Beyond the Sky and the Earth_ A Journey Into Bhutan - Jamie Zeppa [102]
I find myself wanting to talk with him about bigger things, Mr. Iyya and the question of beating, history, politics, religion. He listens, agrees, disagrees, tells me flat-out sometimes, “Miss, you are wrong there,” and I realize I can say anything to him because he will argue back. It is an immense relief to talk in my own voice.
He remembers everything I tell him, and I am touched and flattered when he asks how my brother, Jason, is, or collects bits of Canadian news from magazines for me. He materializes in odd places, under the eaves of a shop, on the football ground at twilight. I begin to wonder if it is more than coincidence when I find him sitting at my favorite bend in the road. “What are you doing here, Tshewang?” I ask.
“Waiting for you,” he says.
“No, really.”
He smiles and I cannot tell one way or the other.
I begin to wonder every morning if today I will see him, and I am disappointed at nightfall if I haven’t. I, too, have memorized small details: he likes to read late at night, he hates the cold, he doesn’t know his real birth date, he has long, spatulate fingers but short, stubby thumbs.
It’s a crush, I tell myself. A silly, passing infatuation. Get over it.
The days pass quickly, the rice growing higher in the paddies, the clouds thickening with the monsoon. I walk at dawn, when Kanglung is sunk in mist, the world softened and still in the slow listless rain. One morning, I meet him running with two of his friends. He is wearing a red bandanna to keep his hair out of his eyes on the ten-kilometer run uphill, and his shorts and tee shirt reveal a compact body with well-defined shoulders and arms, and a lot of smooth copper-colored skin wet with rain. We wave as we pass each other, and when he is out of sight, I stop in the middle of the road, put a cold, wet hand against my flushed cheek. I am shocked at the force, the physical density of my desire.
Mr. Chatterji helps me plant chilies among the roses and gladioli and weeds in my garden. He won’t take the seedlings directly from my hand because they are a “hot” food and handing them to someone directly will result in an argument. I lay the plants on the ground, and he picks them up from there, popping them into the soil and sprinkling them with water. I put twelve chilies in my curry now, and eat ema datshi every day. “Just like a Bhutanese,” Lopen Norbu says when I go to his house for dinner. “Now you need a Bhutanese husband.” I shake my head vehemently, as if the thought had never crossed my mind.
Tshewang visits unexpectedly one Sunday morning. He sits uneasily at the edge of the divan, refusing my offers of coffee and tea. Everything about him is in motion. He chews his nails, taps his feet, fiddles with his pen, and his eyes fly around the room. Our conversation is full of polite abdications, sorry go ahead, no what were you saying? Outside, in full view of the world, we talk effortlessly and endlessly. Inside, alone, we are unable to finish a single sentence. Well, this is a disaster, I think unhappily. Why is it all wrong? I feel thirteen again. He plucks up a magazine and then he is gone, completely absorbed in what he is reading. I lift a notebook from the pile I’ve been marking, but I cannot read a word with him sitting there. I consider his face and his hands, remembering his legs and the curve of his shoulders from the morning in the rain, wondering what would he do if I went over there right now and kissed him, wondering what kind of lover he would be.
He puts down the magazine and says, “Miss, can I borrow a book?”
I reach over and pull One Hundred Years of Solitude from the bookshelf and hold it out to him. “Okay, great,” he says, shoving the book into his gho. “Well, I should get going.”
“Okay.” I want desperately, dangerously for him to stay, and I cannot wait