A QUEEN OF HEARTS

SANGEETA WADDHWANI REVISITS A HEARTY ENCOUNTER WITH QUEEN AASHI DORJI WANGMO WANGCHUCK… NOW REFERRED TO AS THE QUEEN MOTHER OF BHUTAN.   SITTING WITH US AT HER CRAFT AND ART  RICH PALACE IN THIMPU, ONE FELT IMMERSED IN HER SELFLESS, INTUITIVE WORDS. WHAT EMERGED, WAS A PORTRAIT OF REGALITY MEETING COMPASSION

She stunned us with an informality that stood in total contrast to the starch-uniformed, ramrod-spined guards who scrutinize every visitor entering this spectacular Oriental palace in Thimpu, Bhutan.  “Welcome, please make yourselves comfortable,”

Queen Ashi Dorji Wangmo Wangchuck greeted us as we entered, her skin glowing, gliding in her Bhutanese kira towards an exquisite  sofa setting in her expansive palace reception room. Just outside was a view of undulating mountains, hills and ravines, and the richly done up living spaces, replete with floral and spiritual tapestries, warm wooden flooring and carved wall panels, flowed easily into manicured gardens which surrounded the palace.

Bhutan reverberates with a purity; like it was designated to be a home to Buddha’s ideals, and where varied Tibetan master’s voices would echo forever through undulating sacred chants blowing from dzong to dzong, river to valley, forever. “First you rest,” she urged, smiling with special compassion at Yashi Dorji, the 20-something young photographer I have literally hijacked for this photoshoot, who has been covering the Bhutan Literary Festival these last few days. “You work for a newspaper, it must be very hectic!” asked the Queen, wide-eyed and curious, and Yashi, (who couldn’t believe she was going to see the palace – she was Bhutanese, but never thought such an opportunity would come her way!) smiled shyly and agreed, “Yes, life is pretty hectic.”  The Queen Mother, as if reading her diffidence, gave her a big hug – the way one would embrace a working daughter of the family, and ensured we first felt refreshed with tea and momos and only then walked us around so we got a good view of the spaces around, to plan the photo session.

In this manner, I was moved not just by the beauty of the palace, or the serenity emanating from the Queen Mother, but by the essential spirituality woven into life in this mountain kingdom. There is a quality of being in effortless synch with nature, of rarely witnessing harsh words or an excessively intellectualized approach to things. And unlike our highly status conscious milieu, I was witnessing a society where the King had years ago issued a dictat that there be no extremes of wealth distribution… that nobody would revel in vulgar excesses or view himself as different or superior on the strength of money. It was one thing to read about such a history; another to see it in practice!  (What a painful contrast to the extremes and attitudes at home).

I had prepared for this encounter by buying her Majesty’s biographical book, Tales of the Thunder Dragon, at the Jaipur Literature Festival.

Each year, I would email Her Majesty’s secretary, requesting an interview for HELLO! Finally, Kunzang wrote back positively, especially if I was covering the Bhutan Literary Festival – an event for which the Queen Mother is a patron. Thrilled, I spent hours poring over the Queen’s autobiography, and it opened a whole new world to me.  Her Majesty’s life story is filled with anecdotes which show spiritual values to be pulsating through Bhutanese life not only through poojas at dzongs, but remarkable miracles.

Like a Buddhist monastery at Nobgang, where the entire village was saved from an epidemic of small pox as the Buddha deity manifested the disease! And to this day, the statue, now encased in a glass case, shows a singular pox mark, which apparently keeps travelling around his serene face. There were rich legends of the miraculous properties of the Ho Kot So lake, or the natural springs of Gaza, where the Queen herself has experienced healing of her arrheumatism. Stories of the Tibetan mystic and eccentric saint, Drukpal Kinley being able to grant children to the childless.  Her book had filled me with an insatiable appetite to experience a fraction of this spiritual plentitude… and ask her questions… many, many questions. Karmic forces had clearly led me to her!

I started by first asking her if it was true, the female child was more desired than the male child in Bhutanese culture. “Yes, you would be interested to know that in Bhutan, say you have a couple and they can only have one child, they would choose a girl, that is how it is in our country, traditionally. It was a girl child who inherited property, the husband moved in with her. She looked after everything. Of course there are no hard rules that the man always moved in, you have different beliefs in  the South, beliefs in the North are little different…but the bridegroom would come home as a bahu rani, though well it’s changing now here too. In urban Bhutan, the couples now live as couples, not so much in joint families. So if earlier the man had to adjust to his bride’s family, now they simply adjust to each other!” she laughed. 

Another reality of Bhutan which seemed endlessly fascinating, was the Queen Mother’s own marital reality – she and three sisters were married to one King! And yes, like in India before colonial laws enforced monogamy, it seemed common for previous generations of Kings to have more than one wife.

“I would say it’s over now. It’s a part of evolution. And thank God for that!” she laughed. “His Majesty Jigme Wangchuck, the second king, had two queens, His Majesty Jigme Dorji Wangchuck, the third king had two, and His Majesty the fourth King Jigme Singye Wangchuck – my husband – has four queens as you know….but I think that he is a very special man. Special men can handle special situations,” she shared, and one could feel deep affection emanating from her when talking about her husband.  While the Queen wouldn’t elaborate more, my own conversations around Bhutan taught me that though things may have been challenging in the early years of this marital arrangement, the King was known to divide his time equally between the four Queens, with certain days of the week designated to each. And it was also widely rumoured that the one closest to his heart was the lovely, blessed Queen Mother in front of me.

(In fact, during my subsequent travels,  I saw the resplendent 108 chortuns at Dochu La, built by the Queen Mother as prayers of safety for her husband and son when they had to fight off Indian insurgents who were terrorizing people in Southern Bhutan, with an army of just 3000 soldiers. The number 108 symbolises, for Buddhists, the number of prayers in a full cycle. The war got over in just one-and-a-half days, all 30 militant camps destroyed!)

The Queen and her four sisters first got a glimpse of their future husband at the Punakha Dzong, where he appeared on a balcony.  Back then, they were probably clueless that their future would be as his wives. In her book, the Queen wrote, “By the mid-70s, circumstances – and destiny – had brought our small family to settle down in the capital, Thimpu, where my father had built a large house, Namgaychholing, above the Jigme Dorji Hospital. In 1979, the King chose to marry my three sisters and me, in a quiet and very private ceremony… Perhaps our marriage was the fulfillment of a historic destiny – one that united the families of the King and the late spiritual leader of Bhutan, Zhabdrung Jigme Dorji. It was certainly the fulfillment of a prayer composed by my father’s paternal grandfather, which was recited everyyear at our family choku. Dedicated to the Goddess of Long Life, Tseringma, the prayer asked her to grant his wish that kings would be born from his descendents.

Hmmm… perhaps that inner joy, that enthusiasm, came from that deep contentment. It was impossible to believe that Her Majesty was just three years from turning 60, and when asked about this, she was dismissive – “I don’t wake up thinking about being three years short of 60. I just go from day to day, doing what I do, working with the Tarayana Foundation and helping our people to be self-sufficient even in the most remote parts of the country.”

Few of us may know this, but the Queen is fully engaged as President of her foundation, and has walked on foot to the remotest villages to talk to the people, understand their needs and bring to them the basic amenities and skills that would bring them into the modern world without uprooting them from their own way of life.  She shared with me that “All over Bhutan, education is free, healthcare is free. Twenty seven percent of our nation’s population looks after parks; we now have 72 percent forest cover, and constitutionally, cannot go below 60 percent forest cover ever. Our insistence on tourists tarrif at USD 250 in peak season is not a deterrant as much as it is a policy to protect us from having to take care of too many tourists. We are a very small and fragile nation.”

Bhutan has long been out of the global media radar, but in more recent times, the world media did warm up to the cultural spectacle that was the fifth King’s marriage to the gorgeous Princess Jetsun Puma, at the ethereally placed Punnakha Dzong – located at the meeting point between the ever-dancing, prancing male and female rivers – Mo Chu and Po Chu. The Queen Mother nodded, “I think our fifth King has married the most beautiful, the most elegant, most dignified, and more than anything the most intelligent and selfless young lady. She studied in India, in Bhutan and also in London  and  I as a mother and a Queen Mother feel great pride and joy that his Majesty has chosen in her, the Perfect Queen. I personally feel his majesty will have only one queen and you can quote me on that, I think this is how it will be from now on. It was an absolute love story. They met in Bhutan and Her Majesty comes from a very distinguished lineage, spiritually as well as from the royal side.”

The fairytale kingdom has only recently adopted a democratic model, and on my last visit, I saw the Queen Mother guiding the newly elected Prime Minister through the crowd of visiting delegates at the opening dinner for the Bhutan Literary Festival. During the panel discussions, many Indian voices – Pavan Kumar, Tarun Tejpal, Saad Bin Jung – expressed their discontent with how democracy worldover had failed to conserve wildlife, look after the poorest and most disenfranchised, and in many countries, created a cesspool of corrupt ways of leading – all wondering if democracy was really the best future for this paradisical place, where nobody even challenged the local policeman, asserting their ‘freedom of expression.’  Hilariously, the night the Queen Mother hosted the festival delegates to dinner at her palace, in 2013, author Jerry Pinto joked that he actually saw a citizen clashing with a cop, saying “I live in a democracy; I can say what I feel.” Shudder shudder! “The cop looked bewildered as he had never heard anything like this before!” laughed Jerry.

But something in me wanted this fairytale to continue. For at the end of  our conversation in 2012, I was deeply moved when the Queen signed my copy of her book writing, “Be safe and be happy.” Safety had been my exact concern as I was wondering how to see Bhutan in at least a fraction of its glory, all by myself, without knowing the roads or the local people?  It was a vast country, mostly foresty, with no public transport system that came with maps.

When she got to know of my deepest wishes, she said, “Let me wrack my brains.” Next thing I knew, she produced a Maruti car and a crew of two guides – one who would drive me everywhere – because she saw how her book had whetted my appetite to see and experience the magic of the mountain kingdom. I felt she could read me, decode me, and I was so right. She insisted in asking me about my life, my priorities and was deeply moved listening to my story. She realized that I had been very strong, but that I was not a steely or rigid woman. That I was finding my way to certain kinds of happinesses, but that my environment was not as simple and connected to the flow of life, family, ritual and prayer, as where she lived.

We bonded so deeply, that even now, she will sometimes drop me a one line email, telling me where I am on my path. Because she meditates regularly, and lives in a place so pristine, I feel this connection with the Queen will endure, even if we don’t talk.

My colourful photos on this trip – many taken at sacred temples where photos are not necessarily encouraged – were entirely possible through Her Majesty’s gracious escorts.  And wherever we stopped for lunch, I was not surprised to see photos of the Bhutan royal family hung up for adulation and adoration. Particulary portraits of his fourth Majesty, Jigme Singye Wangchuck. For which people won’t admire and love a king who refuses to live in his own palace, but prefers to live in a private tree house? Whose picture show that he has travelled within the country for days on end, cooked for rural children, played basketball with them, has helped the elderly with their day to day chores, and  actually spent nights with families in the villages?  Will a new foreign-educated generation lead a people in this hearty manner?  It was after my travels that I got a genuine understanding of a true ‘people’s king,’ and hope the future leaders of Bhutan will not behave like our politicians, who only get aquainted with parts of the population when they need votes.  This place is a Shangri-La of  higher values. May it forever be such a jewel. And may we in India, learn from this humble Himalayan people.If only innocence could truly be ‘learned!’