Today, after hours of pleading from Thinley, our frequent visitor and sometimes seventh family member, we visited her home again when her father was home and had the pleasure of meeting him. He has three careers: in his day job he is a diglop, a government-employed protocol specialist (he calls it "display"), teaching people entering official government service at the university level how to dress, eat, drink tea, carry oneself in official capacities. He has tutored members of the royal family in this, despite himself living in the extremely humble home we described earlier. Thinley is obviously very proud of his high position, and the honor that has come to him; he has even received an official government award, as she put it, for being a good father. She thrusts at us pictures of him at ceremonial occasions, with one of the princesses, etc. In his second career he is a movie actor in the thriving Bhutanese film industry. Unfortunately these films are not widely available on video, but he showed us his certificate awarding him the best supporting actor from the Bhutan Motion Picture Association for 2002 for his role in a full-length feature film. But his real love, it turns out, is singing and playing the damyan (?spelling uncertain), a traditional Bhutanese instrument that looks like a lute. It has seven strings and is played with a small pointed piece of ivory that looks like a sharktooth. He has had the honor of traveling throughout Europe performing traditional Bhutanese and Tibetan folk songs.
At Thinley's urging, he lifts the gorgeously carved and painted damyan, with its curved dragon-head scroll, down from its nail in the dirty turquoise-painted plaster wall, and we sit entranced while he plays us several traditional songs. His voice is indeed a lovely one, a trilling baritone, and he plays the damyan beautifully with flying fingers on the place where frets would be on a guitar, plucking the strings so rapidly that the instrument both sings the tune and provides a humming bass line at the same time. His children know the songs well; Thinley's five-year old brother sings bits and pieces as he runs in and out from the house to the garden and back.
His English is, as he put it, "small," and so Thinley does most of the translating between himself and us. He gives us a CD produced here in Bhutan of his singing and damyan-playing. We express our delight with his musicianship, and we marvel at his dignity and talent in the midst of what in the US might seem like squalid conditions. He is hoping to hike with us this weekend to one of the local monasteries (goemba) up in the mountains outside of Thimphu. If so, hopefully we will arrive with our gho and kira in perfect order, and conduct ourselves with politeness and proper Bhutanese decorum. One would expect nothing less when in the company of a diglop.
