Bhutan Stories

THE REINCARNATION OF THE IRON BRIDGE BUILDER

Kinga and I went to a nunnery. "Holly, this is the nunnery. It's a place with a lot of nuns." At first I was really annoyed with his style of information-presentation ("This is where the male and female rivers meet. It's very inauspicious when two rivers meet." "Why is it inauspicious, Kinga?" "Well, it has to do with the meeting of the rivers.") But it became charming, after awhile. In this nunnery, the great shrine was to the Iron Bridge Builder. When Kinga was ten years old he went to this nunnery and met the reincarnation of the Iron Bridge Builder, Thangtong Gyalpo. Four nuns grabbed him and took him to the man for the blessing. The man looked terrifying, with long hair and nails several inches long. He scratched the young Kinga on the head, and Kinga still gets the creeps when going to that nunnery.

*

LAMA KARMA

I was sitting in the sunny square beneath the clock tower in Thimphu, reading the Bhutan Times, when a monk approached; a short man in crimson robes. He had long hair, because he had spent four years in a cave (actually the norm is 3 years, 3 months, 3 days; all the monks who do this do not cut their hair). His name was Lama Karma (Karma being a common name here)-- we had tea and oily cabbage & carrot pakoras; talked about the world. He lives between Nepal and Bhutan, is trying to get a Spanish visa. Discoradical transglobal. We walk up a mountain, see Thimphu fading in the afternoon sun. "Do you want a special friend in Bhutan?" Everyone everywhere is such an operator, even the holy men in the most protected countries of the world.

I asked the lama about the doma, the betel nut, that stains the streets a burnished red. "Well, this is because people used to eat people." The gods gave us betel nut instead, to satisfy this craving. The nut is the flesh, the lime is the blood, or something like this. Betel: It's Better Than Cannibalism.

*

THE HOT STONE BATH

So I was at this farmhouse, fast asleep in the afternoon sun after two days in a row of 3am flights, and a boy wakes me up. He wants me to go have a hot stone bath. I can't make sense of this so I get up, blinking. We climb down a ladder to the muddy yard, and enter a shack (below), which has three wooden bathtubs. The mother puts hot stones, volcanic rock warmed over a fire, into the water. I lie there for awhile, listening to the cows, and then climb out. It was a good bath, but perplexing.

Then the teenage boy explains that twenty tourists are coming for a bath at 6 o'clock, the traditional Bhutanese Hot Stone Bath. I cannot picture twenty German or American tourists taking baths in this small building; cannot picture their perplexed expressions, but it is not my business.

The next morning the family-- grandmother, mother, daughter, son-- are sitting on the smooth, worn wooden floor, drinking hot milk (hot from the cow) and eating home-grown fried rice for breakfast. We are watching the coronation of the king. He has just received the crown. Everyone talks excitedly in Dzongkha and laughs. "We are laughing at the crown," someone explains. The crown is shaped like a raven and is very sacred. "It's very heavy. So the King has already taken it off." The crown weighs 7 kg. It is a lovely family moment.

"What about the tourists?" I can't help but ask before I leave. "Did they like the bath?"
"No, Holly, they didn't like it," the son says, seriously. "It was too compact."
Some experiences just don't translate to mass tourism.



*

LUCK

The betel-nut-stained astrologer at a temple affirms that I have had an unlucky year. To counteract this, he sells us a string of prayer flags. We hoist them on the hill with the antenna with the tangle of other prayer flags.

*

I went to another temple, where two footprints were worn into the wood. They were from a man who had done a million prostrations, his faith carving the smooth wood.


*


BAR-HOPPING IN THIMPHU


First we hit the Hub Bar, a basement-space with ambience... no smoke, because Bhutan is the first country to ban smoking & the sale of tobacco altogether. They burn incense instead, for the ambience. We sit at the bar drinking Hit beer. Someone orders me peanuts, which turn out to be peanuts soaked in spicy oil with raw onions and peppers. The television breaks from the BBS broadcast of the coronation celebrations for a long anti-drug program: "The story of a youth's journey towards doom." The Bhutanese teenagers on their way towards doom step out of a car, hip-hop thumping in the background. I look around the bar; it's the kind of semi-artsy place I could feel at home in; a lot of people in the Bhutanese film industry apparently come here. On one wall is a classical Buddhist dragon-monster surrounded by skulls; it looks like a heavy-metal fusion, but it is actually a traditional painting. The monster is next to a picture of Bob Marley. There is also a faded plastic Christmas tree, planted in a rusting can that once contained Paneer Cubes. An illuminated picture of the King in his traditional yellow robe sits over the bar. He is young and good-looking, King Wangchuck, he could have been a film or music star, if he wasn't His Majesty, I think to myself.

The Boomerang Bar, my favorite locale: it's a place where people crowd around, generally buying nothing, and watch people dance. You can sing, too, but most choose to dance: two, three, or four up on the small stage in front, which is really just a slightly-elevated platform with some carpets. The girls wear the traditional kira and dance to this music in Dzongha, but with a modern beat... the songs are very sweetly sentimental, love songs, except for the one "Coca-Le-Co", about a rooster. The groups of dancers practice their dances at home, and all do the moves in synch; it's amazing how they remember them all. The bar owner convinces me to do a Nepalese dance with her, even though I protest that I don't know the moves. A young actor named Tashi charms me with his longish wild hair. Random young Bhutanese come over to congratulate my dancing: "I thought you were Nepalese!" It was lucky for me that the Nepalese style turns out to be very close to how I naturally dance: who knew?

Next: a kareoke bar, which features some videos shot right here in the Tiger Pub. We drink Tiger Beer from Singapore. The crowd is more upscale, somehow, older, less bohemian. There are plenty of cheesy Bollywood videos to sing to, as well as sentimental American tunes with mystifying graphics that don't connect up: a man in an American gas station and a classic car paired with "Have You Ever Seen the Rain"; Phil Collins and "Another Day in Paradise." "Bhutan is a paradise!" a semi-drunk Bhutanese man in a denim shirt affirms to me. Yes.

Some other joints: crowded, smoky, girls come up and dance close to me, this is normal here. "Remember me?" a girl with a tight white shirt appears, wiggling in my face: I don't remember her from anywhere. It's also normal to dance in a small group; nobody dances alone. At "Club Ace", the most renowned disco in all of Bhutan, Bollywood hits are mixed with British techno. A young man apologizes to me that the discos here are not as "developed" as in my country. I tell him, over there, people are too concerned with looking cool so they don't have any fun-- it is more fun to be in a Bhutanese disco. Although, this one isn't to my liking at all: the girls wear pointy shoes, a drunken-conniving look in their eyes, they are the first women I have seen in Bhutan like this. For the most part, the women in the country seem wan, yet hearty, honest: not dolled-up as in other parts of Asia. Not so much lipstick & heels, here: but I wonder if the dolled-up look will catch on, or if Bhutanese women will be able to reject it for something simpler & more comfortable, more practical for navigating the unsmooth streets and fields...





*

THE ROAD OUT OF TOWN

mountain kingdom

Singapore

I spent a week in Singapore awhile back, a week that dissolved like grains of sugar in weak tea // here are a few fragments from this city, which I consider to be the true twenty-first century city.

Once a rule sighted a strange beast that he assumed to be a lion, and hence Singapore got its name: the Lion City. A city named for a mistake; a city that was always a site of transglobal commerce (or so the travel computer on the Airbus 380 from Narita tells me).

There is an island here that used to be called something like the Island of Death from Behind -- it was a prison island-- but in the 1960s they had a contest to rename it; now it's called Sentosa, meaning Tranquility. You take a monorail there, to the simulacrum, and are greeted by exuberant calypso-esque music; the manicured gardens scream with cicadas, and off the white beach of sand bought from Indonesia, tankers fill the straits-- An oil refinery looms in the distance-- It's my twenty-first century nightmare-- But at least they tried to make a playground for the people-- Some utopian impulse at work there, though terribly misguided--

On my last night in the city, my friend treats me to a ride on the Singapore Flyer, the world's largest ferris wheel (until Beijing opens one in a few months)... It takes 35 minutes to make the rotation. It is raining.

You have little context for this photo (besides what I wrote above), yet you can vaguely tell it is of something Important & glorious, no?
In a 4am taxi to Changi, I stare at the television inside the seat in front of me, watch repeats of a commercial for Global Handwashing Day. There are sort-of-headlines, wannabe headlines, information-fragments that stream past on the top of the screen. IN KAZAKHSTAN, THEY EAT, DRINK, AND RIDE HORSES. Or, AIRCRAFT MAINTENANCE IS AN INDUSTRY WITH $1 BILLION GROWTH POTENTIAL. signal/noise floating past in the sultry night, blurred skyscrapers blinking past in the unstarred night, you can vaguely tell something important and glorious is unfolding in this city, in this century, but you can't make sense of it; the whole thing crawling past contextless, speaking indirectly to a silent viewer--

second impressions, Bali

One day there was a cremation; the streets clogged with celebrants. I watched them building this tower all week in the main intersection, to race down the street with, shouts and clanging-- Death as celebratory occasion.


There is always some suggestion behind each wall, each glance, each gate.








There is a temple here with a holy spring. The water bubbling up-- blue, sparkling gray sand, within the ancient rock pool-- maybe have been the most sublime thing I've ever seen; no exaggeration. It looked like life itself; it was life itself, revealing itself so simply--

You bathe there, clothed in sarongs, everyone together in another pool, with several spouts gushing water from the stone walls. The spouts are laden with offering baskets, fragipani & incense & crackers piled high; you step into a cool pool of petals, holy debris floating on the surface, orange koi swimming below-- and you wait in line to wash from each spout, going down the line and dunking your head in the waters, becoming purified. Old women, young men with tattoos, babies carried by their father, shivering people unaccustomed to cold, becoming pure together--



Already I miss waking to the sounds of cocks crowing, of people sweeping the ground with branches lashed together.

Impressions, Bali

"America is a very big island." I couldn't agree more. The man was chatting with me about Obama. He hopes Obama will win, because then his friends in the U.S. can help him out again (so they told him); it's been two months since they sent him any money.... Stopped by an art gallery by the side of this track through the rice field to have a thick Balinese coffee, with grounds & palm syrup. There was a stooped old man with a toothy smile, mouth red from betel nut, I liked him so I stopped, and of course the guy with the motorbike sat down to talk about Obama and his personal hardships. I didn't even want to be on that side of the river in the first place; it was a long story involving water buffalo, a family compound I didn't want to walk back through, a bamboo bridge, etc. It's impossible to be alone here, especially when so many people have their petrol tanks on empty; you take the shape of a full petrol tank; so many shapes one can take--





Fragments::: Exercises in making sense--


One man is working away at the edges of the field with a hoe, collecting eels. He keeps them in a blue plastic bag. They are good fried, apparently.

Cooking lessons--

"What you call this?"
"Butterfly."
"And this one?"
"Dragonfly."
"That one is good to eat."
"How you eat it?"
"Fried. With coconut."


We walk one morning in the rice field & I say, I will be sick if I don't take water. My friend commissions an old farmer with a sickle to climb up a tree and hack down a young coconut for me; through the gash, the water is sweet. Later there is a downpour; he chops off a banana leaf for an umbrella. Abundance.

Poverty: a boy of about nine strokes my arm, "Money, darling, money." They learn to pick up foreign women quite young. I have one twenty-one-year old texting me messages of love every night: he dreams of me, he feels sick, he can't sleep. There is one corner, by the football field, which is particularly bad, but to avoid the corner is so out of my way in this town that I usually just bear it. The kid in the orange-and-green jacket with the Eurotrash hipster haircut is twenty-six, I know, he offered one time to show me his ID; last week he was sitting on the step talking with a woman who had stringy gray-streaked hair. He winked at me as he went past. I guess he was feeling like it would be a lucky night. Another friend assures me that he's not a "cowboy", as they call him, though he does have twenty-five year old friends who meet ladies of sixty-five... It's a bit more nuanced than prostitution, though, because the foreign women that come here are not plainly looking for sex: they also want to be loved, romanced a bit, to feel special. At any rate, though, it's a bit strange to walk the streets with these boys basically offering themselves up for sale to you. Perhaps this is how it must feel to be a man, approached by beautiful women who are just looking at you as a walking dollar sign, knowing that you are not really valued as a person... market rules all.

There are many flags and signs for the election next year: yellow and red, a bull with black horns, the politicians looking angelic, portrayed with light, a holy air. "If you vote for that one," a friend points out, "you get 50,000 rupiah." Five bucks. Not bad, in a place where a hotel room-cleaning boy makes 350,000 a month-- about a dollar a day for eight hours at work.

Sitting in a cafe with a delicious blueberry lassi... Listening to a Bali-travel relationship play out at the next table. Foreign man, perhaps Japanese, unattractive, gold watch. Balinese woman, pink toenails. The man/woman script is made even more cliche by the simple English, for of course neither of them are speaking in their native tongue. If I leave you If you leave me Let's talk about this. Laid out point-by-point. They have known each other two or three days. "I don't marry you because you are good-looking and sexy. Just one of many reasons." You could infer the whole conversation just based on tones and inflections; you wouldn't have to make out the words to make them up. "How old do you think you like to have baby? At what age?" She is ready now. These matters are so uncosmic, stripped of any glow, mystique, glamour. But perhaps life is simple like that, here; not so many grand expectations out of Life, not the pressure to Make a Life... He tries to convince her that home is wherever you go. That you can make a home anywhere and you just follow the opportunity. "Maybe I make some business in Sumatra, a contract over there, we move over there. Maybe Surabaya." I doubt he realises that these islands are different, or that home means family to these people. The transglobal ideology is proving a tough sell. She hasn't taken off her purse throughout the whole coffee; black strap shiny across pink shoulder--

"Up through the turn of the twentieth century, more than half the European men in the Indies lived in domestic arrangements with native women."

*



But I am not doing justice to the beauty, the richness of life here. Hardly anyone asks for money outright; the smiles are genuine. A gracious and gentle spirit-- the religion is strong. Always people making offerings, rice and flowers in little baskets... unlike in so many places, colonization did not break the religion here. People believe in karma, they believe in doing good. I've never seen anything violent or mean, here; the first place in the world I've been which was like this... I mean, I guess Japan is gracious and gentle too. But not on this level.

"People are perceived as poor if they eat millets (grown by women) rather than commercially produced and distributed processed foods sold by global agri-business. They are seen as poor if they live in self-built housing made from natural material like bamboo and mud rather than in cement houses. They are seen as poor if they wear handmade garments of natural fibres rather than synthetics. Subsistence, as culturally perceived poverty, does not necessarily imply a low physical quality of life. On the contrary, millets are nutritionally superior to processed foods, houses built with local materials are far superior, being better adapted to the lcoal climate and ecology, natural fibres are preferable to man-made fibres in most cases, and certainly more affordable. This cultural perception of prudent subsistence living as poverty has provided the legitimisation for the development process as a poverty removal project." -- Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive

When are we going to talk about creating abundance? "Rather than eradicating poverty, I mean-- such a better way to frame the problem. "Eradicating poverty" as a millenium development goal just continues the aid-relief cycle, by the way that it's framed...

but, back to Bali:

Bali is not poor; it is one of the healthiest and safest places I've experienced. Rich in life, spirit. Hopefully, it can continue to be so; its status as a cultural tourist destination may give it some protection from "development." Hotels and villas may continue to encroach on the rice fields, but the place is too strong to be "developed" in other ways... I think this development thing is an old story, a tired story, a very twentieth-century story, by now. What comes next?

I know what comes next, but not how to get there. What comes next is recognizing that traditional people had a lot of really smart ways of doing things... agriculture, building, etc... and learning from them, combining their methods with the best of our technologies to create decent lives. It's really simple, and yet, I can't figure out how to do it, how my life can help to do it. Whatever train we're on seems so fixed on its tracks, but this must be an illusion. Whatever train it is, though, it's global-- But there are still people watching it from the fields, farming their rice-- It affects them because it churns through their fields-- But it runs out of power-- Maybe the passengers can hop down, leave it to rust, before it crashes--

Japanese Tones

One:

a high, manic vibration
the sonorous totality that emerges from the Pachinko parlor,
or the cuteness. The graphic design: smiling fishes, cartoonification. The exclamation points! The schoolgirls posing with peace-signs for photographs. OK!





The school bunny...





The cute train. OK!

Two. But there is also a sleeker side; quieter in a swooshy modern way. Displayed in the bullet trains, of course; the plastic-and-metal kind of order...






Three. The hushed, reverberating tone; quieter in a deep way. The lowest tone of Japan, underlying it all, I like to imagine... before the more recent tones added to the mix...







altogether, a sonorous place; not quite harmonic enough to be called a symphony, but fascinating in its notes--

Hakodate Again

I am thinking of how you counted each time I said your name aloud.

I order noodle soup in a restaurant. The cook brings me two acorns and sets them on the table. I do not know why.

Where are we going?



Sleeping on tatami mats. Waking up with the gong at dawn.
The monk makes an English translation for me of the morning ceremony.
Apparently there is a god sleeping in the graveyard. When he wakes up, when the Buddha comes, the pure will go to the Pure Land. Something like this; some esoteric sect.



This afternoon etched in my mind. The yellow orchid unfurling at an empty table.



I dreamed the colours of the light, the rainbow.

Why don't we take hold of what is important? Because we are afraid.

Driven Towards the Future, on Two Wheels

Recently, Toronto police busted an alleged bike thief - the notorious Igor Kenk. Reports of new warehouses and discoveries kept coming in, and the recovered bikes began to number in the thousands.

Q: Why did Igor Kenk keep 2,800 bikes?
A: Because he knew the post-oil apocalypse was coming.

Read more . . .

Good news!

The Guardian reports that the Aral Sea restoration plan is working.

"One of the 20th century's great ecological disasters has been partly reversed, according to a report that claims the waters are rising once more in part of the Aral sea.

...

Now, the salty drying waters which had dwindled and contained only a single species of fish, host 15 different species of fish and more birds, reptiles and plants, says a report by the Kazakhstan government.

Fishing has also been rejuvenated, and a second phase of the scheme is underway to restore pasture and improve grazing.

"The return of the north Aral sea shows that man-made disasters can be at least partly reversed, and that food production depends on the sound management of scarce water resources and the environment," said the World Bank president, Robert B Zoellick, in a statement released through the government."

from jajouka, with love

a man from an ancient musical tradition spoke to me from his village of Jajouka, Morocco-- regarding the power of the music, its history, and its future.

see...

an interview with Bachir Attar, Master Musician of Jajouka