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By Root 535 0

buildings, the clock tower, the pine trees, the bridge. The villages around, connected by paths. Lopen Norbu’s house. The old lhakhang and the village above. I draw in streams and the river where the students immersed the statue of Durga last year, boulders, a tree full of brown monkeys near the prayer wall above Kanglung. The prayer flags at the bend in the road. The place where I saw a red panda, sunning itself above a tangled bamboo thicket. And places which have revealed themselves, a small cave high up in a rock wall, uncovered when a cloud moved and the light shifted, a waterfall appearing as the mist drifted away. I think that if I finish the map, I will find the glen again. There’s only so much physical space here, it’s simply a matter of tracing out the paths and filling in the landmarks.

I remember things from my childhood, a love of secret places, places inside of places. I remember searching for a secret passageway in my grandparents’ house, tapping on walls, squeezing past boxes and empty suitcases to explore the back of closets. “There are no secret passageways in this house,” my grandmother said firmly. But I was certain there was a way to go through the mirror into a different world, or to fall through an invisible doorway into another time. Here, the folds and pleats of the mountains give me that same feeling, the places that have been forgotten in forests and the far corners of valleys. There are ruins of houses, abandoned villages, skeletons of terraces overgrown with green, and I long to know why the people left, and how long ago, and what conflict or disease sent them away. There are stories everywhere.

The map becomes its own place. I have started too small, I cannot fit everything in, and I must draw bubbles along the borders with miniature maps and symbols inside, connected to the main map with curly lines but one curly line becomes a Bhutanese cloud and another becomes a mountain, and then I give in and color in a lake that does not exist, and a river flowing out of the mouth of Tashigang Dzong, and stars wherever there is room. I look up from my map, out over the valley, north to the sharp peaks, south to the blue-shadowed ridges, up to the darkening sky with its watermelon-wedge moon and a handful of stars. My map has become a conflagration of space and memory and desire, charting the exact space where place and the experience of the place meet.

Jam Session

Dini and I are invited to a dance by the students in our third-year class, a “jam session,” it is called, held in the dining hall on a Saturday night. “We don’t have to be chaperones, do we?” Dini asks, and the students laugh. “No, ma’am,” they say. “Just come and dance.” We promise we will.

I put on my least teacherly clothes, a straight denim skirt and white tee shirt, and walk over to Dini’s. She offers me a shot of Dragon Rum—“protection against an evening of Milli Vanilli,” she says. “We’re still going to feel like chaperones, you know.”

“Dini, do you ever feel attracted to any of the students?”

“Only twenty or thirty of them,” she says, and I laugh.

In the dining hall, the tables and chairs have been pushed against the wall, and crepe-paper streamers and balloons are taped to the ceiling and pillars. The students, in jeans, miniskirts and leather jackets, dance in pairs and large circles to unidentifiable dance music pounding out of a row of mismatched speakers. Two entrepreneurs sell boxes of mango juice and plates of chips by the door. Tshewang, dressed all in black, slides off his chair beside the DJ. “Miss,” he says, bowing formally, “would you care to dance?”

We thread our way across the floor, sticking to the outer edges because he dances as he talks, tirelessly, with frequent leaps and bounds. He keeps closing up the distance I try to leave between us.

“Sorry, miss,” he says, laughing, when we have danced ourselves into a corner. “Would you like to sit down? Shall I get you a drink?” I slide onto a chair against the wall, grateful for the sharp breeze from the window behind. Tshewang returns with a box of warm mango