Beyond the Sky and the Earth_ A Journey Into Bhutan - Jamie Zeppa [131]
I have been in Bhutan for over three years, and my contract ends in June. I have decided not to extend it. Tshewang and I cannot go on in our little room forever. People are starting to ask questions. During a meeting to discuss possible editors for the college’s newsletter, the principal sent the peon to call Tshewang from his hostel. I sat, frozen, in my seat. Tshewang was not in his hostel. I had left him, naked and asleep, in my house. The peon returned, shaking his head. “Tshewang is very hard to find,” the student beside me said. “He just disappears!” I am certain that my Canadian neighbor knows about our relationship, and disapproves, and it will be just a matter of time before he mentions it casually to someone.
Moreover, I am pregnant. I know because every morning at ten o’clock, I must excuse myself from class and rush to the staff toilet, where I am violently but briefly sick. (Once, I stay home from class and hear Mrs. Chatterji being sick upstairs at the same time as me. Later, when I have gone to Canada, several students will write to tell me the happy news: after all these years, Mrs. Chatterji is pregnant.) My body has taken charge, it is engaged in this secret activity and will brook no interference from me. It refuses coffee, tea, alcohol, and for some reason, kidney beans. It demands sleep and fresh fruit and meat. I tell Tshewang, and he walks to his family village, two hours north of Tashigang, and brings back strips of dried pork fat that he boils into an oily chili-flecked curry. I am revolted, but my body says eat it. Tshewang watches me devour two plates with rice. In Bhutan, he says, people believe that eating lots of pork will cause the baby to have good, thick, black hair. He brings me tamarind and urges me to eat it raw. “Pregnant women are supposed to crave this,” he tells me.
“No they’re not, they’re supposed to crave ice cream,” I say, my face puckering up painfully as I chew one of the sticky pods. “I’m sure the baby would prefer ice cream.”
“She,” Tshewang guesses, rubbing my stomach, which is beginning to thicken. “She wouldn’t.”
“He.” I have dreamed of the baby already, a boy with curly brown hair in spite of the pork. “He would.”
I will return to Canada to have the baby, due in December. Tshewang will visit during his winter holidays, and return to Bhutan to finish his last semester at college. Then we will decide what to do. It will be a test, we tell each other, it will give us some perspective. We will use the time to think. We will wait and see. When we are together, I love the sound of these words, cool and unassailably rational. But when we are apart, I am caught in the most terrible despair imaginable. I don’t want to wait and see, I want to know now, for certain, whether we will be together, in Canada or Bhutan or anywhere, it doesn’t matter where, whether we will be a family and have a future together. I want the unequivocal Answer to How Will It All Turn Out. I fill the water cups on my altar and sit in meditation, remembering my practice. I cannot eradicate my worries entirely but, with effort, manage to attain some measure of mental stillness.
In my last weeks in Bhutan, I decide to accompany a few other volunteer teachers on a trek to Jomolhari in northwestern Bhutan. We drive to the end of the road in Paro, to the ruins of Drukgyal Dzong, and then, hoisting up our rucksacks, we set off along the path I saw that first week in Bhutan, the centuries-old trading route. We walk through summer meadows filled with white butterflies, past large comfortable farmhouses surrounded by prayer flags, following the river, a constant rush and surge of white and blue