So Close to Heaven Read Online Free PDF

making the garment hug the body at the hips while having a roomy look at the top. In front, the pouch formed in the diagonal opening above the waist provides a generous pocket for carrying all kinds of useful items: a handkerchief, a traditional wood-and-silver bowl for drinking tea or homemade alcoholic brews, an appointment book, money, the shopping, or a supply of betel chews.
    Under a gho, a Bhutanese man wears a white shirt with overlong sleeves, which are folded up over the outside of the robe at the wrists to form wide cuffs. Adding the
kabne
, a scarf that identifies one’s rank, to this already taxing ensemble is a more complicated operation than one would guess, since the long piece of material has to be thrown over the shoulder and folded over itself at chest height before also being thrown over the left arm. The proportions of folded and free-flowing cloth have to be exact, so that the kabne falls with the correct drape and length.
    The kira, for women, is slightly simpler. Basically a rectangular length of woven cloth (or more likely several pieces sewn together) about two and a half yards long and one and a half yards wide, it wraps around the body over a shawl-collared blouse, the
onju
, and is fastened at the shoulders with silver hooks—or sometimes safety pins and, lately, Velcro. A silver or cloth belt secures the kira at the waist. A short unbuttoned jacket, the
toego
, completes the outfit. The cloth chosen for a kira, traditionally handwoven in horizontal stripes (unfairly, since stripes for men are vertical), now varies in color and design with the whims of Bhutanese fashion.
    Because many, though not all, southern Nepali-Bhutanese are Hindus with cultural links to fellow Nepalis all along the Himalayan foothills, most normally dress differently from the northerners of the high mountain valleys. If the Drukpas only grumble about wearing what is, after all, their traditional costume, the southerners, called officially Lhotsampas, see the enforcement of a national dress code based on a northern costume as a glaring violation of their civil rights and cultural customs. Southern Bhutanese favor either Western clothes or the Nepali jodhpurs, tunic and multicolored
topi
(a kind of lopsided fez) for men or the sari for women, garments that set them apart from the northerners in their ghos and kiras. Efforts by some liberal local officials to ease the dress-code rules or mitigate their enforcement came late, but were real. On a hot, flat plain in the Samchi district, across the border from the Indian tea gardens of Cooch Behar, I saw farmers in Western-style trousers working their fields and a watchman at a Druk fruit-processing plant dressed in a “half gho,” a kiltlike garment, with a sport shirt and Nepali topi. But by then, the damage had been done, and clothes had become a major civil rights issue.
    At the same time that this ethnically based dress code was being imposed on the southern Bhutanese and other pressures were being appliedto them to prove their legitimacy if not loyalty, some well-known politicians in Thimphu apparently took the opportunity to grab Nepali-Bhutanese property. Soon, government officials were forced, unarmed, into the theater of a shadowy guerrilla war notable even in violent South Asia for its senseless atrocities. In the village of Chiengmari, near Samchi, a Lepcha—whose people took no side in the Bhutanese dispute—was beheaded one afternoon and thrown, dismembered, by the side of the hamlet’s one road to serve as a ritual sacrifice or a warning. Local people suspected the former, and told dark tales of Nepali blood rites. People of all ethnic groups lived in terror.
    Yet the day after I heard this story, I watched in acute embarrassment as a local administrator, visiting an even smaller and more vulnerable border hamlet near Sibsoo, set out to humiliate (for the benefit of his audience) a headmaster who refused to live in the free house he had been given on the