One night, he wakes up shouting in Nepali. “Tshewang! Shhhh! I hiss, shaking him and pointing upwards.
“What? What?” he asks, bewildered.
“You were shouting! In Nepali, no less!”
We stare at the ceiling in horror, and then fall back onto the mattress, shaking with laughter at the thought of explaining, at the thought of merely trying to explain, to Mr. Chatterji.
We are both terrified of someone finding out. We don’t know exactly what would happen, but if the principal is raging against students having relationships with each other, he certainly won’t be amused by this, and the other lecturers—well, I can just hear them now. Tshewang dreads Monday morning assembly when the principal addresses the students. “It has come to my attention,” each speech begins, and Tshewang is certain that one morning, he will say it has come to his attention that an improper relationship has developed between one of the lecturers and one of the students. Then we say we should stop this, we decide that it cannot go on, there is too much at risk. We lie on our mattress on the floor, holding each other, staring into the shadows, searching for a way, finding none. Okay, last time, we say. This is the last night. After tonight, it’s over.
But he always returns, and my door is always open.
It is an affair housed in one tiny room, window closed, curtains drawn, door bolted, a relationship conducted in whispers and gestures, by candle light, in the uncounted hours of the night. Laughter is stifled in pillows, cries are swallowed or buried in flesh. I long to go outside with him, into ordinary daylight, walk down the road, laugh out loud. We talk about going to India during the winter holidays, to Calcutta where we will be two among ten million. We will walk down Sudder Street, hold hands in bookshops, we will go into a restaurant and sit at a table and no one will know us, no one will care.
But inside this room we have another kind of freedom. We live outside of scheduled time, according to our immediate wants. We get up in the middle of the night to cook packets of instant noodles. We mix up spicy salads of tomatoes, chilies, cucumbers and crumbled cheese, which we eat from a cooking pot with tablespoons. We make love and sleep, wake up and read, we talk and fall silent. I write a love letter on his thigh, he writes me a long musical dirty message in his sharp minute script on the wall above the mattress. We discuss how many children we would like to have, and whether we would give them Bhutanese or English names, and what kind of house we would like best, we tell each other family stories, secrets. There is time to talk about nothing, to lie with our limbs entwined, absorbed in our separate books. In this room, our everywhere, there is time to spare, time to waste, time to play. When we are together here, we feel disrobed of nationality, personal history, past betrayals and future anxieties. We are pared down to simpler, more lucid selves. In this room, we are two people who love each other. I have never known a flow of affection as pure and as easy as this.
But the moment we get up, dress, prepare ourselves to separate, time contracts painfully, shrinks around us, becomes tight and inelastic. When he has gone, I remember all the things we do not talk about, like is it true that Bhutanese who marry foreigners can not be promoted past a certain level, and could he ever be happy outside of Bhutan, and will this relationship work outside of this room, in real time. In this room there are few causes for quarrel, no push no pull, no stress, no others. We have few misunderstandings, but this means only that we know each other in this one place, in this one way Outside this room, we have no idea who we are, who we would be together.
Outside this room, we are actors, cool and distant, nodding politely when we pass each other in the corridors of the college. In class, he is just Tshewang, taking notes, asking questions, muttering asides in Dzongkha that make his friends laugh. We become good at the split, the deception. We watch each other without ever looking. I am aware of him in the corner of the auditorium, I hear his voice through concrete walls, feel him moving down the hall outside the classroom I am in.
We are careful to do nothing to arouse suspicion. He is an excellent student, but I am careful when marking his homework. Not that it matters—his final exams will be marked in Delhi. I will have nothing to do with the grades on his certificate.
Except he misses so many early-morning classes that he fails economics.
Spring flourishes into summer and we barely notice.
When we cannot be together, we write letters, a dangerous practice considering how disorganized Tshewang is, shedding bits of paper, dropping books, losing notes. He leaves for his summer break and time without him is so painfully slow and barren that I don’t know how I will get through it. It turns out I don’t have to—he returns early, and we spend the next nine days in our room. We tell each other all the fears we can think of. “I am afraid you will get tired of this,” I say. “I am afraid you will want a real relationship.”
“Isn’t this real?”
“I mean a relationship with a woman you can go outside with. Go to Pala’s with. You know what I mean.”
“I’m afraid you’ll go to Canada and abandon me.”
“I’m afraid you’ll tell your parents, and they’ll beg you to put a stop to this.”
“I’m afraid you’ll tell your parents, and they’ll beg
you
to put a stop to this.”
“What would your parents really say, Tshewang?”
He thinks about it. “Honestly, I don’t know. They wouldn’t understand if I converted to another religion, I know that, but about other things, they’re very tolerant. Now, what I’m really afraid of is that I’m going to die if I don’t eat a green vegetable soon.”
We have been living on noodles, eggs and chocolate for a week.
“I’m afraid I can’t do anything about that.”
“You could go get some spinach from the Matthews’ garden.”
“Or you could go.”
“Or I could go, and they could look out their window and see me sneaking out of your house.”
“All right, all right. I’ll go.” I creep out stealthily, casting nervous glances at the windows of the upstairs flats as I collect an armful of vegetables. Tshewang cooks a sumptuous meal of red rice, spinach in butter and garlic, and a salad of green chilies, spring onions and tomatoes. We stand at the backdoor after we have eaten, drinking in the air and eating raisins for dessert until a door opening upstairs sends us scurrying back inside.
The monsoon unleashes itself in a cloudy fury, the students return to the college, and still no one has found out. There are no secrets in eastern Bhutan, except this one.
Furniture
I
am boiling water for the filter and cleaning the kitchen when I hear Lorna walk through the front door. She is singing, “Why, why, why, Delila.” We meet in the back hallway. “Hi,” she says. “I’m pregnant. What’s up with you?”
“Tshewang and I are in love.”
We collapse on the floor, laughing. She tells me about Darren in Canada. “I had no idea when I left that I was pregnant,” she said. “Poor Darren. I sent him a letter. The kid’ll be in high school by the time he gets it.”
“Are you going to have the baby here?”
“No, I’ll finish up early and go home. Home! You know what this means, don’t you?”
“No, what?”
“Furniture! ” Lorna equates furniture with settling down. Her voice is grumpy but the happiness comes off her in waves. She makes me promise not to tell anyone, especially the field director. “He’ll pack me off home, and I want to stay as long as I possibly can.”
“I won’t tell if you won’t,” I say.
“I knew this would happen,” she says. “I mean you and Tshewang. I knew that day we saw him at Pala’s. Well, are you happy now?”
“I don’t know, Lorna. I’m happy, all right. I’m ecstatic, except when I think of the future. We want to get married, but we don’t know if it’s even allowed. Tshewang has already told his parents about us, and says they are fully supportive, but of course there are a thousand other things to consider.” I go through the List of Unresolved Issues and Unanswerable Questions, and she throws in a few of her own. Cultural differences, conflicting expectations about marriage (she has observed that marital fidelity does not seem to be considered a great virtue in Bhutan), power imbalances caused by money, education, experience. “I don’t think Bhutan allows dual citizenship,” she says. “If he emigrates to Canada, he’ll have to give up his Bhutanese passport. And would you really be content to stay in Bhutan for the rest of your life?”
I can’t say for certain about the rest of my life in
any
one place. After all, I only know two places, Canada and Bhutan. “I love Bhutan,” I tell her.
“Yes, I know. I love Bhutan, too, but I know I couldn’t live here forever.”
“Anyone can live anywhere,” I say.
“For a time, sure. But I think part of the reason we love Bhutan so much is that it’s not permanent. We know we have a limited time here, that’s what makes it so precious. And it’s a difficult place to get to. Remember how you felt going home this winter, how you were so worried you wouldn’t get back? It’s one of those impossible places that everyone dreams about. The forbidden kingdom.”
“That’s all true, Lorna, but it doesn’t really have anything to do with Tshewang. ”
“I’m not questioning your feelings for Tshewang, but these things form the background of your relationship and you should think about them. ”
I do think about all these things. They go around and around in my head in a whirlwind of fear and hope. I write lists, For the Future and Against, For the Relationship and Against, I have arguments in my head as different people, Ann Landers debates P. B. Shelley, my grandfather contends with Florentino Ariza. I thought Bhutan was all I would want, I tell Lorna. Just more time in Bhutan, enough time, until I was full up with it, saturated, satiated. I thought that would be the end of it, but it seems there is no end to wanting. Now there is a whole new desire. Now I want Tshewang.
“Well, you have him,” Lorna says.
“I have him now, yes, but I want him tomorrow and next year and the next. We want to have a future together. We want to have furniture.”
“Why can’t you just be happy with what you have now and say goodbye when it’s time to leave?”
Because I cannot bear the thought of that. Because the thought of never seeing him again paralyzes me with grief. It’s not that kind of love, and I’m not that kind of person, and it’s too late for that now, anyway “I want what I want,” I say. “And I don’t want to come to the end of my time here and say to Tshewang, ‘Well, sweetie, that was nice. Have a happy life.’ ”
“Well, given the circumstances,” Lorna says, “and I don’t mean to discourage you, but given the circumstances, I think you should at least think about it.”
I say that I will but I know that I won’t. I haven’t told her the other thing I want: a baby.
I think of all the relationships and circumstances in which children can be conceived, and I think of Tshewang and me in our little room, the pure flame of our love and our time together, and I want a child to come out of it. There will never be another time like this.
F-7
O
utside our room, there are changes. Two new Canadian lecturers arrive, part of a new project that links Sherubtse with a Canadian university. One is a warm sunny man whose house is instantly full of the students and lecturers he befriends effortlessly; the other is an odd, older man who manages to stand erect in spite of the heavy white man’s burden he is carrying. He moves into the flat next to mine, and we take an instant dislike to each other. He has come, he announces gravely to Dini and me, to develop the college. He has the tools to do this because he has spent many, many years in undeveloped countries. I wince at the word but he doesn’t notice. Dini laughs outright, but no, he is serious. She engages him in vitriolic arguments about development and imperialism, but he doesn’t get it.
Southern students begin to leave. Some say their families are being pressured by the army and local authorities to get out. They could not find a land tax receipt from 1958 to prove they are citizens. Others say they are leaving because everyone else is. Others say the south is too dangerous, they are caught between the security forces and the armed groups that raid their houses. “If we wear this dress,” Arun tells me, fingering his gho, “we will be caught by the anti-nationals. If we don’t wear it, the government will think we support the anti-nationals.” He has come to say goodbye; his family sent a message for him to come home. “But where will you go?” I ask. He says to a refugee camp in Nepal, where many others have already gone. He does not know if he will ever come back.
Once again it is news by I-hear-that. I hear that large numbers of southerners are leaving their homes in the south. I hear that they are selling their land back to the government and heading to camps in Nepal. I hear that they are being forced into leaving but that authorities capture the moment on videotape to document this “voluntary migration.” I hear that the emigration is part of a careful plot by the anti-nationals, a propaganda ploy to win international sympathy. They intend to bring out as many people as possible, accusing the Bhutanese government of oppression and human rights abuses. Their plan is to bring down the Bhutanese government, and march back in to a new Nepali state which they will rule. I hear the army is dismantling houses, I hear that heads of families are taken out into fields at night, where they are beaten by soldiers and asked, “Now will you leave?” I hear that southerners who cannot prove they are citizens are being labeled F-7s. F-1 means both mother and father are Bhutanese. F-7 means non-national. What is in between, I ask. F-2 to F-6. No one knows. I hear this is being done to rid Bhutan of thousands of illegal immigrants. I hear this is affecting bona fide southern Bhutanese as well. I hear it is winding down, I hear it is just beginning.