So Close to Heaven (4 page)

International measures of per capita income and living standards based on the distribution of material objects—hospital beds or radios, for example—don’t mean much in Bhutanese terms, when areas of the economy are still often based on barter, or are unmeasurable. Respiratory and intestinal diseases may persist, and as many as one in five village children under five dies because parents and lamas have not been taught hygiene or because the family lives too far from (or does not think of going to) a hospital. But food is abundant, babies get free inoculations against childhood diseases at village health centers or from mobile teams, homelessness is unheard of, education is free, and there are more jobs than citizens to do them.

“Many countries in the third world have to worry about poverty projects; this is not in our planning,” Chenkyab Dorji, the planning minister, told me. “Joblessness is not there. Landless people are not there. There is no hunger here. We only wish to improve the living standard farther. In Bhutan people have their houses. They get their three square meals.” His aims, ludicrous to contemplate in most other South Asian countries, are state-of-the-art communications systems, universal health coverage, and better roads. The Bhutanese adjust to technological change by planting prayer flags around satellite telephone relay stations and power generators.

Foreigners can still come to Bhutan and find a Buddhist peace untarnished by commercialism or artifice. An agnostic like me, climbing at dawn to an old, unkempt monastery, can be transported by the vigorous, insistent chanting of monks and the beat of drums and bells. A kind of peace and sense of well-being grow out of the rhythmic droning and the clang-clang-clang-clang of the percussion that punctuates it. Paradoxically, the experience recalls the inexplicable healing power and spiritual lift that can be drawn from the very different atmosphere of a silent Pennsylvania Quaker meeting, an empty European cathedral, or one of India’s nearly deserted old synagogues, with only the ghosts of long-departed worshippers.

Maybe we on the outside are also drawn in because Buddhism, in almost every one of its many forms or rituals, is an individualistic (and never exclusive) faith. The mumbling of mantras while counting beads, the hypnotic spinning of prayer wheels—these are private devotions. Though all around a Bhutanese monastery there is activity—there are always pilgrims, layabouts, and hangers-on, and artisans at work creating or restoring something, sewing brocaded hangings, planing or carving fragrant wood, arranging trays of flower petals or spices, wrapping holy books in silk—essentially the act of worship is a personal tryst between any one of us rough-cut humans and a better heavenly world. The monks and abbots praying and reciting away the day in the inner sanctum are there to help when needed. The lore of monastic Tantric Buddhism is full of stories of great masters ordering, cajoling, or even tricking disciples into finding their own way to knowledge, religious or otherwise.

For most Bhutanese, life in the hidden Himalayan valleys that form the landlocked kingdom in the shadow of the earth’s highest peaks is still simple and tranquil, if strenuous. Bhutanese Buddhists, inheritors of a phantasmagorical literature, see all around them the elaborate artistic representations of their gods, often in temples set in a natural environment of primeval beauty. To minimize disruption of this way of life, development under two enlightened kings has been very cautious since it began in the 1960s.

Alone among the generally overcrowded nations of the South Asian subcontinent, the Bhutanese enjoy an important quality of life that cannot be overvalued or underestimated: privacy. Though families may be large, virtually everyone has a home and therefore a sanctuary. The
Bhutanese are accustomed to solitude; many ride or walk alone for long hours, perhaps days, from high-altitude villages to market towns or schools and back again. But for an isolated people, they are unexpectedly cosmopolitan. A district administrator assigned to one of the remotest outposts ventured that maybe this had something to do with living on mountains, “where we can be far-seeing and maybe learn to take a broader look at life.”

Samuel Davis thought that the Bhutanese were an intellectual match for any other nationality in the region. He wrote that they might need only secular teachers “to equal, if not surpass, their Indian neighbors, over whom they possess an advantage in an exemption from the restraint of caste, that insuperable bar to social improvements and national dignity.” Furthermore, as Rigzin Dorji said, the people of Bhutan are spared the soul-destroying need to beg for anything: for food, for space, for shelter, for a moment of attention. They are never forced, as are the street people of Dhaka, Calcutta, or Bombay, to eat, sleep, wash, defecate, make love, and raise children in the crowded gutters of urban life. Their world smells of woodsmoke and pine needles, and resonates with birdsong and the splashing of waterfalls.

Into this setting creep the ugly tensions, deep and destructive, that threaten to wound and disfigure this extraordinary nation. As the outside world closes in, despite the Buddhist kingdom’s best efforts to keep its distance from the corrupting influences and sins of others, challenges multiply. An open border with India and air links to Bangkok, Dhaka, Kathmandu, Delhi, and Calcutta not only have brought to Bhutan’s doorstep high-stakes smuggling, including the illegal trade in temple treasures, gold, and endangered animal pelts, but also have exposed the Bhutanese to AIDS and other new diseases. A slowly expanding private tourism industry and soaring property values are creating a wealthy urban (by Bhutanese standards) middle class in the capital, Thimphu, where life grows more distant day by day from its medieval village roots. A few panhandlers and street children have moved in. Burglary is a new urban phenomenon; the lone hair dryer from Thimphu’s first beauty shop was among the first objects to go. These crimes shock and could overwhelm a traditional system of justice experienced for the most part in resolving family quarrels.

What is lost? An atmosphere of trust. In late 1992, in Thimphu, a woman who owns a jewelry shop went out on an errand and left me
alone with her entire stock, some of it extremely valuable antique corals and turquoise pieces. When I finally chose some earrings, and she hadn’t yet returned, I left the money in the charge of an old lama who had dropped in for tea. He nodded and with a toothless smile indicated he approved of my choice. It never occurred to me that he might pocket the cash and leave. And it obviously didn’t worry the shopkeeper that she had left me alone with her inventory in unlocked cases. A year or two later, I heard from one of the sophisticates who lunch at the Swiss Bakery that young hooligans had begun disguising themselves as monks in order to steal from trusting merchants like my jewelry seller as well as from temples. And what about the tourists? I asked, thinking of those well-heeled visitors who pried statues off their pedestals in the struggling stately homes of Rajasthan and packed them away as if they were souvenir ashtrays from a chain hotel. No trouble with them yet, most Bhutanese say. Once trust is broken and the magic is gone, however, everyone takes a piece of what’s left.

There are other troubling changes, larger in scale than the criminal behavior of a few and more immediately dangerous to the integrity of the Bhutanese state. In southern Bhutan, along the unfenced border with India, available land and free education and health care continue to draw illegal immigrants, different in religion and ethnicity from the people of the central valleys and alien to the Buddhist culture that has defined national life for more than a thousand years. Immigrant Hindus of Nepali ancestry are part of a huge Nepali world outside Bhutan’s borders. In the early 1990s, there were at least thirty million Nepalis in overpopulated (and environmentally devastated) Nepal and in India’s Himalayan foothills, and fewer than three-quarters of a million Bhutanese citizens—Buddhist and Hindu together—in Bhutan. Only the small Indian state of Sikkim, where Nepali people long ago outnumbered the former kingdom’s Tibetan and tribal stock, separates Bhutan from Nepal’s teeming eastern border.

“The annual
increase
of the population of Nepal may be as much as the total population of Bhutan,” King Jigme Singye Wangchuck told me in late 1992. “Their population increase per year is about five hundred thousand—half a million—people, and there is chronic unemployment. In Nepal they have destroyed and denuded all their forests, there is no land to be given to the landless people, and all the arable land can no longer be farmed because of environmental and ecological problems.
Where the water table has gone down, tremendous erosion is taking place. India today has about ten million Nepalese, and these ten million Nepalese have all come from Nepal. In Bhutan, the attractions were free education, free health, and easier availability of free land, and all this [immigrant influx] was done with the full support and cooperation of our southern Bhutanese people.”

Faced with this threat to an already endangered Himalayan Buddhist culture, the kingdom’s dominant Drukpa people and others in the Buddhist mainstream reacted initially in panic, setting the stage by 1990 for a rebellion among southerners who said that they were being culturally repressed and illegally evicted even when they were citizens. Their accounts were sometimes true, sometimes exaggerated. Undoubtedly there were outbursts of excessive zeal among the Drukpa administrators; that cannot be denied. A requirement that national dress be worn by all Bhutanese was enforced so rigorously that a Japanese scholar in Western clothes was roughed up trying to convince law enforcement officers that he wasn’t Bhutanese at all.

National dress in Bhutan is defined as a kimono-like
gho
for men and boys and a somewhat different ankle-length robe called a
kira
for girls and women. Worn correctly and with knee-length socks and decent shoes, the gho, often in dark plaids or stripes (even pinstripes), is an elegant garment. Unfortunately, a lot of young Bhutanese, who are hit-or-miss about how they fold and fasten the ample robe and iconoclastic in their choice of what to wear with it (running shoes, athletic socks, and sweatpants are favorite accessories), make the national costume look unkempt if not ridiculous.

The gho has a bathrobe-like wide collar and buttonless front panels, one crossing over the other from left to right when the robe is put on. A gho is ankle-length in construction, but it is worn at knee level, hoisted up and secured by a woven belt, with the excess fabric bloused out at the top. At the back, the robe is folded from the waist down into two inverted vertical pleats that meet at the center, making the garment hug the body at the hips while having a roomy look at the top. In front, the pouch formed in the diagonal opening above the waist provides a generous pocket for carrying all kinds of useful items: a handkerchief, a traditional wood-and-silver bowl for drinking tea or homemade alcoholic brews, an appointment book, money, the shopping, or a supply of betel chews.

Under a gho, a Bhutanese man wears a white shirt with overlong sleeves, which are folded up over the outside of the robe at the wrists to form wide cuffs. Adding the
kabne
, a scarf that identifies one’s rank, to this already taxing ensemble is a more complicated operation than one would guess, since the long piece of material has to be thrown over the shoulder and folded over itself at chest height before also being thrown over the left arm. The proportions of folded and free-flowing cloth have to be exact, so that the kabne falls with the correct drape and length.

The kira, for women, is slightly simpler. Basically a rectangular length of woven cloth (or more likely several pieces sewn together) about two and a half yards long and one and a half yards wide, it wraps around the body over a shawl-collared blouse, the
onju
, and is fastened at the shoulders with silver hooks—or sometimes safety pins and, lately, Velcro. A silver or cloth belt secures the kira at the waist. A short unbuttoned jacket, the
toego
, completes the outfit. The cloth chosen for a kira, traditionally handwoven in horizontal stripes (unfairly, since stripes for men are vertical), now varies in color and design with the whims of Bhutanese fashion.

Because many, though not all, southern Nepali-Bhutanese are Hindus with cultural links to fellow Nepalis all along the Himalayan foothills, most normally dress differently from the northerners of the high mountain valleys. If the Drukpas only grumble about wearing what is, after all, their traditional costume, the southerners, called officially Lhotsampas, see the enforcement of a national dress code based on a northern costume as a glaring violation of their civil rights and cultural customs. Southern Bhutanese favor either Western clothes or the Nepali jodhpurs, tunic and multicolored
topi
(a kind of lopsided fez) for men or the sari for women, garments that set them apart from the northerners in their ghos and kiras. Efforts by some liberal local officials to ease the dress-code rules or mitigate their enforcement came late, but were real. On a hot, flat plain in the Samchi district, across the border from the Indian tea gardens of Cooch Behar, I saw farmers in Western-style trousers working their fields and a watchman at a Druk fruit-processing plant dressed in a “half gho,” a kiltlike garment, with a sport shirt and Nepali topi. But by then, the damage had been done, and clothes had become a major civil rights issue.

At the same time that this ethnically based dress code was being imposed on the southern Bhutanese and other pressures were being applied
to them to prove their legitimacy if not loyalty, some well-known politicians in Thimphu apparently took the opportunity to grab Nepali-Bhutanese property. Soon, government officials were forced, unarmed, into the theater of a shadowy guerrilla war notable even in violent South Asia for its senseless atrocities. In the village of Chiengmari, near Samchi, a Lepcha—whose people took no side in the Bhutanese dispute—was beheaded one afternoon and thrown, dismembered, by the side of the hamlet’s one road to serve as a ritual sacrifice or a warning. Local people suspected the former, and told dark tales of Nepali blood rites. People of all ethnic groups lived in terror.