Bhutanese Monarchy and Queen Elizabeth II

When Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II passed away on September 8, 2022, the news touched every corner of the earth, including us, who never had anything to do with the queen. While some grieved the death of the queen they had loved all their lives, others celebrated the profound life of a monarch who ruled for seventy years.

Their Majesties, the King and Queen of Bhutan, are attending the funeral of the Her Majesty the Queen of the United Kingdom. From the short video clips, we could feel the profoundness of the moment, where a young monarch pays his sincere tribute to another monarch on the other side of the planet. We can only imagine the significance of such a gesture. 

Isn't it fascinating that Her Majesty was born in 1926, the same year our First King, Gonsar Ugyen Wangchuck, passed away? It was the same year Second King Jigme Wangchuck ascended the Golden Throne. He ruled for 26 years and passed away in 1952, which coincidentally is the same year Queen Elizabeth began her era. 

So, in 1952, Third Druk Gyalpo, Jigme Dorji Wangchuk, ascended the golden throne at the age of 23, while Queen Elizabeth did the same at the age of 26. He was three years younger than her. If he had lived his full life, he would be 93 years old. Unfortunately, he died too soon, in 1972, at the age of 43. 

With the untimely demise of the Third King when the Crown Prince was only sixteen, our country was pushed to the edge of a dark era, but this blessed Kingdom was rescued by the young King in the most historical way. His Majesty, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, ushered Bhutan into an era of unprecedented peace and happiness.  

In 2006, when His Majesty the Fourth Druk Gyalpo abdicated the throne at the young age of 51, he surprised the world in more ways than we can ever comprehend. If there was one lesson the world and, for that matter, the late Queen herself could have learned from our Great Fourth, it was the detachment from power and empowering the next generation at the right time. He further engraved his wisdom for eternity by putting the retirement age of 65 for future kings in the Constitution of Bhutan. 

In 2006, when our Beloved Fifth King ascended the Golden Throne, he was coincidentally 26 years old, the same age as the Queen when she took office back in 1952- over half a century ago. The coronation of His Majesty, Jigme Khesar Namgay Wangchuck, was the happiest coronation in the world where the healthy father King crowned the son who was more than ready. The wedding of their majesties and the birth of two princes in the presence of the Great Fourth were events of profound happiness that the Kingdom of Bhutan experienced for the first time.  

Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth, lived across the era of four Bhutanese Kings- from Second King to the Fifth. It was also within this period that the United States of America saw fourteen Presidents come and go, 13 of whom met the queen.  Her life and death are, therefore, of significance to the world. 

May Our King and Queen be blessed with Queen Elizabeth's longevity. 

May the Queen rest in peace. 

Ani Passo - A Tribute

Date: 2020-10-25

My ani Passo was a gentle lady who loved my father, her youngest sibling, so dearly. My late father, Phub Dorji, was as young as her children and therefore she took care of him like one of them. My father, being an uncle to her children, made sure that he lived up to the status he had in the family.

Their family was devastated when my father was killed in an accident in 1984. He was their bread earner and as much as he was a dearly loved brother and Asha. I was a baby when this happened. People looked at me and cried. Every time they saw me they felt pity on me. I didn't have a father anymore. Besides my mother, who lost her husband, it was Ani who felt the deepest pain. Seemingly, she saw her brother in me because she loved me dearly. She won't say it aloud but I knew she did.

She was a quiet lady. Her husband was a powerful Nyeep of Gangtay Palace then and she was said to have spent her younger days in the company of Royals at the Palace. But her luck soon ran out, when her husband was terminated from the palace for alleged abuse of power. He was later said to be arrested and imprisoned in Paro Dzong after the assassination of the Prime Minister, Jigme Palden Dorji in 1963. 

Her husband, after his release from the prison, never came back to her. He left for Gasa and married another woman, and perhaps few more later. It was a fair deal to do so back in their times. A man could travel and father so many children in their ways, and not even be responsible for them. My Ani is said to have been so hurt that she refused to talk to him. As a child, I used to remember him visiting Haa and staying in the same house with Ani and her children. I thought he was still her husband. I never saw anything uneasy about him being in the house. 

But later I understood that her reunited with his children only much later in their lives. She and her children were left to fend from themselves all their lives. Acho Dorji related to me the story of how he met his father in Thimphu when he was employed for the first time in Thimphu. He said their father left them when they were still small and only then they met him. He started reappearing in their lives from then on. 

Ani was a nucleus of the family and she attracted people from near and far in her days. Her house in Yatshotenkha would be the venue of the festivities even during the lochay. Nowhere in Yangthang, I remember people having so much fun during lochay. Even though their house was in the woods, far from the village, people walked to be there. After the lochay was over, we used to have dozens of people sleeping over. Ani was such a warm person that everyone would show up. She has raised her children to be equally warm that even they were no less. 

I have paid her visit at least twice a year as long as I can remember. I looked forward to meeting her as much as she did. She won't show much but I knew she loved seeing me. Later, I went to meet her with my wife, and soon I went with my daughter. She has seen me as a baby and now she was seeming my daughter. It became a full circle in her life. In her own family, her granddaughter gave her a great-granddaughter and they have a beautiful life. 

But I feel, like all families, when Sonam Yangchen went for Paro to work with her husband and she Ashi Yangzo was away each day, Ani must have suffered the isolation badly. She must have felt lonely and sad but she could never articulate it because that was the life she knew. I wonder whose idea it was to build the house at Yasotenkha, away from Yangthang. It was a romantic idea in the beginning but with age that was a wrong place. 

Ani started losing her sense of hearing and vision. Or maybe she was alright but she was losing her mind. When I visited her in the last few years, she has only two things to say, that she can't hear me well and that she can't see me well. I think she could see and hear. She just couldn't comprehend. It wasn't much later that one night she forgot her way home. The whole of Yangthang was alerted to look for her in the forest. It was a cold winter night and we couldn't imagine she would survive. She was found the next day from near Talung. She hadn't walked much. When she was brought home, which was filled with people from all over, she didn't even know what was going on. She didn't even know she was lost and found. She was lost. 

She became a child again. She was gradually forgetting everything. She family, her speech, her ability to walk and eat and even go to the toilet. She back a baby in the diaper. She would look at you love a small baby and make sounds like a baby would do. If she was a baby we would find that cute, but when an old woman does that we found it crazy. I don't know if her children have done enough. I am just a nephew. 

I felt a sense of liberation when she passed away. I couldn't imagine her being trapped in that body that won't even move. I realized why death was important. And later, I felt a little sad that such a beautiful soul who didn't even harm a fly had to die that way. But again, I thought she died that way because that's the most blessed way to die; neither she felt the pain nor us. Everyone welcomed death. 

The storyteller in me was seeking a poetic justice in the fact that Ani never spoke to her ex-husband even though he appeared in their lives every year for at least 20 years. And the fact that she died without speaking to him was a satisfying yet empty feeling. Did he hurt her that deep? 

Why did my ani lose her peaceful mind? 

Tribute to My Late Teacher Karma Wangchuk (1965-2020)

It was in 1997 that I maintained my first journal. My English teacher in Class VII, Sir Karma Wangchuk gave us the assignment to record our day in a small notebook to build our writing skill. The class captain had to collect our journals and take to him for review every evening. We would get it back the next morning with his feedback. Back in the days, we could hardly write an intelligible sentence. We put him off every day. 

One day, by a great stroke of luck I got one sentence correct. I still remember that sentence after all these years, it read "Thinley Gyeltshen left the school on his own accord." My poor English teacher was overjoyed. The remark he left in my little diary had a big impact on me: "Beautiful Sentence. Keep it up!". I kept writing hard to get better remarks from him each day.

It was my teacher Karma Wangchuk who named me PaSsu. He was fond of Haap's accent and found it too funny to call me PaSsu, as a Haap would do, instead of Passang or Passa. I liked it so much and proudly kept it as my pet name.

Knowing him from Junior School to College, he wouldn't be easily impressed but he was openly proud when I handed him a copy of my book PaSsu Diary in 2018. It made a complete circle. It was he in whose class I began journaling and I came to be known as a blogger by the name he gave me, and finally, here he was holding my book. 

Back in March, Among his students who had established a lifelong friendship with him, there were three of us who made it to the funeral despite restrictions due to covid19. We stayed till the end with the members of his family. I stayed till the end because I wanted to his ashes being cast into the river to be washed into the sea and feel the sense of him becoming a part of nature that he loved so much. I thought to myself that he would have loved this part. 

With his death, we lost a living encyclopaedia on the natural world. He would talk about butterflies as if he lived among them. He knew orchids like he had an orchid farm. He could talk endlessly about a bird just by hearing its distant sound. He knew wild animals like a farmer knew his farm animals. He loved wild cats the most and have all the species of it painted. 

His life was simple- the guy seemed to have known the true essence of life already- he spent all his saving during the vacations to explore the wilderness or travel to a historic site. His notes, painting and photographs from the wilderness will very well make up several volumes of books. But he never published anything. I don't think he ever regretted that because he just loved doing it. Publication or exhibition never bothered him. He once told me, "I will always have my side of the story to tell which no one can own. The challenge is even more exciting."

In 1998, I took the only white t-shirt I had to him and requested him to paint something on it for keepsake. He did a black-necked crane on it effortlessly. The shirt didn't last for long but I managed to cut out the crane and preserve it (See pic). He was one of the finest artists I have known and the first to introduce me to art. His favourite subjects were his cousins from the wilderness; there are hundreds of paintings of birds, orchids, mammals, cats, etc. some from as early as 1987 when he was a boy himself. He never exhibited his artworks. In fact, his works were taken by others and published in their books, when he could easily do his own. 

I managed to convince him to do a massive exhibition that will not only showcase his artworks on the natural world but also his photographs on butterflies and his notes. The plan was to hire the RSPN hall and divide it into several sections- Cats of Bhutan; Orchids of Bhutan; Butterflies of Bhutan; Mammals of Bhutan; Birds of Bhutan; and after the exhibition the exhibits will be compiled into several books. But the timing was wrong. He fell ill shortly after that and he could not recover to do it. But I know even if he had recovered fully he may not have been so eager to do it because he was just happy that he had created them. That's all that mattered to him.

The other dimension to the man was his natural love for Shakespear and the literature in general. In 2006 when Shakespear was being removed from the Bhutanese curriculum, Sir Karma was devastated. He didn't say much in protest but when he hosted the Annual Award Ceremony in Paro College, he ran the two hours show using nothing but Shakespeare quotes. He did it so effortlessly like his mother tongue. That night some 400 of us in the hall knew how relevant Shakespear was to this day.

For us, Shakespear means two plays and a few sonnets we struggled with in high school but he was someone he read Shakespeare plays like a love letter he just received and watched the same plays alongside books like we would watch some hot movies. English literature came naturally to him, almost like a household chore and he must have scribbled hundreds of pages of poems and stories, hidden among his countless valuable papers. 

His brother and brother's children agreed to our proposal to form a team among his students and pay him a tribute by doing an exhibition and publishing his works.

Death is but a man becoming a memory, 

You are a powerful memory alive in hundreds of us.

You are alive in me and my beautiful life. 

So Long!