Backstreet's Back

‘Backstreet’s Back’, the second album of the Backstreet Boys, was the first cassette I ever bought. I was about eight: a very good year for me, I remember. Not many people know this but the Backstreet Boys remain very popular in parts of Asia. It doesn’t really bear listening to now, but a few seconds of their international smash-hit ‘I want it that way’ will give you a pretty fair indication of the flavour of pop music here in Bhutan.

Some readers may be familiar with the Danish pop group Michael Learns to Rock. I wasn’t. Nevertheless their song ‘Take Me To Your Heart’ made big waves here in the Kingdom. It is perfectly on point for a certain type of border-crossing popularity, without difficult language or complicated symbolism, syrupy, catchy and perfectly universal, which is to say generic. Here is a link to some of my students performing it in a fundraising cultural evening this past weekend. It was one of twenty items, some traditional but most of which were dripping with sugar.

Popular music here, a stew of innocently plastic Dzongkha songs and ghastly Hindi Pop, serves as a nice metaphor for how the country is modernising: in a Bhutanese way. In Drujeygang, where I am the first Westerner many people have seen in the flesh, European football shirts are a part of every boy’s wardrobe. There are pierced ears and the trendy short-on-the-sides-long-on-the-top hairstyles that are de rigueur for young men across the world in 2015. Ghos and kiras are worn at school but Western clothes (albeit cheap Indian knock-offs) are usually chosen for leisure times. It contrasts with the older men and women in traditional dress whom I see walking into town from their farms for supplies.

Technology is changing the social landscape quickly. While Drujeygang wasn’t electrified until sometime around 2008, now most households have a television. At the half dozen or so shop-cum-bars that serve the village, farmers sit on small plastic chairs on dusty wooden floors and drink beer, chatting aimlessly as all eyes are directed to a football match, a low-production ‘Bhutan’s Got Talent’ show, or a hysterical Bollywood movie. In a script that is playing out all over the world, people are worried about the erosion of traditional culture. I can understand why.

But while the Westernisation of urban Bhutan is well-advanced, and the development of the rural areas continues apace, it is not complete and it does not seem inevitable. In the early seventies the King decreed that the language of instruction in Bhutan was to be English, but Dzongkha (though only one of many local dialects) was to stay the national language. All meat is banned from sale nationwide during certain ‘auspicious’ months and days (though this is commonly flouted).

Homes, temporary or otherwise, are incomplete without an altar and every house, absolutely every house, has a picture of at least one of the Kings adorning a wall. Restaurants, classrooms, offices and living rooms have pictures of Kings one through five looking wisely down on their subjects (note him at the back of the stage in the linked video above). I start the morning with a cup of tea from my Fifth King coffee mug. Indeed, everywhere one can see pictures of K5 (as he is affectionately known) regally shaking hands or shooting a bow and arrow. Soon I expect to see him riding a horse.

Some parts of the culture remain as deeply imbedded as ever. On Friday school was called off. The occasion was the visit to Dagana of a Lama, one of the highest religious figures in Bhutan. In the roasting sun, some of us luckily shaded by umbrellas, the whole school walked an hour or so down the hill, taking the ‘short cut’ through rice and wheat fields, between stumpy mango trees and farm houses, to the paved road. There, red faced and sweating, we waited in patches of shade for his imminent arrival.

As well as the students and teachers there were farmers with their grubby, wide-eyed children and elderly, hunched, shrunken couples in traditional dress and electric grey hair. It seemed that most of the wider community was gathered for its chance to be blessed.

When the leading SUV, commanded by serious-looking military men, first appeared excited murmurs swept across the crowd. A minute later the Lama appeared, resplendent in yellow and burgundy robes. People rushed forward in a line and bowed, hands covering mouths in deference, as he speedily passed along gently bopping each person on the head with his ornate wooden stick (I don’t know the proper term). When he was gone one of his monks followed with a basket of pieces of yellow and orange string. These had been blessed by his holiness and we immediately tied them around our necks for lasting blessedness. It was all over in a minute and a half.

I have been at people’s houses where pictures of idols and consecrated rocks have been produced (perhaps touched by some holy figure in centuries past) and all present bow and touch them to their heads for favour. Last month the principal sent the students home and took the staff on a ‘study tour’ to visit another school and visit Punakha Dzong, one of Bhutan’s most important, where all the teachers prostrated before a building sized tapestry depicting various manifestations of the Buddha. On the way back to our lodging we took a longer route to pass a rather ordinary looking tap on the side of the road. This was holy water, it was explained to me, and we bailed out of the bus to fill drink bottles and drizzle water over our heads and necks for its spiritually salubrious effects.

Not once have I seen even the slightest hint of cynicism about any of this. I don’t know whether it will stay this way and I am unsure as to whether I think it should, but I feel utterly lucky to be here now to see it as it changes and to be a part of this culture.

Anyway, the trip to the Dzong was the first time I had left Dagana since arriving at the beginning of February. Punakha district is hot and dry and marijuana plants grow freely on the sides of the road. At the Dzong I had the strange experience of seeing other white people. At that point I had seen Fraser, Dagana’s other chillip (foreigner), twice, and been visited by another BCF teacher and the head of the organisation once, but other than a brief glimpse of a foreign engineer inside a hydropower project we had visited on the trip north, they were the first foreigners I had seen in three months.

I felt smug dressed in my gho, nodding knowingly at the monks, prostrating, and joking confidently with my Bhutanese friends. I found myself looking at them ‘taking it in’ with their expensive cameras and with sneering condescension I thought, ‘Ha and they think they are seeing the real Bhutan’. It is an insufferably snobbish attitude for someone who arrived here in January. Still, pompous or not, I found myself wanting to escape.

After visiting the Dzong I accompanied the principal and librarian to the annual book fair to buy books for the school library. Before returning to Drujeygang I spent an afternoon in Bajo, a charmless, dirty town that is only a few years old.

Because of Bajo’s proximity to Punakha its residents are entirely accustomed to foreign faces and its young people stand around spitting and littering with the cocky, jaded attitude of young people growing up in big cities all over the world. Big city is, of course, relative. I can’t imagine Bajo has more than five thousand people in its immediate surrounds, though it serves as a commercial and shopping centre for a sizable hinterland, but in this overwhelmingly rural country it is a Place To Be. They have hotels. It has a night club and a pizza joint. I couldn’t stand it.

So it was with relief that I joined the boxes of books in the back of the school bus for the rattling return journey south to Dagana. Soon the roads deteriorated and narrowed and ambling farmers corralling their cows along the side of the road replaced cars. After crossing the bridge into Dagana we stopped to take a pee and as I looked out across the valley I saw a family of grey langurs moving from tree to tree down below.

We arrived back at school and my friends Sherab, Dorji and Dawa helped me carry my newly acquired possessions from Bajo (my mop, my water boiler, my breakfast cereal) up the stairs to my quarter. I had a lovely little frisson of pride and comfort as I opened the door and was greeted with the familiar musty smell and my pile of dusty shoes by the door. This is my home now. It has been for a while. I really like it.