So Close to Heaven (38 page)

Like most visitors with time to spend in Thimphu, I walked a lot, because the town is small, two or three longish streets fed by back alleys
and footpaths into the hills. The altitude hovers around 7,500 to 8,000 feet, not high enough to cause problems for the reasonably fit. The main thoroughfare, with no hills to climb, is Norzim Lam, where dozens of shops sell a mix of local products like handwoven textiles, food grains, and religious objects and imported goods such as clothes, processed foods, and other household items from India or China.

Everyone in town is conversant with the shops’ specialities. When I asked a monk where to find the beautifully engraved slates that sometimes adorn a temple wall, I thought I heard him reply: “Go to Number 32, next to the passion shop.” Passion? Could there be a pornographic video store in the heart of town? When I arrived at Sangay’s Store Number 32, I saw the clothing shop next door and realized he had meant “fashion.” Interchanging the English sounds of
p
and
f
is a common practice in several South and Southeast Asian places I have spent time in. A housekeeper in Bangkok was forever talking about how badly a high-living driver treated his pregnant “wipe.” In Kathmandu, I was introduced to someone who had opened a factory making Tibetan “carfets.”

Thimphu, with its new golf course and a string of recently opened bistros to serve the new moneyed middle class and such foreigners as may pass through or live here briefly, is beginning to develop a restaurant culture of relative sophisticaton, at least for those who can afford it. Until very recently, the smart set was limited to dining in hotels, at a financially shaky café or two, or at home. For lunch, there was the Swiss Bakery, a unique social institution in the heart of town. The owner of the place really is, or was, Swiss. He is among a very small number of foreigners granted the privilege of staying on in Bhutan and becoming citizens. He married here, and all his family now seem to lend a hand in running the rustic café with its wooden benches and tables and a few struggling strands of philodendron. The baked goods, freshly prepared (or reheated in a microwave oven), are comfortingly simple, leaning toward sandwiches and cakes, served with pots of good coffee or tea.

Most people seem to come to the Swiss Bakery not only to eat but also to meet other members of the Bhutanese fast class (including the cabin crews from Druk Air, still an elite in a country with only two small airplanes) and the expatriates who come to share news from home and abroad. One day, it was mail call for a group of blond outsiders, who immersed themselves in letters that had arrived by pouch from some northern European city. On other days, the foreigners seemed more
intent on sizing each other up, especially if a stranger appeared. Competition has begun to surface among development organizations, and turf matters.

The Bhutanese do not wish to be lectured about what they need or don’t need, and they skirt the edge of judging some well-meaning foreigners a little too self-righteous and hectoring. This was an unspoken undercurrent in several conversations I had with government officials about human rights and the treatment of Nepali-speaking rebels in the troubled south. The issue, which had crystallized debate about Eastern and Western ways, had also provoked some unusual criticism of Christians among usually tolerant Bhutanese Buddhists. To at least some Bhutanese (and many other Asians), human rights activists seemed the product of a didactic Judeo-Christian West, a description more often intended to be cultural rather than religious. Furthermore, in Bhutan, where conversions to Christianity are not permitted, many people are aware that Christian missionaries working in refugee camps in Nepal were early champions of southern Bhutanese rebels who fled there with florid and overheated accounts of abuse, and that these foreigners had pressed American diplomats in Kathmandu to accept the rebels’ version of events without visiting Bhutan to see for themselves.

I was struck by a government official’s remark about the gap between Asian flexibility and Western moral absolutism when he talked about the joy of dealing with Sadako Ogata, the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, who is Japanese. All over Asia, even in the rough-and-tumble Indian subcontinent, this theme is repeated, and it is troubling for those outsiders who want to steer a reasonable course between an understanding of other cultures and a belief that certain basic human rights are a universal concept that cannot be conveniently watered down, especially by governments, in the name of civilizational differences. To hear Buddhists argue the case for intolerance is especially unsettling.

For the tourist who passes briefly through Thimphu, staying well away from the smoldering political and cultural issues, this is the town where itineraries are fixed, cars rented, and guides assigned. It is the place to provision oneself with fat candles and matches for electricity-less nights, a few groceries for ad hoc picnics, and bottled water. Thimphu is also where visitors not on prepaid trips stock up on ngultrum, the Bhutanese currency. This transaction, regrettably, requires a trip to the Bank
of Bhutan. For that, most people have to set aside at least an hour, though on a recent trip I managed to accomplish a currency exchange in forty-five minutes by going in just before the staff lunch break, when service suddenly speeds up.

The Bank of Bhutan is a barn, where cashiers are kept in stalls and pens and the rest of us are left to graze in the anteroom while waiting interminably for a simple traveler’s check to be cashed. For anyone familiar with the subcontinent, it doesn’t take long to figure out the problem: Indians have trained the staff and seem to hold pivotal positions, seated at battered tables initialing transactions. From the look of the chaos they have created, I would guess that these tutors come from the State Bank of India, any branch. It goes something like this:

I enter the bank and line up at the foreign-currency window. Two women are chatting, their backs to us customers. Eleven minutes pass. I hand over three checks, being careful to countersign them in front of the sari-clad clerk who pretends not to be looking. She pulls out several ledgers and begins to enter elaborate transaction records. She goes away. Nearly fifteen minutes go by. She returns, adjusting her sari, and gives me back the checks. She says I haven’t signed them exactly the way I signed my passport (in another color ink, nearly seven years ago, on a desk, not a high counter). I sign them again, and again on the back. She goes away once more. This time I win the brass ring, or rather the brass disk with a number, which entitles me to fight my way to another cage at the opposite side of the barren hall where an unmistakably Indian Sikh is in charge of handing out the cash. Meanwhile, a veritable basket of papers with my applications for currency are circling innumerable desks for initials. Forty minutes into the adventure, my number comes up, and I push my way toward the Punjabi turban in the wire enclosure, all but hidden behind supplicants two or three deep. In under an hour, I have my money and am out of the bank. If Southeast Asians can train Bhutanese broadcasters and airline cabin crews, surely it would be possible to get a Singaporean or Thai to create user-friendly banks. Well, at least I had what I needed to leave for a trip through the other Bhutan.

“V
INOD
,” said a voice from somewhere over the front fender of a battered Land Cruiser parked in front of the Yu-Druk Hotel. This was the driver introducing himself as he tinkered with the motor. It was not long
after dawn, but nearly an hour later than I had hoped to leave for Bumthang, a full day’s drive into central Bhutan. Not much reassurance was forthcoming from the nervous protocol officer assigned to accompany me across Bhutan because of his skill with all its languages (though I was given the option of traveling alone for the first time on this trip in 1992). “The car wouldn’t start,” he explained as we prepared to head into a country with no service stations for a hundred miles. Vinod, who had just introduced himself, was under five feet tall and looked all of fifteen years old. He was an Indian from Kalimpong. With tourism on the upswing, Bhutan was running out of homegrown drivers, and the private car-rental companies had gone prospecting for help in the hill stations of West Bengal. At least the terrain was similar, I reasoned, as Vinod jumped into the driver’s seat, his short legs stretching to reach the floor pedals. On the dashboard reposed a Hindu god and a more or less indescribable ornament of blinking red lights.

As we climbed away from Thimphu, with the outline of Simtokha Dzong darkly visible through the morning mist, we caught up with a large, lumbering dump truck loaded with monks. It was, by wonderful chance, the autumn morning when the je khenpo and his monastic following began their annual move to the old capital of Punakha, where winter is less harsh. I had always imagined the decamping to be a dignified procession of holy men with their books and sacred paraphernalia. Who would expect a convoy of Indian-made dump trucks, festooned with garish decorations and “OK Tata” slogans, piled high with trunks, bundles, drums, horns, monks, and novices? There were vans, too, packed to the limit with lamas.

Everyone seemed to be in high spirits. At Dochhu La, the first of the high passes on the road to Tashigang, we stopped to admire an unusually clear view of the high Himalayan peaks along the border of Tibet. There is, apart from the view, a certain spiritual peace at Dochhu La, perhaps because the pass is sheltered by forests and dominated by a chorten, a mani wall, and thickets of prayer flags flapping gently against a natural backdrop of startling beauty. That morning, a row of migrating monks stood at the edge of a clearing, facing the snow-covered peaks of Masangang, Tsendagang, Terigang, Jejegangphugang, Kangphugang, Zongaphugang, and maybe Gankar Punsum—all more than 22,000 feet high. I was transfixed, and hesitant to intrude on what seemed to be a moment of reflection and meditation. It wasn’t. The monks were making a pit
stop to relieve themselves of morning tea, and they laughed uproariously as they turned toward us, adjusting their robes, amused at having been caught in the act by a foreigner. Half a dozen of them, seeing my camera, lined up to have their pictures taken beside a late-model car parked on the grass; its occupants had apparently gone to the small rest house nearby for morning coffee. The monks asked for copies of the picture to be sent to Punakha, to the slight annoyance of the protocol officer, who interrupted to say that I needn’t bother; if I sent the snapshots to him he would pass them on. I hope he did.

II
PUNAKHA

I
F
BOOMING
T
HIMPHU
is what Bhutan is becoming, Punakha represents much of what it was. Punakha, with a labyrinthine dzong of remarkable proportions, the more so because it rises suddenly from flat ground near the confluence of two small rivers, was the country’s capital for several centuries and is still the preferred venue for important royal ceremonies. The climate here is gentle and the altitude, about 4,400 feet, low for Bhutan. In the area north of the dzong, where the motorable road ends and the narrow track begins its steep climb toward the high Himalayan districts of Laya and Lunana, semitropical plants make their last stand. Punakha, on a side road off the main Thimphu-Tashigang highway, rests in a kind of cul-de-sac for those on wheels and thus escapes what passes for heavy traffic in Bhutan. There is not much of a town here, and most of what there is, across a footbridge from the dzong, is very new and very utilitarian: a branch bank, a health center, a school, and a scattering of houses and shops.

Almost any time of year, but most of all when the je khenpo is in residence in the winter months from November to April, there are monks all over Punakha Dzong, spilling into the shady courtyard below the grand staircase that leads into the fortress and lingering outside the walls. Punakha Dzong is stiff with lineage. The Guru Rinpoche was said to have had a vision in the eighth century that something great would be built here by a fellow named Namgyal. Or so it was said after the Shabdrung Ngawang Namgyal came along in the seventeenth century. The Shabdrung was reported to have been apprised of this vision in a vision
of his own as he camped by the confluence of the Po Chhu and Mo Chhu. A glorious dzong was duly erected. The Shabdrung’s embalmed body is entombed in one of its inner temples, the Machey Lhakhang.

What little there is of the present in Punakha vanishes in the dzong. It was a balmy spring day when I first got inside, armed with the government permit that was intended to open forbidden holy places to me. Doma Tshering and I plunged into the dark, dank corridors of the massive monastery in search of someone in charge who would see to it that we didn’t get evicted or cause some kind of unseemly uproar by our presence. My companion was a very attractive young woman, elegantly dressed. Not the sort of person likely to turn up in the medieval squalor of some of the corners we passed. Looking for a minor abbot or anyone in authority, we raced along toward inner and more inner sanctums, barely glancing at the altars, paintings, statues, and unexplained niches whose images blurred. At last we reached a sunny, open inner courtyard where restoration work was underway in a great monastic assembly hall and, several floors higher, in the private quarters of the je khenpo. Both had been damaged by fire years earlier. Rebuilding was taking time because all of the work was being done by craftsmen using only traditional methods and tools.

Doma and I were looking for the man in charge of restoration. Someone directed us to a spot just outside the walls, and we set off again along stone corridors. After a false start into the fetid corner inhabited by novices, we found a fine old ramp leading down a tunnel to ground level. Wide enough for a large cart, it must have been built so that supplies could be more easily wheeled or carried to the upper chambers. Minutes later we were back in daylight and in the prefab office of an engineer. The devastated quarters of the dzong now being replaced, he said, had been built before 1753. In front of his office, stretching across a meadow, an army of craftsmen were at work among piles of fragrant wood identified as hemlock, blue pine, and “key-press,” which I assumed was cypress.