So Close to Heaven (6 page)

Ugyen Wangchuck was by most accounts a shrewd and generous ruler with an informed interest in the world outside Bhutan. White, based in Sikkim, remarked on his first official mission to Bhutan, in 1905, that “Sir Ugyen is the only Bhutanese I have come across who takes a real and intelligent interest in general subjects, both foreign and domestic, and he neither drinks nor indulges in other vices.” The future king told White of his distress at losing many books from his large collection when a fire damaged the Dechen temple near Thimphu. “I held many long private conversations with the Tongsa,” White wrote a little patronizingly in his journal, “and was deeply impressed with his sense of responsibility and genuine desire to improve the condition of his country and countrymen.” The British political officer was moved by the penlop’s confession that he had thrown himself into reading and scholarship in an effort to overcome his heartbreak over the death of a young wife to whom he was deeply attached. Noticing that Ugyen Wangchuck’s eyesight was beginning to fail, White gave him a pair of his own reading glasses before taking leave of the penlop at the end of the mission.

White, an avid and skilled photographer, took pictures of the Tongsa penlop in 1905 after the British investiture ceremony and again in 1907 after his coronation as king. The 1905 portrait shows a stocky, barefoot man with a thin mustache and wispy beard wearing a gho that appears to be made of brocaded satin. White described it as “a handsome robe of dark blue Chinese silk, embroidered in gold with the Chinese character
fu
, the sign emblematical of good luck.” Apart from his sword and raven crown, the Tongsa penlop sports the medal of the imperial British knighthood he has just been awarded. His bronzed round face is creased with a faint smile of self-assurance and pride. In 1907, the newly anointed king wore a robe of lighter blue brocade, his raven-headed crown, Western shoes, and long socks that disappeared beneath his gho. In the intervening years, he had made a trip to Calcutta, then the seat of the British colonial government of India. The shoes—various shoes—were seen more often, though not for the first time, after that trip. In 1911, Sir Ugyen also visited New Delhi to attend the glittering ceremonies celebrating the move of the British Indian government to the imposing
new imperial capital. Official New Delhi, with its wide Raj Path boulevard and elegant government buildings, is still Asia’s most impressive capital city.

Ugyen Wangchuck lived and ruled until 1926, when he was succeeded by his son Jigme Wangchuck. By the time Jigme Wangchuck died in 1952, Britain’s South Asian empire had collapsed and four new nations had been created: India, Burma, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan, the last of which would again fracture in 1971, spawning independent Bangladesh. India’s overwhelming size and the tendency of Indian political leaders to assume that they had inherited Britain’s imperial legacy posed new problems for Bhutan, Sikkim, and Nepal, the three Himalayan kingdoms that had never been colonized. Another, Ladakh, was already part of India (as were the smaller domains of Lahaul and Spiti), and Tibet was being absorbed by China. The era of the third and fourth Bhutanese kings—Jigme Dorji Wangchuck, who ruled for twenty years, from the death of his father in 1952 until his own death of heart disease in 1972; and his son, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, who has ruled since—has been a time of unending tension across the southern approaches to the Himalayas.

When Jigme Singye Wangchuck became the Druk Gyalpo, the Precious Ruler of the Dragon People, in 1972, he was only seventeen. Although he had been to boarding schools in England as a boy and had inherited a warm personality and a reformist agenda from his respected father, the young monarch became a relatively reclusive figure—at least as far as journalists and most foreigners were concerned—until the early 1990s, when the propaganda successes of the rebellion by the Nepali-speaking Hindu minority in southern Bhutan made him realize what his ministers had missed: that an aloof and impenetrable nation can find itself without friends when it needs them most.

He told me this a little ruefully when we first met in March 1991. I had been trying unsuccessfully for more than two years to get a visa to visit Bhutan, part of the territory I was expected to cover from my base in New Delhi as a correspondent for
The New York Times.
It had never occurred to me to ask for an interview with His Majesty, who, like King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand, another hardworking Buddhist monarch I had met a few years earlier, rarely travels abroad and has no interest in personal publicity. Both kings harbor a revulsion for the high-profile, jet-set potentate’s existence, and would never be seen floating through
the spas, casinos, and capitals of Europe, dressed by fashion designers and trailed by paparazzi. While I thought, of course, that it would be fascinating to meet the last reigning Himalayan Buddhist king, all I wanted from the Bhutanese government was the chance to report on ordinary daily life in the country, which had only recently, and with great reserve, opened its borders to tourists.

The Delhi press corps enjoyed a bizarre relationship with the Bhutanese in the 1980s. At the end of October 1988, for example, we were all invited to a Sunday-afternoon news conference in a large formal parlor at the Bhutanese embassy in the Indian capital to be told that His Majesty was getting married very soon to four sisters with whom he had been living for nearly a decade. The young women—Ashi Dorji Wangmo, Ashi Tshering Pern, Ashi Tshering Yandon, and Ashi Sangye Choden—had already borne him eight children collectively, including the boy the king now wanted to confirm publicly as crown prince, Jigme Gesar Namgyal Wangchuck. The date of the wedding and formal naming of the crown prince had been selected, we were told in the announcement delivered by Foreign Minister Dawa Tshering, to coincide with “an auspicious hour on the descending day of Lord Gautama Buddha from the Tushita Heaven on the twenty-second day of the ninth month of the Earth Dragon year.”

Since journalists have no manners, we all clamored to go to the celebration, which was due to take place at the old royal capital of Punakha in the presence of hundreds of assembled monks and abbots. That would be out of the question, we were told by the minister, who must have found us faintly amusing. But we were treated to drinks, folk dancing, and a feast at the embassy instead. As we left the party through a path from the embassy gardens to the parking area, we were each given a weighty box wrapped in gift paper. It felt like a heavy piece of pottery, or possibly a stone sculpture. It turned out, however, to be a case of scotch, which my newspaper’s rules dictated I return. I did so the next day—or rather my husband did, since I had gone on overnight to Sri Lanka. In a letter accompanying both my case of scotch and his, David, also a journalist, tried to explain to the uncomprehending Bhutanese how the mysterious Western press views the giving of gifts by news sources. In Delhi at that time it was nearly impossible to buy untainted or undiluted imported alcoholic beverages, except at extortionate prices from black marketeers with contacts in foreign embassies, duty-free
shops, or shipping companies. We must have seemed crassly ungrateful for this windfall. In any case, my subsequent repeated pleas for visas went unanswered. But then the journalists who kept the cases of Johnnie Walker didn’t get visas either.

In the spring of 1990, urged on by a friend in Nepal who was convinced I could join a tour group to Bhutan from Kathmandu without attracting the Bhutanese government’s attention, my husband and I did just that. We went to Bhutan from Nepal as a trekking party of two; we never knew what happened to the rest of the group to which we were supposedly attached. Worried about being discovered and deported, we memorized what we could on our daily sightseeing trips from Paro, Thimphu, and Punakha, making notes at night for future articles. I could not find one foreigner based in Thimphu on an international aid project who would talk to me: a European volunteer looked up in outright alarm when I cornered him in an office and explained who I was. The foreign press had pariah status, and reporters could not help but wonder what terrible secrets everyone was trying to hide.

We were assigned an owlish guide named Ugyen. All of them seemed to be named Ugyen; the Bhutanese list of personal names is short. Françoise Pommaret, a French Tibetologist and writer on Bhutan, compiled a nearly exhaustive list of about fifty, most of them used interchangeably for boys and girls and in any combination, so that a child’s name—Sonam Wangdi, for example—may not relate to that of either parent. Our Ugyen wanted to work with high-altitude trekkers and mountain climbers, which we certainly were not. He was about to go to Austria for training, and so he allowed himself a little room for complaint about the country’s recently instituted patriotic dress code, with its requirement that he wear a gho at all times and don his kabne every time we approached an official building. He grumbled that if he violated the rules he would be “put behind the bars.”

Ugyen, who referred a little sardonically to his ruler as “our modest little king,” took us from one ornate, otherworldly institution to another: the National Library, the National Art School, the National Museum, several dzongs, and Thimphu’s landmark Memorial Chorten. Like so many others discovering this hidden kingdom for the first time, we were amazed and enchanted by the Bhutanese and won over by their repeated assertions that they were clinging to an endangered culture which could survive only in controlled isolation. However, it was also
not hard to notice, in part through Ugyen’s eyes, the underlying resentment of educated young Drukpas, children of the Buddhist majority, who had been forced into compulsory national dress just as they were discovering international fashion and foreign education. Inevitably, they would later lead a quiet campaign against the dress code, flaunting Western clothes as they dashed around in Japanese cars or hung out at new bistros opening around town. That behavior would in turn set off cries of “privilege!” from less affluent Bhutanese not only proud of their national costume but also unable to afford imported jeans. There were cases of official abuses, when the overzealous dress police would arrest or fine offenders on the spot in the north just as they did in rebellious southern Bhutan, sometimes for very small infractions. The king was beginning to question the value of forcing this kind of symbolic unity on the citizenry. In exasperation, he once told a visiting scholar that he didn’t really care what people wore, so long as they didn’t run round naked.

By this time the dress code had poisoned relations between ethnic groups and violence had begun to ignite in the Bhutanese south. The insurgency was initially sparked by a 1988 census that found thousands of illegal immigrants in the southern border districts. People who could not prove they had a right to citizenship historically or under the terms of a 1958 blanket grant of nationality to aliens faced expulsion, and the alarm was raised among fellow Nepalis in neighboring countries. The violence took an abrupt turn for the worse in the fall of 1990, when Nepali-speaking rebels with bases in India led demonstrations, marches, and attacks on Bhutanese government property. Backed by radical international student organizations and political parties in Nepal fresh from a triumphant democracy movement in Kathmandu, where the powers of the Nepali throne had been curbed in a new constitution, the southern Bhutanese launched their public relations campaign to have the royal government of King Jigme Singye Wangchuck branded internationally as a violator of human rights.

Cloaked in the language of a democratic, antimonarchical cause, press releases from the rebels charged Thimphu with the mass murder of protesters, including more than three hundred people shot in one incident near the Indian border in Samchi district in September 1990. The democracy campaign in Nepal had used the same tactic of inflating (in multiples as high as ten) the numbers of protesters killed or injured by
soldiers or police in large demonstrations. The charges in both places were usually not true, as reasonably dispassionate investigations later proved. Only one young man was proved to have been killed in Samchi during the most widely publicized incident. A local administrator told me it had been the poor boy’s unfortunate karma that he should be on top of a piece of earth-moving equipment when policemen fired into the air to dissuade a mob from crossing a bridge from the direction of India. I videotaped the impassioned official, a cast of one, energetically acting out the entire story of that fateful day by moving from one side of an imaginary battle line to the other.

But the initial accusations of hundreds dead lingered because they had been widely reported by gullible, unprofessional, or sympathetic news organizations in Nepal and India and picked up thirdhand by the international press. At a news conference in Delhi soon after the Samchi incident, an advocate for the Nepali-Bhutanese rebels who was in fact a representative of the Hong Kong-based Asia-Pacific Students Association acknowledged that he had never been to Bhutan and had no firsthand evidence of atrocities. But Thimphu was caught off guard and quickly forced into a hopelessly defensive position.

At that point, Bhutan began to reconsider its hostility to the press. In March 1991, while in Dhaka, I got a call from the Bhutanese embassy in Delhi, saying that a visa would be issued to me forthwith, and I could proceed to Thimphu from Bangladesh on the unspoken promise of an interview with the king, who had taken charge of the southern problem. The Bhutanese knew that I had gone to Bhutan the year before and written articles in contravention of the rules, but this was conveniently overlooked.

Forty-eight hours of comedy followed. Bangladesh was one of the hottest countries on earth at that time of year, and I was working in thin cotton Indian and Pakistani outfits of baggy trousers and loose-fitting shirts called
salwar-kamiz.
In Thimphu, a Himalayan winter was just tailing off into spring. Not only were tropical clothes unsuitable to the climate, but I was also determined to stick to my rule of looking appropriately presentable when meeting any official or other public figure in the third world, however small or unimportant the country. Often our Western reputation for arrogant behavior in poor countries is matched by a notoriety for sartorial casualness that, rightly or wrongly, can be-speak
disrespect to locally important people and their institutions. And this was the king of a country I wanted to visit again.