, and bird climbed on its back to build a tower to the high branches where the best fruit grew. The Four Friends are painted frequently on the walls of temples as well as homes and shops.

At Simtokha Dzong, a seventeenth-century monastery and school, Sangay Wangchuck of the Central Monastic Secretariat paused before a large rendition of the familiar Four Friends parable and placed the tale in a theological perspective. A novice monk of about six or seven stood nearby, rapt (and runny-nosed) as the discourse progressed. As he watched us, his red robe slipped from his small shoulder, revealing a sweatshirt that said, in one of those grab-bag attempts at English so common to Asian bazaars, “High Casual Step It.” It was oddly appropriate to the four creatures standing one atop another’s back, all eyes on the ripening fruit.

“These are the four brothers, the four very, very good friends; best friends,” Sangay Wangchuck was explaining. “So the bird is the Buddha, the rabbit is his closest attendant. He has two main disciples. The monkey is Shariputra, and the elephant is the Maudgalyayana.” I nodded, convinced anew that I would never master the basics of a religion where Buddha always turns up where you least expect him, and in a new context. Shariputra, hailed for his wisdom, and Maudgalyayana, who had paranormal powers, were Buddha’s chief disciples during his lifetime, I later learned from John Snelling’s
Buddhist Handbook.
“Buddhists believe that if you have this one picture,” Sangay Wangchuck went on, “then you pacify all the negatives and have better friendship.” That part I understood.

I wonder: is it sheer coincidence that the Bremen Town Musicians of German folklore—the donkey, dog, cat, and rooster who scared away brigands—are also four animal friends, or, more precisely, three animals and a bird?

In Mongar, a mountain town of cascading bougainvillea, more beautiful than any overcrowded hill station in India, Dasho Lhakpa Dorji, the dzongda, told stories over dinner about local farmers’ efforts to strike a balance among crops, animals, and religion. Several years ago, he said, farmers on the steep hillsides where every available bit of land that could be plowed had been planted found that they and their domesticated
animals were vulnerable to wolves. Putting aside theology in the face of an economic crisis, the mountain people had begun killing any wolf identified as a predator. That is usually permissible in Bhutan if the culling takes place on one’s own property.

“Well, then they found that with the number of wolves reduced, the wild boars were taking over,” the dzongda said. “Wolves had been keeping the wild boar population down. Now we have to think about what can be done—to stop killing wolves, or limit the boars.”

Killing boars isn’t the answer here or anywhere else, advised Khenpo Phuntsok Tashi, a religious scribe, in an article in
Kuensel.
“In our belief, killing boars only causes them to multiply, assisted by local nature goddesses,” he said. This path leads only to more destruction from a vengeful species, he warned. Better to protect the crops, the khenpo said. “If you want to protect your feet against thorns, you cannot cover the whole landscape with leather. It is easier and wiser to put a small piece of leather under your feet!”

It is that homeless dog population, however, that will truly test the limits of theology as Bhutan develops. Already, dogs take a lot of abuse, getting kicked and stoned regularly enough to make them wary of humans, Buddhism notwithstanding. But there is enough ambivalence on the issue of dog control to ensure a continuing supply of strays in the near future. Most wayfarers who inevitably arrive in Paro or Thimphu late in the day discover the dog problem unexpectedly in the middle of the night, just after drifting into a peaceful sleep in the pure mountain air.

Twilight does not linger in the high Himalayan valleys. The sun drops quickly behind the hills and peaks, taking the pleasant daytime temperature with it. As the thermometer’s mercury plunges, life moves indoors and the kind of peace that dwarfs humanity in these gigantic natural settings descends on villages and towns. White and yellow pools of light from naked bulbs draw families around small stoves where rice is ready to be ladled into basket-plates, thick hot tea simmers, and children begin to doze. In Thimphu’s central square, the busy jeep-taxis, parked backs to the wall, eager to spring out for a fare during daylight hours, collect the last of the marketgoers and vanish with the night. That’s when the dogs take over.

Feral Tibetan apsos and former pets of foreign pedigree, local pyedogs of every size and hue, silken longhairs of unidentifiable breeds, and
battle-scarred mutts from South Asia’s infinite store of mangy mongrels—out of the shadows and rain gutters and construction sites they come; up from the Changlimithang archery field and royal basketball court, past the shuttered Yangchenma bookshop, down the hill through the labyrinth of lanes behind the Swiss Bakery. After sniffing their way around the square at a trot, they arrange themselves in ones and twos on the stoops of darkened shops and offices, nose to paws, and go to sleep. No longer on the lookout for stone-throwing citizens, they yawn and scratch and snuggle, looking like piles of fur left out to air. This is temporary.

Some time later, prompted by some secret, primordial signal, the half-wild dogs, as if uneasy in human civilization, begin to bark and howl. A piercing chorus of yaps and hoots shatters the heavy silence. In the distant, dark recesses of the narrow Thimphu Valley and from the driveways and byways of the nearer sheltering hills, dotted with houses, other dogs respond, rending the peace with fearsome announcements. And then it is over. But they have made their point. The square, the town, the valley, and the night belong to them.

Whether the dogs bark or howl, and where, is not without meaning.

“Bhutanese believe domestic animals can give us signs,” Dasho Rinzin Gyetsen, the dzongda of Tashigang, told me in a conversation over tea one evening in the garden gazebo of a guesthouse overlooking his spectacularly situated dzong, more than twelve hundred feet above a narrow river valley. For reasons that would elude most people, the guesthouse management had contrived to block out the panoramic view afforded by the hexagonal pavilion by hanging cheap lace curtains on all the windows. “A horse that won’t go forward can be a warning,” the dasho said, as a respectful waiter hovered with a teapot. “And the dog howling in the night—see which way he points. If he points at a certain house, the devil has entered that house and claimed a soul. The person may not die right away, but his soul has been taken.”

Apart from their function as messengers of doom, the dogs, of course, could be rabid—enough of them, at least, to worry health officers. Children are getting bitten, an epidemiologist said mournfully. “Very often. Yes. Very often. The dogs should be put down. Yes. Yes. There are thousands and thousands of them. More every day. There is a hue and cry. Yes. Yes. But we Bhutanese are Buddhists. The people would never
stand for this. The dogs, too, have a right to live. Most Bhutanese people believe this.”

One evening, from my cold little room at the Druk Hotel, overlooking Thimphu’s main square, I got a demonstration of what he meant. Watching the town settle down for the night, I noticed a ritual I had missed before. Around the corner from the pavement where a scooter repairman worked all day in the sun in front of his shop, a chubby woman, a warm woolly sweater pulled over her kira, was heading resolutely into the center of town, a battered aluminum cooking pot under her arm. At the edge of the square, she bent down and poured a pile of cooked rice on the pavement, scraping the pot with her wooden spoon, alerting the hounds. Minutes later, from a grocery shop nearby, a few slices of stale bread sailed out to the street, to be gratefully received by a yellow-white mongrel too late for the rice. All around town, the mangy dogs were being fed. The process is repeated all over the country every day, frustrating would-be reformers.

Some dzongdas, using their considerable powers over the lives of the districts they govern, have devised novel ways to curb the proliferation of dogs while stopping short of killing them and inflaming public opinion. It’s a struggle, said Pem Dorji, the dzongda of Bumthang.

“Last year, I tried to get rid of the dogs, but the people were against everything I wanted to do,” he said as we toured the countryside around Jakar. “Finally, I collected live dogs. People got a reward for bringing them in. I put three hundred dogs on trucks and took them over the mountains to Lingmithang.” That’s a distance of more than seventy-five miles, over two high passses—one of them, Thumsing La, at 12,465 feet, the highest road pass in Bhutan. The dzongda was bowled over by what happened next. “After two months, the dogs came back,” he said incredulously. “They crossed the Thumsing La and they came back!

“This year I had another idea,” he said. “What we are trying to do now is make the dogs sterile. I got my veterinary officer to castrate them, and then we cut off their tails to show what dogs have been operated on.” From what I could see, the tails were still ahead of the no-tails, but it was early in the game and Pem Dorji is not a man who accepts defeat.

In some districts, Bhutanese have apparently been persuaded to agree to the killing of potentially rabid animals or other strays with lethal injections of chemicals shot from dart guns. In effect, some animals are being
overdosed with tranquilizers. Dasho Lhakpa Dorji—now dzongda of Mongar, and best known by his nickname, Jack—recalled how as district officer in Paro several years ago he had struck a deal with the manager of the Olathang Hotel, a tourist stopover in a woodland setting that had also become a haven for cats. Three large felines in particular had been behaving offensively.

“The Olathang wanted to get rid of these three cats that were doing what cats do wherever they wanted to do it, messing up the hotel,” he said. “So we called in the shooter for the cats, and I got rid of a lot of dogs at the same time.” It wasn’t clear whether the shooter in question used tranquilizers or bullets—Bhutanese can be cagey about this—but in any case Jack’s triumph was short-lived. “It was much better for a while. But before long, somebody sent down a truckload of stray dogs from Thimphu,” he said, laughing at the absurdity of truckloads of mongrels moving from town to town as supplies rose and fell.

All Bhutanese administrators know the perils of offending Buddhist sensibilities when dealing with unwanted animals. Nevertheless, not long ago in Shemgang, in south-central Bhutan, somebody decided on a drastic and probably misguided strategy. Pieces of meat were left around town laced with strychnine. More than one hundred dogs died, but in agony, according to a letter to the editor of
Kuensel
from a foreigner in town, who reported that some animals took up to five hours to die. “In this period, the dogs vomited, went into convulsions, got drowsy, and repeated the cycle.” Cats also were poisoned, along with birds that pecked at the vomit of the doomed dogs. In all, it was a most un-Bhutanese event.

“If you are born among the animals, you don’t have the chance to understand the truth, and you suffer,” said Dasho Rigzin Dorji. But that does not give those in human form the right to use lethal measures when there is imbalance or disorder among speechless, uncomprehending beasts. “If you kill something, you are reborn among hell-beings,” he said. “So therefore, breaking the vows as a Buddhist is a serious crime. Then for many eons, there is no chance of Buddhahood.”