Under the Jackfruit Tree
I was born in May 1972 at Kafleytar, in Sarpang, Bhutan. My mother says I was born under a jackfruit tree. She was working in the garden when I popped out. That is how she told it to me, and I have never had any reason to doubt it. I like that my life began amid ordinary work, outdoors, with soil still on my mother’s hands.
I was the youngest of ten sons. Six of my brothers died before I was born, so I never met them, and only four of us remain. My mother also had three daughters. The eldest could not stand, walk or talk, and from what my mother told me, I understood that she had Sturge-Weber syndrome. She died when she was around ten. Two of my sisters are still around, both older than I am. I have often thought about what it must mean to raise a last child after losing so many.
My Father, the Pandit
My father was the local Pandit. He had studied in Varanasi, returning home with a degree in Sanskrit and a deep standing in the community. His work took him from house to house and ceremony to ceremony, so for most of my childhood he was away. I grew up mostly with my mother, a couple of dogs and cats, and a couple of cows.
My mother could not read or write. My parents began their married life at Harpey Pani (in Ratekhola, Chirang, I recall her saying. Readers may be more aware of where those places fall exactly at - I am not too sure if Harpey Pani and Ratey Khola are even in the same locality, since those names do not exist any more) and later settled at Lamidara, which is now called Mendrelgang, in Tsirang. I am told my father also had a second household there, with two sons, and for some years he divided his time between them and us. Eventually he bought a plot of land at Kafleytar, in Sarpang, and settled my mother’s side of the family there. That is where I was born. Later he came to live with us for good. Even then, in my early childhood, he would travel to Lamidara and stay a week, a fortnight, sometimes a month. But he always came back.
My mother told me she had a hard time at Lamidara, and that it became harder after my father’s second marriage. She told me about it the way she told me about the weather- in a matter-of-fact manner. While there was some bitterness in it, she had mostly accepted her fate, and she spoke about it plainly.
The Land, and the Road to Market
We had land in Kafleytar. There were two rice-fields, a large piece of dry land where we grew corn, mustard for oil and mixed crops, and a kitchen garden full of vegetables. Our neighbours were good people, though poor, and they were always ready to help with house chores in return for food. My father received grain, clothes, utensils and other things from the religious programmes he led, so we were relatively better off than the people around us.
Some of what the kitchen garden produced -beans, chillies, brinjals and leafy greens- we sold at Sarpang Bazaar, about eight kilometres away, mostly. I helped my mother carry it all. Sometimes we took the bus that the Bhutan Government Transport Service ran between Sarpang and Gelephu, but mostly we walked, there and back.
At the market we squatted on the ground with our wares spread out in front of us. A fistful of chillies for one price, three or four brinjals for another, a banana flower, a fistful of fermented mustard greens that we called gundruk. Everyone around us had much the same: a hand or a bunch of bananas, a small heap of long beans, moringa pods or moringa flowers, ladyfinger (okra), a papaya, a few cherry tomatoes, perhaps a bottle of curd or whey. The sounds and smells of that market were different then. With the money we earned, my mother bought the things the household needed.
Two Near-Tragedies
Around 1975, when I was still very small at three years, I stole a coin from my father’s pocket. He carried a lot of coins, and he seemed to have a perfect account of every one of them. The coin was meant for goli mithai, round sweets sold at Nuni ko Dokan, the shop near my future school at Leopani. I am not sure I ever got to buy any. I suspect I was lost in tears long before I reached the shop.
My father found out, and I was punished. Fearing the impending punishment, I hid among the branches of a tree recently felled for fodder, and somewhere in the leaves I drifted to sleep. When I woke up, I heard loud crying. It was my mother, my father and my sister, mourning a lost child. I did not come out of the foliage. Rather, I slipped quietly into my bed and hid, afraid of another round with that dreaded cane, and went back to sleep. It has taken me years to realise what that evening really held: the same father who counted every coin had been weeping for me.
The root cause of the second incident were bananas. In those days, buyers from Assam used to come and take almost all of our bananas in exchange for money. They felled the stems halfway: half of each trunk stayed standing, and the other half bowed toward the ground from the point where it had been struck. I decided to climb onto one of those bowed trunks. It was slippery, and I fell hard onto some rocks, on my back, and the light went out from my eyes for a long time.
My sister had seen me climb and fall. She told me later that she picked me up and took me to the open space outside the house, where they tried to bring me round. I remember being very wet when I regained consciousness, from all the water they had poured over me. I had fallen only a few metres from the house. I do not remember how old I was, and I do not remember anyone telling me anything much about that incident. My back still aches when the weather turns cold.
Twice, as a child, I was lost and found.
Leopani, and the Road to Zhemgang
I joined Leopani Primary School in 1979, a school that is now called Dekiling Middle Secondary School, and studied there up to class five. I passed out in 1985, after the Class Five Common Exams. Mine was the last batch to sit those exams in class five; from 1987, the government moved the common exams to class six, after a one-year gap. There were about twenty-five of us in that batch, and we were all sent to different schools, scattered across Bhutan, with every student at a different school. In 1986, I landed in Zhemgang, which was then spelt Shemgang.
It was my first journey away from home, and my first stay away from my family, so my father decided to accompany me there. The school’s principal, Mr A. K. Dhar, travelled with us from Gelephu in a bus reserved by the teachers and students. A couple of seniors from my village, already studying at the school, came along too. I do not remember much of that first evening at the school, only that my father had been beside me and then he was gone. I studied until class ten at Shemgang.
We almost did not make it to Shemgang. On the climb from Tingtibi toward Zhemgang (the Dakpai Hill, for those who know the terrain), the brakes of our bus failed. It rolled backwards and hit a rock (actually the hill itself) behind it. That rock/hill saved us. If the bus had rolled in the other direction, all of us would have gone over a sheer cliff, and I would not be here to write this. Nobody was seriously hurt. The only person I remember being shaken was a boy in the last seat, who had been resting his head on an air pillow when the back of the bus struck the rock. The pillow burst, and the blast left him rattled for days.
The bus was stuck on the hill, and there was no chance of repairs there. We spent the night on it. In those days there were no telephones or mobiles, and almost no traffic on that road. Some of my seniors, who were already studying in the higher classes at Zhemgang, set out on foot to get help. It took them four or five hours to reach the school. Without them, we might have stayed on that hillside for two or three days before anyone came along. Towards the afternoon of the next day, a truck sent from Zhemgang arrived, and we were on our way again. I later came to know that those hills were infested with rock-bees, and we were lucky we were not attacked. Perhaps the bees knew that we were there only because of that accident, and we would have never thought of disturbing them.
That was the first of many times in my life when people I barely knew did something for me without being asked.
What the Hostel Was Like
Life in the hostel was hard. There was always a shortage of water, and going to the toilet was painful. Sometimes we ended up in the forest nearby, where grass and leaves served as toilet paper. Food was rarely enough for most of the boarders. Bulgur was our staple, meat was a rare luxury, and our daily meals were of questionable quality, to say the least. But we survived.
Home felt very far away. Two of my brothers and one of my sisters were already in service in those days. If I needed money, I wrote a letter and posted it, and the letter took at least fifteen days to reach them. Money, if it came at all, came by money order through the post office. Anyone who received a money order had his name put up on the school notice board, and we would go and collect it. That happened rarely, perhaps once in six months, and it was never more than a hundred or two hundred ngultrum. However, to us, that was a luxury.
The school did look after us in its way. We were fed and clothed: we were given some underwear and bedding, half of a round bar of washing soap every fifteen days, and half a bar of Lifebuoy soap every fortnight.
We were also required to do manual works. We dug the garden and planted potatoes, chillies and other vegetables. We chopped wood for the kitchen. We went into the forest to chop firewood and carry the logs back. I was very thin and not used to hard work, and I would not have managed without my seniors, who were protective and helpful to me. I still remember some of them clearly. Suk Bahadur Monger is now a forester in Paro. Indra Bahadur Rai, who is now a dental technician at the national referral hospital in Thimphu, always helped me chop, collect and carry wood. I owe him my thanks, and I am glad to give it here.
The manual work changed me more than I realised at the time. It made me stronger in body, and it gave me a quiet confidence: if I could haul firewood out of a forest at thirteen, there was not much that a hard day could throw at me afterwards. Looking back, I do not see the chores as something that was done to me. I see them as the place where I learned that I could do things.
The Long Walk Home
Our summer vacation fell in June and July, the rainy season, when most of the route to Gelephu was blocked by landslides. One summer, a group of us, about ten in all, decided to walk home. It took us about two days, through mud and mudslides, with leeches and snakes and rain that followed us the whole way. We had a lot of help from cow-herders on the road. We reached Gelephu unharmed, and I reached home on the third day.
The following week was recovery. I was worn out from the journey and from everything the hostel life had asked of me.
When I walked in, my father was at home, which was wonder enough. He was a man of few words. He said very little, but his eyes showed how happy he was. I also got a good deal of scolding, and a good deal of love, from both my parents, and you can guess which came first!
Winters at Home
During the winter breaks I went home and helped my mother with the garden and with the cow she kept for milk. I ran around the paddy fields with the dog and the cat.
It was during those winters that I learned to cook. At first, I only helped my mother, but later I handled it on my own. In the afternoons, when she came back from a backbreaking day of work, she would send me to the kitchen to make tea and snacks for her, and in the evenings, to cook dinner. She told me I was the best cook in the village. As a child, that felt like a sweet achievement. Now I realise, of course, that she was just cajoling me. But those days of gentle flattery shaped my cooking, and I am still going at it to this day, hopefully improving by the day.
What the Hostel Taught Me
Hostel life taught me a great many things: resilience, time management, discipline and self-sufficiency, and others that are harder to name. I think a lot of these are lessons that young people today do not quite have the chance to learn, and I am not saying that to compare one generation with another. This is simply what that life was like, and what it gave me.
It also taught me about sharing. I remember a particular incident where a bar of chocolate had been parcelled from home, handed over by a driver. That was probably sent by my eldest brother when he came home. I remember sharing it with friends in bed, after the lights were out, in pieces so small we could hardly see them. I can still recall the joy of it. Another time, my sister sent me butter and beaten rice, and that, too, did not stay mine alone for long.
Patience came from the fifteen-day letters and the money orders that arrived twice a year if I was lucky. Gratitude for small things came from half a bar of soap and a piece of bedding. What I learned, above all, was that something shared with friends, however little it may be, goes a long way in building trust and friendship.
The Door That Closed
In 1991, I reached Sherubtse College in Kanglung, where I met some of my primary school friends again. The years from 1989 to 1992 were years of turmoil in Bhutan, after the census in the south, and many of my friends left the country. I took up bio-maths and completed class twelve- Indian School Certificate (ISC)- in March 1992, in the middle of those difficult years. I completed my year 12 with honours. Mr Balasubramaniam taught me maths in classes eleven and twelve, and he was the best maths teacher I have ever met.
In those days, the government provided scholarships to students who did well in Class XII, and I was one of them. I qualified for both an MBBS and a BE in Electronics. But the scholarship required the production of a No Objection Certificate (NOC), and I could not get one because my father had been wrongly branded as an anti-national by some of our own villagers, just by virtue of being the most educated person in the village, and by assumption, someone able to read the literature put out by the insurgents, and that label had stuck in the government’s records. It was later proved to be wrong, but the NOC did not come until 1997.
I remember walking back from the scholarship office to my brother’s house at Changangkha, where there is now a bonded warehouse of the Army Welfare Project. I locked myself in the spare bedroom, and I did not come out for two days. I was frustrated and angry, mostly at myself. You know the feelings of a teenager who is denied the thing he wants most, and what I wanted most then was to become a doctor. My brother’s whole family was in the house, and none of them asked me a single question. I am grateful to them to this day for that.
When I came out, I had decided that biology, the dream of being a doctor, and engineering were behind me. It was a decision about not wanting to be reminded about something I was not allowed to pursue. I went straight back to Sherubtse and took up what they called BSc (A), which meant Physics, Maths and Statistics. BSc (B) was Biology and Chemistry. I would like to say something pulled me toward Maths, but I believe it was just a decision taken without much thought.
I have no regrets now. I think what happened happened for the best.
Five Students and a Calculator
My BSc (A) class had five students. BSc (B) had twelve. We shared some classes with them, such as English. I am still in touch with every one of my classmates from that small class, and with the twelve as well. One of the five served as a minister for five years from 2018, and he remains a close friend.
I had wonderful teachers. Charles, a Canadian, taught us physics, and he graciously gave me a Texas Instruments calculator, the first scientific calculator I had ever seen. Ms Jamie Zeppa, who is the author of Beyond the Sky and the Earth: A Journey into Bhutan (1999) and Every Time We Say Goodbye (2011), taught us English. Mr Nidup was our Maths teacher in those years, and he also taught us integral calculus. And Mr Arora, who had taught me chemistry in class twelve, was our hostel warden during my degree years.
Statistics turned out to be a pleasant surprise. It taught me to make sense of numbers, to take calculated risks, and to read into what the numbers were saying. It also taught me patience, because in those days we tallied every figure by hand. I have found that a great deal of what it taught me applies to real life.
Every evening after dinner, we went to the IMTRAT mandir for a session of bhajans. I believe I honed my harmonium skills there, while the rest of us, uncouth youths that we were, shouted at the top of our voices and tried to make it sound good. There were “jam” sessions, too, where we danced, just the boys, even as we envied the gentlemen who had ladies of their own to dance with. And there was the food: bread for breakfast with rajma (kidney beans) curry, and ample butter on the bread, meals completely unlike what we had known in high school. We all remember Drimpon Naku, who was in charge of all the delicious food they gave us, and Lopen Sexy, whose real name I have forgotten, and so many others.
Those of us who graduated in 1995 still have a WhatsApp group, and we meet as a group from time to time. Some of my classmates are now CEOs, of Banks and Tech companies, and some are senior judges, to name a few.
After Sherubtse
I graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Science from Sherubtse College in 1995. Those years were tumultuous. For a long time I had no citizenship ID card, only a temporary paper, and travelling by bus was both harassing and embarassing. Every time a checkpoint came up, we were required to get down and make an entry in the police register. It was not only me, but all of us who were like me. We were looked at with suspicion. I received my citizenship ID in October 1995, a few months after I graduated.
I still could not get the NOC. So, in May 1996 I joined a manufacturing company, and worked there for a year. When I got my first salary, I went with some friends, with half of it in my pocket, to watch the premiere of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge at Norgay Hall in Phuentsholing. When we came back, the door of our flat was open and many things were missing, among them my ID. I ended up with another temporary paper, and I received a new ID only in 2007.
Meanwhile, the NOC finally came in 1997. In May that year, I joined the Bank of Bhutan, and the rest, as they say, is history.
The People on the Road
When I look back at all of this, what I notice most is how many people helped me along the way: the seniors who walked for hours to bring help to a stranded bus, the cow-herders on the road home, Indra Bahadur Rai carrying logs beside me, my brother’s family who asked no questions, and Charles, who handed a village boy a calculator. None of them owed me anything.
And I keep coming back to my father. He was a man of few words, and he often expressed what he felt only through his eyes. I have come to believe that a good deal of life is said the way he said it: quietly, without ceremony, and by always coming back.
❤️❤️
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