Falling Off the Map by Pico Iyer

Author:Pico Iyer
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307760722
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-02-09T10:00:00+00:00

And so, in time, I came to settle into the rhythms of this silent country, to come to know its patterns so well that the days began to pick up speed and blur. At dawn, in Thimphu, the mist swaddling the western mountains. In the mornings, the quiet tennis-ball sound of wood being chopped outside my window. At lunch, in the hotel, a team of Japanese “salarymen” lined up in dark suits around a large table and muttering gloomily, “Muzukashii desu, ne?” (“It’s difficult, isn’t it?”), as they bravely did battle with their curries. At four o’clock, the officials streaming out of the cottagelike buildings in Tashichhodzong, the central government complex, like schoolboys just released from class, healthy young men, most of them, sturdy and solemn, bearing thick black briefcases, white scarves worn like sashes over tartan kilts. As darkness fell, the bright young things of Thimphu—all six of them—assembling in the Benez café to gossip about boyfriends, in the “convent English” of wealthy girls from private Indian schools. And then, after dark, lights shining like candles in the many-windowed houses, and the streets all chill and silent. All night, the yelping of the mangy dogs, and then, at dawn, the light returning with the sound of jeeps, a reveille of horns, the clatter of boxes loaded onto trucks.

And gradually, as the days went on, I began to make a life inside this Sleepy Hollow world. I took over a small room in the Druk Hotel. I signed on as a member of the Thimphu Public Library. I bought balcony tickets to Stallone movies at the local cinema (where the crowd seemed especially taken with Terry Funk, in the part of Frankie the Thumper). And I took my clothes to the town’s dry cleaner—less deterred than I should have been, perhaps, by its enigmatic motto, “Cleanliness before Loveliness”—and bargained the proprietress down to an express seven-day service.

Sometimes I moved to Paro and adjusted myself to its bucolic, mild-breezed rhythms. In the mornings, when I awoke, girls singing as they worked. Afternoons in Paro Dzong, all red-and-gold serenity. Later, in the failing light, a gradual chill sharpening the air. Monks making their slow way back to temples. Children singing folk songs in the dusk. The valley suspended in a virgin silence. “Idyll” was a word from which I was accustomed to recoil, yet truly I felt that there could be nothing lovelier than this peaceful windless valley, so innocent it did not know the meaning of the word. Even in December, it was spring in Paro. And sometimes, walking home through avenues of willows, golden under cobalt skies, I felt as if I had stumbled upon the hidden Arcadia of Heinrich Harrer’s Seven Years in Tibet. A sequel, perhaps: Several Weeks in Bhutan.

The weeks, too, began to take shape as I grew accustomed to Bhutan. On Saturday afternoons, copper-faced men would gather in front of the avenue of willows behind the hotel and there, in the brilliant sunshine, the mountains behind them, send straight arrows shooting through the quiet air.

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