Beyond the Sky and the Earth_ A Journey Into Bhutan - Jamie Zeppa [126]
Often, we don’t sleep until dawn. I doze uneasily, waking every twenty minutes to look at the changing light. I have to teach at nine o’clock. I shake him awake but he burrows deeper into the quilt, his limbs heavy with sleep. Many mornings, I go off to teach and he sleeps through his economics class.
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