Ithaca Read online

  On an impulse, Zach buys the paperback copy of The War of Angels from the proprietor of the bookshop, who has been giving him the look shopkeepers the world over have perfected when customers linger past closing time. He leaves the shop and goes in search of the Swiss Bakery. He finds it easily enough, an unpretentious restaurant with a limited selection of sandwiches and pastries on offer. It is almost deserted, like every other establishment he has been in since he got to Thimphu; it is one of the things he likes about the city. He is trying to make up his mind between a chicken and cheese sandwich and a plain grilled cheese sandwich when he feels a tap on his shoulder. He turns to find himself face to face with a short, balding man dressed unusually for these parts in trousers, shirt, and cardigan. He looks familiar, but Zach can’t place him, and then he does, when the man says, “Its Zach isn’t it?”

  “Das?”

  Before he left India for London and a master’s degree at Goldsmiths College, Zach studied at one of Delhi’s great educational institutions, which was much sought after because of the excellence of its faculty and its proximity to a women’s college whose students were renowned for their beauty. Much of his time there has blurred away, but one incident emerges as clear as if it had happened a few minutes ago. All freshers had to endure a few weeks of ragging, a stupid and pointless ritual that was eventually banned when a less than robust junior killed himself after being humiliated nightly for over a month by a particularly vicious band of seniors.

  In Zach’s time, however, ragging had been alive and well; his worst moment came when he was summoned to a senior’s room one Sunday afternoon just before lunch. One of the three seniors present asked him whether he was hungry, and he answered that he was.

  “Hot or cold snack, junior pisser?”

  “Er … hot, sir.”

  A tub of red chilies was produced from behind the senior’s back and he was ordered to eat every one, which he did, masticating each bite thoroughly. The agony was unendurable, spikes of pure pain shot to his brain before being channelled to every part of his body. Tears streamed down his cheeks, his mouth and head threatened to explode, the sound of his heart filled his chest like a mercilessly struck gong, his body was on the verge of giving way from the punishment it was absorbing – but he was determined not to beg, to give in, he was too stubborn for that. There must have been close to a hundred chilies in the tub. He had munched his way through about thirty or so of them when one of the trio, alarmed at the symptoms of near collapse Zach was exhibiting, told his friends to ease off.

  “Want some water, junior pisser?” the senior who had given him the chilies asked.

  Zach managed to nod. The senior reached under his bed, pulled out a large plastic bucket of soapy water in which his dirty laundry had been soaking, and told Zach to go out of the room into the corridor and drink every drop of the water. He had picked up the bucket, staggered out into the corridor and, beyond caring by now, started to drink the filthy water in great breathless gulps. Within minutes, he had begun to retch.

  Das, who was passing, had taken in the situation and gestured to Zach to put the bucket down. He had curtly informed the three seniors that he was “borrowing” the junior, as he needed him to run an errand. He was a year senior to them; they had no choice but to agree. When they reached Das’s room, he was set free with a bowl of curd to cool his tortured mouth and palate. The incident was not the beginning of a deep friendship; Das was graduating that year and was too senior to bother with a newcomer like Zach. But they would greet each other in passing at the hostel or on the way to class, and Zach had never forgotten the senior’s kindness.

  It has been over twenty years since they last met. The long hair he remembers has vanished; Das is almost bald, the fringe is very grey, and he looks older than his years. He tells Zach he has lived in Thimphu for seventeen years, and that he works for a non-profit organization, is married to his childhood sweetheart, and has three children, ranging in age from six to fourteen. Before they part, Das invites him to dinner the following night.

  Das lives in Motithang, a quiet suburb built on an elevation above Thimphu. The night is crisp and clear and the lights of the city stream up to the stars. The house the taxi deposits him at is built in the traditional way: three stories tall, with a prayer flag planted squarely in the middle of the roof, upward curving eaves, wooden shutters, an ochre-yellow façade bright with Buddhist paintings of dragons, tigers, and fertility symbols, including a larger-than-life representation of a brownish-pink penis.

  No sooner has the taxi’s engine cut off, than Das comes out, and ushers Zach into the house. He introduces his wife, Sonam, a woman with a serene face, and their three children. Instinctively, for he hasn’t done this in a long time, Zach raises his hands in a namaskaram and bows slightly. The family smile at him, then Sonam disappears to organize dinner, and the children scamper upstairs to their room.

  Das pours Zach a glass of Bhutan Mist, a surprisingly good malt, and they make the first stuttering steps towards reestablishing the slender connection they once had. At first the conversation moves through the great events of the day, especially Barack Obama’s extraordinary rise to prominence. Even in this Himalayan fastness people were glued to their TV sets, Das tells him, mesmerized by Obama’s charisma and compelling story, the momentary brightness of his election shining through the enveloping gloom of a decade racked by war, terrorism, and economic blight. By the time the second whisky is poured, they have begun delving into each other’s lives, and here Das is the more forthcoming of the two. He tells of the years spent working in India in the administrative service, the decision to move to Bhutan where Tenzin, the eldest of their children was born, the job with the NGO that has something to do with education, the building of their own house after years of living with Sonam’s parents. He shows Zach around the place, explains the architecture and adaptations he has made to the traditional Bhutanese house that everyone is required to build by law. The ground floor that is still used to house livestock in the rural areas has been converted into the living room they are sipping their whisky in, with wooden floors and glass panes in the windows rather than the usual wooden shutters. There is a proper staircase that leads to the first floor instead of the tree trunk with steps cut into it that the older houses still have. Zach, who has never owned a house, would have usually been bored stiff by these details but he finds that he is quite interested. Would he have behaved differently if the conversation had taken place in London, would he perhaps have been condescending towards Das and his small, uneventful life? Undoubtedly. But as the evening carries on it seems that Das is the one to be envied, with his stable existence and calm outlook on the future. What does Zach have, what has his life of frenzied preoccupation with work, years of short-lived romances, evenings spent drinking with unreliable friends, lunches and parties with the publishing set in London, and an absence of rootedness brought him? A broken marriage. Anxiety about work. And the constant need to experience the next adrenalin rush, take the next step on the high wire his life is balanced on because not to move forward would be to fall – and to fall would be to perish, there are no safety nets in his life – it is why he continues to whip himself on. Whereas Das will continue to accumulate slowly his little triumphs, he will watch his children grow to adulthood, dandle his grandchildren on his knee (do people even do that anymore?). And then this train of thought comes to an end: no, Zach could not have led this life; he would have died of boredom, better to go out on his own terms.

  They dine without the children, who have already eaten. He jokes about his difficulty in learning how to appreciate ema datse on his first visit here, and Das and Sonam laugh together, their eyes meeting, a reflexively intimate moment born of long years of love and friendship. Zach’s mood sours momentarily. He thinks: When Julia and I were together, except in the very early days, we did not have this. Within a couple of years we were leading our separate lives and careers, and when we were together we were not fused but distinct. Son
am asks whether he is married and he replies truthfully that he is, but that work has kept Julia back in London. At some point in the evening, when the conversation has moved away from the personal and back to political and social events, Zach says he is not convinced by the Bhutanese concept of governance.

  “Surely you cannot legislate happiness,” he says. “People are the same everywhere; they don’t give a damn about inner happiness until they have satisfied their craving for material things.”

  “I think you’re oversimplifying,” Das says quietly. “What we’re trying to do as a society, what the king, and his father with whom the concept originated, are trying to direct us towards is to attain a balance between material prosperity and the things that give us inner happiness. We have problems, just as everyone has problems, but I think the point of GNH is to set different objectives for ourselves as individuals and as a country, objectives that redefine notions of prosperity and wealth, objectives that try to steer us away from rampant consumerism. If we get even partway there we will be better off than we were before.”

  “And you can do this by turning your back on the modern world, becoming a sort of primitive Utopia?”

  Das and Sonam laugh together. “No, that is the way the media depicts us,” Sonam says. “Today you can go to a disco in Thimphu, we are connected to the Internet, we have forty satellite channels –”

  Das carries the thought forward, “The point is we do not want to be swept away by all these things, we need to remain connected to our culture, achieve the right balance. An extraordinarily high percentage of Bhutanese who leave the country return, so we must be doing something right.”

  Zach is not entirely persuaded, but he doesn’t really want to carry the argument further. If this is the way this country and its people want to lead their lives, who is he to disagree – he can’t even manage his own life. He compliments Sonam on the food, and her face suffuses with pleasure. Das says, “Sonam makes a great meen moily; she learned how to make South Indian food like a native when we lived there. And when you visit next we’ll give you the best ema datse in town.”

  After dinner Sonam vanishes upstairs, leaving the two men alone. Das pours them another whisky. They make small talk, and then, all at once and in a way that seems perfectly natural, Zach unburdens himself about what has brought him to Thimphu. As he does so, he thinks that it is his years in London that have made him so uptight, so unwilling to talk freely of the things that he really wants to talk about. In this part of the world they do things differently. He is glad, fiercely glad that it is so, as he tells Das about the lonely death of his mother, his troubles with Julia, his fears about his job. His host does not interrupt once. When he is finished, Das freshens his whisky, and then says there is something he would like to show him.

  He takes Zach to the back of the house, and leads him into a sparsely furnished room – a desk, a chair, and a shelf of books. In the corner something glows in the dim light of the overhead bulb. Das walks him over, switches on a spotlight, and a tremendous bird rockets out at them – an outrageously coloured creature, plumed in howling reds, blues, and yellows.

  “What is it?” he asks his host.

  “A male satyr tragopan, one of our migratory birds. Its plumage is actually even more stunning than this, I don’t think I have done it justice.”

  “It’s extraordinary,” Zach says. “But why is it painted on the floor?”

  Das doesn’t reply directly but says that Sonam and he decided to settle in Thimphu after their first-born, a boy, died in an accident when they were living in Trivandrum. But the change of scene did nothing to calm his mind, he found it hard to concentrate on anything, he was short with Sonam, unable to focus on his work. One day, a group of Tibetan monks from Dharamshala visited Bhutan and demonstrated the art of sand-painting, using small metal funnels called chakpur and coloured sands to create beautiful and detailed mandalas. They spent several days creating a luminous work of art, and then, when it was finished, they swept it up, destroyed it, to demonstrate the impermanence of everything, to show graphically the Buddhist concept of non-attachment.

  “It made a powerful impression,” Das says, “and I was determined to learn the art of sand-painting, it seemed to show me a way to come to terms with the death of my boy.”

  They look at the flaring beauty of the bird on the floor; in a short time it will be as if it never existed.

  “At first I found it difficult to destroy the paintings I created or even to make good paintings for that matter. I was not trained like the monks, my paintings were not based on religious themes or anything like that, and for me sand-painting was simply a way to work out my grief and my frustration. It didn’t help that I wasn’t a particularly good artist or that the material I was using was difficult to manage. But I kept at it. The first successful painting I made was of Sonam’s parents’ house; it had taken so much effort that I couldn’t bring myself to erase it, I had to have Sonam do it for me. And then slowly I began to get the point.”

  “How long did this one take you?”

  “About three months.”

  “And when will you destroy it?”

  “Tomorrow. I have just a few details of the crest to complete and I’ll be done.”

  “Thank you,” Zach says simply, “for sharing this with me.”

  Back in his hotel he thinks for a long time about Das’s method of dealing with sorrow and loss. Although he can’t see himself spending months creating paintings of coloured sand in his apartment, the principle makes a lot of sense to him. He thinks that, without really planning it, his life has been built on a platform of detachment. It is the only way he could have survived and learned to thrive in places far from home. The years he’s had with Julia, the years he has been sheltered by Litmus and by Seppi, these have eroded his watchful and self-reliant nature. It’s why he has been feeling so unsettled, he will need to start rebuilding his defences – here and now would be a good place to start.

  Novelists rarely agree about anything to do with their craft, but the one thing on which the views of a large number, from Gabriel García Márquez to R.K. Narayan to Graham Greene, seem to coincide is that what fills the well of their imagination is their childhood and early youth. As he lies on his bed in his Thimphu hotel room thinking about his life he gets what they mean – within the noise and chaos of the present, it is only the significant events of his childhood that rise up clear and untarnished.

  Zach’s ability to fend for himself was formed early on. His father worked for a coffee company high in the Shevaroy Hills; their nearest neighbours were three miles away and Zach, an only child, was pretty much left to his own devices with only a succession of ayahs for company. When he was ten he was sent to boarding school. It was a tough school, and he was the outsider; the student body was largely blue-collar and resented his family’s wealth and his life of apparent privilege; he had to fight and fight often just to be left alone.

  One incident stood out. Home for the holidays, he had just celebrated his thirteenth birthday, which fell on December 15. His father had taught him to shoot the previous year, and his parents had given him an air gun for his birthday. Although he had been prohibited from indiscriminately slaughtering the bird life that abounded in the vicinity of the house, he tried to do just that when he was unsupervised, which was most of the time. The help weren’t able to curb his bloodthirsty instincts (formed from reading too many books on shikar) because they were only permitted to caution him, or threaten to tell his parents, they were not allowed to command. Fortunately his aim was wayward and apart from an unfortunate bulbul that he dropped while it perched on a telephone wire, the birds around the house were terrorized but unharmed. But although Zach had delighted in his air gun what he was really looking forward to was the opportunity to use his father’s Purdey shotgun, a beautiful weapon with twin barrels of blue steel and a stock as black as night. Ever since he could remember, Zach had gone out with his father on hunting expeditions; Nirmal was a
fair shot and had bagged duck, quail, and jungle fowl, and on one memorable occasion a wild boar. He had promised to let Zach use the shotgun when he turned sixteen.

  Two days after his birthday his father was called away to a meeting at the company’s headquarters in the plains. He expected to be away for four days. On the second day of his trip, his mother received a call from her neighbour saying the police had informed her about a convict who had broken out of prison in a town approximately three hours away and was last seen heading in their general direction. There was nothing to worry about, the police had said, but they would keep in regular touch until the convict, who had been serving a life sentence for chopping his neighbour to death with an aruval over a land dispute, was captured. The police were telling everybody to stay close to their bungalows, the neighbour said, and to get in touch if they spotted anyone who looked suspicious. The police phoned the house soon after with the same message. Zach’s mother told him to stop going out with his air gun until the murderer was caught. He dragged himself around the house that day, trying not to get in the way of his mother or the help. By the evening of the next day he was thoroughly bored.

  At around five-thirty, after Thangavel, the butler, had cleared away the tea things in the living room, Zach went to his bedroom to listen to music. His bedroom gave on to a verandah, beyond which there was almost half an acre of beautifully maintained lawn bordered by a hibiscus hedge that stood about six feet high. On the lawn was a swing on which Zach had spent many happy hours as a little boy urging his father or his ayah or one of the gardeners to push him higher, higher. As he lay on his bed listening to an old Jefferson Airplane song on the stereo, he thought he saw a silhouette by the hibiscus hedge. In the winter, night came early in the hills, and the gardeners were normally gone by five, but maybe one of them had stayed on late; then he’d remembered that the gardeners had a half-day on Fridays. Today was Friday. His heart beating a little faster, Zach had stealthily slid off the bed, and crawled along the floor to the window; crouching down, he had peered over the sill into the dusk. Was he imagining things or was that something that looked like a human figure wrapped in a lungi? He dropped to the floor, crawled across the room, pushed open the door, crawled out into the passage that separated his room from his parents’ room, closed the door to his room, and ran to the cupboard containing his father’s shotgun. His mother was having a bath, and the servants were in the kitchen preparing supper, as the neighbours were coming over that night.