Day 1, Day 10

The streets are empty. It’s late, maybe midnight. The moon’s light is only half full, but still the hill is drenched in it, painting everything a phantom grey as if the city were covered with a layer of fresh snow or volcanic ash. The glossalalia babbling that had seeped into the office from the Pentacostal church next door has long since died away, and it’s quiet. Once a taxi drives by, its headlights playing shadow webs upon the building walls—a spinning safety-glass jigsaw of power lines and balcony rails. A few minutes later we pass a couple figures going the opposite direction, little more than silhouettes. I could swear they are carrying spears.

“Where are all the dogs, man?” Pema asks. It is my first day in Gangtok, and National Press Day. I got in too late to make the Press Day event, but when Pema got back that afternoon he sat me down and put me to work on tomorrow’s edition, editing, proofreading, rewriting. Native-equivalent fluency in English is hard to come by, and most reports and press releases that come my way are written in a peculiar sort of broken English. So I sit and work through them, rearranging sentences for flow and clarity, cutting out superfluous details, and doing my best to turn them into something resembling news stories. An hour into it Subash hands me a phone and tells me to take down the details on a new hydel project from their correspondent in Mangan. After fifteen minutes of “Ke re? Pheri bhannus na. Can you repeat that?” I think I have everything, and write the story. When I get back from dinner, Pema is on the phone with people in Mangan, getting the real facts—the sacred rock is actually a cave, the man who said he’s sell his land didn’t, that sort of thing. When the stories are done, Subash prints out the pages for me to proofread, and I go to town on a columnists’ feature on Indian fung shui, trying to get all the occurrences of cardinal directions into a single format. I’m halfway through when Subash takes the page from my hand. At this point those sorts of details aren’t worth caring about. We print out the finals, half-sheet transparencies, and head out onto empty streets.

When we get to the printer’s, we turn off the road and pass through a red metal gate with a tiny door in it. It’s late, maybe midnight. Subash tugs at my sleeve as I duck through the gate. “This is the entrance to hell,” he says, and grins in the moonlight.

***

"Sir, you need a ticket, and the photo exhibition is closed today." The guard doesn't even bother to get out of his chair.

"Don't worry, it's okay. I'm a journalist." I wave my invitation slip under his nose as I stroll by. He doesn't stop me.

I get up to the entrance and make towards the stairs. Again they say it is closed, but when they find out I'm from NOW! their whole attitude changes. "Come this way, sir," says a lackey, and he leads me up the stairs.

I'm a little late. There had been some sort of traffic obstruction on the way up, and it was pretty touch and go for a while. But that's alright. NOW! is the most popular newspaper in Gangtok, so I can afford to be fashionably late. I haven't really missed anything. The officials are all sitting around, nibbling on biscuits and sipping tea and coffee. I spot some other reporters, milling around with an assortment of notebooks and cameras, and we exchange what I hope are knowing glances.

I snap some photos of the bigwigs, and suddenly everyone with a camera is heading inside the exhibition room, ducking the red ribbon strung across the entrance. I follow.

"Excuse me, are you with the press?" Dr. Anna has an accusing lilt to her voice. Then she recognizes me. We had met before, on the official program visit to the Tibetology Institute. "Oh, you're Andrew, aren't you?"

"That's right," I say. "I'm with NOW!"

"Brilliant," she replies, and ducks back out to help with the elaborate process of ushering the ambassador from Bhutan into position.

Thirty seconds later the Ambassador pulls the loose, delicate bow on the ribbon and the place gets that shiny, inaugurated smell. Everyone either claps or snaps pictures, depending on what they have in their hand. I do the picture thing.

Dr. Anna starts taking the Bhutanese Ambassador, in his traditional Bhutanese dress, from one display of photos to the next. After a few minutes of shooting I notice that the screen on my camera isn't showing anything. I take a picture and it just goes white. I sidle until I'm next to one of the other photographers with the same kind of camera, and explain my problem. He take the camera and fiddles with it, then hands it back and assures me that the problem is just with the screen, that the camera really is taking pictures. I hope he's right.

I loiter, oscillating indecisively between my camera and my little notebook. Occasionally I'll drift close enough to catch a snippet of a conversation or an interview by one of the other reporters, and I'll write something down. When the Ambassador comes out to talk with the press and says ambassadorial things, I write them down.

After a while I decide to loiter a little closer to the snack table and get some coffee. It doesn't help. I've been battling a cold for a couple days now, and at the moment I'm too busy trying to keep my snot in my nose to really "get the story," as it were. Not that there is much story to get. Everything here is pretty standard, and Pema already knows most everything about the exhibition and the Tibetology Institute. I'm mostly here for the pictures. At least I hope.

I try striking up a convo with someone important looking, but they have pretty pressing business over there a moment later. I chat a bit with Tenzing Tashi, one of the major organizers and researchers on the photo project. She says that she used to work for NOW! as a marketing director, and she asks me call her “Tina.”

“Did you get everything you need?” she asks. I sniffle up my cold and assure her that I have. My cell phone rings, and I pull it out. “Maybe you have to go,” she says, and heads towards the exhibit room. I answer the phone, expecting Pema, but it is just B.B from the program house at Mountain Hut. I don’t have to go at all, but after that last exchange sticking around seems awkward. By now everyone seems to have left, so I leave too, my notebook full of disconnected facts and scribbled quotes. My first real assignment as a reporter, and I can't help but feel pretty out of my depth.

In the end, though, it turns out I wasn’t out of my depth at all. It doesn’t matter that I didn’t get every detail on the exhibit; most of what I need is waiting for me in a press release back at the office. After all the press releases I had edited, one would think I would have expected this, but I didn’t. Between the press release, my memory and notes, and a few details confirmed by Pema, the story comes together, and we put it on the front page with my by-line (my by-line!) and my picture of the ribbon splitting.

The next morning I get a text message on my cell phone: “That was a very nice piece on our exhbtn. Tks. Tina.”