So Close to Heaven Read Online Free PDF Page A

the tourists? I asked, thinking of those well-heeled visitors who pried statues off their pedestals in the struggling stately homes of Rajasthan and packed them away as if they were souvenir ashtrays from a chain hotel. No trouble with them yet, most Bhutanese say. Once trust is broken and the magic is gone, however, everyone takes a piece of what’s left.
    There are other troubling changes, larger in scale than the criminal behavior of a few and more immediately dangerous to the integrity of the Bhutanese state. In southern Bhutan, along the unfenced border with India, available land and free education and health care continue to draw illegal immigrants, different in religion and ethnicity from the people of the central valleys and alien to the Buddhist culture that has defined national life for more than a thousand years. Immigrant Hindus of Nepali ancestry are part of a huge Nepali world outside Bhutan’s borders. In the early 1990s, there were at least thirty million Nepalis in overpopulated (and environmentally devastated) Nepal and in India’s Himalayan foothills, and fewer than three-quarters of a million Bhutanese citizens—Buddhist and Hindu together—in Bhutan. Only the small Indian state of Sikkim, where Nepali people long ago outnumbered the former kingdom’s Tibetan and tribal stock, separates Bhutan from Nepal’s teeming eastern border.
    “The annual
increase
of the population of Nepal may be as much as the total population of Bhutan,” King Jigme Singye Wangchuck told me in late 1992. “Their population increase per year is about five hundred thousand—half a million—people, and there is chronic unemployment. In Nepal they have destroyed and denuded all their forests, there is no land to be given to the landless people, and all the arable land can no longer be farmed because of environmental and ecological problems.Where the water table has gone down, tremendous erosion is taking place. India today has about ten million Nepalese, and these ten million Nepalese have all come from Nepal. In Bhutan, the attractions were free education, free health, and easier availability of free land, and all this [immigrant influx] was done with the full support and cooperation of our southern Bhutanese people.”
    Faced with this threat to an already endangered Himalayan Buddhist culture, the kingdom’s dominant Drukpa people and others in the Buddhist mainstream reacted initially in panic, setting the stage by 1990 for a rebellion among southerners who said that they were being culturally repressed and illegally evicted even when they were citizens. Their accounts were sometimes true, sometimes exaggerated. Undoubtedly there were outbursts of excessive zeal among the Drukpa administrators; that cannot be denied. A requirement that national dress be worn by all Bhutanese was enforced so rigorously that a Japanese scholar in Western clothes was roughed up trying to convince law enforcement officers that he wasn’t Bhutanese at all.
    National dress in Bhutan is defined as a kimono-like
gho
for men and boys and a somewhat different ankle-length robe called a
kira
for girls and women. Worn correctly and with knee-length socks and decent shoes, the gho, often in dark plaids or stripes (even pinstripes), is an elegant garment. Unfortunately, a lot of young Bhutanese, who are hit-or-miss about how they fold and fasten the ample robe and iconoclastic in their choice of what to wear with it (running shoes, athletic socks, and sweatpants are favorite accessories), make the national costume look unkempt if not ridiculous.
    The gho has a bathrobe-like wide collar and buttonless front panels, one crossing over the other from left to right when the robe is put on. A gho is ankle-length in construction, but it is worn at knee level, hoisted up and secured by a woven belt, with the excess fabric bloused out at the top. At the back, the robe is folded from the waist down into two inverted vertical pleats that meet at the center,