Losar

Dreaming takes me away again. Off to that world that isn’t here: the strangely familiar spaces, the impossible romances, the warmth of a summer morning. I melt into the landscape, settle and take root.

And then BAM. I wake up and it’s real again. Afterimages linger for a second and I realize, Holy shit, I’m in Bhutan. It takes a few moments but I understand how far away I am. This is no dream. I’m awake. Alive. And I better go along and do something with myself.

An obsession realized is hard to describe. For the past three years, more really, I was poring over images and videos of this far flung place. During those times, I cultivated an idea of what it must be like in Bhutan: smell of incense; feeling of cold, alpine air and mountain sunshine; chants of monks, deep and guttural; Himalayan peaks stretching as far as the eye can see; spiritual, abundant happiness.

In that waking moment though, when reality strikes, Bhutan is none of those things. My concrete barracks, the Boy’s Sick Room, is frigid in the morning. And in the afternoon. And in the evening. It’s most noticeable after waking though, when I have to confront a day in a foreign country. A step into the cold is a step into culture, one that I must engage in not solely because I exist here now, but because I promised myself to exist here well and to take full advantage of it.

Feral dogs bark in the distance. A merchandise transport truck from India growls along the roadway about a half mile up. There are bird noises I’ve never heard before. Lame Pup comes shivering to my front steps, limping, rank, and looking for food.

I awake and hear Yoezer and Celine playing next door. Yoezer is four, I think, and Celine three. They banter in Kengpa, one of many languages spoken in this country. I know none of the languages, and though I have semi-committed to learning Sharchop, the language of the east, whenever I ask what a word means, they tell me, “That was Dzongka actually,” or “We were speaking Nepali,” or “That was English. What, you can’t understand my accent?” The discussion between Yoezer and Celine, which sounds earnest, is nonetheless unintelligible. They shout and giggle and discuss, all in cuck-cucks and throaty jöms.

In one swift motion I slip out of my sleeping bag and I step into the cold air. Long-underwear and t-shirt and sweatshirt and light down jacket. Scarf and hat. Wool socks. I make way to the squat toilet, always pungent, and I relieve myself.

The day has begun.

I cross to my battered wooden door, which still clearly shows the orange and green and blue hand painted symbols which I believe bring good luck to a house. They could just be pretty though. I open the door and step outside and am greeted with a view that no online video or picture album could prepare me for. I am just under the clouds. The sun is beginning to pour in, an effusion of light emanating, it seems, from the misty clouds themselves rather than from a single source. The world beyond is all mountains, steep and, in many sections, uninhabited. The south faces are dry and the villages clearly stand out for lack of trees. The north faces, where I live, are much greener, much more vegetated. Houses poke out of the greenery and punctuate the hillside erratically. On the occasion of a flat bit of land, rice paddies sprout horizontal like gills on the side of an emerald fish.

Today is an important day. It’s the Lunar New Year, Losar, as the Bhutanese call it. Gyeltshen, my neighbor, and his family and friends have invited me to celebrate with them. They lay out a large, thin foam pad on the grass in front of our kind of duplex and we sit in a circle in our pajamas and eat a salty vegetable porridge, tokpa, and drink butter tea, sooja. The sun pours over us and we squint as we talk. They speak Kengpa and I can’t make heads or tails of it. My brain produces a dumb, silent Error message over and over: Not Japanese. Not Spanish.

There are, however, bursts of English. Numbers are said in English, as are certain phrases like, “best way,” and “very interesting.” I’m also referred to as “sir,” both as a sign of respect and because many of them do not know my name yet.

“Does sir like hot food? Are chilies okay for sir? How long will sir be staying? Does sir have family down there?”

“Down where?”

“Sir’s country?”

“Yes, I have family.”

“So sir is married?”

“Oh, no. I have my parents and sister in America, but I am not married.”

“Bachelor, sir?”

“Yes. Bachelor.”

An unmarried, thirty two year-old white guy is about as aberrant as it gets out here. The notion of not having a wife and a few kids by my age is almost sinful I feel. As we sit on the pad, three out of the five women are breastfeeding healthy, rotund babies. Celine and Yoezer run around and play, occasionally coming in for a bite of tokpa or a tubular rice cake. The men tell me about how they have no free time anymore and the women glare at them and return to the work of caring for the children.

Gyeltshen, the boy’s dorm room warden and my neighbor, sits stoically among the others. I’d think he was unfriendly if it wasn’t for the occasional glance my way and smile, and the way he takes his three-month old son into his arms and playfully jostles him, making baby-sounds that are universal. Phuntsho, who lives a little ways away but who came to join the Losar festivities, is very talkative. She makes jokes and asks questions and tells me how much I will like it here. Here, is still an intangible concept; I still wonder, Where am I?

In the afternoon we play games. Gyeltshen challenges me to a game of chess. As we play, some of the others, Mr. Dorji and K.D., gather around and sit close. They watch our calculated moves as if they were watching a thriller on the T.V. In the end, I win, but I think Gyeltshen gave away a few pieces—part of that Bhutanese hospitality. 

Then we gamble. I put in twenty Ngultrum to the game of cards and am given three. I have a pair of nines, but Sangay has a run. She collects an eighth of the pot and we go again. I’m out again with a poor hand and Mr. Dorji collects his winnings. Finally, after a few rounds I have a high pair of queens, and another eighth of the pot goes to me. By the end of the round I’m up forty Ngultrum, nearly a whole U.S. dollar.

When the gambling stops the women head to the kitchen. For hours they are singing and dancing. There is a crashing of pans, hissing of pressure cookers. The real celebration is effusing from that kitchen and we, the men, are not invited. We sit outside and shoot the shit. Succulence and spice escape the walls and tempt our appetites. The women bring out a welter of curried chicken and fish. They bring pork with chili peppers, the pork ninety-five percent fat and five percent meat. They bring the infamous ema datsi, spicy green chilies in cheese sauce. Red rice and white rice are jettisoned from inside of rice cookers in their inner-pots. There is dal and saag and dried beef. The hosts insist I eat first and I know that this is a gesture of respect. But I do not want to stand out as a guest, but rather, as a new friend, so I insist that someone else go before me.

“No sir, you go, you go.”

“No, no, no. Please someone else first.”

“No it must be you, sir.”

“Someone show me how,” I offer as an excuse, just to get someone in line before me. But then I regret the statement. Show me how? Now they’re going to think that I don’t know how to serve myself food. Fantastic.

Mr. Dorji offers to show me how, and he kindly demonstrates the scooping of the rice into the bowl and the placing of the curries onto the rice. I copy him with aplomb, hoping to prove that I am not an idiot.

When we sit back down on the mat, I realize that I don’t have a spoon. But then I see that no one has a spoon. Sensing my dilemma, a woman offers, “Spoon, sir?” I can’t falter again, lest they think: What, he doesn’t know how to eat with his hands, either?

“No, I’ll eat with my hands, just like you guys.”

“It’s okay, sir, we’ll give you a spoon.”

“No, no, no. I can do it. No spoon,” I demand.

“Okay, sir. You’ll get used to our custom then.”

“That’s right,” I say.

“Do you know how to wash your hand with the rice?”

I debate saying, “I totally know how to do that,” and instead revert back to the simple ape I am. “No. Show me, please.”

Mr. Dorji takes a small pinch of rice and rolls it into a ball between the palms of his hands. He rolls the ball around, up his fingers, across the meat of his thumbs, down toward his wrist. When he is finished, the little ball is a dark grey, having collected all dirt that was stuck to his hand. I copy him, and my ball crumbles half way through. I pretend I was finished ‘washing’ my hands anyway, and I put the crumbled bit of rice onto the mat and watch the others to learn the technique for grabbing at my food.

I have been missing this experience as a traveler. I have eaten with a knife and fork, I have eaten with chopsticks, but I have yet to eat with my hands; there was a great part of the world that I was missing. Bhutan offered the bridge.

My friends’ hands are calloused and brown. One hand holds the plate. The other is the grasping crane. The claw of the crane drops to the edge of the plate, scoops more rice than curry, massages the mixture, balls it and then the crane lifts and turns palm up and inserts the mix into mouth. I think to myself, There has to be a right way and a wrong way to do this. But as I watch, techniques vary. Some look to create a ball of food, others pick at the large solid pieces—the beef and pork chunks, the steamed radishes and cheese soaked chilies—eat those first and then grab a pile of rice and drop it down the hatch. There is no way to keep the hands clean—what would be the point of that—the cheesy sauces and spicy curries, the oils and fats and little flecks of cilantro and survivor rice grains cling to their hands, and before the bowl is finished, someone beckons them for seconds and first they refuse vehemently, and then are up and heaping more rice, more curry, more fatty pork and dal into their bowls. They come back to their seats and ask me to take seconds too.

I do my best, relieved that there appear to be no rules. I relish the tactile stimulation that arises with my fingers deep in a warm bed of rice. There is something tawdry about how the oils lubricate each digit, a violation of rules ingrained when I was very young and my mother would scold, “Don’t eat with your hands!” Here in the hinterlands, the rules have changed. I go in for more, and take handful after handful of delicious mix. I caress the spongy fat of the pork. I scoop up the ema datsi and heave it into my face. I pinch the dried beef and delicately slip it onto my tongue. And then I line up for seconds and do it all over again. I scrape my second serving clean with all four fingers together, as if holding an invisible cloth. And then I sit back in sweet satiety.

“Are you adjusting to the fooding sir?"

“Yes, I can handle it.”

“You liked the meal then, sir?”

“That was delicious,” I say. The women look pleased. The men have the same lugubrious smile that I do, their one soiled hand perched dangling off a knee, drying and resting, waiting to be washed.

We wash our hands and I retire for a nap. That great fatigue that comes with adjusting to a new life abroad has not gotten any easier despite my now accumulating experience. It’s a feeling I crave, that barrage of culture—new language, heat and humidity, the smells of wood smoke and new plants and feces; the eating of strange meals in strange ways; the T.V. constantly on, news in Dzongka and Hindi soap operas; the kids roaming wildly; the vast views with stupas and temples and prayer flags scattered across the hills; it’s my constant state of worry: am I accepting enough food, refusing enough, sitting properly, addressing people properly, acting friendly enough but not superficial; Will I be okay here? Will I make it? And it’s all exhausting.

The input is so alive. It is easy to fall asleep now. Just so easy.