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By Root 559 0

single window can be easily covered with one piece of cloth. He lights a candle stub and sets it on the floor under the table. The shadows grow and shrink crazily, and then the flame burns steadily, and the room becomes still. In a moment of painful awkwardness, we stand side by side, looking at the bed on the floor. The only remedy is to take off all our clothes as quickly as possible. Once we have plunged directly into nakedness, shyness is impossible, and we curl up on the mattress beside the candle, wrapped in the quilt, whispering. Outside, the night has deepened, and we are held in a rich dark silence. He is a warm and ardent lover, completely uninhibited. It is as if we have been lovers for years.

“Tshewang, there’s just one thing.”

“Hmmm?”

“You absolutely have to stop calling me ‘miss’.”

He snorts with laughter. “You prefer ma’am? Shall I call you that?”

I hide my face in the quilt and laugh. I am safe here, with him; in the middle of the biggest risk I have ever taken in my life, I am safe. “Jamie,” he says. “How is that?” I like the way it falls from his tongue into two clear, neatly balanced syllables. “Don’t let me go to sleep,” he says, “I have to leave before morning.” But we both drift off and awaken to daylight sounds: a broom scraping concrete steps, windows being unlatched upstairs, Miss Dorling muttering to her two snapping, yapping Apsoos as she passes by. I don’t know how he’ll get out unseen now. In the kitchen, he pins a towel up over the window and makes sweet tea which we drink from one mug. I ask him if he wants toast, and he pulls an alarmed face, as if I had just offered him something insane for breakfast. He says he will eat rice at Pala’s, thanks. I watch as he dresses, pulling on his gho, crossing one side over the other, aligning the seams, checking the hems. Grasping the sides, he raises the hem to his knees, then folds the sides back into two neat pleats. One hand holds the pleats in place, the other wraps the belt around his waist.

“How do I look?” he asks, smoothening down his hair. “Guilty?”

“No,” I laugh. “Do you feel guilty?”

“No. I feel happy.”

I wait at the back door to let him out but he heads into the sitting room. “Tshewang, you aren’t going to walk out the front door!”

“No one will know that I haven’t just stopped by this morning to get a book,” he says, and grabs one from the shelf. A last kiss behind the door and then I wrench it open. We are suddenly separate, he standing on the steps outside, I in the shadow of the door frame inside. I am shocked at the sunlight, the bright trees, flowers, voices, the whole ordinary world awake below us, the same as it was yesterday, except that I feel I am seeing it from a perilous angle and my heart is pounding wildly, and I wonder if I will regret this. “Thanks, miss,” he says loudly, formally, becoming Tshewang, student proper again. He raises the book. “This should help my writing.”

“Oh yeah, that’ll really help,” I say, biting my lip. He looks down at the book for the first time, and throws his head back and laughs. I love him. I regret nothing. He strolls off, stuffing Recipes for a Small Planet into his gho. I close the door and lean against it, feeling the wood against my back, blood running in my veins, warmth in my palms, the trace of the last kiss.

Energy is eternal delight.

A Secret in Eastern Bhutan

He leaves his hostel room at night, after eleven, taking the most circuitous routes across campus. He must avoid students returning late from Pala’s, the hostel dean, the night watchman, houses with lights still on, and the dogs. The dogs are the worst, he says, and we are glad when it rains, because the dogs take shelter under the hostels and the black curtains of rain hide him as he sprints down the road to my house. He turns the handle of the unlocked door slowly, and pads across the floor. We go into the dining room, now our room, where we lie on the mattress on the floor, beside the candle burning under the table. Sometimes he returns to his room before dawn, gliding out the back door into the wide night,